“Just leave him be!” Gretchen hissed. “He’s trying to make a fresh start!”
Eli ignored that. “Does Freddie have a girlfriend?” he asked.
Color flooded Gretchen’s pale face, throwing her freckles into sharp relief. “No,” she snarled, “he doesn’t. And if you think you’re going to pin anything on him, you’re dead wrong!”
“Now, why would I try to ‘pin anything’ on poor Freddie. He’s such a good, upstanding citizen, after all. Just like you and Fred.”
For a moment, Gretchen looked as though she might spring across the counter, like some small, wiry, weasel-like creature, all teeth and claws and most definitely rabid.
Eli was reminded of a time when he was a kid, and he and J.P. and Cord had come across a young raccoon up in the foothills, where cottonwoods rustled among close stands of fir and pine.
Thinking the animal was hurt, he’d reached out, meaning to pick it up off the ground, where it lay sprawled and stunned.
In the space of a heartbeat, that raccoon balled himself up and came hurtling at Eli with the force of something fired from a giant slingshot, bowling him over, leaving him flat on his back, with cuts stinging all over his arms and chest and the wind knocked right out of him.
He’d had to have stitches, and a series of rabies shots.
Now, years later, standing in a supermarket, he couldn’t help drawing the obvious parallels between that critter and Gretchen Lansing.
Not much difference, for his money, except that she probably wasn’t rabid.
“I’ll be out to your place sometime tomorrow with official notification of the restraining order I mentioned to your husband and son last night. Make sure Freddie’s around because I’ve got some questions for him. Got that?”
Gretchen finished ringing up his order and then bagging the four wine bottles, each one carefully wrapped, all without saying a single word.
Her thin lips were pressed together hard, and her gaze skirted Eli’s.
“In the meantime,” Eli went on, putting away his debit card and gathering up his purchases, “I’d like to wish you a genuinely happy New Year.”
CHAPTER TEN
BRYNNE FOUND SARA in her kitchen, at the epicenter of holiday chaos.
Sara’s young daughter, Hayley, was seated at the table, carefully sprinkling coconut flakes onto a white layer cake, while her friends, Melba and Dan’s daughters, Jill, twelve, and Carrie, nine, supervised.
Eric and Dan could be heard all the way from the den, on the other side of the house, shouts of jubilation alternating with bellows of protest as they battled it out on their video game.
Sara smiled a greeting and rolled her eyes. “Sit down and make yourself at home, if you dare,” she said.
Brynne laughed, though she felt a familiar pang of loneliness as she shed her coat and hung it from one of the pegs next to the back door. She couldn’t help comparing this happy cacophony to the silence of her apartment.
“What can I do to help?” she asked.
Dan had left the wine she’d brought on a nearby counter.
“You could pop those bottles into the wine cooler,” Sara replied, stirring something in the giant bowl she held. She was wearing a colorful cobbler apron over her jeans and bright green sweater, and she looked about twelve years old.
“Mom,” Hayley said, backing away from the cake to consider it solemnly. “Does this look okay?”
“It looks fabulous,” Sara said. “Thank you.”
Hayley resembled her mother, with her dark hair and gray eyes, and she seemed to have inherited Sara’s good disposition. “Can we go to my room and watch a movie?”
“Use the TV in the living room,” Sara replied, setting the bowl down, opening the oven door and bending to peer inside, her long braid dangling. The lovely aroma of roast beef filled the steamy room. “This is a holiday and I don’t want you holed up in your bedroom all day.”
The three young girls trooped out of the kitchen, and Sara heaved a great sigh, though she was smiling.
Brynne had slipped three of the four bottles she’d brought into the built-in cooler, a small under-the-counter refrigerator with a glass door, but she waggled the fourth enticingly. “Shall I pour?” she asked.
“Please do,” Sara responded. “Every year, when New Year’s rolls around, I wonder why I don’t just spend the day in my bathrobe with my feet up.”
Brynne took two glasses from the rack affixed to the underside of the cupboard above the cooler and reached into a drawer for the corkscrew. “Why don’t you?” she asked, as she began the process of opening a lovely bottle of crisp, dry white. “The holidays seem to get more hectic every year—first, there’s Thanksgiving, and all the attendant fuss, then, too soon, it’s Christmas, and even more fuss. A week after that, we’re staying up until midnight, and finally—”
“We’re cooking a roast beef dinner and hoping we can get everybody fed before half the guests are crowded into the den, watching the big football game,” Sara finished.
Brynne handed a glass to Sara, then filled one for herself. “You do it all because you love your family and your friends and you want your kids to have great memories to look back on. You’re a wonderful mother, Sara.”
To Brynne’s surprise, her friend’s eyes filled with tears and she sank into a chair at the table, nearly thrusting her elbow into the coconut layer cake in the process.
Brynne immediately set her own glass down and rested a hand on Sara’s shoulder. The other woman was trembling a little.
“Sara,” she said, “what is it?”
“I don’t want to spoil the holiday by telling you,” Sara replied, with a sniffle. She picked up her glass and took a resolute sip.
Brynne sat down, pulled her chair closer to Sara’s. “Tell me what?” she asked, though she had a pretty good idea what the problem was. The night before, Eli had told her about the threatening text Sara’s son, Eric, had received from Freddie Lansing.
She knew, too, that Dan Summers was there as a professional, rather than a friend, although he was certainly that, too.
For all that, Brynne knew that the choice to discuss the problem was Sara’s to make, not hers or Eli’s. Plus, on the off chance that Eli had spoken out of turn, she didn’t want to throw him under the bus.
Sara spilled the story Brynne had expected to hear, but with greater detail.
She’d hired Dan Summers to live in her house until the Freddie Lansing threat had been resolved. He would be accompanying Eric to school, while one of his crewmen, scheduled to arrive that afternoon, would watch over Hayley.