True believer - Nicholas Sparks [38]
Doris chuckled and went back to sautéing. For a moment, there was silence in the kitchen, and Lexie breathed a sigh of relief. At least that was over, and thankfully, Doris hadn’t pushed too hard. Now, she thought, they could have a pleasant dinner.
“I thought he was quite handsome,” Doris opined.
Lexie said nothing; instead, she grabbed a couple of plates and utensils before moving to the table. Maybe it was better if she simply pretended not to hear her.
“And just to let you know, there’s more to him than you think there is,” she went on. “He’s not what you imagine him to be.”
It was the way she said it that gave Lexie pause. She had heard that tone many times in the past—when she’d wanted to go out with friends in high school, only to have Doris talk her out of going; when she wanted to take a trip to Miami a few years back, only to be talked out of it. In the first instance, the friends she’d wanted to join were involved in a car accident; in the latter, riots had broken out in the city and had spilled into the hotel where she’d been planning to stay.
Doris sometimes sensed things, she knew. Not as much as Doris’s own mother had. But even though Doris seldom explained further, Lexie was fully aware that she always sensed the truth.
Completely unaware that phone lines were buzzing all over as people discussed his presence in town, Jeremy was lying in bed under the covers, watching the local news while waiting for the weather report, wishing he had followed his initial impulse and checked into another hotel. He had no doubt that had he done so, he wouldn’t have been surrounded by Jed’s handiwork, which gave him the willies.
The man obviously had a lot of time on his hands.
And a lot of bullets. Or pellets. Or the front end of a pickup. Or whatever it was he used to kill all these varmints. In his room, there were twelve critters; with the exception of a second stuffed bear, representatives of the entire zoological species of North Carolina would be keeping him company. No doubt Jed would have included a bear as well if he’d had an extra one.
Other than that, the room wasn’t too bad, as long as he didn’t expect a high-speed connection to the Internet, or to warm the room without use of the fireplace, order room service, watch cable, or even dial out on a push-button phone. He hadn’t seen a dial phone in what? Ten years? Even his mother had succumbed to the modern world on that one.
But not Jed. Nope. Good old Jed obviously had his own ideas of what was important in the way of accommodations for his guests.
If there was one decent thing about the room, though, it did have a nice covered porch out back, one that overlooked the river. There was even a rocking chair, and Jeremy considered sitting outside for a while, until he remembered the snakes. Which made him wonder what sort of misunderstanding Gherkin had been talking about. He didn’t like the sound of that. He really should have asked more about it, just as he should have asked where he could find some firewood around here. This place was absolutely freezing, but he had the funny suspicion that Jed wouldn’t answer the phone if he tried to call the office and ask. And besides, Jed scared him.
Just then the meteorologist appeared on the news. Steeling himself, Jeremy hopped out of bed to turn up the volume. Moving as quickly as he could, he shivered as he adjusted the set, then dove back under the covers.
The meteorologist was immediately replaced by commercials. Figures.
He’d been wondering whether he should head out to the cemetery but wanted to find out if fog was likely. If not, he’d catch up on his rest. It had been a long day; he’d started out in the modern world, went back in time fifty years, and now he was sleeping in the midst of ice and death. It certainly wasn’t something that happened to him every day.
And, of course, there was Lexie. Lexie whatever-her-last-name-was. Lexie the mysterious. Lexie who flirted and withdrew and flirted again.
She had been flirting, hadn’t she? The way she kept calling him Mr. Marsh? The