Until Dark - Mariah Stewart [1]
“Do you know Matt?” he asked casually.
“No, no. But I know of him, of course, since he won the batting awards and all last year. That sort of news travels in Little League circles, as I’m sure you know.”
“Well, I sure won’t tell him that,” he relaxed somewhat—after all, no harm, no foul—but reminded himself that such slips were worse than foolish. Loose lips and all that. “We don’t want his head swelling more than it already is.”
She thanked him again, and he returned to his place on the opposite side of the field, his heart beating wildly.
Her eyes were so blue, her hair so soft, so blond—there was just something about blue-eyed blonds. And her neck was so graceful and lovely, rising above the open collar of her blue-and-white-striped shirt . . .
Up close she was everything he’d hoped she’d be. He could barely wait to see her again. She’d serve his purpose quite nicely.
Of course, it would be a shame. She’d been friendly and courteous to him. He almost liked her. But he could not, must not, lose sight of his agenda, of the role she was to play. And that was, in the end, the important thing, he reminded himself. His agenda.
He glanced at his watch. Time to go. She wasn’t the only fish in this week’s sea. There were others to see, others to get to know a little better before his . . . campaign got under way.
He resisted the urge to walk past her again as he left the field. He could not risk further contact. At least, not until Tuesday.
On Tuesday, pretty blue-eyed, blond Kathleen Garvey, mother of Tim and Eddie, would be all his.
The trap would be baited, and the game could begin. . . .
Chapter
One
The old man took two steps back, then two more, until he was close to the middle of the one-lane dirt road. There he stood, hands on his hips and a scowl on his face, watching the painters tuck the last of their scaffolding into the rusty bed of an old pickup truck of indeterminable color. The only vehicle in a twenty-mile radius that might have been older than the painters’ was his own.
“So, what do you think?” The young woman stood on the bottom step of the front porch, the smile on her face a sure sign that she had a pretty good idea of what her elderly neighbor was thinking.
“Your grandfather be spinning in his grave, right at this very minute, that’s what I think.” He wagged a gnarled finger at her. “Old Jonathan be spinning out of control right down there where we laid him. Surely he is.”
“Now, Mr. Webb”—Kendra Smith bit back a grin and forced her most earnest expression—“what is it that you think my grandfather might object to?”
“Well, since you ask, let’s start right there with that purple door.” The cigar that Oliver Webb held jabbed at the air in the general direction of the house that was the object under discussion.
“It’s called aubergine. It means eggplant.” She came down off the step to stand next to him.
“Fancy word for purple.” He all but spit out the word. “What in the name of the Jersey Devil were you thinking? Painting the house green and the door purple!”
“I was thinking that the house has spent all of its two-hundred-plus years painted white.” She tucked an arm through his. “I was thinking it was time for a change.”
“Houses supposed to be white, maybe,” Oliver Webb said, perhaps with a little less bluster. “If in fact they need to be painted at all.”
“I like it, Mr. Webb.” Kendra tilted her head as if to study the paint job that had just about all of the 147 residents of Smith’s Forge, at the fringe of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, lingering at the counter in MacNamara’s General Store for an extra ten or fifteen minutes just to talk about. “I like it a lot.”
“Be suiting you, then,” he grunted, and she knew he was softening, just as she’d known he would.
“Suits me just fine.” She smiled, disarming him.
“Hmmph.” Mr. Webb took a puff or two on his cigar. “Well, anyone come looking for you, you won’t be hard to find, that’s for sure.”
He knocked the ash off his cigar and climbed into the cab of his 1976 Chevy pickup. The