Page 74 of Unpacking Secrets

Juliet’s breathing audibly hitched, but she managed a smile. “Thank you.”

“You need anything else, you just call. Got it?”

“Got it,” I confirmed, clasping her hand tightly when Juliet stepped back.

For a long, quiet moment, we stayed there by the door, watching as Sally got into her midnight blue Subaru and drove back toward the inn. Juliet took the wine from my hand and tucked herself under my arm.

“Doing okay?” I asked against the top of her head.

“As okay as can be expected, I guess. That smells heavenly, but I’d like to keep working on the sketch for a bit. I think I’m getting closer.”

“Of course. I’ll unpack everything and keep it warm.”

Mark and Libby arrived just after five with Blue in tow. The dog raced past them into the house, ignoring me completely to dance circles around Juliet at the table.

“Damn, dude, you’ve been replaced,” Mark said with a mournful shake of his head.

“I’ll try to accept my fate,” I joked.

Blue wagged her tail at me as I entered the kitchen but didn’t move from Juliet’s side. Almost unconsciously, Juliet set her hand on Blue’s head, much as she had that day in the forest. I leveled a mock scowl in the dog’s direction.

“Yeah, yeah, just remember who feeds you, silly mutt.”

Juliet rubbed at her bleary eyes when I came to look down at her efforts. Only three sketches seemed to have made the cut as possibilities. They were arranged in an arc on the table before her.

“Portraits are not really my strength,” she said wearily. With one finger, she tapped the sketch to her right. “This one looks a little familiar, the same way Nan’s did when I first saw it, but I don’t know if these are anywhere close to what Tom Heller would actually look like now.”

Libby peered over Juliet’s shoulder. She cocked her head thoughtfully as she studied the sketches. Mark and I looked at each other over their heads—if anyone would recognize the man from around town, it was likely to be Libby. Her clinic treated most of Spruce Hill’s residents at one time or another.

“Can you give that one some facial hair?” Libby suggested, pointing to the sketch Juliet had indicated.

With the three of us clustered around her and Blue’s head resting on her knee, Juliet added first a mustache, then a goatee, and finally a full beard.

“Oh, no,” Juliet whispered, horror dawning on her face before she even finished shading. “I recognize him now. The beard changes his appearance dramatically. No wonder he only looked vaguely familiar before.”

“I recognize him, too,” Libby said. “I think he lives just outside of town. He came in for stitches back when I first opened the clinic. I’ve only seen him in town once or twice since.”

Juliet’s gaze met mine over her shoulder. “I ran into him at the grocery store when I first got here. He asked if he knew me from somewhere. Totally played up the harmless, small town guy routine, but he creeped me out. If he knew both my mother and Nan, there’s no way he didn’t recognize me right then and there. He’s known I was here since the day after I arrived.”

When she shuddered, I laid my hands on her shoulders and squeezed, fighting the urge to pull her into my arms—or to swoop her up and take her far away. I forced myself to think logically, lifting my hands away to take a picture of the sketch.

“I’m sending this to Roberts,” I said.

Juliet dropped her attention back to the drawing, looking so damned fragile that it broke my heart. Over her head, I gave our friends a look and Libby immediately dropped into the chair next to her.

She started speaking to Juliet in the soft, quiet way she used with her younger patients, clearly trying to take her mind off the events of the past twenty-four hours. Mark gathered up the discarded papers on the table and set them in a tidy pile on the kitchen counter to make room for dinner.

Once the image had been passed along to Chief Roberts, I handed out plates of Sally’s chicken and side dishes, which garnered unenthusiastic nibbling at best. I sat on the other side of Juliet and draped my arm over the back of her chair while we ate, occasionally stroking over her spine with my fingertips.

That physical contact between us, however slight, had a calming effect on us both.

“Do you think he’s been here this whole time? All these years, I mean, since my mother left town?” she asked quietly.

My hand slid up the back of her neck and into her hair before I puffed out my cheeks on a long exhale.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him around, but Anne Zoratti said he left the area when your mother did. Maybe he went looking for her, tried to follow her trail. Maybe he was hiding out, waiting for the uproar to die back down after Melissa’s departure, which was a pretty big deal in this town. If he came back later on with that beard, older, a new name, I can see how he might have flown under the radar.”

“Or maybe he came back after Nan died. Waiting for my mother to show up again.” Her eyes lifted to mine. “And when he found out she wasn’t coming, waiting for me.”

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