I frowned as I stood at the hot grill in my country store restaurant. I was beset by a vague sense of foreboding, a gray film creeping over the light in my psyche.
Everything in my life was rosy. Pans ’N Pancakes, my business, was thriving and in the black, and right now it smelled like meat grilling and contentment. My employees, Danna Beedle and Turner Rao, seemed happy with their jobs. I was solid with Abe, my electrical lineman honey. Aunt Adele was healthy. It was December first, with white lights twinkling and the aroma of fresh evergreen wafting from the tree Abe and I had cut and set up in the corner yesterday. Most important? Our small town of South Lick, Indiana, hadn’t seen a murder in a year. So whence this sense of looming doom?
Danna carried over a load of dirty dishes from our biggest table. We still had a few diners finishing their meals, several waiting for their food, and one couple intent on their chess match at the game table. But at one-forty-five, the lunch rush was over. My right-hand woman took a second look at me after she deposited the dishes in the wide sink. “What’s the matter, Robbie? Did you hear bad news? Did a ghost walk over your grandma’s grave?”
“No.” I mustered a smile. “Everything’s fine. I got a funny feeling something might happen. A not-good something.”
“You?” she scoffed. “I thought you didn’t believe in woo-woo stuff like that. Me, on the other hand, I listen hard when I sense something bad’s up.”
“I don’t really believe in woo-woo.” Although that palm reader out in Santa Barbara last February had been onto something when she’d warned me of danger. Danger I should have paid more attention to. “Anyway, all’s good here, right?” I waved my arm around at the country store where I’d made my dream come true. Tables of different sizes filled the restaurant area. Shelves filled with antique and vintage cookware lined the store section, almost all of it for sale. I also offered skeins of Adele’s wool and her knitted hats, a local Amish farmer’s honey, and other homey products. I even had a pickle barrel. A big menorah sat ready on a windowsill for when Hanukkah came around next week, and tomorrow Abe was going to bring Sean, his teenage son, to help decorate the tree.
“Yes, it’s all good.” She pointed at the grill. “Except you just burned that turkey patty.”
“Shoot!” I flipped the patty. “It’s not too bad. I’ll eat it when I get a chance. And there’s only one more order waiting, right?” Our order carousel had a single slip hanging from it. I grabbed another disk of ground turkey and laid it on the grill.
“Yep, for that two-top. I’m going to take a quick break, okay?” Danna asked.
“Go ahead.”
She slid out of her blue store apron and tossed it in the dirty laundry box, then headed for the ladies’ room. I examined the slip. We’d run out of our lunch special, and this was a straightforward order of two hamburgers—one medium rare with the works and one well done with nothing—a coleslaw, a fruit salad, and two brownies, with a milk and a ginger ale to wash down the meals.
I also offered one kind of soup every day, plus turkey and veggie burgers, a couple of wraps and sandwiches, and a Caesar salad on the regular menu. Customers could also order breakfast all day long until we closed at two-thirty. With such a small crew and kitchen, I stuck to the first two meals of the day. And today Turner was off. Tuesday tended to be our slowest, customerwise. Turner was taking one class per semester at a new culinary institute in Bloomington, the university town in the next county. The class was held on Tuesdays, and I’d told him Danna and I could manage without him for a day.
After I finished the turkey burger order and delivered it, I filled the hamburger plates and carried them over to Tanesha and Bashir, a couple holding hands at their table. They were staying in one of my B&B rooms upstairs and had said they were on their honeymoon.
“Enjoy your meal.” I smiled at them. They looked more or less my age of twenty-nine. Geez, that meant I’d be thirty next May, which was kind of hard to believe.
“Thanks, Robbie. We love it here,” Tanesha said in a clipped accent that pegged her as being from Minnesota or maybe North Dakota.
“I’m glad. I do, too.” Despite being a native mid-coast Californian, I did love the distinct seasons and the relaxed pace of life in southern Indiana. South Lick was nestled in the hills of scenic Brown County, so I could get a strenuous workout when I took my bicycle on the roads to work off the stresses of being a solo entrepreneur.
I turned back to the grill. The cowbell hanging from the heavy old front door jangled as a tall man younger than me walked in with light brown skin flushed from the cold. He closed the door but stood with a tentative air, gazing around as if searching for something or someone. I’d never seen him before.
“Welcome,” I called. “Are you here to eat? You can sit anywhere, and we’ll be right with you.” I walked toward him, rubbing my hands on my apron. “I’m Robbie Jordan. This is my store and restaurant.”
“Thanks.” He didn’t smile and a tic beat at the corner of a brown eye. He was slender, over six feet tall, and his short-cropped dark golden hair was as curly as his dark lashes, almost kinky, in fact. A chinstrap beard lined his jaw, and he looked to be in his mid-twenties. “Um. Does somebody named Danna work here?” When his voice shook, he cleared his throat. “Danna Beedle.”
At that moment, Danna emerged from the restroom. I glanced her way.
Was this guy on the up-and-up? He looked innocent enough, and was clearly nervous. But strangers coming in and asking for Danna, who had only last month turned twenty-one, made me nervous, too. “And who might you be?” I found something a little familiar-looking about him but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Or maybe he was the cause of my uneasy woo-woo feeling a little earlier.
“My name is Marcus Vandemere. Can I please talk to her?” His gaze followed Danna to the kitchen area where she donned a clean apron. “That’s Danna, isn’t it? I would have known her anywhere.”
What? Well, what could go wrong in a public place like this in broad daylight? “Yes, it is. Danna?” I waved her over. When she drew close, I said, “This gentleman would like to speak with you.”
She cocked her head, her reddish-blond dreadlocks covered today in a red-and-green scarf in honor of the Christmas season. “Hi. I’m Danna.” My assistant, almost as tall as Marcus, held out her hand to him.
He took a deep breath and blew it out, then took her hand in both of his. “I’m Marcus, and I’m so glad to meet you. I’ve been looking for you.”
“You have?” She scrunched up her nose. “Why?”
“I’m your half brother.”
Danna gaped at Marcus. “You, you’re . . . what? I don’t have a brother.” She slid her hand out of his, frowning. “I’m an only child. Always have been.”
I stared at him. Had Danna’s late father, whom she’d never known, had a child with another woman?
“I know this is a big shock.” His voice was stronger now, and his tone gentle. “Our mom gave me up for adoption.”
Whoa. Corrine Beedle, Mayor of South Lick, had a past I hadn’t had a clue about. And neither did Danna, judging from her reaction.
“She did?” Danna’s voice rose. “She never told me. How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-six.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I’m twenty-one, barely. So Mom . . .” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, it’s super hard to get my head around this.”
“I understand,” he said.
“Where do you live, Marcus?” I asked.
“In Bloomington. I’m in grad school at IU, but I grew up in Indianapolis.”
A customer raised her hand across the room. I gestured that I would be right there.
“Why don’t you two sit down over by the desk?” I pointed to the small sitting area in my office corner where they could talk without diners hearing. “I can handle things, Danna.” As long as a tour bus didn’t show up.
She looked wary but finally nodded. “Come on.” She slowly added, “Marcus,” as if trying on the word for size.
I busied myself with delivering the ticket to a four-top. The total was under thirty-five dollars, and they’d ordered—and consumed—a lot of food.
“We sure love your prices, hon,” one of the women said.
“Thanks. I need to meet my expenses, but I’d hate to have them so high folks felt they couldn’t afford to eat here.” In fact, what I charged for meals was under the going rate in Nashville, but I sure made up in quantity what I might have earned with a pricier menu.
I refilled the drinks of the honeymooners and checked with the chess players to see if they needed anything. I shot a glance at Danna and her brother on my way back to the sink. They sat at right angles, neither of them smiling or looking relaxed, but talking. What an astounding piece of news for her to get out of the blue. He probably wanted to meet his birth mother, too. What would Corrine do with that? Meeting a birth family had to be a minefield to navigate on either end. Marcus could be welcomed with open arms—or treated coldly. Had Corrine ever looked for him and not found him? A lot of people used Ancestry or other DNA services these days to connect with birth families. Marcus’s sibling relationship to Danna must have been what I’d thought looked familiar.
All the customers had paid and left, with the newlyweds also buying a vintage muffin tin before heading out for the afternoon. I was loading the dishwasher when Danna and Marcus approached.
“Get this, Robbie. Marcus loves to cook, too.” Now Danna was smiling, and her eyes sparkled, too.
When a wide smile split Marcus’s face, I definitely saw the resemblance between the two.
“I sure do, especially international foods,” he said. “My parents always took us to weird restaurants—at least they seemed weird to a kid—and we traveled a lot, too, when I was growing up.”
“Maybe cooking is in our genes,” Danna said.
“Robbie, I need to get back for a seminar,” Marcus said, holding out his hand. “Thanks for not kicking me out.”
“Hey, I’m glad to meet you.” I shook his strong, smooth hand. “I hope you’ll come back and eat here.”
“He promised to,” Danna said.
I watched as she walked him to the door. They exchanged a hug, and after Danna closed the door behind me, she stood rooted in place, shaking her head as if in wonder.
“Hey, turn the sign to ‘Closed’ while you’re there,” I called to her. “It’s two-thirty.”
She flipped over the sign in the window and locked the door, then nearly skipped back to me.
“Robbie, can you even believe what just happened? I have a brother. I always wanted a big brother, and now I have one.”
“That’s great. Can you come down off your cloud a little and scrub the grill? I turned it off and it should be cool enough.”
She laughed. “Yeah, sure. Sorry.” She grabbed the scraper and started.
“How did he find you, anyway?”
“He read an article about finding birth families. He’d never felt like he needed to before, since he grew up happy and loved. When he finally asked his parents—his adoptive parents—they told him Mom’s name. It wasn’t like in the old days of closed adoptions and locked records. They knew about my mom all along, but had agreed after they adopted Marcus as a newborn not to tell him until he asked.”
“And he asked.”
“Yes. He’d done Ancestry, but neither Mom nor I have, and my grandmother hasn’t, either, so he couldn’t find us, and I don’t have any other siblings.” She paused in her cleaning and drew her light brows together. “That I know of. Man, I am so having a talk with my mother tonight.”
“Do you wish she’d told you about him earlier?”
“Of course! I could have had a brother years ago.”
“Yeah.” I loaded detergent into the dishwasher and pushed the On button. “Unless she’d also agreed not to tell you until he looked for her.”
“I guess. Whatever. I’m just glad I know about Marcus. And he’s only over in Bloomington! I can, like, see him all the time.”
“I’m happy for you.”
She smiled to herself as she worked. Her hand slowed. “So that’s who it was,” she murmured. “Robbie, one time when I was about eight I caught my mom looking at a picture. She was sitting on her bed and she had this really sad look on her face.”
“You think it was a picture of Marcus?”
“I bet it was. I went in and asked her who was in the photograph. I only caught a glimpse but it was definitely a little baby.”
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She stuffed it into her nightstand drawer, hugged me, and said she loved me.”
“Which didn’t answer your question.”
Danna resumed scrubbing. “Not at all. Next chance I got, I went and looked for it, but she’d hidden it somewhere else. I asked her again and she told me it didn’t matter.”
“You’ll get the whole story tonight, I’m sure.” I also planned to google the heck out of this guy to make sure he was who he said he was. I wasn’t letting anybody hurt Danna.
The wind was an angry banshee by seven that night. I sat in my small apartment at the back of the store and listened to it roar like the Wabash Cannonball through the big fir outside. The one antique window I hadn’t gotten around to replacing rattled something fierce, and the gale was a lewd Father Nature whistling through a crack in the door.
Still, I was snug with my feet up on my couch, tuxedo cat Birdy rolled into a ball at my side. A half-completed crossword puzzle was on a clipboard on my knees and a half-empty glass of a hearty red wine sat on the end table next to my elbow. Abe couldn’t be with me because he had been called into work. Electrical wiremen were much in demand when branches were coming down onto wires all over the county.
Something went thud outside my back door. I groaned, but laid down the puzzle and padded through the kitchen to the door. I switched on the porch light and peered through the glass. As I’d thought, it was my trash can, rolling toward the back of the property. Heck, let it roll. Today had been trash day, so it was empty. And it would either lodge against the barn or the tall trees. The heavy plastic barrel wasn’t going to escape. The store trash cans were in an enclosure at the side of the building, so they were safe, too.
I got snug on the couch again. I frowned when sirens raced by out on the road. The rumble that accompanied one sounded like it had to be a fire engine. I hoped if it was a conflagration, they caught it quickly. This was wind without rain, and it had the potential to carry sparks far and wide.
Sipping my wine, I pictured Danna at home grilling her mother about Marcus. Would the discussion go smoothly for her? Would Corrine welcome Marcus into their lives? Or would she want to keep him at a distance? Maybe he’d be a painful reminder of a past she had left behind. Of course, Danna could have her own relationship with her brother even without her mom. She’d sounded excited about that. Too, perhaps Marcus only wanted to meet Corrine but not get close to her. He had adoptive parents he probably loved, after all. Twisty situations with many threads could get smoothed and sorted out, or they could become even more tangled.
I also had two half siblings, except they were younger than me. I hadn’t been given up for adoption, but my mom, now almost four years gone, had never told Roberto Fracasso she was pregnant. He’d been a visiting scholar here when they’d fallen in love and I was conceived. He’d gone back to Italy, and Mom had moved to Santa Barbara. After I’d found him almost two years ago through luck and digging, I’d gone to Pisa to meet him, his wife, and his two adult children, even a little nephew. Although my half sister hadn’t warmed up to me, I’d loved meeting everyone, Roberto most of all. My short hefty-hipped build was Mom’s, but my brown eyes, Mediterranean skin, and lush dark curly hair were a hundred percent my father’s. Gazing at his face was almost like looking in a mirror.
My cell rang with my aunt Adele’s ringtone. I connected and greeted her.
“Turn on the local news, Robbie,” she said in a rush. “Quick.”
I grabbed the remote. The screen filled with footage of fire enveloping a two-story house. Gushes of water from the firefighters’ hoses formed arcs into the flames. One end of the house was not on fire but the roof gaped open. I glimpsed an REA cherry picker truck at the edge of the scene, REA being the county electrical cooperative and Abe’s employer.
The camera cut to a reporter with her back to the fire. “In breaking news, the South Lick home of a local man caught on fire earlier this evening after a tree blew onto a live wire, sparking the blaze. No one was at home, but the firefighters had their hands full battling the flames so they didn’t spread. The fire chief told us they currently have the fire ninety percent contained and he’s confident the neighboring homes are safe. Teams from Monroe and Johnson Counties also responded to the call. Power is out in the neighborhood, but an REA spokesperson says they will repair the lines as soon as it is safe to do so. Back to you, Clint.” She signed off and the station returned to its usual programming.
I hit the Off button. “Wow,” I said to Adele. “Do you know whose house it is?”
“That’s William Geller’s. Doctor over to Columbus Regional. He’s lived in South Lick since God made dirt.”
South Lick sat about halfway between Columbus Regional Hospital to the east and the Indiana University Hospital in Bloomington to the west. “It’s a good thing he wasn’t home,” I said.
“Yep. Musta had to work late or something.”
“Does he have a family?”
“Nope. Wife upped and left him about a decade ago, and they never had any kids.”
“That’s a blessing, anyway. And that the firefighters contained it despite this wind. Is it howling out at your farm, too?”
“Like a pack of hungry wolves.” She whistled. “But my sweetie Samuel and me, we’re cozy inside. And I took and trimmed my trees last fall so they aren’t anywhere’s near the wires or nothing.”
“Good. I still have power. The fire must be on the other side of town.”
“All righty, hon. You have a good night now. We’ll be in for lunch tomorrow, I reckon.”
“Give my love to Samuel,” I said. “And to you.”
“Will do. Love ya, sugar.”
I shivered after I disconnected. That guy Geller was awfully lucky not to be in a house on fire. I’d never experienced a blaze like that, and wasn’t planning on it, either. I picked up the puzzle again.
An hour and a half later, the puzzle was finished and so was the wine. I yawned wide. Fi. . .
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