Barefoot at Midnight (Barefoot Bay Timeless Book 3) Page 10

  She paused in the middle of opening the box, frowning at him. “Were you like each other’s AA partners or something?”

  “Jake wasn’t an alcoholic,” he said simply. “I was. I am, I should say, since they train you to acknowledge it’s never over. But, for me, it’s as over as it can be.”

  She studied him for a long moment, unable to see anything that she would consider classic signs of an alcoholic. He looked healthy, strong, and completely in control. Yes, he’d been wild in high school and known to party hard, but so had Libby.

  “I haven’t had a drop for ten years,” he said as if he knew what she was thinking. “And I won’t.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  He moved another box. “I guess you’re never really sure, but I feel like I am. I replaced drinking with cooking as my addiction. But it wasn’t easy, and I couldn’t have done it without Jake.”

  Jake Peterson, man with a heart. That certainly wasn’t how she’d thought of him since her mother had revealed this secret almost a year ago. But Law’s impression of the man sure was different than hers.

  She slid the penknife along a taped seam on the first box.

  “How did you get to be such good friends with him?” Libby asked as she lifted the cardboard flap gingerly, half expecting a bug to crawl out.

  “He caught me stealing a beer from behind the bar when I was fourteen. I was thirsty,” he said matter-of-factly. “And probably needed some attention.”

  “Where were your parents?”

  He didn’t answer for a moment, gauging her as if he wasn’t sure just how honest he should be. “They split when I was thirteen,” he said. “My mom moved away from Mimosa Key, and my dad ran a boat-rental business down at the marina.”

  “Your mom left? Is that why you were already drinking that young?” she asked, fully aware of how a shaky situation on the home front could lead a teenager down the wrong path. God knew she’d had her share of booze long before it was legal.

  “I was drinking because…” He paused a long time before continuing. “I was a delinquent loser who discovered at a young age that beer and wine and especially whiskey give one the ability to think they are immortal. And I needed that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my old man did his best to try to kill me on a daily basis.” He shoved another box in front of her. “Get to work, Lib. You look like you’re going to faint.”

  If she did, it was because pieces were falling into place, and she didn’t want them to fit. She didn’t want Jake to be some kind of great guy with a love for certain people. It was easier not to like him. But Law painted a picture she’d never considered before.

  “So Jake really was like a father to you.”

  He abandoned the junk and sat down on one of the boxes. “Yes, he was. And he said as much on his deathbed and many times before.”

  “You were with him when he died?” For some reason, that shook her a bit.

  “Not at the moment, but right before he went into a coma and didn’t come back.”

  She considered that, and how tough it must have been. “I’m sorry for you,” she said, and meant it. “But it doesn’t change that, to me, he was an absentee, missing, disinterested father who rejected his children outright.”

  “You think.”

  “I think,” she agreed.

  “But you don’t know.”

  She didn’t answer because she’d already admitted she was on a hunt for the truth. Didn’t that mean at least some part of her wasn’t buying her mother’s story?

  “Not knowing, not being one hundred percent certain, leaves a hole in my heart,” she admitted, hating that her eyes were suddenly damp with tears, but there they were. “It’s like a piece of you doesn’t exist.”

  “And you think you can find that missing piece in here.” It was a statement, not a question, and the fact that he got that made her see Law a little differently. He really did want to help her find the truth.

  Her heart slipped around a little, and softened, thinking of the childhood he’d had. “I guess you know a little bit about missing pieces,” she said softly.

  “Yeah. It sucks when shit is missing.” He pointed to the boxes he’d moved close to her on the floor. “Those all came from the apartment. There’s another one from the restaurant. Everything else is gone except…” He pointed to the ancient BarcaLounger. “Jake’s throne.”

  “He sat in that?” Libby asked, a shred of hope rising. “Maybe it could be tested or scanned somehow? Maybe we could cut the leather off from the armrests?”

  “If you want him to curse you from his grave,” Law said. “That was his most-prized possession.”

  She curled her lip at the once-beige-now-brown crappy chair. If that was his prized possession, what did it say about the man who was…her father?

  “Don’t judge until you sit in it,” Law said. “It’s pretty damn comfy after a day of standing on your feet running that bar and restaurant. Come on, dig through that box.”

  Inside, she spied paperback novels that were so worn the library would probably have turned them away. “Why did you save these?”

  Law crouched closer to look in. “I saved those because books were…I don’t know, everything to him. He loved to read. Spy novels, mostly. But anything. Mysteries, romance, thrillers. Jake read constantly, and the ones in here were from the bookshelf he called his ‘comfort’ reads. He escaped in books.”

  He pulled out a thick, cracked, yellowed paperback. “Shogun.” He turned the book to her. “He must have read this book a hundred times.”

  “Then put it down,” she said quickly. “It could have his DNA.”

  He angled his head, pity in his expression. “I’m no DNA expert, but I’m pretty sure you need blood, skin, hair, or nails from Jake, not fingerprints on a novel.”

  “Maybe there’s a hair in it,” she said. “Put it aside, and I’ll keep looking.” She carefully lifted another title, the yellowed pages threatening to part from old glue. “No chance you accidentally kept a razor or hairbrush?”

  “Not in that box,” he said, reaching over the open container to touch her hand. “You need to know that I’ve been through all of this. I did this already.”

  “Looking for DNA?”

  “Just…looking. And packing.”

  So all this stuff was compromised, anyway. “I still want to look,” she said, lifting her hair off her back and snagging a hair tie from her wrist to put it in a ponytail. “I still want to know what made my biological father tick. I can’t help wanting to know something about him.”

  “Then you’re looking in the wrong container,” he said. “All of that is right here.” He tapped his temple. “And I’m happy to tell you everything you want to know about Jake.”

  She pulled out the top of her T-shirt and puffed air down her chest, sweat sticking to her now. “Your memories are…biased.”

  He lifted another book, another historical story by the same author. “So you think you’re not getting the real dirt on this guy you’re determined to hate posthumously if his story comes from someone who cared for him?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “And maybe I just want to have a chance to figure him out for myself.”

  He nodded. “Then let’s take the boxes to the truck,” Law said. “Let’s get them somewhere cooler, and you can go through every single thing and catalog everything. But you won’t learn much about the man by what he read and his old tax returns.” He pointed to another box. “That’s what’s in here, if I recall.”

  “And in that box?” she indicated the third.

  “Some clothes, I think. His favorite Blue Angels T-shirt he got at an air show we went to.”

  “Why would you keep that?”

  “Because he had the best time that day. I couldn’t remember him ever being so happy.”

  She studied him for a minute, trying to imagine this rough-around-the-edges masculine man getting all tender over someone’s old shirt. “Seriously?”<
br />
  He shrugged. “I don’t know how much clearer I can make this: Jake Peterson was my best friend. He was without a doubt the closest thing to a real father I ever had and one of the few people in the world willing to go to the mat for me when I didn’t deserve it. I loved the guy. I shared meals and memories and dreams and about four hundred gallons of non-alcoholic beer. I cried when he died. Hard. And I cried again when I packed up this shit, sad that I’d never see him or hear him swear like a sailor or laugh from his belly. I’m sorry if you want to hate this man you never met, but I don’t.”

  She studied the boxes and books, the echoes of his speech still bouncing around her head and the little room. “Okay.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say, because in her chest, her heart was cracking into a million pieces.

  How could Jake Peterson love someone who wasn’t his child, but reject someone who was?

  “Let me go get one of those carts, and we can take it all down in one trip. I’ll be right back,” Law said, his voice still thick with emotion.

  When he left, she turned back to the carton of books, stunned to realize tears were blurring her vision, her own emotions rocking her. Sadness. Regret. Frustration.

  And then an unexpected wave of fury shot through her, making her grip the fat novel in her hand. She wanted to rip it apart, to just tear the thin, beloved pages out one by one and burn them along with all the rest of everything Jake ever touched.

  Swearing softly, she whipped the book across the small space hard enough that it thudded against the recliner and clunked to the floor. She heard Law’s footsteps and the squeak of a rusty pushcart and didn’t want him to know about her little temper tantrum. On her knees, she crawled to the book and snatched it up, but when she did, something fluttered to the floor.

  Great. She’d destroyed Jake’s collector’s edition paperback version of—

  A picture. She froze as she realized it was a thin photograph, the shiny kind with rounded corners that people had developed at the drugstore when Libby was a kid. She picked it up and squinted at it, gasping softly.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered.

  “What is it?” Law asked, coming back to the entrance.

  She stared at it for a long time, vaguely aware that a tear rolled down her cheek. Did she really need more proof than a photo of a couple saved for years in the pages of Jake’s most beloved book?

  “It’s a picture of my mother.”

  Chapter Nine

  Law settled next to Libby on the storage room floor, taking the photograph from her hands. There were four people in the shot, two couples.

  “Is that Jake?” Libby asked.

  Was it? Law squinted at the profile of a young man hidden under a mop of chestnut hair and wearing tortoise shell glasses, his prominent nose sticking out as if he wore a name tag. Time had softened the young man’s jaw and bony shoulders, so none of that looked like Jake to Law, but there was the nose that always looked a little too big for his face.

  “Yes, it is. I recognize his nose.” He glanced at Libby, wondering if he should make a joke about how lucky she was not to have inherited that. But she didn’t seem in a joking mood, so he shifted his attention back to the picture that he’d somehow missed when he went through Jake’s stuff. Had he missed a will, too? Was he so grief-stricken back in those dark days that he hadn’t looked carefully enough?

  “Is that the Super Min?” Libby asked.

  “Looks like it.”

  “And there’s a pumpkin on the door,” she noted. “Must have been around Halloween.”

  “I wonder what year,” Law said.

  “Before 1971, I’d guess, since that’s the year I was born. We’d have to date this picture somehow, but I doubt that technology exists.” She flipped the photo over, but the back was blank. “I wonder who those other people are.”

  The other couple looked significantly older than Jake and Donna.

  “They’re not your grandparents?”

  “Oh God, no. Jake’s parents? They have to be in their fifties.”

  The older man in the picture wore an old-school golf shirt and sported mostly gray hair and the handsome face that reminded Law of a 1960’s successful “Mad Men” type of executive. The woman next to him had a more matronly look, with a stiff white top and frumpy skirt. Neither of them looked too happy, but a blind man could see Jake was smitten. Donna was smiling, too, but into the camera, not at Jake. She definitely looked happy, her eyes glinting like she had a joyful secret.

  Maybe she was pregnant, Law mused, but kept that theory to himself.

  “It looks like he really likes her,” Libby said, pointing to Jake and her mother.

  “I told you he cared about her.”

  “Then why would he…” She swallowed, not finishing the thought.

  “Maybe you don’t know the whole story, Lib,” he suggested gently. “Maybe what your mother thought happened wasn’t exactly what really happened. How’s her memory?”

  She shot him a sideways look. “Her memory is not in question. Her acting skills, however, are a thing to behold.”

  Making her side of the story even more questionable.

  “My mother is…colorful.” She held out the picture of a woman who looked a lot like Libby, only she had slightly darker, wavy hair blown off her face in a style not seen much anymore. Her smile was like Libby’s, though, wide and bright as she held the sides of a loose, ill-fitting minidress in a mock curtsy. Even the pose was playful and clever.

  “She looks like fun,” he mused.

  “Fun is a relative term.” She fanned herself for a second, using the picture. “She’s entertaining, that’s for sure.”

  When she stilled her hand, he took the photo, angling it so he could really study the people in the shot. “I can see it,” he said.

  “How entertaining she is?”

  “Why Jake would fall for her.”

  “Pffft. He didn’t fall for anything, remember? He acted like he never met her when she told him she was pregnant.”

  Then something didn’t fit. “They are right there on the street in the middle of town,” he noted. “So he wasn’t hiding the relationship. How could he act like he didn’t know her if he took pictures with her right in front of the Super Min?”

  She studied the picture again, quiet for a moment. “He doesn’t look like he would break her heart,” she conceded.

  “He loved her. I distinctly remember he said he loved a girl named Donna.”

  “Anything else?” she asked. “Did he say anything else about her? Why they broke up? When he saw her last?”

  Not a chance he could remember a detail like that. “Why don’t you ask her?”

  She chewed on her lower lip a bit, as if contemplating exactly how to answer that. Finally, she said, “Because I don’t always believe what she says, but…” She tapped the picture. “The fact that he had a picture does lend quite a bit of credibility to her story.”

  “And mine,” he added. “Why would he keep that if he didn’t care for her?”

  She sighed, not arguing that logic. “Tell me something about him, Law.”

  He thought about that for a moment and all the ways he could go with describing Jake Peterson. Heart of gold, salt of the earth, friend to the end. But something told him she wouldn’t believe any of that. At least, not without an anecdote.

  “When I was a teenager, maybe sixteen or so, I spent my first night at the Toasted Pelican.”

  She turned and looked at him, listening.

  “My dad was on a rampage, and I was pretty sure he was going to kill me.”

  Her eyes widened. “Why? Why was he like that?”

  “Because he blamed me for some bad shit that happened in our family,” he said, not wanting to get into details. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, even though, deep in his gut, he knew nothing else mattered quite as much. “What you need to know is that Jake risked his own life and reputation to let me stay with him, to let me hide at his restaurant, and to m
ake sure I ate, slept, had clothes, and didn’t drink…much.”

  “How long did you stay?”

  “That time? A month or two. But there were more instances, until I was big enough to really defend myself. I took shelter in that restaurant and with that man so many times. He never did anything but help me, over and over again, and assure me that I was the son he never had.”

  She listened, taking it all in, her finger running over the edges of the picture she still held. “It all comes back to that damn restaurant, doesn’t it?”

  It sure as hell did. “I guess that place represents something,” he agreed. “For me, it was a sanctuary. Still is, I guess.”

  “And that’s what I want it to be for me,” she said softly. “Exactly what I want. A place where women can go and feel safe and healthy and strong.”

  “How ironic that the Toasted Pelican was that for me for most of my life.”

  “And here I am trying to take it away from you,” she said.

  “And here I am helping you.”

  She smiled at him, those tears still glistening in her eyes. “Why would you do that? Honestly,” she added before he could answer flippantly. “Don’t tell me it’s for sex, because I know that’s not the reason.”

  He lifted his brows.

  “Not the only reason,” she added. “Why wouldn’t you go all hard-ass and fight me in court, waving your will and legal rights?”

  He inhaled, so ready to tell her that he had no will. All he had was Jake’s last words, but all she had were her mother’s words. Plus, that picture reminded him that he hadn’t scoured this stuff enough, not with a clear head.

  “Would you believe me if I said I’m just a flat-out good guy?”

  She nodded slowly. “Yeah, I’d like to believe that, but I don’t generally trust men. Especially when they think there might be sex involved.”

  “You just said you know that’s not the reason.”

  “The only reason, I said. Why are you helping me?”

  He looked down at the copy of Shogun he’d seen in Jake’s hands a dozen times, practically hearing the old man launch into a lecture about honesty, one of his hot buttons. Sure, Law could be completely honest about the will, but that could cost him everything here. He had to at least have one more chance to find it.