"Good, because if you're not too busy, I'd like to talk to you about something important. But if y'all are in the middle of something, I can come back. I know what it's like to get interrupted in the middle of something." He looked at Lindsay pointedly.

"No need. I'd better be on my way anyway," Mike said, seeming to sense Lindsay's discomfort.

"But you can't leave," Lindsay said. "What about Owen's uniform?"

"Would it be all right if I just left it here for him? He'll be here in a minute."

"Uh, sure," Lindsay said. She wasn't sure if she was up to having an important conversation with her father, but she didn't see how it could be avoided.

Once Mike had left, Lindsay and Jonah took a seat on the back porch steps. It was still early enough in the evening to avoid mosquitoes and the air was a perfect 70 degrees.

"So, you wanted to talk to me about something?" Lindsay prompted.

"Yes. But first, how're you doing?"

"Oh, hanging in there, I suppose," Lindsay said with a wan smile.

"You've got a lot of people who care for you, you know. I see how your friends look out for you. Speaking of which, what was that all about?" Jonah asked, pointing his thumb over his shoulder toward the kitchen.

"Dad, don't start."

"I'm not starting. I'm worried about you. I don't want you to rush into anything. I know how much you and Warren cared for each other, and it's gonna take some time to get a handle on what you're gonna do now. Teresa said he's been beside himself since y'all broke up. And you've gotta take care. Especially with what all has been going on outside of that."

"You and Teresa talk about us?"

The thought of Jonah and Teresa discussing her relationship with Warren had been weighing on her ever since she'd found out about their romance, but having it confirmed was still disturbing. Disturbing and yucky.

"We're your parents. We both just want you to be happy. Honestly. That's all I want for you. You're my girl."

Lindsay studied her father's face. She'd been steeling herself for a full-on haranguing about her breaking her engagement with Warren, or going out with a dangerous man who turned out to be a criminal, or being caught in a compromising position with Mike. Or possibly all of the above. Her romantic choices had always been one of the many trip-wire topics in their relationship, along with anything regarding her mother, her liberal views, and her more-than-occasional use of colorful language. She'd witnessed several seismic shifts in this long-standing dynamic over the past year, and she was ashamed to admit that most of the moves toward reconciliation had been undertaken by Jonah. He'd gone out of his way to try to cut her a bit more slack, and to hear her side of a story before giving his own opinion. And now he stood before her-perhaps concerned, perhaps even disappointed-but still full of affection. It would take awhile to get used to this mellower, less judgmental version of her father.

"Thanks, Dad. That means a lot to me."

"Don't thank me just yet. I don't think you're gonna like what I have to say next. I've been turning this over in my mind, praying on it, knowing what a terrible time this is for you. But then I thought about how upset you were about me keeping my relationship with Teresa a secret. I realized you and I do that too often-keep things from each other. That's not what I want from you, but I've been doing it, too."

Lindsay tried to antic.i.p.ate what her father was going to say next, but she drew a blank. With this kind of build up, it was clearly something of monumental importance. She tried to keep an open mind. "I know I've been too secretive. Old habits are hard to break," she said.

"Okay, then hear me out. Like I said, I know this is a bad time, but I have news I hope will bring some joy into our lives. I know you'll probably think it's too soon, but well..." he cleared his throat. "I'd like to ask Teresa to become my wife."

Lindsay popped to standing, as if the porch had suddenly turned white-hot. Her first reaction was to stomp inside her house and slam the door. Or maybe yell at her father for rubbing salt in the wound of her own failed engagement and selfishly following his own bliss while she was still in fear for her life. She wanted to shut down and lock her father out-out of her house, out of her life.

"You want to marry Warren's mother?" she said, almost growling the words.

"She's a good woman, Lindsay. A good Christian. I've waited a long time to find somebody who loves me back."

Lindsay paced up and down in front of the porch, breathing deeply. The energy she'd spent being angry with her father over the years could've powered a small city. Despite all her work experience dealing with human emotions and frailties, it was still so hard to apply what she'd learned to her own life, not just to her patients at the hospital. She took a deep breath and faced her father. It was time to stop humming along with the choir, and really sing.

"Okay," she said finally.

Jonah had been watching her anxiously as she paced, his shoulders pulled forward like he was bracing for a blow. Now he relaxed. "Okay?"

"Yep. I want you to be happy, too. That's what families are about-wanting what's best for each other. Teresa's lucky to have you."

"Really?" he said uncertainly.

"Really." She smiled at him. The more she spoke, the better she felt. She began to believe the words as she said them. "I'm glad you told me. You shouldn't have to hide something that makes you happy. And you deserve happiness. You spent so long pining over Sarabelle, being faithful to her even though she's never going to change. Teresa and I haven't been what you'd call close, and the whole thing with Warren is just going to make this awful and weird for me, but you're right. Teresa Satterwhite seems like a good woman. I can pretty much guarantee that she'll never rob my house, or show up drunk to a church picnic, or steal your Billy Graham Bible." She held out her hand to him. "I'm sorry if I made it hard for you to tell me."

Jonah jumped up, gathered her into his arms, and spun her around the way he'd done when she was a very young child.

"Dad! Your back!"

He set her down on the ground but kept his arms around her. "I don't care. This is worth a hundred slipped discs."

"Uh, hi."

They turned to see Owen loping around the corner of the house in his loose-limbed, teenage way. He regarded them curiously and raised his hand in greeting.

"Oh, hey, Owen," Lindsay said. "We didn't hear your car pull up."

"Yeah, where's your Doberman alarm? I was knocking on the front door. Usually he'd be barking like a maniac."

"He's out with Simmy and Dunette," Lindsay said.

Owen continued to look at Jonah. "My dad said he left my uniform here? And that you had Chinese dumplings? I can come back if you're busy, though, or, you know, just grab the dumplings and the uniform and take off."

Lindsay realized that Owen must think he'd caught her in a compromising position, standing in the arms of a strange man. Was she fated to always have her relationships with men, even with her own father, misconstrued?

"It's okay," she said. "This is my dad. Jonah Harding, meet Owen Checkoway. He's Mike's son."

"Pleased to meet you, young man," Jonah said, extending his hand.

"My dad was just giving me some good news," Lindsay explained.

"I'd better hit the road," Jonah said. "I've got some jewelry shopping to do."

Lindsay involuntarily touched her ring finger, which was still slightly pink and chapped. "Maybe get her a platinum ring? Platinum is a safer bet than gold."

Chapter 19.

"Do you want anything else? Dunette made some sweet tea," Lindsay offered. Owen was sitting at her kitchen table, polishing off the last of a mound of two dozen of Rob's dumplings.

"No, thanks. I'm good," he replied, chewing. "Those were awesome." He popped the last dumpling in his mouth and rose to put his plate in the dishwasher. "Hey, do you have time to look at my trig homework? It's due in the morning. Anna said you're really good at math."

"Sure," Lindsay replied. "She might've oversold my skills, though. Trigonometry isn't something I use every day."

"You've gotta be better than my dad. He's awful at math," Owen said. He took his laptop out of his schoolbag and flipped it open.

"How're things with Jess?" Lindsay asked, taking a seat next to him at the table.

"Pretty good. I haven't seen her as much since her grandpa died. She's really sad about it."

"They were really close, huh?" She paused. "Did she ever talk to you about being given power of attorney for him?"

He turned away from his computer screen for a moment to shoot her a quizzical look. "No. That's a pretty weird thing to ask."

"It's a pretty weird thing to do, too. Don't you think?"

He shrugged. "I dunno. Maybe. I mean, it's not like he could trust his daughter. Jess's mom is really nice and everything, but she just does anything anybody tells her to do. And Jess's dad would probably have either stolen all the money or messed it all up somehow. I don't think Mr. Boughtflower trusted anybody except Jess. There's always so much pressure on her to be, like, the family star. She's so good at so many things, but it's like it's never enough. Like she's afraid they won't like her if she's not perfect. I think it was even like that with her grandpa."

"It can be tough to feel like you have to be perfect all the time," Lindsay said.

"Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons we're together. I kind of get that. My dad was always like that with my mom. He thought she was the most perfect person ever. Like if she cooked something, and it was nasty, he thought it was good. I don't think he was just saying it, either. I think he really made himself believe it, like it was wrong to be like, 'She's a really great person and I love her and whatever, but she can't cook worth a d.a.m.n.' I know he really loved her, but sometimes I wonder if he really even knew her, you know? Like how can you know somebody if you never even let yourself see the bad parts of them?"

Lindsay gawked at him. From the first time she'd met him, she'd been struck by what an old soul he was. He always seemed to provide the ballast to the hot air balloon of his father's heedless enthusiasms. Now she was astounded anew by the casual way in which he'd illuminated so many essential truths about the people around him. She still didn't understand what motivated her parents or fueled their relationships. But this kid who'd experienced the trauma of losing his mother to a devastating illness? This kid was the Dalai Lama in sweatpants.

Owen opened the on-line practice exam he'd been asked to complete. "Anyway, Jess and I don't really talk about family stuff that much, that's just kind of like my opinions."

"This might seem like a weird question, too, but did she ever mention anything about a place called Burnt Island or the Lumbee Indians?" Lindsay asked. She didn't want to lose the opportunity to find out more about the Boughtflower family's past.

Owen gave her another quizzical look. "Well, she did a report on Henry Berry Lowrie for North Carolina history last semester. He was a Lumbee, right?"

"What?!" Lindsay asked, shocked to have stumbled so effortlessly onto a mound of pay dirt. "Do you know what it was about?"

"Yeah. We had that cla.s.s together. That's how we met. We had to pick a famous person from North Carolina history. She did Henry Berry Lowrie. He was, like, a vigilante or something. He and his gang pulled off a bunch of small heists against the rich planters and stuff, but then he pulled off this one huge job and disappeared. Stole a ton of money and was never seen again, so he became kind of a legend. And they never found the money. It was a really good paper. She got an A."

While he was talking, Lindsay had gone to the kitchen counter and began paging through one of the Lumbee history books she'd ordered from Amazon, looking for the section on Henry Berry Lowrie. "Did Jess say why she picked that topic? Was it part of your curriculum or something?"

"Nope. She had to get special permission from the teacher to write about the Lumbees, but she usually gets her way, you know? She's really persuasive."

"And you don't know why she picked Henry Berry Lowrie?"

"Nope. Probably just because he was really interesting. Like a cool Indian swamp pirate or something. I did Nina Simone. She was pretty cool, too, but I only got a B."

Lindsay turned the information about Jess's interest in Lumbee history over in her mind. She'd been so focused on finding out about Boughtflower's involvement in the Battle of Hayes Pond that she hadn't fully explored the connection to Henry Berry Lowrie. Could it be that the money Boughtflower thought of as cursing his family was the missing Lowrie fortune? And could the "hidden body" refer to Lowrie himself? Could something that happened so long ago really trouble a man's dying days the way Boughtflower's had been troubled? There was no doubt in her mind that whatever secret Boughtflower had tried to tell her was inextricably connected to the history of the Lumbees. There was also no doubt that there was a lot more to Jess than her flawless face.

"Do you and Jess have trig together, too?" Lindsay asked.

Owen took one of his basketball shoes out of his gym bag and begun to lace it up. "No, she's in Calculus. She's really good at math. If she wasn't busy tonight, I would've gotten her to help me with this."

Lindsay furrowed her brow, remembering back to her first meeting with Jess. The notebook she'd seen in Jess's purse had looked like trigonometry or geometry problems, not calculus. As if Jess were trying to triangulate something, or solve for a missing angle. Surely Jess couldn't like math so much she did trig problems in her spare time?

"What about astronomy? Are you in that cla.s.s with her?" Lindsay asked.

"Mount Moriah High doesn't have astronomy," Owen said, raising his eyebrows at her. "What's with the third degree?"

"Sorry. It's nothing really. I'm trying to get to the bottom of something Boughtflower said. Anyway, I just thought Jess might be taking that."

Owen shook his head. "Nope, she's got Calc and theater and a couple blow-off cla.s.ses. She graduates the week after next, so Calc is really her only hard cla.s.s this semester."

Although Lindsay found it more than a little fishy that Jess would lie to her about having trigonometry and astronomy homework, she let the matter drop. She was aware that she was already asking an unusual number of questions, many of which must have seemed odd to Owen, and she didn't want to completely freak him out. "Have y'all decided what you're going to do when she finishes?" Lindsay asked.

"We're staying together. I'm gonna try to graduate early, and then move to New York next January. I'll apply to NYU and Columbia, and maybe Hunter as a backup school."

"You're moving to New York for a girl you've only known a couple of months?" Lindsay asked. She tried to keep her tone neutral, but realized that she sounded exactly like the kind of adult she would've avoided when she was a teenager.

Owen, however, took her concern in stride. "I think I want to do something with international NGOs, so New York is probably the best place in the world to do that. And Jess wants to be an actress, so she's gotta be in either New York or L.A. She's really, really good at acting. She can do all kinds of accents and fake cry with real tears and make herself look like a totally different person and stuff. She even had a meeting today with some casting agent or model scout or something. I dropped her off in Raleigh after school. I've gotta pick her up later, after my game."

"She's meeting a casting agent in Raleigh?" Lindsay asked. Compared to Mount Moriah, Raleigh was a bustling metropolis, but it wasn't exactly an ordinary stomping ground for talent agents and casting directors. "Do her parents know about that?"

Owen shrugged nonchalantly. "Probably not. They're pretty high strung. Anyway, she's an adult, you know? She can make her own decisions."

"I guess," Lindsay said, frowning.

"This is the part I don't get," Owen said, pointing to a shape on the screen. "The rhombus where the diagonals bisect each other?"

Although Lindsay's thoughts were distracted, she managed to help Owen work through the most difficult problems, relieved that her math skills weren't as rusty as she'd feared. As she worked with him, she could see the astuteness of something Anna had once said to her-Owen was the kind of kid you just wanted to feed. Lindsay was far from the motherly type, but there was no doubt Owen had a unique blend of maturity, appreciativeness, and vulnerability that just cried out to be cared for.

"What will your dad do if you move to New York with Jess?" Lindsay asked, as Owen packed up to leave. "He'll be stuck here by himself. Or will he go off on another travel adventure?"

Owen looked perplexed for a moment. "I think he'll stay," he said, smirking.

"Don't you think he'll get bored, though?"

"Not with you around." He patted her on the head, looking down at her with an affable expression. "You'll keep things interesting for him."

Chapter 20.

When Dunette, Kipper, and Simmy arrived home a short time later, they found Lindsay at her kitchen table with her laptop, several open books, and handwritten notes spread out all around her.

"What on earth are you doing, honey?" Simmy asked.

Lindsay briefly explained her theory about there being a link between the mystery surrounding Boughtflower's will and the Lowrie Gang, and her belief that Jess had been withholding some knowledge about it.

"There's got to be a connection," she insisted. "Everything Boughtflower said fits with this story. Since the end of the Civil War, Lowrie's gang had been doing all these low-level robberies, stealing candlesticks and rustling livestock. Then all of a sudden, in 1872, just as the pressure is really mounting, they pulled off this huge, daring heist. It's like something out of a movie. They stole almost $30,000 in gold from a safe in the sheriff's office and the stores of some well-to-do merchants in town. There's only one more confirmed sighting of Lowrie after that, and then he vanishes. I've also been looking up some information on the Boughtflowers, too. George Boughtflower, Otis's grandfather, set up his first factory in Burlington in 1880. He didn't have any relations there-just appeared out of the blue with enough money to open a factory. There's a missing body, stolen money, and it all took place in and around Burnt Island Swamp. If Boughtflower's ancestors had something to do with Lowrie's disappearance and then used the stolen money to start the family business, maybe that's what he felt so guilty about. Maybe he wanted to see that the Lowrie descendants, the Lumbees, get the stolen money back."

Dunette frowned. "I'm about the only person in Robeson County who's not related to Lowrie," she said. "And if what my granddaddy told me about my family is true, I'm about the last person the Lowrie money should come to."