I could see that n.o.ble was debating whether or not to tell me the truth. I had a feeling that "truth" and "women" weren't two words he thought of as belonging together.

After a while he sighed as though his decision had been made. "I need a place to live. I've had a little trouble at home, and, well, I ain't exactly welcome there right now."

I lifted my eyebrows and made a guess. "Nine months kind of trouble?"

Looking down at the floor, n.o.ble gave a little smile. "Yes, ma'am. One of my uncles has a new wife, and she's real young and real pretty, and reeaaaal lonely and..." Breaking off, he looked up and gave me a little what-could-I-do? kind of grin.

I thought about what he'd just revealed and wondered why I'd ever craved a family.

"Ford won't like this," I said.

"I understand," n.o.ble said, then, slowly, dramatically, he leaned his mop against the kitchen cabinet. When he turned away, his shoulders were slumped and his head was down so low he looked like a turtle retracting into its sh.e.l.l.

"You ought to go on the stage," I said to his back. "I haven't seen such bad acting since I was in the fourth grade. Okay, what can you do to earn your keep?"

When he turned around to look at me, I saw what I was sure was the real n.o.ble. Gone was the slump; he was standing up straight and proud.

"I could put this rat trap of a house back together," he said. Also gone was his meek att.i.tude-and so was half his accent. "In one stint in the poky I worked in the bakery."

I wasn't going to be so uncool as to say, "And what did you do to get put into jail?" I decided to test him. I said, "Tell me how to make a croissant."

With a little smile he described-accurately-how to make a croissant with the b.u.t.ter between the layers.

I hated to be redundant even in my own mind, but all I could think was, Ford isn't going to like this.

"Look," I said after a while, "you rummage around, find what you need, and start baking. The richer and more gooey the things you make, the better. This plan calls for some sweetening-up of the boss."

And exchange of information, I thought. If there was anything Ford liked better than high-fat food, it was information. I knew he was aware that I'd been withholding info from him lately, so if I wanted to coax him into letting n.o.ble and... uh, Toodles, stay, I was going to have to bargain.

As I went up the stairs to Ford's office-where I was sure he was hiding -I thought of the absurdity of it all. I was going to have to reveal private information about myself in an attempt to get Ford to allow his own family to live with him. It didn't make sense.

But as I reached his door, I thought, Who are you kidding? I was dying to tell somebody about Russell. And since Ford was becoming the best friend I ever had, he was the one I wanted to tell. And I didn't agree with Russell that Ford would tell Dessie. It had been days since his date with her and, as far as I knew, there'd been no contact between them since then. And, yes, I did push the b.u.t.ton on the phone that shows all the incoming calls for the last month. Not one from Ms. Mason.

Lifting my hand, I knocked.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

Ford

I wanted to tell them to get out. I wanted to tell n.o.ble that I'd never liked him, that he'd always been my enemy, and that I was done with that part of my life, so he could get into his rusted-out old Chrysler and leave. I wanted to tell my father to get out, too. He was nothing to me.

But I couldn't do it. Even though I knew what they wanted from me, I still couldn't kick them out.

I could tell myself I was being heroic in allowing them to stay, but the truth was, I was curious about my father, and I... well, I had kind of missed n.o.ble. Maybe it was because I was getting older, or because I no longer had Pat's family as mine, but in the last couple of years I'd been thinking of visiting my relatives again. Then I would remember that, "You won't remember this..." c.r.a.p and cancel the plans I'd been making.

So now here was this man I'd only seen in pictures and the cousin I'd spent my childhood being tortured by, and I knew they needed a place to stay. No one had told me my father was going to be released years before the end of his sentence (Good behavior? Got a Ph.D. in entomology?) but n.o.ble's eldest daughter had e-mailed me about what her father had done.

Vanessa had been furious and ready to disown her father, but, to tell the truth, the story had made me laugh. Uncle Zeb had married some girl a third his age, then left the poor thing to cry in loneliness. Vanessa told me her dad had just been released from the local hoosegow where he'd been thrown for thirty days for threatening to shoot some man's eternally-barking dog. n.o.ble might not have received jail if he hadn't been caught inside the man's alarmed fence, loaded shotgun aimed. Worse, n.o.ble'd had to be wrested to the ground to keep him from shooting the dog after the sheriff arrived. He said that if he was going to be sent to jail anyway, he wanted it to be for an actual crime, not for something he'd just thought about doing.

So, anyway, n.o.ble had been in jail for thirty days, and presumably celibate during that time, then he'd been confronted with a nubile and extremely neglected young wife. Vanessa was saying she never wanted to see her father again, but it all didn't seem too bad to me.

It was my guess that n.o.ble had found out that my father was being released from prison, kept the knowledge to himself, and on his way out of town, had picked the old man up. So now they were here, two ex-cons, with no job, no cash, and no place to stay.

Oh, yeah, I knew what they wanted. I was sure n.o.ble wanted a grubstake and the second I gave him money enough to open some business somewhere, he'd be off. And he'd leave the old man with me.

So what would I do with a geriatric gnome?

I didn't get any further in my thoughts because Jackie knocked on the door, and when I told her to come in, right away, I saw that she wanted something from me. Let's see. What could it be?

When she started to speak, I wanted to tell her to spare me the lecture, that I'd just get out my checkbook. I'd buy n.o.ble some business far away from the angry relatives (if I knew them, only the younger generation was angry; Uncle Clyde's generation was probably laughing their heads off) and I'd send the old man to a nursing home.

But as soon as I saw Jackie's face, I decided to use her guilt to get her to tell me why she'd been so weird lately. First, though, I had to listen to what she was saying about family She was saying how everyone needed one and how as a person got older, family meant more to him. and someday I'd regret not getting to know my father, and I should let bygones be bygones and- I'd seen my father sitting upright, eyes wide open, but sound asleep.

After he'd unnecessarily told me who he was and before Jackie made her dramatic wet-dog entrance, Tessa had asked him how he could do that. He said that where he'd been he'd learned that he had to look as though he were alert at all times. He said that a man with his fine physical looks couldn't let down his guard ever. Tessa had giggled because she thought he was joking about his "fine physical looks," but I could see that he was serious.

While Jackie was going on at me about family, I tried to see if I'd inherited this ability to sleep with my eyes open while sitting up. When I'd about decided I was going to be able to do it, Jackie stopped talking and looked down at her hands. Uh oh, I thought. She'd gone off family and was on to something else, but I hadn't been listening. I searched my mind to remember what she'd been saying. Oh, yes. Camera. Something about a camera. Her new digital maybe? Or that fantastic little printer she'd bought?

"Where'd you get it?" I asked. That seemed a safe question.

"I..." she began. "I met this man and he lent me-"

She couldn't have woken me up more completely if she'd shot at me. "A man?" I asked.

"You..." She looked hard at me. "He doesn't want me to tell you about him because he said you'd tell Dessie. But I think you're a better person than that. You are a better person than that, aren't you?"

"Much better," I said. I saw no need to tell Jackie that Dessie's mad pa.s.sion for me had only been an attempt to make her jug-eared lawn boy jealous.

Instantly, Jackie gave me so much information that I had trouble understanding it all. Of course my hearing may have been clogged by the fact that my temperature had risen approximately twelve and a half degrees.

What kind of town was this? I'm a rich bachelor. Where were the women who were dying to have me? Women who would do anything to get me?

Dessie wanted some kid who only knew how to push a lawn mower, and now Jackie had-my temperature went up two degrees more-"met a man."

"Wait a minute," I said, "let's backtrack. His name is-?"

"Russell Dunne."

"And he is-?"

"An a.s.sociate professor of art history at the University of North Carolina."

"Right. And he gave you-?"

" Lent me the digital camera and the printer. They're his, not mine. At the picnic he took a photo, printed it out, and I thought it was-"

"The printer isn't battery-operated so how'd he use it out in the woods?"

"I don't know. Maybe he had a battery pack. He had so much stuff in his bag it was almost magic."

I think she was trying to make me laugh, but laughter was the furthest thing from my mind. "Magic," I said.

"If you're going to be nasty, I'm not going to tell you anything."

I apologized, but I was dying to ask her to spell the guy's name. When I searched out his credentials on the Internet I wanted to be sure I had the name right.

I listened politely as she told me how "nice" he was, but my mind was racing. She had to have met him on Sunday. While I was at Dessie's, solving her love life and being a great friend to a woman I hardly knew, Jackie had been picking up men... Where?

"Where did you meet him?" I asked. " Exactly where?" I added, in case she'd already told me.

She waved her hand. "That doesn't matter. I'd been taking photos of flowers and-"

"You picked up a man on a trail somewhere?" I asked, truly shocked. "I didn't think you were that kind of woman. But then, you're not from my generation, are you?"

Jackie didn't take my bait. "He grew up in Cole Creek, but he-" She looked down at her hands. "He asked me not to tell you about him because of your relationship with Dessie."

Again with Dessie. Was I tied forever to her because I'd had dinner with her? First Rebecca and now Dessie. "What's Dessie got to do with this?" I asked more sharply than I'd intended to.

"Russell wrote a bad review of her work and since then the town has considered him a pariah."

That took me so aback I couldn't prevent a smile. What an old-fashioned word. "A pariah, huh?" I stopped smiling. This thing needed some logic applied to it. "Why would the town care whether or not Dessie Mason gets good reviews?"

"She's the town celebrity so they don't want her hurt."

"Really? It's my opinion that this town pays no attention to celebrities.

Take me, for example. In that town where I met you, they were all over me, but here, we've had one invitation to an afternoon in the park and since then, zilch."

"What does that mean?" Jackie asked, frowning.

"Just that something isn't ringing true." I could see she was getting angry, so I smiled to soften what I wanted to say. "Are you sure this guy didn't ask you not to tell me about him because I might stop him from getting what he wants?"

Jackie narrowed her eyes at me. "And just what is it that you think he wants?"

"You. In bed."

"Is that supposed to shock me? You just said that I'm from a different generation than you are. Women today aren't eternally-virgin Doris Days. I hope he wants me in bed. I really, really, hope he does. But, so far, no luck."

I didn't want Jackie to see my shock. Or was it shock? Was it, maybe, red-hot jealousy?

"Let's not fight, okay?" she said softly. "I really came up here to talk to you about your relatives. They don't have any place to stay."

Sorry, but I couldn't move my mind around that quickly. Some man had written a bad review of Dessie Mason's work and now an entire town hated him for it? Did that include Miss Essie Lee? She was as dried-up as Dessie was luscious, and human nature told me that the Miss Essie Lees of the world did not defend the Dessies.

I wanted to ask Jackie more questions about this man. Top of my list was to ask for his social security number so I could run a major search on him.

But when I looked at Jackie, I could tell that she'd just asked me a question.

Ah, yes. Toodles. My dear old dad.

"You didn't put it in your book," Jackie said.

That startled me. Had I ever had a thought that I hadn't put in one of my books? She spoke again. Oh, yes, why had my dad been in prison? True, that particular story had not been put into any book. I had, of course, written the story, but that ma.n.u.script had been a thousand pages long, so Pat had done some cutting. She said it was better to leave out the reason the hero's father was in prison because the missing story lent some mystery to the book. She didn't say that I was revealing too much, but then Pat could sometimes be as polite as her mother.

"When he was a baby," I said, "my father was dropped on his head and afterward, he was always slow. Not r.e.t.a.r.ded, but..." I thought. "Simple.

Childlike. My mother told me he took everything literally."

I settled back in my chair. I'd told this story only once before, and that was to Pat. Right now, part of me didn't want to accord Jackie the honor of being the second person to hear it. After all, while I'd been patching up someone's broken romance, Jackie had been picking up a strange man in a forest, believing every word he said, and l.u.s.ting over him. I couldn't make myself think about what she'd said, that she wanted to go to bed with this stranger. Had I misjudged her character? Was she after all men? Would n.o.ble have to fend her off? My funny-looking father?

I made a vow to never again eat black olives that had been sliced into little rings.

"My uncles," I said, "decided to rob a bank. They were all young and full of themselves and they saw it as a way to make themselves rich. Of course they didn't think how they were later going to explain the fact that even though half of them were unemployed, they could suddenly afford houses and cars. But anyway, they came up with what they thought was a foolproof plan: They'd use Toodles as a decoy. He-"

"Why's he called 'Toodles'?"

I looked at her. "I'll tell you the details if you want to hear them, but it might be better just to say that one of the results of my father's injury was a very long delay in toilet training."

"Oh," Jackie said. "So how were your uncles going to use a poor, innocent man like your father to help them commit a crime?"

"Toodles was to sit outside the bank with the motor running in the getaway car, thinking he was going to drive away when they came running out. But my uncles double-crossed him. They planned to rob the bank, then go out the backdoor where another car was waiting. They figured that by the time the police came, they'd be long gone. When the police stopped to arrest Toodles, that would give them time to escape."

"They wanted your father to be arrested?"

"Yes. As a diversion. They knew Toodles hadn't done anything wrong, so what could the police charge him with? Sitting outside the bank in a car with the engine running? My uncles figured the police would let him go after a few hours, then the lot of them would share the money and live happily ever after."

"And the police wouldn't search for the bank robbers? Wouldn't they suspect your uncles?" Jackie asked, eyes wide.

"The police could find them for all they cared, because my uncles believed they had ironclad alibis: each other. Who could fight eleven men swearing that they'd all been together?"

"Okay, so what went wrong?"

"My uncles didn't know that Toodles had been seeing a girl."

"Your mother."

"Yes. She'd been raised in an orphanage and she was pretty much alone in the world. And she had such a bad temper that she didn't have a lot of dates, plus she was past thirty, so maybe when little Toodles came along, she was ready to try anything." I shrugged. Who knew what went on in my mother's head? The woman had certainly never shared any of her inner feelings with me.