Wreathed (23 page)

But would everything be all right?

I didn’t
know
, and I would find out in an hour, and I
wasn’t ready to find out.

I knew how I felt about Adam, or at least I thought I did. I wanted to be close to him, to feel his warmth next to mine, to see his eyes light up when I walked into a room, to see him look at me with longing and ardor, to possess him and have him possess me.

But that wasn’t the same thing as romance.

And it wasn’t the same thing as love.

I hadn’t let myself use that word in connection with Adam. I knew I liked him. I knew I was attracted to him. I knew I couldn’t stop thinking about him. But I didn’t know if I loved him. I thought he wasn’t ready to say that he loved me. To be honest, I didn’t know how I would react if he
did
tell me he loved me.

We’d spent so little time together, after all. And the one thing that we had in common—the one thing that had brought us together—was Sheldon Berkman.

I rubbed my eyes, blew my nose, and did the best I could to salvage my composure and my makeup. This worked until Sheldon knocked on the passenger-side window and made me jump against my seat belt.

“You doing OK in there?” he asked. “Just checking.”

I shot him a look that I thought was cold and malevolent, but that he apparently thought was warm and inviting. He opened the door and got in the car.

“I ended up splitting the difference,” he said. “I got crab rangoon at the Chinese place and a chicken biscuit and coffee at Dunkin’. It went together better than you’d think it would.”

“I’m so pleased. I can’t even tell you.”

“Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat? Maybe a snack or something? My treat. You look like you could use a pick-me-up.”

“I don’t want anything from you but for you to tell the truth about what you did,” I said.

“The truth is that you’re looking a little worse for wear. And I’m sorry about that. I opened up my big fat mouth when I shouldn’t have. Let me make it up to you.”

“You couldn’t make this up to me in a thousand years of trying, so don’t. You have no idea how much you have messed up my life over the past couple of weeks.”

“You’re the one that’s driving. I would feel a lot better if I knew you were keeping your blood sugar up. I can get you a bottle of Coke at the Chinese place; they had a whole refrigerator full of them.”

“Fine,” I said. “Get me a Coke, and keep your mouth shut the rest of the way to Freehold, and we’ll call it a truce. Deal?”

“Deal,” he said, and came back a minute later with a bottle of Coke, a Sprite for himself, and two fortune cookies. He opened his and checked the fortune. “It says,
To one who waits, a moment seems a year
. Sounds about right. What did you get?”

I ripped open my cookie and read the fortune. “
Depart not from the path that fate has assigned.
”

“I guess that could mean anything,” Sheldon said.

“The only path I’m following right now is the Garden State Parkway,” I said. “Buckle up.”

I gunned the car back onto the Parkway and headed north in relative peace and quiet.

Chapter 27

Adam lived in a pleasant house on one of the main commercial streets in Freehold, in a mixed residential-commercial neighborhood. There was a deli two doors north and a fried-chicken restaurant just to the south. The house had peacock-blue siding, a large front porch, and a collection of whimsical topiary bushes in the minuscule front yard. Adam’s battered old Jaguar was parked alongside, and I pulled my car behind it.

I had meant to get the address from Sheldon, but he had fallen asleep at the turn-off from I-195. Luckily, I had brought the redwell Adam had given me, and his address was on some of the paperwork. I left Sheldon snoozing on the passenger seat and got out of the car and knocked on the front door.

There was no response.

I did a quick, surreptitious check of the mailbox, and there was a PSE&G bill for “Adam Lewis,” so I knew I was at the right address. I knocked again. Still no response. The door was locked.

The front porch had a swing that looked comfortable enough, and I had no doubt I could sit there until Adam came back from wherever he was and play
Candy Crush Saga
until I ran out of lives or patience. I tried his cell number, but it went straight to voicemail. I checked his Facebook status, and he hadn’t posted that he was going anywhere or doing anything.

I heard a scraping sound, and checked behind me to see if Sheldon had gotten out of the car. He still looked to be asleep, so I listened again, and the sound was coming from behind the house. I stepped down off the porch and went to check to see if there was a way into the backyard, which there was.

I heard the scraping noise again, coming from the far back corner of the house. I walked around and looked, and saw Adam’s head sticking out of the ground.

“Oh, it’s you,” the disembodied head said. “I thought I heard someone knocking.”

“No wonder you couldn’t answer the door. Are you all right down there?”

“Sure,” he said. “Could you hand me that caulk gun? The one with the white handle? It’s about a foot out of my reach. Be careful you don’t fall in.”

I picked up the odd metal implement that he indicated and stuck it down in the hole where Adam was standing. “Thanks,” he said. I couldn’t help noticing that he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

“I always heard that the first rule of holes is that when you’re in one, stop digging.”

“It should be that if you’re digging one, make sure you can reach the caulk gun. What are you doing here?”

“I have some news for you,” I said.

“I have some news for you. When you install a rainwater cistern in your house, make sure you pump all the water out over the winter, so when it gets cold enough to freeze, it doesn’t crack the plastic wall and cause a leak. I’ve been meaning to do this all winter, but it’s the first day in a long time that it’s been warm enough to work outside. I have all the gravel cleaned out, I think. If you can give me a minute to caulk the leak, I can listen to whatever news you have to tell me.”

“I admire your ambition and work ethic.” I also admired the way his muscles rippled under his skin, but I didn’t say that out loud. He was just starting to work up a sweat.

“You sound like a sidewalk supervisor,” Adam said. He took a long-handled shovel from the depths of the hole and stuck it out, handle first. “Would you mind taking this? As long as you’re here, you might as well be helpful.”

“Not a problem,” I said, taking the handle.

“Of course, you’re not supposed to be here anyway. Legal ethics, remember?”

“I found a loophole,” I said. “Not a big loophole, though. Maybe five-foot-four, I guess. I didn’t think to measure.”

“If this is a joke, I’m not getting it. Can you take the caulk gun?”

“No problem. Do you need help getting out of that hole?”

“Just stand back.” He grabbed the lip of the cistern and pulled himself up, bunching his legs underneath him. With one convulsive heave, he pushed his upper body out of the cistern and onto the lawn, and then scrambled the rest of the way out. He stood up and brushed a few stray wisps of grass off his glistening torso. “Have you come here to negotiate? Because I have a rule about making any agreements unless I’m properly dressed.”

“I have one thing to show you. It’s in my car. If you follow me, you’ll understand why I came.”

“You didn’t bring the stuffed giraffe all the way down here, did you? If you didn’t want it, you could have just sent it back.”

“Something else,” I said. “Something big.”

“I thought the stuffed giraffe was pretty big.”

“Even bigger.”

“You say so,” he said. He went over to the back porch and grabbed a black T-shirt with a cartoon dinosaur on it, and put it on. “Let’s go see. It better be good, whatever it is.”

We trooped around the back of the house, and I walked over to the passenger side of the car and looked through the window. The car was empty.

“He got away,” I said. “Let’s look around. He couldn’t have gotten far.”

“What are you talking about?” Adam said. “Who are you talking about? If this is a joke, Wendy, it isn’t the least bit funny.”

“Yoo-hoo!” I said. “Sheldon! Where are you? Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

“This is a joke,” Adam said. “You drove all the way down here to play hide-and-seek.”

“It’s not hide-and-seek,” I said. “I found him. Your uncle. Sheldon. He’s alive, has been all this time.”

“If this is a joke, it’s not very funny, Wendy. Unless it isn’t a joke, and you’re delusional.”

“No joke,” I said. I looked up and down the street. No sign of Sheldon. He wasn’t on the porch, and he couldn’t have gotten into the back yard.

“Uncle Sheldon is dead. You should know. You went to the funeral.”

“
Your Uncle Sheldon is alive,
” I said. “He was never dead. He was trying to play a sick prank on my mother. He was hiding in the house in Cape May, the one in the codicil. He was fixing it up.”

“You may not be aware of this, but you’re having a dissociative episode right here in my front yard. Do you have a past record of mental illness that I need to know about? Do I need to call someone to pick you up?”

Adam stood there and grinned at me, that adorable, infuriating grin that had been haunting my waking hours for the last week. I wanted to throw something at him, but I didn’t have anything close at hand. The only thing that kept me from slapping him was the fact that he wouldn’t tease me like this unless he really thought Sheldon was dead.

“He’s alive,” I said. “And it’s important that you believe me. Because if I find out later that you knew he was alive all this time, you and I are going to have a problem.”

“Uncle Sheldon is dead,” Adam said. “I picked up the ashes from the mortuary myself. If you think he’s alive, you’re wrong. I know I was teasing you just now, but now you’re starting to worry me. You need to stop whatever this is you’re doing, because there is no way you can convince me that my uncle is still alive,” he said.

“Oh, there’s a way,” I said. “Having said that, that’s wonderful that you think so. I’d hate to think you were lying to me all this time. Now all I need to do is find out where he wandered off to, and we’re set.”

“Let’s just suppose, just for a minute, that you’re right and I’m wrong,” Adam said. “Maybe you did go down to Cape May. Maybe there was someone squatting in that old house. Maybe he told you he was Sheldon Berkman, and you believed him. But he isn’t, because
Sheldon Berkman
is dead
. That would explain everything, wouldn’t it?”

“Then let’s find whoever it was that was in the car, and we’ll know for sure,” I said.

“If there was someone in the car, where did he go?” Adam asked.

“
I don’t know,
” I said. “You have to believe me on this one. I am telling you the truth. Your uncle is alive, and he’s around here somewhere. Why don’t you go down to the chicken place? I can check the deli, and we can meet back here.”

“Let me explain what this looks like from my perspective,” Adam said. “We went out twice, and had a great time, at least the second time, anyway. And the next morning, you tell me that we can’t see each other again because of that insane codicil.”

“Which doesn’t apply anymore, because your uncle is not dead
,
” I said.

“Be that as it may. Now, here you are, telling me my uncle’s alive, and asking me to trust you, and you don’t seem to understand why that’s difficult for me right now. You are not giving me a lot of room to work with here, Wendy.”

“Your uncle is alive. You have to believe me. We can find him.
He cannot have gotten that far.
”

I stood there for a long moment. I felt tears streaming down my face for the second time that day. The first time, the tears had come from stress and anxiety and uncertainty. These were different. They were hot tears, from anger and disappointment.
It isn’t fair
, I thought.
Sheldon is alive. You have to believe me. We can be together again. All you have to do is listen to me.

But I didn’t say anything, because life wasn’t fair and Adam didn’t trust me and I was losing him and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. And anything I could say would be so terrible and final that I couldn’t ever take it back.

And then, at the depth of my despair, and right on cue, Sheldon opened the front door of the house and stepped onto the front porch. “What are you kids talking about?” he said. “Hope I haven’t interrupted a lovers’ quarrel.”

Chapter 28

The look on Adam’s face was a combination of shock, amazement, and utter consternation. “
Holy shit,
” he said. “Where did you come from?”

“Hello, Adam,” Sheldon said. “Good to see you. You’ve done a lot of work on this place since the last time I was up here. Did you pick out this blue for the siding?”

“Holy shit,” Adam said again. “You
are
alive. How? Why? What the hell is going on?”

“How did you get in the house?” I asked. I tried to keep the edge of anger I was feeling out of my voice—mostly because I was so happy that I didn’t have to spend the afternoon looking for Sheldon to prove to Adam that I was right—despite the fact that I still wanted to wring his neck.

“I was in the car and I woke up and it turned out we were here,” he said. “I didn’t know where either of you were. I had a key, so I went inside. And I’m an old man, and I had that bottle of Sprite on the drive up here.”

Adam rubbed his face with his hands. “This is not happening,” he said. “Why? What in God’s name did you think you were going to accomplish?”

“Didn’t Danny tell you about the plan?” Sheldon asked. “He was supposed to, after the funeral.”

“Tell me what?” Adam asked. “That you weren’t really dead? That you were pulling an insane stunt?” There was an edge to his voice I hadn’t heard before. I’d expected Adam to be unhappy about being proven wrong, but he sounded as though he was angrier at Sheldon than I was, and I wasn’t sure that was possible.