Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Fifteen
IT WAS HARD FOR CAL TO SEE BILL TURNER AND say nothing about Gage being in town. But Cal knew his friend. When and if Gage wanted his father to know, Gage would tell him. So Cal did his best to avoid Bill by closing himself in his office.
He dealt with orders, bills, reservations, contacted their arcade guy to discuss changing out one of their pinball machines for something jazzier.
Checking the time, he judged if Gage wasn't awake by now, he should be. And so picked up the phone.
Not awake, Cal decided, hearing the irritation in Gage's voice, hasn't had coffee. Ignoring all that, Cal launched into an explanation of what happened that morning, relayed the dinner plans, and hung up.
Now, rolling his eyes, Cal called Fox to run over the same information, and to tell Fox that Layla needed a job and he should hire her to replace Mrs. Hawbaker.
Fox said, "Huh?"
Cal said, "Gotta go," and hung up.
There, duty done, he considered. Satisfied, he turned to his computer and brought up the information on the automatic scoring systems he wanted to talk his father into installing.
It was past time for the center to do the upgrade. Maybe it was foolish to think about that kind of investment if everything was going to hell in a few months. But, if everything was going to hell in a few months, the investment wouldn't hurt a thing.
His father would say some of the old-timers would object, but Cal didn't think so. If they wanted to keep score by hand, the center would provide the paper score sheets and markers. But he thought if someone showed them how it worked, gave them a few free games to get used to the new system, they'd jump on.
They could get them used and reconditioned, which was part of the argument he was prepared to make. They had Bill onboard, and he could fix damn near anything.
It was one thing to be a little kitschy and traditional, another to be old-fashioned.
No, no, that wasn't the tack to take with his father. His father liked old-fashioned. Better to use figures. Bowling accounted for more than half, closer to sixty percent, of their revenue, so-
He broke off at the knock on his door and inwardly winced, thinking it was Bill Turner.
But it was Cal's mother who popped her head in. "Too busy for me?"
"Never. Here to bowl a few games before the morning league?"
"Absolutely not. " Frannie loved her husband, but she liked to say she hadn't taken a vow to love, honor, and bowl. She came in to sit down, then angled her head so she could see his computer screen. Her lips twitched. "Good luck with that. "
"Don't say anything to Dad, okay?"
"My lips are sealed. "
"Who are you having lunch with?"
"How do you know I'm having lunch with anyone?"
He gestured to her pretty fitted jacket, trim pants, heeled boots. "Too fancy for shopping. "
"Aren't you smart? I do have a few errands, then I'm meeting a friend for lunch. Joanne Barry. "
Fox's mother, Cal thought, and just nodded.
"We have lunch now and then, but she called me yesterday, specifically to see if I could meet her today. She's worried. So I'm here to ask you if there's anything I should know, anything you want to tell me before I see her. "
"Things are as under control as I can make them, Mom. I don't have the answers yet. But I have more questions, and I think that's progress. In fact, I have one you could ask Fox's mom for me. "
"All right. "
"You could ask if there's a way she could find out if any of her ancestors were Hawkins. "
"You think we might be related somehow? Would it help if we are?"
"It would be good to know the answer. "
"Then I'll ask the question. Now answer one for me. Are you all right? Just a yes or no is good enough. "
"Yes. "
"Okay then. " She rose. "I have half a dozen things on my list before I meet Jo. " She started for the door, said, "Damn it" very quietly under her breath, and turned back. "I wasn't going to ask, but I have no willpower over something like this. Are you and Quinn Black serious?"
"About what?"
"Caleb James Hawkins, don't be dense. "
He would've laughed, but that tone brought on the Pavlovian response of hunched shoulders. "I don't exactly know the answer. And I'm not sure it's smart to get serious, in that way, with so much going on. With so much at stake. "
"What better time?" Frannie replied. "My levelheaded Cal. " She put her hand on the knob, smiled at him. "Oh, and those fancy scoring systems? Try reminding your father how much his father resisted going to projection-screen scoreboards thirty-five years ago, give or take. "
"I'll keep that in mind. "
Alone, Cal printed out the information on the automatic systems, new and reconditioned, then shut down long enough to go downstairs and check in with the front desk, the grill, the play area during the morning leagues games.
The scents from the grill reminded him he'd missed breakfast, so he snagged a hot pretzel and a Coke before he headed back up to his office.
So armed, he decided since everything was running smoothly, he could afford to take a late-morning break. He wanted to dig a little deeper into Ann Hawkins.
She'd appeared to him twice in three days. Both times, Cal mused, had been a kind of warning. He'd seen her before, but only in dreams. He'd wanted her in dreams, Cal admitted-or Giles Dent had, working through him.
These incidents had been different, and his feelings different.
Still, that wasn't the purpose, that wasn't the point, he reminded himself as he gnawed off a bite of pretzel.
He was trusting Quinn's instincts about the journals. Somewhere, at some time, there had been more. Maybe they were in the old library. He certainly intended to get in there and search the place inch by inch. If, God, they'd somehow gotten transferred into the new space and mis-shelved or put in storage, the search could be a nightmare.
So he wanted to know more about Ann, to help lead him to the answers.
Where had she been for nearly two years? All the information, all the stories he'd heard or read indicated she'd vanished the night of the fire in the clearing and hadn't returned to the Hollow until her sons were almost two.
"Where did you go, Ann?"
Where would a woman, pregnant with triplets, go during the last weeks before their births? Traveling had to have been extremely difficult. Even for a woman without the pregnancy to weigh her down.
There had been other settlements, but nothing as far as he remembered for a woman in her condition to have walked or even ridden to. So logically, she'd had somewhere to go close by, and someone had taken her in.
Who was most likely to take a young, unmarried woman in? A relative would be his first guess.
Maybe a friend, maybe some kindly old widow, but odds were on family.
"That's where you went first, when there was trouble, wasn't it?"
While it wasn't easy to find specifics on Ann Hawkins, there was plenty of it on her father-the founder of the Hollow.
He'd read it, of course. He'd studied it, but he'd never read or studied it from this angle. Now, he brought up all the information he'd previously downloaded on his office computer relating to James Hawkins.
He took side trips, made notes on any mention of relatives, in-laws. The pickings were slim, but at least there was something to pick from. Cal was rolling with it when someone knocked on his door. He surfaced as Quinn poked her head in just as his mother had that morning.
"Working. I bet you hate to be interrupted. But. . . "
"It's okay. " He glanced at the clock, saw with a twinge of guilt his break had lasted more than an hour. "I've been at it longer than I meant to. "
"It's dog-eat-dog in the bowling business. " She said it with a smile as she came in. "I just wanted you to know we were here. We took Cyb on a quick tour of the tow
n. Do you know there's no place to buy shoes in Hawkins Hollow? Cyb's saddened by that, as she's always on the hunt. Now she's making noises about bowling. She has a vicious competitive streak. So I escaped up here before she drags me into that. The hope was to grab a quick bite at your grill-maybe you could join us-before Cyb. . . "
She trailed off. Not only hadn't he said a word, but he was staring at her. Just staring. "What?" She brushed a hand over her nose, then up over her hair. "Is it my hair?"
"That's part of it. Probably part of it. "
He got up, came around the desk. He kept his eyes on her face as he moved past her. As he shut and locked the door.
"Oh. Oh. Really? Seriously? Here? Now?"
"Really, seriously. Here and now. " She looked flustered, and that was a rare little treat. She looked, every inch of her, amazing. He couldn't say why he'd gone from pleased to see her to aroused in the snap of a finger, and he didn't much care. What he knew, without question, was he wanted to touch her, to draw in her scent, to feel her body go tight, go loose. Just go.
"You're not nearly as predictable as you should be. " Watching him now, she pulled off her sweater, unbuttoned the shirt beneath it.
"I should be predictable?" Without bothering with buttons, he pulled his shirt over his head.