At last Tris understood what she was telling him. “Oh, yeah. I see. I think that would be a great idea. Pere will need entertaining, won’t he?”
“And a nurse won’t do that.”
“Are you kidding? The nurse I have in mind plays chess and juggles, and she’s beautiful. She could—”
Gemma was glaring at him.
“Right. Nurses don’t entertain their patients. Maybe it’s better to get someone Pere already knows and feels comfortable with.”
“Think you can get Mrs. Frazier to agree? She might want to put him upstairs and hire that juggling nurse.”
“If I were to hint to Alea Frazier that more than just recovery might come out of this, she will sew her son’s feet to the floor of that room. I must say that Rachel has done a good job of keeping this a secret. How long has it been going on?” Before Gemma could answer, Tris said quietly, “Uh oh. The store has opened and we’ve been found out. Here comes old Dr. Burgess. I’ll have to ask him to sit down. Damnation but I need to talk to you. I may have found the Heartwishes Stone.”
“You what?!” Gemma said much too loudly as someone grabbed the back of her chair and she almost tipped over. Tris was up in a second, one hand steadying Gemma, the other taking the arm of a bent old man. When Gemma’s chair stopped wobbling, Tris helped the man to sit down between them.
“Dr. Burgess,” Tris said, “I really want you to let me examine you.”
“I’ve had too many doctors poking and prodding at me,” he said in a smooth voice, looking more at Gemma than at Tris. “I can no longer bear the sight of a needle.”
Gemma tried to be pleasant as Tris introduced them, but she was quite annoyed. Why had Tris let her go on and on about Pere when he had something so important to tell her? She desperately wanted to hear what he had to say.
Dr. Burgess was chattering on about how he was so very hungry and wanted one of Ellie’s pastries and her coffee. When he fumbled about as he started to get up to go to the counter, Tris told him to sit, that he’d get the food for him.
“What a dear boy you are,” Dr. Burgess said as Tris left.
The second he was alone with Gemma, the old man moved his chair a bit closer to hers, and she had to give him her attention. Whereas she’d liked odd-looking Mr. Lang from the moment she first saw him, she didn’t like this man, who had moved much too close to her.
“It’s you I wanted to talk to,” he said, smiling at Gemma in a way that would have been appropriate from a much younger man but that she found a bit creepy from this old man. “I don’t know if you’ve been told that I’m also an historian. I would love to hear about your research. I want to know what you’ve been finding out. From the gossip around town, it’s truly fascinating. And also,” he said with a sly look, “I hear that congratulations are in order for your engagement to our local sheriff.”
“You’ve heard wrong,” she said. “There is no engagement. Colin Frazier and I have only been dating.”
He put his age-spotted hand on her arm. “But you are living with him, aren’t you?”
She pulled away from him and picked up her bag.
“Oh dear, I’ve offended you,” he said. “I do apologize. I thought it was normal today for young couples in love to live together. Maybe I’m wrong.”
Tris returned with coffee and a plate of pastries. “Gemma, you aren’t leaving already, are you?”
“Gemma—may I call you that?—was just about to tell me all about her research.”
“She’s good at her job,” Tris said, looking from one to the other as he sat down.
She wanted to stay with Tris and hear about the Heartwishes Stone, but more than that, she wanted to get away from this old man. In spite of his protestations of hunger, he hadn’t touched the pastries. She glanced at the big belly that protruded under his old cotton shirt. The cuffs were frayed, the collar discolored around the neck. If he was hungry for something, it wasn’t for cream puffs.
It hit Gemma all at once what was bother
ing her about the man. He was an ailing historian who, by the poverty of his clothing, hadn’t been very successful in his career. The man was an academic, which meant that he desperately wanted to be published. She had no doubt that he’d heard rumors about the Heartwishes Stone and he planned to find out all he could from her, add to it, then get published. She had a vision of newspaper articles, magazines, tabloids, TV, the Internet, all of them splashed with stories of the Heartwishes Stone. Minutes after the stories appeared, Edilean would be inundated with . . .
She didn’t want to think of what would come into the peaceful little town: everything from rampant greed to the truly needy. All the horrible things she envisioned were the reason she’d decided never to write about the Stone in anything that would possibly be published. She’d even thought of talking to Mrs. Frazier and explaining why the document Gemma wrote for the family’s private use shouldn’t include the story of the Heartwishes Stone. It was one thing to write of an old legend, but things that were happening now seemed to be going back to that Stone.
She had to shake her head to clear it.
“Are you all right?” Dr. Burgess asked, his hand yet again on her arm.
Gemma didn’t want to be near the man any longer. She stood up and looked at Tris. “I’d like to talk about Pere some more. Could I come by your office?”
“I’m booked solid today. I’ll be so glad when Ariel gets here and can help out. How about dinner tonight?”