“I like it. I haven’t lived in a house for years.”
“Me neither,” she said. “It’s been apartments and hotel rooms, and . . .” Her voice began to trail off. “It’s very warm here and I haven’t been sleeping well.”
As he watched, she fell asleep.
Eli took the empty glass out of her hand and put it on the table. Quietly, he left the porch and went inside to his bedroom, shut the door, and called Jeff.
When Jeff heard his phone, he grimaced. Why oh why couldn’t the man manage his own life for even a minute?
Jeff was sitting on a bench under a gigantic oak tree in a little park in the middle of the cute little town of Edilean. Beside him was a young woman named Melissa, and he’d asked her about the tree. She’d told him that it came from a seed brought over from Scotland by the original Edilean.
“So the town was given the name of a woman?” Jeff asked, his eyes wide with interest as she told him the history of the town. She was pretty, with freckles on her nose, and she was a deputy sheriff.
“In your job, don’t you risk getting shot at?” Jeff asked.
“There’s not much of that in Edilean.” She turned to look at him. “You’re easy to talk to.”
“And you’re easy to listen to,” he’d answered. “Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”
“I’d—”
She didn’t finish because Jeff’s phone rang and it was the theme from Jaws. Eli. Jeff gritted his teeth. Now what? Eli wanted him to buy polish for Chelsea’s wings? He touched the phone on.
“You have to be me,” Eli said, without a greeting. “If she figures out I’m me I think she’ll leave. She needs me to be you.”
They’d worked together for so long that Jeff almost understood what his boss was saying. “She thinks you’re me?”
“Yes!” Eli said. “And if she figures out the truth she’ll leave.”
It wasn’t the first time someone from the past had thought Jeff was Eli. After seeing the photos, Jeff had understood the mix-up. But Eli’d had years of being what Jeff called Taggertized. Early on, his new relatives by marriage had pulled Eli into a gym and told him of the benefits of eating protein by the pound. By the time Eli was twenty, he looked completely different.
When the Taggert family had first met Jeff, they’d tried to do the same thing to him, but he’d just laughed at them.
“I think you should tell her the truth,” Jeff said and knew he was saying this mainly to impress the young woman next to him. She was unabashedly listening to his conversation. Was snooping part of her law enforcement job? “Just tell her the truth!”
“No,” Eli said. “I don’t want to be me. I don’t want to be someone she has to endure.”
Jeff got up from the bench and walked to the far side of the park. “Take her out somewhere nice, have a good time, then surprise her with the good news of who you really are.”
Eli sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. That’s what I should do. I’ll tell her who I am, then of course she’ll leave, and you and I can go back to Langley. Pilar says DC wants me to fly to some station in Iceland and see what’s going on there. You can go with me.”
He saw Melissa get up, and he watched her cross the street, her uniform clinging to her. She waved to him, then he saw her hurry after some guy who looked like he should be on the cover of GQ. There was a stethoscope around his neck. Jeff was sick of Iceland and deserts and places with bugs bigger than his face. It had been exciting for a while, but lately he’d been wanting something more ordinary.
Jeff went back to the phone. “I’ll be there in a few minutes and I’ll pretend to be you. But what then?”
“I have no idea,” Eli said. “I’m playing this by the minute. I have no long-term plan.”
That sentence silenced Jeff. Eli was a master at planning. He had one-year, five-year, and ten-year goals. Eli often astonished people at meetings by quickly outlining a plan of action that would take many years to complete.
“Interesting,” Jeff said. “Where is she now?”
“Asleep on the front porch. I think she’s in a sugar coma.”
“You were alone with a beautiful girl and you put her to sleep?”
“At least I kept her here,” Eli said. “She’s going to wake up soon and I don’t know what to do to make her stay.”
Jeff heard the panic in Eli’s voice and thought, If I ever fall in love, I hope someone shoots me.