Long Shot hg-1 Read online

  Aimee took a bite of sandwich and talked with her mouth full. “When’s your meeting with the mayor?”

  Jen flicked on her phone to check the time. “About ten minutes.”

  Which, if she remembered correctly, gave her about six minutes to eat, since it took four minutes to walk to Town Hall. They ate in silence, Aimee’s past disappointment hovering around them. Then Jen fixed her hair and makeup, grabbed her purse with her trusty laptop, and headed for the front door.

  A hard wave of memory slammed into her. This moment felt like all those other summers, leaving for job after job after job, her college-fund bank account growing with every hour worked. It was as though ten years hadn’t passed. Even the feel of the front door’s oblong brass knob brought back memories. She’d drown in them if she wasn’t careful, and she’d only been in Gleann for an hour.

  She opened the door, the scent of thyme and rosemary wafting in. The herb garden, surrounding little metal breakfast tables, was new. She couldn’t, for the life of her, picture Aimee having planted that, but apparently she had.

  “Jen.”

  She turned around to find Aimee standing in the hallway, at the foot of the narrow, creaking staircase leading up to the guest rooms, her eyes filled with emotion.

  “I want you to know that I feel bad asking, for taking you away from the city.”

  “Don’t. It’s no biggie. Came at the perfect time.” Jen’s eyes swept over the foyer and she smiled. “Anything for this place. Anything for you.”

  She hadn’t told Aimee about the impending partnership or the risk she’d taken coming here at this particular time in the year. There was no point. She’d been taking care of Aimee her whole life. Back when they were growing up, it had been a responsibility Jen had assumed with drive and determination. Now she accepted it with bittersweetness, but still with love.

  Aimee blurted out, “I’m older. I should’ve been taking care of you, instead of the other way around. And here you are again.”

  The first time Aimee had said anything of the sort, and it struck Jen like a bell. She covered it with a smile, as reassuring as she could make it. “It’s okay. I’m going to do what I can,” she said, and then headed downtown.

  Gleann legend claimed that its founders had used Celtic magic to transport a chunk of old Scotland into this out-of-the-way valley in the new world, from its stone-facade shops crowding the narrow sidewalks, to the meandering paths of its streets. The Stone Pub stood at the center, beckoning everyone under its thatched roof. Jen had always found this place magical, despite no truth to the legend. Even as a doubtful eight-year-old, the first glimpse of Gleann had set her at ease.

  Now, however, the place was practically deserted. She remembered buckets of bright flowers spilling from window boxes and street lamps, and the shop that had once sold granny sweaters and wool pants. All gone. Kathleen’s Kafe, with its row of six-paned windows, still stood though, and that made her sigh with some measure of relief.

  The ice cream parlor where she’d scooped out orders one summer had long since closed, but she could see that at the building’s last use, it had been a scrapbooking store. The Picture This sign still hung over the door. A faded poster was taped inside the window, one corner curling back, proclaiming: Gleann’s Great Highland Games! Don’t Miss It!

  Looking around town, she realized it was the only mention of the games anywhere, and the thing was supposed to happen in two weeks. It matched what Aimee had told her over the phone, that the games had faded into an annual event with very little enthusiasm and dwindling participation, yet the town clung to it out of tradition. If this was the kind of hill she’d have to scale while here, she was in deep shit. But then, that’s what she excelled at: climbing her way out of that deep shit and putting on the best events any amount of money could buy, in any amount of time, no matter how short.

  Then she looked closer at the poster.

  Leith. His brown hair longer than when she’d last seen him, wet and clinging to his forehead and cheek. His rugged face contorted in exertion, his body even bigger and more muscular than she remembered. He clutched a hammer in his great fists, thick arms sweeping the thing high around his head. The hammer wasn’t an actual hammer at all, but a large metal ball on the end of a long handle. The thrower twisted it around his body several times, then released it backward over one shoulder.

  In the picture, Leith looked powerful and focused. Badass. And he wore a kilt.

  Good God, a kilt.

  She’d seen him wear his family’s tartan before, back in high school when the whole town had turned out for the annual games. But a kilt on a boy was a much different thing than a kilt on a man. In the photo the wind had kicked up the hem, displaying the hard lines of his thigh muscles set in a wide stance. Black kilt hose—knee socks, she’d once called them and had been quickly corrected by Leith’s dad—showed off bowling balls for calves.

  None of the men in New York were that kind of gorgeous.

  The pseudoshrine out on Route 6 declared he’d last won the heavy athletics competition five years ago, the same date on the poster, which would age him in that photo at twenty-three. What did Leith look like now? Seeing how much he’d improved from age eighteen to twenty-three, the curve for hotness progression over time indicated he should be approaching godhood right about now, at twenty-eight.

  Her phone blared a warning heralding the time, and at first she didn’t recognize the sound. She was never late. Ever. She hurried down the street, past the half-filled Kafe, to the small brick house that served as Town Hall. Ringing the doorbell to the locked front door, she couldn’t help but feel like an underappreciated teenager all over again—as though she’d accomplished nothing in the past decade and had nothing to show for herself. It was an odd feeling and one she annoyingly couldn’t attribute, until the door finally opened and a silver-haired woman in braids, jeans, and a gigantic Syracuse T-shirt frowned down at her.

  That expression Jen remembered with painful clarity.

  “Hi, Mrs. McCurdy.” Jen pasted on a smile.

  Mrs. McCurdy, Jen’s old manager at the ice cream parlor and also a former steady dog-walking client, looked Jen over with awkward appraisal. The mayor stepped back and opened the door wider, her fleshy arm jiggling. “Here. Let me show you the mess you’ve inherited.”

  Jen took a deep breath. “Um, great. Thank you, Mrs. McCurdy. It’s great to see you, too.”

  “It’s Mayor Sue now,” the other woman threw over her shoulder as she headed down the hall.

  “You . . . you want me to call you that?”

  “Everyone else does.”

  “I’m glad Aimee called me,” Jen said. “I would hate to see the games die.”

  “Well, you agreed to work for free and Aimee said you know what you’re doing.”

  The thing was, Jen knew Sue must have had some form of confidence in her, otherwise why would the older woman have continued to hire her in the past, job after job, summer after summer? Still, would it have killed her to say, just once, “Nice job, Jen. Thanks so much”?

  Sue turned in to what must have been a bedroom at one time, but was now a tiny corner conference room with a giant box fan whipping warm air around. A laptop sat on the table. Sue hooked loose strands of wiry hair behind each ear and spun the laptop around so its screen was visible.

  Jen bent over and squinted at the spreadsheet, specifically at the tiny number in the bottom right rectangle. “That’s what’s left? Where’d DeeDee run off to again?”

  “France, we’re told.” Sue snorted, and Jen wasn’t sure if the disgust came from the fact that the longtime organizer of the Highland Games had run off with a sizable chunk of the town’s money, or that she’d run away to a place that wasn’t Scotland with a man who didn’t have a drop of Scottish blood in him.

  Jen wasn’t remotely Scottish either, which might have accounted for some of Sue’s snobbery over the years. In Gleann, there were the descendants of the original founders . . . and every
one else. Sue McCurdy was the former. Years ago, the joke had been that Aimee and Jen Haverhurst were Irish twins in a Scottish town. Also, there was the fact that Aimee had been a hellion during her summers here, and Jen had had to skip out of work on more than one occasion to bail her out. Maybe Sue had never gotten over that joke or Jen’s sister-related absences.

  Jen tapped the spreadsheet on the screen. The amount left in the games’ account wouldn’t even have covered her fee back in the city, but she wasn’t here for the money. A part of her got way too excited at this challenge. It was, quite simply, a matter of pride. Aimee’s income, Aunt Bev’s legacy, and Jen’s own childhood memories were at stake.

  “I read that the other games across the state are doing amazingly well.”

  Sue narrowed her eyes. “Did your research, did you?”

  “Always.”

  Sue nodded, braids swinging. “They get bigger every year, more commercial, more notoriety, pro athletes. We get smaller. The society doesn’t like giving resources to something that doesn’t even really compete. But we have more history. Better atmosphere.”

  Jen hadn’t been to the other games, but she nodded with Sue’s assessment about Gleann’s. It was too bad, however, that they seemed to have lost that history.

  “Think you can do it?” Sue crossed her arms under her generous boobs. The Syracuse printed on the front looked like yracus.

  Jen pulled her hair back into a ponytail and took a seat. “I think so. Yes.”

  Sue frowned at her before leaving, as though she’d had hundreds of other event planners lined up around the block to take this gig for free, and Jen still had to prove herself.

  The thing was, she would prove herself. To Aimee, who’d been so clearly disappointed in Jen’s absence the past decade. To dear Aunt Bev, whose love and encouragement had brought her to Gleann and changed her life for the better. To Leith, who’d been so hurt and angry when she’d left. And to her mom, who’d laughed when Jen said she wanted to go to college.

  Jen spent the next two hours flipping through old files and memorizing spreadsheets, committing totals and rearranging numbers in her head. There were very few resources, even less money, and practically no organization or innovation. No wonder the society was about to pull out. The timeline to pull this thing off—and to make it better than in years past—would be extremely tough. She couldn’t turn the games into the grand affair she’d like to, but there were lots of small, special things she could add to or improve in the time allotted that would make a nice difference.

  She needed to take inventory. She needed to contact vendors and perhaps wrangle some short-notice sponsors. She needed to learn how the hell to run a heavy athletic competition or get someone to do it for her, and, in looking at the scant number of entrants, attract more athletes. She needed—

  Her phone rang. Aimee.

  “Hel—”

  Screeching and sobbing filled her ear.

  “Calm down, Aim, I can’t hear a thing you’re saying.”

  “Oh my God, the whole place, Jen!” There was splashing and squishing in the background. “The toilet or the bathtub or something up in your room. Something must have burst. Water everywhere. Totally flooded.” A sob, a sniffle. “It’s dripping through the floorboards, into the main room downstairs. Oh my God! I don’t know what to do!”

  Despite her earlier vow to give this thing her all for the next two weeks, Jen’s first instinct at hearing Aimee’s panic was to run. To swim like hell far, far away from her sister’s mess. Why the hell was her sister calling her now? Ah, of course. Because Jen was here, and when Jen was here, she took care of things.

  All her clothes and toiletries were in that room, sitting right outside the bathroom. Probably floating down the hall by now. Crap.

  She ground fingers into her temple. “Maybe you should, I don’t know, turn off the water at the source and then call a plumber?”

  “What? No.” More crying, more splashing.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because I can’t call him.” It came out like hiiiiiiiim, and Jen finally got it. Aimee had probably slept with whoever hiiiiiiiim was and they hadn’t moved past the After-Sex Awkwardness.

  Lovely. Jen Haverhurst to the rescue.

  “Just hold on, Aim. Be there in a second. Can you at least find the water shutoff?”

  “Okay. Yes. I think so.”

  Jen hung up and sighed. She pushed back from the table and poked her head out of the conference room door. “Mrs. McCurdy?”—because she could never, ever bring herself to call her Mayor Sue—“Know of any places in town I can rent? Like, today?”

  Chapter

  2

  Leith MacDougall stacked three bags of topsoil, shoved his hands under the bottom one, and heaved all three into the back of his white pickup truck. On the other side of the barn, his phone jumped and buzzed from where it sat on the empty potting bench. He let it go to voicemail. There was a shitload of packing up and consolidating to do before he closed down this location and handed the keys back to Loughlin, the property owner. Wasn’t like it would be a new client calling anyway.

  Chris, his lone remaining employee, entered through the big sliding door, pushing an empty wheelbarrow. The younger guy eyed how much Leith had cleared out in fifteen minutes. “Wow. Motivated?”

  “You could say that.”

  Leith lifted the bottom of his already-soaked T-shirt to wipe his sweaty face. His muscles ached, but that’s what he loved most about his business. Planning and designing the landscapes fed his brain and gave him a deep sense of accomplishment, but it was the digging and planting and grunt work that really made his blood buzz. The physical stuff always got him going, and over the past year, he hadn’t gotten nearly enough of it.

  Was he referring to landscaping or sex? Sadly, either one applied.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  “Heard this morning at the Kafe they’re still going through with the games this year even though DeeDee took off,” Chris said, crossing the vast, empty floor. “Rumor has it Mayor Sue found some sucker to take over, last minute.”

  Leith reached for the last two bags of soil. “Good for them.”

  God, the barn was so empty. The only things left were his worktables and the shiny sign hanging on the far wall, an indulgence he’d splurged on when business had been so good he could afford such a thing. MacDougall Landscape Design. Gleann, New Hampshire.

  Chris popped up the wheelbarrow and turned it upside down in the truck bed. “You’re not even going to stick around for it?”

  Leith swiveled the final soil bags so they’d fit nicely. “Why would I?”

  Chris took out a rubber band and tied back his hair. “Dunno. Curiosity? Tradition? DeeDee said my band could play.” He was trying to come across as nonchalant but failed miserably.

  Like so many others living here, Chris had been born in Gleann, would probably die here. At nineteen, he hadn’t gone to college, not that that had been an option for the kid who’d barely made it out of high school. He’d had a rough go, made some shitty mistakes with drugs and booze, gotten in some serious trouble, and then Leith had given him a chance at employment. Turned out that chance had been exactly what Chris needed to straighten out his life, and Leith did fear what might happen to the guy when he left.

  There came that old guilt, rising up to bite him again.

  Leith didn’t answer Chris. The games he’d once loved and excelled at had turned into a sad, sorry event showcasing how sad and sorry this town had become. He’d stayed for so long out of a loyalty that seemed to be part of your blood if you grew up here, and because when Hemmertex had been here he’d been swimming in money, but now he needed to move on. Correction: he was dying to move on.

  Of course, the second he let himself think that, his da’s voice rattled through his mind—Don’t turn your back on the people who need you, boy—and Leith was right back where he started.

  “Sorry, man,” Leith finally replied. “I’m s
upposed to head over the state line that weekend. Checking out a possible new location in Vermont.”

  Chris hung his head. “Oh. Yeah.”

  The landscape business should have been enough to keep Leith here, but it wasn’t. Not any longer. He’d started his business right as the rich people had arrived, and he’d made his own killing. But the whole valley had been slowly dying since the last Hemmertex executive locked up his giant vacant house on the outskirts of town almost two years ago. No one to design for anymore. Local maintenance was no longer going to cut it—not for his bills, and not for his dreams.

  Family could have kept him in town, but with Da gone three years now, he was alone.

  His phone started ringing again. He realized he hadn’t heard a beep earlier to indicate a voicemail had gone through. Maybe it was a client. A shrubbery emergency or something. Hell, he might take anything at this point; the finish line of his reserve funds was in painful sight. He jogged across the barn and grabbed the phone.

  “’Lo?”

  “Mr. Lindsay, my name is Jen Haverhurst. I’m told your property at 738 Maple Avenue is available for rent.”

  The connection must have been pretty crappy, out here in the “suburbs” of his tiny hometown, because he could have sworn the fast-talking woman had claimed to be Jen Haverhurst.

  “Mr. Lindsay, are you there?”

  It was Jen, all right. Same flat Midwestern accent. Same barely contained impatience, same determination.

  His ass sank onto the tipped-down hatch of his pickup. Why the hell did she think he was Mr. Lindsay? Oh, yeah. Because he owned that house now, along with two others on that block. More empty properties dragging Gleann into the murky depths. Whoever kept track of the rental listings must have updated his contact phone but not the name. And if the listing still had Mildred’s husband’s name, the records hadn’t been touched in the twenty years before that.

  Jen.

  Last he’d heard from Bev Haverhurst before she died, Jen’s job was putting on big parties and events in New York City. Wait . . . was she the “sucker” Mayor Sue had dragged in to help pull off the games on short notice? Why on earth would someone like Jen agree to attach herself to a sinking ship?