Ingrid Weaver - Winning Amelia

He’d never had any defense against that smile. His reasons for refusing her seemed trivial when weighed against the prospect of spending more time in her company. Sure, he normally worked alone, yet he’d known this case would be anything but normal from the moment Amelia had shown up at his office. It wasn’t merely curiosity that had convinced him to help her. He would have gone along with whatever she’d asked, regardless of how slim the chances of success, because his knee-jerk reaction had been to make her happy.

It still was.

Terrific. Obviously, nothing had truly changed in the past fifteen years. Amelia was still smart enough to talk circles around him. She still had the ability to wrap him around her little freckled finger.

And apparently, when it came to Amelia, Hank was still a fool.

CHAPTER FIVE

A ROW OF ragged spireas grew along the side of the garage and partially blocked the only window. Amelia lifted her arms to keep them from getting scratched, twisted around and used her back to push her way between the bushes. Once she reached the wall, she discovered that the window was coated with several years’ worth of grime. She cleared a peephole with the heel of her hand and leaned close to the glass. Although there was an hour to go before sunset, an ominously dark bank of clouds towered in the west, bringing an early dusk. “I can’t see anything, Hank,” she said. She cupped her hands around her eyes. “It’s too dim.”

“Hang on.” Branches rustled as Hank joined her. He took a handkerchief from the back pocket of his jeans and expanded the circle she’d cleaned, then clicked on a small flashlight and angled it against the window. The narrow beam slanted through the shadows inside the garage to reveal a dull, flat expanse of pale blue fabric.

“That doesn’t look like a car,” she said.

Hank passed her the handkerchief, waited while she wiped off her palm, then folded the cloth dirty-side-in and returned it to his pocket. He continued his inspection of the garage. “It’s a tarp. There’s a car underneath.”

She squinted. He was right. The fabric was draped over a large, bulky shape that could only be a car. “That’s got to be it.”

Hank continued to play his light over the tarp until he reached the lower edge. There was a sudden glint from a chrome bumper and the gleam of a highly polished fender. A yellow fender. “It’s the right color, and the shape does correspond to a fifty-seven Chevy. Whether it’s the right car remains to be seen.”

She knew that Hank was cautious by nature—after all, what other man his age would carry a clean handkerchief in his jeans?—so she tried to contain her impatience. He must know what he was doing. He had been right about the car jogging her sister-in-law’s memory. As soon as Amelia had described what Ruth had observed, Jenny had remembered how the man who had bought the painting had wrapped it in a quilt he’d had in his car trunk. She hadn’t noticed what model of car it had been, since she’d had to deal with other customers at the same time, but she did remember glimpsing bright yellow.

Amelia had relayed the information to Hank immediately, but it had taken him two days to get a response from someone at the car club who had organized the show last weekend, and another two days to learn which members had a fondness for canary-yellow paint. Of the six who owned cars of the right era that came close to the right color, three lived out west and two were in Quebec. Only one, Kemp Forsythe, whose spirea bushes they were currently standing in, lived within an hour’s drive of Port Hope.

“It’s the car, Hank.”

“Possibly.”

Still don’t like to make a commitment, do you? she thought. She swatted at a mosquito that hummed near her ear and turned to study Kemp Forsythe’s house. According to Hank’s research, the man owned a small computer repair business in town, and had lived at this address for twelve years. No one had answered the door when they’d arrived, and the windows were still dark, despite the rapidly deepening dusk. The ranch-style, brick bungalow appeared to be around thirty years old and was set well back from the road. A cornfield stretched out behind it and at least two acres of yellowed grass plus an apple orchard separated it from the nearest neighbor. The road itself was a winding, potholed length of tarred gravel that branched off a county road twenty kilometers north of the highway.

Hank had driven most of the way under the speed limit. Part of the reason for that might have been due to his choice of vehicle. For a man whose father owned a car dealership, he drove a remarkably unremarkable sedan. It was sensible, gray and at least six years old. She likely could have coaxed more speed out of Will’s old Chevette.

“We’ll give him another half hour,” Hank said. “If he doesn’t show up, we’ll come back tomorrow or next week. Tuesday evenings are usually good for finding people at home.”

“Come back? No way. My painting’s here. It has to be. We can’t leave.”

“Seeing how it’s Saturday, we could have a long wait.” Lightning flickered through the clouds, followed by a rolling grumble of thunder. Hank reached past her to push aside the branches that blocked her path. “Storm’s going to break soon. We can’t stay out here.”

There wasn’t much space between the bushes and the garage wall. His chest nudged her shoulder, his arm slid against hers, and instantly, warmth tingled across her skin.

The memory of another summer evening stole into her mind, when Hank had driven her to the lakeshore in the old jalopy he’d been so proud of. They’d left their shoes in the car and had gone to the water’s edge to watch a storm roll in. The breeze had been heavy with the smell of seaweed, wet sand and impending rain. The air had crackled, both from the storm and from their own sense of something about to happen. Their typical teenaged garb of shorts and T-shirts had turned every casual touch into the delicious feel of skin against skin. That had been the night their friendship had entered new territory, one they’d both been enthusiastic to explore. They’d begun the journey by sharing their first kiss....

Hank eased farther to the side, breaking the contact.

More thunder, louder than before. Amelia could sense electricity in the air now, too. She exhaled slowly and maneuvered out of the spireas. She brushed herself off more briskly than necessary. It didn’t work. The memories clung like static-charged lint. “We could try phoning him.”

“Do you have somewhere else you need to be?”

“No, of course not. Finding the painting is my number one priority.”

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