Closer Than They Appear Read online

  I stabbed a finger at the contact sheet. “Is this how we look to you? Like some stereotype with nothing to offer but rust and dirt and good ole Southern craziness?”

  He looked as stricken as I felt. “No, I swear.”

  “You sure could have fooled me, Mr. Brodie.” When the name made him pale, I stalked toward the door, all but daring him to let me pass or be run down.

  “I was going to tell you my real name,” he said as I pushed past him into the hall.

  “I’ll just bet you were.” I’d worked up a good head of steam, and I was afraid I’d blow if I didn’t get out of there. Especially when I realized that I’d spent the entire afternoon letting him photograph me and Rachel.

  Oh God.

  I whirled around. “Do me a favor, will you? Use all the pictures of me that you want, but if you so much as attempt to use a picture of my daughter, I swear I’ll find you in your fancy studio, wherever it is, and I’ll stake that tripod right through your weaselly heart.”

  That set off his temper. “If I’d meant to use the photos I took today, I’d first have had you sign releases, as I did with everyone else. But I didn’t, because—”

  “—you can’t make us look pathetic enough?” I glared at him. “No, wait—if you could turn sweet little Clay Campbell into a hopeless urchin, it ought to be easy to transform my clumsy Rachel into a c-clown.”

  Cursing the tears coursing down my cheeks, I started to turn away, but he caught my arm. “You have to let me explain, Hannah . . .”

  “I don’t have to let you do anything.” I jerked my arm free, then added peevishly, “And it’s Mrs. Longstreet to you, mister.”

  “Yes, it’s been Mrs. Longstreet from the beginning, hasn’t it?” he shot back. Fury carved lines in his features. “That’s how you stay safe, by keeping that circulation desk between you and the rest of us. Hell, we chatted for three weeks before I even learned that you weren’t married, because you refuse to let any of us close enough to prove ourselves worthy of you.”

  The fact that there was a grain of truth to his words only irritated me more. “What? You accuse me of not letting people close, Mr. Brodie?”

  He winced. “All right, that’s fair. But the thing is—”

  “Mr. Crogan!” called a voice from down the hall.

  Muttering a curse, he turned.

  “I thought I heard you down here.” Mrs. Sikes, the manager of Hamilton’s Inn, bustled toward us with a package in her hand. “That Fed-Ex delivery you been waiting for just came in. Tom said he got held up by an accident, or he would’ve been here sooner.”

  She handed Dave the package, and relief showed in his face. “Great, thank you,” he told her, while I debated how to make my escape without rousing any gossip.

  Although it was probably too late for that, since Mrs. Sikes was already eyeing me with a knowing look. “Tom says he’s swinging by the newspaper, but he’ll be back in a few minutes if you got anything you want to send.”

  Dave stared at her, then me, then her. “I do, thanks. I’ll bring it down in just a second if you can tell him to wait.”

  “Sure thing.” She flashed him a coquettish smile. “Anything for you, Mr. Crogan.”

  I scowled. Apparently I wasn’t the only one to be taken in by “Mr. Crogan.”

  As she waddled off, he ripped the tear strip off with his teeth and then thrust the package at me. When I just glared at him, he said, “Please take it. Look at these pictures, all right? And wait here for me. I’m going to grab my film. I’ll be right back.”

  I took the package numbly as he went through his room into the adjoining one, leaving the front door open. For a minute, I just stood there staring at the package, not sure what to do.

  One thing I did know—I couldn’t stand to see any more of his awful photos.

  I started to toss them through the door. Then it occurred to me that if people had signed photo releases, it had to have been without knowing what they were agreeing to. But if I showed them what he’d done, then maybe they could prevail upon Ida or Amos or somebody to get them their releases back—

  I made a split-second decision. Then I stepped inside his room, scooped up the other contact sheets, stuffed them into the package with the new ones, and fled. Mr. Brodie would never get a chance to print these if I had anything to say about it.

  Hannah

  AFTER SPENDING my Saturday night avoiding David Brodie—refusing his calls and closeting myself in my bedroom with the claim that I had gotten indigestion from his stupid kippers—I awoke on Valentine’s Day to a pounding headache.

  That wasn’t surprising, since I’d spent half the night on Google. Google was no stranger to Dave Brodie. The man darned near owned the search engine. Typing in “Dave Brodie” and “photographer” on my laptop got me 52,081 hits, everything from galleries to newspaper bios to his photo essay in Vanity Fair. The man was amazing, darn him.

  I hated him for that. So much talent, so many photos. Not the photos he’d taken in Mossy Creek—I still couldn’t bring myself to look at those. They sat on my dresser exactly where I’d left them when I’d arrived home last night from the park.

  But the other ones? Let’s just say that the man knew how to capture a subject. And looking at the eloquent images tore my heart in two. Because for whatever reason, he’d decided that my town, the town that I loved, wasn’t worthy of the care he seemed to show his other subjects.

  “You’re not going to church with me and the Blackshears?” Rachel asked plaintively from the doorway of my bedroom.

  “Sorry, sweetie. My headache is really bad.” That was the God’s honest truth, although it was only part of it. I wasn’t going anywhere until I figured out what to do about Dave’s pictures. I was liable to erupt into tears if I ran into anybody he’d featured so cruelly.

  “Monique’s not going, either,” Rachel grumbled. “She says she’s an atheist.”

  “Does she?” I murmured absently, then started as her words registered. “Since when did you learn to speak French?”

  Rachel dropped her gaze to the carpet. “Um . . . well . . . she’s leaving today, so I wanted to talk to her before she left so . . . well . . . I called and asked Mr. Crogan if he’d come over and translate. H-He’s downstairs.”

  I gaped at my daughter. “You asked him here without my permission?”

  She thrust out her lower lip. “He’s my friend, too, you know. And you were supposed to have a date with him until you got sick last night and made me call Mrs. Sikes and give him a message not to come.”

  “Darn it, Rachel, how do you know I didn’t have a perfectly good reason for not wanting to see him? How do you know I hadn’t found out he was a murderer or a thief or—” A famous photographer who wants to make fools of us all.

  “Mr. Crogan? Puh-lease.” She rolled her eyes. “He’s, like, the nicest man I ever met. And you didn’t say he did anything wrong—you just said to tell him you were sick.” A canny look crossed her face. “Are you saying you weren’t sick? That you made me lie to him and Mrs. Sikes?”

  Busted. And by my daughter, no less. She got smarter by the minute, the little imp. And that, along with the discovery that she actually had good hand-eye coordination, was disconcerting. Everything was disconcerting these days.

  Sharp objects again.

  I sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You want me to tell him to go away?”

  “Yes.” As her face fell, I said, “No.” The truth was, I’d have to deal with him sooner or later. And it wasn’t fair to use Rachel as a go-between, even if she was eleven-going-on-twenty. “Tell him I’ll be down in a minute.”

  “He . . . um . . . asked me if you’d looked at the pictures yet. I didn’t know what he meant, so I didn’t know what to tell him.”

  I sucked in a breath. “
Tell him . . . I’m looking at them now.” And just so she’d know I wasn’t lying, I got up and grabbed his package, then carried it to the bed.

  Time to rip off the bandage. Find out just how bad it was. Then at least I could make an informed decision. And if the photos riled me up, that was all the better—it would make it easy for me to kick his famous behind out of my house.

  As soon as Rachel left, I took out the contact sheets. The initial ones I’d seen were on top, and I looked at them again to help me brace myself for the new ones. I still hated them, but now I could see the artistry behind them. That almost made it worse, because it was the artistry that shaped the vision.

  Of Mossy Creek as some sort of broken-down hell full of pathetic people.

  Blinking back tears, I pulled out the rest of the sheets. The first half of the initial sheet looked like more of the same. And then . . .

  The vision changed. There was no other way to describe it.

  I knew it the minute I saw the shot of Jayne Reynolds making a latte at The Naked Bean. The camera had caught her in the midst of a smile at a customer. The soft and subtly shadowed lighting gave it a feel of homey comfort, while the focus still crisply captured the modern espresso machine in the background.

  My breath catching, I looked at the next and the next and the next. The Sitting Tree awash with morning light—you could practically hear the holy hush of the clearing. How many Creekite romances had begun under that tree including, it was rumored, our mayor’s and police chief’s, years ago? And here was Marle and Hope Settles kissing, with the covered bridge of Bailey Branch glistening behind them on a wintry afternoon. It went on and on until I came to a set of photos that caught me up short.

  “Hannah?” said a tentative female voice from the doorway.

  I looked up to see Monique watching me with concern. Only then did I realize that tears were streaming down my cheeks. “Yes?”

  She glanced down at the pictures, and her face cleared. Coming over to the bed, she took the contact sheet from me, her gaze fixing immediately on the set of photos I’d just been looking at. I’d forgotten about the afternoon Dave had taken them.

  A week ago, I’d hurried out of the library to run an errand, only to be met by a sudden downpour. Pausing to wait under the overhang, I’d glanced over to see Dave standing in the parking lot to the left of the entrance with a tarp half-slung over his camera, his sweater plastered to his skin and his hair lying in ruins about his face. I’d smiled and waved, and he’d just kept his eye to the camera, snapping pictures madly as rain beat down on his back.

  Monique laid the sheet in front of me. “L’amour,” she said, tapping her finger on one particular photo.

  More tears escaped. I might not speak French, but I sure as heck knew what that meant.

  I stared at the picture she’d indicated. In most of the others I was backlit by the fluorescent lights of the library so you could see only a silhouette. But in this photo, I’d turned my head toward the window, and Dave had caught me half in shadow, half in light, on the cusp of a smile, looking as alluring and mysterious as any Parisian model.

  L’amour.

  “Excuse me,” came a familiar male voice from the doorway, “but I thought you might need a translator.”

  I lifted my gaze to find Dave wearing blue jeans and a Yankees t-shirt, his hands shoved into his pockets and his chin thrust out as if he braced himself for a final judgment. Mine.

  Monique smiled, said something in French, then eased herself from the room. But I could only stare at him, completely at a loss for words. Finally I said, “I have to take Monique to the bus. But afterwards, you and I will talk, all right?”

  He nodded.

  “I SHOULDN’T HAVE lied to you,” Dave said softly. He’d walked me to the library after I dropped Monique at the circus bus. Now we sat in my office in the quiet, empty building, a private place where I steeled myself to deal with the truth about his motives.

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “But I didn’t see it like that, at first,” Dave went on. “I routinely take a false name these days, because I’m so well-known that once people go on the web and find out about my work, it changes how they behave toward me.”

  The web. Busted again. As I hurriedly closed my laptop, he added, “It makes it hard to get a real photo.”

  Thinking of those initial images, I raised my eyebrow. “And by ‘real photo,’ you mean . . .”

  He grimaced. “All right, yes, I admit it. When I first came here, I was predisposed to . . . shoot a certain sort of image.” He stepped farther into the room. “After I’d seen the coverage about Hurricane Katrina, I’d proposed a series to the Museum of Modern Art that I was calling “Beneath the Mask of the South.” They were damned eager for it. Since I’d already met Ardaleen Bigelow at an exhibition and she’s the First Mother of Georgia, I’d thought she’d be the perfect source for information about a town to photograph, one that fit my admittedly biased opinion.”

  I blinked. “Ardaleen was behind this?” Mayor Ida Hamilton Walker’s much-older sister, mother of Governor Ham Bigelow, was notoriously anti-Creekite, the result not only of a long sibling feud between her and Ida but a rivalry between small-town Mossy Creek and big-city Bigelow that went back over 150 years. “The governor’s mother was willing to help you make Mossy Creek look bad to the world? And by extension to slander the entire state of Georgia—and not just the state, but the whole Southern region?”

  “I know, I know,” he said ruefully. “It only took me a week here to realize that asking Ardaleen Bigelow where to shoot photos was like asking a wolf to help me deliver mail to Red Riding Hood’s house. But I rationalized that it was all right because your mayor knew everything.”

  “What?!!” I said, outraged. I would have to have a talk with Ida.

  “I contacted her the minute I came to town. I told her what I wanted to do, and after she calmed down—I thought, for moment, she might kill me—she agreed to let me shoot wherever I wanted. She even promised to keep my identity secret.”

  When I shook my head in disbelief, he added dryly, “I suspect that Mayor Walker knew I couldn’t spend more than a week in Mossy Creek without abandoning my original vision.” He looked suddenly embarrassed. “I also suspect that I . . . er . . . raised her hackles when I pompously explained how I wanted to capture the inequities that I knew ran rampant in small Southern towns. She practically gave me the keys to the city.” His eyes gleamed. “She even suggested places I should shoot. Canny woman, your mayor.”

  My admiration of Ida went up another notch. Suddenly her true intentions dawned on me. “She’s going to blackmail the governor with this scheme of his mother’s.” I clapped my hands and laughed. “We’re going to get a football stadium at the new high school! You watch! Suddenly the governor will find plenty of funding for it.”

  Dave leaned over my desk. “But just so you won’t think I’m a complete arse, there’s something else. It’s no excuse, but . . .” His face flushed. “Though I was born in Edinburgh, I was raised in a remote Scottish village in the Highlands. That’s where my father chose to bury himself after my mother died. I think he was trying to gain comfort by returning to his roots, but for me—”

  He broke off, and suddenly I understood. “I don’t guess there were many half-Burundians in the Highlands.”

  “None. No one of color at all. While I fell in love with the mountains and lochs and burns, school was hell. And my father was oblivious.” He cast me a self-deprecating smile. “So I caught the brunt of the bullying, not only because of my mixed blood but because I was a science-fiction-loving geek. I wasn’t a bluff and braw Scot. I didn’t fit in. So I came to Mossy Creek with a chip the size of all Scotland on my shoulder.” His voice softened. “Until you knocked it off.”

  I was having trouble holding back my happy tears. “Mossy Cree
k knocked it off.”

  He shook his head. “You did it first. From the day I entered that library, you treated me like any of your other patrons, fussing over me, ordering in books to suit my reading tastes, recommending places to eat and sights to photograph . . . And you did it without knowing I was the famous Dave Brodie.”

  My cheeks got hot. “I didn’t think you noticed.”

  “Oh, I noticed.” His gaze held an unnerving intensity. “Just like I noticed the brilliant green of your eyes and the sweet curve of your hip and the innocent way you had of rousing a man’s guilt with one gentle word.” He dragged in a heavy breath. “I’m sorry for what I said about you and the library yesterday. It was a knee-jerk reaction to watching you close me out again.”

  “No, you were right. This library has been my haven, maybe the same way your Scottish village was for your dad.” I’d used it like a vampire’s coffin, a place where I could avoid seeing that my daughter was growing up. From acknowledging that I did want more in my life than comfort and safety. “But for better or worse, you dragged me from behind the desk, so don’t you go apologizing for it now.”

  “All right.”

  I fumbled with his contact sheets. “So . . . um . . . what are you going to do about the pictures?”

  He gave a strained laugh. “If the museum will agree to a new exhibit entitled ‘Revisiting the South,’ then I’ll use the later ones.”

  “And if the museum refuses?”

  “I’ll take the exhibit elsewhere. I might do that anyway.”

  “Why?”

  He flashed the heart-dissolving smile I was rapidly growing to love. “Because I don’t intend to stay around in New York to oversee it.” Nervously, he thrust his hands in his pockets again. “I’ve been considering leaving the city for some time now to settle in an area more like the Highland countryside where I grew up. And while the mountains around here aren’t quite the same, I begin to think they just might do.”