Then she stood up, too. “Was he alone?”
“I think so. I didn’t see anyone else near him. When I got back here and read your note, I thought it was a strange coincidence. But more important, I’d rather not be introduced to him. I’d be afraid he might want to learn more about what I’m doing. I’d hate to have the laboratory find out I’m such an amateur before I’ve applied for a job.”
“No problem, Mary Beth. And again. I’m so sorry I mentioned it to him.”
She averted her eyes back to the bookcase. “It’s okay. You didn’t know.” Then she left as quickly as she’d appeared.
Annie sat back down at the table and stared at her laptop screen. All she could think about was Simon sitting in the library reading one of her books. Why? It almost felt like he was stalking her. She laughed. “Don’t flatter yourself,” she muttered. In person, he was definitely a year or two younger than she was; maybe he was John’s age. But unlike John, Simon was far more worldly to want to be bothered with the likes of Annie Sutton. Still, there was something unsettling about him reading up one of her books in public. If he was so interested, why hadn’t he asked her for one?
If only Murphy would add her two cents.
Mulling over the situation, Annie knew she had no control over Simon’s behavior. But she could at least correct the faux pas she’d made about Mary Beth. So, after looking up his email address at CBN, Annie composed a note:
HISIMON,
IWANTED TO LET YOU KNOWIWAS MISTAKEN ABOUT ONE OF OUR GUESTS BEING INTERESTED IN CLIMATE CHANGE. SHE’DONLY MENTIONED THE TOPIC IN PASSING, AND IT TURNS OUT IT’S NOT HER AREA OF EXPERTISE. SORRY FOR THE MIX-UP—SEE YOU AT BREAKFAST!
She re-read what she’d written and thought it would do the trick, so she clicked Send and turned back to the blog post she’d been writing before Mary Beth had interrupted.
Within seconds, however, Annie’s email alert sounded: the message was from Simon, and it simply read:
THANKS FOR REACHING OUT. I’M PRESENTLY ON VACATION BUT WILL TRY TO CONNECT WITH YOU WHENIRETURN.
Annie mumbled a little. Simon was on vacation. Right.
But as she returned to her writing, a spidery sensation skittered across her skin: Didn’t most TV people say they were on assignment, not vacation? And wasn’t he supposedly on the Vineyard to work?
Shaking her head, she knew she must stay as far away from him as possible. If there was something untoward about why he was there, Annie had no room in her life for it. She did, however, wish he wasn’t staying in the cottage, where he would be living among everything that was part of her.
Then her thoughts drifted back to Mary Beth. Why had she been so concerned that Simon might upend her attempt to get a job? Did she really believe he’d bother to tell the whole world about her?
Mary Beth seemed like a bright woman, perhaps a little bashful but smart enough to be looking for a midlife career change. Annie could not fault her for that. After all, wasn’t that what she, too, had done?
Then again, the woman hadn’t shared what type of work she’d done before.
The more Annie thought about it, she was as baffled by Mary Beth’s behavior as she was by Simon’s. But why on earth did she care about either of them?
Still . . . in spite of the hours she needed to work, Annie wanted to get to the bottom of the mysteries—if there were mysteries there at all.
* * *
Shutting down her computer, Annie left the reading room, took a shortcut past the media room, and emerged into the back hall where she went into the kitchen and ducked into the chef’s room. She selected a bottle of wine, Chanel Bordeaux, which one of the guests had heralded as a new favorite from California. She took a corkscrew from a drawer while mulling herdilemma, when an unfamiliar voice called out:
“Got any more cookies?”
Annie looked up as Simon’s assistant, Bill, stuck his head into the room.
“Sure,” she replied. She moved to the counter, took two cookies from the canister, then slipped them into a waxed paper sandwich-sized envelope. “Did you work up an appetite this afternoon?”
“Yup. Pretty much.” He took the cookies, said thanks, and started to head back to his room when Annie asked, “Were you able to accomplish any work today?”
He laughed. “If you call walking up and down Main Street, checking out the surf shop and a couple of bars work, then yup, I did some.” He wasn’t overly enthusiastic. Or maybe he was a little drunk. If either was the case, it was not surprising that Simon had requested separate rooms.
Annie laughed in return, hoping that a friendly manner would mask her intent to pry. “How about at the library? Did Simon get anywhere on his climate change research?”
His head bobbed back a little, as if he had no clue what she was talking about. Then he said, “Oh, yeah, sure. I guess. All I know is he points, I shoot.”
So Simon’s assistant was in fact a videographer. Which was about the only concrete thing so far that made any sense. “Sounds easy enough.”
