Sympathetic Magic(60)

That didn’t occupy her for very long, however, so she wandered back to the family room, thinking maybe she’d turn on the weather again to make sure the snow really had gone away for the foreseeable future. When she entered the room, however, she noticed for the first time the phone sitting on the built-in desk at the back wall, as well as the doodled-over pad of paper next to it. Smiling, she recalled how Lucas had praised her sketch, and said his scribbles were the real doodling.

She’d read somewhere that studying doodles could tell you a lot about a person, but frankly, she couldn’t remember which sorts of scribbles and underlines and comic faces were supposed to represent which personality traits. On the pad he’d left behind, there were concentric circles and extremely symmetrical 3-D boxes and triangles, as well as stars in a variety of shapes and sizes. In amongst the scribbles, she saw phone numbers and names, a few she recognized, including Angela’s. And then at the bottom, outlined by a large emphatic circle, was the somewhat cryptic message, Buy Lester lunch sometime to say thanks.

Who was Lester? Margot didn’t recall hearing of any Wilcox clan member with that name, although she had to admit she wasn’t familiar with most of them. And what was Lucas grateful for, that he wanted to buy this person lunch?

Knowing Lucas, it could be something as simple as loaning him a box of golf tees, although they were a little past golf season at this point. She shrugged and turned on the TV, hoping it wouldn’t take Lucas quite as long this time to clear off the driveway.



* * *



He came in through the mudroom on the side of the house and left his snow-encrusted waders there. Time for another shower, probably, and he hoped that maybe he could convince Margot to join him this time. Or, even better, climb into the whirlpool tub and soak away the knots in his shoulders from brute-forcing the snowblower up and down the driveway. He hardly ever used the bathtub, but maybe if they gathered up some candles from elsewhere in the house, ran the hot water, and soaked together before progressing to even more pleasurable activities?

That could definitely work.

From the sound of it, she was in the family room, with the TV on again. He paused in the doorway and admired the sight of her sitting on the couch, attention fixed on the forecast. Her makeup was minimal today, just a bit of mascara and color on her lips, from what he could tell, and he liked her that way. She was so beautiful that she really didn’t need much embellishment.

“So are we really in the clear?” he asked.

She turned away from the television, a smile touching her lips. He hoped he could make her smile like that often, because he loved the way it softened her face, brought a glow to those wide, dark eyes.

“Looks that way. At least for the next couple of days. They think there might be another storm coming in late on the weekend.”

That didn’t bother him, although it was a little unusual to get snow in such rapid succession this early in the year. “Well, I’ll worry about that when it hits.” He hesitated, then said, “And you? I know you’d talked about going back to Jerome today, but since you hardly got to see anything of Flagstaff — ”

“I told the other elders I’d be coming home today.” Strangely, though the words themselves were emphatic enough, her tone wasn’t, indicating that she was having second thoughts on the subject.

“Any reason why you couldn’t stay, other than that?” He tried to keep the urgency out of his voice. Surely she must guess how much he wanted her to remain here for as long as possible, but he also didn’t want to sound as if he was pressuring her.

“Not really. I packed an extra change of clothes, just in case.” Her smile turned sly. “But if I stay any longer than that, I’m going to run out of underwear.”

That’s really not what I’d consider a problem, he thought. “We do have a mall here, you know.”

“Ah, so now you’re tempting me with shopping.”

“Don’t think of it as tempting…think of it as providing you with useful information.”

With a laugh, she reached for the remote, shutting off the TV before getting to her feet. “By the way, who’s Lester?”

The sweat on his back seemed to suddenly congeal into ice. “Uh…why do you ask?”

“I saw his name on the pad by the phone. Maybe I was snooping a little.” Her gaze was fixed on him, but he didn’t see any suspicion there, only a bit of rueful amusement at her poking around the place while he was otherwise occupied.

Not that he could really call it snooping, when he’d been stupid enough to leave the pad sitting out on the desk in plain view of anyone who might pass by. “He’s…a friend.”