Flirting With Pete: A Novel by Barbara Delinsky Page A

own. She did the same with the bottom right drawer. The drawer above it held Connie’s stationery, both a formal letterhead with the Harvard insignia that he was entitled to use as a member of the faculty, and his personal stationery. The latter was ivory with black block letters. CORNELIUS B. UNGER.
    She had no idea what the B stood for. She had asked a number of people over the years, but no one else knew, either.
    Stationery offered a golden opportunity. Had Casey been in Connie’s shoes, leaving her home and its contents to a child she’d never known, she would have left a note here.
    Both piles were neatly arranged, but neither of the top sheets had the slightest markings on them.
    Disheartened, she closed that drawer, opened the one above it, and found half a dozen small mesh boxes. One held elastic bands, another erasers, a third Post-it pads. The rest brimmed with Callard & Bowser butterscotch candy.
    The candies gave Casey a start. She loved butterscotch candies— had been a chain eater in grad school, so much so that she had cracked several molars because of her habit of biting rather than sucking. So she wasn’t very good at proper candy eating either, but Connie couldn’t have known that. She might have imagined he had filled the little boxes with her in mind, if, given all else, it hadn’t been improbable.
    She reached for a candy, thought twice, pulled her hand back.
    Closing that drawer, she opened the shallow center one. Half a dozen Bic pens lay in a slim pen tray— and that did her heart good. She hated Bic pens, never ever used them. The pen she used was a Mont Blanc. It had been a gift from her mother.
    Feeling redeemed, comforted to think she had thwarted Connie in this one thing, at least, she opened the drawer farther. Behind the pen tray lay a wooden ruler, and behind that a manila envelope.
    When she pulled it out, her pulse quickened. A “C” was scrawled on the front, definitely by his hand. C was for Cornelius, but she didn’t know why he would have put his own initial on the front. C was also for Casey.
    Heart pounding, she unfolded the clasp, opened the envelope, and pulled out a wad of typed papers that were held together by a binder clip. Flirting with Pete, she read front and center, and beneath it, in smaller letters, A Journal .
    Flirting with Pete. A Journal.
    Casey flipped through the papers under the top one. They were double-spaced, full sheets, each one numbered. She returned to the first.
    Flirting with Pete. A Journal.
    C was for Casey. The same something that told her that was true drove her on.
    Removing the binder, she laid the papers on the desk, turned the cover sheet aside, and began to read.

Chapter Five
    Little Falls
    The Friday morning fog was so thick that Jenny Clyde couldn’t see much more than a smear of scrub grass to her right, a swath of rutted road to her left, and the scuffed rubber tips of her own worn sneakers taking her steadily on into town. Drifting left, she saw less grass than road. Left a little more, and the grass disappeared.
    Holding steady in the middle of the road, she focused straight ahead, blotting out all but the mottled gray of the tar and the hovering white mist. Fog was a late summer staple in Little Falls. Wedged in a gully between two high peaks, the town got caught in the war between warm days and cool nights. Jenny had always imagined clouds caught in that war just hit the slopes, slid down to the bottom, and lay there helpless and spent.
    Not that she minded the fog. It let her pretend that the town was protective, forgiving, and kind. It buffered her from the cold hard facts of her life.
    A car approached, a muted hum at first, then a gargle that grew more distinct the closer it came. Jenny didn’t budge from the middle of the road. The gargle became a rough sputter. She walked on. It came louder and nearer… louder and nearer… louder and nearer… louder and nearer…
    At the very last minute, she trotted out of harm’s