By the Book (6 page)

“Want me to take your trash down for you?”

“What?” she asked, taken back. It wasn’t an extraordinary question. He frequently took her trash down with his. It was a neighborly thing to do. Right?

“Your trash? Want me to take it down to the dumpster for you?”

“Ah. No.” She motioned behind her with a finger. “Felix. He’s here. He can take it down in the morning. But thanks.”

“Felix?” He tried to look into her apartment. Clearly he hadn’t seen the car parked on the front lawn as yet. “He’s here? Is he your date?”

“No,” she said, her voice taking an offensive tone. Her dates and her brother were none of his business.

“Isn’t he going to eat?”

“No,” she said, an octave higher. She didn’t need to give him an explanation, she knew, but the insanity of the situation was getting to her. “He’s ... under the weather ... a bit.”

“Drunk,” he said in a holier-than-thou tone she couldn’t appreciate from a ratlike creature.

“Plastered,” she said, picking her own adjective. “He couldn’t eat with a feedbag tied to his face. But I appreciate your concern for him just the same.”

Eugene frowned, stumped and hungry.

“Well, when he wakes up—”

“His head’ll be bigger than his belly,” she interjected. “He may not be able to eat for hours. Days maybe.”

He was backing up to his apartment door. “Days ...?”

“And when he’s feeling better, he’ll be hungry as a one-man army and eat everything that isn’t nailed down. He always does.”

Plainly disgruntled, he retreated into his apartment and the door slowly swung closed. Ellen smiled. The little green book should have been printed in twenty-four-carat gold. Who knew it could be so easy to rid oneself of pesky pests, without actually being rude or unkind—or using a broom. She stepped back and closed her own door.

“You know,” came a weak voice from down the hall, “I could eat something.”

“Shut up, Felix. You can starve to death for all I care,” she said. “And don’t eat the leftover roast beef while I’m gone; I’m saving that for my lunches this week.”

She cringed at the knock on the door. Eugene had heard leftover roast beef and had returned.

The grimace on her face slowly brightened to a dazzle as she took in Jonah Blake dressed in dark slacks and a sport jacket, the pressed white oxford shirt making the whites of his eyes whiter and the mystic green greener, though the light in them was no mystery at all. She didn’t need to be someone with Vi’s expertise to recognize the look in his eyes. She didn’t need to be someone with an attitude or a little green book to know what he was thinking. She was born a woman and knew it instinctively.

She went warm and soft and gooey inside.

It pleased him, probably more than it should have, to see that she’d gone to no little effort to dress up for their date. He’d been in Quincey long enough to know the dress code was casual, and had debated long and hard over his decision to go one step further to impress her—now he was glad he had. Except ... well ... maybe he’d gone too far. She was staring at him. She was so beautiful and elegant ... and so completely silent. His hand went to the open collar of his shirt self-consciously, and he fought an urge to squirm. He thought about buttoning it, then shoved his hand in his pocket.

“I decided to leave the cloak and dagger at home,” he said, hoping she’d equate his lack of a tie with some sort of effort to fit into his present surroundings, rather than with his dislike of them.

“I’m glad,” she said, aiming for a breezy attitude, her heart fluttering wildly. “You look very nice.”

“You’re beautiful.”

A muffled groan from down the hall had him frowning. He pulled his gaze from hers and looked past her with some anxiety.

“Thank you,” she said, reaching for the purse she’d set on a table near the door. “I’m also starving.”

He looked confused and still concerned. “Didn’t you hear that?”

“What?”

“That noise? Like moaning?”

“No.” Amazing. With the proper attitude, lying was easy. She suspected that with an altogether different attitude, murder would be the same. “Ready?”

He nodded uncertainly, stepping aside to let her lock and close the door, then following her down the stairs. He wasn’t one to hear things that weren’t there or to forget small, inconsequential things readily. Details were his business, and as a rule, few escaped him. But her bare back and the sweep of her hair that left her throat exposed and vulnerable had a disturbing effect on his mind. Filled it, in fact, with nothing but thoughts of touching her, of pressing his lips to the warm nape of her neck, of drawing in the scent of her. ...

“Any trouble getting here?” she asked, perturbed that Felix had dead-ended their discussion of her beauty—as if it were frequently debated, which it wasn’t.

“No. None. In fact, I’d given myself a few extra minutes to get lost in, so I had to sit in the car for ten minutes before I could come up.”

“Oh no,” she said, glancing back at him, her stomach lurching with excitement when their eyes met. Breezy. Easygoing. Self-assured, she reminded herself. “You should have come up. Or are you a stickler for punctuality?”

“It’s an old habit.”

“Ah, yes,” she said playfully. “A military-CIA-FBI-spy guy would have an old habit like that.”

He chuckled as they came to the bottom of the stairs, and was about to reply when they heard Mrs. Phipps.

“Oh, Ellen,” she said, swinging the door wide from its cracked position. “We thought we heard someone out here. We thought Eugene was bringing the trash down. But don’t you look pretty,” she added, looking at Jonah.

“Thank you. Mrs. Phipps, this is Jonah Blake. He’s in town visiting his father for a while,” she said, then addressed Jonah. “Mrs. Phipps taught third grade here for ... how long, Mrs. Phipps? A hundred years?”

“Goodness. Was it only that long?” She laughed at Ellen’s gentle teasing. “Seems more like two hundred to us, although we have to admit it sometimes feels like it was at least that long ago since we did it. But then, time has a way of speeding up and slowing down all in the same day so you don’t know how long ago anything has been.” She held out her hand to Jonah. “And are you Earl Blake’s son? From the camera shop downtown?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, sliding his hand between both of hers, allowing her to rub and chafe it as they spoke. Ellen was relieved to see she wasn’t the only one around with a soft spot for sweet little old ladies. “Do you know him?”

“Yes, indeed, though not very well at all. We understand he’s ill. How is he?”

“He’s had a stroke, ma’am. They say he’s stable but ...” He shrugged.

“Oh, what a shame, what a shame.” She patted Jonah’s hand sympathetically, then finally released it. “He is so talented. We remember him coming to our AARP meeting to talk about his pictures one time, years ago. He showed us the magazines and journals and told us about all the places he’d been to. He really is a fascinating man. You look a good bit like him, you know.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“It’s true. And what do you do? Are you also a famous photographer?”

“No, ma’am.” He and Ellen exchanged an amused glance. “I’m a terrible photographer. I haven’t any artistic talents at all.”

“What a shame. But then, neither do we.” She laughed. “My son was very artistic though. Not like your father, but when he was little, he drew wonderful pictures in crayon. Very ... alive. Colorful.” She hesitated a moment as if she’d lost track of her thoughts. She did this sometimes—especially when she talked about her son, who had died in his adolescence in a farming accident. “And what is it you do?”

Again their gazes met and held and shared an amusement as Ellen turned toward him with great interest to hear his answer. Sharing a thought or idea with only a look, without touch or word or gesture, was very intimate somehow. An invisible linking between them. She liked it.

“Right now I’m trying to keep my father’s camera shop afloat in case he recovers enough strength to go back to it,” he said, evading the question not because he needed to, but to entertain Ellen. “From what I can tell, it’s about all he’s got, and he hasn’t been able to tell me yet what he wants done with it. Leaving it closed up while I sat around the hospital doing nothing seemed like a waste.”

“And it would have been. That’s very good thinking, young man. We know your father will appreciate what you’ve done for him.”

“I hope so.”

“Oh, look at me. Holding you up in the hall here, all dressed up. You look so nice together. A very handsome couple.”

They both smiled at her and edged toward the door, saying their good-byes and good nights.

“Nice lady,” he commented moments later.

“Yes. Very nice.”

“Nice night.”

“Yes. Very.”

“Nice parking job,” he said, eyeing Felix’s car.

She couldn’t help it. She laughed, breaking the awkward what-to-talk-about-next tension between them. “I only know your father by sight,” she said, watching as he opened the car door for her. “I didn’t know he was famous.”

“I didn’t either.” She looked startled, then confused, so he explained. “I mean, I didn’t know the extent of his fame until I moved into his house here. I’d seen some of his pictures and knew he was well known, just not how well known.”

“Oh.”

He could see she was still bewildered as he swung the door closed and circled the car to get in on the other side. He wasn’t used to having a father, much less talking about him, and the idea of discussing their relationship made him even more uncomfortable. Still, this woman was different; what he felt for her was different. Maybe he should treat her differently. Maybe he should make an effort to explain himself and his life to her. Open up a little.
Be
uncomfortable for a change, and not keep trying to avoid it.

He got into the car and fastened his seat belt, then turned toward her.

“I didn’t grow up around my father. I hardly know him.”

“Oh,” she said sadly. “I’m sorry.” She would have left it to his discretion to say more, if she were still too nice. However ... “Were your parents divorced, then?”

“Yes,” he said. Unable to simply sit and talk about it, he distracted himself by starting the car and pulling away from the curb. “He was gone before I was a year old. I didn’t see him after that till I was six, when my mother died.” He took a deep breath. “I can count on one hand the times I saw him after that.”

Then who had raised him? Where had he grown up? These questions kept her silent for a minute. She decided to take a giant leap forward and work her way back.

“Until now.”

He nodded. “Until now. Now I see him every day, and we still don’t speak to each other.” He smiled at the irony.

“What sort of photographer was he?” she asked, fully aware that a great deal more had happened between them since he was six. She could hear it in his voice, tight and tempered. She’d blundered into an open wound and, too nice or not, couldn’t bring herself to cause him any further pain. “Would I have seen any of his photographs?”

“Maybe. ... There’s only one Italian restaurant in town, on Glover; I checked. Is that where we’re going?”

“Yes.” He checked? Standard procedure for a mercenary-CIA-FBI-spy guy? What had she gotten herself into?

“If you’ve done much reading or research on the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement in the seventies, the riots and all,” he was saying, turning into a busy intersection, “then you’ve no doubt seen several of his photographs. He has a wall full of photojournalism awards from the sixties and seventies and a couple from the early eighties. Forty of them maybe. Gruesome photographs. But you can tell he was good.” He hesitated. “You can tell that he loved his work.”

She mulled this over. “Is that when he moved to Quincey? When all the unrest died down?” Another thought. “Why Quincey?”

“I don’t know for sure when he moved here,” he said, sounding almost apologetic. “We’d lost all contact by then. The records on the shop only go back to 1990. He must have been doing something. ...” His voice trailed off. “But I do know why he moved to Quincey,” he said brightly, thinking it a real trick that he knew anything at all about him. “He inherited his house and the lease on the shop from a man named Levy Gunther. I found that out from his lawyer—who, by the way, didn’t even know I existed. He didn’t know the whole story either, but it seems this Levy Gunther was the father of some kid my father photographed and then later saved in a bombing or something. I guess this kid came home from Vietnam and eventually died of something else, leaving Gunther with no one to leave the shop to, so he left it to my father. As a sort of thank-you, I guess. And I suppose he thought someone like my father would appreciate a camera shop. So, according to the lawyer, my father showed up here about six years after the man died, and stayed. Paid the taxes. Painted the house. Opened the shop and settled in.”

“Huh,” she said, too wrapped up in the story to recall her attitude. “That’s amazing. Did Gunther and your father ever actually meet?”

“I don’t know,” he said, stopping at a red light and glancing at her. The amazing thing was how easy she was to talk to. All he had to do was answer the questions she wasn’t too shy or too apathetic to ask. She was genuinely interested in people—in him—and it showed.

“How old is your father?”

“Seventy-eight.”

“Then he would have been about seventy when he came here.” A pause. “I was just thinking that he should have opened a portrait studio or something here, so he could keep taking pictures, instead of just selling cameras. But maybe he was feeling too old for that. You know, I don’t think I ever saw him out taking pictures around town. And I never heard talk about him being famous. Do you think he stopped taking pictures altogether when he came here?”

“I don’t know,” he said again, pulling into the parking lot beside Pappino’s Italian Restaurant. When he’d parked and turned the engine off, he looked at her. There was such a sad expression on her face that he couldn’t help asking, “Why? Why do you ask that? What are you thinking?”

“Just how hard it is to give up something you love like that. He wears glasses, I know. Maybe his eyes got so bad that he couldn’t see well enough to take great shots anymore. That would be a horrible thing to have to admit to himself. Maybe he had nowhere else to go. Maybe he came here to sit out the rest of his life, waiting to die.”