Authors: Tim Pratt
Where was she going? Had she walked here, and from where? Maybe the woods weren’t as deep and dark as they looked, if people lived within walking distance. As for us being great friends…I wasn’t counting on it. Mere proximity’s not a great excuse for friendship, in my experience, and not to sound all woo-woo, but she had a weird energy.
Maybe Melinda was friendly like a hurricane was windy, but the wildflowers were pretty, and they smelled nice. I went back inside long enough to put them in water—since I hadn’t found a closet full of vases yet, I settled for putting water in an R2-D2-shaped cookie jar—and resumed my attempt at exodus. I was tempted to crank up the roadster, and perversely interested in giving the Studebaker a whirl, but the prospect of driving a strange car with an ancient manual transmission on these insane hills was too daunting for the moment. Instead I took my old faithful car, coated in road dust, and meandered on down the driveway toward the wider world.
The trip back to town took only fifteen or twenty minutes, and I didn’t pass one single other car until I got a mile outside of Boone. I couldn’t decide if country living was peaceful or creepily isolated. Whatever cultural-social event had clogged up the parking situation the day before was over, and I found a spot in front of the lawyers’ office without any trouble. I strolled around a little before going in, though, just to get the feel of the place, and it was pretty charming—King Street was a combination of college-town-quirky and cynical-tourist-bait, with lots of restaurants, a brewpub, a game shop, an antique mall, a bead shop, a couple of used-book stores, and plenty of cafes, none of them Starbucks. I saw lots of flyers for local bands, and people looking for roommates, and various political and environmental causes.
It wasn’t so long since I’d gotten out of college myself, and the whole campus-life vibe was comforting, a familiar element in an alien periodic table. I wondered when classes started up again—it had to be soon, summer was fading fast—and if the university had a decent art department. Maybe I wouldn’t have to labor in
total
isolation. It would do me good to meet more people, especially since so far I’d only really met my lawyer—who was cute, but who’d fled my presence like I was radioactive—and a neighbor I didn’t expect to click with. Making art is the most important thing in my life, but having somebody to make out with is also pretty nice. There are cute boys and girls at college. That’s a true fact of nature.
I made my way back to the lawyers’ office, and June greeted me by name.
“Trey said I should come sign some papers,” I said.
“I’ll help you,” a voice said. I turned and saw the old guy from the day before, who’d popped out of his office like a horizontal jack-in-the-box. His face was all bushy eyebrows and disapproval. “Come in.”
His office was immaculate—it looked like a photo from a catalog, not a place where actual work happened—and he gestured for me to sit down, then took his own chair, putting a great slab of polished mahogany between us. “I’m Stacy Howard Senior. This is my firm. My grandson has asked me to take over dealing with your affairs.”
I blinked. “Ah. Why?”
“You’d have to ask him. I don’t tend to deal with routine paperwork, but…” He shrugged. “Anything for family, wouldn’t you agree?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “We just have a few documents for you to sign.” He slid over a folder, and I opened it up, glancing through to make sure I wouldn’t be signing over power of attorney, declaring myself incompetent, or any other melodramatic movie-lawyer-villain stuff. The senior Howard handed me a pen that looked engineered to tighter specifications than my car, and I started signing where the little sticky-note arrows indicated.
“You knew Mr. Grace?” I said, scribbling away.
“I did. Not well. I’m not sure anyone in town knew him well. But I was his lawyer for decades, until he passed.”
“Did he ever say why he left me everything?”
Mr. Howard made a low hmmming sound. “Just that you were a relation from an estranged branch of the family, and that he wished to make amends for being absent from your life. He instructed us to help you while you were in town, in any way you require. I told him I couldn’t imagine a young woman, fresh out of college, would want to live in that ramshackle house, out in the middle of nowhere—young people like cities, I said, life and possibility, but…” He shrugged. “If you do want to sell the place, let me know. There are several interested buyers for the property—some people think it’s an area ripe for development. You could parlay that modest inheritance into a small fortune.”
“Actually, I think I’m going to stay awhile,” I said. “But I’ll let you know if I change my mind. Mr. Grace…did he die here?” Did he die in the
house
was what I really wanted to know.
“No, he had a house near Lake Tahoe. I’m told he passed away of natural causes.”
“Tahoe. Nice. Who inherited
that
house?”
Mr. Howard sighed. “It was sold, and for well below its value, I’m sad to say. Most of his holdings were liquidated promptly upon his death, as per his instructions. The money was used to settle his debts, pay estate taxes, and so on.” He glared at me, doing a fair impression of a pissed-off bald eagle. “I can provide you with documentation of the expenses if you wish. As for the rest of the money—you received what was left in the form of a cashier’s check.”
Right. I wasn’t accusing him of ripping me off, but he was clearly the type to take any question as a criticism. Happily, his mentioning of the check gave me a graceful way out. “Speaking of money, I should go to the bank.” He rose, and I did too, and he shook my hand with a lizard-dry grip. I couldn’t tell if he disliked me personally, or disliked everyone equally, or was annoyed that I didn’t want to sell the property, or annoyed that he’d been forced to take over dealing with me from his grandson. (I wondered again what I’d done to make such a bad impression on Trey that he’d felt the need to flee my house
and
sunder our professional relationship. Except I knew I hadn’t done anything…so screw that guy.)
I left his office, nodded farewell to June, and went out into the sunlight.
Trey was leaning against my car, which wasn’t a good idea, given how dirty it was. He wasn’t dressed in his lawyer-suit today, but in black chinos and a black polo shirt that showed off his arms. He smiled widely when he saw me. “Hello, Ms. Lull.”
“Hello, ex-lawyer. Do you want something?”
“I do, actually, but only if you do, too. Now that we no longer have a professional relationship, I can ask if you’d like to get a drink sometime without trampling all over my ethical or moral boundaries. Of course, for all I know you have a serious boyfriend, or you don’t care for men romantically, but I thought I’d take a chance.”
I looked at him for a second, trying to muster up my death glare, but I couldn’t help it—a little laugh slipped out. “The way you ran out of my house yesterday, Trey, you acted like I had leprosy or something. Now you’re asking me out? Maybe some girls like the mixed-message man-of-mystery thing, but it doesn’t do much for me.”
He ducked his head, sheepish. “Sorry about that. Yesterday, in your kitchen, I realized I was alone in a house with a client, and I was thinking a lot more about how good you looked when you stretched than about protecting your interests.”
Well. It’s always nice to know an attraction’s mutual, but I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily. “Don’t the lawyer gods frown on consorting with clients?”
He nodded. “Yes. Exactly. So I decided I’d better do something about the problem. I told my granddad my, ah, concerns, and he agreed to take over handling the estate, even though we mostly try to keep him away from clients unless they’re as old and cranky as he is. But now that I’ve eliminated the conflict of interest…”
“A little confidence can be a good thing, but you might be getting ahead of yourself a little, don’t you think? Conflict of interest aside—what makes you think
I’m
interested?”
“Just blind hope and stupid optimism. Two things I have in abundance. But I didn’t want to put you in a bad situation, either way. Now you can reject me, and when you do, you won’t have to worry about working with a guy who just hit on you inappropriately.”
“Hmm.” I looked him over, letting him twist for a minute, and giving it some thought. Feel free to leap, but do it with your eyes open. He was cute, and there was definitely a spark, though whether it would fizzle or ignite remained to be seen.
“I do like drinking,” I said at last. “And you have the advantage of being almost the only person in this town I know, so you’re not competing in a crowded field. And, no, I have no serious partner, and I am not entirely uninterested in men. No promises, and I’ll buy my own drink, but yeah, you can be next to me when I buy it.”
“
Almost
the only person you know? Who else did you meet? Unless you’re counting granddad and June—”
“I met this woman, Melinda…”
“Ah. Sure, Melinda Sharp. She lives in a little cottage on the edge of your property—technically I guess you’re her landlord, but she signed a hundred-year lease or something with Mr. Grace, and she pretty much acts like she owns the place. She’s a character.”
“She’s got…a lot of personality.”
“Ha. She does at that. She used to go around to the schools when I was a kid and teach us about making pottery and candles and wood carvings, and she leads classes in…oh, what is it…‘Storytelling for Self-Enlightenment,’ something like that, mostly for the tourists and retirees. There are a lot of people like that out here, semihippie sorta-kinda-artists who cobble together a living one way or another.”
I bristled a touch. “I’m a sorta-kinda-artist, you know.”
“Really? You don’t strike me as a sorta-kinda woman, Bekah. Seems like you’d go all out.”
That was better. “I do my best. So Melinda’s not likely to murder me and harvest my eyeballs or anything?”
“You big-city women are paranoid. Melinda’s harmless, unless she thinks your chakras are out of alignment, and even then she’ll just
talk
you to death.” He took out his phone, consulted the screen, and said, “Back to more important subjects, regarding that drink—how’s tomorrow work for you?”
I laughed. “I’ll have to check my calendar, but I don’t think I have any big plans.”
“Good. If you want anything stronger than beer or wine, we’ll have to head outside of town—there are some good bars in Blowing Rock.”
“You’re telling me this is a dry town?”
“You can buy hard stuff at the liquor store, which keeps pretty much the same hours as a bank, but no, there’s no liquor by the drink in Boone. Just beer and wine in restaurants. I assume the city fathers are afraid the college students would turn into a drunken murder-mob if they could order shots at a pool hall.”
“You should have mentioned this in the letter you sent me, Trey.” I gave him my best mock-stern look. “No liquor! I’m pretty sure you could be disbarred for an oversight like that.” I plucked the phone from his hands and put my number in his contacts list, then passed it back. “I have to go do some grown-up stuff now, as a responsible homeowner and impending pillar of the community. You still willing to show me around the property later?”
“I live to serve. But inviting me to your house before we even get a drink together? This is starting to move way too fast for me, Ms. Lull.”
“I just don’t think your grandpa’s going to want to tromp around the fields with me, is all.”
“‘Tromp around the fields?’ Is that what the kids are calling it nowadays?” He grinned when I rolled my eyes, making me want to roll them even harder. “But you have a point. The long grass is hell on his Italian loafers. How about I come over after lunch today, say around two?”
“I’ll clear my schedule, Mr. Howard, Esquire. Oh, I forgot to ask your gramps—are there any more keys? There’s at least one lock I can’t open.”
He shook his head. “Afraid not. You’ve got all the keys I know about. Could be more somewhere in the house, I guess. If you hired a crew of ten or twenty guys to sort the place, you might even find them in a year or two.”
“You’re more helpful every minute. Now, if you’d kindly get your ass off my car door…”
He popped up onto his toes, gave me another grin, and sauntered off, the picture of cool—only slightly spoiled by the smear of dirt from my car across the ass of his pants.
It wasn’t bad, though, for a dirty ass.
The rest of the morning went smoothly. The bank manager was happy to have me open an account and bring back some of the money Archibald Grace used to keep there, but he couldn’t tell me much about my dead relative, either—kept to himself, only met in person a few times, the usual. The manager set me up with a book of counter checks—paper checks, pretty quaint; next I’d get a buggy whip and a valet—and a temporary ATM card while I waited for the real stuff. I’d have to do something about my bank account in Chicago sometime, but the three-digit balance back home wasn’t so pressing now that I had a fat five-figure one here. The manager really wanted to talk about moving my money into high-yield blah-di-blah but I told him I’d get back to him about that, because I had another appointment.
What I didn’t tell him was that appointment was with a cheeseburger at a brewpub. The beer was only so-so and the burger was just a little better, but the hand-cut fries gave me reason to be cheerful.
I made one other stop, spending a good chunk of the money I’d taken from the bank in cash, and filled up my trunk in the process.
After that final errand was done, I returned to the house—let’s make that “I returned home”—around one o’clock and briefly wrestled with my pernicious ingrained cultural conditioning before deciding I
wasn’t
going to take a shower and put on makeup just to go walking around a field with Trey. Boots and jeans and a flannel shirt would do.
That settled, I contemplated what to do while waiting for Trey. I realized there were still rooms in the house I hadn’t seen—there was apparently a
tower
, too—and I decided that was pretty messed up, and I should know if there was a room full of human hearts in bird cages or a meth lab or a room painted black except for all the red pentagrams. I decided to circle the house and look for external doors, or, failing that, windows I could crawl through. At the front door, I plucked the sword cane on a whim—I’d probably need a walking stick, and why not take one I could brandish at Trey later if he turned out to be a secret creep? (I didn’t get that impression, but nobody’s evil-bastard detector is foolproof, and I believe in playing it safe.) I went outside into the sunshine and breathed deep, grudgingly willing to admit there was something to this whole fresh-country-air thing. While I was basking in the glow of nature’s embrace and all that, my phone rang. Charlie.