Secrets (8 page)
“Not yet.”
She turned at his tone, but he smiled blandly. She did not have time for his games. “Well, call me if you find anything.”
“Would that include wildlife?”
She frowned. “Anything living you may consider yours.”
He’d consider more than that his. Lance turned over the vase and read the signature there for himself. How many Flavios could there be? Only one that he’d heard of when Conchessa told him Antonia’s lineage and what she’d learned through years of letters.
Flavio came into the story much earlier than Lance had intended to look. Was there a date on the vase? He pulled a box of magazines underneath the light bulb, climbed on it, and held up the vase. ’89. If he was right, that was 1889—and Flavio had once courted his great-great-grandmother Carina.
Curbing his excitement, Lance worked until it grew too dim in the attic to continue. If he were simply clearing it out, he would make much quicker progress, but he had to search carefully, or he might miss something important, as he’d missed the signature on that vase.
He carried it downstairs with him to the kitchen, carefully soaked and washed the grime, then dried it as the heirloom it was. He’d have to make sure Rese kept it in a safe place. For now he set it in a corner of the kitchen where she’d be unlikely to notice.
A twinge stirred inside. He wasn’t keeping it from her. He was just getting answers. He’d decide what to do with them when the time was right. He stroked the globe of the vase, then he went and found Rese working in the dining room.
He squinted up at the flame-shaped bulbs in the chandelier, then noted her progress. She was creating an ambient space, perfectly suited to his culinary ideas. “Are we serving dinner to the guests?”
She turned from the trim she stained with smooth even strokes, then followed his gaze back over the room. “I haven’t decided.”
He didn’t miss her switch from plural to singular. But then he was only the lackey. Whatever sense of ownership he’d gained in both the kitchen and the attic were in his own mind. “I’m leaving now. It’s too dark in the attic.” He dug in his jeans pocket for his keys. “I’ll finish tomorrow.”
“You’re not cooking?”
He fought to keep the resentment from his face. “I signed out.” He’d already logged more hours onto the pad in the kitchen than a normal workday, and she didn’t merit another personal effort. “There are ramen noodles in the cabinet.”
She nodded. “Good night.”
He walked out, and a sharp whistle brought Baxter running. Lance climbed onto the Harley, and Baxter leaped into his lap and sat. Yeah, no wanting in that dog. Lance secured the hind legs into the leather pockets and started the bike. He picked up burgers at Murphy’s for both of them and drove to the Sonoma Valley Inn.
In his room with Baxter, Lance took up his guitar and pondered Rese Barrett’s Wayfaring Inn. The name didn’t fit. It sounded weak and transient for a place that had stood so long and known hard work and suffering. And loss. He clenched his jaw.
What had Nonna been trying to say? He pictured her tortured efforts to give him the message, something she wanted him to do for her, something it might be too late to do.
No
. He slapped his hand on the guitar, giving Baxter a start.
Nonna Antonia would recover. She was a fighter. And as she fought to regain her faculties, he would pursue a cause he didn’t yet understand. He might be tilting at windmills, but the faded envelope she’d pressed into his hand had sent him to Conchessa, and what he’d learned there had brought him to Sonoma.
Without speaking, Nonna Antonia had sent him on this errand as she had so many others through his boyhood years. She couldn’t explain it with half her face hanging and half her brain uncooperative. But she’d sent him off to do something important, and he meant to do it. The brightness in her eyes when he’d kissed her papery cheek had told him she knew he would do whatever it took.
Rese lay in the dark. Why did nighttime have to be a battle? Sleep her enemy? She had spent most of her life in old houses, and she knew the sounds they made. She knew the dark held no monsters, the shadows no ghosts. Why couldn’t she fend off the emptiness as thoroughly as the real-life taunts and teases?
The engineer’s report had been thorough, and she’d addressed the structural issues, fortifying the villa with sound construction and new seals on the old windows. It should be tight as a drum and strong as an ox and … all that kind of thing. But lying there now as wind bullied the house, shouldering the walls with monstrous heaves, she heard another moan. It sounded like a person in pain, a pain that spoke of sorrow and anger and wrongdoing.
Nonsense. Nothing but wind. Unless …
Had Lance stirred up something in the attic? Even as she thought it, a howl tightened the tendons of her neck. What terrible thing had happened in the house? She didn’t want to know! She pulled the comforter up with a jerk.
Don’t be stupid
. What if someone saw her like this?
Oh, wouldn’t the guys just love to learn she was spooked. Scared to be alone? Scared of a little noise? No way. But what was it? She jammed a fist into her eye and rubbed. It didn’t matter. She needed to sleep.
Her shoulder ached; her arm didn’t seem to have a place to go, and she’d have a stiff neck before it was over. She forced her muscles to relax. It was quiet for long enough that she almost succumbed, then a sharp thump jolted her, and she listened hard. All the bad movies of deranged people locked in attics and all Mom’s ghost stories converged in her mind.
She should never have told Lance to clean it. That caught her up short, and anger stirred. What was she thinking? She was not afraid. She just wanted to sleep, and the noise distracted her, made her wonder. Had she missed something—but what? She’d been methodical, thorough. Except for the attic.
She’d done no work up there, marshaling her resources and energy into the areas requiring it. Once Lance had it cleaned out she would inspect and correct whatever weakness the wind had found. There was a logical explanation for the moans. No ghosts or … people in pain.
But what if
he
had come? A frisson of real fear climbed her spine. If Walter …
Stop it!
She had not thought of him for years. He wasn’t real. Had never been real. She knew that. But …
Stop
. She had enough trouble sleeping without adding irrational thoughts. Irrational? She’d spent more nights than she wanted to recall watching for Walter in the shadows.
That didn’t make him real, and she refused to waste another minute on it. She rolled to her side and punched the pillow into shape. Temperature, moisture, age, some flaw the wind exposed. Those were the things that made houses noisy in the night. Sound carried when everything was still.
A low howl sounded above her. She gritted her teeth. If there were critters in the attic, Lance would find them. Anything else, she would correct. As soon as he had it cleaned out she would do a thorough inspection. She pressed her eyes closed and made them stay that way. She would not tolerate irrational fears. If she could face down the unruly men in her father’s work crew, she could face an empty old house.
And sleep in it. She would sleep. She would.
Knees crusted with dirt.
Sharp snick of the knife.
The warm weight of the fruit in my palms.
How easy my feet, how light. My basket over?ows.
Other hands. Many hands. Hands joined together.
We laugh. We sing. We dance between the vines.
It is the best time there is, when the land
gives back what we have poured out.
W
hen Lance arrived the next morning, he let himself in with the key to the kitchen door that Rese had given him. He saw no sign of her, but the cadence of the morning news came through the wall from her suite. Since he didn’t want to get caught where she might expect him to cook, he logged his starting time on the pad in the kitchen and went upstairs. Payment was secondary motivation. Money had never been enough to keep him somewhere, and it meant even less this time. But since cleaning the attic was the only thing he was being paid for at the moment, he’d keep track of the time.
The air was damp and chilly under the eaves this morning, and he realized he’d left the small window open all night. He bent and lifted a portable movie screen that must have blown over, then climbed across the piles and closed the window. He turned back and surveyed the situation with an almost tangible anticipation.
There might be nothing else in the attic remotely connected to him, but in his dreams he’d crept through the debris, finding pieces of the story buried in corners. And Nonna Antonia had watched over him as he fit them together like a broken mirror, then peered inside. It wasn’t only his reflection in the glass, but Nonna’s and others with her.
With that in mind, he set about removing rolls of linoleum and old paint cans. It was amazing the place hadn’t combusted, and after an hour or so, reality was dispelling his dream. As Rese said, the chances of finding something of value up there was less than likely.
Too soon she came up, her assertive posture hammering home the truth of the situation. He was a minion. “Sounds like war up here.” She looked around as though expecting something besides him, an army he might have smuggled in?
“The hammock.” He motioned toward an old steel frame with a crispy canvas sling he had dragged into the cleared section of the floor. The thing weighed a ton and had rubber grips on the bottom that slid like a washboard when he pulled. “Want it?” His mouth twitched with laughter, but she had to look twice before she caught the joke, then dismissed it with a shrug.
“With a new sling, it wouldn’t be bad.”
Given her penchant for resurrecting old things, he shouldn’t be surprised. But he gave it a dubious inspection.
She tipped her head. “We could spray-paint it.”
Had she actually said we? “Where do you want it?”
“Out back for now. I’ll help.” She grabbed one side of the frame and lifted, realized its mass and adjusted her grip. “Ready?”
He caught the other side and followed.
“Watch the stairs, here. They’re steep.”
“Thank you.” He couldn’t help grinning behind her back. He’d safely navigated those stairs quite a few times now. But if she felt better instructing him, more power to her.
She tipped the hammock sideways to pass through the door, and he noted the flex and shape of her in T-shirt and painter’s pants. A loose T-shirt no more hid a shapely form than an unshapely one, though he guessed she meant it to.
Why she didn’t make more of what she had he couldn’t guess, but it was just as well, considering he had a job to do. He could only attribute his errant thoughts to that seriously misplaced sense of connection. They lodged the hammock near the garden shed. “Until I decide what to do with it,” she said.
Ah. So the work was “we” but the decisions were “I.” This girl wanted control.
“Fine.” He went back up. So far there had been nothing resembling records or personal papers of any sort in the attic. He would probably do all the work for nothing. But he hauled out another stack of newspapers, these from the late sixties, and left them in the driveway with the others.
There was a button jar and a box of handkerchiefs that a woman might find interesting. He put them in the “things for Rese” spot and removed a web-infested pile of rags to find a mouse nest complete with scurrying creatures that escaped into the eaves. They’d have to put out traps.
Lance hauled the rags down to the driveway and informed her. Did he imagine her shudder? She walked like a man, worked like a man, acted like a man, but was that a girlish gesture?
He said, “We’ll need traps.”
“Get whatever you need and give me the receipts.”
“You want the kind where they stick inside and wiggle around until they die, or the ones that snap their necks?”
She shot him a dark look. “Did you need to ask that?”
“You like to make the decisions.”
“I gave you charge of the wildlife.”