Chapter 6
CHAPTER 6
“ W e need to talk about your doors.”
That was Burke’s opening line, when he found Georgette seated on the floor, sorting laundry. Whenever she had downtime, she tried to address the details it was otherwise easy to overlook, such as all the towels and sheets. As time allowed, she liked to go over them in detail, noting any tears or stains, so she could replace them. What did people do to washcloths? She went through so many of them, due to mascara or lipstick or unknown things that wouldn’t come off in the wash.
“What about my doors?” she asked. Their paths hadn’t intersected since the brief interlude in the diner yesterday. Georgette had no idea where he went or what he did with his time. Had he been hiding in the inn the entire evening yesterday? Hanging out in the dusty rodent zone? Maybe. She should probably care about that more, and she wondered why she didn’t. Was she lonelier than she realized? Without guests to occupy her time, was she thankful to have a ghostly figure haunting her attic?
“They’re pathetic,” Burke announced.
“They’re original to the house,” Georgette replied.
“I know, that’s what makes them pathetic. Do you know how easy they would be to kick in? One blow, and they’d fly off their hinges.”
“Why would someone have to kick them in, when I leave them unlocked?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose, as if so overwhelmed by her idiocy, he could no longer breathe properly. “Why do you leave them unlocked?”
“I run an inn, a, what’s that word, hospitality industry. Welcoming strangers inside is kind of my thing.”
“Any lunatic could get in,” he said.
“Clearly,” she replied, motioning to his lurking frame.
That gave him pause, and it almost seemed like he smiled as he folded himself into a seated position beside her. “Think you’re pretty cute, don’t you?”
“Oh, yeah. All the boys love Georgie. It’s my detailed attention to linen that reels them in and keeps them coming back for more.” She smoothed the edges of a fitted sheet through her fingers, checking the snap on the elastic. It could only survive so many dryer cycles before it gave out and became limp.
“I don’t like how open this place is,” Burke said.
“It’s like you mentioned before, context matters. You come from some dicey situations where you see a lot of bad guys. This is coastal Maine. The worst we deal with is rabid otters.”
“Really?” he said.
“No, but how cool did it sound when you pictured roaming bands of rabid otters?” she said.
“Would your brother be okay with you not locking your doors, with your lax security here?”
She bit her lip. That very topic had been brought up by Brody on numerous occasions, and she’d always batted it away, dismissed it because of course her big brother was going to worry about nonsense. “There is nothing of value here,” she said instead.
“What about all your antiques?” Burke returned.
Georgette snorted. “It’s New England, Burke; everything is antique. The floor you’re sitting on is two hundred years old, but no one is going to come in here with a crowbar and pry it away.”
He sighed.
“I’ll let you put a steel door in the attic, if you want,” she conceded.
“Really?” he asked, sounding perkier.
“Sure, build a bunker, make it radiation proof, I don’t care.” She waved him away, certain it would never go that far. Any minute he would lose interest in whatever this was and disappear again.
“The material needed to be radiation proof is far too heavy for an attic,” Burke said, then, “Oh, you were kidding. Right. Jokes about the apocalypse are hilarious. Ha.”
“They are, if you’re the one inside the bunker.”
He whistled appreciatively. “Dark.” His arms circled his knees, drawing them close to his chest. “How did one as young as you come to own an entire inn?”
She was quiet a few beats before she answered. “I lost my parentswhen I was fifteen. Car accident. Brody was really careful with the insurance money. He could have kept it all, claimed it for my care, but he didn’t. Instead he presented it to me, when I became an adult, and helped me come up with a solution. He let me go to culinary school, with the stipulation that I would return home and use my degree. I didn’t want to work for someone else, and I didn’t want to own a restaurant. An inn seemed like the most logical option.”
“Do you like it?” he asked.
“Some parts of it, yes. It’s a lot of work. I mean, a lot . I’m basically married to the inn, can’t ever go away or take a vacation. And sometimes I get a little tired of being surrounded by so many strangers. Sometimes I want to curl up in my pajamas and cocoon for a while, but I always have to be available, to do prep for breakfast, to answer guests’ questions or complaints. I think if I could afford to hire someone, then I would love it. If I could get a break when I needed it, some breathing space, then it would be practically perfect.” She bit her lip and shook her head. “I shouldn’t complain.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because it’s so ungrateful. How many people have a massive sum of money at their disposal that allows them to buy an entire inn?”
“How many people lost both their parents as a kid?” he returned.
She flinched.
“Plus, you’re hearing impaired.”
“Wait, what? I am? Are you sure?” She touched her fingers to her hearing aids and feigned a gasp. “What do you know, you’re right. I guess that explains why everything is so muffled all the time.”
“Apparently it’s sharpened your other senses, like sarcasm,” he said.
“I’m a deaf orphan; sarcasm is all I have,” she said, returning her attention to the sheets.
“I hung up your spouting,” he said, tapping her toe to get her attention before he spoke.
“What spouting?” she asked.
“The spouting that had fallen off the back corner of the inn, that was making water drain directly into the foundation.”
“Oh, right, yes, the one I totally knew about and intended to fix,” she said. The truth was that she was so busy trying to keep up on the inside, that she rarely checked the outside. Twice a year she hired a landscaping company to tidy the flower beds, plant some annuals, and trim the hedges, and that was the extent of her outdoor upkeep.
“Well, it’s done, but I think you’ll probably need new gutters soon, probably when you get the new roof.”
“New roof?” she said, jolting so the elastic she was testing snapped back and stung her hand.
“Surely you realize that you need a new roof, and it’s going to require a tear off, along with new flashing and, as I said, the gutters.”
“Maybe you could stop looking for things that need fixed.”
He tipped his head, studying her. “I thought I’m supposed to fix things, while I’m here.”
“Fixable things, like light bulbs that need replaced. Not gigantic things I don’t want to know about.”
“Not knowing things won’t make them go away,” he said.
“Wanna bet?” she returned. “Denial is a system that has served me well for nearly three decades.”
“Obviously you had the inn inspected, before you bought it,” he said.
She remained resolutely silent.
“Georgette, tell me you had the inn inspected.”
She tossed aside the sheet. “It’s a two-hundred-year-old building, Burke. It was never going to be good news. What did you expect them to say? That it’s magically getting younger and more solid? I knew it was a hovel when I bought it. I’m doing the best I can here.” She sniffled.
“You’re crying ? You cannot cry.” He jutted an accusing finger at her.
“Watch me, or better yet don’t. Leave me to cry while rubble rains down around me. I’ll be like Mrs. Havisham.”
“You’re not wearing a wedding dress,” he pointed out.
“Oh, that’s right, because even the crazy old spinster from the Dickens novel had that going for her. Me, I get all the perks of being unwanted, without the cool dress.” She swiped her hand over her nose.
“You need to calm down,” he said.
“Being told to calm down has never worked in the history of humanity, but I admire your optimism for trying.” She sniffed again, feeling strangely unembarrassed that she was crying and leaking in front of him. There was something about his absolute insanity that put her at ease. Who cared that she was coming off like a love-starved lunatic? She still wasn’t as crazy as the hobo living in her attic.
“Look, I wasn’t kidding about being handy, I actually am, and I can handle most things. Except tears, I cannot handle tears. So if you’d only stop crying, we could make a list of things that need done.”
Indeed, he looked almost supernaturally agitated. She gave a juddering breath and tried to stop crying, but it was hard. By nature, Georgette wasn’t a big cryer. She was a handle it and get it done type person. The downside was that when she did cry, it tended to release a lot of pent up fear, sadness, and disappointment. Some of it she’d been storing since her parents died, because Brody wasn’t good with tears, either.
“Should I touch you?” Burke asked.
Georgette backed up so fast, she fell over backwards. “What?” she asked, putting up a hand to ward him away.
“Like a, you know, a hug or something?” Never in the history of mankind had someone been as uncomfortable as Burke was now. She was fairly certain he’d rather field a prostate exam than hug her, so that made it sort of sweet that he offered. And loads better than what she first thought he meant. Not for nothing did she have a cop who was a brother. He’d warned her about depraved men who would love nothing better than to prey on a woman who couldn’t hear them approach.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. There weren’t a lot of huggers in her life. Certainly not Brody. One of her best friends from culinary school had been a hugger. Carol had also been Brody’s girlfriend for a while, but then they broke up and now she was married to someone else. Georgette hadn’t seen her in too long, and there was a weird, broken space between them that she’d managed to stuff down and avoid dealing with, but now that the well was open, it was all pouring out. She rested her head on her knees and cried in earnest, for Carol, for her dumpy inn, for her lonely heart, for her parents, for everything.
Burke sidled closer, slowly, so as not to spook her, and eased an arm around her shoulders. He was warm and solid and large and his overtly masculine smell was strangely comforting. Georgette gave in to temptation and leaned closer, resting her head on his impressive pec as the tears came to a natural end.
“Huh, that actually worked,” he murmured.
“Don’t get used to it, I’m not a cryer,” she warned.
“It’s probably okay, if you do it sometimes. I feel like I’ve passed some sort of test here and, in the future, will have my bases covered and know better how to handle it.”
“Or, and hear me out, you could try not making me cry in the first place,” Georgette suggested.
“No, that doesn’t sound like me,” he said. “But the cleanup’s not horrible, so I have little incentive to change my behavior.”
Once again his blatant insanity was vaguely appealing for the comfort it allowed her. With most people, Georgette was baffled. Not being able to hear well had left her out of a lot of inside jokes and subtle nuance. People didn’t realize how much they expressed through tone. Georgette could hear words, but not tone, not the subtle shifts that let her know when someone was teasing or angry or mocking. When she could, she tried to decipher clues using expressions, but there were a surprising number of people who remained expressionless while they talked, like robots. As a result, she tended toward plainspoken people who said what they meant and meant what they said. Burke seemed disastrous at talking to people, but at least he was honest about it. She much preferred that than other people she knew, who were nice to her face but secretly talked about her or made fun of her behind her back.
“Someday I want you to tell me why you’re really here,” she said.
“I could tell you now,” Burke said. “But then of course I’d have to kill you.”