DAY 3
T he sound of heavy machinery rousted Tilly the next morning. She ran to the window overlooking the backyard in time to see a bright-yellow tow truck attaching a winch to the bumper of her car.
Her phone rang with an incoming text from George.
Hey there. You can tell the maintenance guy I had his Kia towed. Also, about that exterminator?
“No. No, no, no,” Tilly moaned as the truck made its way back down the driveway with her twelve-year-old Kia in tow.
She looked over at Smoosh, who was still curled up at the foot of the sofa. “Now what?” she asked. He raised his head, wagged his tail once, and went back to sleep.
She stared down at the phone while she tried to think.
Finally, she started typing.
Where did the car get towed to? Exterminator in Florida for holidays. Strongly suggest you follow suit. Piney Point rodents extremely aggressive. And prolific.
His deep-throated laugh echoed throughout the house.
Her phone dinged with another incoming text.
I’ll take my chances. Car is at Joey’s Garage. I took a look under the hood and discovered it needed a new alternator. Tell your “maintenance man” I said Merry Christmas.
Tilly didn’t know whether to curse or rejoice in George’s generosity. What would it take to dislodge this guy?
His phone rang, and, as usual, he put the call on speaker.
“Hey, babe.”
So it was the fiancée, the stunning (according to Ruth) Vanessa. She wasted no time getting down to business. “George, I just checked in your closet, and your tux isn’t there.”
“It’s not?”
“No. Did you remember to pick it up from the cleaners after Callie and Mike’s wedding last month?”
“Maybe?”
“George! I texted you about picking it up. I set an alarm on your phone to remind you, just in case.”
“I got busy,” he protested.
“You need the tux for the ball. For which I am the committee chair. Which is in three days.”
“Can’t I just wear a suit?”
“No! It’s a black-tie ball. Not a blue-suit-and-brown-shoes ball. And it feels like you’re deliberately trying to sabotage the most important social event of the year.”
“I’m not trying to sabotage anything. I’m up to my ears in old-house crap. Can’t you just pick up the tux from the cleaners?”
“I could. If I had the claim check. Which I don’t.”
“It’s probably in the Jeep. I’ll find it, I’ll get you the claim-check number, and you can pick it up. Easy peasy.”
There was a long pause. “George? Do you realize how important this ball is to me?”
He sighed. “I get it, Vanessa. I’ll do my best to get back in time.”
When Tilly heard the back door open and slam shut, she tiptoed to the window overlooking the backyard. Sure enough, his legs were sticking out of the driver’s-side door of the Jeep as he tossed items onto the winter-barren yard: fast-food wrappers, foam coffee cups, an energy drink can, a pair of ski boots, a tennis racket, a gym bag, and a Dunkin’ Donuts bag.
Her phone dinged, and she looked down at the newspaper photo Ruth had forwarded. George, a.k.a. Sticks, was devastatingly handsome in a tux, dark hair spilling over one eye. The gorgeous blonde on his arm was beaming, looking radiant in a low-cut silver gown that put all her many assets on full display, but George, poor George, looked like a deer caught in the headlights.
“She’s gonna kill me,” George muttered, absentmindedly munching on a stale doughnut hole. The tux was the least of his problems. A small chunk of plaster had fallen from the kitchen ceiling, and for the first time, he noticed brownish water stains above the upper kitchen cabinets. He set off in search of a ladder. No time like the present, right?
He found the extension ladder leaning against the barn’s outside wall.
George peered inside the barn, the musty odor awakening in him all those long summer days spent playing with his cousin and sisters when his grandparents were living. As he dragged the ladder toward the house, he idly wondered who might buy the Crowe’s Nest. A family, he hoped, who would love and restore the house, instead of a bitter old bachelor like his Uncle Gus.
By the time he made it around to the front of the house, the sun had sunk lower in the sky, dropping the temperature, and dark-tinged clouds scudded by, lending his mission a new sense of urgency.
George stepped backward and considered his strategy. The climb up to the porch roof didn’t look too challenging, but from there, he’d need to haul the ladder up and onto the porch roof before he could reach the steeply sloped roof over the attic.
No problem, he told himself. His gym had a rock climbing wall, and he regularly achieved Power Zone workouts on the Peloton Vanessa bought him for his birthday after she’d half-teasingly, half-seriously accused him of getting a dad bod. “We need you ripped and Nantucket ready come July,” she’d said, patting his abs.
“You can do this,” he chanted as he ascended the ladder. “You’re a rock star.”
But when he stepped onto the porch roof and made the mistake of looking down, he nearly swooned. It was a straight drop of fifteen feet, easy.
“Shake it off, George,” he told himself in the same stern tone his favorite Peloton instructor used. He grabbed the ladder and, inch by inch, managed to drag it up the front of the house.
Finally, he succeeded in lifting the unreasonably heavy and unwieldy extension ladder onto the porch roof, gasping from exertion. Peloton, he realized, was a piece of cake in comparison to roofing.
Tilly’s dread mounted with every thudding step George took on the aluminum ladder. She’d watched his progress from the back and side attic windows as he’d hauled it to the front yard, but he was out of her range of vision now.
What if he actually managed to get onto the roof of the attic? What if he decided to investigate inside the attic? He could easily pick the lock. Worst-case scenario, he’d kick her out into the cold, tell her boss, and get her fired. She’d be unemployed and lose the new apartment—and her deposit money. She’d spend the rest of the winter sofa surfing. Even worse , George might call the cops. As Ruth had pointed out, Denny would love an excuse to avenge the blow to his pride that she’d inflicted by leaving him.
She scurried around, gathering her meager belongings into the black plastic trash bag, as she plotted her escape. She would wait until George had reached the summit of Mount Crowe’s Nest; then she’d dash out the back door with Smoosh.
“Ruth,” she whispered into her phone. “I’ve got to make a break for it. Can you come pick me up? If he finds me here and I lose this job, I’ll lose my apartment, and then what?”
“Yeah, but I’m at least fifteen minutes away ...”
“I don’t care. Get over here. Now. Please? When he gets up to the roof, I’m gonna grab my stuff and make a run for it. I’ll wait for you down on Lakeshore. Hurry, please?”
She disconnected before Ruth could argue her out of her decision.
Even a cursory inspection revealed that the porch roof was in rough shape.
George trod gingerly, feeling spongy spots beneath his boots. No wonder the kitchen ceiling was falling in.
He leaned the ladder up against the shingle siding, adjusting it, testing it to make sure it was steady and would support his weight.
By the time he’d taken four steps up the ladder, he was regretting this foolhardy effort. The wind had picked up in the last few minutes, and George could swear the temperature had dropped at least fifteen degrees. He’d forgotten his gloves, and his hands were numb from the cold by the time he was halfway up the ladder, which was also the point when the wind, now a whistling, howling fury, whipped his beanie from his head and sent it sailing away.
And now the ladder was flapping against the house, and at the precise moment he decided to climb down and leave roofing to the pros, his foot slipped, and he felt himself falling. He heard an earsplitting shriek, which he realized was his own.
Tilly was about to flee the attic when she heard the scream and, seconds later, a sickening thud. She let go of Smoosh and ran to the window, where she peered down at Sticks Holloway, a.k.a. George, sprawled awkwardly on the porch roof below. He wasn’t moving.
“Oh my God.” She powered down the stairs, and the next thing she knew, she was crawling out of a second-floor-bedroom window, staring down at him. She knelt beside him, touched his neck. His face was pale, but he was breathing. His head was bleeding, and he seemed dazed.
“Hey,” she said quietly. “Are you okay?”
“Nooooo,” he moaned. “Hurts.”
“What? What hurts?”
“Everything. But my ankle . . .”
She managed to push up the hem of his jeans and saw that his right ankle was already beginning to balloon.
“Okayy,” Tilly said. “Can you stand up?”
He opened his eyes and stared. “Who are you?”
Good question. She thought, fleetingly, of all the answers.
“Just an innocent bystander,” she said finally. “C’mon. Lean on me.”
Somehow, she managed to get him back through the bedroom window and down the stairs. She made him sit in a chair while she pressed a kitchen towel to the cut on his head to stanch the bleeding.
“Car keys,” she said, looking around the kitchen.
“Is this a carjacking?”
He was loopy. In shock, maybe, but she was relieved at being mistaken for a thief instead of being recognized as his former classmate. “This is me taking you to the hospital. Now, where are your car keys?”
“Uh ...” His face had gone even paler, and he began to sway.
She patted the pockets of his jacket, then his jeans, until finally, she found the keys in his front pocket.
Tilly wrapped one arm around his waist and guided him out the back door to the Jeep. His weight felt solid. She opened the passenger-side door. “Okay, George, just kind of slide into this seat, and I’ll buckle you in. How are you feeling?”
“Awful,” he mumbled. “How do you know my name? Who did you say you are?”
“A concerned stranger,” Tilly replied. “Let’s get you to the hospital.”
She was sitting in the emergency room waiting area when her phone rang.
“Where were you?” Ruth demanded. “I waited in the car down on Lakeshore for nearly an hour; then I drove past the house, but there were no cars.”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Tilly said. “George fell off that ladder from like twenty feet up. I couldn’t just leave him there. It was freezing. He could have died. So I put him in his Jeep and drove him to Barnwell Memorial.”
“He fell twenty feet? And he’s still alive?”
“Mrs. Holloway?” A nurse stood in the doorway to the treatment area, beckoning to Tilly. “The doctor would like to speak to you now.”
“Me?” Tilly looked around, but the only other person in the waiting room was a teenage boy staring sullenly down at his phone.
“Gotta go, Ruth. The doctor wants to talk to Mrs. Holloway.”
“Oh boy,” Ruth chortled. “Keep me posted.”
George was dressed in a green hospital gown and was reclining on an examining table, his right leg elevated, the ankle encased in a cast, a bandage on the back of his head.
The doctor was very young, possibly a rising kindergartner, Tilly thought.
“Mrs. Holloway? Your husband had a bad fall, but fortunately, he is mostly in one piece. And the ankle fracture was a nice clean break, also fortunate.”
“Clean,” George mumbled, looking up at her with a puzzled expression. “I’m clean.”
“He has a mild concussion,” the doctor said. “We put some stitches in his head and immobilized the ankle in a cast, but he can’t put any weight on it for at least two weeks.”
“Two weeks?” George repeated, like a deranged parrot. “Two weeks?”
“Correct,” the doctor said. “That ankle needs to be kept elevated at all times, in order to minimize the swelling. So, obviously, bed rest. And about the concussion. You’ll need to stay close by and observe him.” He handed her a slip of paper. “Here’s a list of what you’re watching for. The first twenty-four hours are critical to his recovery, so you’ll want to stay in the same room with your husband, obviously.”
“He’s not my husband,” Tilly finally said.
“Really?” The doctor raised an eyebrow. “Then you are?”
“Er, just a casual acquaintance.”
“Are you confident you can care for him for the next two weeks? See he gets his pain meds, eats regularly, keeps that ankle elevated, help him with the crutches?”
“Not really,” Tilly said. She was starting to panic. “Shouldn’t he stay here, with, like, trained health care professionals?”
“I don’t want to stay here,” George spoke up. His eyes looked unfocused, like he might nod off, the way he had during the drive to the hospital.
Tilly swallowed hard. She couldn’t keep up this charade. “Maybe you should call his fiancée. Her name is Vanessa.”
“No!” George said. “I don’t want her to know.”
The doctor looked even more confused, but he touched George’s arm and handed him a clipboard. “Just need you to sign your release form. Here. And here.”
George scribbled something on the clipboard and sat back.
“All set, then,” the nurse said, handing him a pair of crutches and helping him into a wheelchair.
As the nurse helped George onto the wheelchair, Tilly was treated to a flash of his bare but well-muscled derriere.
“Where are his pants?”
“Oh, that ankle ballooned way up. We had to cut ’em off,” she reported. “But here’s the rest of his stuff.” She handed Tilly a plastic bag and winked. “Take good care of him.”
George fell asleep shortly after they pulled away from the hospital but five minutes later woke up and gave her a startled look.
“Who are you, again?”
“I’m, er ... Tilly.” She had to think fast. “From Piney Point Vacation Rentals. I came by the house to check up on you, and that’s when I found you. You fell off a ladder, onto the porch roof.”
He blinked and gingerly touched his bandaged head. “Don’t I know you from someplace else?”
“I get that a lot,” Tilly said. “I have one of those faces.”
George looked down at his bare legs. “Why was I climbing a ladder without pants?”
It had started snowing while they were in the emergency room, and fluffy white flakes swirled in front of the Jeep’s headlights. Back at the Crowe’s Nest, at least an inch blanketed the lawn. Tilly helped George navigate the steps up to the kitchen and steered him into the parlor and to the sofa, where she helped him stretch out and prop his injured ankle on a stack of dusty-looking throw cushions.
“You’ll have to sleep here,” she said apologetically, nodding toward the stairs. “I’ll just run upstairs and bring down some quilts and a pillow.”
“And some pants.”
Smoosh was waiting just inside the attic door. He scampered down the stairs behind her, and while he went outside, she made a quick dash to the backyard woodpile. Thankfully, George was dozing where she’d left him. She built a fire in the fireplace, then stopped to adjust the quilt she’d draped over him. She’d brought a couple of quilts for herself and a pillow, too, and fashioned a nest for herself in a broad, overstuffed wing chair that she pulled closer to the fire.