Chapter 4
The house had a new sound in it.
Hank noticed it the way he noticed a heart murmur, not all at once but as a thing his ear kept circling back to until he was sure of it.
Ever since he’d moved in, the old house had been deeply quiet with just him living in it.
For a few hours several days aweek he saw patients here, and the foyer held a murmur of sound beyond him and the occasional screaming toddler with an ear infection. But that was it.
Madison’s arrival had added very little to the noise. She watched TV quietly in the family room in the back of the house sometimes, and she spent a lot of time in her room, reading. Occasionally water ran somewhere in the house where he wasn’t at.
But most mornings now, a low and industrious sound came from the front room. Paper riffling into stacks. The clatter of a keyboard. The soft thunk of a desk drawer closing.
Two weeks. Eight mornings. That was how long Sunny had been here, and his office had begun making sounds of work actually getting done.
Friday morning he carried a mug of coffee through the butler’s pantry from the kitchen to the office and set it on the desk where she could reach it without looking.
She’d told him on her first day that she took it black.
By her third day, she’d told him a man who kept a coffee pot going and never once let her fetch her own refills was either the easiest boss in Montana or up to something.
He’d said he was the easiest boss in Montana.
She’d written it down, deadpan, as if she meant to verify the claim later.
“Morning,” he said.
“You billed the Pruitt baby’s well-check to an insurer that dropped him in March.” Sunny didn’t look up. “I refiled it under the correct plan. You’re welcome. Also, this,” she lifted a curling receipt between two fingers like it was evidence in a trial, “is for fence posts.”
“Correct. I needed to repair the backyard fence.”
“It’s filed under medical expenses.”
“The Hadleys paid me in fence posts after I gave Bill a chest x-ray and heart work up.”
She looked up at that and something startled flickered through her eyes. “I didn’t know doctors still did that.” A pause. “But you can’t deduct a fence as a medical expense.”
“Could if I fell on it.”
She smiled briefly. “Fair point. I’ll give it a try with the IRS.
I’m marking it payment for medical services rendered.
She made a note and added it to the row of sticky notes stretching across the top and down one side of the desk pad she’d installed on the desk.
In eight days he’d started to gauge how good or bad a day she’d had by the volume of those notes.
Only once had he seen them wrap around all four sides of the pad.
She’d called Tessa and asked if Jack could babysit her kids for a few hours.
She’d stayed until nearly supper time fighting back the proliferation of notes to only three sides of the pad.
The front screen door banged. It still needed oil, but he hadn’t oiled it because the squeak told him when somebody came in.
The voice of his future sister-in-law called out, “Doc? You decent? Doesn’t matter, I’m coming in.”
“I’m in the office,” he called back.
Tessa came in at a brisk clip he’d learned to fear. She didn’t meddle in his life often, but when she did, it was usually a doozy.
Today, she had a garment bag slung over one shoulder and a magazine in her other hand.
She stopped in the doorway, eyeing the tall pocket doors peeking out of their wall recesses with more interest than any single door warranted.
Her gaze turned to his desk. She took in the neat piles of folders, labeled trays, and wide expanse of desktop she could now see the actual wood of.
“Well, would you look at that!” she exclaimed. “There’s been a desk under there this whole time.”
Sunny looked up at her, smiling, and set down a manila folder.
“Sunny Carter, you are a miracle worker, and I’m stealing you the second you’ve got Hank sorted out.”
Tessa dropped into one of the patients’ chairs in front of the desk, crossed her legs, and went straight to the part he could already tell he wasn’t going to care for. “Hank. I need your house.”
“You have a house.”
“I need your house. The rooms, the bones, that staircase. Sunny, have you seen that staircase?”
“I have. It’s magnificent. Best feature of the house.” She added quickly, “At least of the part of it I’ve seen.” A pause.
“What do you need my house for?” he asked.
Here’s the situation.” Tessa slapped the magazine onto the cleared desktop area.
Frowning, Hank read upside down. The words Mountain Bride were printed across the top of a glossy wedding dress photo.
Tessa explained, “Charlotte’s patchwork gown, the one she’s sewing for Jenna.
I sent a few photographs of it to an editor I went to college with in New York.
Mostly I did it to show off. But she called me back in less than an hour.
She’d already run the pictures and the story of the dress past her senior editor and the publisher, and her magazine wants to do a feature story on the dress with a photo shoot of Charlotte’s latest designs that aren’t released yet.
The feature has been promised placement right up front in the autumn issue and consideration for the cover picture. ”
“That’s great news,” Hank said warmly. “Congratulations! “Does Charlotte know?”
“Charlotte cried, then obsessively remeasured a gown she’d already measured.”
Hank stared at Tessa, confused. While he was truly pleased for her, he did wonder why she’d barged into his office during working hours to announce it to him.
Tessa tapped the magazine with her index finger. “There’s a catch. We can’t photograph a gown like this against some a sheetrock wall. The magazine wants a local house in Cobbler Cove for the backdrop. A grand old house. Full of light and history and—to use their word—patina.”
Across the desk, Sunny looked up abruptly.
Tessa finished, “And there is exactly one grand old house in Cobbler Cove that can pull off this shoot.” She looked at Hank triumphantly, like a poker player laying down a winning hand.
He stared at her in dismay as comprehension of what she was saying dawned. “No,” he said pleasantly.
“Hank,” she said, in the tone of a woman who had not yet begun to fight.
“It’s a half-wrecked house, Tessa. The porch floor is going to start swallowing children any minute. The dining room hasn’t had anyone set foot in it for I don’t know how long. You’d be shooting a thousand-dollar gown in front of a water stain shaped like Idaho.”
“Sweet Hank. Charlotte’s couture gowns start at around ten thousand dollars. As for the gown made from all the WoWS widows’ dresses? It’s priceless.”
Hank said warningly, “I’m not kidding about the water stain looking like Idaho. It’s about the same size as Idaho, too.”
Tessa shrugged. “So we fix the water stain.”
“We?” Hank raised a skeptical eyebrow at Tessa. He caught Sunny sitting back with interest, waiting to see how her friend dealt with his over-my-dead-body brow.
Tessa declared, “You do know that your bookkeeper also has a college degree in historic interior design from a very prestigious program, I might add.”
“What?” he responded blankly, looking back and forth between Sunny and Tessa.
“That might not have come up in my job interview,” Sunny confessed, adding with a wince, “It’s actually a degree in the history of interior design. That allowed me to restore, renovate, and furnish historically landmarked properties.”
While Hank was quiet plenty of the time, he was rarely rendered completely speechless. This was one of those times.
Tessa said, “I’m right, aren’t I, Sunny? This is the best house in town.”
“I can’t tell what the interiors of the other Edwardian homes in town look like from the outside.
But I can say the historic bones of this house are exceptional.
It’s as fine a piece of Edwardian architecture and construction as I’ve ever seen.
Whoever built it knew exactly what he was doing, and nobody since has laid a hand on the key structural elements.
Its half-wrecked, original state is the best thing that could have happened to it.
The ground floor alone, brought back to period could be absolutely stun—” She broke off.
Looked at him sheepishly. “It’s your house. ”
And there it was. The real catch. He could see the whole of it now, laid out plain as an X-ray. Sunny and him redoing this place. Making it a gracious and inviting home for Madison.
For three weeks, his daughter had lived anxiously out of boxes she refused to unpack.
Then Sunny talked a little interior décor with her, and Madi laughed for the first time.
She would surely come out of her room more to see what was going on if the house got renovated.
He knew, in his heart of hearts, that she would like having Sunny around more. And she would laugh again.
“Could Madi be part of the process?” he asked, looking at Sunny, not Tessa.
“Of course!” Sunny exclaimed with what sounded like genuine enthusiasm. “It’s her home, too, after all.”
“When is the shoot?” he asked Tessa reluctantly.
“First week of August. Six weeks out.”
“Six weeks to re-do this house? That sounds impossible. Plus, Sunny’s already got a full desk to deal with, and four kids, and—”
“I’ll manage it,” Sunny declared certainly. “The WoWS have been so good to me, and this is something I can give back to a couple of them.”
He looked at her doubtfully for a few seconds longer. But he couldn’t’ turn his back on the lure of drawing out Madi and helping this place become home to her.
“All right,” he said heavily. “But I’m not moving my porch chair.”
“The aluminum one?” Tessa blurted.
“It’s a good chair,” he replied a shade defensively.