Chapter 22
I open the door right as Hunter is turning to leave.
“Got somewhere else to be?” I ask playfully.
He frowns in the least flirty way possible. “No, I just don’t like to be kept waiting. My schedule stays busy.” His jaw is tight, and he won’t quite meet my eyes.
Something has definitely changed since last night.
“Then I won’t keep you. Come on in.” I stand back, holding the door open.
Hunter cocks his head but doesn’t enter. “Upstairs? I thought we were talking about the store today.”
“Yeah, I guess I was hoping to cut open the door in the apartment first so I wouldn’t have to go around the building constantly. Like you said, the alley doesn’t always feel safe.”
He nods and enters, nearly stepping on my grandmother as he makes a beeline to the smooth walls of the kitchen corner. He raps his knuckles along the wall, thunk-thunk-THUNK. The last thunk sounds obviously hollow.
“Empty space,” he says. “That’s the door. I can cut it now, but it’ll be rough and ugly. I can get supplies to finish it out tomorrow.”
“If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to be able to move between the two spaces without passing by the Raccoon Disco Dumpster.”
Hunter considers me. “You and Maggie are very different women.”
I stare at the cockatoo watching nervously from her perch on the back of a kitchen chair. “Yeah, it’s looking that way. But I never met her, so I wouldn’t know.”
I want him to see that whatever grudge his family holds against Maggie—
It’s got nothing to do with me.
Especially if that’s why he’s suddenly being so frosty.
Hunter hurries out to his truck and returns with an electric saw that looks like something used to carve particularly thick-skinned Thanksgiving turkeys. After a few minutes of knocking and buzzing, there’s a hole in the wall and a rough rectangle of drywall on the floor.
“Pretty sure the actual door is in the storage room,” Hunter says, inspecting his work. “I can get that set up soon, too. The downstairs door locks from inside the stairwell, so if you’re worried about safety tonight, you’re covered.”
The newly reopened doorway yawns dark and cavernous in the cheery kitchen.
There’s a light switch, so I flick it and find lots of dust on the stairs heading down into the store; I guess Maggie’s spell ends at the wall.
Of course, I now know that when I reach the landing and the stairs change direction, I will find a pile of old blankets and pillows at the bottom, but cleaning that up won’t take long.
“Any work you need done up here?” Hunter asks, looking around. “I see you took down the blinds.”
“One good yank is all it took, but I can handle window treatments. Everything else is in order.”
Hunter heads for the newly cut door. Maggie bustles after him, but I snatch her up and swiftly slip her into the cage.
“Don’t you dare—”
“Good girl,” I tell her soothingly. “Wouldn’t want you to get hurt while we’re working.”
I’m sure I’ll pay for this later, if being yelled at by a telepathic parrot can be considered payment, but I want to talk to Hunter without a Regency-era chaperone squawking insults and anxieties in the background.
As long as she’s a bird, this is the equivalent of keeping a toddler in a playpen so they won’t accidentally blow up the house.
Hunter leads the way downstairs, and even though it’s a perfectly normal, if narrow, stairwell with enough light to see, it still feels like we’re descending into some sort of mummy tomb.
He turns on the landing first, and as I follow, I hear him moving the blankets aside to make room for me.
Once the door to the store is open, the stairwell seems a much friendlier place.
I don’t feel at home down here yet the way I do in the apartment, but I know where the lights are now, so I turn everything on.
Those long fluorescent tubes will have to go, and soon.
Their buzzing gnaws at my brain like a mosquito.
The space feels emptier without Abraham, but the scent of boiled peanuts lingers.
Hunter leans against the counter, which is just a wooden box with some shelves on the back. His general uniform seems to be some sort of plaid shirt over a white undershirt, well-fitting jeans, and work boots. His hair is dry today with waves, shiny enough to suggest he takes nice care of it.
“So do you know what you want?” he asks. “I have some ideas, but it’s your space and your money.”
I take a deep breath and look around. I feel like a little kid making a Christmas list, about to ask for a pony.
“For one thing, better lighting. Probably a funky chandelier or two in front, some basic cans farther back. Whatever will look classy but be cost-efficient and easy to change out.”
“There are actually a couple of old chandeliers in the antiques market,” he points out.
“Lots of inventory just sitting around that you might like, if you’re into funky—and it all belonged to Maggie, once the store owner went to jail and stopped paying rent.
” He looks down and chuckles. “But—full disclosure—I’m pretty sure the dumpster raccoons have a nest in there, so we might need riot gear. ”
“Okay, so it comes with free pets. If you have time and a rabies vaccination, maybe we can check that out later?”
He nods. “If you like.”
Well, don’t sound so excited about it, I want to say.
I walk to the front door and turn to regard the store, imagining the possibilities. In my mind, the sad particleboard shelves fall away, their dull movie boxes banished to a corner. Hunter joins me, notebook ready.
“In an ideal world,” I say slowly, like I’m casting a spell, “I’d have bookshelves all around the walls. Built-ins.”
“And a rolling ladder, right? Like in Beauty and the Beast.”
I blush. “I said an ideal world, but yeah. A girl can hope, right?”
“The great thing about being a carpenter is that I can turn those hopes into reality. Especially if you already have all the materials in the hardware store.” He talks as he sketches. “Pretty lucky that you inherited two more stores that have most of the supplies you need, right?”
I find the little dictionary in my pocket, rub my finger over the snap.
“Yeah, very lucky.” Then I refocus on the task at hand.
“So that’s a side wall and a back wall of built-ins.
Then I need freestanding shelves at regular intervals.
Starting about here”—I move to a place that would offer lots of room for displays up front—“and ending here.” I walk along the line the shelves would take, following the run of the wooden boards to where the shelves would end, toward the back wall.
“So that’s probably four sets of shelves. ”
“You know, if I built them on casters, you could move them around if you hold events or if you just wanted to change the store up a bit,” Hunter says.
He runs his measuring tape along the floor.
“If they were nailed down, they’d be twelve feet, but if we wanted them to move, we’d do six-foot shelves and put them together.
The casters would lock, though, so it’s not like the shelves would be drifting around and knocking over customers. ”
It does not escape me that he said we, and I like that.
It makes it feel less like I’m a prima donna demanding work and more like we’re doing something together, building something new and exciting from the wreckage of Maggie’s old life.
Like we’re dreaming this store into existence.
I need to keep him in that mode, the one where we’re a team—not the one where I’m the scion of his family’s worst enemy.
“That’s a great idea! I would love to be able to reconfigure things.”
“And where will the movies go? I know the locals depend on this place. The nearest movie theater is twenty miles away, and the population skews older and less tech-friendly.” The look he’s giving me suggests there’s more at risk than just where to put some moldering VHS boxes. This…is important to him.
“Of course. I honestly think they could be shelved spine-out like books and just take up a corner. Maybe get some newer releases, too.” As I walk the perimeter of the store, I realize that there’s one cheap white particleboard shelf against the wall that’s out of alignment with all the others.
It has only four VHS boxes on it, so I grab it by both sides and try to rock it away from the wall. “What’s this?”
Hunter walks over and considers it. Biceps straining in his flannel, he picks up the whole damn shelf and pulls it away from the wall to reveal…
A door.
My curiosity skyrockets, and I immediately go for the doorknob. It’s locked, but I have Maggie’s big key ring, so I pick the keys that look most likely to fit the brass knob and go through them one by one.
“Did you know about this?” I ask.
“Nope. I did a little work for Maggie, but she was very private and never seemed to want to do any upgrades. She had me stop by to replace the light tubes when they blew out, and she had me drywall over that door upstairs, but otherwise, I got the feeling she didn’t want me in here.”
Finally the key turns, and I open the door like a kid hunting for Narnia.
It’s an office—and it looks like it hasn’t been used in a century.
The dust spell is definitely not in force here.
There’s a heavy old wooden desk, several file cabinets, a dozen cardboard boxes, and a rolling chair that’s got to be from the sixties.
And sitting in that rolling chair, coated in dust, is a human skeleton.