The Grumpy Carpenter's Sunshine (Small Town Grumpy Sunshine #6)

1. Piper

PIPER

The box truck took the last switchback like it held a grudge, and somewhere under the hood something made a noise no engine should make.

Everything I owned slid sideways in the cargo hold, a whole orchestra of reclaimed subway tile and ring lights and the cardboard boxes I'd labeled FRAGILE in a shade of optimism I no longer felt.

I downshifted, a trick I'd taught myself off a video three nights back, and the truck heaved up the grade and kept on climbing.

"For anyone just joining us," I told the phone clipped to the dash, "this is what a fresh start looks like. A seventeen-foot truck I'm not legally confident I can drive, on a road the map gave up on a half hour ago."

The little red dot had quit at the tree line and stayed there, blinking, stranded, as lost as I was. I kept talking to it anyway. Silence and I have a bad history. The second I go quiet, the things I keep at arm's length get loud.

The phone buzzed in its clip, and a name lit the screen, the one I'd come all this way to get free of.

I sent it to voicemail with my thumb before my eyes could catch more than the first letter.

The screen went dark. I kept my foot easy on the gas and my eyes on the road, which was a thing I'd gotten good at lately, looking clean past the part that hurt and driving on like the next mile was the only one that counted.

Pine crowded in on both sides, close enough to drag a hand through, the green going nearly black where the slope dropped off.

The air through the cracked window came in cold, all sap and stone with woodsmoke buried under it.

I worked my jaw against the altitude and smiled for the camera, because the smile was the job.

"Pinewood Ridge, Colorado," I said. "Population, a number I'll confirm the second I find a human. Elevation, high enough my ears have popped twice. And somewhere up here, my house."

My house. The words still didn't sit right in my mouth. I said them out loud all the same. Saying a thing enough times was the closest I'd ever come to making it true.

Then the road leveled, the trees let go, and there it was. I hit the brake harder than the moment called for and just looked.

The listing had given me three photographs, all of them blurry, all of them shot from angles a generous person would call forgiving.

None of them had prepared me. The Hartwell House sat at the end of a gravel drive with its back to the mountains, like it had picked the view itself a century ago and dared anyone to take it away.

Three stories of Victorian, gray where the paint had worn to nothing, a wraparound porch dipping at one corner like a grin with a tooth gone.

The windows were dark and blind. The turret on the east side wore a blue tarp lashed over its cone of a roof, and the tarp had slipped, so the whole place looked like it had thrown on an eyepatch and felt no shame about it.

It was, without competition, the ugliest thing I'd ever loved on sight.

"Okay," I breathed, and forgot the camera entirely, which never happens. "Okay. Hi. There you are."

I parked crooked, cut the engine, and the quiet rushed in so complete it rang in my teeth. I unclipped the phone and climbed down, gravel grinding under boots that had been clean that morning, in a city four hundred miles behind me.

The cold caught me off guard. Down in the valley the heat had glued my shirt to my back. Up here the air came thin and clean with a bite under it, like the mountain wanted to know whether I meant it before it let me stay. I zipped my jacket to the chin and decided that counted as a yes.

I framed the shot with the house over my shoulder, exactly the way I'd built it in my head across every hour of that drive.

"This is it," I told the lens, and my voice dropped into the register it finds when I actually mean something.

"This is the one. Everybody warned me that a single woman buying a wreck she's never set foot in is how a horror movie opens.

Maybe. But this house has stood here holding on all this time, waiting on somebody to see what it could be.

So let's find out together what she's got left.

Welcome to the restoration. Welcome home. "

The word was barely out of me when I saw it. The front door stood open.

Not unlocked. Open. Eight inches of dark between the door and its frame, where I had a lockbox code sitting useless in my phone and a closing packet that swore, in the flat unbothered language of law, that this house and every wrong thing in it belonged to me.

I lowered the phone.

"Hello?" I called, and hated how thin it came out.

A bird answered from somewhere up the slope. Nothing else did. I climbed the porch steps, testing each one before I trusted it, and the boards complained but held. The door swung in under my hand with a long groan of hinges.

Inside, the house smelled of damp wood and dust and decades of disuse, with something sharper laid over the top, fresh-cut and out of place.

Light fell through the boarded windows in dirty bars.

A staircase rose out of the gloom dead ahead, and even ruined it brought me up short, the kind of work nobody pays for anymore.

Even in the half dark, the place told me what it had been.

Ceilings high enough to lose a voice in.

Plaster medallions furred with cobweb where the chandeliers used to hang.

A pocket door swollen so far off its track it would take a strong back to shift it.

My eye did what it always does and skipped the rot for the bones underneath, and the bones were a marvel.

Somebody had built this by hand and meant it to outlast them by a wide margin.

I laid my palm flat on the newel post. The wood sat cool and solid under a century of grime, and for one breath I felt steadier than I had in a long while.

A man stood at the foot of the staircase, watching me.

He was big in a way the room had to make space for.

Dark hair grayed with plaster dust, a flannel shirt with the sleeves shoved past the elbows, forearms that had plainly done this kind of work their whole lives.

A pry bar hung loose from one hand like he'd forgotten it was a thing a person might fear.

He didn't look startled. He looked at me the way you look at weather that's rolled in off the mountain without asking.

My hand closed on the first thing it could reach, a curtain rod propped against the wall and furred gray with dust. I leveled it at him.

"I've already called the sheriff," I said.

"No." His voice came low and sparing, like every word cost him. "You haven't."

"Excuse me, I absolutely did."

"No signal up here." He didn't move. "Whole ridge. You'd have watched the bars die on the way up."

I had watched them die, the little red dot on the map blinking and then gone the whole way up. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of looking now, though every nerve in my hand itched to.

"Then I'll drive back to the bottom and call him from there," I said, "right after I mention the strange man with a crowbar I found standing in my house."

Something moved behind his face. Not a smile. The near miss of one.

"Your house," he said.

"My house. Closed eleven days ago. I've got a packet and a lockbox code I apparently never needed, since the door turns out to be a suggestion.

" I took a step toward him, rod up, working up a head of steam, because steam was most of what I had.

"So you've got about ten seconds to tell me who you are before I start swinging this very dusty curtain rod at your head. "

"Stop."

It wasn't loud. That was the whole force of it. It landed like a flat palm against my chest.

I stopped.

"That board." He tipped his chin at the floor in front of my boots, where the planks ran toward the stairs. "Gone underneath. Rotted through. One more step and your leg goes down to the joist."

"Cute," I said. "Scare the new owner off so you can finish whatever you came in here to do." I held his eyes, which was the mistake, and took the step out of pure spite.

The floor wasn't there.

My boot punched through soft wood with the wet sound of a spoon sinking into something turned, and I dropped after it, the curtain rod clattering away, my stomach lurching down into the dark ahead of me. I had one bright thought about what might be living under a house this old.

Then a fist knotted in the back of my jacket, and I didn't.

He hauled me up and back like I weighed nothing, the way you'd lift a kitten out of a gutter, and set me on solid floor a full body length from the gap. Splintered wood ringed the place my leg had just been. Cold breathed up out of it.

We ended up close. Far too close. His fist was still bunched in my collar, my face a hand's width from his, close enough to read his eyes, a flat and unsettled gray, the exact color of the house.

He was furious, which made no sense, when I was the one who'd just tried to feed myself to the foundation.

"I told you," he said.

"You didn't say it like you meant it," I shot back, because my pulse was going hard and quick, and the one thing that's always run louder in me than fear is pride.

He let go. Stepped back. Put a careful yard of dusty air between us, like I was a stove somebody had just warned him was hot.

I tugged my jacket straight with whatever dignity a person keeps after being yanked off her feet by the scruff. "Who are you?"

"Webb." He crouched, picked the curtain rod up off the floor, and held it out to me handle first, the way you'd hand a sword back to someone with no business holding one. "Marcus Webb."

I didn't take it. "That's a name. It's not a reason."

"You asked for a name."

"I asked why a man I've never met is standing in a house I own with the front door already open." I folded my arms. "Try the part you skipped."

He weighed me. The pry bar tapped once against his thigh. This close, I could make out the thin pale scars crosshatched over his knuckles, the kind a man collects slowly, one tool at a time.

"I've got a key," he said.

I waited. The house ticked and settled around us. He looked at me like that had been a whole sentence, a finished answer, and no amount of waiting was going to buy the rest of it.

"To my house?" I said.

He didn't answer. He held my gaze and gave me nothing, and left me sitting in everything he wasn't saying.

I reached out and took the curtain rod after all, mostly to give my hands something to do besides shake.

Gravel crunched outside.

A car door banged, and a voice came up the porch steps ahead of the woman it belonged to, bright and carrying and pleased with the whole world.

"Yoo-hoo. Anybody alive in there, or did the porch finally eat one of you?"

She filled the doorway. Sixties, maybe, silver hair pinned up under a visor that read PINEWOOD RIDGE DINER, a foil-covered plate balanced on one palm like she'd come into the world holding it.

She took in the room without breaking stride.

Me, the curtain rod, the broken mouth in the floor, the man with the pry bar.

"Oh, good," she said, warm as a kitchen. "You've met Marcus."

I looked at her, then at him. "You know him?"

"Honey, there isn't a soul on this mountain who doesn't." She came in, stepping around the hole like she'd been doing it her whole life, and pressed the warm plate into my free hand.

Butter and apple and cinnamon lifted off it, and my stomach gave me away with a growl.

"Hazel. I run the diner at the bottom of the hill.

Saw a moving truck go by that belonged to nobody from up here and thought, there she is, the girl who bought the Hartwell place without once standing in it. "

"Piper," I managed. "Grant."

"I know, sweetheart. We've been chewing on you for a month." She beamed at me, then at him, and her eyes ran a quick, bright sum between us that I didn't care for the total of. "So. You two settle it yet? The job?"

"There's no job," Marcus said.

"There's the whole house," Hazel said.

"No job." He turned for the door without another look at either of us.

"He's the best there is," Hazel told me, not bothering to lower her voice, like he'd already gone.

"Old houses, restoration, the real thing.

People drive him out to Denver, to Aspen, offer him whatever he wants, and he turns most of them down where they stand.

Three counties, and you won't find another pair of hands that can bring this place back.

Only his." She watched him reach the door.

"Trouble is getting the man to say yes. To a job.

To a person. To a sentence with more than four words in it. "

Marcus stopped on the threshold. He didn't turn around.

"Dawes is the sheriff," he said. "In case you still want to call him."

Then he was down the steps and gone, an engine catching somewhere past my truck and thinning out toward the valley.

I stared at the empty doorway. "So he just walks into strangers' houses."

"Just this one." Hazel said it gently, and the gentleness had a whole story folded up inside it that I hadn't earned yet.

She nudged the plate still balanced in my hand.

"Eat that while it's warm. And start thinking hard about that roof.

First real snow drops in about six weeks.

This old girl's stood a hundred and thirty winters.

One more with the sky pouring in through that turret, and she won't see spring. "

I stood in my ruined, beautiful, broken-down house with a curtain rod in one hand and a stranger's pie in the other and a hole in the floor where my leg should have gone, and it landed on me with a sudden, sinking clarity.

The one man who could keep this place from folding into its own basement had just driven off without once telling me why he carried a key to my front door.

"Hazel," I said. "How long before he changes his mind?"

Hazel patted my arm. The sympathy in it was real, which was the worst part. "Oh, honey. He doesn't."