Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Annie
The first thing I see is the roof. I sit in Lanie’s drive with my hand still on the gearshift and stare up at blue tarp stretched clean and tight across the back slope of the house. Not pretty. Not finished. But right.
The torn section is covered now, weighted down and tied off, not flapping wild in the wind anymore.
New shingle bundles wait by the fence. Ruined boards are stacked in a pile, neat as you please, right by the drive.
Someone’s tried to sweep the porch, but all it’s done is leave dark, wet streaks across the old planks.
Something happened here while I was gone.
Lanie steps onto the porch before I can get out of the car, wiping her hands on a dish towel like she’s been caught doing something she shouldn’t.
I open the door slowly. “Lanie.”
She lifts her chin. “Before you start, it’s handled.”
“That isn't the comforting sentence you think it is.”
“It's handled,” she repeats.
I get out and shut the car door harder than necessary. The sound cracks across the yard. “What happened?”
“Nothing for you to get yourself all worked up over.”
I look at the roof again. The old corner that used to gape open is dried in now. There’s fresh bracing under the porch where it sags. This isn’t the kind of patch job you do with one ladder and a stubborn streak. Somebody did real work.
“Aunt Lanie.” It’s the pleading way I say her name that I know gets her. Same way I used to say it when I was 11 and wanted something.
“Annie,” she parrots and then turns back toward the house.
“Wait.” I cross the yard, gravel shifting under my boots. “Tell me what happened. Pretend I’m twelve and I’m asking you to explain the plot to an episode of Dawson’s Creek.”
That almost gets me a smile.
She glances toward the road, then back at me. “Dwight Pritchett took my money.”
“What money?”
“The money I gave him to fix this damned roof.”
My fingers twist in the fabric of my messenger bag. “How much did you give him?”
I’m careful not to make it sound like she did something silly. She clearly didn’t. She paid a man for a service that apparently needed to be done.
She folds the towel once, then again. “Eight thousand.”
Deep breath in, deep breath out. At Stanhope, eight thousand dollars is a drop in the bucket. For Aunt Lanie, it’s the difference between having groceries for the next three months or depending on the generosity of strangers for the next meal.
“Eight thousand dollars?”
“I had a contract.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“You had enough on you.”
“Lanie.”
“I wasn’t about to pile a leaking roof on top of what you just lived through.” Her voice sharpens, then catches. She hates that it catches. “You came home looking like somebody had reached in and scooped you hollow. I wasn’t handing you a bucket and saying, here, baby, worry about my ceiling too.”
I rub my hands over my face and tell myself that the reason I didn’t see it is that I was consumed with grief. Doesn’t make me feel any better, though.
“You should have told me.”
“Well, I didn’t. What you gonna do about it?”
The porch light hums overhead. Evening gathers in the trees, turning the yard’s edges blue and soft.
I look back at the roof. “Well, at least it looks like it’s being repaired. What happened between the time I left and the time I came home?”
Lanie rubs her thumb over the towel’s hem. “Reed came by.”
Everything in me goes still.
“He what?”
“He came by looking for you. Saw the mess.” Lanie leans against the porch rail as if her knees have gotten tired all at once. “Asked questions until I answered them. Got the money back through one of his attorneys by midafternoon.”
“He’s good at that kind of thing,” I say, because the words are easier than the feeling climbing up my throat.
“Money didn’t put the roof back on. It’s gonna be winter soon and the chances of me getting a roofer out here before the weather gets nasty weren’t good.”
“So you found someone.”
“Reed may have made a call or two.”
The connections are being made in my brain. Lanie needed a roof. She saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.
“I gave him Jackson’s number.”
“You gave Reed Jackson’s number.”
“I did.”
She looks so pleased with herself, I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep myself from laughing.
“And?”
“And he called him.” Her brows lift, daring me to make more out of that than the situation deserves. “Looked miserable, if you want the God’s honest truth. Then he called him anyway.”
“He hired him?”
“He called him. Jackson brought help. Burt from Mountain Ridge came with two men. Reed paid the emergency cost and made sure Dwight’s refund went back into my account.”
I look at the stack of shingles. “He supervised.”
“No.” Lanie’s voice goes quieter. “He worked.”
I turn toward her.
She nods once. “He hauled shingles and did what anyone told him to do. Got corrected by men who knew what they were doing and took it without showing his tail. Jackson had him prying up porch boards at one point. Reed about ruined a good beam before Jackson stopped him.”
I try to picture it. Reed in his good clothes, sweaty and tired, taking orders from Jackson Boone. The man he had the audacity to ask about the other day.
“He kept going after his hands blistered,” Lanie says.
Wind stirs the branches overhead, cool and sharp on my skin.
Lanie looks toward the repaired section. “I told him not to think fixing my roof bought you back.”
My heart gives one hard knock. “What did he say?”
“He said that wasn’t why he was doing it.”
I wait.
“He said he’d have done it if you never spoke to him again.” Lanie’s mouth works for a second before she firms it. “Said I’d been family for eight years and you loved me.”
He could have written a check and gone back to the hotel. He didn’t. He could have waited here so I’d have to see him beside the evidence. He didn’t.
“He stayed?” I ask, looking around for evidence of a car parked behind the house or somewhere I simply haven’t noticed it.
Lanie shakes her head. “Left before you got back.”
The fact that he left before he could face me shouldn’t bother me.
I’d braced for the ambush. I was ready to walk into my aunt’s house and find Reed there, hands sore, eyes waiting for me to notice what he’d done.
Ready to be angry at him for cornering me.
Instead, he made sure I came home to the roof, not to him.
I look down at my phone. All I would have to do is scroll to his name and press connect.
Lanie doesn’t push. She just folds the towel over her arm and opens the screen door. “I’ve got beans on. You want some?”
“In a minute.”
She looks at me for a long second. Then she goes inside, leaving me with the roof.
I stand in the yard until the porch light draws moths. Then I call my husband. He picks up on the third ring. Quick, steady.
“Annie?”
He has a way of saying my name that belongs solely to him. I’ve never gotten tired of hearing him say it, whether he’s tired, turned on, or even pissed at me.
“I want to talk.”
A pause. “Where?”
“I’ll send you a location.”
I choose Crane House because I'm exhausted and running out of places to hide.
I drive up the ridge while dusk settles through the trees and park in front of the house that has started to feel like a question I’m finally willing to answer.
Crane House sits waiting for me in the failing light. The porch sags where Jackson told me not to put weight. The side threshold is safer, braced just enough for photographs and careful steps. One upstairs window catches the last bit of sun and flashes dull gold.
Before Stanhope, Reed and I used to do this. I’d point at something half-collapsed and tell him I wanted to see it. Reed would turn the car around simply because my face had lit up.
His headlights wash over the weeds fifteen minutes later.
He gets out slow, the strain showing in his shoulders. His hair is damp from a shower, but there’s a raw line under his thumb and a careful tightness in the way he shuts the car door. He looks tired, less polished than usual. Less like Stanhope’s heir, more like the man I used to know.
He doesn’t look at the house first. He looks at me. For a few seconds, Crane House might as well not exist. His gaze moves over me, stopping at my eyes like he needs to make sure I’m really here because I asked. Then he looks away, like he knows better than to stare too long.
“This is it?” he asks.
“This is her.”
I start with the exterior because Jackson would be furious if I went inside a condemned building. I show Reed the steep front gable and the old workroom at the back, where shelves still hang on rusted brackets.
“Maybelle kept her records there, I think,” I say, pointing through the side window. “Or supplies. I’ve found mentions of her accounts and all sorts of things people didn’t bother preserving because they belonged to women’s work.”
Reed steps closer to the glass, careful not to lean his weight on the frame. “Can the shelves stay?”
“Maybe. Jackson says we’ll know more once the wall is opened.”
He nods, eyes tracing the warped wood inside. “They should, if they can. The room would lose something without them.”
I look at him. He’s not watching me to see if he got it right. He’s still looking through the window.
So I keep talking. I tell him about Maybelle Crane and the women who came up the ridge before dawn when doctors had given them nothing but bad news.
Reed listens, not looking for a way to insert his own two cents. He asks when the porch was added. He asks whether the wavy glass is original.
“Jackson finally got the trustee on the phone this afternoon. They accepted my offer, and while closing will take a few weeks, the trust signed an access agreement letting us begin emergency stabilization now. Work starts tomorrow,” I say.
“Who’s doing it?”
I watch him. “Jackson.”
He does his best to keep his expression near emotionless. He nearly manages it.
“That makes sense,” he says, finally.
I watch the jealousy right there at the surface, kept in check only by his restraint.
“How does it feel?”
He frowns faintly. “What?”