Mel sucked in a breath, her eyes going even bigger. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Seriously thinking about things I’ve got no right to think about,” he said, realizing how hard he was frowning. That Mel’s pulse had kicked up at the base of her throat. He let his hand drop, and Mel released a shaky breath.
“Ryder—”
“I’m no more interested in trying to recapture the past than you are,” he said with a short, point-to-you nod. “But just to set the record straight? I didn’t hurt you back then because I was rich. I hurt you because I was stupid. We clear on that?”
“Sure,” she said after a moment, the single word squeezed out as though she didn’t dare say anything more, and Ryder finally made his feet carry him down the porch steps.
And away from madness.
Chapter Four
Quinn had thought it was kinda weird that Ryder was already gone when she and April got back from the store, since he’d asked for the chocolate chip ice cream. But then, considering how weird things already were? She didn’t suppose she should be surprised.
Especially with her mom. At first Quinn had been focusing too hard on her cut hand to really notice, but once Ryder got her fixed up Quinn saw that Mom was sort of rattled. And not because of Quinn’s hand, which wasn’t nearly as bad as when she’d been a little kid and the window in their apartment had slammed shut on her fingers, breaking two of them. That sucked. This was messy and all—she hadn’t been kidding about the blood—but nothing to get scared about, really. But Mom had looked like she was gonna throw up. So what could it be except Ryder? Except if they’d been friends and stuff...?
It made no sense. But then, the older Quinn got, the less anything about grown-ups made sense. They were just weird.
And she really needed to come up with a new word before she wore that one out.
So last night Mom let her eat a boatload of ice cream, and then she and April and Mom watched some dumb old movie—only it was a tape or something you had to rewind when it was finished? Weird—and then the grownups made her go to bed way before she was ready while they stayed downstairs and talked. Only Quinn couldn’t sleep, because she kept thinking about how Mom looked like Quinn had felt when they’d gone to that fake haunted house last Halloween—even though she knew it was fake, she was still all nervous from thinking something was going to jump out and scare her any second.
Except it wasn’t Halloween and as far as Quinn knew her great-grandmother’s house wasn’t haunted, pretend or otherwise. Gross and dirty and disgusting, but not haunted.
At least today was sunny and warmer and Mom had said, yeah, they could go walking along the waterfront soon, but not until after her other cousin—Blythe—got there from D.C. So, since her hand didn’t really hurt all that much, Quinn—who’d been up since the butt-crack of dawn, as Mom would say—dragged out some of her homeschooling textbooks and did a couple of assignments, which made Mom happy, she could tell. She’d also tried playing the old piano in the gathering room, but she gave up after a couple of minutes because it was so badly out of tune she couldn’t tell if she was hitting the right notes or not. So now she was poking around in one of the upstairs bedrooms, even though she kept sneezing from all the dust. It smelled funny, too. Like Mrs. Davis’s—her babysitter’s—apartment upstairs when she kept her windows closed for too long.
She could hear April and Mom talking downstairs again, and even though she knew it was stupid her stomach started to hurt a little. Like it used to when she’d hear Mom and Lance whispering out in the living room, right before they broke up, the words sounding all sharp and pointy, like knives—
Quinn closed her eyes, imagining she could hear her grandmother, feel her heartbeat in her ear when she’d give Quinn a hug. Grams used to say thinking too much about your past, especially the parts that make you feel bad, keeps you from seeing the good things right in front of you.
Then she heard April laugh, and she smiled. April was cool. When they’d gone to the store, April had actually listened to her. Like she cared what Quinn thought about stuff. Mom told her April’s husband died, a thought that tried to make Quinn sad about Grams dying. For a while she’d been bummed about Lance, too, but she got over it. Because now that she thought about it, his smile had been all fake. Like he was trying too hard. And why Mom couldn’t see that Quinn did not know.
Ryder, though—now his smile had made her feel like everything was really going to be okay—
Holy cannoli, her great-grandmother had so much stuff. Everywhere. Mom had said to be careful, there might be spiders, but Quinn liked spiders. Actually she liked bugs, period, but especially spiders, although she wasn’t a total dummy, and knew to stay away from black widows. Other than that, the house was way cool, especially being so close to the water. And all that sky...
She walked over to the bedroom’s dirty window, thinking she felt like...like she wasn’t stuck in her body when she looked at it. Not like she was in the sky, but like the sky was in her.
As she watched, she saw a boy—around her age, maybe, it was hard to tell from way up here—walking along the edge of the water, a large black dog galloping ahead of him, barking its head off—
“That must be Blythe!” she heard her mom call out, and Quinn tiptoed to the head of the stairs—the floors creaked really badly—then crept down a couple of steps to sit where she could see the entryway through the bannister, wishing she had a cat or dog or something to keep her company until life got back to normal.
Whatever the heck that meant, she thought with a sigh.
* * *
“Oh, dear God—” Blythe Broussard’s perfectly smudged, smoky eyes darted around the gathering room, clearly not knowing where to focus first. “I had no idea it was this bad.”
“And it’s all ours, aren’t we lucky ducks?” Mel grumbled as her cousin’s gaze lifted to the gathering room’s leprous ceiling, her multi-bangled wrists crossed over the charcoal-gray, dolman-sleeved sweater gracefully draping her angular, nearly six-foot-tall frame.
“Lucky’s not exactly the word that first comes to mind,” Blythe said, the sunlight fighting through the room’s three large, filthy windows glancing off her spiky blond hair, the pewter-colored works of art dangling from earlobe to shoulder. Damn things had nearly lacerated Mel’s cheeks when they’d hugged. “Right now I can’t decide whether she hated us more or less than our mothers.”
“Now, now,” April said as she carted in a bamboo tray laden with teacups—real ones, not mugs—and a plate of baked goodies. “Hate is such a strong word.” Honestly, between Blythe’s designer glam and April’s Barbie-doll vibe, Mel felt downright frumpalicious in her jeans, hoodie and Crocs. Pink and sparkly though they were. Not that Ryder had seemed to mind the night before, she thought on a what-the-heck? as she recalled the confused look in his eyes, the intensity in his voice. The way his hand shook when he touched her. And how her body had mwa-ha-ha’d in response...
“Yes, it is,” Blythe said, flopping down in one of the chairs and jerking Mel back to the subject at hand. Although she’d never been particularly close to her aunts, apparently their grandmother had cut off April’s and Blythe’s mothers, as well, for various and sundry reasons....
Okay, clearly the dude wasn’t married. Because he...um, no. No way. But for damn sure Mel needed to find out a salient fact or six before this phantom dinner. A thought which provoked more mwa-ha-ha-ing—
“At least it’s a beach house,” April said. “So the weathering is good, right?”
For the love of Mike, girl—focus!
“Honey, this goes way beyond weathered,” Mel said, slamming shut the gate on her renegade thoughts as her gaze latched on to the dry-rotted sheers shivering like ghosts in the drafty windows. Now that she’d seen the place in the harsh light of day...oh, dear.
Then she looked
at April, all twin-setty and such, a velvet headband keeping her long hair from tangling with the goodies as she set the tray on a small table nestled between a group of tatty looking chairs. As sweet and put-together as always—even as a child, she wouldn’t dream of her undies not coordinating with her outties, never mind how cheap any of it was—her smile now did little to mask the sadness camped out in eyes not quite as bright as Mel remembered.
Because despite hours of catch-up conversation the night before, during which April had coaxed Mel into spilling her guts about her failed relationship with Lance, April had not been nearly as forthcoming about her own marriage, other than to admit how much she missed her husband. But if April wanted to hide whatever she was hiding behind a heaping plate of baked goods, who was Mel—insert ironic eyeroll here—to say?
“Where’d you get those?”
“I popped out to that new bakery on Main Street while you were still asleep. Y’all want coffee or tea? I’ve got both in the kitchen. And hot chocolate for Quinn, if she wants it.”
Blythe and Mel exchanged a glance before Mel said, “What’s with the perfect hostess routine?”
Artfully arranging her wares on the dinged table, April shrugged. “I like taking care of people. Makes me feel useful. So what’ll it be?”
“Coffee,” Mel and Blythe chorused before Mel bellowed, “Quinn! Breakfast!” which naturally got a “Who’s Quinn?” from Blythe.
“Mel’s little girl,” April said before scurrying back to the kitchen. “Sweetest child ever...”
“Don’t believe a word of it,” Mel said to Blythe, selecting a muffin from the pile and settling into one of the chairs to feast. “The part about her being sweet, I mean,” she amended as the child herself appeared, scrubbed her dusty palm across her butt to shake hands with Blythe and mumble hello, grab a muffin—but only after first ascertaining it wasn’t contaminated with raisins—and bolt back toward the stairs.
“What are you doing up there?” Mel called after her.
“Nothin’. Exploring.”
“You want hot chocolate with that?”
“No, I’m good.”
Mel looked back at Blythe. “As I was saying.”
Blythe chuckled, then said, “And why didn’t I know you even had a kid?”
Their oldest cousin, even if only by a year, had always mother-henned her and April. To death. A more than decent trade-off, they’d finally decided, for Blythe’s gleeful, detailed sharing of every adolescent rite of passage she’d scored ahead of her younger cousins. “S’okay,” Mel said, biting into some kind of muffin. Oooh, oatmeal chocolate chip. Score. “April didn’t know, either.”
“And why is that, pray?”
Mel felt her face warm. “We hadn’t spoken for, what? Two years by that point. I was hardly going to suddenly surface with that piece of news...this is pretty good,” she said, pointing to the muffin. “But I can do better.”
Which would have been Blythe’s cue to follow Mel down a different conversational path. Had Blythe been anyone other than Blythe.
“Was there a husband?” she asked, buttering a corner of her scone, and Mel stuffed more muffin in her mouth.
“No,” Mel said as April returned, bearing coffee. “What about you?”
“Do I have any kids?” Blythe shook her head. “Just as well, since the marriage experiment failed. Miserably.”
“Oh, honey,” April said with a touch to Blythe’s shoulder before she sat, “That’s too bad.”
“Not really,” Blythe said with a short laugh. “So,” she said, clearly as eager to steer the conversation away from those pesky personal issues as Mel had been, “what are we doing about the house?”
“Since April’s not on board with my initial plan,” Mel said, “which involved a match and several gallons of strategically dribbled gasoline, I vote for selling. As quickly as possible. Although I suppose we have to...” She glanced around, then back at Blythe. “Do a little cleaning first.”
“Can we even fit a bulldozer in here?”
“Maybe if we brought it through the French doors...?”
“Girls!” April barked. Well, yipped. “We are not going to toss this stuff without goin’ through it! What if we throw out something important? Or valuable?”
“Then we’d never know, would we?” Blythe said. Then sighed at April’s hurt expression. “Fine, fine. We’ll...” She shuddered, setting her earring-sculptures to mad jiggling. “Sort. But I can’t be here full-time, I’ve got clients lined up far as my iPad can see. I can maybe do some late afternoons and evenings, how’s that?”
“Works for me,” April said, even as Mel saw any possibility of her escaping this hell-hole in a timely manner disintegrate before her eyes. “But—”
“And I know we won’t get top dollar for the place in the condition it’s in,” Blythe continued, “but some fresh paint might mitigate the ick factor enough to get something for it. I know a Realtor not too far away, I’ll have her come do a market analysis early next week—”
“I don’t suppose you could stage this for, like, cheap?” Mel asked.
Blythe laughed. An oh-you-poor-deluded-soul kind of titter. “Sweetie, I’m a decorator. Not God. Although some of my clients seem to think I am,” she said with a grin, sipping her coffee.
“Actually...” April’s baby blues bounced from one to the other. Like an adorable, fluffy kitten with serious mischief on its mind. “I thought maybe we could discuss, um, alternatives. To selling, I mean.”
Another exchanged glance preceded Blythe’s careful, “Such as?”
“Well...how about turning it back into an inn? Or at least a bed-and-breakfast?”
While Mel nearly choked on her bite of muffin, Blythe hooted. “Sorry, count me out. Not about to give up my life—let alone a career I busted my posterior to achieve—to run a B&B. Anywhere. With anyone. Even you. An innkeeper I am not. End of discussion.”
Then April turned her undeterred gaze on Mel, who shook her head as vehemently as she dared while her eyes were still watering. She lifted one finger before taking a swallow of coffee, then cleared her throat. “Don’t look at me, I’d rather shove sharp sticks under my fingernails than move back here.”
“Why, for heaven’s sake?” April said, her voice all kitteny-soft but her eyes...not. “Okay, so I get that Blythe might not be able to change her life, but you already said you lost your job—”
“You lost your job? Oh, sweetie...”
See, this is why she never told people stuff. Because they used it against you.
“—and an inn has to have somebody to cook. And that can’t be me, because I can’t even make toast. And ohmigod,” April said to Blythe, “you should have tasted this stir-fry she made last night, swear to God angels sang in my mouth—”
“Stop!” Throat cleared, hands lifted, Mel leveled her gaze on her cousin. “First off, it was a simple stir-fry, for heaven’s sake, I didn’t even make the sauce from scratch. And second...I’m sorry, hon. I really am—” Okay, she wasn’t, but she didn’t have to be mean about it “—but me staying here? Not gonna happen. There are too many...” She pressed her lips together before she tripped over her big mouth right into dangerous territory. Then—hallelujah!—she realized she had the perfect out. “Besides, if Blythe isn’t interested—”
“Sharp sticks? Right there with ya, babycakes.”
“—then we’d have to buy out her share of the property. And I don’t have a cent to spare right now.” Or ever—
“Um, not a problem,” April said quietly. “Because if you’re absolutely sure you don’t want to go into this with me—” she looked from one to the other, getting two vigorous head shakes in response “—I could buy both of you out. And have more than enough left over for renovations.” At their gape-mouthed expressions, she blushed almost as pink as
Mel’s Crocs. “Since my attorney tells me I’m apparently stinking rich.”
* * *
It was all still a bit much to take in, Mel thought as she tossed together this and that into her version of a salade Nicoise, that the cousin who’d barely had a pot to pee in, as Nana would say, had been able to assure Blythe that, yes, a six-figure budget to renovate the old house would not be a problem.
She’d known her husband Clayton was wealthy, of course—something about a family business which he and his mother had sold some years before—but she’d had no idea how wealthy until after his death.
And she still seemed a little gobsmacked about it all, unable—or unwilling—to say much more. Probably because the poor thing was still grieving too hard, Mel mused as she sliced boiled potatoes and dumped them into the wooden salad bowl. Although April did confess that as a child, her biggest wish had been to live in the house forever. Now, to get a shot at owning it, to have something that was completely hers, was a dream come true—
“Whatcha making?” Quinn said as she sashayed into the kitchen and plopped into one of the chairs, all big, blue trusting eyes and ingenuous grin, and Mel’s heart fisted inside her chest, the truth relentlessly lapping at her consciousness like the waves against the beach. Being around her cousins again, slipping back into the easy, open relationship that had made those childhood summers so special, so free, only made her realize how much that damn secret was holding both of them prisoner.
“Salade Nicoise,” Mel said over a spurt of anger. “You hungry?”
“Starving.” Puckering her forehead, Quinn snitched a piece of cold asparagus from the cutting board and popped it into her mouth. Kid always had preferred “good” food, in fact, for which Mel had always been grateful. Sweet, no. Omnivorous, yes, the raisin phobia notwithstanding. “Mom...you okay?”
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