Seventeen Days

by Linda Griffin

  Oblivious to her resentment, Rick said, “I could put a shelf here for a microwave if you’d like. What about a dishwasher?”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t mind washing dishes in the sink.” It wasn’t entirely true, but a dishwasher would have to wait.

  “Good view for it,” he said, gesturing at the window. “That will give you more space for storage—I could put drawers here.”

  “This is starting to sound expensive,” she said. Not to mention having him around for days at a time.

  “It won’t hurt to draw up a few plans and give you an estimate,” he said. “No cost, no obligation.”

  “My mom lo-o-o-o-ves her new kitchen,” Nancy said. “She said it was worth every penny.”

  “Word-of-mouth advertising,” he said. “Nothing like it.”

  “Her cabinets are beautiful,” Jenna acknowledged, “but I’m sure there are other things I should do first—updating the kitchen isn’t my first priority.”

  “She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Nancy put in.

  Rick was writing down measurements and didn’t even pause. “Was that a non sequitur?” he asked.

  Nancy munched bacon while she considered this. “Not on purpose,” she said at last.

  Rick and Jenna exchanged an amused glance over her head. “A non sequitur is something that doesn’t follow logically from what went before,” Jenna explained gently.

  When Rick finished measuring, he put his notebook away and left the kitchen without a word. The screen door banged shut behind him.

  “He’s nice,” Nancy said, “but the—”

  Jenna cut her off. “What did your mother say about repeating gossip?”

  “It isn’t gossip if it’s true. Danny’s mother is dead. Is your mother dead?”

  “No. She’s fine, thank you. She lives in Arizona with my dad and three cocker spaniels.”

  “I like dogs. We can’t have one because of the—the whatchamacallits. They make Larry sneeze.”

  “Allergens?” Jenna suggested. She was waiting for the sound of the pickup leaving. She didn’t hear anything, and through the window above the sink she saw Alvarez crossing the back yard. “Do you want any more bacon?” she asked.

  Nancy shook her head and then remembered her manners. “No, thank you, Miss Scott.” Jenna got up anyway and checked to be sure the burners were off as an excuse to see where he had gone. He was poking around the shed. She had said there were other things she needed done, but he shouldn’t assume she meant to hire him to do them!

  She started piling dishes in the sink, and Nancy helped by putting away the juice and the jam. Rick left the shed and disappeared around the corner of the house. Again she waited for him to leave, and again she heard nothing. Nothing in her city-bred experience made it acceptable for him to hang around, but their previous dealings didn’t allow her to go out and say, “Get off my property. You’re not welcome here,” either. If she had been alone, she might have continued to wait and wish he’d leave, but Nancy was more curious or more gregarious. Appetite temporarily satisfied, she ran outside to see what he was doing.

  Jenna followed reluctantly. Through the front window she saw him talking to Nancy. He had his notebook and pen out again, no doubt listing things he could charge her for. He and Nancy walked out of sight—not toward his pickup. She sighed in exasperation and went to retrieve her sketchbook.

  She sat on the front porch with her feet on the loosest step—no doubt the repair was on his list—and sketched the path and the driveway and the pickup. Danny would have liked it. The pickup wasn’t new and had a few dents in the tailgate, but it was clean.

  Rick and Nancy rounded the corner of the house. “Your paint is peeling,” Nancy told her.

  “I know,” she said. “It’s an old house, and nobody lived here for a long time. What color shall I paint it?” She hoped Alvarez had understood the “I.”

  “Pink,” Nancy said at once. “It’s my favorite color.”

  “Pink is nice,” Jenna agreed. “But maybe not for the exterior.”

  Nancy climbed up the steps to see what Jenna was drawing, but when she found only a boring pickup, she lost interest. “Okay, red,” she said and resumed following Rick around.

  Jenna flipped a page. Portraits were not her forte, but she began trying to capture his face. There was something foreign about him. Not unfamiliar, not threatening, but somehow off-putting. She was equally puzzled by his face and by her reaction to it. She was embarrassed to think his ethnicity might be what bothered her—after all, she had lived in California all her life.

  He was attractive enough, but not classically handsome. By a purely Anglo standard, his nose was too broad, his jaw too prominent—but when she looked up to see him listening patiently to Nancy’s chattering, she could see only that they were right for his face. By any standard he had lovely cheekbones and slender, expressive hands, and she had never seen such beautiful, dark hair. Why was he here? Why was he still here? Her sketch didn’t do him justice anyway, and when he glanced up and caught her watching him, she busily shaded the background and turned another page.

  Nancy was being a bit of a pest, but he didn’t seem to mind. He pulled a paint scraper out of his tool belt and showed her how to remove the flaking paint around the window. She set to work with more energy than skill, making a lot of unnecessary noise, but Jenna supposed she couldn’t do much harm. Once she was well into the job, Rick came up and joined Jenna on the porch. He glanced at her sketchbook, which now showed only Nancy’s pigtails and glasses.

  “I can do that myself,” she said, gesturing toward the window.

  “I know,” he said. “But she likes to help. Don’t pass up free labor.”

  “When do you have to pick up Danny?” she asked pointedly.

  He checked his watch. “Not yet,” he said. “Not so hard,” he added to Nancy.

  “You don’t go to church?” Jenna asked.

  “Not today,” he said. He was probably Catholic. Did San Ignacio—named after a saint after all—have a Catholic church? Uh-oh, she thought, remembering her high school fascination with Catholic boys—Mexican, Italian, Irish. He wasn’t sitting too close, but it felt too close. On her property was too close. He wasn’t dangerous, but on some level she was afraid of him—why? He was Danny’s father, and Danny was a terrific kid, and she had seen the sweetness of the affection between them. Was she wary of all men in the wake of Patrick’s desertion? Would she feel this if Jim Kelly or Mike Hayes were sitting here?

  He glanced at her sketchbook, and she tightened her grip for fear he would take it out of her hands and look at the previous pages. She added bows to Nancy’s pigtails and tried to get the exact shape of her mouth—wide, gently curved, with her mother’s sensitive lips. “You do this for a living?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Technical illustration. I’m not very good at portraits.”

  “Technical illustration,” he repeated and nothing more, and she was damned if she could think of a single thing to say about her work or anything else. The silence stretched out, and she wondered if it was as uncomfortable for him as it was for her. She at least had something to do with her hands. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. He didn’t seem uncomfortable. The only sound was the scraping of paint.

  She opened her mouth to say something, anything, out of desperation, and he started to speak at the same time. He stopped and gestured for her to go on with a faint smile. “How long have you lived in San Ignacio?” she asked.

  “Three years.”

  “And Los Angeles before that? Did you do the same kind of work?”

  “No,” he said and then he stood up. He took the scraper out of Nancy’s hand and showed her again how to free the loose layers of paint. He faced Jenna on the steps, but didn’t come back. “I was a teacher,” he said.

  “Really?” She imagined him showing teenage boys how to do woodwork or auto mechanics as casually as he demonstrated paint scraping
for Nancy.

  “Yeah,” he said, acknowledging her surprise. “I taught history.”

  “This is a big change, then,” she said.

  “It is,” he agreed and abruptly changed the subject. “Jenna. Is that a nickname?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s on my birth certificate.” She stood up too, because a car was racing along the road. A white car with beacon lights on top—the local police.

  Rick took a step toward his pickup and put the paint scraper back in his belt. An unusual energy was in the air, and she understood his response without knowing how she knew. He was a parent, separated from his child. There was unknown trouble, and his instinct was to go find Danny. An odd thing to feel when she had no children of her own, but she knew she was right. He headed for the pickup, but remembered to stop and give them a wave in farewell.

  “’Bye,” Nancy called, disappointed but not particularly surprised. She didn’t seem concerned or even curious about the police car. She brushed paint dust off her hands and the front of her dress and came back up the steps slowly. Her face brightened when she saw what Jenna had drawn. “That’s me,” she said. She sounded every bit as pleased as Danny had.

  “Yes,” Jenna agreed and gave her a better look at the sketchbook. “Pretty girl.”

  “No,” she said and, no doubt remembering what she had been told about compliments, added, “I mean—thank you. I wish I could draw like you.”

  “I wish I could sew like you,” Jenna offered. And cook like your mother, she thought, and keep—no, she would not waste a minute of this beautiful day feeling sorry for herself. She sat back down and filled in details of the portrait under the subject’s admiring eyes. She didn’t have it quite right, hadn’t captured Nancy’s unique personality, but it didn’t have to meet any critical standards. When she had done all she could, she tore off the page and gave it to the girl. “I should go wash the dishes,” she said. “Do you want to help me?”

  Nancy considered, torn between the lure of further conversation and distaste for boring kitchen chores. Jenna laughed at her expression. “Never mind,” she said. “They’ll keep.” She was happier now that Rick was gone, freer. Why was he so hard to talk to, when he had been as friendly as anyone else in town? Maybe he was too damned good-looking. “Tell me about yourself,” she suggested. “What do you like to do besides sew and scrape paint?”

  Nancy giggled. “I don’t like school,” she said, “but I like to read.”

  “Good. What books do you like?”

  “I’m reading one about a whaling ship,” she began enthusiastically. She recounted the story to date while Jenna sketched what she hoped was a passable whaler.

  “My favorite was Black Beauty,” she said, and Nancy had read it too. The conversation was very satisfactory, and Jenna was feeling relaxed and comfortable when the rest of the Hayes family returned from church. Nancy, all reason for resentment forgotten, ran off to join them.

  Jenna went into the house and washed the breakfast dishes. When everything was tidy, she headed out to the shed and found a paint scraper of her own. At the risk of spoiling the girl’s fun, she set to work, adopting Rick’s technique. When the task grew tiresome, she decided buying paint would be more fun.

  She drove into town. Judging by the dearth of parked cars and passersby, some businesses were closed on Sunday, but the tiny hardware store was open. To a city girl used to large home improvement centers, it was like a child’s conception of a store, a hardware dollhouse. The door was open, and the overhead lights were on, but nobody was around. The only paint was a few cans of black Rust-Oleum and white exterior flat, but a display showed colors she could order.

  She surveyed the choices. Here was no extravagant wealth of shades, and the colors had straightforward names, no “Pecan Cream” or “French Vanilla.” She considered a pale green, daringly christened “Light Green,” or the truly exotic “Almond” for the kitchen, which would have to wait until she knew whether Rick Alvarez would talk her into remodeling. Of course she could start right away with white.

  “Hullo,” a hearty voice said behind her, and she jumped. The speaker was a young man she remembered from the barbecue, but his name escaped her. He was a pretty good square dancer and had a cute, girlish wife. “Planning to paint?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry; I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “Harvey Wells,” he said. “Too many of us to learn all at once.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “You’re Megan’s husband.”

  “Right,” he said, beaming. He gestured toward the paint display. “I can get you any of those colors in three days at the longest. Of course the big paint stores in the city have more choices, but we only carry the one brand.” Carroll City was nearly two hours away—too far to drive for pastels with edible names. “See anything you like?”

  “I guess I’ll start with white,” she said, “and maybe something for the trim.” She studied the display.

  “Take your time,” he said. He sauntered to the small counter and busied himself with a pencil and paper.

  Jenna flirted with Nancy’s choice of red—the color called “Red” was the shade of old barns—and decided on a deep forest green, dubbed “Dark Green,” for the exterior trim. Harvey looked up and smiled when she approached the counter. He wrote down the information, offered an opinion on how many gallons of each color she would need—he knew the house—and offered to carry the white he had on hand to her car. “Now, if you need help with the painting,” he continued, “there’s lots of kids who’ll work cheap.” He gestured at a bulletin board near the door, covered with bits of paper. “They don’t do anything fancy,” he said, “but they’re all good workers. We take them down if we get complaints.”

  She wondered what Rick Alvarez thought of this low-priced competition, but she dutifully studied the board. The scraps held brief job descriptions—“painting, yard work, chores,” said one—names, and in some cases phone numbers. Larry Hayes had a listing, but she doubted he would be interested in helping her paint after she had hurt his pride. His sister probably would, if she could be trusted. Ought she to offer to pay Nancy for scraping paint? Or save her pennies for whatever Rick might talk her into? “No cost, no obligation,” he had said.

  While Harvey was writing out a receipt for her, she glanced around the store. It held mostly tools of every description—rakes, hammers, screwdrivers, drills, paintbrushes, and so on—and generous supplies of nails, screws, and tape. Between the bulletin board and the counter was a narrow case labeled Local Artists. A quick survey revealed the sort of thing she would expect to find in any tourist-area drugstore—amateurish shell jewelry, watercolor cards with sentimental poetry, embroidered potholders and checkbook covers, and on a shelf by themselves a series of wood carvings with a surprising delicacy of detail. She picked one up—a kitten curled up in comfortable sleep—and found it light and smooth in her hand, the texture of the wood almost lifelike. She checked for a price sticker on the bottom. It was signed in neat capitals—E. Alvarez. Enrique, she thought and felt herself flush as Harvey approached to hand her the receipt. She put the kitten back on the shelf. So he was an artist.

  She and Harvey carried paint cans out to stow them in her car. She was opening the trunk when Megan hurried across the street toward them. “Hi, Jenna,” she said cheerily, but her voice held an undercurrent of suppressed excitement.

  Harvey noticed too. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “It’s that Los Angeles woman.”

  “Barbara Raymond?” Jenna asked.

  “Yes, Mrs. Raymond. She’s dead.”

  Harvey dropped a can of paint into the trunk with a jarring thud. “Dead,” he repeated.

  Megan could barely contain her eagerness. “They found her body on the rocks below the pier.”

  “Drowned?” he asked.

  “No.” She leaned in to whisper conspiratorially, “They think she was murdered.”

  Harvey and Jenna stared at
her, speechless. Jenna remembered the two men searching below her in the morning—for evidence of a crime, for a body?—and the police car passing the house. Barbara Raymond was a beautiful, vibrant woman—how could she be dead? Worse, murdered. Who would want her dead? Who, in this quiet, out-of-the-way small town, where big-city crime was presumed not to intrude, would take the life of an elegant yet friendly stranger? “She’s too beautiful,” Rick had said. “Women like that are nothing but trouble.” Perhaps she had brought the trouble with her, or it had followed her from L.A. A stranger would stand out in this place, but who knew what might creep in while they were all peacefully asleep in their safe, quiet houses? Scary.

  There was a moment of awkwardness before she realized they were waiting for her to leave before continuing the conversation. “Thanks, Harvey,” she said. “I’ll let you know about ordering more paint.” She slid into the front seat and pulled out from the curb. Harvey and Megan stood in the middle of the street and watched her go.

  As she drove in, she noticed two cars in the driveway next door, but nobody outside. In her own driveway, she sat for a moment, overwhelmed by a new, sharp feeling of dread. San Ignacio, once a peaceful refuge, had in the space of a few seconds, in the words of a pretty young woman, become dangerous, sinister. She stepped out of the car and felt small, insignificant, as if she might be swallowed up by the enormous sky. What was the opposite of claustrophobia? Agoraphobia?

  She had intended to put the paint in the shed, but now she was reluctant to go into the dusty darkness and left the cans in the car. The front door was unlocked—a natural choice only an hour ago. She had not supposed anybody, even the mischievous Nancy, would enter uninvited. Where had she put the small brass key?

  She closed the door behind her and stood still in the nearly bare living room. A rush of fear and loneliness brought a lump to her throat. She walked slowly into the bedroom, and her gaze went straight to the portrait of her grandmother above the bed. It was a good likeness, with enough life in the eyes to suggest she was about to speak. Jenna drew closer and touched the glass as she would have touched her grandmother’s cheek, and without warning she wept—not for Gran, but for Patrick. No, not even for Patrick—to hell with him!—for her lost love, the love he had betrayed.