by Unknown
Emma’s pulse took a leap at the mention of the sheriff. Nothing wrong with that, she told herself. Sam Gold is a fine-looking man, eligible, responsible. The list sounded like a singles advertisement. And he was that. A walking billboard for the perfect eligible bachelor, and probably every uncommitted woman in Serenity was willing to answer the ad.
“Seems you weren’t the only one to experience some mischief the other night,” Elizabeth continued. “Someone threw a sack of burning manure on the Oateses’ front porch. Frank Oates is ready to strangle whoever did it. Ruined his best house slippers stamping out the fire. This morning Fred Tillman reported the air gone out of all four tires on his new tractor. Several tombstones had the usual graffiti on them. Things like, ‘Baby it’s cold in here’ and ‘I’ve been in better places.’ Same old stuff.”
“I thought Sam said they had a man patrolling the cemetery.”
“They do, but those kids are resourceful, believe you me. Maybe they’ll get it out of their system someday.”
The bell over the door tinkled, and Elizabeth got up to greet the customer. The two women visited a few minutes. After the customer left with her purchases, Elizabeth returned to her desk. “You’re really going to sell the house?”
“That’s what Sam wants.”
Elizabeth picked up her coffee cup. “What does Emma want?”
What Emma wanted had never been a consideration until lately. Now she wasn’t sure how to answer that question. “I think I would like to convert the house into a Victorian tearoom.”
Now the words were out there, hanging in the air.
“A tearoom?” Elizabeth’s head cocked to one side. “What a lovely thought. Serenity doesn’t have one, of course. We ladies sometimes go to one in Durango when we’re there. Why, I think that’s a wonderful idea. Are you serious?”
Emma set the last stack of books on a shelf. “I thought about a tearoom in the house, with a botanical garden out back; maybe replant my mother’s rose garden. I love plants. Did you know I’m a horticulturist? That’s what I do in Seattle.”
“Oh, that’s right, you did mention that to me before,” Elizabeth said. “This old memory isn’t what it used to be. Can’t keep details in my head anymore.”
Emma grinned. “I own a small business that has a combined
nursery and gift shop. We not only sell plants but contract to put plants in malls and office buildings and maintain them on a weekly basis, and we also provide landscaping service and care.”
She hoped all her “babies” were thriving in Seattle. Her poinsettias should be ready to begin blooming, just in time for the Christmas holiday season.
Elizabeth stood and took Emma by the shoulders. “This is your dream, isn’t it? Then follow it.”
“But it’s so … impractical. A tearoom and a botanical garden? We’re talking about a lot of money. Money that I don’t have.”
“You have no savings?”
“Some,” Emma admitted. “But I’m not a gambler. That money is the only thing that stands between poverty and me. I won’t gamble my retirement on a project that most people would agree is frivolous.”
“What about Lully’s estate?”
“I don’t know—I can’t get into her computer files. I’ve tried and tried—do you know a hacker that could help me?”
“No, sure don’t. Sorry, hon. I’m computer illiterate. Have you talked with Sam about this?”
“Sam doesn’t want a tearoom; he thinks the town needs a new parking lot more. The Mansi house gives him a headache. And so do I if the truth were known,” she admitted.
“I doubt that,” Elizabeth said, gently squeezing Emma’s shoulders before releasing them. “I wish I could help, but this shop barely earns me a living. The rent is astronomical, the roof leaks, the owner won’t do any repairs, but I stay because the location is good and I love books.” She paused. “A tearoom with specialty teas, cookies and gift items. Plants and flowers. Now that isn’t so frivolous. The women here would love it.”
Emma shook her head. “It’s impossible.”
“Well, maybe. But still, it would be nice.”
“Don’t say anything to anyone about this,” Emma said. “It’s a foolish thought on my part. At first I concocted it out of thin air so Sam would give me time to think about selling the house. But now I love the idea.” She sighed.
“I won’t say anything. We all have dreams.”
“I suppose,” Emma admitted, though few of hers had come true.
Half an hour later Emma lugged a box of decorations to the front of the store. Choosing cutout turkeys, pumpkins, cornstalks, and Pilgrims, she began affixing them to the front window with Scotch tape. Elizabeth had already chosen appropriate books to display on the tri-cornered shelf, and they were stacked to one side, ready to arrange. Emma was perched on a stepladder that had seen better days when the front door opened, bringing in a gust of crisp air.
Sam took two strides into the shop before turning to focus on Emma. Her precarious perch teetered. He steadied the ladder and looked up at her. “Whoa. Be careful there.”
“Thanks.” She drew a shaky breath. “Are you looking for a book?” She asked as she descended the ladder. She wondered when he had time to read. He seemed to be perpetually on the job.
“No. We’ve got an offer on the house.”
Emma set the stepladder aside. “How? It hasn’t been listed yet.”
Sam smiled in that exasperatingly knowing way he had when he knew she was irritated with him, not with the issue at hand.
“Word of mouth. You forget the town and county are small—everyone knows the house is going to be for sale.”
She shoved a turkey aside. “How come Ned came to you first?”
“Because he was going out of town to show property all afternoon and dropped the contract by the office. Is that okay? Or shall I take it back and tell him to talk to you?”
She was being unreasonable, she knew, but she didn’t like feeling out of the loop. “No, let me see it.”
Sam handed over the pink sheet. Emma frowned at the figure. “Well, this is stupid.”
“That’s what I thought.”
The offer was ten thousand dollars short of Emma’s expectations. Then there was Sam. Sam. Always Sam. What difference did any of it make? His name was on the deed legally, and if he didn’t want to cooperate, there was nothing she could do but buy him out. And she didn’t have enough money to compete with what the town would offer for a municipal parking lot.
“Emma?”
“No.” She slowly tore up the contract.
A frown formed on his face. “We could have talked about it.”
“It’s too little money—the offer falls way short of what we can get if we make a few improvements. Agreed?”
Sam stared at her, his brown eyes assessing. “The idea is to sell and forget about improvements. If you don’t want a parking lot you’re going to have to settle for less. It’s likely whoever buys the house wants it for the location and will bulldoze the house down. It needs too much work.” He shifted stances. “It’s going to be this way with every contract we get, isn’t it?”
“Every one but the right one.”
“Right.” He set his hat back on his head.
She swallowed and released the bomb. “Bring me two hundred thousand and we’ve got a sale.” She smiled.
He looked at her as if she were nuts.
“Too high?” she queried innocently.
“You think?” He laughed, but she knew he wasn’t amused. “Why not a million?”
“Okay.”
“You’re playing me for a fool.” His gaze hardened.
Offended, Emma’s chin raised a notch. Sam met her visual challenge. “Exactly what were you thinking?” she countered.
“Ninety thousand, exactly what the city’s offered.”
“Too little—we could get more from a private buyer if we made the necessary renovations.”
“And where do we get tha
t kind of money?”
“From the bank. People do it all the time. It’s called a home-improvement loan.”
“You have to have a ‘home’ to work with. We have a pile of lumber and nails that isn’t worth striking a match to. It’s the land that’s valuable, not the house.”
“To you maybe.” She crossed her arms. “Not to me.”
He looked like he’d gladly strangle her at this point. “Those are fourteen-foot ceilings, Emma. You’ll need a scaffold to paint the rooms, and then there’re new baseboards, new floors—”
“New roof,” she admitted, then shut up when she realized she was defeating her purpose.
“Then there’s the cost of labor.”
“We could do a lot of it ourselves. I’m pretty good with a paintbrush and ladder.”
“Finding someone dependable enough to show up—”
“Don’t people in this town need work?”
“Apparently not. Ask anyone whose tried to have anything done lately. The cost to do the work, even by ourselves, won’t be offset by the extra dollars we might—and I repeat, might—get.”
Perhaps he was right, Emma allowed, but she wasn’t about to let him know that. The repairs would give the house a better sales value, but more importantly it would give her time, and time was all she needed to make him see the light.
“Do you know the zoning laws for that property?” Sam asked.
“No.” She hadn’t thought to investigate. “Why?”
“Someone asked the other day.”
“Who? Were they interested in buying the house?” Who in Serenity wanted the eyesore? And why?
“No, it was idle conversation about the property, and it occurred to me that since it sits in the middle of town, it might be zoned as something other than residential,” he said.
“Or it could be grandfathered as a possible retail business property,” Emma added.
The shop door opened and Ray Sullins came in. Picking up a weekly newspaper, he turned to Sam and Emma, grinning. “Hello.”
Emma nodded. “Hello.”
“How you doing, Ray?” Sam reached out and shook the smaller man’s hand.
Ray took a piece of red yam out of his pocket and gave to Sam. “I thought this was pretty, and you might need it sometime.”
“Thanks, Ray.” Sam stuck the yarn in his jacket pocket.
“Have you sold Lully’s house?”
Emma resented Ray’s familiarity a little, but swallowed it. He had, after all, apparently spent some time there with Lully.
“No,” she said. “It will take a while.” Suddenly Emma thought of something. “Ray, do you happen to know the password to Lully’s computer files?”
Ray nodded. “It’s a secret.”
“You can tell me,” Emma urged. She had to get into those files!
“Can’t,” Ray said. “I promised.” He smiled and his face relaxed. “The house will sell,” he agreed. “But Lully won’t like it.”
“Ray, listen. It’s very, very important that you tell me how to get into Lully’s files. I can’t settle the estate until I know her financial situation.”
“Uh-uh,” he argued. “That’s Lully’s business.”
“But Lully’s gone now, Ray. Please, I need your help. Weren’t you helping Lully? Are you part of the jewelry business?” Lully could have given him part of the business—who knows what she did?
A sly look came over his face, and he covered his mouth with his hand and giggled. “That’s a secret.”
“Why, hello, Ray. Haven’t seen you in a while,” Elizabeth greeted as she came from the back of the store. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“I wanted to look at comic books.”
“Go right ahead—make yourself at home. I’ll be in the back if you need me.”
No wonder Elizabeth can’t make a profit, Emma thought. She let Ray read the merchandise without buying it. How many others did the same?
Ray drifted over to the comic section and crouched down, apparently settling in for a while.
Elizabeth shook her head when she passed Emma. “A really nice fellow, but different,” she said in a low voice. “Well, I’m going to be sorting through those return paperback books if you need me.”
“Okay,” Emma shoved the box of cutouts aside. “Sam?” she asked softly.
Sam turned from the rack of mysteries he was spinning. “Exactly what was Ray and Lully’s relationship?”
Sam glanced toward the comic section, lowering his voice.
“I don’t know exactly. Many times I’d stop by to check on Lully during the day I would find them sitting on the front porch or working on that long table with some of the jewelry they made.”
“Then he did work on the jewelry with her?”
Sam nodded. “I’d see them around town sometimes, at the bank, the grocery, and other places. He picked up her mail a lot, took delivery of supplies for the jewelry.”
Emma frowned. “I didn’t know that.”
“Ray is our Forrest Gump. Barely made it through school. Wouldn’t have without a lot of help. He lives at the nursing home and washes dishes and sweeps and waxes the floors to pay for part of his keep. The state picks up the other half. He has the heart of a saint. He’s never been a problem.”
“Just a bit of a character.”
“No not a character. The whole town looks after him.”
Emma’s cheeks pinked. What possessed her to make such an awful remark? “I know that sounded judgmental, and I didn’t mean it that way.” She paused. “I guess I’m surprised to learn that my sister had a close relationship with anyone, much less a man.”
Sam spun the rack a final time before abandoning his search.
“I don’t know how close they were, but anytime I stopped by and found them together, they blushed like teenagers caught kissing behind the barn.”
Emma’s jaw dropped. “You don’t mean—”
Sam held up his hand. “I don’t mean anything. I’m saying that your sister could blush as red as her hair. It was ‘charming,’ I believe you women say.”
“Charming,” Emma repeated, glancing back to look at Ray. The little man giggled to himself as he turned the pages of a comic book. It was difficult to think of her sister as Sam described her. Even more difficult to think of Lully and Ray … kissing.
“Ray’s actually pretty good with computers. He helped Lully install software and explained the program to her—though how he knew how, nobody knows. She was always running over to the nursing home to ask him questions.”
Emma was dumbfounded. “Life is like a box of chocolates,” she murmured. Ray was the key to Lully’s secrets and he wasn’t willing to reveal them.
“There was the usual speculation about the relationship. The gossips said it was more than I think it was.”
“What do you think it was?”
“Two lonely people who found comfort in each other. I think Lully and Ray enjoyed spending time together as well as working together. Nothing wrong in that.”
“Two very different people finding something in common?”
“That’s about the size of it.” He winked. “I have to go. I’ll be in Izzard County this afternoon. If anything comes up, call the office and Ken will get a message to me.”
“Comes up?”
“If you need me.” He brushed passed her and she felt goose bumps fuse.
The bell tinkled when Sam shut the door behind him. Emma watched him stride down the street toward his office. If she needed him. Well, now. He was about fifteen years too late with that offer, wasn’t he?
She picked through pumpkin cutouts and, affixing cellophane tape, climbed back on the stepladder. How was she going to get Ray to reveal Lully’s password? Even if he did, Emma knew nothing about jewelry or Lully’s business, so she couldn’t really do much. She would post a notice that the mail-order business would no longer be viable.
By the time she finished decorating the window the headache that had thre
atened all morning had moved to the base of her skull. It was six o’clock when she glanced at her watch. The afternoon had flown past.
“Time to close up,” Elizabeth called from the back room.
Emma pulled the Closed sign.
Elizabeth clicked off overhead lights, tucked the money from the register drawer into her purse, and plucked her coat off the coatrack. “Sam is a hunk, isn’t he?”
Emma shrugged into her coat, biting back a grin. A hunk. Right, Elizabeth—a real hunk. “I suppose so.”
“You must have thought so when you were younger.”
Elizabeth was smiling when Emma looked up. “So, you know all about that. Deliver me from small-town talk.”
Elizabeth shrugged. “Someone mentioned it. I don’t mean to bring up unpleasant memories.”
“Nothing to it. We were young, full of foolish dreams and his mother and my sister had a better grasp on life.”
“I see. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I’ll start thinking about a Christmas display. The holidays will be here before we know it.”
“Great. Good night.”
Emma was glad when she could graciously leave. She didn’t want to relive those turbulent teenage years. She’d dealt with too many memories already. Yet it took everything in her not to think about her past.
She pulled her collar up to her ears. A brisk wind made it seem even colder than the temperature indicated. If it weren’t so cold and the wrong time of year, she would indulge her urge to plant a rosebush on Lully and Mom’s grave site. Silly thought, but it made her feel good.
The sight of Brisco’s Café invited her to abandon her thought of a tuna-salad sandwich for dinner. Cooking for one was too much trouble. Unfortunately, when she stepped inside, the first thing she saw was Sam sitting at a table with a group of men who were obviously friends. He must have finished his business in Izzard County earlier than he expected. Their laughter rang out in the warm room.
“Take a seat anywhere,” the waitress sang out, drawing Sam’s attention to Emma. He nodded and went on with his conversation.
“Thanks.” Emma chose the only empty table available, which was, regrettably, immediately adjacent to Sam’s group.
Tossing her coat and scarf into the empty booth bench, she occupied herself with the menu, though it would hardly hold her attention. The offerings were simple fare, though good. No fancy salads or appetizers here.