by Annie Jones
Kate laughed her sister off. “It’s rustic.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that.” Jo’s lips twitched. “But can’t you get tetanus from that much rust?”
“What did you expect?”
“Honestly, I don’t know what I expected. But I sure hoped for something…” Her voice trailed off.
Kate didn’t question her further. Instead she turned again to look at the facade of the old place.
The wicker flower box under the upstairs dormer window, which had always made the place look like something from a tropical watercolor painting, now hung higher on one side than the other. More dried twigs poked through the sides of it than shriveled, dead flowers swayed in the breeze on top. The dead petals scraped against the tarnished storm window screen with a sound that reminded Kate of a knife on burned toast.
The yard had bald patches. The bushes were overgrown. Bits of the scrollwork trim had broken off in the eaves. The trim around the porch was splintered. It all needed painting.
Over the sixteen years since she had last stood at this vantage point, the sidewalk had sunken down four inches in spots and jutted up in rocky slabs in others. Two big bins of trash, including a lot of brown and green bottles and crushed soda and beer cans, sat by the curb. A sign hung across the front door warning against stepping foot on the front porch and suggesting they go around back.
“It’s a disaster,” Jo muttered.
“I think it’s wonderful,” Kate murmured.
Try as she might to blame that response on her medication, she more honestly suspected she was seeing the sweet old cottage through the eyes of the five-year-old who had first come here full of anticipation. Not through the filter of the thirty-nine-year-old who had arrived today with a broken foot and a lifetime of broken expectations. Tears deluged her vision, and probably clouded her judgment as well, as she reached for her sister’s hand and gave it a squeeze.
Jo didn’t quite recoil but she did flinch slightly at Kate’s unexpected touch. “Are you okay, Kate?”
She nodded, sniffled and seized the brass head of her cane with both hands. “Probably just a side effect of my pain medication.”
“So, you going to explain to me how this place used to be closer to the beach thirty years ago or will that cause a total meltdown?” Jo had already turned her attention in the direction of the beautiful beach that lay somewhere out there, beyond her ability to see it, bordering the Gulf of Mexico.
“Back then, before the area got so developed, before they built the bypass and widened the highway, come nightfall we could sit in the backyard and hear the waves crashing on the beach. It was the lullaby that sang us to sleep at night and the thrilling charge that woke us in the morning.”
She paused and listened.
No waves. No lullaby.
“It became a part of the way we thought of this place,” she went on. “It set the rhythm of our days and became inextricably intertwined with our memories.”
Kate took a deep breath but only smelled car exhaust, dust in the air and the slight hint of bleach. “So much so that being gone all these years we just sort of merged the ideal and the real. In my mind, when we first came to this place, it was on the ocean, and even though I can see that’s not true, it still rings true for me today.”
Jo crinkled her nose first at Kate then at the house. “Are you a podiatrist or a poet?”
“Can’t I be both?” Kate raised her head. The sound of highway traffic greeted her, the buzz of cars and trucks trundling over the roads that had only been narrow streets years earlier. “At least Dream Away Bay Court is still isolated and undeveloped.”
“You say that like it’s a good thing.” Jo squinted at the bumpy lane they had come down to reach the cul-de-sac with only two houses in it.
“If someone wants privacy. If they want a retreat from the world to be alone with his or her thoughts. If you want to make a spot that’s yours alone. This is just the place.” Kate tried to make it sound appealing even though Jo had to know that Kate, herself, found the very notion appalling.
“Privacy, sure. Except for having windows of the only other house around staring directly into yours.” Jo turned to face the smaller cottage.
Designed in the same style as theirs, it only had one story. Though, as a child, Kate had attributed the old place with plenty of stories of her own making. “Ahh, the mystery house.”
“The what?” Jo, who had popped up the tailgate of her Cruiser and had begun unloading suitcases, swung her head around so fast that even the hem of her blue-and-white sundress flounced in response. “This is the first I’m hearing of that. What mystery? Do not tell me something awful or untoward went on in that house and you never told me about it.”
Kate smiled slyly, enjoying the ability to reclaim the right of the big sister to spin tales and enchant her younger sister, who had long ago become disenchanted with everything from men to these kinds of whimsical memories.
Jo went up on tiptoe, or as on tiptoe as she could in her stylish but ridiculously impractical shoes. She twisted her head over her shoulder to whisper. “It looks deserted.”
“It always looked deserted.” Kate made her way over to Jo, her head ducked down as though creeping along, trying to stay low and out of sight. Even though she stuck out like a sore…foot with her clunking cane and clumsy cast. Still, she grinned and whispered in her best late-night, under-the-covers, scary-story voice, “That’s why I called it the mystery house.”
“Nobody ever lived in it?”
“No one was ever home the weeks we were here.” Kate shook her head trying to recall sharing the quiet cul-de-sac with any other vacationers or locals. “But look at it. So neat and well kept. Someone must live there or rent it out sometime or it would be in as bad a shape as…”
Jo followed Kate’s line of vision, putting her facing their own cottage again. She let out a slow, muted sigh.
“Didn’t you ever go over there and…”
“And what? Snoop?”
“Investigate.” Jo raised her nose in the air, making her gorgeous blond curls shimmy over her squared, straight shoulders. “You never went over and rang the bell or knocked on the door to see if anyone was home?”
“Every year,” Kate confessed. “But no one was ever there.”
“Ever?”
“Nope. I mean, there was furniture from what I could see through the windows, you know, from standing on the porch.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It was as if whoever owned it packed up and left as soon as they heard our car come down the lane.”
“Like those photos in documentaries about ships at sea that are found with the table still set for the evening meal?”
“Well, maybe not quite that dramatic but the place looked like someone could come home at any minute and pick up their lives without much fuss or bother. The kitchen had all the appliances, fridge running and all.”
“You looked in the fridge?”
“I could hear it humming.”
“Standing outside?”
Kate ignored the loaded question. “And the place always had curtains and a window air-conditioning unit and a phone. Sometimes even a dish with hard candy in it on the coffee table and a new TV Guide by the armchair.”
“But that was just what you could see from the porch, right?”
“Well, maybe when I was younger, I did press my nose to those windows.”
“And?”
“And peeked through the old-fashioned keyhole in the back door.”
Jo folded her arms to show she could hold her ground as long as Kate could stall. Longer, probably, given that Kate’s foot had already begun to throb. “And?”
Kate exhaled and leaned on her cane. “And dragged a crate from the garage so I could climb partway through an open window with a torn screen around back.”
“My word, Kate! You were guilty of breaking and entering.”
“I was not. That screen was already broken when I got to it. And I o
nly entered my head and most of my shoulders, just so I could get a good look around, you see.”
“Well how do you do, Kate-the-cat-burglar.” Jo snickered.
“I didn’t burgle a thing! C’mon. I was a good kid, just…curious.”
“Kate the curious,” Jo echoed, somehow making it sound as if she were disappointed she couldn’t use a more unflattering label.
“Didn’t you ever do a little harmless pretend spying of your own when we came down here as kids?” Kate tried to remember the two of them engaging in the covert action but couldn’t.
Jo went back to the task of unloading their things. She heaved a gym bag onto a plastic tote filled with sheets and towels and shook her head. “I was too busy spying on you.”
“What?”
“Okay, not so much spying, since I didn’t try to hide it. But the truth is most of my memories of this place center on you, not either of these cottages. From the time I can really remember coming here, all you cared about was going to the beach and hanging out with other teenagers and college kids. You didn’t care about the house. So I didn’t care about the house.”
“You weren’t even curious?”
“It had always been there.” Jo shrugged. “I don’t try to spy on my neighbors now, if that’s any consolation to you.”
“It is, in an odd way.” Kate smiled, even though every second they stood there she could feel her medication waning. She took a deep breath and tipped her head toward the uneven walkway that led through the yard and around to the back. “Shall we?”
“Give me a sec.” Jo pulled a tape measure out of her purse and extended the yellow metal strip from the chrome casing. She narrowed one eye, lifted her chin, lowered it, wagged her head side to side then let the metal slide back into place with a decisive whisk and clatter. “I remember it being bigger.”
“What are you doing?” Kate scowled at her sister.
“Oh. This?” Jo blinked at the tool in her hand. “I, uh, force of habit, I guess.”
“You guess?” If Kate were to hazard a guess, she’d guess her sister was up to something.
This whole adventure had her on edge. More than the usual edginess she applied to every situation of every minute of every day of her life. It had all come too easily, hadn’t it? This trip. This sudden interest in a place neither of them had seen in sixteen years. Nothing with Jo, nothing between the two of them or anyone throughout the patchwork of relationships that made up their family had ever come that easily.
Complications. It was something the doctor had warned her to avoid. He’d meant with her bones knitting, range of motion in the joints and with the tissue healing, but Kate couldn’t help thinking it applied here as well.
So she let the slightly strange action slide. If people ever decided to start calling her on every oddball thing she ever did, she’d…she’d feel as if her father had returned. Kate blinked and in that instant she remembered this cottage for the thing it had once been—a haven from her father’s scorn, frustration and, sometimes, rage.
With that thought it was as if the whole scene before her transformed. The layers of chipped and peeling paint fell away. The small Victorian-ish style cottage stood in her mind fresh in buttery-yellow clapboard and brilliant white gingerbread scrollwork.
“Is it a fairy house?” she had clasped her hands together and asked her mother the first time they had driven up.
“It’s a fairy-tale house,” her father had muttered.
She had blinked, not understanding.
“Your father just means that there are no such things as fairies. But it certainly does look like a house straight out of a storybook.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth. I meant that it’s a fairy tale to think us buying this house down here will change anything, will make anything better.” He had laced his bitter grumblings with curses and name-calling. She wasn’t sure, but the gist of it all was that she and her mother had come to this house with their hearts filled with hope and anticipation, and he wanted no part of it.
“You don’t have to be here,” her mother had said in reply, her green eyes scrunched down into slits and her always impeccably made-up lips pursed. She looked as if she had just sucked a lemon, Kate remembered thinking.
And her father had looked as if he was about to spit fire.
“Good.” He had slammed the trunk of their car and dropped the suitcases on the drive. “I’ll be back to pick you up in two weeks.”
Two weeks out of every year without her father. Then it had seemed the best of all worlds. Later, after he had gone from their lives forever and taken her younger sister with him, Kate had wondered if things would have been different if it hadn’t been so easy for him to leave that first time.
Her gut twisted knowing she had not run to him, wrapped her arms around his legs and begged him not to go. If only…
“It’s awfully old-fashioned, isn’t it?” Jo tilted her head one way and then the other.
Kate startled, then forced her attention to the place, which again looked like a poorly aging, once-grand lady. “I think it looks a bit like those Victorian conch cottages you find down in the Keys.”
“And that would count for something if it were in the Keys. But here? It just looks…tired.” Jo withdrew the tape measure and let it snap back in place again. Her mouth twitched to one side then the other. “Hardly an ideal spot for a home or a vacation getaway.”
“Well, then it’s the ideal spot for me, because I’m tired of standing out here. Make with the key so we can go inside and I can prop my foot up and start ordering you around.”
“Key? I don’t have the key.”
“What do you mean you don’t have the key? You were the one who packed up Mom’s things after she sold the condo.” And took a cut of the Realtor’s fee for doing it. Kate had never faulted her sister for that, thinking that anyone who had held open houses and contract negotiations with their mom had earned every penny she got. But still, now, with sensation slowly returning to her foot and her patience waning, all she could think about was how Jo tended to look out for herself first and everyone else…never. “You should have gotten the key. Where do you think it is?”
Jo gathered the bags she had just unloaded, slinging them over her shoulders, her arms and filling both hands. “It’s probably in a box in that storage unit I shoved everything in.”
“Storage unit? Shoved? I thought you sifted through every knickknack and…paddy-whack, sorted it all out, bagged and boxed and organized…”
“Did I say I did all that?” She looked off at the cottage, her expression more inquisitive than evasive.
No, of course she hadn’t said it. Kate had just assumed it. It was what she would have done on the occasion of her mother’s latest big adventure, if Kate hadn’t been so preoccupied with the disasters of her own life. In theory.
In reality, she’d probably have done anything to avoid dealing with it. Instead of the key being in a storage unit where their mother could retrieve it, under Scat-Kat Kate’s care, it would probably have been moldering in a landfill.
Thunk.
Thunk.
Thump. Bump.
Thwack.
One by one, Jo divested herself of the luggage.
Kate exhaled and leaned on her cane. The tip sank into the rich damp soil beneath an island of thick, lush grass. “What now, then?”
“We call a locksmith.” Jo already had her sleek cell phone in one hand, pressing numbers with her thumb even as she spoke.
“You have a number of a locksmith in Santa Sofia, Florida, in your cell-phone contact list?”
“No, but I have one in Atlanta and I presume they have connections down here.”
“You are very good at your job,” Kate noted when her sister finished up the series of calls that had someone winging their way to the rescue.
“Thank you.” Jo tipped her head and her gorgeous blond hair—hair she hadn’t had when she’d showed up at the E.R. five days earlier—went tumblin
g over her shoulder.
“How long?” Kate asked.
“How long have I been good at my job?” She seemed a bit more offended than a woman wearing someone else’s hair should have been.
Kate chuckled. “No, how long until the locksmith shows up?”
“Oh. The locksmith.” Jo nodded and looked down. She took a moment to shuffle her feet over some bits of crumbling concrete in the drive. While she didn’t have on the three-hundred-dollar pair of pumps she’d worn two days earlier, the strappy beaded sandals with glitter and curved acrylic heels probably cost more than Kate had spent on her whole wardrobe of sensible, arch-supported doctor-approved—and she knew because she was that doctor—shoes.
Kate nudged the side of Jo’s shoe near the strap lacing over her hot-pink pedicured toenails with her quickly getting grubby purple cast. She managed to wriggle her own ashen toes in a way that actually seemed to taunt her sister for her frivolousness, saying flatly, “Yes, the locksmith. When can we expect someone to show up and let us in?”
“Well, about that…”
“They aren’t going to show up, are they?”
“Oh, yes, absolutely. They are going to show up.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow afternoon.”
“What are we supposed to do until then? Sleep under the stars?” Kate actually could do that. She’d brought a tent and some camping gear, just in case they came down and found the place roofless or without power. But being prepared to do something like that in a pinch and being forced to do it because your sister forgot to bring the key were two entirely different things.
“Some lack of imagination from someone already versed in the art of breaking and enter—”
“I told you it was already—”
“Broken. Yeah, I know. Well, looking at this place, it wouldn’t surprise me if it were already a little bit ‘broken,’ too.”
“What does that mean?”
“How hard could it be to get in?” Jo raised her hands out at her sides. “The locksmith said to try the back door or any windows in the back first, anyway. They’re usually the ones most likely to have been left unlocked. If not…”