by Annie Jones
“Whose idea was it to put a bathroom right off the kitchen, do you suppose?” Jo stared into the large room with its sea-foam-green tile floors and walls and faded flamingo-pink fittings.
“Maybe it was an afterthought. Would they have included indoor plumbing when this thing was built in the forties?”
“Most houses did, but…these colors are definitely from the fifties.”
“Probably the owner’s idea of an ultramodern convenience.”
“Or just the easiest place for an addition, with the kitchen already plumbed.” Jo’s mind was already trying to come up with ways to sell the odd placement.
She didn’t have to think long. She had loved this huge, gaudy room as a kid, taking baths, being able to run in for a bathroom break and be out the back door again before Kate, who’d customarily played “it” in a game of hide-and-seek and could finish counting to one hundred.
Her mother had loved it as well, as it kept them from tracking sand all over the house.
But as a Realtor, it troubled Jo. It gave a first impression of being out of place, inconvenient and not very private. Coupled with the fact that the upstairs only had a half bath, and one that had been fit quite obviously into an old hall closet, she’d have her work cut out for her.
Ask anyone what people should consider when buying a house and you would most likely hear the old adage “location, location, location.” They were instructed at Powers Realty to get sellers to clear away clutter and wash all the windows because “people are really buying light and space.” But in her experience, Jo knew that most buyers could overlook a lot of things, but bathrooms and kitchens clinched the deal.
“I’m not going to close the door.”
“Kate!”
“So I can leave a kitchen chair in the open doorway,” she went on without missing a beat. “That way when you’re done you can use the chair like a walker to get yourself over to the table. I set whatever is left of our travel snacks there and you can have at ’em.”
“You sound like you’re setting me up for a long wait. You’re only going out to the car, not setting out to get help through the jungles of the Amazon.”
“Oh, please. You’re hungry and hurting. Fifteen minutes will seem like forever to you.” Kate escorted Jo into the room and let her hold onto the sink for support.
“Fifteen minutes?”
“Or longer. It’s going to take me a while to get to the car, find the first-aid kit and work my way around the house again.”
“Not to mention the time you’ll need to study the house across the street.”
Kate threw back her shoulders and smoothed her hand down her thick, gorgeous hair. “That reminds me, did I see a pair of binoculars in your trunk?”
Jo puffed up a bit at not just nailing Kate on her covert intentions but on the fact that for once her sister hadn’t tried to deny it, but had just gone with it. Could that mean they were getting a little more relaxed around each other? “Um, yeah. I have binoculars for work.”
“To check out the…um, what?”
“Competition mostly. I use them to keep count of how many people come and go from open houses in a neighborhood where I have a property or to get info from yard signs.”
“Maybe I should send you to do the investigation into the mystery house.”
“Only if you want to put this one on the market.” It was out before Jo had thought through the comment, but once it had slipped through her lips she determined to use it to her advantage. She narrowed her eyes on Kate’s face, watching for even the slightest positive reaction to the idea.
“Sell the cottage?” Kate raised her head and made a sweeping survey of the place. “Hmm.”
And just that fast, she turned away, leaving Jo with no more insight into her sister’s thoughts than…well, than Jo ever had into her sister’s thoughts.
Kate made her way out the door.
Jo took care of business in the bathroom. Real business. Even as she saw to her own hygiene, she made mental measurements, eyeballing every inch for cracks, peeling paint, chipped tiles. She snapped on the faucets and the shower head, checking both the pressure and the water quality. All good.
“Ugh, but the colors,” she muttered under her breath as she made one last scan. “If I were going to do this right, I’d have to gut this place just to make it borderline presentable.”
Just then she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. “Talk about borderline presentable!”
She tugged and pushed and fluffed and smooshed her hair, trying to even it out. She did not succeed.
“Pick me, pick me, pick me,” she muttered her would-be motto. “Yeah right.”
Rumpled, slept-in clothes.
Positively gruesome-looking ankle.
Hair like a decades-old doll’s, ratty and mashed into a mess on one side.
Pick her? For what?
Nobody would want her. Not like this. No one had ever wanted her, really. All the old fears ricocheted around her thoughts. Heading here, being here where she felt she might find some answers and where she had known mostly happiness, they had not plagued her for a whole day. Now, standing here in a bathroom that might well keep her from making that quick sale she needed, and looking, well, the way she looked?
“Don’t do this,” she told herself.
At least she could take some solace in the fact that she didn’t know a soul in town and wasn’t going to run into anybody that she needed to impress.
“Hello?” A deep voice rang through the house from the back door.
Masculine. Decidedly so. And…strangely familiar.
Jo froze, her hands gripping the back of the chair until all the color drained from her fingers. “Who…Who is that?”
“You don’t know me, ma’am. My name is Travis Brandt. I’m the—”
“Travis Brandt? The Travis Brandt?”
“The only Travis Brandt standing at your back door, yes.” He still sounded every ounce as dreamy as he had seemed on TV.
“Of course I know who you are!” Travis Brandt. A bona fide blast from the past. A former college football hero turned pro, his name had been known throughout the South. With his great looks, powerful voice and a way of wrapping words in a Southern accent so rich it made your teeth ache, he’d gone into sportscasting, rising quickly through the larger markets on his way to taking a spot at whatever major network he chose.
Only he didn’t chose. He’d just…dropped out of sight one day. People had speculated on the reasons for a time but then had forgotten about the man.
He’d had it all and now…
“Your sister said to call out first and make sure that you were decent.”
She took a quick glance in the mirror again. Decent? That might be a bit too optimistic.
Jo had to do something and quick. She needed to make a good impression on this man, or at least not scare him off.
After all, Travis Brandt was just the kind of man she could sell a house to—fast. Or barring that, the kind of man who might know people who would want to invest in a business deal, giving her the funds to fix up the place for a slice of the profit when she flipped the cottage for top dollar.
Aren’t you in deep enough trouble trying to do that in Atlanta? She clenched her jaw and pushed her anxiety over her situation aside. People fell in love with a house in the first thirty seconds. They did not give their fellow human beings that long.
Not that she wanted Travis Brandt to fall in love with her! How could he?
Her standing here looking as bedraggled as the house she wanted to unload?
“Um, ma’am? Did you hear me? Are you decent?”
Jo snapped to her senses. Or maybe something in her snapped and she took leave of them. Either way, she had to act. Grabbing a towel, she threw it over her head as if she had just come from the shower. It would mean she wouldn’t get to feast her eyes on the man, but then he wouldn’t have to jab his eyes out after seeing her, so that seemed a fair exchange.
S
he grabbed the back of the chair and began scooting it out into the kitchen as she announced in absolute truth, “I don’t know about decent, but I can promise you, I’m covered up.”
Chapter Six
“Stop whining.” Kate settled down on the couch and adjusted the worn old quilt over her aching lower body. It wasn’t quite noon and she was exhausted. She could blame it on not sleeping well last night. But she suspected it had more to do with the exertion of going out to the car to retrieve the first-aid kit.
Then going even farther, to the curb.
Then just a wee bit farther, out into the street. Using the binoculars, trying to see if there were any furnishings or landscaping or clues of any kind that might give away the secrets of the mystery house.
That it had begun to rain in the past hour did not do much to perk her up. She’d had plenty of patients who had claimed that changes in the weather played havoc with damaged joints, but Kate had always dismissed the notion as all in their heads.
“No, it’s all in their toes,” her mother had scolded. “You are always in too big a hurry to really listen, Scat-Kat-Katie.”
Now how had that dreaded nickname worked its way even into her daydreams? Kate’s shoulders tensed for a moment before it occurred to her that the reminder of her own nervous habits probably came from the subject at hand. “It’s your own fault that Travis Brandt couldn’t wait to rocket out of here, Jo.”
“Rock it?” Jo, moving with much more confidence, but still gingerly and plainly favoring her freshly wrapped ankle, joined Kate in the front room. Cautiously, she lowered herself onto the other couch then settled some things bundled in a towel beside her. She nestled down into the cushions as if the nubby fabric were as prickly as a cactus.
A pause.
Clunk. Followed by a more delicate clunk, but a clunk just the same as she blatantly used Mama’s antique-ish colonial-style coffee table as a footstool.
“Rocket as in ph-weeew.” Kate slid her palms together in a quick upward motion that she hoped illustrated her admittedly weak imitation of a missile blasting off. In case that hadn’t made her point, she offered a more direct description. “The way Mom would take off and explode if she saw you propping your feet up on her coffee table.”
Jo flinched, slightly. A quick reflexive jerking action as if she couldn’t get her feet down fast enough. But she didn’t put them down. She paused instead, then planted them right back where they were.
Kate opened her mouth in shock at the sheer defiance of it.
Jo tipped up her nose. “Well, Mom isn’t here, is she?”
“Neither is that cute preacher man.” Kate made the sliding palm gesture again but decided to forgo the sound effects.
Jo’s expression went positively glum.
Kate felt a twinge of guilt over her childish attempt to be the boss of her completely grown-up sister. A woman capable of doing whatever she wanted in a house that none of them had bothered to maintain, much less protect the furnishings in for way too many years.
Jo gazed at her reflection in the hand mirror she had drawn from the pale blue towel beside her. Using some solvent solution, she began to work to free a section of the long blond curls from where they had been attached to her scalp. “He did act like he had a fire lit under him.”
“What did you expect? You carried on a whole conversation with him with that towel over your head.”
“I couldn’t let him see me with my hair, um, you know, not…uh, done.” A long strand fell away like a wilted streamer an hour after the parade had passed. Half of her head looked like a yellow bath mat run through the dryer on high one time too many. The other half, a cascade of silky blond curls—that had also been run through the dryer on high, with poor Jo’s head still attached to it. “Bad first impressions are very hard to overcome.”
“And you somehow think that you made a good first impression?” Kate teased gently.
Jo dropped her hand into the swirls of blondness pooled in her lap. “Well, he is a minister. They’re big on second chances, right?”
“And third chances and however many it takes, I guess.” Kate rested one shoulder against the couch and watched her sister a moment.
“Some of us have a long learning curve,” Jo whispered.
“When it comes to cute guys?” Kate was genuinely puzzled by her sister’s comment.
Jo blinked a few times, as if processing the thought. She shifted her bandaged ankle, then shifted her eyes the way she used to do as a child about to fling out her arm and shout at Kate “Tag, you’re it.” “When it comes to cute guys some people, and I won’t name names but I could say this someone is in this very room, wearing a purple cast and has an unnamed name that rhymes with Flatherine Flomwell…”
“Patherine Promwell? Zatherine Zomwell?” Kate suggested, tapping her cheek to show how very hard she had to think to unravel the riddle.
“…has a very long learning curve,” Jo went on. “Sixteen years and holding, so far.”
“I thought we were talking about your quest for second chances.”
“We were talking about the kind of impression I wanted to make on Travis Brandt.” Jo went back to work on her hair.
“We were, weren’t we? Which means the real question is why does it matter to you?”
“It?”
“The kind of impression you make,” Kate clarified. “You only just met the man.”
“But his reputation preceded him.”
Kate scrunched her mouth to one side. Even she had heard of the man, so she could not argue that point. “Still, you’re not likely to see him again, unless we stay down here a while, and you’re the one who has already been making sounds about not wanting to keep this place. So, why do you care what kind of impression you make on some local beach preacher?”
“I just thought…” She looked up and away. This positioned her face so that the last bits of gray morning light illuminated her expression. Her lips pursed. Her eyes gave the appearance of poignant wisdom.
“You just thought, what, Jo?”
After a few serene seconds, she lowered her gaze right into Kate’s. “That’s for me to know and you to find out!”
“Well!”
Jo stuck out her tongue at Kate.
Kate thought of doing likewise. Something about this house brought out the worst in them and did not help their already strained relationship. At least she could be grateful that Mom wasn’t here to egg things on. She made a note to add that gratitude to her prayers, then pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “Fine. Clearly, you are up to something, baby sister. Something that you are not ready to discuss openly with me.”
“Ya think?” She sounded like a churlish teenager, which gave Kate some hope as it showed some maturity over the five-year-old her sister had acted like two minutes earlier.
Kate moved on to make her point before Jo regressed or shot straight on to acting like their mother. “I just don’t see why this scheme of yours kept you from asking the man to run out and bring us back some groceries.”
“Oh, really, how would that have looked? This was a man who had everything most people dream of. Wanted by every network, and who knows how many women?”
“I certainly don’t want to know,” Kate huffed.
“Yeah, me, either,” Jo said softly. “Can you imagine it? Going from that to drumming up business for his church by going door to door.”
“He was extending an invitation. It was nice. And the perfect opportunity for you to ask him to help us.”
“Right. I can’t talk to you directly or look you in the eye, pal, but I have no problem ordering you around like a cut-rate cabana boy?”
Kate cocked her head. “Why cut rate?”
Jo let out a long, heavy sigh. “Because if he were a high-priced cabana boy, I wouldn’t need him to run errands, we’d be someplace where I could just use room service.”
Kate took a second to soak that in before she gave her sister a short burst
of soft applause. “You said that with such immediacy and conviction that I almost forgot…that it didn’t make a lick of sense!”
“I know!” Jo massaged her scalp and groaned. “We’ve been cooped up in this house too long.”
“Without a decent meal.” Kate’s stomach rumbled. All this talk of food only made the hunger worse.
“Don’t start that again. I couldn’t ask the man for that kind of dorky favor. The timing was all wrong.”
“Because you plan to ask him for a bigger dorky favor later?”
Jo did not meet her eyes or even acknowledge Kate’s wild guess. She just pulled free another piece of hair then shook it out as she said simply, “I just met him. It didn’t seem right to impose. It’s not like getting us a meal is part of his job.”
“Really?” Kate adjusted her leg but that did not ease the quiet throbbing in her bones. She would never make it through this day if she had to both bicker with her sister and battle her body.
Jo worked free the last of her store-bought hair, gathered it up in the towel she had worn while talking to the preacher and set it aside. “Anyway, I noticed you didn’t ask the man to run our errands for us, either.”
“I was busy tending to your injury.”
“And spying on the neighbors.”
“And spying on the neighbors,” Kate conceded. “Except there weren’t any neighbors to spy on. I wonder if the place is going to sit empty the whole time we’re here?”
“Maybe we should call the caretaker lady again.”
“You think she’d know about the house across the street?”
“No, but if we explain our predicament, she might take pity on us and bring us by something to eat.”
It was not an easy task to place the call. In the confusion of last night, neither of them had recharged their cell phones. That meant they had to find their chargers and plug them in and then get the caretaker’s number and then when she answered…
“What?” Kate pressed the phone tight against her ear. “Ms. Weatherby? I…can’t hear you.”
“Swamped…” the woman shouted “…ing out…” Was all Kate heard next, then “Billy J’s. Rain brings…in…sardines.”