2 Weeks 'Til Eve (2 'Til Series Book 3)

by Heather Muzik

  Tara opened the front door. “You realize this isn’t going to work if you continue to have a problem with boundaries. Just because I’m right down the road doesn’t mean I want you dropping in all the time—”

  “What are we in the friggin’ Twilight Zone? You’re lecturing me on boundaries? I’m the daughter of Elizabeth Hemmings. She knows an inappropriate drop-in when she sees it; you can ask her yourself.” Catherine stepped aside so Tara could see her mother coming up the front walk.

  Her friend’s eyes widened. “I’m kind of busy right now, Cat,” she said through gritted teeth.

  Catherine merely shrugged, a gesture that said she had no control over the situation.

  “But I’m not wearing any panties,” Tara hissed, shifting uncomfortably.

  Startled, Catherine looked down at her friend’s lower half, hoping that she had something on. Yes, a skirt that looked like it had spent the night balled up on the floor. Askew. Her shirt was on backwards too, the V running down her back that she noted as Tara turned to motion to someone inside. And as she swung to face front again, so did the twins, making it painfully obvious that she was also braless.

  Catherine narrowed her eyes at all the blaring sex signs before her, then spun to block her mother’s way. “This isn’t the best time for a—”

  “Nonsense, Catherine, nobody turns away the welcome wagon,” Elizabeth Hemmings assured her, stepping up onto the porch anyway.

  She groaned, turning back to face Tara who was smoothing at her hair self-consciously, looking nervous enough to bolt. Shameful even. Which was something Tara never was. Elizabeth Hemmings was a force to be reckoned with.

  Catherine mouthed sorry from over her mother’s shoulder.

  Tara glanced once more behind her and stepped outside, closing the door. “Mrs. Hemmings, what a surprise!” she announced.

  “It’s Elizabeth, Tara, so lovely to see you. Though you’ll catch your death in so little clothing.”

  Catherine winced. Direct hit. Hasty appearance noted.

  “So this is the house I’ve been hearing about,” Elizabeth Hemmings continued, holding onto her pie carrier like she was protecting it with her life—the same one she’d had for years and had somehow packed in her suitcase and brought onboard the flight here, without an actual pie in it, presumably just in case she decided to bake and take a pie somewhere while she was visiting. And of course she’d found a way to make that dream a reality.

  Catherine was embarrassed. For herself. For Tara. This was awkward as hell, knowing that something that would give her mother a heart attack had been going on inside that door. Plus, she was let down. She wanted to think that Tara was better than just picking up some random guy off the street after all her talk about feeling vulnerable and confused and caring too much for Jason. All those feelings out the window in the interest of a quick screw?

  “If the inside is half as nice as the outside, then you have quite a place here,” Elizabeth added to move things along.

  “Oh… would you… like to come in?” A stilted question as Tara shivered in place, legs crossed to protect her delicate parts.

  “Sure, yes, that would be nice,” Elizabeth said, cradling her pie with one hand as she opened the door herself and stepped up over the threshold into the foyer.

  “I didn’t realize you’d have company,” Catherine whispered to Tara. “I didn’t see an extra car out front or I would never have stopped.”

  “I brought him home with me last night,” she whispered back.

  “You didn’t waste any time.”

  “No. I didn’t. If I’m one thing, I’m quick to get on the horse,” Tara admitted, trailing them inside.

  The warmth hit with force, a wall of homey goodness that was accentuated by the scents of pine and potpourri, which was served up in a bowl on an antique dresser stationed in the foyer.

  Elizabeth Hemmings relinquished the pie carrier to Tara now that they were safely inside, and immediately started unbuttoning her coat to stay awhile. Presumptuous in such a nonintrusive way that there seemed no response other than for Tara to hand the pie off again to Catherine while she took the coat and hung it on a rack stationed next to the door. Then she took the pie back, allowing Catherine to remove and hang her own damn coat.

  “This is so nice. Homemade?” Tara asked sweetly.

  “Of course.”

  “Well, why don’t I serve us some right now then. Would you like some tea or coffee perhaps?” she offered, settling into hostess mode with an ease that was unnerving to Catherine. A part of her wanted to scream imposter! if only for the fact that she herself had never looked so at ease doing the same, and because Tara was pulling it off even while knowing full well some guy she’d just been screwing was somewhere else in the house at this very moment with his pants halfway down and his penis at full mast. You are judged by the company you keep, Elizabeth Hemmings had said ruthlessly through the years, and Tara was keeping some company alright.

  “Cat!” Tara barked.

  “What?” she yelped back, darting from Tara to her mother, who was giving her a look reminding her to be polite as she’d been raised.

  “Do you want some decaf?”

  “No, that’s okay.” Catherine was too busy looking around for sex evidence her mother might see. Worried. As she passed by the living room, her mouth fell agape at the sight inside. It was a Norman Rockwell scene. She’d been here just days ago and since then Christmas had hit with force. A tree aglow in front of the large picture window, decorated in folksy style with delicate paper crafts and felted ornaments wrapped in a spiraling red and cream gingham ribbon of garland. A fire was crackling at the hearth. Stockings were hung by the chimney with care—two in fact. Pine boughs snaked along surfaces while three wise men in glittering antique gold journeyed on camels along the mantle toward Bethlehem. And on either side of the fireplace, a watchful battalion of nutcrackers in their festive finest lined the tops of the bookcases.

  “Aren’t they great?” Tara gushed, when she noticed Catherine lagging. “That’s not even the whole lot. I have a few in every room. I like the quasi-clown vibe of them.”

  “Where did they all come from?” she asked in awe, like maybe Tara had conjured up an evil nutcracker spirit that had sent its minions here.

  “I’ve been collecting them since I was a kid. Every year Santa brought me one. Still does,” she winked, like it was dirty.

  She probably does have a dirty nutcracker somewhere. Or a vibrator she calls the nutcracker, Catherine thought snarkily. She could have definitely believed that Tara had a naughty nutcracker collection—she loved wood jokes—but to have a tried-and-true traditional one? It was so far off the mark she felt dizzy.

  “How lovely,” Elizabeth Hemmings said, admiring the view into the living room that was so captivating her daughter. “You’ve done a fabulous job inside and out.”

  “I just wish they judged the inside. I have a Christmas tree in every room, you know. Each one with a different theme. I have the Patriot tree,” Tara said.

  “You mean patriotic?” Catherine corrected.

  “No, it’s The Patriot. For the movie. You know… Mel Gibson and hot, hot Heath Ledger, may he rest in peace.”

  Catherine smirked.

  “It’s got muskets and battle-torn flags and red coats and minutemen. And there’s a cheese tree in the dining room—you want to see it? Covered with real cheese. Those little wax-coated wheels are perfectly sized for ornaments.”

  “No thank you.” Catherine shook her head. “I don’t think I can take that much moldy cheese.”

  “It’s all packaged cheese. Shelf stable. Hickory Farms and all that. The tree that keeps giving. Visitors can take an ornament to go. That tree alone would solidify a win with the town council. Seven feet of cheese. Who wouldn’t love that? Come to think of it, I could put it outside. Expand the cheese offerings that way since it stays at least refrigerator-cold out there. And cheese can be frozen too.”

  “And you’l
l have every wild animal around stealing a meal,” Catherine pointed out.

  “I didn’t say there wouldn’t be challenges,” Tara admitted. “But that’s why we make a good team. I’m a dreamer and you’re a killer of those dreams.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “I’m kidding, Cat. Chill. I’m just saying that you keep me in check.”

  Obviously not well enough.

  In the kitchen, Tara went about getting dishes and silverware, pulling out a silver pie server that looked like an heirloom for special occasions. Catherine certainly didn’t have anything like it. And prior to this moment she would have bet her life that Tara Delrio would never own such a thing in her life.

  “You’re catching flies, Catherine Marie,” her mother cautioned.

  Tara served three generous pieces of pie and headed to the stove to get the teakettle that was propped on the back burner—another thing Catherine did not have. A teakettle. For the tea that proper people offered to guests, properly. She felt the itch of something… perhaps a tiny rivalry that her friend who’d always been haphazard was suddenly more put together than she was. And in front of her own mother!

  “You’ve really made this place home already,” Elizabeth said. Full of praise for an act of spontaneous insanity, Catherine noted.

  “It’s a start. It needs some help. Some love. But isn’t that what we all need?”

  Some of us need a valium and a straightjacket.

  “It is just so nice that it came with a lot of the old furnishings so I was able to get moved in and function around here without having to rush out and buy a bunch of things on the spur of the moment. I can take my time.”

  Because rushing into things is crazy, right, Tara?

  “It isn’t perfect by any means, but it will do for now. I definitely have plans.” Tara rubbed her hands together with something like glee. No, it was glee. “Remodeling projects. Decorating. A blog. Maybe even a book someday. #DelrioDIY.”

  Catherine almost rolled her eyes right out of her head. “So is this place really haunted?” she blurted, to change the subject. Not that she believed such things, but she had been known to have a healthy fear and a strong case of the creeps.

  “Nah,” Tara waved it off. “At most I would call it benevolently anointed.”

  “What?”

  “It has an essence, for sure.”

  “An essence?” Catherine looked to her mother, sure to see she was nonplused by Tara’s assertion, but instead she was nodding her head lightly. This was the goddamned Twilight Zone. If any of this had been voiced by her own daughter—Any. Of. It.—Elizabeth Hemmings would demand Catherine Marie snap out of it. But here she was taking it in without a smidgen of distaste or a grimace of disbelief.

  Tara continued, “I don’t know about haunted places... I mean, I like to think they exist because scary shit like that’s just cool as hell.” There’s the Tara I know, Catherine thought, waiting for the kick under the table from her mother, telling her they were both getting out of the nuthouse while the getting was good. But there was nothing. Elizabeth Hemmings sat there taking her tea and eating her pie like this was any midday visit to Normalville.

  “But this place… it’s just a lovely, settled, peaceful home. I can feel it,” Tara assured them.

  “That is so important,” Elizabeth Hemmings said.

  What the—

  “Isn’t it, though?” Tara agreed.

  “It certainly is. You have to be at rest in a house. I know that when William and I were looking for our home when we first married, we saw so many places. I would walk into each house and stand in the middle of each room and just feel it. Some of those places were perfectly nice, but something just didn’t set right with me when I was in them. I don’t even know what it was. But when we found the right one, our home, I never questioned it.”

  Tara was nodding, lapping up the comradery, while Catherine was wondering what kind of peace anyone could feel in this place. It felt like hostile territory to her. The odd man out.

  “I just know that the people who died here were—”

  “People died here?” Catherine screeched. “People? As in not just one but more than one? No wonder no one ever wanted to buy this place. No wonder it sat on the market. No wonder all the furnishings were left behind. It’s all tainted. What kind of investment is that?”

  “An investment in the future,” Tara said simply. “It’s a shame that this place was being unfairly judged and left to rot.” So earnest and calm and—

  Infuriating! If there was one thing Catherine had always been able to count on, it was that Tara was more off-the-wall and overboard than she was. But even though Tara was being as reckless and impulsive as ever, she was doing it in a maddeningly composed way—a Lindsay Lohan in Martha Stewart’s clothing.

  “I just think that death shouldn’t taint life. So, people died here. So what?”

  “Was it a murder-suicide?” Catherine dug snippily.

  “No. Just a husband and wife. Years apart from each other. He had a heart attack in the bathtub and she died in her sleep… upstairs in bed.”

  “How can you bathe here or sleep here knowing—”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “It just does,” Catherine reasoned.

  “To you, maybe,” Tara said breezily. “You can’t just board up or tear down every building where someone died. What’s next? Tear up the roads where accidents happened? Fill in the lakes where people drow—” She clamped her hand over her mouth, stricken, falling off her high horse with a guttural groan, looking to Elizabeth Hemmings with overwhelming embarrassment and sympathy before letting her eyes dart to Catherine, pleading with them both for understanding.

  Instead of being angry, though, Catherine’s heart hurt for her friend. Yes, Tara had been trying to put her in her place, but she never would have gone there if she was thinking clearly.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Tara, it’s—”

  But they were both stopped cold as Elizabeth reached across the table and put her hand on Tara’s hand and squeezed. Catherine saw her mother’s face had drained completely of color; she’d lost her veil of unruffled perfection that she wore with grace in all situations. This pale woman was no longer Elizabeth Hemmings, the quintessential perfectionist, she was simply a mother who had lost a daughter. Shields down. Twenty-plus years drained away. It was like Catherine was back at the kitchen table of her youth, sitting with her mother and father after they heard the news that Josey’s body had been found in the pond just beyond their neighborhood—her mother looking like her whole body was going to crumble and cease to work anymore.

  “God, Mom, are you okay?” she whispered.

  In answer, her other hand reached out to clasp her daughter’s, linking the three of them across the tabletop. “She’s right,” Elizabeth said tightly, her eyes locking on Catherine’s, holding her gaze with a force that she only wished she herself could muster—so much certainty and strength. “That’s why we stayed there, you know.”

  “What?” Catherine eked out.

  “In that house. Near that pond…. That’s why we stayed there, when it would have been easier—so much easier—to leave.” Tears surfaced in her mother’s eyes.

  She’d been to hell and lived to come back from it, but it had changed her. Sometimes Catherine allowed herself to remember her mother before Josey died. Because she was different then. Quicker to laugh. Quicker to scream. More expressive in all ways. In an effort to survive her worst nightmare, Elizabeth Hemmings had learned to contain her grief. Not pent-up but controlled. That was her mother.

  “We didn’t want the house where we’d welcomed three wonderful, happy, healthy children to become what houses like that—the ones with stories or tragedies—become. We wanted life to define it. So we stayed. Even though—”

  “I’m so sorry, Elizabeth,” Tara said breathlessly, “I really didn’t mean anything by it. I wasn’t trying to—”

  But she shook he
r head no, denying the apology as if it was completely pointless to try to make her take it. “You girls just need to promise me that you will stop this.”

  “Stop what?” Catherine asked.

  “Stop all of the—whatever is going on between you. This on-again-off-again thing.”

  “It’s nothing, Mom.”

  “Nothing,” Tara agreed.

  “It isn’t nothing,” Elizabeth countered, sighing. “You know what I see when I look at you two?” Both stayed silent, waiting, afraid to contradict her or even to prod her along. “You complement each other in your differences. I know you get into some crazy messes and I know that you don’t always get along, but as I see it, you act more like sisters…” Her voice weakened some and she turned to Catherine specifically. “Like Josephine and you… the two of you would have been like this with each other. She was so much younger than you, and more impulsive, and you wouldn’t have been able to help but mother her, while she would push your every button with her free spirit. I know you had your moments, but she looked up to you so much,” her mother continued. “She just didn’t want to be left behind.”

  Thursday, December 14th

  -47-

  “Thick as thieves again, eh?” Fynn asked, catching her as she tried to sneak out the door before Tara could ring the bell.

  “What have you heard?” Tara demanded.

  He stopped Catherine on the threshold. “So you are up to something.”

  “Us?” she played dumb.

  “Yes, you. As in you two. As in Thelma and Louise. As in trouble.”

  “So long as I get to be Louise,” Tara said. “Thelma is an old lady’s name.”

  “Louise isn’t much better,” Catherine grunted.

  “Can I put in my two cents for a second and say that nobody is holding anyone up today, or driving off any cliffs.” A firm warning.

  “Good luck finding a cliff to drive off around here.”

  Fynn shook his head, not caring for Tara’s choice to avoid the point. He focused on his wife. “So, let me ask again, what are you ladies up to?”