by Anne Tenino
“Sure. Give me two of those pecan twists for here and toss another four in a bag to go.”
Buck raised his eyebrows. “Expecting company for breakfast?”
“Me? Nah. But it never hurts to show up at work with extra, you know what I mean? Besides, I wouldn’t want you to be forced to take them all home to Ari. We need him to keep that svelte figure, or else the costume shop’ll have to rebuild all his breakaway shirts.”
“I think his metabolism runs on carbs,” Buck said over the hiss of the milk steamer. “You should see how many doughnuts he can put away at one sitting.”
“Some guys just win the genetic lottery, I guess. Now me—I’ll pay for these with an extra half hour out running with Tarkus.”
He chuckled. “You’ll be lucky to get away with half an hour. Your dog has more stamina than any three guys.”
“Tell me about it. I don’t need a personal trainer when I’ve got him.”
Buck arranged the order on a tray. “That’ll be twenty-three fifty. By the way, I see you’re here with Seth Larson.” His voice rose slightly at the end of the sentence, making it almost a question.
“Yeah.” Nate handed over his debit card. “Just met him tonight. I’ll bet you know him though, since you’re both townies.”
He didn’t meet Nate’s eyes as he ran the card through the reader. “He’s a few years older, so we never ran in the same crowd.”
Nate keyed in his pin number. “I guess it’s stupid to assume everyone in Bluewater Bay knows everyone else, eh?”
“Oh I know him all right.” He handed back the card and muttered something under his breath that sounded like “Everyone does.”
What? Nate was about to ask for clarification, but Buck had already turned to the next customer. He shrugged and picked up the tray, wending his way through the maze of tables to where Seth was waiting.
Nate set down the tray. After he tossed his jacket over the back of the chair, he unloaded the drinks and plunked the plate with the pastries in the middle of the table. “You like nuts?”
There was that smile again. “You have no idea.”
“Me too.” He settled into the chair across from Seth. “These are my favorites. Have one.” Nate picked up the pastry and took a bite.
Seth poked at the other one with a finger. “Pecans? Not exactly the nuts I had in mind,” he muttered.
“So tell me more about the Bluewater Bay Larsons. Are you all related?”
“Unfortunately.” Seth took a vicious bite of his pecan twist. “Although not all of them are a waste of space. My aunts are okay. So’s my cousin Laura: she’s a large animal vet. She’s pretty cool. And my grandma, of course.”
“Old Mrs. Larson?”
Seth looked down his nose. “‘Old’ is not a word we use, thank you. We prefer ‘seasoned to perfection.’”
Nate chuckled and finished his pastry, licking a smear of caramelized sugar off his finger. “I’ll remember that. You must be familiar with that house, then? The one Fennimore built?”
“Ridiculous, isn’t it? Clearly the dude liked to show off his bling. It’s got a widow’s walk, for God’s sakes—a fucking tower with a balcony overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca.”
“But that’s what I mean. It’s the history.” Nate leaned forward, and his knee accidentally bumped Seth’s. “You can just feel it. The house encapsulates your family, its—its synergy with the town. There must be some incredible artifacts in there.”
“Well I can tell you about some of those artifacts, although I wouldn’t call them incredible. I mean, some of them are impressive, but . . .” He took a sip of his latte, wrinkled his nose, and set it back on the table. “I spent most of this afternoon becoming way too familiar with mummified rodent corpses in the dustier parts of the attic because my grandma is convinced it’s infested with squirrels. Plus I live over the garage.”
“No kidding? Do you think I could take a tour sometime?”
“I could arrange that.” Seth leaned forward, and Nate suddenly felt fingers running along his thigh. “We can start with my bed.”
Nate jerked his leg away, heart pounding, mortification sending heat crawling up his throat. “I’m not into that.” Shit, not again. He’d been so sure Seth understood he wanted to talk, not screw.
Seth swallowed audibly. “So you aren’t into guys?”
“I mean I don’t do sex.”
His jaw sagged. “You mean at all?”
“Yeah. For the most part.”
“‘For the most part.’ What does that even mean?”
“Just—” Nate sighed. “Sorry. Let’s call it a day, okay?” He retrieved his jacket. “Keep the pastries.”
He hurried across the room, catching a glimpse of Buck’s wry smile as he pushed through the doors. The damp, chilly air outside was a shock against his flushed face. Why don’t I ever learn? Next time, I’ll stay home where I belong.
Seth had never been shot down quite as painfully as tonight. His pride still smarted, even an hour later, walking back to his place. The fog had turned more serious and become rain, which was an excellent reflection of his mood. Piss-poor.
After leaving Stomping Grounds, he’d returned to Ma Cougar’s, hoping to find someone to hang out with so he could forget about Nate, pretend it never happened. Not Lucas, because the dude would want to know what’d gone down, but another person. Preferably in front of some of the “theater crowd” so they didn’t get the wrong idea—like that he and Nate had left to hook up. He’d prefer it if those people thought he’d left to actually talk genealogy.
In the end, he did find someone, a guy named Evan he could even have gone home with (they’d done it before), but Seth found his sexual appetite had been killed for the night.
Speaking of which, who didn’t do sex? As in, ever? Or at least “for the most part”?
Lots of people. Nuns and priests for one, like his great-aunt, Sister Regina.
Nate wasn’t a fucking priest though. He just has the sex life of one.
That explained so much of tonight, didn’t it? Like all the confusing signals he’d gotten off Nate after most of his double entendres. Not sure Nate had been getting the message, Seth had made some of his innuendos way over-the-top obvious. He’d hit on straight guys before, sometimes even knowingly, and he was well versed in how they reacted to obvious lines. Straight guys got uncomfortable, even angry, but they didn’t pretend that whatever Seth had said was exactly what Seth had meant. Who asked if you liked nuts and actually meant nuts?
Nate, apparently.
Turning into the driveway of the Sentinel House, Seth hunched his shoulders, digging his fists deeper into his pockets. He searched the ground for a rock to kick—even a pebble would do—but he kept Grandma’s driveway too orderly. Where the hell was a scapegoat when you needed one? He could use one of those mummified mice he’d found in Grandma’s attic to drop-kick right about now.
Just then, like an answer to his prayer, another rodent crossed his path. This one was very much alive, the bastard, and larger than anything he’d run across in the house. It couldn’t be a rat—he was pretty sure no rats had ears like this one—and the profile was too short and rounded to be a squirrel’s. Whatever it was, it looked as if it was carrying something in its jaws as it scurried past and ducked into a hole in the base of the outside wall, right under the damn stairs that lead up to his apartment, no less. Relieved to have something to focus his negativity on, Seth charged through the garage’s side door and flipped on the light. I’ll give Grandma a squirrel infestation.
What he called a garage his mother called “the carriage house,” and in this case, her grandiose idea was more correct than his, even though it had been built after the advent of the automobile—barely. It was a little sturdier than the average garage, and while it held his car and Grandma’s, they could have fit at least one more. It also had interior walls, unlike most garages. Seth grabbed a flashlight off the workbench, then began scanning the trim boards, lookin
g for any signs of gnawing or rot.
He might have been carefully maintaining Grandma’s house and grounds, but it looked like he’d been neglecting this building some. It appeared fine from a distance—he kept it painted, just like the main house—but as he searched under shelves and behind boxes he found some deterioration. Damn it, he didn’t want to replace the drywall in here, it was a fucking garage, for God’s sakes. But knowing his family (and even Grandma), they’d want it fixed if they knew it wasn’t perfect.
“How did I become the family’s superintendent, anyway?” he muttered while shoving aside an old wooden crate with his shoe.
As he neared the southeastern section of the garage, the smell—like rotting meat—tipped him off that he was close to finding his rodent. This is about to suck. Swallowing to keep from gagging, Seth kicked aside a half-empty paint can and found a gnawed-out hole in the corner, with lots and lots and lots of twigs falling out of it.
For the first time since he’d started chasing this thing, it occurred to him he might have been happier to ignore it. Yeah? Who else is going to deal with it? This was his job, the one he’d shouldered twelve years ago when his parents had ordered him to “pull his own weight” by becoming Grandma’s de facto handyman.
“Fuck.” Now he was as annoyed with this situation as he’d been with Nate earlier. As he stomped back to the workbench for a crowbar, the silver lining presented itself to him: he hadn’t thought about being spectacularly shot down for at least ten minutes.
Get over it. You’ve been rejected before. He shoved the questions about why this one bothered him worse than normal into the back corner of his mind. He had more urgent shit to deal with now.
Back at the suspected nest, he knelt on the floor as he manhandled the panel off the wall with a screech of nails. Just as he caught sight of the full glory of the rodent’s nest, a tail disappeared through another hole in the outside wall. Skinny like a rat’s, but covered with wiry hair. The kind of tail he could clean out a bottle with.
What the hell was that? He’d been hunting pests and larger game in this area his whole life. He would have sworn he’d seen every species of animal that lived around here, but this thing was new.
His puzzlement over that was secondary to his amazement at the collection of shit—and plenty of it was literally shit—in the rodent’s nest. Bottle caps, sticks of all shapes and sizes, shredded paper, rusting bits of metal, a piece of broken mirror— Was that a strip of staples for his staple gun?
Gingerly, he used the hook end of the crowbar to pull on a particularly snarled bunch of twigs, and a whole pile of refuse cascaded out, kicking up dust and making him cough, not to mention breathe in a lungful of whatever smelled so badly.
“Fuck this.” He hacked as he stood, scanning the rafters for his Have-a-Heart traps. He’d set one tonight and deal with the rest of this shit in the morning.
By the time he was setting the trap up near the creature’s midden, it was nearly midnight. Creature’s midden. Like this was some gothic story, with ghosts in the attic and an unsolved spousal murder.
Okay, so what the hell to bait it with? Some of the rodent’s own treasure? Since Seth didn’t have a clue what else would attract the thing, he pulled on a pair of work gloves and dug through the pile of crap that had fallen out, trying to find something especially shiny. Most of it was rusty or dirt-encrusted, but he found a particularly long, skinny piece of metal that had a few clean spots on it still. He pulled it out to see if it would work, and as he did, the full shape revealed itself.
Knife. An old hunting knife, if he knew his stuff, and he kind of did. It had a clip-point blade, like a Bowie knife. He rubbed what had to be the handle on the back of his glove, trying to get rid of enough of the dirt to get an idea of what he was dealing with. This thing was either damned old or a reproduction of a Wild West-style knife. Judging by the amount of rust on the blade, he was leaning toward damned old.
Huh. Seth’s puzzlement didn’t last long once it occurred to him whose knife this probably had been. Fennimore’s. He groaned. This whole place had been built by his ancestor, and it was full of objets that had belonged to him. Once Seth showed this to the family at large—and he had to, even Grandma wouldn’t help him hide it, he was certain—they’d be frantically trying to “authenticate” it, and it would stir up the argument he and Grandma were trying to win. Namely, that this house wasn’t that important and she should be allowed to move.
Damn it to hell. No longer really caring about the rat, he baited the trap with the piece of mirror he’d seen at first. Then he left everything else lying there—the mess and the paint cans and the crowbar and everything.
The knife he took with him, of course. Carrying it in his still-gloved hand (the thing was gross as hell, antique or not) he was ready to swear it weighed a half ton, and it considerably slowed his progress up his stairs. Once inside, he set it on the spindly table Grandma had insisted he keep by the front door (another ancestral piece of furniture, but not important enough to display in the main house), then he stripped to his skin, left his clothes piled by the front door, and walked straight into the shower for the second time that night.
Seth awoke with the distinct sense of having been misjudged.
He couldn’t quite remember why righteous anger burned in his chest, but between that and the pounding in his head, he chose to bury his face under the blanket for a few more minutes of sleepy peace.
The pounding wouldn’t stop, even when he pinched that acupressure point in the web of his thumb. I didn’t drink that much.
Oooh. Someone was knocking on his front door.
It had to be his mother. No one else would come by this early, and if they did, they wouldn’t try to wake him.
I could ignore her. He was nearly to the front door before he’d finished that little fantasy, and he didn’t even pause before opening up to find—yes. “Good morning, Mom.”
Her screaming-orange raincoat made his vision jangle, and his fingers twitched with the urge to shut the door in her face. Except, again, he’d never do that, because—as she said about the pile of dirty clothes in his entryway when she walked in—“Seth Larson, I raised you better than that.”
Her lips were pursed in disapproval even as she presented her cheek for a kiss.
Obediently, he pecked it. Very bad manners to leave dirty clothes lying around in your own home. Check.
Having grown up with a hypercritical mother had taught Seth to read her mood like a seismograph read tremors, and he knew immediately this was the beginning of a downright miserable visit. Ruffling his hair with his fingers as he shut the door, he wondered if she was the reason for the clinging sense of wounded pride he’d woken up with. He hadn’t seen her yesterday, so it had to be something—or someone—else.
Nate Albano.
“Why are you scowling at me?” demanded his mother. “It’s not my fault your grandmother refused to answer the door at her house. I had to come here and wake you.”
“Nothing, sorry. Bad dream.” He wasn’t alert enough to dissect out all the wrongs in that statement. “Just let me throw these in the laundry . . .”
“Pearl’s avoiding me,” Mom declared once Seth was half hidden in the little utility closet next to his tiny kitchen, stuffing clothes into his washing machine. He rolled his eyes but didn’t reply. Of course Grandma was avoiding her. During her last visit, his mother had said his grandmother had a duty to the family to stay in Sentinel House.
“How did you get your clothes so dirty, anyway?”
Seth went for shock value. “I was rooting out a rat in the garage.”
Bad move—it led to a diatribe about him living at Grandma’s rent-free in exchange for “maintaining the grounds.”
He tuned her out until he was done loading the washer.
“—your job to keep the vermin under control,” his mother finished as he did. He glanced over at her, sitting poker straight on his settee—another refugee from the main house, but o
ne he liked—crossed ankles tucked in close and hands clasped between her knees. “Did you remember to put in some baking soda?”
“Yes,” he muttered as he punched the washer’s On button a lot harder than necessary.
“Good. Now let’s go find Pearl.”
Having his mother following him down the exterior stairs made Seth highly conscious of needing to lay down new grippy tape. In the Pacific Northwest, wood didn’t make it through the winter without growing some kind of slime. As he led the way, he kept half his attention behind him in case she slipped.
“You’ve been living with an old lady too long,” his mother said when they’d reached the bottom, cinching the belt around her coat tighter. “I don’t need you to help me down stairs.”
“Mom.” Seth sighed. “Grandma won’t thank you for implying she’s infirm.”
“No, I won’t.” His grandmother’s voice floated out from the garage.
Shit. He nearly reached out to reassure his mother, but she was firming her jaw so obstinately that he didn’t want to touch her. “Don’t make it worse,” he murmured.
As far as he could tell, she disregarded him entirely.
Before he could consider fleeing, Grandma appeared in the garage doorway. Seth spoke first, in hopes of preempting the looming argument. “Morning, Grandma.” He leaned forward to kiss her cheek, and in response she lifted her hands, squeezing his upper arms.
Either that worked or she’d already decided to take the high road with her daughter-in-law, because other than throwing a glare his mother’s way, Grandma focused all her attention on him. “What happened in here?”
“I had a raging party with a rat, or something ratlike, at least. I’m going to clean it up before I go to work.”
Grandma waved off his words. “It’s your first day in your new job, you don’t need to do anything now. That mess is in no one’s way.”
His mother huffed. “He’s just going to tend bar, it’s not as if he’s got a position with real responsibility.”
“Well.” Seth winced at Grandma’s tone. “You can just keep your opinions to yourself, Debra, no one wants to hear them. He’s a good boy and works hard.” She didn’t like anyone denigrating her grandchildren, even if it was their own parent.