That was interesting. What was up with the boyfriend?
“Why do you hate that song so much?” she asked suddenly.
“I hate the belabored circus metaphor, what with the clowns and tightropes and whatnot. I hate that she’s advising people to keep all the feelings inside, which, my God, strikes me as terrible advice. And that she’s actually yelling about not crying out loud, which, I mean—how does that make any sense? I don’t like advice yelled at me from a song.”
“I think Miss Manchester would characterize it as singing,” she said finally. Sounding subdued. But she looked dazzled. Her eyes were lit with hilarity.
“Miss Manchester would be deluded.”
“She has some good songs. ‘Midnight Blue.’ Pretty good song.” Now she was messing with him.
He waved this opinion away with an impatient chop of his hand.
“I like songs like . . . like that Baby Owls song. About being lost in the forest and going around and around and around. Perfectly adequate lyrics. Keep it simple. Lost in the forest, going round and around and around. Happens to someone every day, right? Not this sentimental histrionic dreck.”
“Yeah, but that Baby Owls song is kind of existential, when you think about it. The round and around is meant to symbolize the circle of—”
Mac clapped his hands over his ears. “LALALALALALA.”
She smiled.
He smiled, too.
“You used to like Roxy Music,” he ventured quietly, into the delicate, soft little silence.
“Maybe my tastes have changed.”
“Maybe you’re lying.”
She didn’t disagree with this. But she was restless now; her eyes had gone guarded and cool.
“I think the only stupid thing about that song is that the singer gets back up on that tightrope over and over even though she falls off and gets hurt over and over again. Every time.”
That sure sounded like a message. Maybe a warning.
He didn’t much care for innuendo. Some instinct of self-preservation prevented him from poking at it.
“Hey, Avalon?” Mac said suddenly. “You know what else the deer and squirrels might not appreciate?”
He reached into his back pocket and withdrew the thing he’d found while he was trimming back some oleander. He gave a little flick of his wrist.
Her blue bra unfurled and fluttered in the breeze, twisting and dancing gaily from his fingers.
“Littering,” he said.
She stared at it. Hilarity and outrage mingling in her face; her cheeks went pink. It was about as adorable as it gets.
Then she snatched it from his fist. “I was wondering where that got to,” she said.
She was smiling when she returned to the house. Despite herself. It was just that Mac’s explanation for why he didn’t like that song was so at the ready, so idiosyncratic, so him, that everything in her leaped with pleasure at its force and originality. She remembered that Mac had kind of felt, in fact, like a song you could really dance to. Or the kind like, say, “Stairway to Heaven,” with soft parts and loud parts and crescendos.
And she was happy to get her bra back.
And she understood something else clearly in that moment: Corbin’s ethos of rejecting anything commonplace did not in and of itself constitute taste. Or a personality. It was what he did because he didn’t know himself; it was what he did because he feared, and probably rightly, that he just wasn’t terribly interesting.
It was quite an epiphany.
And Mac had remembered about Roxy Music.
Something soft, something perilously teenage, something that felt like hope, turned her insides tingly until she ruthlessly squelched it. After all, he’d soundly mocked her fantasy about slow dancing out there on Devil’s Leap. And he was still that guy who had no patience for spectacle.
So she kept “Don’t Cry Out Loud” going at whimsical intervals all day while she washed her walls. Just to show him she meant business, until about nine thirty at night.
Which was when the fuse blew.
Instant blackness was accompanied by a sort of groaning sigh that spelled the expiration of all lights and appliances.
She froze where she stood, a Hot Pocket with one bite out of it clutched in one fist and a Jellystone Park glass full of iced tea in the other.
“Huh.”
The living room had become a cavern. The corners she’d swept so thoroughly were suddenly dense with shadowy mystery. Out the big windows the dark was that kind of thick-textured, velvety purple dark that you only get in the country. Trees speared up into it.
She used a slanting stripe of moonlight as a road to get to the couch, which was where, serendipitously, she’d propped her lantern. She settled her Hot Pocket and her tea down on the overturned box reincarnated as a coffee table, curled up on the sofa that smelled like her family’s rec room and therefore her family, and pressed a number on her cell phone.
“Hey, pumpkin.”
“Hey, Dad. When you were prowling around outside, did you happen to notice where the breaker box was? Asking for a friend.”
A little silence, during which he probably stifled an “I told you so.”
“So are you sitting there in the pitch dark?” He sounded amused.
Her dad was smart.
“I have my lantern. And the glow of my cell phone. And the moonlight is rather picturesque on these hardwood floors. It’s illuminating all the scratches.” She aimed the lantern beam at the back wall and made a shadow dog with her hand. That was a mistake. In this light it looked more like the Loch Ness monster than a dog and there were enough unidentifiable shadows as it was.
“That house has a fuse box, not a breaker box. It’s outside behind that little round door. You got any fuses handy?”
“Sure, Dad, I got a whole box full of fuses right here.”
“You do?” Her dad sounded so touched and thrilled she was instantly filled with remorse.
“Sorry, Dad. I shouldn’t tease you like that. Do fuses even come in boxes? Can you order them with an app?”
He snorted. “Do you have lights in the other parts of the house?”
Ava cast her gaze up the stairs. The entire flight was so dark she couldn’t distinguish one step from another from where she sat. The light switch at the top might as well be down a deep, dark well. Moonlight threw shivering shadows of pine boughs against the wall, thanks to the big windows.
“Mmm, yeah,” she said vaguely. “I think so.”
“What were you doing when you blew the fuse?”
“Um . . . listening to music and heating something up in the microwave.” It wasn’t a total lie, but she crossed her fingers. “I think the refrigerator is on that fuse, too, though I don’t have too much stuff in there that can go bad.”
“You know how to get into the basement?”
She hesitated.
“Yep.”
“You can do it, pumpkin. Maybe the groundskeeper has a fuse.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
She might be a grown woman, but “you can do it pumpkin” would never lose its motivating power, and that’s why she’d called him instead of Googling.
She hooked the lantern over her arm and headed out the door into the deep dark, down the flagstone path.
Five feet away from Mac’s front door a cloud shifted and Avalon stopped cold and tilted her head back. The half moon hung up there like a neon sign over the door of a heavenly speakeasy. Behind it, a million stars pinned the blue velvet sky up in place.
It was preposterously beautiful and so strange when you really thought about it, that enormous radiant shape in the sky.
Honestly, it was so dumbfoundingly gorgeous in the country all at once it felt like insanity to live anywhere else.
She took in a long, long breath for courage. To attempt to settle her hammering heart.
Exhaled.
She raised her hand to rap on the door.
It flew open before her knuckles even brushed it. She w
as treated to a backlit glimpse of pillow-rumpled hair, a lamplight-burnished torso partitioned in muscles as satiny and distinct as quadrants on a Hershey bar, low-clinging red boxers, and a jaw shadowed in stubble.
The impact was a bit like taking a mallet to the head. Her ears literally rang from the sheer sensory input.
“Hold out your hand, Ava.” His voice was gruff from sleep.
Her hand, much to her chagrin, was already kind of out. What in God’s name was she going to do with it? Strum her hand down those muscles like she was playing a xylophone solo? Reflexively touch each quadrant, like a child learning to count?
He slapped a fuse into her hand.
And when it seemed she wouldn’t move he slowly, gently curled her fingers closed over it.
And bang.
Shut the door again.
Shot the bolt.
And killed the lights.
She stood motionless. From just that little touch, her entire self seemed to be humming like a plucked string. How about that? Her subconscious had known he had amazing abs.
The first step she took away from the door was a little unsteady.
The next one was more certain.
Because she’d lay odds he was still watching. And she’d be damned if she’d let on that he’d rattled her.
For some reason, the notion that he was looking out for her was as disturbing and comforting and oddly beautiful as the moon.
It was cold and he didn’t heat the house at night, but Mac stood in his bare feet and boxers and tweezed open his blinds with two fingers to watch Avalon move through the dark, find the basement door, fumble with the keys, then vanish inside.
And despite the fact that she richly deserved a foray into the spidery basement in the deepest dark of night, he was rooting for her.
Because with some logic he barely understood but which was having its way with him now, because his mind was sleepy, it seemed like the world itself wouldn’t be safe unless she was.
And so when the lights blazed on again in the house he smiled.
And a few minutes later, when the lights went back out again, he decided to go back to bed.
He folded his arms around the back of his head and smiled.
Because she was safe, sure. Because of the look on her face when she’d gotten a look at him in those boxers.
But also because of what he had in store for her tomorrow.
Chapter 10
Sleep was dreamless and morning dawned a little chilly, something she realized the moment she put a foot down on the wood floors in the turret. She fished about in her gym bag to see if her mom had donated any warm things. She found woolly rainbow-colored socks, the sweatshirt featuring the giant disembodied face of Annelise’s cat, Peace and Love, that Annelise had given her grandpa for Christmas, and a pair of slippers with cocker spaniels on the toes. She put all of them on. The sweatshirt hung down almost to her knees.
She fumbled for her phone; it was only seven in the morning. How about that: the gently increasing light in her room had been her alarm clock. She decided to give herself a reprieve from looking at emails and texts until at least eight. Instead, she reflexively moved to open a window to let in birdsong and country air.
She stopped a few inches from the window.
And frowned.
And sniffed a little.
What the hell was that smell?
Heart pounding in dread now, she flung open a window, then slammed it down like a guillotine and scrambled backward. “Oh Jesus. Oh sweet Jesus!”
Only a thousand cows cooperatively farting in unison would create a smell like that.
She lunged for the hand cream in her purse, whipped the top off and snorted the vanilla-sandalwood blend like she was Al Pacino in Scarface, then bolted down the stairs, her hand sliding along the silky wood of the banister.
“Please . . . not . . . the . . . septic. Please. Not. The. Septic.”
That was her prayer, one word per stair, like they were rosary beads, all the way down.
She froze in the foyer. Through the door she could hear a muffled BEEP . . . BEEP . . . BEEP . . .
It sounded for all the world like a big truck was backing up outside.
And all at once a hundred nightmare scenarios flitted through her mind like bats released from a cave, all of them involving Mac and revenge.
She flung the door open. Nobody was out front. That was a bit of a relief.
She followed the sound, bolted down the path and out onto the drive and up the flagstone path as fast as her spaniel slippers could carry her.
She came to an abrupt halt at the fork in the road, just before the gate, and stared.
Mac was standing out there, hands planted on his hips, a few feet apart, looking like a happy pirate on the deck of his ship.
In front of him was a huge red truck, the movements of which he appeared to be directing.
“Good morning, Mac,” she called. “What fresh hell have we today?” Ava said it as brightly as a kindergarten teacher.
“Fresh manure,” he corrected with cheery self-satisfaction. “Not fresh hell.”
The manure in question was heaped in the back of said bright red truck, which was driven by a big guy wearing a white undershirt and a San Francisco Giants baseball hat. One tan arm bulging with muscle was propped on the open window.
The guy shouted merrily down to her over the sound of his idling engine. “Mac doesn’t cheap out when it comes to his crops. This is some good shit. Top notch! About time Mac decided to do some winter planting. You been out here, what, three years now, Mackie?”
Avalon turned very, very slowly to Mac. “Your crops?”
“My winter crops,” Mac reiterated in a tone that reminded her of a Buddhist monk she’d once met, who had clearly successfully meditated away every shred of anxiety, past and future. There was, however, a faint and very wicked hint of “duh” in his voice. “Fresh Loads is my go-to guy.”
At first Ava thought Fresh Loads was one of those terrible nicknames men give each other instead of demonstrating affection, like Bumpy or Skid Mark (two guys she’d actually gone to school with), but Mac gestured with his chin and she looked. “Fresh Loads” was indeed lettered on the side of the truck, in an ornate old-timey font embellished with feathery stalks of corn and lusciously blooming flowers.
Mac glanced over at her, and the glance became a comical double take. He whisked her from the top of her sloppy ponytail to the spaniels on the toes of her slippers, and, depending upon how sharp his vision was, in between might have noticed she hadn’t shaved her shins in a few days, and now little bristles sparkled in the direct sunlight.
“You sure you got that fuse in okay last night? You kinda look like you got dressed in the dark. You did look a little dazed when you walked away from my place.” His brow was furrowed in mock concern.
He was a wicked, wicked man.
“This is what I wear to work every day,” she informed him loftily.
He grinned at this as if she was a slot machine that had just paid off.
The driver cut the engine. The truck shuddered like a big animal. “Is there a problem, ma’am?”
“No, no. I just thought I might have a septic emergency.”
“Understandable,” he said solemnly. “Pretty pungent. The good stuff always is.”
“Don’t worry, Avalon,” Mac soothed. “It’ll only smell like this when the temperature gets into the high seventies or eighties. Which it will be for . . . oh, the next few weeks. We’re looking at a warm spell. Or when a breeze sends it up toward the house. Which is usually only during the day. It’s a little more pungent in the summer though. When I plant my summer crops.”
All of which of course meant she had to cancel with Rachel indefinitely.
He was a stone-cold evil genius.
“I kind of like the smell,” she lied coolly.
“Smells like prosperity, doesn’t it?” said the philosopher in the truck, in all seriousness, listening to this exch
ange. He sucked in a long breath and sighed it out with pleasure bordering on a purr. “Farm-to-table vegetables! Nothing like it! Knowing who grew your food and where it grew and in what it grew. It’s how food should be. Mac is great at it.”
Despite Mac and the Stench (now there was a band name if she ever heard one), Avalon was charmed. She supposed she was glad there were people in the world who took pride in doing things like scrubbing crime scenes or cutting linoleum with those terrifying knives shaped like little scimitars or formulating gourmet poop, things she was ill-equipped to do.
But something about it made her wistful and restless again. It was pretty clear that even the gourmet poop guy was more fulfilled than she was currently.
Fresh Loads gave his truck door a friendly pat. “Well, if everything’s okay here, I’m going to go drop this load off. You comin’, Mac?”
“Right behind you, Randy.”
Randy fired up the engine again and steered his fragrant load off to wherever Mac would be planting his winter crops.
Mac turned to her. “So what’s the deal, Harwood? Are you on sabbatical? Are you going to be here indefinitely?”
“Why? Trying to suss out how fast I need to sell this place so you can plan another skirmish? How stupid do you think I am?”
“Not even a little bit stupid. Now, if you’d asked me about your judgment . . .”
Her temper was ramping. “If I’d angled the ramp just a little farther back, I would have made that jump across Whiskey Creek.”
“Hindsight is a wonderful thing. So is physics. Funny thing is, now I could easily calculate the right angle for a ramp that might get you across. If the mood strikes you.”
“And now you’re trying to kill me?”
“Why? You tempted to make that jump?”
The word tempted, with all its soft plump consonants, hung there, throbbing with dimensions of meaning.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
“I notice you haven’t made me a new financial offer for the house yet,” she countered.
His expression didn’t change in the least. It was like he hadn’t even heard her. She was positive he had.
“The giant cat on your shirt is staring at me and you’re wearing dogs on your feet. Don’t you think you’re overcompensating for not having a pet?”
Dirty Dancing at Devil's Leap Page 10