I had hugged the beauty of that moment for as long as possible. I’d even gone the long way home on purpose, right past Bridlemere, to show those gates I wouldn’t be intimidated.
Not that they had noticed. At nine o’clock at night this time of year it was already good and dark, and there’d been no lights on at all that I could see within that mansion sprawled along the water’s edge.
My brother’s house had been a different story. Every light had been ablaze, Sam’s truck was parked beside the tree out front, and Bandit met me at the side door to the kitchen. Or, to be specific, at the open place where the side door belonged.
Sam had his tool belt on. “Good timing,” was his greeting. “I could use an extra pair of hands.”
Obligingly I set my briefcase down, shrugged off my coat and draped it on the nearest kitchen chair, and turned to help. “You didn’t have to do this.”
“Yeah, I did.” He handed me the hinge pins. “It was bugging me. Now here, I’m going to hold this up. If you’ll just drop those pins in . . . perfect. Thanks.” As I stepped back he gave the pins a final tap in with his hammer, swung the door shut, and surveyed it with the eye of a perfectionist. “Almost.”
If there was any kind of flaw I couldn’t see it, but he knocked the hinge pins out again and handed them to me. “Just need to mortise in this hinge a little better.”
While he got his chisel from the toolbox on the floor, I looked around. “Where’s Rachel?”
“Skyping with your mom.”
“My mother Skypes?”
“Seems like it.”
Mortising a hinge appeared to take a lot of patience and restraint. He made the small cuts with his chisel, set the hinge in place and screwed it firmly back into the doorjamb, and then took the door in both his hands and said, “Okay, let’s try again.” This time it seemed to suit him better. Even so, he rummaged in his toolbox for a hand plane and shaved off the slightest bit along the inner edge below the lock plate.
I glanced up towards the ceiling, wishing I could listen in on Rachel and my mother, hoping it was going well. My mother had Opinions when it came to education, and specifically on people dropping out of it. I knew because she’d voiced them all to me, at great length, these past weeks. I ventured, “So, have you heard arguing or yelling?”
Sam assured me that he hadn’t. “It’s been pretty calm.”
Bandit, curled up in the corduroy dog bed that Rachel had bought for him and which had become a fixture now under our table, appeared to bear witness to this. Then again, he might just have been tired. It was after nine thirty and long past the hour when he should have been home.
Sam was checking the fit of the door again, swinging it wide to make sure it was up to his standards. He had to be tired, too. He’d been on the roof of the Wilde House when I had pulled into the parking lot early that morning, and after the regular workday was over, when I had been putting together my notes for the board meeting, he’d still been clearing things up, making sure that the site was secure for the night. He’d been driving out just as the first of the trustees drove in. I’d have thought, after dropping by here to get Bandit, he would have gone straight back to his place.
Although now I thought of it, I wasn’t sure where Sam’s place was. I knew that he had one. I also knew it had a shed that was either incredibly large or had magical properties, because it seemed anytime I mentioned anything, even in passing, that I wished we had at the Wilde House—a good pair of shutters, a shelf, or a step stool—he’d turn up the next day with one he’d found “lying around in the shed.” And for things he considered a favour, he only took payment in food.
So I looked at his work now and asked, “Can I make you a sandwich?”
He promised me there wasn’t any need. “I grabbed a burger. And besides, you’re out of bread.”
“Oh.”
Rachel, coming through the doorway from the hall, remarked, “I tried to call you earlier to see if you could pick some up on your way home, but it’s a little hard to call you when you don’t have this.” She held my cell phone out, accusing.
“Sorry.”
She seemed more resigned to my forgetfulness this evening than upset by it. “How can you not even know that you don’t have it with you?”
“I was busy getting ready for the meeting.”
Sam closed his toolbox, unbuckled his tool belt and set it on top, and asked, “Good meeting?”
“Great meeting.”
I told them why. “So that’s two victories, really,” I finished up. “Getting the last word with Sharon, and getting that painting in spite of my grandmother.”
Sam said, “You’ve lost me, now. What did your grandmother do?”
“You remember. We asked for a grant from the Sisters of Liberty, to help us fund acquisitions. They turned us down.”
“And you think your grandmother did that?”
I sent him a sideways glance. “She is the president.”
“Maybe in name. But she doesn’t do much with them anymore. Not since the spring. It would be her vice-president running the show—Carol Speck. And she’s good friends with Sharon.” Standing there looking so casually male in his T-shirt and jeans he hardly seemed the sort of guy who’d notice who was friends with whom, but when I asked him how he knew, he said, “Small place like this, it pays to figure out how people are connected so you don’t get into trouble.”
Rachel nodded understanding. “Dad said the best thing to do is assume everybody’s related until you learn differently.”
I felt my forehead crease faintly as I tried absorbing Sam’s words. “So you think that this Carol . . .”
“Speck.”
“You think that she was the reason the Sisters of Liberty turned down our funding request?”
“I’d believe that before I’d believe that your grandmother did it.”
“And why is that?” I hadn’t meant for the edge to creep into my voice. It just did.
Sam shrugged. “It’s not her style. She’s too much of a lady.”
A short silence followed his words until Rachel said coldly, “She wasn’t too much of a lady to miss my dad’s funeral.”
Sam looked from Rachel’s face to mine. “I’ve obviously hit a nerve. I didn’t mean to. Sorry.”
With a small smile I explained, “It’s a pretty big nerve. Kind of hard not to hit it.”
He looked as though he was about to say something else, but then he didn’t, and things might have ended there except I asked, “Why since the spring?”
“What?”
“You said she hadn’t had much to do with the Sisters of Liberty since the spring. Why?”
“I don’t know. She got sick, I think. Nobody saw her in town for a while. She still doesn’t come out of the house much.”
“She came to see me,” I said dryly, “that day at the Privateer Club, so she can’t be a total hermit.”
Once again he seemed about to say something, but I saw him rethink that impulse. “Anyway,” he said, and lifted Bandit’s leash from where it hung beside the door, “I’m going to get this troublemaker home. Thanks, Rachel. Charley, see you in the morning.”
Bandit dragged his heels a bit, and since Sam’s hands were full with leash and toolbox I stood there and held the door for them, which gave me time to notice something. “Sam.”
“Yeah?”
“This isn’t the same door.”
“That’s because the old one was just an interior door,” he said. “This one will actually keep out the weather.”
“But it can’t have cost nothing,” I pointed out. “And if you tell me you just found this lying around in your shed, I’m not going to believe you.”
It would have been an easy thing to miss the slight curve of his mouth because it came and went so quickly, but his eyes still held the smile. “You won’t, huh?”
“No.”
Accepting this, he said, “Okay, it wasn’t in the shed.” He let the dog go first as they stepped out onto the porch, and then he turned and told me, “It was in the basement.”
“Sam.”
“No, honestly. I had it left over from another job. It didn’t cost me anything.”