"Up there?" he said, standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up, his back to me.
"Yes," I said. I followed him up and into the bathroom. It was a bit warm up there, and he slipped off his jean jacket and tossed it casually on the vanity, knocking down a little display of small round soaps carved to look like roses, which Sarah likes to put out for guests but which no one has ever dared use to wash their hands. I put them back in their dish and slid them into the corner, next to a single brass antique candlestick holding a single white candle. Rick set down his toolbox and opened it, revealing an assortment of tools and rolls of tape and tubes of caulking. He opened the glass door to the shower, looked down, sat on the bottom of the shower door opening, and ran his hand along the seams where the floor met the wall.
"You see where the grouting is cracked and coming apart?" I said, trying to be helpful. Rick said nothing.
"The water got in there," I said, "and must have been dripping down to one place in the kitchen, and that's where the drywall fell away."
Rick picked away at some of the loose grouting and threw it out onto the bathroom floor, some of it landing on my shoe. He reached not into his toolbox but his back pocket and pulled out what appeared to be a Swiss Army knife, but when he pressed a button I couldn't see and the blade swung out in a fraction of a second, I gathered this was an implement without a corkscrew, bottle opener, nail file, or screwdriver.
He picked away at more of the loose grout with the knife. I felt a responsibility to make conversation.
"So you work for Valley Forest?" I said.
Rick slowly turned so he could look at me over his shoulder. "You figured that out, huh?"
I went downstairs. I saw Trixie approaching the front door and opened it before she had a chance to knock.
"Hey," she said.
"I've got one of Valley Forest's finest upstairs looking at the shower. I'm hoping he won't run off with Sarah's flowered soap collection."
We went into the kitchen and I got out two cups.
"Sorry I dropped by unexpectedly," I said. "I would have called, but I didn't have your number, and I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I don't even know your last name."
Trixie smiled. "Snelling."
I tried to recall all the names I'd scanned under accountants in the phone book. I couldn't recall seeing Snelling. So I mentioned it.
"I'm not in the book yet," Trixie said. "Should be in the next one."
I put Trixie's coffee in front of her, then some more of those Peek Freans. "I guess your next appointment showed up just as I was leaving."
"Yeah, he was a bit early."
"I was trying to think whether I knew him from anywhere," I said. "Or whether he knew me."
"Oh yeah?"
"Because he looked at me and winked."
Trixie blew on her coffee, grabbed a cookie. "Really."
"It just struck me as odd."
Trixie seemed not to care. She chewed on her cookie. "So what were you coming over for? Unless it was to invite me over for coffee, which is a good enough reason."
"First of all, I was going to ask you, officially, if you'd do my tax stuff. Figure out my deductions, file my return, you know."
"Sure. No problem."
"But not for free. I don't want to take advantage. Just charge me whatever your going rate is." I paused. "What is the going rate?"
And there was that twinkle in Trixie's eye again. "Don't worry about that," she said. "I can probably do it in no time, I've got the program on my computer."
"If you're not going to charge me, I'll find someone else."
She took a sip of her coffee. "Fine. I'll bill you. Will that make you happy?"
I sat down across from her and grabbed a cookie. "The neighborhood's been kind of funny lately, don't you think?" I said.
Trixie cocked her head slightly. "What do you mean?"
"Odd things going on. Like what happened down at the creek. That guy, who wanted to preserve Willow Creek, who got killed?"
"I heard about that. A real shame."
I told her my role.
"God," she said. "I never found a dead person."
"I saw him a few days earlier, at the sales office. He got in this big argument with Greenway, you know, the hot shit who's in charge of the development."
Trixie nodded knowingly, like maybe she knew this Greenway character. I didn't ask.
"I had been over there, asking about getting someone to fix that hole." I pointed up by the pot lights. "And fix the shower, where the water was leaking from, and this Spender comes in and they start yelling at each other." I gave Trixie a few more details, how Spender said he couldn't be bought, about Greenway ordering him out.
"And then there's Earl," I said. I waited to see whether Trixie would pick up on my opening.
"What about Earl?" she asked.
"Have you noticed anything, I don't know, out of the ordinary at Earl's place?"