Her Man Upstairs
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Dixie Browning
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16.5K
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12
One
Marty allowed herself ten minutes, start to finish, to shower, shampoo the stink out of her hair, dress and get back downstairs in time to meet the fourth carpenter. If he even bothered to show up. What the devil had happened to the work ethic in this country?
She knew what had happened to her own. It fluctuated wildly between gotta-do, gonna-do and can’t-do. Between full speed ahead and all engines reverse, depending on the time of the month.
At least she had no one depending on her for support. Not even a cat or a dog, although she was thinking about getting one. Something to talk to, something to keep her feet warm in bed at night while she read herself to sleep. But then there were all those shots and flea medicines and retractable leashes and collars and tons of kibble.
So maybe a couple of goldfish…?
She checked her image in the steam-clouded bathroom mirror, searching for signs of advancing age. “At least you’re not paying rent. Except for the phone bill, the power bill and property taxes, you don’t owe a penny to anyone.”
On the other hand, her split ends were in desperate need of a trim and the sweater she was wearing dated back to her junior year in college. Even if she could’ve afforded to update her hairstyle and her wardrobe, she lacked the interest, and that—the lack of interest—was the scariest of all. She was sliding downhill toward the big four-oh, which meant that any day now, the guarantees on various body parts would start running out. Oh sure, her teeth were still sound, and she could still get by with drugstore reading glasses, but she plucked an average of three gray hairs a day; she was collecting a few of what were euphemistically called “laugh lines” and lately her back had been giving her trouble.
Of course, moving a ton and a half of books and bookshelves single-handedly might have had something to do with that.
Bottom line, she wasn’t getting any younger. Her income was zilch minus inflation, her savings account had earned the lofty sum of a buck eighty-seven in interest last month, and with the least bit of encouragement she could become seriously depressed. She read all those magazine articles designed to scare women and sell pharmaceutical products. The trouble was, scare tactics worked.
Frowning down at her Timex, Marty decided she’d give him ten more minutes. Traffic jams happened, even in Muddy Landing, population just shy of a thousand. She’d forgotten to ask where he was staying, when he’d called late yesterday to see if she still needed a builder. If he was coming from Elizabeth City and happened to get behind a tractor or a school bus, all bets were off.
Squeezing the moisture from her thick chestnut-colored hair, she tried to hedge against disappointment by telling herself that he probably wouldn’t show at all, and even if he did, he probably wouldn’t be able to fit her into his schedule anytime soon. If he did manage to fit her in, she probably couldn’t afford him. But the biggie was her deadline. If he couldn’t meet that, then there’d be no point in even starting.
“Well, shoot,” she whispered. When it came to looking on the bright side, she was her own worst enemy. So what else was new?
The first time the idea had occurred to her, she’d thought it was brilliant, but the longer it was taking to put her plan into action, the more doubts were seeping in.
Was that a car door slamming?
She gave her hair a last hurried squeeze with the towel and then felt in the top drawer with one hand for a pair of socks. Having long since gotten out of the habit of matching her socks and rolling them together, she came up with a short and a long in two different colors. Tossing them back, she raced for the stairway, bare feet thudding on the hardwood floors.
At least she no longer reeked of polyurethane. If the cinnamon had done the trick, neither would her house.
The phone rang just as she hit the third step down from the top. Swearing under her breath, she wheeled and raced back to catch it in case it was her carpenter asking for instructions on how to find her address.
“Hello! Where are you?”
“Is he there yet?”
Her shoulders drooped. “Oh, Sasha.” If there was an inconvenient time to call or drop by, her best friend would find it. From anyone else Marty might think it was a power thing. “I thought you were someone else. Look, I don’t have time to talk now. Can I call you back?”
“You’re talking, aren’t you?”
“But I’m in a hurry—so can it wait?”
“Is he there yet?”
“Is who there—here?”
“Your carpenter, silly! Faylene said Bob Ed said he was going to call you yesterday. Didn’t he even call?”
Marty took a deep breath, drawing on the lessons of a lifetime. Patience was a virtue, right up there with godliness and cleanliness. At various times, she’d flunked all three. “Somebody’s here, I just heard a car door slam. It might be him—he. Listen, later I want to know exactly what you two have been up to, but not now, okay?”
If you couldn’t trust your best friend, whom could you trust?
“Wait, don’t hang up! Call me as soon as he leaves, okay? Faylene said—”
Marty didn’t wait to hear what Faylene had said. The trouble with a small town like Muddy Landing was that aside from fishing, hunting and farming, the chief industry was gossip. By now probably half the town knew what she planned on doing to her house, who was helping her do it, and how much it was likely to cost her.
Slamming the phone down, she peered through the front bedroom window to see a ratty looking pickup with a toolbox in back and a rod-holder on the front bumper, a description that fit roughly half the vehicles in Muddy Landing. There was probably a gun rack in the back window, too, and an in-your-face sticker peeling off the back bumper.
Well, so what? If the guy could read a blueprint and follow simple instructions, she didn’t care what his politics were or what he drove or what he did in his spare time.
Not that her drawings bore much resemblance to blueprints, but at least she’d indicated clearly what she wanted done. Not only indicated, but illustrated. If he could read, he should be able to do the job. If it weren’t for all the red tape involved with permitting and such, she could probably have done it herself, given enough time. There were how-to books for everything.
She watched from the window as a long, denim-covered leg emerged from the cab. Putty-colored deck shoes, Ragg socks, followed by leather clad shoulders roughly the width of an ax handle. Judging by all that shaggy, sun-streaked hair, he was either a surf bum or he’d spent the summer crawling around on somebody’s roof nailing on shingles. All up and down the Outer Banks, building crews were nailing together those humongous McMansions on every scrap of land that wasn’t owned by some branch or another of the federal government. She’d like to think of all the tourists who would pour down here once the season got underway as potential customers. Trouble was, there were enough bookstores on the beach so that few, if any, tourists were likely to drive all the way to Muddy Landing, which wasn’t on the way to anywhere.
She was still watching when her visitor turned and looked directly at the upstairs front window. Oh, my…
As she flicked the curtains shut, it occurred to Marty that living alone as she did, inviting all these strange men into her home might not be the smartest thing. This one, for instance, looked physically capable of taking out a few walls without the aid of tools. He’s a construction worker, silly! she told herself. What did you expect, a ninety-seven-pound wimp?
She was halfway down the stairs when the doorbell chimed—three steps farther when the smoke alarm went off with an ear-splitting shriek. “Not now, dammit!”
She galloped the rest of the way and reached the bottom just as the front door burst open.
“Get out, I’ll take care of it!” a man barked. He waved her toward the open front door.
Swinging around the newel post, Marty collided with him in the kitchen doorway. She stood stock-still and stared at the billowing smoke that was rapidly filling the room.
“Try not to breathe! Where’s your fire extinguisher?”
“Beside the drier!” Marty yelled back. Racing across the room, she jumped and slammed her fist against the white plastic smoke detector mounted over the utility room door. The cover popped off, the batteries fell out and the ear-splitting noise ceased abruptly.
In the sudden deafening silence they stared at each other, Marty and the stranger with the shaggy, sun-bleached hair and the piercing eyes. The stranger broke away first, wheeling toward the range where clouds of pungent smoke rose toward the ceiling.
“Get out of my way!” Marty shouldered him aside and grabbed the blackened pie pan with her bare hand. Shoving open the back door, she flung it outside, took two deep breaths and hurried to turn off the burner.
The stranger hadn’t said a word.
Trying not to inhale, she clutched her right hand and muttered a string of semi-profane euphemisms. God, she could have burned her house down!
“You want to tell me what’s going on here?” Fists planted on his hips, the stranger stared at her warily.
He wanted answers from her? She wasn’t the one who’d burst into a house uninvited and started shouting orders. At least he wasn’t wearing a ski mask over his face and carrying an AK-whatchamacallit—one of those really nasty guns.
Of course, she’d been expecting a carpenter. And he did have a toolbox in the back of his truck. But for all she knew, the thing could be full of nasty weapons of mass destruction.
A big fan of hard-edged suspense, Marty often let her imagination get the better of her. Not only that, but she’d been under a growing amount of stress, which always tended to affect her common sense.
“Sorry about that,” he said quietly, pulling her back to reality. “I thought you had a real fire going.” He waved away the pungent fumes with one hand.
Trying not to breathe too deeply, she leaned over the sink and held her stinging fingers under cold running water. Ow-wow-ee!
She felt him right behind her and tried not to react. He had to be her carpenter—either that or a fireman who just happened to be passing by 1404 Sugar Lane and smelled smoke.
Or the answer to a harried maiden’s dream?
Not that she was a maiden. Far from it.
Way to go, Owens—so much for getting your head together. You nearly burn down your house and now you’re checking out the vital statistics of the first man on the scene.
“Uh—maybe I’d better leave, okay?” The voice was rich and gravelly, if somewhat tentative. Pavarotti with a frog in his throat.
“No! I mean, please—I need you. That is, if you’re the carpenter I was expecting. You are…aren’t you?” She turned, still clutching her wrist to keep the pain of her burned fingers from shooting up her arm.
He was staring, probably trying to decide if it was safe to hang around. “Ma’am, are you sure you’re all right?”
He’d called her “ma’am.” Pathetically un-PC, but sweet, all the same. Conscious of her dripping hair and her naked feet, Marty tried to look cool and in control of the situation. Oh, Lord, did I remember to fasten the front of my jeans?
In case she hadn’t, she tugged her sweater down over her hips. A smile was called for, and she did her best, which probably wasn’t very convincing. At least, her would-be rescuer didn’t look convinced. Any minute now he’d be calling for the butterfly squad.
Deep breath, Owens. Get it in gear. “Sorry. I’m usually not this disorganized.” At least, this time of day she wasn’t. Early mornings were another matter. She was a zombie until she had her fix of caffeine and sunshine. “It’s just that everything happened at once. First the phone, then the doorbell, then the smoke alarm.”
He nodded slowly. Then he sniffed, using a really nice nose. Not too big, not too straight—just enough character to keep the rest of his features from looking too perfect. “What is that smell?”
Marty sniffed, too. The air was rank. “Polyurethane and paint thinner, uh, laced with fried cinnamon. Actually, not all my ideas work out the way they’re supposed to. You ever have one of those days when everything goes cronksided?”
He continued to watch her as if he suspected her of being a mutant life-form. His eyes, she noted, were the exact color of tarnished brass. Sort of greenish blue, with undertones of gold. Looking uneasy, he was backing toward the front hall, and she couldn’t afford to let him get away.
“I left the burner turned on the lowest setting, thinking sure I’d have time, but…” Despite appearances to the contrary, she tried to sound intelligent, or at least moderately rational.
Fat chance. She sighed. “Look, I’ve been painting bookcases in the garage and I left the side door open so I could hear the phone, so that’s how the smell got into the house, okay? I was just trying to cover it—while I showered—with cinnamon.”
“You showered with cinnamon.”
Was that skepticism or sympathy? Time to take control. “Yes, well—I probably should have used something heavier than one of those aluminum foil pie pans. Pumpkin. Mrs. Smith’s. I hate to throw them away, don’t you? They come in handy for scaring deer away from the pittosporum.”
Nodding slowly, he backed a few steps closer to the hall door, watching her as if he expected her to hop up on a counter and start flapping her wings. “This is the right address, isn’t it? Corner of Sugar Lane and Bedlam Boulevard?”
Bedlam Boulevard wasn’t even a boulevard, just a plain old street. She’d almost forgotten the developer’s love of all things British: Chelsea Circle, Parliament Place, London Lane.
She snickered. And then watched as his lips started to twitch. And then they were both grinning.
Marty said, “Could we start all over, d’you think?”
“I guess maybe we’d better. Cole Stevens. I was told you needed some remodeling done?”
“Martha Owens. I’m mostly called Marty, though. Come on into the living room, the odor shouldn’t be so strong there. I’d open a window, but we’d freeze.” Ignoring her stinging fingers—she’d probably burned off her fingerprints—Marty led the way, pretending she wasn’t barefoot and dripping and utterly devoid of any claim to dignity she might once have possessed.
Following her, Cole wondered if he wouldn’t be better off leaving now. He’d never worked for a woman before—at least, not directly.
He wondered if the fact that she was barefoot had anything to do with the way she moved. Hip bone connected to the thigh bone, thigh bone connected to the—
And then he wondered why he was wondering. Why he’d even noticed the way she walked—or the way she’d scrooched up her mouth when she’d hurled that blackened pan outside. For a crazy woman, she was sort of attractive.
It wouldn’t hurt to stick around for a few more minutes, seeing as he was here. He hadn’t planned on going back to work this soon, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t change his mind. The one thing he was, was flexible.
When he’d set out earlier this week, he’d had some vague idea of cruising south until he saw someplace that appealed to him. Less than a day out of his old mooring place on the Chesapeake Bay, he’d had some minor engine trouble and looked for a place to lay over. He’d radioed a friend of his, who had recommended Bob Ed’s place near the neck of Tull Bay on North Landing River. He’d limped along on one engine, located the place, liked its looks and rented a wet slip for a week, with options.
Yesterday he had exercised his option for another two weeks. One of the things he liked about the place was the fact that, other than a few local commercial fishermen, it was empty. Add to that the fact that, while it was off the beaten track, it was relatively close to a metropolitan area in case he ever needed something that couldn’t be found in the sticks.
Hell, there was no law that said he had to keep on running. No family, no job to hold him back. Not much of a reputation either, but the lack of a haircut over the past few months should keep anyone from recognizing him as the whistle-blower who’d brought down the third largest developer in southeastern Virginia.
What he hadn’t counted on when he’d pulled up stakes and headed south was having so much time on his hands. When a guy didn’t have a real life, things got boring real fast.
He’d been considering moving on when he saw the old guy who ran the place trying to replace a rotten window frame. He’d offered to help, and had been pleased and somewhat surprised to discover that he hadn’t quite lost his old skills. By day’s end they had replaced three windows on the northeast side of the rambling unpainted building that housed Bob Ed’s Ammo, Bait and Tackle, and Guide Service. He’d met Bob Ed’s lady, Faylene, briefly yesterday when she’d come to bring a stack of mail from the post office.
Now there was one strange lady. It was largely due to her that he was here today, actually considering signing on for a construction job. Too much fried food had evidently affected his brain.
Either that or too much solitude.
Cole followed the Owens woman into a comfortable, if slightly cluttered living room, where she turned to confront him. He stood six foot two to her five feet plus a few inches, yet she managed to look down her nose at him.
Haughty as a maître d’in a five-star restaurant, she said, “May I see your résumé?”
His résumé. Cole didn’t know whether to laugh or to leave. A few minutes ago leaving had seemed the better option, but sooner or later he was going to have to jump-start his career. Living alone aboard his boat with no real structure in his life wasn’t going to do it. This job, small as it was, sounded like a good first step if he planned to stay in construction, which was all he knew.
Hands on, though. No more management.
“My résumé,” he repeated. He cleared his throat. “Short version—the firm where I worked for the past thirteen years recently went bankrupt, so my résumé would be pretty worthless.” He didn’t bother to add that the firm had belonged to his ex-father-in-law, who had pushed him into an area of management he had been unprepared for. Deliberately, he’d later learned. The result being that by calling a spade a spade—or in this case, calling a crook a crook—he’d lost his wife, his job, and any ambition he’d once had to be the best damn builder in the business.
“Would I have heard of it?” she asked.
“Were you watching the local news last spring?”
“Local? You mean Muddy Landing?”
He shook his head. “Norfolk. Virginia Beach, specifically.” The state line was less than forty-five minutes away. Northeast North Carolina got most of the news from Norfolk feeds.
The way she was eyeing him, she was probably reconsidering her job offer. With no résumé and no referrals, he couldn’t blame her, but now that he’d come this far, he was determined not to let that happen. Something about big, cloudy gray eyes and soft, pouty lips…
Oh, hell no. Any decision he made would be based on his own needs and not on the appeal of any woman. He’d gone that route once before, and look where it had landed him.
“Look, I’ll be honest with you,” he said.
“For a change?”
Cole didn’t particularly like being called a liar, especially when he wasn’t, but having been grilled by experts, he let it pass. “I can leave now or we can go on with the interview, your choice,” he said quietly. “I’d intended to head on down the Banks and points south in a few days, anyway.”
“Then why did you bother to apply?”
Had he thought gray eyes looked soft? At the moment hers looked about as soft as stainless steel. “I’m beginning to wonder,” he muttered, half to himself. The lady was as flaky as one of the Colonel’s biscuits. “All right, fair question. First, I did a small repair job for a guy who owns the marina where I’ve been living aboard my boat. Yesterday a friend of his happened to mention that she knew somebody who needed a small remodeling job done in a hurry, and asked if I was interested in earning some maintenance money.”
Actually, despite appearances, he had a fairly decent investment income considering his simplified lifestyle. But the market tended to be schizophrenic and, as someone once said, a boat was a hole in the water into which the owner poured money.
“You said that was your first reason. What else? Is there a second reason?”
A second reason. If he said “instinct,” she was going to think he was as big a nutcase as she was. As to that, the jury was still out, but until he had more to go on he’d just as soon not have to defend himself.
It had been instinct that had first tipped him off that Weyrich was dirty. Long before that, it had been instinct that told him Paula was bored with their marriage and looking for bigger fish to fry. Frying them, for all he knew. By that time it had no longer been worth the effort to find out.
“It just struck me as the thing to do,” he said finally. “Small town, small job—good place to get my bearings again.”
“Again?”
She might look like soft, but the lady was a piranha—big eyes, tousled hair and all. “Look, if it’s all the same to you, let’s leave my bearings out of this and get on with the business at hand. Do you need a job done, or don’t you?”
She took a deep breath, hinting at what lay hidden by a baggy turtleneck sweater that showed signs of age. And he wasn’t even a breast man. If anything, he was an eye man, eyes being the window on the soul.
The window on the soul?
Clear case of too much fried food and too much time on his hands.
“It’s a remodeling job,” she explained. “I doubt if it’ll take very long. At least I hope not. I want my downstairs moved upstairs so I can reopen my bookstore downstairs.”
Cole thought for a minute, then nodded slowly as a couple of things clicked into place. “The bookshelves you were painting in your garage.” The smell still lingered, a combination of burnt cinnamon, fresh urethane and paint thinner—but either his olfactory sense was numbed or the stench was starting to fade.
She nodded. “I thought I’d better refinish them now so that they’ll be thoroughly dry by the time my upstairs gets finished so I can move my downstairs upstairs and move the shelves into these two rooms and start restocking.”
Okay. He had the general picture now. “You want to show me what you have in mind?” He hadn’t committed himself to anything.
Marty rubbed her right thumb and forefinger together as she considered whether to show him her drawings first or take him upstairs. She’d burned off her fingerprints, which might come in handy in case she couldn’t get her bookstore reopened in time and was forced to turn to a life of crime.
“Come on, I’ll show you upstairs first so you’ll understand my drawings better. You might as well know, you’re not the first builder to apply for the job. The others turned it down.”
“Any particular reason?” he asked.
Conscious of him just behind her, she made a serious effort not to move her hips any more than she had to. Too much stress was obviously affecting her brain. Just because she’d noticed practically everything about him, from his tarnished brass eyes to the worn areas of his jeans to the way they hugged his quads and glutes and…well, whatever—that didn’t mean he was aware of her in any physical sense.
Sasha would have had a field day if she could’ve tuned in on Marty’s thoughts. Her friend was always after her to add a little more vitamin S to her diet. Vitamin sex. “Maybe then,” she was fond of saying, “you’d get a decent night’s sleep and not be a zombie until noon.”
She wasn’t that bad. Just because she wasn’t a morning person—
He’d asked her a question. He was waiting for an answer. Kick in, brain—it’s four-thirty in the afternoon! “Reason why they didn’t work out? Well, one never showed up, and the next two, once they found out what I wanted done, told me I was wasting their time. Oh, and one of them said he could only work on weekends because the rest of the time he worked with a building crew at Nags Head.” She hadn’t yet mentioned the time constraints, but that shouldn’t be a problem. It wasn’t a major job, after all. Not like starting from scratch and building a house.
“So—here it is.” She waved a hand in the general direction of the upstairs hall and the spare bedroom, which she planned to move into so that the larger bedroom could become her living room.
She had painted up here less than two years ago. She’d chosen yellow with white trim on the theory that sunshine colors would help kick-start her brain when she stumbled out of bed and staggered to the bathroom early in the morning.
While he looked around, tapping on walls, studying the ceiling, Marty told herself that it would get done. It was going to work. Her life was not in free fall—it only felt that way because time was wasting. She kept racing her engines but not getting anywhere.
Following him around, she tried not to get her hopes up—tried not to be distracted by the fact that he smelled like leather and something spicy and resinous, and that he looked like—
Well, never mind what he looked like. That had nothing to do with anything except that her social life had been seriously neglected for too long.
They were standing beside the closet she wanted taken out and turned into part of a new kitchen when he said, “You want to show me your drawings now?”
There was plenty of room. It was only her imagination that made it feel as if the walls were shrinking, pushing them closer together. Breathlessly, she said, “Come on, then, but remember, I’m not an architect. You can get the general idea, though.” Turning away from her yellow walls, she was aware again of how early it grew dark in late January—especially on cloudy days. “I’ll make us some coffee,” she said. Heck, she’d cook him a five-course dinner if that was what it took to get him to agree.
Marty saw him glance into the spare bedroom where she’d stored dozens of boxes of paperback books, plus the bulletin boards where she used to tack up cover flats, bookmarks and autographed photos. She hated clutter, always had, and now she was wallowing in the stuff. As Faylene, the housekeeper she could no longer afford, would have said, “You buttered your bread, now lie in it.”
Hmm…alone, or with company?
