Windswept (8 page)

E and his plans notwithstanding, however, I said a special prayer at services in our St. Gregory Episcopal Church last Sunday. To have a child of our own--heaven!

***

Present Day

Monday, May 21

Dressed in jeans and an SMU T-shirt and with a car stuffed to the brim, Barrett was on the road by seven and reached Houston’s outer beltway around eleven-thirty. She thought she had made good time--until she became embroiled in a massive traffic jam on Interstate 45 just above the North Loop. It was one in the afternoon before, warm and frazzled, she drove across the bridge to the Jamison house.

The home and surrounding greenery looked like a cool oasis after the traffic, heat, and grime of the freeways. She parked her car where she had on her previous visit, climbed out and stretched. She couldn’t help but grin widely as she walked up the three low, wide steps. She was actually here, the Windswept papers were inside, and her future was hers to control.

Gonzales met her at the entrance. “We are so happy to see you, Dr. Browning. Mr. Jamison is out of town, as you know, so I am welcoming you in his name. Please leave your things in the car and I will take them to your room.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Gonzales. I’m happy to be here also. The box in the car marked ‘Office Supplies’ should go in the office.”

“Very good.” He indicated the woman standing at his side. “This is my wife, Eva. Eva, why don’t you take Dr. Browning to her room so she can freshen up? If you’ll give me your car keys,
maestra
, I’ll put the car in the garage when I’m done.”

Barrett smiled at the term
maestra
, Spanish for teacher and a title of respect. She gave Gonzales the keys and turned to his wife. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Gonzales.”

“And you,
maestra
. Please call me Eva. If you’ll follow me . . .” Eva, a short, roly-poly, cheerful-looking woman, led the way up the stairs at the back of the entry and along the balcony over the dining room.

They went past an open door through which Barrett saw a bedroom. She followed Eva into the next and last room on the end of the house. The beautifully appointed guest room with its own attached bath contained an alcove seating area with a comfortable-looking chair and a television set.

“Lunch is ready,
maestra
,” Eva said after showing Barrett where the towels were. “I thought you might like a light, cold meal after your long trip, so I prepared a shrimp salad with lime and avocado. Perhaps with some iced tea?”

“Sounds wonderful,” Barrett replied. “I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

“Just come down to the dining room whenever you’re ready. Oh, and please let me know if there is any type of food you don’t eat or if there is anything special you would like me to prepare.”

“I’m not picky. Whatever you and Mr. Gonzales are eating will be fine.”

“I was planning on a chicken dish tonight.”

“Chicken will be fine,” she reassured Eva.

“
Muy bien
,” the housekeeper said. “Just come to the dining room when you’re ready.”

Barrett stopped to study her surroundings. She was relieved to see the room did not continue the relentless hard starkness of the contemporary living room. The conventionally styled furniture and the earth-tone colors in the walls, carpet, and bedspread were more soothing to her eyes than the vivid colors below, but the space was not without its own drawbacks. She blinked as she realized the bland chamber could have been a room in a high-class hotel. So far the only warmth she’d seen in the house had been in Davis’s office or around the pool.

The coldness didn’t matter, she told herself as she walked into the bathroom. She didn’t need coziness. She had Windswept.

She washed up quickly and hurried downstairs. She was ravenous.

The screen dividing the dining room from the foyer had been folded together to provide entry. A long, black-glass table ran down the middle of the room under a chandelier Barrett could only describe to herself as a chrome-bar-and-light-bulb contraption. Against the back wall, a stretch of black marble mirrored its opposite in the living room, but where that one had a fireplace and a painting, this one held what looked to be an iridescent crystal sculpture hanging from the ceiling to the floor. It wasn’t a solid piece of glass, but looked almost as if it had been woven, with space between the threads. It seemed to ripple like a cloth tapestry also.

Eva came in through a door under the balcony with a plate and a large glass of iced tea. Barrett sat down at the lone place setting and Eva put the food in front of her.

“There’s plenty more salad,
maestra
. Please, enjoy your lunch.”

“Thank you. It looks delicious.”

Barrett took a bite and couldn’t help humming at the taste. The tender shrimp, piquant lime, and smooth avocado offset each other delightfully, and the flour tortillas adding the necessary base line. She’d have to ask Eva for the recipe.

She looked around as she ate. The room was large, and the table quite long. This space felt just as cold as the living room across the way, and it was not from the air conditioning. She wished she had brought a book to read, as she always did when eating alone. Even the presence of taciturn Davis would be an improvement. There was nothing she could do about it at the moment, however, so she applied herself to the meal.

Just as she decided she couldn’t eat another bite, Gonzales came into the room. “I have unloaded your car and placed it in the garage. Here are the keys and additional keys to the kitchen and the front doors.” He handed her the sets and continued, “Please allow me to instruct you how the alarm system works. Eva and I reside in the apartment over the garage, and we always set the system when we leave the house, usually between seven and eight, and you will need to disarm and reset it if you go out or return later than that.”

“Certainly,” Barrett said and followed him to the front door.

After she could turn the system on and off to her and Gonzales’ satisfaction, Barrett unpacked her clothes and toiletries, then picked up her laptop case, iPod and docking station, and briefcase and went down to her new office. She felt the tug of the boxes as she went past the conference room door, but she resisted. “Be strong,” she ordered out loud. “Be disciplined. Settle in first so you’ll be organized.”

A closet held supplies like paper and staples, boxes of white cotton gloves for document handling, a stack of new, still flattened, acid-free storage boxes and several cartons of acid-free folders, as she had requested. She’d transfer the records to them as she went along. The small round table and chairs by the windows offered a comfortable alternative to sitting at the desk. The L-shaped desk was clean, the computer boasted a good-sized flat-screen monitor, and the chair was ergonomic, thank goodness.

She peeked into Davis’s office. Peggy Murphy had told her he would be on a trip when she arrived. The news brought both a twinge of regret and one of relief. Regret . . . what? She wouldn’t have an audience to astound with her expertise? He wouldn’t be here to remove the awkwardness of being in a stranger’s house without his presence? She wasn’t sure where the feeling came from.

She knew, however, exactly where the relief originated. She could get to work without distraction. She’d have the papers all to herself. She wouldn’t have to deal with his silences and intent, enigmatic looks.

Or with any possible attraction to the man. Her inexplicable reaction in his downtown office had not repeated itself when she said good-bye at his house the following afternoon. Sure, his handshake had been warm, his smile transforming. His low voice had sounded more reassuring than hard. He’d actually spoken in full paragraphs, declarative sentences, not interrogatory ones.

True, his statements had more of a “laying down the law” flavor than any beseeching of her to please catalog the collection, but it was to be expected. Edgar had done no less; in fact the grandson had sounded remarkably like his grandfather when setting her parameters.

At least they hadn’t parted with a meeting of the eyes that sizzled her blood. She wasn’t sure how she would have handled herself if something similar had occurred. She’d been so high from making the deal her blood was already bubbling. It would have taken a powerful reaction to sidetrack her from her zeal for the papers. She probably wouldn’t have noticed anything less overt than his grabbing her and kissing her.

What? Kissing her? Where did she get such a notion?

Shaking her head at her screwy thought processes, Barrett turned back to her desk. Enough lollygagging.

It only took a few minutes to unpack her few supply items and boot the computer. An envelope from Peggy Murphy sat on the keyboard and held complete instructions for passwords, network access, and the like to access the Davis office network. Everything worked perfectly.

“Done. Showtime,” she announced to the world and pushed back from the desk with a grin. “Now, finally, Windswept!”

She opened the door to the conference room and, for a moment, simply stood in the doorway gloating at her good fortune. She decided first to open a couple of the boxes just to see what state the records were in. Then she could be more systematic.

The gloating turned quickly to frustration, however, once she looked into several containers. As far as she could tell, the contents of each box were mostly coherent, with files in a rough chronological or alphabetical order--where there were folders at all. One held large envelopes with string ties, another held bundles of letters tied together with ribbons, some were filled with what looked like shoe boxes. To make the situation worse, the receptacles were stacked in totally random order and the labels were not helpful, or necessarily truthful. She couldn’t even find the boxes she had worked on over the past holidays.

She stood back to consider her options. If she wanted to catalog the records in an coherent way and build her knowledge as she went along, instead of jumping from, say, 1880 to 1920 and back to 1845, she would need to do some sorting. “Looks like you’re going to get some exercise, Barrett,” she sighed.

In the supply cabinet she found some felt-tip markers, tape and paper. She opened the first carton on the left, decided quickly how to describe the contents, wrote notes and its dates on the paper and taped it to the outside. She hauled the carton into the hall as a starting point, and went back for the second one. She had been working for about an hour, grouping cartons by date in the hall, when Gonzales appeared in the door.

“Dr. Browning, what are you doing? You shouldn’t be doing heavy lifting.” He sounded horrified.

“It’s all right, Mr. Gonzales.” She blew a curl out of her eye as she placed an 1880 carton with its companions. “This is the only way I can organize these boxes. I’m quite strong, really. I would love some more iced tea, though, if there’s any available.”

“Right away, and I’ll bring Ricardo to help you.”

“It really won’t be necessary. I prefer doing this by myself.”

His expression was adamant. “Please, Dr. Browning. What would Mr. Jamison say if he saw you doing all this manual labor? He would blame me for not taking good care of you. His instructions were very strict. ‘She should want for nothing,’ he said.”

Barrett gave in, not that it was much of a struggle. She didn’t want to get Mr. Gonzales in trouble, and she knew her back and legs were going to start protesting this unfamiliar exercise pretty quickly.

Gonzales returned within minutes with a large pitcher of iced tea, glasses, and Ricardo, a burly young man with grass stains on his jeans. Barrett heard him give Ricardo instructions in Spanish not to let the
maestra
lift so much as one box.

When Gonzales introduced Ricardo, Barrett shook hands with the young man and spoke to him in her own fluent Spanish, explaining her organizational method. Gonzales and Ricardo both blinked, Ricardo smiled shyly, and Gonzales left the room with the admonition to dial “3” on the house phone line if she needed anything else.

By five o’clock, Barrett and Ricardo had made a sizable dent in the cartons, Barrett looking and writing, Ricardo lifting and carrying. She called a halt to their exertions just as Gonzales came in.

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

“Yes, we’ve accomplished quite a bit. Would it be possible for Ricardo to help tomorrow?”

“You have his help as long as you need it,
maestra
,” Gonzales replied.

“I don’t want to take him away from his regular duties,” she explained.

“Please do not worry,” Gonzales said. “Ricardo’s duties are what I decide they are. We are both happy to be of whatever use we can. Dinner will be ready at seven.”

The lonely dining room displayed another aspect of its character in the evening light, Barrett thought later as she finished Eva’s delicious roast chicken with an apple-raisin-walnut stuffing, green beans with almonds, rice and freshly baked rolls. Over their tops, the chandelier’s light bulbs had small chrome hoods which focused all the light downward to concentrate on the table. A dinner party with a colorful centerpiece and beautiful people would bring the room alive, she hoped, but until then, brrrrrr.

The glass sculpture climbing the back wall compounded the effect. It did more than glow or sparkle. Hidden spotlights in the ceiling far above shone directly on it. The glass “threads” had sharp angles and facets, and the light reflecting off these polished planes changed as one walked around the table. The result made the sculpture seem to move, to ripple down the wall like an icy waterfall.

It was an interesting effect, she decided, but it reinforced the feeling of coldness in the room, and she was glad she did not have to look at it while she ate. Thinking of eating . . . she and Eva had to come to a meeting of the minds about how much she could eat. She couldn’t spend the next two months feasting without looking like the biggest Windswept box at the end.

Then she grinned to herself. On the other hand, being waited on was certainly a pleasure, a seductive one, almost. Certainly easy to get used to. She opened the book she had brought with her and read while she finished her meal--including a piece of lemon meringue pie.