June (3 page)

He sprinted back up the path like she was saving his life. Even though she’d essentially become a hermit, Cassie could still read people like a book. This man coming toward her with a furrowed brow was stressed out. And much closer to her age—couldn’t have been a day over thirty—than she’d guessed when she spotted his professional-looking shoulders from behind.

He mounted the groaning wooden steps. Her name trembled out of his mouth with a question at the end. He pocketed the smartphone and rushed across the porch. The phone inside the office stopped ringing; the grackles nesting to the left of the front door squawked to fill the silence.

Sunlight ricocheted off the tiles that still remained on the Two Oaks porch. They were gray now, and wiggled in their settings, like diamonds in an inherited wedding band. Still, even more than a hundred years old, they were lustrous enough to reflect the sun’s beams and make this man approaching appear to glow. Cassie lifted her hand to block the glare. He’d been the one calling since yesterday, she understood in a wave of mistrustfulness; the house phone had stopped ringing the moment he pressed end on his cell.

“I’m Nick Emmons.”

His hand was out for a shake, but his eyes darted everywhere but her, assessing. She followed his gaze up to the dry rot along the crossbeams of the roof, then to the chipping column at the porch’s western corner. She felt as she had in the hospital, holding her grandmother’s wilted hand, wanting to shout, “This isn’t her! You don’t even know her!” to the well-intentioned nurses, with their charts and machines. All he saw here was a wreck. She narrowed her eyes at this stranger, imagined his foot breaking through one of the ancient floorboards that lined the porch’s tile. He’d be trapped waist-high, out of reach of the doorbell. She’d steal his smartphone and go back to bed and blame the whole thing on a house with a mind of its own.

But now a breeze carried the scent of him, which was a bit like woodsmoke and a bit like Speed Stick, the green kind, the kind Cassie’s first crush, the high school student who’d mowed the lawn in Columbus, had worn. Here stood a good-smelling, impeccably dressed man, washed in the scent of Cassie’s early erotic fantasies, the corners of his mouth now pulling up at the sight of her; she couldn’t pretend she didn’t like the way the hushed blue of his tie played off the gray of the suit, or how a cowlick detoured a sprig of hair off his forehead.

“This place is amazing,” he said, and she found herself delighted by surprise.

But it was best to rip off the Band-Aid. “You from the bank?” she asked, pulling the bedspread tight, enjoying the nubble of chenille under her fingertips.

“Eighteen ninety-five? ’Ninety-six?” He sized up the semicircle of yellow brick that framed the front door. “Was this the original entrance? Never seen anything like it.”

“Uh,” Cassie said, then repeated her question about the bank, which he patently refused to answer. He tapped his foot against the slackened tiles, then turned to take in the view from the front door; she guessed that was his Ford Fiesta out front. A pickup pulled by, the only glimpse of the driver a tattooed arm out the open window accompanied by the twang of the country station. Nick surveyed the roof of the porch again before turning back and asking about the landline. Did she ever pick up? Why didn’t she have an answering machine? Did she have a cell? E-mail? She was incredibly hard to get in touch with, did she know that? Cassie watched this Nick Emmons unconsciously pull his cell out twice, both times punching in his secret code, opening up e-mail and text, before switching it off and slipping it back into its home, the pocket over his heart. He was a man who would not hold still.

Cassie thought—and told herself not to think—of Jim. Jim, with his oft-disconnected landline, depending on how tight on funds he was that month. Jim, who, when everyone else went wireless, and Cassie mocked and cajoled him to join the modern age, had been resolute. Jim, who never shaved, and was close enough to fifty that she’d never dared ask how many years he had on her, who didn’t own a suit, and showered only when absolutely necessary. Cassie didn’t exactly miss him, and she knew that ending things had been the right, if painful choice. But with the arrival of this well-dressed, good-smelling, nosy, busy man, she found her mind retreating to that unmade bed on the floor of Jim’s studio, his paint-stained fingertips playing scales up her spine.

“What do you want?” she asked bluntly, trying to push through this strange fog that seemed to have dulled her sensibility.

“Oh.” Nick’s smile faltered. “Right.” He cleared his throat and lost his charge. “Could I come in for a bit?”

They both saw at once that this would not be nearly enough to earn him entry. He tried again. “I’m here about your—an—inheritance.”

So he was from the bank after all. Cassie felt her jaw clench. She wished she had some clothes on for this fight, but if the time to have it was now, so be it. “That money is mine fair and square. She left it to me. I know the house needs a lot of help, but she owned it outright, which means I own it outright now, and I may not look like I know much about money and houses and that kind of thing, but I do know you can’t just take it from me until I’ve had sufficient time to—”

He waved his hand to stop her right there. “I don’t know anything about that. I’m here about money you’ve just, well, as of yesterday, you’ve inherited from someone—a relative?”—he seemed to be having a wrestling match with his own words, as if every one he uttered was up for debate—“someone”—he settled for that safe word, nodding diligently over it—“someone I’m not sure you’ve met…” He peered over her shoulder, into the darkness of the foyer, then tilted his head as he met her eyes again. He looked surprised when their gazes matched, as if she’d scalded him. “I’d really love to come in.” He cleared his throat. “To fill you in.” He gained confidence, rivering his fingers over the brass filigree that lay around the doorbell, then looking back at her with unbridled enthusiasm. “I had no idea you live in such a treasure. This should be on the register.” She frowned. He reined himself in. “Can I…can I come in? It’s important.”

No, she thought, no, you can’t, I’ll be the one who decides what’s important. But maybe the house wanted him, because, before Cassie said yes, she knew she was going to say it. When a gentleman came calling, you learned his business over a pitcher of lemonade served in the front parlor; that had been her grandmother’s way.

“I don’t have anything on,” Cassie said. A quick blush touched Nick’s cheeks, just as Cassie caught the scent of him again. A third note, something like juniper, hit high in her nasal passages, where it would linger. She clutched the bedspread. She felt her face grow hot, unexpectedly hot. She’d meant to say, or should have meant to say, something appropriate, like “Fine; just give me a minute.” She turned abruptly in to the house. Blind in the dark foyer, she waded through the snowdrift of mail, cringing at the crinkle of paper under the soles of her feet. The pile of correspondence had reached an untenable state; she could see this clearly now that Nick Emmons had followed her inside.

She reached for the banister just as her eyes adjusted. An inheritance, from a relative? But it didn’t have to do with Two Oaks? What could that mean? A mistake, most likely; she didn’t have any relatives to speak of. Or maybe it was some kind of scam. Maybe Nick Emmons was a stalker, someone who smelled just like Aaron Wilson-Myers precisely because he knew Cassie would go weak in the knees for a man who smelled like Aaron Wilson-Myers, and he was soundlessly slipping up the stairs behind her. At the landing now, she glanced back in alarm, but no, there Nick was, just where she’d left him, turning in wonder at the vast foyer above him, at the curved pocket doors of the round office, at the brass lion’s head on the front doorplate, as though he’d never been anywhere so beautiful, and Cassie felt unexpectedly flattered and undeniably proud.

Cassie dressed from the dirty pile that had been growing like mold around the outskirts of her bedroom. Once decent, she pushed the weeks’ worth of unwashed detritus into the wardrobe, and the rest of it to the far side of her bed, just in case Nick happened to peek in. She laughed at her strange logic. Why would he ever just peek in? Then she made the bed. Why was she making the bed? Why did she feel the need to sniff her armpit and dab on Secret? She was not going to sleep with Nick Emmons, a man she did not know, a man with a message about some mysterious inheritance. She went to the mirror and pulled her hair into a greasy ponytail.

Instead of heading back down the master staircase, Cassie padded across the open upstairs hall, lit by the three fleur-de-lised stained-glass windows in yellow, grass, and rose. She passed three of the home’s ample bedrooms, then turned in to the tight, dark passageway that led, to the left, toward the servant hall and stairs, and, straight ahead, into the fourth, underfurnished bedroom.

Into the ruddy servant hall she went. The red pine that lined the walls reminded her, uncomfortably, of a coffin, especially as she glanced into the maid’s room and wondered what it must have been like to sleep every night in that tight box above the kitchen.

There’d been a black maid at Two Oaks once, if Cassie was remembering right. Cassie had seen a picture in one of her grandmother’s albums. The woman was very old, older looking than Cassie’s grandmother had been when she died, hunched and gnarled and skinny but dressed in an apron. To think of making an old lady cook and clean for you. “It was different then,” her grandmother had explained primly when Cassie asked. “She’d been at Two Oaks for years. Where would you have her go?” And Cassie had bitten her lip about rich, male racists; one never questioned her grandmother’s precious uncle Lem, even though he was sixty years gone.

At the lip of the stairs, Cassie leaned forward and listened for Nick. Nothing. She checked the window; the side street was empty, as it always was this time of day, just porches and lawns, everyone either at their jobs down at the plant or crocheting blankets in front of their morning shows. She wondered if anyone had taken notice of her gentleman caller. She supposed they couldn’t think any worse of her, the wayward granddaughter of St. Jude’s most upstanding citizen. Everyone knew that she hadn’t made it back in time to do much except sit by the old woman’s bedside. In the grocery store, or as they eyed her from their front porch swings, she resisted the urge to cry out that it wasn’t her fault; her grandmother had kept news of the brain cancer from her. But of course Cassie knew it ran deeper than that, that plenty of things were her fault, and even if she hadn’t delivered her grandmother to a painful, lonely death, she’d done plenty to contribute to the disappointing, lonely life that had immediately preceded it.

Cassie stepped down gingerly—the stairs were straight and simple, creaky but secret. She skipped the fourth, noisy step, wondering, as she did so, why she was hiding in her own home.

On the last step, Cassie leaned against the pine wall to listen. She could hear a murmur from the front of the house. That smartphone again. Her stomach snarled. She ducked into the tight hallway and then into the kitchen, thinking to grab herself a bite. But then she heard her grandmother’s inconvenient voice at the back of her mind: “Make every guest welcome.” Damn those hostess genes.

A jar of green olives stuffed with pimientos—into a white-ridged ramekin. A half-eaten bag of sour cream and onion potato chips that weren’t as damp as they might have been—into a cut-glass bowl. She sawed the mold off a hunk of cheddar that had been in the icebox for so long that she couldn’t remember buying it. Everything went onto the pressed melamine tray her grandmother had used for TV dinners. Cassie added a carafe of flat 7UP. At least it was cold.

The doorway connecting the kitchen to the rest of the house had always been divided in half all the way down to the doorsill; pine on the service side, oak for company. The tray rattled as Cassie stepped over that line into the foyer, the hollow rib cage at the center of the house, which connected the front door, straight ahead, to both the front and back parlors at Cassie’s one and four o’clocks respectively, to the kitchen straight behind her, then the dining room at seven, and, beside that, the master staircase soaring up past the stained-glass windows toward the two floors above. At Cassie’s nine o’clock, the foyer tapered out toward a side door that led underneath that overhangy thing where people had once waited for their horse-drawn carriages—her grandmother had called it something fancy she couldn’t for the life of her remember—and, finally, tucked beside the front door at her eleven o’clock, stood the architectural wonder of the house, a cylindrical office for which the infamous Uncle Lem had imported a curved mantelpiece and windows. By the time Cassie was in residence, the office’s curved doors were wedged halfway open, off their tracks; at least that wasn’t her fault.

No sign of Nick as she waded through the pile of mail, hoping not to spill the 7UP. Almost to the front door, starting to believe Nick might, in fact, be there to kill her, Cassie heard him sharply note, “Nick, calling for Max.” Then a pause. His voice was coming from the front parlor. “Yes, yes, I know, but he’ll have to come through me first.” Another pause. “Because that’s how she wants it.” Cassie turned in to the double-wide doorway just to the right of the front door and found Nick tucked, quite comfortably, into the corner of her grandmother’s yellow velvet davenport, the davenport that had moved to Columbus when the old woman came to care for Cassie, and then, once Cassie was off to college in New York, went back to its spot by the wide corner windows of her grandmother’s favorite room in the world, fluttering with lace curtains.

“There you are,” Cassie said as he begged off—“Have to call you back, Sarah”—drew his phone back from his ear, pressed end, and stood—a bygone, gentlemanly gesture.

“Sit,” Cassie commanded as she set the tray down on the busted footstool between them. She’d propped up the broken leg with two two-by-fours nailed together, which worked just fine as long as you didn’t move it.

His eyes danced over the ornate plasterwork that connected ceiling to walls. “Lemon Gray Neely,” he said, shaking his head with warmth, as if he loved the guy. “What a visionary. Can you imagine what it must have taken to get this neoclassical treasure designed and built in a little town like St. Jude in the nineteenth century?”

“Uh, how do you know about Lemon Gray Neely?”

He tapped his phone proudly. “Googled it. Not a whole lot of information, but at least a couple of hits.” Then he rubbed his hand along the dark wood of the doorway, taking in the oak mantelpiece inlaid with red tile and the grandfather clock at the edge of the room, which had clanged and ticked so loudly when Cassie moved in back in December that she’d let the pendulum wind down again.

Cassie allowed herself, for a moment, to see past the crumbling plaster, the spiderwebs spanning the corners, the dust bunnies gathered along the edges of the room. She saw what the place really looked like: shabby, yes, uncared for, sure, but undeniably majestic. She checked Nick again; he seemed genuinely awed.

But she wanted to know about this inheritance. She popped a chip into her mouth. It melted too quickly. She dragged the horribly uncomfortable floral armchair from in front of the fireplace, hoping the action would break Nick out of his reverie. He offered to help, but she waved him off, even though the thing weighed at least fifty pounds, all horsehair and mahogany. It dated from who knew when, and expelled dust when she plopped down in it.

She noticed him eyeing the olives. “Want some?”

“I had a shake on the plane.”

“The plane.” She lifted one eyebrow mysteriously. “The plane from where?”

He cleared his throat. There it was again—the apprehension she’d first noticed on the porch. “Los Angeles.”

“City of Angels!” It came out like an old lady would say it, which she usually didn’t care about; she’d accepted her fate. Still, she tried to modulate her voice. “A shake, huh? Like, chocolate, or…?”

“Spinach. Kale. Ginger.”

She lifted the olives and shook them in front of him. “Imagine the chemicals.”

He took one. Popped it in his mouth.

“So,” she said, after watching him eat a chip (small victories), “you mentioned an inheritance.”

A tiny frown formed between Nick Emmons’s groomed brows. He folded his hands before him, like a child playing businessman. “Do you know who Jack Montgomery is?”

A black-and-white head shot of a movie star from a different era floated to the surface of Cassie’s mind. In the picture, the man was leaning toward the camera ever so slightly, hands folded under his chin. He was handsome in an old-fashioned way, with a heavy, dark brow and brooding lips. Where had she seen that picture? It had been taken earlier than the other really famous photo that popped up in her mind’s eye: a full-color shot of him chewing at the end of a stalk of wheat, gazing out across an empty, golden field. That particular image was, Cassie knew, a still from that manly movie involving horseback riding, guns, a pretty girl, and plenty of ennui. A pre-Jim boy had taken her to a screening at Film Forum.
Absalom’s Ride
? But Jack Montgomery was primarily famous for being famous by the time Cassie was born; he was old, older than her grandmother.

“Jack Montgomery passed away three days ago,” Nick said. “Turns out he left everything to you.” He said that last sentence casually, but he watched her as he said it. “So I suppose you could say I’m here because of your grandmother. I’m here because of June.”