The Other Side - J. D. Robb [134]
“Yes, ma’am, and I’ll be right here waitin’ on it.” He stepped back with his hands low on his hips. His fifty-year-old beer belly looked taut under the green T-shirt he wore with an unbuttoned blue-plaid cotton shirt. He was shorter than her five-foot-nine frame and looked every bit as much a demolition man as she did a financial analyst. Well, she at least hoped the distinction was that clear. No offense to Mr. Brown, but she’d worked very hard to get where she was, and she liked to think that people could tell merely by looking at her that she was diligent and good at what she did.
“I hope you’ll be doing more than just waiting. Contrary to what you think, this house has no magical powers, and it’s not going to simply fall down on its own when it feels like it.” She slipped the strap of her purse up high on her shoulder, put the key in the lock, and gave it a hard twist. There was no give inside, so she rattled the knob a little and twisted more gently the second time.
Mr. Brown was watching intently with a patient but smug expression on his face, and it was making her edgy. She realigned her body and the strap of her purse so he couldn’t see, then shook the knob twice, good and hard, before twisting the key—this time in the opposite direction.
Truly. She didn’t have the time or the energy for this. A scream of frustration started to build in her throat.
“What about oil? Have you tired oiling the lock? Maybe it just needs lubricating.”
“I did, but I’m happy to do it again for you, ma’am.”
“Please. Call me M.J. Ma’am is so . . . my mother.” Her cringe was barely visible.
“Yes, ma—” He caught himself. “Oil’s out in my truck. I’ll be right back.”
“Fine.”
She left the key in the lock and turned to watch him bound down the steps of the wide front porch and lope across the unkempt lawn toward his truck.
It was a warm, muggy night in August, and the fireflies were still active—jumping, frolicking as if at play. She glanced down at the top step where it met the tall white support pillar, where she’d spent hundreds of blissful hours as a child watching them before bedtime, dreaming of fairies and fantastic wonderlands where she reigned as Princess Ariel.
She was almost thirty-three now, and those memories seemed a hundred years old.
So did the paint on the pillars and porch, she ruminated in distaste. Only the ornate cast-iron gate remained of the fence that once encircled the front yard; weeds had choked out what few flowers remained in the beds along the sidewalk. She thought she ought to feel bad that her mother had fallen into such straits at the end of her life, but she didn’t—it had been her mother’s choice.
There were track marks crisscrossing the front lawn from some monster machine Mr. Brown had loaded up and sent elsewhere to work until he gained cooperation from the house . . . that’s what he’d said, cooperation from the house, like it was something alive.
She looked away from the yard, and because there was nothing else to do while she waited for Mr. Brown, she reached out and rattled the key in the lock again—and the door sprang open.
“Oh, for . . . Mr. Brown, I have it,” she called over her shoulder as she stepped inside. A sigh of aggravation turned to a hacking cough full of dust. Aside from a slightly thicker layer of grime on everything, the place hadn’t changed since her last visit a few days after her mother’s sudden passing.
The dark wood floors and faded wallpaper in the hall harkened back to a time when fern fronds were in fashion. And while both the front living room and the small parlor on the other side held proof of her mother’s attempts at modernizing the décor, the stark white walls had long ago gone grunge brown . . . a not-too-bad basic color, except that everything in both rooms had gone grunge with them.
Yet it was the smell of the place that kept her rooted in the doorway and feeling oddly anxious. A musty smell, of course, as one would expect in a house of