When You Walked In

She looked up with a frown, saw a darkened spot on the ceiling, and had just enough time to get out the words “What the hell—” before the torrent hit her.

The water carried with it chunks of horse-hair plaster from the ceiling and an evil tide of filth that had collected in the rafters. It hit her in a stinky mess, splashing all over the desk and the floor in a great whoosh of noise. When the torrent ceased, she took her glasses off and lifted her arms, watching brown rivulets drip off her skin.

It smelled, she thought, like bat guano.

The sound of pounding footsteps heading her way was neither reassuring nor welcome. She shot up from the desk and shut the door to the office.

“Hey, Frankie, what happened?” George’s booming voice sounded characteristically confused. He’d worked for her for about six weeks and sometimes the only difference she could find between him and an inanimate object was that occasionally he blinked.

In the kitchen that serviced the White Caps dining room, George was supposed to be the fry-guy, the sous-chef, the pâtissier and the busboy. What he did do was take up space. At six feet seven inches, and tilting the scale at well over three hundred pounds, he was a big oaf of a man. And she’d have fired him on day two except he had a good heart, he needed a job and a place to stay, and he was nice to Frankie’s grandmother.

“Frankie, you okay?”

“I’m fine, George.” Which was her standard reply to the question she despised. “You better go make sure the bread’s cut for the baskets, okay?”

“Yeah, sure. Okay, Frankie.”

She closed her eyes. The sound of dripping, dirty water reminded her that not only did she have to pull off yet another magic trick to balance the account for the month, she had to clean up her office.

At least she had the Shop-Vac to use for the latter.

Much to her dismay, White Caps had financial problems she couldn’t seem to solve no matter how hard she worked. Housed in the old Moorehouse mansion, on the shores of Saranac Lake in the Adirondack Mountains, the ten-bedroom B & B had been struggling for the past five years. People weren’t traveling as much as they used to, so overnight guests were fewer and fewer and there wasn’t enough local traffic in the dining room to cover the costs of the operation.

It wasn’t just a general reduction in tourist trade that was the problem. The house itself was part of the reason the reservations were drying up. Once a gracious summer home from the Federal Period, it needed a major overhaul. Band-Aid fixes such as a fresh coat of paint or some pretty window boxes could no longer hide the fact that dry rot was eating up the porches, the eaves were rotting and the floors were beginning to bow.

And every year it was something else. Another part of the roof to fix. A boiler to be replaced.

She glared at the exposed pipes over her desk.

Plumbing that needed to be rehauled.

Frankie wadded up the spreadsheet and threw it in the trash, thinking she’d prefer to have been born into a family that had never had anything rather than one that had gradually lost everything.

And as she picked some of the plaster out of her hair, she decided the house wasn’t the only thing getting older and less attractive.

At the age of thirty-one, she felt more like fifty-one. She’d been working seven days a week for a decade and couldn’t remember when she’d last had her hair done or bought a new piece of clothing, other than work uniforms. Her fingernails were chewed to the quick, her hands shook all the time and her diet consisted of coffee, breadbasket leftovers and more coffee.

“Frankie?”

Her sister’s voice was subdued as it came through the door and Frankie had to struggle not to scream back, Don’t ask me if I’m okay!

“Are you okay?”

She squeezed her eye lids closed. “I’m fine, Joy.”

There was a long silence. She imagined her sister leaning into the door, one pale hand against the wood, a worried expression on her perfectly beautiful, Pre-Raphaelite face.

“Joy, where’s Grand-Em?” Frankie knew that asking about their grandmother, Emma, would channel the concern somewhere else.

“She’s reading the telephone book.”

Good. That was known to quiet the dementia at least for a little while.

In the pause that followed, Frankie stood up and started to grab hunks of plaster off the floor and the desk.

“Ah, Frankie?”

“Yes?”

The reply was so quiet, she stopped cleaning up and strained to hear Joy’s voice through the wood panels. “Speak up, for God’s sakes, I can’t hear you.”

“Ah, Chuck called.”

Frankie pitched some plaster into the trash can, nearly knocking the thing over from the force.

“Don’t tell me he’s going to be late again. This is Friday of the Fourth of July weekend.” Which meant with the way things had gone last season, they would probably have a couple of people come for dinner from town. With two sets of guests in the house, there could be nine or ten expecting food. The number was nothing like it used to be, but those people needed to be fed.

Joy’s voice became muffled again so Frankie threw open the door. “What?”

Her sister took a quick step back, cornflower blue eyes stretching wide as Frankie brushed a wet length of brown hair out of her face.

“Don’t say one word, Joy, unless it’s about the message from Chuck. Not one word.”

Her sister started talking fast and Frankie got the gist. Chuck and his girlfriend Melissa. Getting married. Moving to Las Vegas. Not coming in, tonight or ever.

Frankie sagged against the doorjamb, feeling her wet clothes and her apprehension cling to her like a second skin. When Joy reached out, Frankie shrugged off the concern and snapped to attention.

“Okay, first, I’m going to go take a shower and then here’s what we’re going do.”

Lucille’s life ended not with a whimper but a bang on a back road somewhere in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.

Going seventy miles an hour, the 1987 SAAB 9000 blew a gasket and that was game over. With a burst of noise as loud as a gunshot, she relinquished her usefulness with protest and wheezed to a stop.

Nate Walker, her first and only owner, let out a curse. When he tried the key, he wasn’t surprised when the response came from the starter, not the engine.

“Aww, Lucy honey. Don’t be like this.” He caressed the steering wheel but knew damn well that begging wasn’t going to fix whatever had made that kind of noise.

It was probably hydraulic lift time.

Opening the door, he got out and stretched. He’d been driving for four hours straight, heading from New York City to Montreal, but this was hardly the kind of break he had in mind. Eyeing the road, which was just a little asphalt and some yellow paint away from being a footpath, he figured his first move had to be getting Lucille out of the way of traffic.

Not that he had to rush. He’d seen one other car in the last twenty minutes. Looking around, there was only thick forest, more of the thin road and the gathering darkness. Silence pressed in on him.

Putting Lucille in Neutral, he braced his shoulder against the doorjamb and pushed, steering through the window with his right hand. When she was safely on the rough, scratchy grass at the side of the road, he popped the hood, got out his flashlight and gave her a look-see. As Lucille had aged, he’d gained a proficiency in auto repair, but a quick inspection told him he might be out of his league. There was smoke coming out of her and a hissing noise that suggested she was leaking something.

He shut the hood and leaned back against it, looking up at the sky.

Night was coming on fast, and being far to the north it was cool even in July. He didn’t know how much walking it was going to take to reach the next town so he figured he better be prepared for a hike. Going around to the front seat, he threw on his battered leather jacket and collected some provisions. Stuffing the bottle of water he’d been nursing and the remnants of the turkey grinder he’d had for lunch into his backpack, he reckoned he had enough to last him.