Moonlight in the Morning (Edilean 6)

“A surgical gown.”

“I love those things! No backs to them.”

She laughed. “You’re horrible, you know that?”

“Sometimes I am. I better go to bed. My plane leaves very early. Will you miss me?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I will.”

“Anything I can bring you back from Miami?”

“How about one of those muscle guys from the beach?”

“How about if I buy you a new bikini and you model it for me?”

“That’s possible. Can I swim in your pond?”

“You can swim in my bathtub. With me.”

Jecca laughed. “Good night, Cupid.”

“Good night, Psyche.”

Smiling, she clicked off her phone and snuggled down under the covers. Yes, she was going to miss him.

Jecca awoke early the next morning and she felt full of energy. She told herself it was because she was at last going to get to work on her watercolors, but what was in her mind was seeing Tristan’s house, and the playhouse.

She didn’t want Mrs. Wingate and Lucy to be suspicious, so she kept herself calm during breakfast. She scrambled eggs with green peppers while Lucy cooked sausages. Mrs. Wingate made toast and set the table.

Jecca didn’t want to appear to be in a hurry, but the meal seemed to go on forever. When she got out the door, her portable art kit under her arm, she practically ran to the path to Tristan’s house.

It wasn’t difficult to find the playhouse. The path to it had been wo st hdiv heighrn down by generations of Aldredges, and Jecca hurried down it.

Her first sight of the playhouse was a mixture of delight and horror. The delight was from the beautiful design of the building. It was like a miniature Victorian house, with carved posts on the tiny porch, cutout trim along the steep roof. There was no mistaking that the little house came from a different era.

Her horror came because she was Joe Layton’s daughter. When she was little, she would go with her father to construction sites to deliver loads of lumber and supplies. She’d followed her dad, her hands full of crayons and an old toy bunny rabbit, and listen to the men go over whatever was wrong with a building. By the time Jecca was nine, she could look at a house and tell what needed to be repaired.

Right now she saw that the pretty little playhouse was in desperate need of renovation. A gutter was loose, roof tiles were cracked, windows needed caulking, the door hinges were about to come out. And unless she missed her guess, there was dry rot in a couple of places.

Besides the work that needed to be done, the paint was cracked and peeling. It was down to the bare wood in places.

“Not good,” she said as she turned the knob of the front door and ducked to go in.

She was glad to see that the inside was much better than the outside, but it still needed work. Long ago, the interior walls had been painted a lovely cream color, but they now showed the marks of years of use. There were a few pieces of child-size furniture, all of it homemade, with faded, worn slipcovers that someone inexperienced had run up on a sewing machine. “Lucy could do better,” she said.

For a moment, Jecca stood just inside the door, looking at the place and remembering how Tristan had led her through it in the darkness.

When she glanced around, she saw a couple of lamps. Turning, she saw a light switch beside the door, and she laughed. If he’d wanted to, Tris could have lit up the place for their meeting.

Jecca was glad he hadn’t.

To the right was a doorway. Again she ducked before entering a small room that had a child-size bed built into an offset in the wall. It was like a large window seat and covered with a spread that was threadbare from years of use and washing.

For a moment all Jecca could think about were the hours she’d spent snuggled up with Tristan on that bed. Such sweet memories!

She went back outside to walk around the playhouse. It really did need quite a bit of work before it could be painted. Even then, the old layers would have to be removed, scraped, and sanded, before new paint could be applied.

Jecca opened her art box, removed her camera, and began to take photos. She took some long shots of the building, but she also made many close-ups of places that needed work done.