The Closer He Gets
In the overhead light she saw that the old porch had been torn down and the bones of raw lumber framed a new one. He really had been making progress.
“Got a lot done today,” he told her, turning his head to assess his progress. He sounded satisfied. “As long as the skies don’t open up, I’ll shingle the roof tomorrow and build railings.”
“It’s wonderful.” She’d have to drive by in daylight to better take in the effect, but she had seen enough to know he had an eye for design. “I love wide front porches. I thought about putting one on my house but I’m afraid it would look wrong.”
“I plan to hang a porch swing,” he said, stepping back to let her in. He added a careless, “Should help sell the house.”
A vicious slice of pain told her she hadn’t accepted the knowledge that he’d be moving on as well as she’d thought. Or...maybe, deep down inside, she had let herself think he’d change.
“God knows,” he continued, oblivious to the blow he’d struck, “I’m unlikely ever to use it. I sit on my butt in the patrol car too much of the time as it is.”
Somehow she managed to laugh. “You know, it might be good for you to slow down once in a while and rock a little.”
He gave her a wicked grin. “I prefer to do my rocking in bed. With you.”
Of course, she blushed.
He looked satisfied at that, too.
She admired the new refrigerator he’d bought, which had the freezer compartment on the bottom. It surprised her that he’d spent several hundred dollars extra for a feature like that on an appliance that would be staying with this house. Probably, she thought with another sharp reminder, he considered it a selling feature.
While he dished up dinner, she wandered down the hall to see if he’d started on the bathroom. He hadn’t, but when she stuck her head into the two empty bedrooms, she saw that he had stripped the wood floors. Her noise crinkled at a smell she hadn’t noticed until now, probably because whatever he was cooking had overcome it.
Dinner was simple: a salad and marinated chicken breasts over rice. While they ate, he told her about the police records he’d received concerning his sister’s murder.
“I can’t believe there isn’t more. What do you want to bet there’s a full box stowed somewhere down in the basement?”
“Why would they try to block you?” she asked.
He made a sound in his throat. “My best guess? Some of the old-timers are still around and maybe they know they didn’t do what they should have.”
“So what will you do next?”
“Apply pressure. Keep looking into the background of everyone I can think of who was around enough to have noticed Sheila and known where her bedroom was.”
Thinking about that felt like fingers crawling up Tess’s spine. “He’d have had to, wouldn’t he?” she realized. “He couldn’t exactly start flinging open bedroom doors until he found her.”
Zach grimaced. “Actually there were only two bedrooms downstairs, my parents’ and Sheila’s. Plus a bathroom, of course. Zach and I had the room upstairs.”
“Like the one in this house?” Did that bother him? she wondered. How much did this house resemble his childhood home?
“Bigger and open. It was pretty much an unfinished attic with steep stairs. One window.” His mouth curved. “Bran and I thought it was cool. Mom especially hated going up there. If we weren’t too noisy, we could stay up all night if we felt like it, and be as slobby as we wanted, too.”
Tess laughed. Two boys sharing might not have been as congenial a few years later when his brother wanted to sneak girls home to listen to then-popular hard rock but was stuck with his kid brother as a roommate. She decided not to mention that, though, given that he and Bran had never had the chance to find out what happened to their relationship when one was a teenager and the other still a boy.
“We wished we had a bathroom up there, though,” he said slowly, betraying his unease with the parallels between his childhood home and this house. Where he would be plumbing in a bathroom upstairs. Another selling point, he’d tell himself, but it had to be more.