Aurora 04 - The Julius House (5 page)

He took my hand and once again I felt that oozy, melty feeling that was disgustingly like a forties song.

“I heard from Barby,” he said, and I kept my face smiling happily with some effort. My future sister-in-law wasn’t my favorite part of the wedding package.

“She’s flying in two days before the wedding, and she accepted your mother’s offer of her guest bedroom. I’ll call your mother and thank her,” Martin said, making a note. “And Barrett called.”

Martin’s son called Martin about once a month, to recount his ups and downs on the road to an acting career in California.

“Is Barrett still going to be your best man?”

“He can’t make it.”

I stiffened, dropping all pretense at smiling.

“He has a part in a movie filming then,” Martin said expressionlessly. “He’s waited a long time for this part; he has lines and is on screen for several scenes . . . the hero’s best friend.”

We looked at each other.

“I’m sorry,” I said finally.

Martin looked over the heads of the other diners. I was glad we were in one of the little alcoves that make Beef ‘N More at least a tolerable place to eat.

“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” he said after a moment. The subject of Barrett was clearly closed.

I shifted my face around to “Expectant.”

“The garage apartment,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows even higher.

“I have a friend who just came into town from Florida. He lost his job. He and his wife are very capable people. I wondered—if you didn’t mind—if they could have the garage apartment.”

“Of course,” I said. I’d never met a friend of Martin’s, an old friend. He had made a few connections locally, mostly at the Athletic Club, upper-management men like himself. “You knew him from—?”

“Vietnam,” he said.

“So what’s his name?”

“Shelby. Shelby Youngblood. I thought . . . with all the renovation ... it might be nice to have someone else on the spot out at the house. Shelby will probably work out at Pan-Am Agra in shipping and receiving, but Angel, his wife, could be there when he’s not.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling I’d missed something important.

“When I found out Barrett couldn’t come,” Martin said, almost as an afterthought, “I called your stepfather, and he’s agreed to be my best man.”

I smiled with genuine pleasure. In many ways, it was easier to marry an older man who was used to fending for himself. “That was a good idea,” I said, knowing John must have been pleased to be asked.

We parted in the parking lot. He took off back to work, and I was going to my favorite paint/carpet/wallpaper store, Total House, to start the Julius place on its road to becoming our house. But halfway there, I pulled over to the curb and sat staring ahead, my window open for the cool fresh air.

Martin, in his “mysterious” mode, had put one over on me.

Who the hell was this Shelby Youngblood? What kind of woman was his wife? What sort of job in Florida had he lost, and how did he know where to find Martin? I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, wondering.

Probably this was the
downside
of marrying an older man who was used to fending for himself. He also was not used to having to explain himself. And yet Martin deserved to keep his past life a secret, I thought confusedly; I was hardly telling
him
all... No! I had told him everything that might make a difference to our life together. I wasn’t wanting to know the names of his sexual partners in the past years, which of course he should keep to himself. But I had a right, didn’t I, a right to know—what? What was really frightening me?

But we hadn’t known each other that long, I told myself. We had plenty of time for Martin to tell me whatever heavy and grim passages from his past he wanted me to know.

I was
going to marry Martin.
I started my car and pulled back into the modest stream of traffic that was Lawrence-ton’s lunch-hour rush.

Because really, trickled on a tiny cold relentless voice in the very back of my mind, really, if you asked him and he told you, you might learn something that would force you to cancel the wedding.

The prospect of being without him was so appalling, I just couldn’t risk it.

At the second stoplight, I swept this all neatly under my mental carpet as prewedding jitters and took a right turn to Total House.

There I made a few salesmen very, very happy.

* * *

I met Martin at the Episcopal church, St. James, that night for our fourth premarital counseling session with Father Aubrey Scott. The two men were standing out in the churchyard talking when I arrived—Martin shorter, more muscular than Aubrey, more intense. It felt odd walking over to them under their scrutiny; Aubrey had been my escort for several months and we had been rather fond (though never more than that) of each other. If they were asked to describe me, I suddenly thought, they would describe totally different people. I stowed that thought away to chew at later.

Martin had met me when I was dating Aubrey, and consequently always felt extra possessive when Aubrey was around, I’d noticed. Now, he slid his arm around me as I joined them, while keeping their desultory conversation going.

“—the Julius house?” Aubrey was saying in some surprise.

I looked up, way up, at his mildly handsome face with its carefully groomed dark mustache.

“Her wedding present,” Martin said simply.

“Quite a gift,” Aubrey said. “But, Roe, won’t it bother you?”

“What?” I asked, deliberately obtuse.

“The missing family. I’ve been in Lawrenceton long enough to hear the story, several times.

Though I’m sure it’s gotten embroidered over the years. Can there really have been hot food still on the table when the mother came over from the garage apartment?”

“I don’t know, I hadn’t heard that particular twist,” I said.

“And it won’t make you nervous?” Aubrey persisted.

“It’s a wonderful house,” I said. “It makes me happy just to walk in the door.”

“Emily would be too nervous to stay an hour.”

Aubrey always had to drag Emily Kaye into the conversation. I figured the sexual dynamics went something like this: Aubrey and I had parted when Martin and Emily appeared on our horizons. Emily had the child Aubrey wanted and couldn’t have (he was sterile) and Martin had so much electricity for me I felt the air crackled when we were together. But Aubrey had dated me first, and perhaps a little resented my recovering from his gentle “good-bye” speech so thoroughly and quickly. So Emily Kaye, his all-but-in-name fiancée, was sure to be mentioned whenever I saw him.

It’s stuff like that that made me so glad to be almost married. After so many years of dating and not-dating, I was heartily sick of all these little undercurrents and maneuverings. I was ready to be devastatingly straightforward. There is no telling what my reputation for eccentricity would have become if Martin hadn’t chanced to want to see a house my mother, the real estate queen of Lawrenceton, was too busy to show him. She’d sent me in her stead and we had met for the first time on the front steps.

The phone rang in Aubrey’s office, and he excused himself to answer it. I seized the opportunity to turn Martin’s face toward mine and give him a very thorough kiss. That was certainly one of the biggest differences in my relationship with Martin; the sex was frequent, uninhibited, and absolutely wonderful. My sexual experience was not extensive, though I’d had what I thought was good sex before, but I had found a whole new dimension to the subject with Martin Bartell.

He said, “If it’s the suit, I’ll wear it every day.”

“I was just thinking about the first time I saw you.”

“Can we go back and stand on the steps of that house again?”

“No, Mother sold it last week.”

“Well—” Martin bent to resume where we’d left off, but Aubrey came out of his office then.

The churchyard was getting dark, and he called to us to come in. We went in hand and hand, and while we talked in his office, the darkness outside became complete.

“I had supper tonight with Shelby Youngblood,” Martin said. He was leaning against his car, I against mine, side by side in the church parking lot. The security lights overhead made his face colorless and cast deep shadows under his eyes.

Martin was going to spend the night at his apartment since he was leaving early in the morning to catch a plane to the Pan-Am Agra plant in Arkansas.

“I should meet him,” I murmured.

“That’s what I wanted to set up. Can he come out to the new house tomorrow morning?

That’s where you’ll be?”

I nodded. “Martin, what’s this man like?”

“Shelby? He’s .. . trustworthy.”

That wasn’t exactly what I’d expected to hear. A strange capsule biography.

“I guess I wanted a little more than that,” I said. “Does he drink, smoke, gamble? Where does he come from? What did he do before he came here?”

“He doesn’t talk much about himself,” Martin said after a pause. “I guess you’ll have to find out what he’s like from his actions.”

I’d made Martin angry. Perhaps he felt I was questioning his judgment.

“You know what I call the way you look now?” I asked.

Martin raised his eyebrows in polite query. He really was angry.

“Your ‘Intruder Alert’ face.”

He looked surprised, then irritated, and finally he began laughing.

“Am I that bad?” he asked. “I know I have a problem talking about some things. No one ever called me on it before.”

I waited a little while.

“I don’t talk about Vietnam easily, because it was dirty and scary,” he said finally. “And there are some people I don’t talk about, because they’re connected with that time ... I guess Shelby’s one of them. He’s from Tennessee, from Memphis. We were in the same platoon. We were good friends. After the war, we hung around together for a while. We kept in touch. Maybe once every three months I’d get a phone call or letter, for at least four years or so. Then I didn’t hear from Shelby for a long, long time. I thought something must have happened to him.”

Martin turned to look at the floodlit church, the lights shining full on his face for a minute, making him look—old.

“I got a letter from him about a year ago, and we resumed the connection. He had married Angel.”

Martin stopped abruptly and I realized I had gotten all I was going to get.

It was a start.

* * *

I was at the Julius house by seven the next morning. I looked at each room, slowly and carefully, revising my room-by-room list of the changes that needed to be made. At 8:15 the carpenters came, followed me around, took notes, and left. At 9:00 the paint, wallpaper, and carpet people came, measured, and left. At 9:45 the plumber showed up, trailing a miserable-looking assistant with a cigarette stuck in his mouth.

“Please don’t smoke in here,” I said as pleasantly as possible.

The lanky red-haired boy, who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, threw me a sullen look and retreated to the front yard, where I was willing to bet he’d leave his cigarette butt in the grass. After years at the library, I could fairly accurately predict which teenagers were going to behave and which were going to be problems. This one was a problem. I looked at my plumber.

“I know, I know,” John Henry said. “I don’t think he’ll last long. It’s a pain riding in the truck with him. But his mama is my wife’s best friend.”

We sighed simultaneously.

John Henry and I discussed the bathrooms, worked out a schedule (as soon as possible), and then he crawled under the house to check out the plumbing. “I’m a little scared to explore too much here,” he confessed with a broad grin. “Who knows but what they’re all under the house?”

“Oh, the Juliuses.” I smiled back. “Well, I bet the police checked that out pretty thoroughly at the time.”

“Sure. Still, I bet you wonder if they’ll show up here somewhere. It’d give me the creeps, Roe.”

“It doesn’t bother me,” I said dismissively, and turned to the open front door to see a stranger standing there. He was looking back over his shoulder at the red-haired boy smoking on the lawn. When he turned to me, I recognized the dark man who’d been sitting in Martin’s waiting room the day I’d returned from Ohio.

This was Shelby Youngblood. He looked at me in that moment, and we had a good rude stare at each other.

He was about five foot ten, swarthy-skinned, with muscles that were truly impressive, even to one used to Martin’s muscular build. His hair was a dusty black, shaggy, only a few threads of gray, and his mustache was the kind that framed his mouth. His eyes were blue, and he wore old jeans and a faded T-shirt. His hands looked broad and hard.

“Miss Teagarden?” he asked, in a pleasant voice. “I’m Shelby Youngblood.” I’d expected him to growl.

“I’m glad to meet a friend of Martin’s,” I said honestly. “Please call me Roe.”

We shook hands. His were very hard, ridged and scarred.

“Come see the garage apartment,” I suggested.

I got my keys and led the way, out the kitchen, under the roofed walkway, over to the garage with the covered stairs running up the side closest to the house. I unlocked the door at the top, and we went in. Since the garage was not only more than wide enough for two cars, but had a deep storage room running all its width along the back, the apartment was larger than one expected from outside. It was a very good size for one person—it was basically one large open room. I hoped two people would be comfortable there. The bathroom was small but adequate, and more modern than the ones in the house, since it was the Juliuses who had turned what had been a glorified hayloft into an apartment for Mrs. Julius’s mother. The tiny kitchen was not meant for producing a full Thanksgiving feast, but would be bearable for someone who was not an enthusiastic cook.