The Barefoot Believers (19 page)

“Where are you, Kate?” The rustle of plastic bags. The thump and bump of objects hitting the kitchen table. The clunk, swoosh, clunk of Jo moving with new confidence using the borrowed crutches preceded her sister peeking around the corner of the door frame and staring at her. “Who were you hoping it would be? Oh, let me guess, Prince Charming?”

Kate winced at the very thought of Vince barging in and finding her not at her best. “Last night, did I just fall asleep or did I drool, too?”

“Vince left before the drooling began.”

“Good.”

“And only a few minutes
after
the snoring started.”

Kate groaned.

“What are you doing in here? I thought we agreed that we'd wait to try the steps when we both felt up to it.”

“I felt up to it enough for both of us.”

“Obviously you were only half-right.” Jo gave a direct deadpan look to where Kate had landed on the stairwell. “Did you get any rest at all while I was gone?”

“Yep.”

“Yep? No complaint about being stranded here wanting to get out and about?”

“Nope.”

“Whatever meds you are on, your doctor should have prescribed them years ago.”

“If only I'd had the foresight to jump in front of Mom's tire sooner.” Kate smacked the pad into her sister's palm.

“Oh, good, you did your assignment.”

“All of my assignments, including your real dirty work.” Kate watched to see if her sister picked up on the double entendre.

“Kitchen and bathroom?” Jo said without giving any evidence that she suspected what Kate was suspecting about her wanting to sell the cottage.

“Not only did I get everything done you asked, I actually enjoyed doing it.”

“You enjoyed peeling up dirty old shelf paper from the kitchen cabinets and bathroom linen closet?”

“It gave me a sense of purpose and accomplishment.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It kept me from dwelling on my problems.”

“Oh?” Jo seemed more than a little intrigued by that prospect.

“Okay. First I dwelled, um, dwelt?” Kate scrunched her eyes into narrow slits then bunched up her lips as she rifled back through years of English grammar rules then finally gave up and forged on. “At first I did sulk and brood and worry a little. Then I decided to let it go and just do the work.”

“Just like that?”

“Sure.” Kate continued with a smirky smile, gesturing to demonstrate what she had done all morning, “And besides, I really liked the sound the paper made when it came up in one great big sheet.
Schlerrrrrrp!
”

Jo shook her head, her soft blond hair catching the afternoon light from the front-room window, as it swept along her neck, barely brushing her shoulders. “Tell me again how that's not the pills talking.”

“Do you know how long it's been since I spent the day working with my hands without the responsibility of dealing with other people? Managing staff? Working with patients? Fielding pharmaceutical reps? Juggling accounts payable?”

“Um, change that to contractors, sellers, buyers and mortgage lenders, and you have
my
usual day.”

Always a competition with them.

Well, not today. Today, Kate would not try to one-up her sister. Both of their jobs had aggravations, after all. Kate's just happened to be more important, more pressing, more, well, everything. Which was why she had enjoyed the contrast of this day so much. “Then maybe you can understand how doing this today gave me attainable goals, and when it was over I felt something I haven't felt in a long time.”

“Stiff? Sore?” Jo stretched her arms up then put her hand to the small of her back. “So glad you went to med school so you don't have to do that unless you choose to?”

Kate considered the mere mention of med school a sort of mini-coup in her favor, so she smiled even more broadly when she gave her sister the real answer. “Content.”

“Content? Working around the cottage made you content?” Jo crossed her arms over her white cotton shirt and clucked her tongue. “Well, if you liked today's to-do list, you are going to love tomorrow's.”

“Let me guess. New shelf paper?” Kate rubbed her hands together.

Jo nodded. “And that is just the beginning.”

“The beginning of what?” Kate wondered.

But before Jo could elaborate, and Kate had no illusions that her sister would not, indeed, elaborate, Kate's cell phone blasted out her familiar ring tone.

“It's Mom,” Jo warned, raising her own phone to indicate she'd just gotten a call from their mother as well.

“Dare I answer?” Kate wondered, knowing that when she didn't get an answer, her mom would try again immediately to give her time to limp to the phone.

“I didn't.”

Kate pushed herself up to her feet, clinging to the railing for stability. “You think that's wise to ignore her like that?”

“You'd rather talk to her and try to sidestep her inevitable questions about when she can come down here to stay?”

“Stay?” Kate glanced at the pad in Jo's hand. For one fleeting instant, she thought of grabbing it back and writing in bold letters on the disastrous side of the lists—
MOM.

She loved her mother but the three of them in a two-bedroom cottage with the two sisters even slightly incapacitated? Those old instincts to run away welled up in Kate again.

“You want to tell her about my ankle? Or your falling through her front porch? How about we regale her with the tale of how we all got thrown out of Billy J's?”

But Kate couldn't run. “Technically we didn't get thrown out so much as we didn't get to stay and eat our food there.”

“Mom is not big on technicalities. She hears what we've been through already, what do you suppose she will want to do?”

“Rush down here to the rescue.” That meant they couldn't talk to her until they had some really positive things to say. “I don't feel right about just not taking Mom's calls.”

The cell phone went silent.

“Oh, but your doctor, the man charged with keeping you from messing your foot up forever? Him you can avoid with not so much as a twinge of conscience?”

“People who live in glass houses…”

Jo scowled at Kate, practically daring her to come up with an applicable finish to that hasty accusation.

“Shouldn't throw cell phones?” Kate gave a one-shouldered shrug.

Her phone rang again, just as she knew it would.

“What about it, Kate? You going to throw your cell phone?”

“Yes. Out a window.” She made her way down the stairs. “What are you going to do?”

“I am going to be using my phone to make calls.” Jo helped her make the transition from the last wooden step to the carpet, where her cast could get more traction.

“Calls to who?” She moved more quickly now, heading toward the couch.

Jo reached into her pocket and produced a stack of multicolored business cards. She fanned them before Kate like a seasoned poker player glorying in her hand.

“Where did you get those? And what are they?”

“Stopped into a real-estate office, friend of a friend type of deal.”

Kate pulled up short.

“Where I went to get references for carpenters and painters and tile layers and plumbers,” she read the professions off one by one. “For fixing up the place.”

“Toward what end?”

Jo clamped her mouth shut tight.

“You just made it clear you don't want Mom coming down here. So why the big rush to fix the place up, Jo?”

“Be sweet to me, Kate. I'm trying to do a good thing, here.”

“I bet you are. But a good thing for who?” If Jo had not pulled out their mom's favorite pouting plea to “be sweet,” Kate might have conceded that it was a good idea to fix the place up, no matter what the motivation behind it. But the admonition dragged across her nerves and put her on high alert. For this family, “be sweet” really meant “be careful” because something big was headed right at you. “I thought we wanted to keep things honest between us, Jo. Why don't you start by admitting outright that you want to pretty up this place so you can put it on the market as soon as possible?”

“Do I?” Jo's expression went dark.

Kate sensed genuine conflict in her sister. “Don't you?”

“I don't…I don't know anymore.” She leaned one shoulder against the door frame at the bottom of the stairs and looked around. “I thought I did. There. It's out. I wanted to sell this place. I
need
to sell this place. And I justified that by telling myself that my needs were bigger than Mom's whim about living here. But now?”

“Now you've gotten a little bit of a whim yourself, huh?”

Jo looked at the floor. She shifted her weight, using the crutches Travis had given her for renewed support.

“Okay, so we fix the place up some.” Kate shut her eyes, hardly believing what she was saying. “How do you propose we would pay for that? How are we going to afford all these fellows on these fancy business cards?”

Jo flicked through them all, humming cheerily as she did.

“Jo?” If there was a bigger red flag in their family than “be sweet,” cheeriness was it! Kate braced herself. “You've got an idea, don't you, Jo?”

“H
e's your ex-boyfriend. Why drag me into this juvenile scheme?” Jo spoke in a whisper so sharp and rushed it reduced her vowels to near silence and made the consonants practically pop and hiss.

“Stop whining.” Kate got into position and stretched her hand up toward the doorbell. She could just…almost…reach. “You said you thought you saw him over here. You agreed we need to be good neighbors. This was your idea, after all.”

Jo's vivid green eyes all but bugged out of her head. “Coming across the street to see if Vince would consider helping us fix up the cottage was my idea.”

Kate strained every muscle in her body, trying to give herself that extra oomph to realize her goal.

“But this?” Knee bent and standing on her good foot, Jo gestured with her crutches, holding them both straight out to indicate pretty much everything taking place on the front porch of the mystery house at the moment.

“Great idea. Hand me your crutch, I need the extension.”

Jo obliged, slapping the aluminum into Kate's open palm with a sound that smacked of sarcasm. “
This
is all you, big sister.”

Kate scrunched down low to approximate where she planned to be and lifted the ungainly crutch. “If I can just reach the doorbell.”

“And then what do
I
do? I can't exactly run for it.”

“Hide.” Wasn't it obvious what Jo needed to do? Especially given Kate's vantage point, crouched beside a big empty box shoved off to one side of the closed front door.

Jo's expression went positively sour. “What?”

“Hide. Duck out of sight.” Kate made a motion as if she were pushing her sister's head down below eye level. Out of sight.

Ahhh. The mere thought of being able to do just that made Kate feel better.

Yes, it was a mean thought, but given the kind of day she'd had and Jo's obstinate and obtuse response to a simple, logical request to make herself scarce so they could carry out Kate's covert master plan? Kate decided she'd leave it off her list of faults for now. She pointed to the enormous elephant-ear plant that stood almost as tall as the porch rail. “Those leaves will provide the perfect camouflage.”

“And what will you use for cover?”

“This.” Kate stabbed her finger at the oversize cardboard container that, according to its label, had recently held a brand spanking new clothes dryer.

“You wouldn't. You couldn't.” Jo sneered then paused. She chewed her lower lip, her worried gaze on the large box. “Would you? How
could
you?”

“Easy. It's slit open all the way up the side and across the bottom. It's practically got its own door. I simply back in, keep low and use your crutch to ring the bell.”

“And then what? Single-handedly nab the thieves as they come to the door?”

“We don't know they are thieves.”
They
being whoever owned that pickup parked at the back of the house. The one Jo had spotted as she'd driven up, thinking it was Vince's, but which, after they had wobbled and hobbled all the way across the cul-de-sac, they had realized was not Vince's at all.

Or maybe it was.

They weren't sure.

Jo really thought she'd seen Vince standing in the driveway with his back to the street when she'd driven past a few minutes earlier. The old truck certainly looked familiar to them both. Neither could say for sure it wasn't Vince's.

As they'd peered through the branches of a scraggly mess of leaves and limbs by the mailbox at the end of the drive, Kate had tried to recall the truck she'd seen in the drive the day before. But what with dropping through the floor shortly after that, it had blurred a bit in her memory. They'd taken Travis's car to Billy J's and when they'd gotten back, it had been dusk and she hadn't exactly had her eyes on their surroundings.

“The truck could belong to whoever has rented the place out,” Jo had suggested.

“Except it has a local tag and a Billy J's Bait Shack Buffet bumper sticker on the back bumper, which is peeling off.”

Jo had raised one artistically arched-in-one-of-Atlanta's-best-salons eyebrow. “The back bumper is peeling off?”

Kate had gritted her teeth, unwilling to let Jo get the best of her by playing dumb. “It's an old sticker, then. Must have been on there for ages. Why would anyone who had lived in Santa Sofia for ages suddenly up and rent this old place?”

“You're just rationalizing because you want to snoop around more,” Jo had accused. “Admit it. You would use any reason as an excuse to try to get a peek inside this old place.”

“All right. You caught me. I'm curious. I'll grant you that.” Kate had thrown up her hands, and almost lost her balance. A side effect, she'd concluded, of having overtaxed herself today. “But did you ever stop to think that despite my more self-serving motivations, that this is also the act of a good neighbor?”

“I thought you prayed for us to
have
good neighbors, not to
be
them.”

“You can't
have
them unless you
are
them.”

Up the eyebrow had gone again. “We're our
own neighbors?
”

“We're
everybody's
neighbors, Jo. You know, like in Sunday school when they taught us about the good Samaritan?”

“Oh, don't you try to turn this into a who-knows-her- Bible-better battle with me, Kate-the-couldn't- sit-still-and- spent-most-of- her-time-in- the-corner Cromwell.”

Kate had wanted to argue that she could still hear the lessons from that vantage point but then Jo would bring up the rows of gold stars after her name in every classroom, not to mention her blue ribbons for the annual Bible Bowl. All of which completely missed Kate's point, which was…that Kate wanted to do things her way.

“Hear me out, now. I'm saying that in that ‘we are all travelers on life's highway' kind of way, we all have to look out for one another. It's the same principle as those neighborhood watch programs.” The moment the words had left her lips, Kate knew she'd found a way to win Jo over to her side.

Jo had confirmed as much with a quick cock of her head and narrowing of her eyes.

“Yeah. That's right. Wouldn't you like to add that to your list of strong points when you put the cottage on the market? Proactive neighborhood watch program in effect.”

“That's a bit much to claim even for someone as seasoned at highlighting the bright side of things as me. But I'm more interested in the other part of what you said. If we put the cottage on the market? You're open to that now?”

“No.” Kate was less of a highlighting-the-bright-side type of gal and more a never-one-to- gaslight-someone-into- thinking-she-would- take-any-side- but-her-own one. “I don't want to sell the cottage. At least not now. Which is why I want to find out as much about what's going on over here as possible.”

“And nothing I do can convince you otherwise?” What Jo had expected to sound disappointed, peevish even, had come out almost hopeful, as if perhaps she didn't really want to sell the house now but needed someone else to take the fall for that decision.

“Have you ever convinced me ‘otherwise' in our whole relationship, baby sister?”

A slow smile had overtaken Jo's face.

“Which is why we should not even be wasting time here bickering. Now, let's get up that driveway. Carefully.”

On closer inspection, then, Jo had noted that where the truck bed had been empty when she'd arrived home, it was certainly not so now. Though Kate couldn't imagine why anyone would steal the shabby old chest of drawers and swing-arm faux brass floor lamp loaded into the pickup's bed, she had to admit that finding them there did seem quite suspicious.

And so Kate had formulated this plan, which left them on the porch, whispering. “If there are thieves in there, they are unlikely to come to the door. After all, the first rule of a home robbery is not to get caught in the act.”

“Then why are we hiding?”

“Just in case these thieves don't know the rules.”

“So, if it's not a thief, what do you aim to do? Jump out of the box and yell ‘surprise'?”

“If it's Vince Merchant, I just might.” Yeah. Right. As if Kate had that kind of nerve where that particular man was concerned. The whole time they'd spent in one another's company yesterday she'd hardly said boo to him. She'd wanted to. Not say boo but say…so many things. Ask so many questions. Talk and talk. Catch up. Make up. Just speak up about all that had gone on between them and in all the years since.

Instead she'd kept her conversation to immediate needs—how they would go about fixing the porch, what they wanted from the grocery store, if Billy J ever, in the decades they had eaten at the Bait Shack,
ever
changed the oil in his deep fat fryers. Kate cringed.

And now she envisioned leaping out of a box on the porch like one of those girls who jumped out of cakes?

“Kate?”

Jo's desperate whisper snapped Kate back to the moment. She scrunched herself down into the box, telling her younger sister as she did, “Hurry and hide yourself in those big leaves. Oh, and Jo?”

“Yeah?”

“After this is over, let's go have some cake.”

“Some…what?”

Kate secreted herself in the box then poked the crutch out through the slit.

Braaa-aaa-ppp.

The old doorbell sounded more like a Bronx cheer than a cheerful chime of a quaint beachy hideaway.

Kate held her breath and listened. Nothing. No villainous scramble to get out the back way. No shushing or frantically whispered questions about who it could be or what they should do.

“Ring it again,” Jo popped her head up to say.

“You didn't even want me to ring it the first time. Why should I ring it again?”

“Maybe they didn't hear it the first time.”

That wasn't Jo's voice! Kate's heartbeat went as faint and flickering as a candle about to be blown out. That was…She turned her head to confirm it with a quick glance. “Vince!”

“Hey!” He grinned and gave a nonchalant little wave the way only a man like Vince Merchant could when finding the woman he had once professed to love tucked inside a dryer box outside the door of a stranger's house. “What's going on?”

Kate looked to the crutch protruding from the box, just inches from the doorbell, then at the man. Then at the doorbell, then at the man, then…Then the momentum of her movement threw her off balance again. She pitched forward and tumbled out of her hiding place.

At that point she could only look up, smile and say feebly, “Surprise!”

“Not really.” Vince shook his head and helped her up. “In fact, I made a bet with Moxie as to how long it would take the two of you to come nosing around over here.”

Kate got to her feet, brushing off the track pants with the side of the leg unsnapped to the knee—the only thing she had that she could get on over her cast that didn't need laundering or wasn't a dress.

“Moxie?” Jo batted the leaves aside, looking a bit like Fay Wray or some other beautiful blond, black-and-white movie heroine emerging from the jungle. “Isn't that…?”

“Me.”

“Oh.” Kate turned to find a young woman standing behind the smudged glass of the old storm door just a few feet away.

She looked familiar. But not familiar.

Kate thought of the time she'd seen a famous television actress buying underwear in a discount store in Atlanta and because the face felt so familiar, she had walked up and asked if they had gone to high school together. Like that. Someone she had never met, but knew by sight. Someone who felt like a critical part of her life, yet was a total stranger.

“Excuse me, but have we met?” Jo asked the question that Kate had been too lost in thought—or was it imagination or emotion or memory?—to pose.

“No.” The young woman shifted the baseball cap pulled low on her head, shading her eyes.

Her eyes. They were bright and clear and brown. Kate focused in on them. “Are you sure?”

“Y-yes. I know who y'all are, of course. The Cromwell sisters?”

Jo nodded.

Kate supposed she did as well.

“I was just about to bring this dresser and lamp over to you.”

“To us?”

“Why?”

“A dresser was stolen and a lamp broken in your house. Happened on my watch. Feel I owe it to y'all to make it right.”

“Oh, no. No.” Kate didn't want to insult their longtime caretaker but she didn't want that junk in her home. Not now that she had decided on keeping the place. “You don't have to—”