The House on Hancock Hill (6 page)

Still, it was a roof over my head, and I was so grateful for that, I grabbed one of the blankets off the bed and sank into the couch with a deep, exhausted sigh. The thing was so soft and comfortable, there was no way I’d be getting up without help, so I closed my eyes and fell asleep instantly.

A
STRANGE
impression of someone stroking my hair permeated my dreams, but when I opened my eyes I was alone. I carefully stretched my stiff muscles and yawned. A brown paper bag sat next to a white one in the dining nook underneath the window. I struggled to my feet and made my way over. A note was propped up against my wallet.

Brought you something to eat to tide you over.

Mrs. Mitchell invited you for dinner this evening at seven. I suggest you go; her beef Stroganoff is to die for.

Hope you feel better when you wake up. Didn’t want to disturb you.

H.

I ignored the rush of disappointment at not catching him, but I knew he probably had things to do, and it wasn’t as if we were just going to pick up where we’d left off as teenagers and hang out again all night. Still, it was only three o’clock, and getting dark out already, so I had a few hours to kill. After taking care of calling my insurance company and making sure they’d cover the rental car, I decided to contact the sheriff’s department.

“Houghton County Sheriff’s Office,” someone said pleasantly on the other end of the line. “What can I do you for?”

“Hello, this is Jason Wood speaking. I’m calling about—”

“The Johnson farm fire, yes,” the someone said. I honestly couldn’t tell from their voice if they were male or female. It definitely wasn’t Colleen, or I’d have asked her about Zach’s anal glands. “Mr. Wood, how are you feeling?”

Ugh, small towns.

“Much better, thank you. Deputy Ron was going to set up an appointment for me. Could you see if he’s done that?”

“Deputy Ron has left for the day.” At
3:00 p.m
.? Not much crime around these parts, then. “But don’t worry, Mr. Wood. You make sure you settle in with Mrs. Mitchell”—my jaw dropped—“and we’ll contact you tomorrow.”

Jesus Christ. I hung up.

My stomach made a noise, reminding me I hadn’t eaten anything since that morning’s coffee and toast. The bag Henry had left me revealed a BLT and a hummus veggie sandwich. There was something heartwarming about the thought that Henry might’ve considered me a vegetarian, and I knew I was going to have to watch myself. This was nothing more than sentimentality over a lost friendship.

There was a packet of salty chips and a bottle of Coke. I wasn’t a fan of soda, so I put the bottle in the small fridge to the left of the stove. The kitchenette had hardly any counter space, I noticed. If I was going to keep my promise of making cupcakes for Henry, it wasn’t going to be in here.

After filling a glass with water from the tap, I sat at the table in the dining nook. It had one of those U-shaped benches around it, and once I got past the painful pinkness of it all, I realized how cozy this place was. A TV hung screwed into the wall with a small gas fireplace underneath. It looked inviting on a day like this, and I resolved to turn on the fire later. May as well make myself comfortable if I was to hang around for a week.

I ate the hummus sandwich and half the BLT because I was more starved than I realized. It made me feel instantly better. There were two bottles of painkillers in the white bag, one stronger than the other, and since my face was throbbing from the extreme challenge of chewing, I decided to take one of the strong ones.

As I was checking e-mails on my phone, relieved this place wasn’t far enough removed from civilization to lack an Internet connection, I remembered my laptop bag. I was half on my feet in panic, thinking it might still be in the trunk of the crashed car, when I saw it standing beside the door, half-hidden by a draft-stopping curtain. I heaved a huge sigh of relief. I was going to owe Henry a lot more than just a dozen cupcakes.

It wasn’t like my laptop held the secrets to the universe, but it did have the recipes for all the baked goods I’d ever made, including a portfolio of pictures. Only another baker would find any use for them, but I had my own way of doing things, and it would suck to find all my trade secrets spilled on some forum or other. Especially since Denny and I were opening a second bakery in Detroit.

Chapter 4

D
ARKNESS
WAS
starting to fall even though it was only quarter past four. I drew the flowery curtains and turned on a light as well as the fireplace. It sputtered to life with a pleasant hiss, and I sank into the couch with my laptop. In addition to the portfolio and pictures of a post-college trip to Europe, there were some old photographs I’d scanned on there from my childhood, and I was pretty sure some of those would be from the farm.

It didn’t take me long to find them. In a folder labeled “UP,” I came across one of Dad in front of the farm, me trying to throw my arm around his shoulder like the big man I was. My fingertips barely grazed his shoulder blade. It must’ve been right after the divorce, I guessed, because I certainly wasn’t any older than eight. We had the same brown hair and slender build, but his eyes were gray while I had Mom’s hazel-green.

They say divorce is incredibly hard on a kid, but it had felt like I could breathe freely again. It wasn’t that they’d argued all the time. Family life had been pretty average until I was five. That’s when my little brother was born.

I remembered him well. God, Alex had been so tiny, so helpless when I was allowed to hold him while Dad supported his head. He lived for three days and then died of congenital heart disease. Mom had never learned how to cope with the loss. More and more, her bedroom door would be closed to me, and not long after Alex was buried, she’d started drinking. Everything changed then.

When I was six, Dad heard her blame me for Alex’s death, and that, as they say, was that. Mom moved out that same weekend. A month later, she left for Florida, and I never saw her again. When the divorce came through in the summer, it was nothing but a formality. Dad might’ve been pretty much buried in his work for the first six years of my life, but he more than made up for it in the thirteen that followed.

Since this was way before digital cameras, a lot of the photographs were overposed. There were some snapshots of the farm, a couple of gorgeous sunsets over the canal, but mostly it was me and Dad, arm in arm, or me and my friends, goofing off for the camera.

The first one I came across of Mac, Johnny, and me made my stomach jolt. Mac was looking at me, I was looking at the camera—for some reason I thought it was Dr. McCavanaugh who’d taken this picture—while Johnny was staring at something to his left. I looked about fifteen in that one. The last summer I’d spent at the farm.

Johnny was bigger than both of us combined. In this photo, his hair looked blond, but it was actually ginger and shorn very close to his skull. His dad had been a military man, but I’d forgotten about Johnny’s buzz cuts. Henry and I were scrawny, like colts growing too fast and unable to keep up with it. We were all bony knees and elbows sticking out of our T-shirts and shorts, Henry’s auburn hair falling messily over his eyes. His smile was wide and full of fondness, it made me smile in response. With a small flutter in my chest, I realized he’d probably been the best friend I’d ever had.

It wasn’t on purpose, but now that I was older, I knew I did keep people at arm’s length. Apart from Denny, I doubted there was anyone who truly knew me well. It was a lonely realization.

My hair in the picture was longer than it was now, and it was sticking up in all directions. I wondered if we’d just been swimming in the canal. A familiar melancholy swept over me the longer I stared at the three of us. Had I realized I wouldn’t see them again for over fifteen years, I might have done things differently.

It was vague, how we’d become friends. No particular event brought us together, other than being the same age and living in the same neighborhood. Dr. McCavanaugh used to bring Henry into town while he was working at the clinic, and off we’d go. Joined at the hip, we were, and again I wondered what could’ve happened between Henry and Johnny Neville to cause that friendship to end. It was normal to drift apart, but from what Henry had said, Johnny still lived here, so something must’ve gone down.

Maybe Mrs. Mitchell knew. Maybe I could use the small town mentality to my benefit for some snooping of my own.

Looking at these snapshots of my past had made me gloomy, so I finished up with the e-mails. There were a few from the bank and the Realtor in Detroit, two from Denny with recipes for cupcakes and a new kind of bread he wanted to try, and one from Daniel, asking if I wanted to go out on Saturday.

Daniel—blond-haired, blue-eyed, and five inches shorter—was the closest I had come to a relationship since college, which was to say not close at all. Every week or two, we’d meet up, go out, have dinner, have sex, and that was it. He was nice, if a bit clingy, but then everyone would probably come across as clingy compared to me. It’s not like I minded a hug or two, but once I was ready to sleep, I wanted my space.

Quickly, I typed out a reply, telling him I was sorry, but I’d be up north for a while. Would I have hooked up with him if I hadn’t been here? Probably. I didn’t know why that made me feel so empty suddenly. It wasn’t like I’d been looking for a relationship. On the contrary, the urge to share my space with someone wasn’t so much absent as it was in the negative. I loved my apartment above the bookshop. They had the best dirty chai I’d ever had the privilege of inhaling. Heaven, it smelled like. But I liked living alone. I didn’t have time for much with my insane work hours, so Daniel was convenient.

I’d had that one relationship that had lasted through college. I had thought I was in love. I’d been wrong.

After thirty minutes of tweaking the recipes Denny sent me, my nose and ribs began to hurt again. If I was going to sit through dinner like a decent human being, I was going to have to take more pain meds and probably rest for another hour, so I did the former and went to check out the bedroom for the latter. It was as I feared: more pink flowers. At least there were a lot of pillows.

Sleep didn’t come to me easily this time. I drifted in and out of awareness, strange thoughts filling my mind as sometimes happened when I tried to force rest.

My insomnia actually stemmed from anxiety issues, or so my therapist used to tell me. Mostly, it had begun after Dad died and suddenly there was no one who’d make sure I was safe at the end of the day. My mind would just go into overdrive, and I’d have no control over the direction of my thoughts.

I’d gotten better over the years. The bakery helped because it tended to tire me out enough to fall asleep within an hour, and I did think age put things into perspective. Not that I’d had less to worry about as I’d gotten older, but more that I’d come to accept there wasn’t much I could do about it. I’d been told that’s a pretty bleak view on life, but most things that are true are pretty bleak.

One thing Dad taught me was that happiness wasn’t something to be chased. It was to be found in the little things because a man who was always searching for better was a man who’d never be content.

A
N
HOUR
later, I was more tired than I had been before I’d lain down. It was tempting to roll over and try for more sleep, but I didn’t want to disappoint Mrs. Mitchell, so I dragged myself off to the bathroom to take stock in the mirror. Short of applying movie-quality special effects makeup, there was nothing I could do about the bruises or the stitches on my chin. And Mrs. Mitchell had seen me already, so the best I could hope for was I wouldn’t put her off her Stroganoff too much.

My clothes were clean and reasonably unwrinkled, and while I felt bad about accepting a dinner invitation and arriving empty-handed, there was nothing I could do about that either.

I stood in the empty silence of the apartment for a while, feeling I should call someone to assure them I was all right. There was no one to contact, no one who’d be missing me, so I had no idea where the feeling came from. Maybe this place really did stir all the ghosts from my past. I shrugged off the eerie feeling and put on my coat.

The temperature had dropped again. By the time I was down the stairs and on the porch knocking on the door, I was shivering.

“You poor dear” was what Mrs. Mitchell greeted me with, ushering me into the living room. I didn’t know if it was for my benefit (for all I knew, Dr. Donalds had e-mailed her my medical records) or if Mrs. Mitchell suffered from the cold as much as I did at the moment, but there was a large wood fire roaring in the open fireplace, and I was automatically drawn to it.