I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(31)

Edith took in the woman’s tired eyes, the resigned set of her shoulders inside her sweater, and an idea struck her with all the force of a revelation. She set down the apple she’d been examining and smiled at the woman.

“Why, I have a guesthouse,” she said. “Short-term boarders only, vacationers. I’m sure we could work out a rate for the summer. May I give you my address and phone number?”

The woman’s wan face lit up. “Well, of all the luck! My goodness. I’ll take all your information down right now!” she exclaimed, opening her handbag to rummage for paper, which she found, and something to write with, which she did not. “Does your establishment have a name?”

Edith imagined her precious house overrun by strangers and found it didn’t hurt. It seemed somehow right. Give yourself to something, Joseph had told her. Maybe this wasn’t it, not quite, but it would do for the moment. She reached into her own handbag, pulled out a pen, and handed it to the woman.

“It does,” she said. “I call it Blue Sky House.”





Chapter Twelve

Clare




“Ave Maria” was pouring out of the open front door of Edith’s house, lightening the heavy summer air and tingeing it silver, so I stopped in my tracks on the front walk, shut my eyes, and listened. Near the end of the song, as the voice began to trace an ascending arc so exultant and starlit that it made me want to cry, it cut off and said, “Damn it, Riley, I’m working here! You’ve called four times in forty minutes. If you miss me so much, why don’t you get off your scrawny butt and come see me?”

I laughed. Through the open door, I could see a long, jaunty silhouette, one hand on a cocked hip, the other pressing a cell phone to an ear. As I stood there, the silhouette moved toward me through the house, coming into focus. By the time it got to the door, I saw that it was a girl, probably younger than I was by a few years and worlds sassier, with cherry-red lips, platinum hair twisted into a bun on the very top of her head, and a bright blue bikini top.

“And, hey, if you bring me a pack of Butterscotch Krimpets, I’ll be your BFF. And not just for a day but forever and ever.” She paused, listening, then rolled her big Betty Boop eyes. “Yes, I know BFF forever is redundant? That’s why it’s funny? Just get up and get—”

Spotting me, she broke off.

“Gotta go,” she said.

She shoved the cell phone into her pocket and grinned.

“Hi, there. You must be the new owner,” she said, walking toward me with her hand out. “My mom said you’d be coming, got word from a lawyer about it, but I thought it was tomorrow. She’ll be upset that the house wasn’t quite ready for you.”

“No, no, I’m early. I guess I got a little impatient,” I said. I shook her ring-bedecked hand. “Hi, I’m Clare Hobbes.”

“I’m Joliet,” she said. “Not like the Shakespeare character, like the town in Illinois where my grandma’s from.”

“I like it,” I said.

“Thanks.” She gestured toward the door of the house. “I just changed the sheets. Wasn’t sure what bed you’d be sleeping in, so I took them all home yesterday and washed them. Even though no one ever sleeps here, we do that from time to time, because my mom is super-anal about Edith’s house.”

“You and your mom own the cleaning service I guess? The one that gets paid out of the trust?”

“Ha! Own! Baby, we are the cleaning service. My grandma started it up when she moved here from Joliet. Granny started cleaning this house in the 1960s, before my mom was born. When her arthritis got bad, my mom took over. Her boyfriend, Axel, does all the handyman stuff, repairs, yard work. He even takes care of the canoes; honestly, I think he’s obsessed with the canoes. Anyway, I started college last fall. Pre-vet. But I’m helping out this summer.”

“Well, thank you for changing the sheets.”

Joliet shooed away my thanks with her hand. “I love being here. When I was a baby, Mom would plop me down in whatever room she was cleaning. I guess I kind of grew up in this house.”

“That’s nice. It’s a nice house.”

It was. White clapboards, tall windows, a porch that looked like it was once screened in but was now screenless and doorless, a garden lavish with flowers.

Joliet nodded, thoughtfully. “Yeah. I suppose I grew up in a lot of houses because of the cleaning service and all, but this one’s special.”

“How so?”

She smiled with her whole face. “Because it’s Edith’s.”

Joliet said this as if no further explanation were necessary, and as a person who had spent all of an hour and a half in Edith’s company, I understood completely. “Was she a friend of your grandmother’s?”

“No, another company cleaned this house for ten years before my grandmother took over, and of course, by then Edith was long gone. None of us ever met her. In fact, we didn’t even know she was alive until we found out that, um, she wasn’t anymore, which made us all sad. No, it’s just the house itself. You feel Edith all over it. You feel both of them.”

“Both?”

Joliet looked surprised at my question. “Well, Edith and Joseph, of course.” She said it the way people say Romeo and Juliet or Bogie and Bacall. “How do you not know about Joseph?”