Just Like Home(20)

There was only this.

Vera leaned against the counter hard, the scrap of paper under her palms, her lips pressed tight between her teeth, breathing hard through her nose.

This was a page from her father’s journal, and it was all about how much he had cared for her.

Her head spun hard, a sudden wave of dizziness, and the momentum of that dizziness swung her right around to the back door of the house, the one that led out of the kitchen and into the yard. She crossed to it in three long strides, burst through the back door, practically fell down the steps to the grass. Her feet devoured the lawn and blood rushed in her ears and she wasn’t even aware that she was pounding on the door to the cottage, not until she heard the banging of her own fist.

It looked almost nothing like the shed she remembered. It really was a little cottage now, with a new tin roof and a window on one side, and presumably some plumbing within. But the pressed-aluminum walls were the same and they rattled with every blow she struck.

She kept banging on the door until she felt the sting in her knuckles.

“Did you do this?” she shouted at the door. It didn’t answer. She pounded on it again, this time with the flat of her empty hand. “Duvall! Get out here!”

The door swung inward, revealing a shirtless, damp-haired James. He didn’t look afraid so much as confused. Some deep animal part of Vera felt disappointed at that. She fought it down, barely.

“What’s going on?” he asked, one hand resting on the front of the waistband of his low-slung jeans as if he had only just finished doing up the button and needed to make sure it stayed put. One side of his mouth slid up into a sly grin. “I thought you weren’t interested in coming over to my place.”

Vera held up the thermos. “Did you do this?

James looked back and forth between Vera and the thermos several times. “Did I do what?” His brows were crinkled up with what almost seemed to be genuine confusion.

Vera faltered, her thermos-hand drooping. “You didn’t—you didn’t put anything in this thermos?”

“Nope.” He shook his head, leaning against the doorframe of the garden shed. “Never seen it before. Why, was there something in there you were saving for dinner?”

She hesitated. The question she wanted to ask was unaskable. If James hadn’t put that slip of paper into that thermos, then the chances of him having found the journal in the first place were slim at best.

“Nevermind,” she snapped. “See you in a couple of hours.”

His gaze turned sharp. “Wait. Vera. Did you find something? Or did you … feel something?”

Her heart was in her throat, was in her mouth, was going to fly out at him like a cicada in the early-summer heat. She didn’t answer.

“Vera,” he said, taking a halting step toward her, all the playful antagonism gone from his face. “Vera, tell me what happened. It’s important.”

“Like hell,” she spat. “I know better than to tell a Duvall what happened.” She turned to stalk inside, furious at herself for having come out here at all.

His slow drawl stopped her in her tracks. Just like that, the serious, sincere James Duvall was gone, replaced by the man who’d answered the door in the first place. “Just a couple hours left between now and dinner, like you said. Does that mean you’ll join us tonight? Not gonna hide out in your bedroom again?”

When she looked over her shoulder, he was staring her down, intent. He’d pulled a lighter from his pocket and was spinning it between two fingers. She couldn’t stop herself from looking him over, taking in his bare chest and abdomen: the ridge of his collarbones, the slight bump of his ribcage, the taut stretch of flesh across his belly. He was fresh and lithe and whole. His skin looked brand-new.

A shiver ran up Vera’s spine. She wanted to ignore it. She wanted to ignore it more than she’d ever wanted anything. When she met James’s eyes again, he was smirking.

Oh, she thought. Oh, no. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll see you at six.”

“See you at six,” he replied with a wink. And then the door was shut, and Vera was alone in the yard, holding a thermos that had just finished telling her that her father liked her better than anyone, wondering who had left the message there for her to find.





CHAPTER EIGHT


Vera sat at the little round table in the kitchen, digging her thumbs into the edge of the plexiglass that was screwed in over the tablecloth. Whoever drilled it in must have cut screw-holes through the cloth, she thought, to keep it from twisting up around the screws when they went in.

There was a lip print in the center of the plexiglass, neat as anything. Someone had tried to kiss this table, and nobody had ever cleaned that kiss away.

It could have been any of them. The artists and the poets and the mediums who paid her mother for a chance to live in the Crowder House, the tour groups who came through to look at the kitchen where Francis Crowder used to make his coffee, the reporters who sat across from Daphne and asked her what it was like and what he was like and did she know? Did she ever suspect?

It was nearly time for dinner, but she did not want to go into the dining room. She did not want to sit with her mother and James Duvall to share a meal. She did not want that at all.

The dining room didn’t seem to want her, either. The arch that separated the two rooms was high and wide and open, but the low early-evening light that streamed through the kitchen windows didn’t penetrate the thick dark within. At the place where the black-and-white tile of the kitchen floor met the warm wood of the dining room floor, the ambient light cut off, the sudden darkness as solid as a curtain drawn between the two rooms.