The Magnolia Inn(15)

When he opened them, Jolene was watching Sassy pick her way up the stairs, one at a time. “She’s never been in a two-story house?”

“Nope. Only step she has had to deal with is the one to get inside my trailer,” he answered. “So back to those washstands. You didn’t state an opinion.”

She threw up her palms. “Hey, you’re the one with the money.”

“But you are my partner, so we’re going to share things, right?”

“I never thought something like this would even be possible. I know you paid a lot for your half, but you really need to tell me what our budget is, Tucker. I’m willing to take a small salary out of what we bring in and put the rest of the profits toward paying you back, but I need to know. As it stands, it’s pulling in a low six-figure gross a year, before taxes, insurance, and utilities. Like you said, we’re partners.”

Tucker’s eyebrows drew down into a solid dark line. He didn’t want to tell her how much money the insurance company had given him when Melanie died, but she was right. They were partners. He did a rough estimate of what it would take to put the bathrooms in and to do some cosmetic work on the downstairs and added several thousand dollars to that. It wouldn’t deplete the money in the savings account by any means, but it was a rough budget.

He quoted her the amount, and she gasped. “Good Lord, did you rob a bank? Why are you working odd jobs?”

He shrugged. “Even when I was on the Dallas police force, I flipped houses, so I had a nice nest egg, but there was insurance money after my wife was killed in a car accident.” It pained him still to think of profiting from her death. He drew out his tape measure and figured the size of the armoire. That kept his hands busy while he regained his composure and swallowed the lump in his throat. “We’ve got the finances to do this job right. Now, if we take this thing out, it’ll give us quite a bit more room. Washstands could be an old sideboard or buffet—they’d fit in. But they couldn’t be much bigger than what’s up there in the first room we’ll start working on,” he said. “Anyway, I thought maybe you could do some lookin’ around to see what you could find.”

“I’ll check in with Lucy and Flossie,” she answered and then abruptly changed the subject. “Were you even in this house before tonight?”

“Nope, but . . .” The story about Melanie’s senior tea was his private memory, and he cherished it too much to share. “I’ve remodeled a lot of these old places, and I kind of figured it looked the same.” He straightened up and started down the stairs. “Lucy and Flossie sound like what you’d name kittens.”

“There’s also Dotty, but she doesn’t have an antique shop. Those are their nicknames.” Jolene followed him.

That evening was the longest one-on-one visit Tucker had spent with anyone in a long time. It usually took about an hour to work up a rough estimate for a job, and most of the time that involved a guy, not a woman. The walls had begun to close in on him. His chest tightened. “I’m going out to my trailer now.” He laid his yellow pad on one of the four round tables in the dining room, twisting his torso as if to release a breath.

“Aunt Sugar left two sets of keys. Yours is on the foyer table. See you tomorrow. When it’s just us, breakfast is at seven. But for guests, it’s on the bar from six thirty to nine.”

He grabbed his coat. “I’ll be here.”

He picked up the keys and hurried outside into the bitter cold wind whistling through the tall pines. With no electricity to keep the tiny space heater going, the trailer wasn’t much warmer than outside. He jerked the chenille bedspread from the bed and wrapped it around his body as he fell back on the sofa and stared at the ceiling.

“What have I done, Melanie? I wanted to buy this property for you, to fix it up in your honor, but now I’m having second thoughts.” He shook off the bedspread, and in two strides, he opened the refrigerator. He fumbled around in the dark until his hand closed around a bottle of beer, but then he changed his mind and left it there.

“I need something stronger.” He opened the cabinet above the stove and carefully felt around until he recognized the shape of the whiskey bottle. Using the light of the moon flowing in from the kitchen window, he poured about two fingers into one water glass. He sat on the sofa and drew the spread over him.

Even though he couldn’t see Melanie’s face clearly in the dark, he held her picture to his chest. “Talk to me. I’ve got a couple of days to back out of this deal. I can always drag this trailer back to Marshall and go on with my life.”

The whiskey warmed his insides, but it didn’t do much for the outside, which continued to get colder by the minute. “Are you tellin’ me to go back to the house?” he asked. “I don’t know if I can. You’re here with me in the trailer.”

You got a choice. You can get up off your butt and go get into a warm bed or freeze to death. Her voice sounded so real that he looked over his shoulder.

He tossed back the last sip of whiskey and threw the bedspread on the sofa. It only took a minute to pack a small duffel bag with a change of clothing and his toiletries. He hoped that the two socks he’d found matched, but if they didn’t, he could always come back for more when it was light.

The house was dark when he opened the door and slipped inside. Stumbling over furniture, he tried to find the light switch, but no amount of running his hands across the walls turned one up. Finally, he decided to make his way to the kitchen, and that’s when a spiderweb hit him smack in the face. Tucker Malone would do battle with a burglar hopped up on drugs quicker than a spider, so he did some fancy footwork trying to brush it away.