Peachy Scream

by Anna Gerard

  The wallpaper here was a pinkish-gray pattern consisting of cabbage roses and stripes, with the coverlets on each bed a darker pink trimmed with off-white Battenburg lace that matched the off-white lace curtains. Even the antique, hurricane-style bedside lamps with hanging crystals continued the theme, with hand-painted pink roses on their off-white glass shades.

  Both men winced visibly—okay, so maybe I needed to consider going a bit more gender-neutral in at least one of the rooms—but they accepted their fate politely.

  “It’s real nice, ma’am,” Marvin observed with a shrug as he took it all in before tossing his hanging bag onto one of the twin beds. Radney managed a bemused smile and followed suit.

  Now, only one other guest besides Harry still remained. Chris Boyd.

  Harry had told me that Chris was the newest and youngest member of GASP … and, apparently, their token hipster. It was a label hung upon a certain type of youth, the kind who tended to be progressive, vegan, and into Instagram. Last I’d heard, hipsters were fast going the way of the emo kids before them, but I’d seen enough of them wandering around Cymbeline to believe the trend wasn’t quite dead yet.

  Mostly, it hadn’t stopped Marvin from referring to the youth as “Emo Boy” when he’d thought no one was listening.

  True to type, the androgynous Chris wore his dyed black hair slicked back and mostly hidden under a black knit cap. His pale features were halfway obscured by a pair of black plastic-framed glasses that might or might not have been an affectation. His clothing was a trendily ironic updating of grunge. Skinny black jeans, Converse sneakers, and an oversized white T-shirt topped by an undersized red-and-yellow checked flannel shirt —the kind Marvin might have worn twenty years and fifty pounds ago. I had yet to hear him speak, mostly because he’d been wearing a set of wireless earbuds and had his nose buried in his phone since he’d left the bus.

  “So, are you and Chris going to share a room, then?” I asked Harry.

  The actor gave me a disbelieving look.

  “You’re forgetting that I’m the play’s director, on top of being the tour operator,” he replied. “I can’t share quarters with a member of the cast, and I can’t move in on a guest. It wouldn’t look right.”

  “So where do you suggest you stay, then?”

  “Well, I can think of one other place.”

  In this day and age, a comment like that would have earned most men a roasting on Twitter, if not worse. I knew what Harry meant, however, and it wasn’t like it sounded.

  On his last visit, he’d showed me the tower room, which I’d assumed was simply a decorative architectural feature atop the second story, not actual living space. Turns out he’d lived in it for a few summers when he was a kid visiting his great-aunt. In return for his revealing the hidden door that led up to it, I’d let him clean up the room—which had not been touched in a good decade—and allowed him to stay there for a few days.

  “We’ll see about that,” I told him. “For now, let’s get Chris settled.”

  Harry nodded and gave the youth a not-so-subtle nudge to get his attention.

  “Heads up, kid,” he said as Chris shot him an annoyed look. “Ms. Fleet wants to show you to your room.”

  This entailed walking a few more steps down the hall and opening the final door. I did both, and then gestured the youth to take a look.

  Small as it was, this room was the sparest in decor. The wallpaper had a more modern vibe, its design of tiny cranes amid bamboo in shades of sand and the palest of pinks evoking an Asian feel. I’d added a wall scroll with red kanji symbols representing love, wisdom, and health. The window I’d covered in a simple linen shade that resembled a miniature shoji screen.

  But the biggest change was the bed. I’d recently swapped the room’s original cherry four-poster for a pair of twin beds, the better to accommodate more guests. They sported simple linen pillows and were arranged against the wall in an L-shape like daybeds to make the most of the minimal square footage. A sleek wooden lap desk perched on the foot of one, serving in lieu of a nightstand.

  “It’s a bit small,” I apologized as I showed him inside, “but you get it to yourself.”

  Chris pulled one ear bud from his ear—I’d begun to think the accessory was surgically attached—and looked around.

  “It’s deck,” he said succinctly.

  From his nod of seeming approval, I took the expression to mean something positive. Without looking at me, he returned the ear bud to its place, dumped his canvas backpack on one bed, and sprawled his thin length across the other bed. Faint squawks seeped past the knit cap, the sound emanating with surprising ferocity from the tiny earbuds.

  I pulled the door shut and turned to Harry.

  “Let’s get the rest of the luggage up here, and then we’ll figure out your room.”

  Chapter Four

  We schlepped the rolling bags and suitcases from downstairs hall to upstairs hall with relative speed. After a couple months of doing this, I’d developed a pretty good set of arm muscles, not to mention definite tightening of the old glutes. We matched up the bags with each guest; then, leaving them to unpack, I turned to Harry.

  “If you really want the tower room, it’s yours for the duration. But I warn you, it looks a little different from the last time.”

  “I don’t care what it looks like, as long as you had an AC unit installed,” he replied with a shrug.

  Anyone not knowing the secret would never have found the room, as the door leading to it was cleverly hidden within the hallway paneling. Like the downstairs hall, this passage was lined with dark wood, though instead of wainscot, the paneling was installed from floor to ceiling. Matching half-round wooden trim added a decorative touch, forming what resembled a series of tall, narrow picture frames aligned side by side.

  But a closer examination of one panel would reveal that a four-inch section of the trim was slightly offset from the rest of the molding. In fact, I was able to turn it almost like a knob. Which was exactly what it was, and what I now did.

  A portion of the paneling popped open like a narrow door, letting loose a blast of hot air and exposing what at first appeared to be a closet. I reached in and tugged a length of string dangling there. An LED lightbulb that I’d recently installed on the inner wall blazed to life, revealing a broad ladder solidly mounted above and below, though its pitch was far too narrow for it to be climbed without using both hands and feet. Peering up, I could see the shadowed section of railed landing above.

  “After you,” I told Harry.

  Had I known the room was going to be used, I already would have opened the windows to let out the residual heat and turned the new window AC unit I’d installed to full blast until the place cooled to bearable temperatures. Which, during a blazing hot Georgia summer, took a while. Once the temperature equalized, the room was quite livable. But for the moment we’d have to sweat.

  By now, Harry had reached the landing and flipped on the lights. As he did, he gave a grunt of surprise. I grinned a little as I joined him there.

  The circular room was perhaps twelve feet in diameter and ringed by eight single-hung windows that gave a bird’s-eye view of the surrounding neighborhood. On his last stay, Harry had set up the place like a tiny studio apartment, complete with a bed and sitting area. But since his departure, I’d commandeered the tower for my own use … well, mine and a few of my new friends.

  The only remaining furniture was the narrow bed and a battered wooden chest of drawers. Those items had been pushed to the far wall near a tiny vintage sink that, thanks to a local handyman, now ran hot and cold water. The wooden floor, freshly sanded and varnished, gleamed in the afternoon sun that streamed in the westernmost windows.

  Harry gave the newly cleared space a quizzical look as he wiped sweat from his forehead; then, catching sight of an open wooden box holding rolled lengths of colorful squishy rubber, he nodded and smiled.

  “You turned it into a yoga studio,” he said, tone approving
. “Is someone teaching a formal class up here?”

  “A woman named Wendy Tucker from the fitness center came a couple of evenings a week,” I told him. “She teaches hot yoga—you know, the kind where you sweat your butt off for an hour and a half doing all the poses. I provide the space, and the students pay her per lesson. It worked out great, since I didn’t even have to turn on the AC. Of course, I get to take the class for free. And it’s lots of fun.”

  “We decided to go on hiatus for August since so many people are involved with the festival and end of summer obligations,” I went on, “but once school starts we’ll pick back up again. If nothing else, I figured holding the classes was a nice plug for the B&B.”

  While I was explaining all this, I turned on the window AC unit and opened a couple of windows to get a cross breeze.

  “It cools down pretty quickly,” I told him. “I assume you’re okay staying up here with just a bed and chest of drawers?”

  Though, of course, given that he used to live in his bus, even a stuffy bare tower room was the height of luxury.

  “This will be fine,” he told me. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to change into something more comfortable. Tights and hot weather aren’t the best combination.”

  I stifled a snicker and nodded. To be truthful, I was so used to Harry in various costumes that I’d almost forgotten he was still wearing his Elizabethan regalia.

  I was halfway back down the ladder stairway, when he abruptly leaned over the railing and hailed me. “Oh, Nina, I almost forgot.”

  He paused, and I glanced up, waiting to be showered with well-deserved thanks. After all, I’d let him and his troupe stay despite what counted as blatant deception on his part.

  Instead, he said, “On the way in, I promised our guests they’d get afternoon tea. See what you can rustle up, will you?”

  * * *

  Since, technically, I always put out afternoon refreshments for my guests—fresh-brewed coffee, iced tea, lemonade, along with cookies, cake, and fruit—I had already “rustled” things up when the troupe came downstairs to the dining room about thirty minutes later.

  “Brewed, not instant?” Len Marsh inquired with a nod at the gallon jug of tea perched on its stand.

  “Cold brewed,” I assured him, feeling a bit smug. “But if you like sweet tea, you’ll need to add your own sugar.”

  Of course, that set off a discussion of the relative merits of sweet tea (the unofficial drink of the South) versus plain tea. A sidebar debate then ensued regarding cold brew versus sun tea, since that summer staple apparently had been found to harbor bacteria and was now on the bad list. I exchanged knowing glances with Mattie. The GASPers were an argumentative lot, it seemed.

  Once the troupe had filled their plates and glasses, I left them to their own devices for a quick cleanup in the kitchen. When I went to check on refills a few minutes later, I found Harry and everyone else except for Radney seated at the dining-room table. Bound sheaves of paper that I assumed must be scripts sat in front of each actor, while Harry, as the director, had an oversized white binder beside his plate. Tessa had an open laptop in front of her, which I assumed was for taking script notes.

  Marvin acknowledged me with a smiling nod before returning to the notes he’d been making on a legal tablet. Chris, of course, was staring at his phone, earbuds firmly in place as he used both thumbs with blinding dexterity to text something to someone. Tessa and Susie were murmuring back and forth to each other, not seeming to notice that Bill was seated between them.

  As for Len Marsh, he seemed absorbed in the small square of peach cobbler that he was eating along with his coffee. Not that I blamed him, since the cobbler was the famous (at least, in Cymbeline) version handmade by Daniel Tanaka, who with his wife Gemma owned Peaches and Java.

  Harry held court at the head of the table, a knife and the remains of one of my peaches on a plate next to his elbow. He was now dressed in modern attire, meaning artfully distressed black jeans and a turquoise linen shirt, the color of which made his blue eyes look even bluer.

  Reminding myself that the vibrancy of his eye color was none of my concern, I brushed up a scattering of crumbs from the sideboard and made sure the coffee pot still had a few cups left in it. But when I turned to go, Harry held up a restraining hand.

  “You don’t have to leave,” he told me grandly. “Being a civilian, you might find it interesting to see what a troupe like ours does to get ready for a performance. I don’t think anyone would mind, would they?”

  Said troupe members shook their heads and mumbled their agreement to my staying. Meanwhile, I gave Harry a considering look. I’d not yet decided if he had something up his thespian sleeve regarding his claim to my house. Maybe the smart thing would be to take him up on his offer and, at the same time, keep an eye on him.

  “Sure, sounds like fun.” Indicating one of the spare dining-room chairs positioned up against the wall, I added, “I’ll just sit over here and listen quietly.”

  He nodded and then returned his attention to the troupe.

  “All right, people, we’ll do a read-through now during tea, then break for supper. I’ll be available tonight for any preliminary coaching, and then we’ll have our first rehearsal right after breakfast tomorrow morning. So, any questions before we begin?”

  He was answered by the sound of a throat clearing loudly. As one, we turned in the direction of where Len Marsh sat.

  Since we’d had only the slightest of introductions, I hadn’t had much of a chance to size up the executive beyond the obvious. So far, however, he definitely was giving off the vibes of the stereotypical rich guy who figures his bucks somehow make him worthier than the rest of us. Though what Len didn’t know (unless Harry had stooped to gossiping with him) was that, up until my divorce, I’d been one of those same rich folks.

  Well, if only by extension.

  It had been my tournament golfer husband who had parlayed a talent for strolling about the greens and swinging a club into a seven-figure salary. And I had to admit that it had been nice to breathe that rarified air after years spent barely eking by on his income as a club professional along with my own modest corporate salary. But by the time Cam and I split up—mostly because I finally figured out that playing golf wasn’t all he was doing out on the various tournament courses—I’d had my fill of the so-called upper crust.

  But back to Len. While the rest of the group had opted for vacation comfort in their wardrobes, he was dressed in business casual—sharply pressed khakis and an expensive polo shirt embroidered with a tiny version of his corporation’s logo. I had to admit that the look did work for him. He was still a handsome man, if a bit past his prime, with strong, even features that gave him an air usually described as “distinguished.” The steel-gray eyes and matching silver hair—surprisingly lush for a man his age—complemented a face that would have looked at home on the inside pages of any Fortune 100 annual report.

  Now, however, his features had assumed a martyred expression that gave him the look of a Brooks Brothers saint. Worse, his gaze was turned in my direction.

  “Actually, my question is for our innkeeper … Ms. Fleet, was it? I trust that this bed-and-breakfast is in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. I require special accommodation for my handicap,” he said and gestured toward his right leg, currently tucked under the table

  I heard a faint snort from Marvin’s direction.

  “The only handicap old Len there has is his personality,” he muttered, drawing a snicker from Chris, seated beside him.

  Len drew himself up and started to sputter, while Susie hurried to smooth the waters. “Now, y’all know full well—you, too, Marvin—that Len is still recovering from his injury. He still has to take those pain pills for his knee.”

  She glanced my way, her pale eyes wide with remembered dismay.

  “I almost died when I got the call from the police,” she confided. “Poor Len was clipped by a car one night last month whil
e he was out riding his bike by the college campus. The fool driver didn’t have his lights on, and the only reason Len wasn’t killed was because he managed to leap off his bike and out of the way in time. He hurt his knee landing wrong-ways on the sidewalk.”

  “Wow,” I replied, a bit inadequately, while Len made a show of gingerly sliding his injured leg to one side and stretching it out. “Did anyone get the car’s tag number for the police?”

  “No, Len was the only witness, and he wasn’t exactly in the position to be taking notes. But they got paint scrapings off his road bike, so if they ever find a suspect they’ll be able to check that evidence against the person’s car.”

  Len, meanwhile, cleared his throat again.

  “I appreciate everyone’s sympathy”—he paused and gave Marvin a baleful look that said quite the opposite—”but I’m more concerned about how I will manage my stay here. While the room you assigned to my wife and me was quite, um, adequate, I really require first-floor accommodations.”

  Fortunately, I’d done some research on this very subject soon after I opened and could address it with some confidence. On top of being a historic residence, I had five or fewer rooms for rent and lived in the house myself, all of which exempted my place from being ADA compliant.

  I explained as much to Marsh, adding, “I know it’s not ideal, but maybe we could set up a sleeping area for you downstairs in the parlor?”

  I fully expected him to respond in the negative, but to my surprise he graciously nodded.

  “That might be an option. And I noticed that your porch extends around most of the house. I assume I will be allowed to smoke out there, rather than having to walk all the distance to your designated smoking area several times a day.”

  Meaning that he’d read the welcome pamphlet in the room, as that was where the smoking area was mentioned, a graveled area in the far corner of the backyard hidden by a short wooden fence.

  I caught Susie’s pleading look, which I’m sure was accompanied by a telepathic message. Something along the lines of, We all know he’s going to be a jerk about it, but I’m the one who’s going to have to listen to it.