Hearth Stone

by Lois Greiman

  “Does he live here?” Sydney asked and Colt snorted.

  Sophie rolled her eyes. “Dickenson doesn’t think Lincoln’s good enough to tie his little Emily’s combat boots.”

  “I didn’t say that,” he argued.

  “I believe what you said was nobody was good enough to tie your Emily’s combat boots,” Casie countered.

  “Yeah.” Sophie nodded at her employer while buttering her already buttered roll. “But I forget. Was that before or after he threatened to shoot off Linc’s ear?”

  “Both,” Casie said, and Colt grinned.

  “Maybe I was kinda hard on the gangly little—”

  “Sydney …” Emily stood in the middle of the kitchen, spiraled telephone cord stretched tight. “It’s for you.”

  “Me?” She actually shook her head, sure Emily was wrong. Who would have bothered to track her down? No one wanted to speak to her.

  But the dread that suddenly curdled her stomach told a different story entirely. Tragedy had struck before.

  “Hello?” Her voice sounded rusty, as if her trachea were being constricted. She tightened her hand on the old-fashioned receiver and felt her pulse beat a hard shuffle in her wrists.

  “Sydney.”

  “Father?” A half-dozen emotions struck her at once, a tangle of feelings so complex, she couldn’t sort one from the other. She glanced toward the people who watched her from only a few feet away. “What’s wrong?”

  “What indeed?”

  She shook her head, confused, as images of black burned through her mind. Black veils. Black suits. Black dirt, thrown atop her mother’s gleaming casket. “Is Grandmother all right?”

  “I heard you made a purchase.” A noise clinked in the background. Ice, she thought, languishing regally in his two fingers of Royal Salute Scotch.

  “Oh …” Everything was fine. Everyone was fine. She tried to relax her grip on the phone and pushed out a laugh. It sounded breathy and false. “You scared me. So everything’s okay?”

  “Is it?” he asked.

  Confusion swirled in her. “There’s nothing wrong with Tori, is there?” Victoria Frances was the closest thing she had ever had to a sister even though her cousin and her father had barely spoken since Tori had colored her hair an unacceptable shade of ash three years before. Overall, however, Tori had toed the Wellesley line with old-world aplomb. Unless you considered the tiny tattoo inked behind her left ear, which Leonard invariably did.

  “Was this your cousin’s idea? Is that it?”

  “What?” She glanced toward the others again. They had returned to their meal. Only Emily watched her, but certainly they all heard, all listened. “No. I mean …” She lowered her voice, then turned briskly and slipped around the corner. Faded wallpaper marched down the hall and up the stairs. “I just needed to get away for a while. She found me a place to stay, but—”

  “So this fiscal disaster was your own brainstorm?”

  She exhaled and lowered her voice even more, unsurprised that he had already learned of her purchase. “It’s beautiful land, Father. You should see it. I really think—”

  “I assume you obtained the mineral rights, at least.”

  “The mineral rights?”

  He breathed a laugh. “If it weren’t for the tests, I would swear we shared no blood at all. I knew you were irresponsible, Sydney, but I won’t have you living in North Dakota like some backwoods hippie.”

  “South Dakota.”

  “What?”

  “I’m in South Dakota.” She sounded like a recalcitrant preschooler, but she couldn’t help it. At five she had sounded like she was a thirty-year-old.

  “Listen, young lady, I’m not going down this road.”

  “What road?”

  “Is this an attempt to force me to prove my feelings for you?”

  He couldn’t, she noticed, even say the word love.

  “No.” She squeezed her eyes shut and wondered if she was wrong. Maybe that was exactly what this was. A shakedown to produce some sort of emotion, some sort of honest interaction. “This isn’t a lemonade stand, Father. I—”

  “Come home,” he ordered. “First flight out.”

  She huffed a breath of surprise. “I can’t just—”

  “First flight,” he repeated, “or there will be consequences.”

  Chapter 4

  “So …” Philip Jaeger had his Realtor smile firmly in place. Sydney simply stared in return, grappling with a dozen anxieties, a million insecurities suddenly laid bare to the world. Two days had passed since her conversation with Leonard. Three nights in a moldering motel room off Highway 16 had brought reality home to her in a tidal wave of regret. She must have been insane to buy this place, to think she could magically re-create what Casie and her crew had at the Lazy. Hell, maybe she was crazy just to want to. “You’re thinking of living here now?” If he was trying to make it sound as if the idea wasn’t entirely ludicrous, he missed the mark by a mile.

  They stood in the kitchen of the log house she had purchased only days before. Ramshackle might have been one word for it. Kindling would be more apt.

  “It’ll only be for a short while,” Sydney said and slipped bumpily into her cool demeanor. Her stomach jumped. “Until I can start work on the new house.”

  Lies. All lies. The bomb her father had hinted at had made a direct hit. She had no money for reconstruction. The pimply-faced motel clerk had told her that much. Her credit cards, one in every precious-metal color, were no longer valid. Luckily, Tori had paid for her stay at the Lazy, but those blissful days were over. Her father had cut her off.

  “I will say I’m a bit surprised,” Philip said and glanced around the kitchen as if it weren’t a short step up from purgatory. “I’m not sure this place is going to be up to your usual standards.”

  She almost laughed out loud. “They say hardship is good for the soul.”

  “Do they?” Jaeger asked and ran a finger across the blotchy yellow Formica that flowed like curdled milk over the countertop.

  “Or some such tripe,” she muttered.

  He laughed. “Listen,” he said, tone relentlessly upbeat. “I own a couple decent rental units in town. How about you stay in one of them until the weather warms up again?”

  As if that was ever going to happen. It had snowed the night before, two inches of heavy accumulation that stuck to every surface like tar.

  Out east the apple blossoms would be bursting to life and the foals skipping across pastures as green as shamrocks. But the pastures were owned by David Albrook, she reminded herself, and the foals belonged to a Chinese syndicate.

  A pip of noise sounded from beneath the scarred cabinets.

  Philip Jaeger made a face. “The rentals aren’t fancy,” he admitted. “But they’re mice free.”

  “Mice?” The meaning of his words came home to her with a start. “There are mice here?”

  He cleared his throat and looked as if he wanted to laugh, but managed sobriety with an effort. “To tell you the truth, Sydney, vermin might be the least of your problems.”

  He watched her mentally brace herself, watched her shore up her defenses.

  “What are the worst of my problems?” she asked.

  “Well …” He shrugged. “Like I said before …” he began, gently reminding her of his former caveats. He was all for camaraderie, but even more for covering his own ass. “No one’s lived here for years. And you made it very clear you didn’t intend to do so, either. So there might be a few things that make this property kind of …” He tilted his head. “Unlivable. At present, anyway.”

  For a second she was tempted almost beyond control to grab him by the lapels and tell him to spit it the hell out, but maybe she had made enough mistakes to last into the next millennium.

  “Okay …” She gave him a prim nod, neat and crisp as if her life hadn’t fallen into shambles around her ears. “What are the things I have to worry about first?”

  “Well …” He nodded rhy
thmically. “Water.”

  She waited for him to continue. When he failed to do so, she still refrained from shaking him. A Wellesley did not shake. But maybe she wasn’t a Wellesley anymore. Her people had always been tied to money, to power, to prestige. If that was gone … “What about water?”

  “I mean, it has water,” he hastened to add. “So you’re in luck there.”

  She gave him the slightest corner of a scowl. It wasn’t as if they were in the Mojave Desert; of course they had water.

  “Lots of places around here don’t,” he added. “But I’m not sure the place was properly winterized before the previous tenants moved out. They were just renting, you know, and sometimes…” He shrugged. “Well … they may not have drained the pipes. They didn’t take the best care of the place.”

  She waited several seconds, in case he wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of the statement, but he resisted. Philip Jaeger had a good deal of self-control, too, it seemed.

  “Very well,” she said and wished she could throw up the yogurt she had eaten for breakfast. But that was another thing a Wellesley didn’t do. Bodily functions were inconspicuous and dignified, performed only when absolutely necessary. “What will it cost to drain the pipes now?”

  He stared back at her. A half-dozen naked emotions skittered across his face. The first was humor, but it was rapidly replaced by something that looked suspiciously like pity … a feeling she detested more than the sliced beef liver she had been served without fail every Tuesday at Arbor House. “Listen,” he said. “I’ll give you a good deal on one of those rentals.”

  For a moment she was almost tempted to ask for a dollar figure on that “good deal,” but all she had left in her checking account was a few thousand dollars. Practicality suggested she do whatever it took to preserve that paltry sum.

  So she tilted her chin a little and steeled her spine. “I’m sure that’s very … generous of you, Mr. Jaeger, but if you’ll just tell me how to get the place winterized, I’m certain I’ll be perfectly …” She intended to push out the word happy, but even Sydney Wellesley at the top of her game wouldn’t be able to pull off a fabrication of such astronomical proportions. “… content here.”

  He refrained from glancing around. It probably wasn’t a simple task. Train wrecks, after all, always invited interest. “Okay. Well, you don’t have to winterize it now.”

  “Then why did you just imply the opposite?”

  He opened his mouth as if to explain things, but finally smiled again. “How about I just try to get things working for you?”

  “Well …” She spread her hands and focused her attention on the ragged nail on her right index finger. “If you insist.”

  “I do,” he said, and glancing down the stairs, barely shuddered as he headed into what had surely been originally intended as a torture chamber.

  Sydney watched his descent for a moment, then exhaled carefully and forced herself out of the kitchen. Not a single piece of furniture graced the family room. On the other hand, it was the proud owner of a stark white toilet seat. So perhaps the davenport was in the bathroom, she thought, and was less than surprised to learn that she didn’t have enough energy to investigate. Momentarily comfortable with her weaknesses, she wandered into what might have been a parlor in some long-ago time. It was empty except for a half-rolled-up swath of carpet … an unbecoming orange-and-green shag, like something regurgitated by a love shack from the sixties.

  The rest of the house was no better. The second stair gave way under her weight. The runner was half torn away. At the top of the steps, the walls were covered with stained paper and peeling paint. Up here there was no carpet, just yellowed vinyl flooring that curled at the corners and crackled if she dared venture across it. She turned away, but stark reality struck her from every angle. The missing doors, the pitted walls, the broken windows, the …

  The windows. She found herself pulled across the floor, eyes glued on the center of the panes. The glass was cracked or missing completely, but beyond those shattered squares, the world swept away in an eternity of tree-lined hills and endless skies. From this vantage point, not another building could be seen. Only open land and gnarled evergreens. Red bluffs and pristine snow.

  She drew a careful breath, and in that moment a deer stepped out of the brush. Delicate as a dancer, she lifted her muzzle as if testing the breeze. Her eyes were dark and limpid and in their depths there was both wisdom and wonder. She gazed into the distance as if contemplating the future, as if challenging the elements.

  “Good news!” Jaeger yelled from downstairs.

  The doe snapped her attention toward the house and then she was gone, leaping across the new-fallen snow like a sprinter, all speed and grace and wild optimism.

  Goose bumps prickled along Sydney’s arms.

  “Ms. Wellesley?”

  She turned toward the sound of his voice. “I’m up here.”

  His footsteps tapped toward her, tripped on the second step, then hustled along. In a moment he breezed in. “I thought for a moment you’d hopped the four twenty-five back to Virginia.”

  She inhaled slowly, bracing herself, remembering the doe. “As I said …” She clasped her hands together, reaching for strength. “I’ll be staying here.”

  “Well …” He smiled, but there was something about the expression that clearly questioned her sanity. “In that case, come on. I’ll show you what we’ve got.”

  She followed him down stairs that moaned like ghosts. He glanced back. “You okay?”

  “Of course,” she said and picked up the pace.

  “I thought maybe you were limping.”

  “No,” she lied and stepped onto the orange-and-green carpet. It felt strangely crusty under her feet. What exactly would cause a carpet to be crusty?

  “Okay.” He led her into the kitchen. “Are you ready for this?” His tone was effusive, his smile a little too toothy as he reached out and turned the tap.

  A choking sound issued from the faucet. It coughed, wheezed, and spat forth a sludge-like substance that was the color of urine and the consistency of mud.

  Sydney stared, struck dumb, as a toxic-looking substance spattered into the stained porcelain of the sink.

  “All right, it’s not perfect,” Jaeger admitted, optimism leaking a little from his tone. “But look. It’s clearing up some already.”

  Panic squeezed Sydney like a sponge, but she forced herself to remember the hills that rolled like magic outside her window, the doe, the very image of independence and power.

  “It’ll be fine,” she said and pulled her gaze from the pseudo-water with an effort.

  “Sure,” he agreed and turned off the tap. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t so lucky with the furnace.”

  Her stomach twisted. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to hire someone for that.” He winced as he glanced about. “And to replace the flooring. And maybe …” Taking the few steps to the stove, he fiddled with the knobs on the scarred face of the oven. Nothing seemed to happen. “Guess you’ll have to have someone take a look at that, too.”

  “Well …” She tightened her fists, loosened them restlessly. Perhaps the doe had been a sign. But maybe instead of advocating independence and strength, it was suggesting that she flee from this place as fast as her crippled leg could carry her. “I’m sure you know someone who can take care of those things.”

  He cleared his throat and glanced at her before shifting his gaze uncomfortably back toward the oven. “I’m afraid you’re going to need several different people.”

  “Oh?” Fear crept along her spine.

  “An electrician and a furnace man, at least. I mean, I suppose you don’t want to do too much to the house since you’re just planning to raze it later, but if you’re hoping to stay here at all, you’re going to need someone to replace a couple windows and get the heat working.”

  “I see. Well …” She put as much enthusiasm into the word as she coul
d muster. But after a lifetime of presenting a bored mien to the world, enthusiasm wasn’t exactly in her wheelhouse. “I guess I’ll need several names from you then.”

  He canted his golden head. “I’ll see what I can do, but …”

  “But what?”

  “This isn’t exactly New York City.”

  She forced a look of surprise. “Are you sure?”

  He chuckled. “Okay, it’s not even Sioux Falls.”

  “But South Dakota does have blue-collar laborers. Correct?”

  “Well, yes, of course. But sometimes …” He shrugged. “Sometimes it’s difficult to get people to come out this far. Especially if you don’t know them personally.”

  She interlaced her fingers, tamped down the panic that coiled in her stomach and crept up her esophagus. “I’m told the Lazy Windmill was in rather poor condition just a short while ago. I doubt they had to mortgage their souls for a working stove.”

  “Well … Casie’s always taking in kids, and that Emily …” He shook his head. “She feeds anyone who wanders onto the property. Have you tasted her blue beef?”

  She stared at him. Seconds ticked into silence as she formulated words. “Are you saying I have to be a sous chef to get my furnace working, Mr. Jaeger?”

  “Well, no.” He laughed. “But it couldn’t hurt.”

  Chapter 5

  Sydney had purchased a used mattress while spending one more night in that depressing little motel room off Highway 16. It was lumpy and stained, but at least it was small, which meant it cost less to have it delivered.

  Later, she’d called the car rental company and extended her agreement. But she wouldn’t be able to afford that luxury much longer. Panic scratched at her spine, but she pushed it down. Everything was going to be fine, she assured herself. Father would come around in a few weeks. He could be vindictive. She had known that since childhood, but he was loyal. After her mother’s death, he’d not so much as glanced at another woman. Instead, he had remained true to his wife’s memory. Of course, he had hardly waxed poetic about her or lulled Sydney to sleep with amusing anecdotes regarding their courtship. But he wasn’t an amusing anecdote kind of man. As was his way, he had merely assured her that Winona Wellesley was the epitome of femininity … lovely, graceful, and morally above reproach. Sydney would do well to try to fill her pointe shoes.