Jane studied her choices. She passed right over the teddy bears, the poodles, the fuzzy red lobsters. "The little whale. I want the whale." The vendor handed it over just as three men and an attractive woman dressed in a skin-tight miniskirt came up to McKenzie and her.
"Mac!" one of the men said, slapping him on the back. "We're goin' for a beer. Wanna come?"
The woman looked deliberately from McKenzie to Jane and back to McKenzie again, but nobody was introducing anyone.
Mac said, "Sure. I'll come." He turned to Jane and gave her a brief, ironic smile. You know that better offer I mentioned? it said. Here she is.
He walked out with them.
Jane blinked, then bit her lip and turned to go. She'd never won anything before, but she'd never been cut like that before, either. Oh, well. It's a wash, she thought sadly, clutching her little gray whale and turning to go.
"Miss — you still have another chance," the vendor said to her.
"Oh. Do I? I wasn't counting." She reached in and pulled out her one last chance.
Sorry.
Chapter 7
Jane hadn't seen Phillip Harrow since his dinner party, and when he stopped in she was surprised; she'd assumed he was off the island.
"I was, last week," he admitted. "But I spend most of my time on the island—more than Bing, although far less than Mac. And of course, all of us are home less than the Crates, who prefer to live as if they're under house arrest. Some islanders are like that."
Jane laughed and offered him coffee and a tour. Phillip declined the coffee, but politely agreed to let her show him the house.
She took him first to the fireplace room. He had good things to say about it; everyone did. He ignored the tarot cards that were still laid out, just as Jane had found them, on the little inlaid table,
"I assume by now all the neighbors have trekked on through," he guessed aloud. "With your aunt having been a recluse, everyone's worked up a fierce curiosity about the house," he said as she led him through the rest of the place.
"It's true. Dorothy Crate and her mother have already been by, and Cissy and Bing, of course. I get the impression that people on Nantucket know every one of the older houses, that they regard them kind of like community elders. A total stranger knocked on my door yesterday and asked to see the place."
"And Mac McKenzie?"
"He's been here," she said briefly. As far as the back door. Any farther will be over my dead body.
They were in the kitchen now, with its knocked-down wall and exposed timbers. Jane explained her plans, and Phillip nodded without commenting.
They retraced their steps to the front room. In the empty parlor Phillip saw a stack of wallpaper books piled in the middle of the floor and said, "You won't think I'm out of line if I give you a tip, I hope. But my business is real estate, after all."
He ambled up to the opened page of the top book and said, "You don't want to spend too much time and money papering walls with, say, this floral chintz, because the buyer may own Arts and Crafts Movement pieces and prefer a minimal look.
"In general, you'll want to avoid putting the stamp of your personality on a property you mean to sell — no matter how charming a personality that happens to be," he said, smiling. "Let's face it: the renovate-and-flip age is over," he added. "You should be watching every penny you put into this project."
Grateful for the advice, Jane said, "I'm glad to hear you say that. After talking to the Crates I felt an obligation to restore Lilac Cottage to museum condition. To be honest, I just don't have the money," she said, closing the wallpaper book with a slap. "I'm looking for a job right now, and I have a condo in Connecticut to pay for.
"I wish I could keep this, I really do," she added with a sigh, watching the lively play of sunlight through the diamond-paned windows. "There's just something endearing about this place, even in March."
"That's a good sign, Jane. If you like it, someone else will, too," he said reassuringly.
Phillip had his hand on the front doorknob. Suddenly he turned to ask Jane if she'd decided on a realtor yet, and whether she had a ballpark figure in mind. Jane hadn't talked to any realtors, but she had a price in mind and said so.
"Too high, I think," he said thoughtfully. "For these times, anyway. But I'll tell you what: before you sign a listing agreement, let me ask around. I may be able to find you a buyer and save you the commission."
"Would you? Oh, that would be fabulous," Jane said, her hopes beginning to soar. Phillip was just what she'd been missing — a disinterested, impartial advisor. She herself knew nothing about real estate. How else had she managed to buy a condo at peak, in a development that remained half-empty to this day?
"No promises, now," he warned, taking out a pair of calfskin gloves from the pocket of his topcoat. "But I'll make a few calls. In the meantime, don't go boxing yourself in by signing a contract with somebody."
Delighted, Jane walked with him to the door and waved him a friendly good-bye as he slid behind the wheel of his burgundy Mercedes.
Jane's giddy optimism lasted all of thirteen minutes, which was when she picked up the wallpaper razor and lifted it to the next wall due to be stripped. The searing pain in her shoulder returned, and she was plunged into instant depression.
The antibiotics had done nothing. The wound was healing, but the pain itself was worse than ever. And yet she'd been told that her blood test results were within normal range. What is going on? she wondered, becoming frightened. Some form of premature arthritis? Lyme disease? What?
Feeling frustrated and defeated, she threw on a jacket and a woolen cap and went out for a walk. It was cold; her breath came out in smoky billows. Inevitably, inexorably, her steps took her to the little burying ground behind the house and the rose that was growing on Judith's grave.
Jane paused, her mittened hands jammed in the pockets of her jacket, and studied the thorny shrub. It was very old, that was obvious. The shrub wasn't tall, perhaps four feet, but it was dangerously thorny and sprawled all over the grave.
Was this rose the cause?
She circled the grave slowly, staring at the shrub. How could she have become infected by it? Just suppose that's really what had happened — never mind that her doctor had laughed at her theory. Then where did the poison, or the fungus or the virus or whatever it was, come from?
The roots are growing on a grave.
That thought had first formed at Phillip's dinner party, when the different versions of the Legend of the Cursed Rose got passed around. Jane had pushed it to the back of her mind, and there it had germinated, probably in the dreams which seemed to trouble her almost nightly. Now it was emerging, fully formed, a frightening, demonic thing: The roots are growing on a grave. Over it, through it, part of it
"Oh, God," she whispered, crouching down for a closer look. How deep did the roots of roses go? She was no gardener. How deep were bodies buried? She was no gravedigger. Was Judith buried in a coffin? Had the coffin rotted away? And Judith? How connected, in nature's grand recycling scheme, were Judith and the rose?
She pushed herself away from her crouching stance and jumped to her feet, shaking violently. This is dumb, this is stupid. You're letting yourself fall under the spell of this ... this other side of Nantucket. Just because a little bookcase goes bump in the night, you're ready to call in an exorcist.
She wasn't forgetting, either, what her mother had told her on the day of her aunt's funeral: that when Jane was eight years old, Sylvia Merchant had spent the summer filling her head with "paranormal gibberish." Gibberish. Yes. You are predisposed to gibberish.
And yet ....
She circled the grave again. Was it her imagination, or was the dull, ever-present pain in her shoulder easing? Or was it just the anesthetizing effect of the cold? She circled the grave once, twice more, trying to determine if the relief was measurable. When she looked up, it was to see McKenzie's dark green truck stopped in the lane nearby.
Unfortunately, McKenzie was i
n it. He was sitting in the driver's seat, watching her. The sun was slanting off the window, so she couldn't see the expression on his face. Amusement, contempt, menace, bafflement, all four — anything was possible.
Oh, fine. Here I am, behaving like a puppy at a fire hydrant. What must the man think of me? She decided to preempt the obvious guess — that she was insane — by confronting him. She walked boldly up to the car. He rolled down his window.
"Hi, Mac, I see you've got your muffler fixed. How've you been?" she said in her breeziest way. "I haven't seen you since ... since ..." Since you walked out with a gorgeous woman hanging on your arm, you jerk.
"Since you got lucky," he said with that ironic smile of his.
"Funny; I would've said that described you to a T."
He thought about it a second. "You must mean Miriam," he drawled. "Miriam's one of my cousins. I would've introduced you, but I didn't want to seem impertinent."
"Oh, for —! Why do —?" She looked down at her shoes, suppressing a snort, wondering whether there was any way they could have a simple conversation without exploding into class warfare.
In the meantime it occurred to her that he could've done something on his own to level up the playing field. Something to put them on terms of friendly equals. He could've said, "That's a pretty jacket you've got on." Or, "You look nice in blue." But no. He just sat behind the wheel of his pickup, watching and waiting. What was he waiting for, a work order? Why did he make her feel like an overseer on a cotton plantation?
"Well," he said at last, rolling up his window.
"Before you go!" she said quickly. "I wonder if ... if you could give me some advice. About the two hollies on either side of my front door. They're way overgrown; I can't walk up the steps without getting tangled up in them. Something has to be done."
"All right," he said with a look almost of concern. "An hour from now okay?"
"I'll be there."
"By the way ...." He reached for something on his front seat and passed it through the open window to her: it was the rotary hand drill, with a brand-new wood handle varnished to a brilliant finish.
"I once saw a woman break another woman's finger at a flea market over a shoe rack," he said. "I guess we stopped just shy of that last week. I've got other hand drills," he added, rolling up the window.
Before she could respond, he was bumping down the lane toward his place and Jane was left standing in one of the sandy ruts, with the drill in one mittened hand, thinking, Damn. He did that on purpose. To have the upper hand. Well! We'll see who's more gracious than who.
For the next hour Jane worked diligently on the wall of the parlor, ignoring the pain in her shoulder. By the time she heard the loud thunk of the old brass door knocker, she was more than happy to stop what she was doing and answer it. She'd made a pot of extra strong coffee and defrosted the second half of Mrs. Adamont's apricot coffee cake, just to show how gracious she could be.
But when Jane opened the door, she saw at once that McKenzie was on his way to a boat. Dressed in a heavy navy blue sweater and yellow oilskins over olive green rubber boots, he looked like the picture on a box of Gorton's Fish Sticks.
"Come in while I put on a jacket," she said, oddly disappointed that this was just a pit stop for him.
As he stepped into the parlor, he pulled off his watch cap; she was struck anew by the almost boyish wildness of his thick, curled hair. A lot of men his age had begun to cling for dear life to what hair they had left on their heads. Jane felt sure McKenzie had never given it a thought.
Stuffing the cap into his pocket, he looked around the room. "It's too bad she closed in the fireplace on this side," he remarked as Jane slid her sore shoulder carefully into the sleeve of her jacket. "This was always a good room for a fire."
"You've been here before?"
"Once or twice," he said noncommittally. He was rocking back and forth on the heels of his boots, obviously in a hurry.
With someone as tight-lipped as Mac McKenzie, "once or twice" could mean once or twice a day, or once or twice in his life. She knew from Bing that McKenzie's people had been farming the land behind her for two hundred years. In the forty years he'd lived there, McKenzie must've learned some damn thing about Sylvia Merchant.
"When was the last time you were here?" she asked him.
"The day before your aunt closed down the house. When she gave me her cat."
"She gave you her cat? I didn't know that! Where is it now?"
He shrugged. "Mousing, probably. You must have seen him around. Big, gray, yellow eyes. Kinda wild."
She remembered the creature in her basement. "Does he have a face like a Gremlin, from the movie? I was attacked by something gray downstairs a couple of weeks ago."
"Could be Wicky. As I recall, he liked to squeeze through a missing piece of granite in the foundation and sleep on the furnace. Look, I don't mean to press, but the tide is falling and I mean to do some clamming."
"Sorry," she said quickly. "Let's go outside and have a look, shall we?"
They stepped out onto the sagging front porch together. The overhanging hollies, like dancing teachers nudging their students to waltz, forced them uncomfortably close to each other.
"See?" Jane said in an edgy voice. "There isn't room for both of us on the porch." There isn't room for both of us on the planet, she thought, catching her breath at the nearness of him. What was it about him? He emanated a kind of strength that she found almost threatening. "They're just too big."
McKenzie stepped down two steps and looked up at the majestic hollies. "Someone probably dug up a couple of wild seedlings and just stuck 'em in the ground on a whim, never considering their ultimate size.
"I grew up with this pair," he added with obvious affection. "When I was a kid the first thing I learned to watch for were the boy holly, and the girl holly with the bright red berries; they marked the turn home."
"Yes, but now they're too big for the site they were planted on," she repeated, feeling like the other side of a custody battle. They were her trees, after all, to do with as she wished. "I wanted to get a quote from you for cutting them down."
His look turned instantly dark. "Are you kidding?"
"Or," she added quickly, "cutting them way back. You could kind of take out a semicircle from the inside half of each one. On each side of the porch. Do you know what I mean? Kind of like ... this," she said, gesturing with her arm in a wide semicircle.
But her shoulder wasn't up to the task. "Ayyii" she said, gasping from the pain.
He gave her a sideways look, as if she'd dribbled tea down her chin. "Did you ever get that scratch looked at?"
"Yes, yes, yes," she said, wincing and rubbing her shoulder through her jacket. "The blood tests, whatever they were, all showed normal. I think it might be Lyme disease."
"They would have tested for that."
"Okay, then it's the curse of the Cursed Rose," she snapped.
"If you're talking about the rose I saw you moping over a little while ago, I guess you've got the wrong rose. That's a rugosa rose on Judith Brightman's grave. God only knows how long they've been around—England had them two hundred years ago from Asia. People make tea and jellies from their hips, which are full of vitamin C. It's not a real dangerous rose," he said in his deadpan way.
She made a face. "All I know is that I was fine before I scratched myself on its thorn, and now I'm not. In any case, it's my problem, isn't it?" she added sweetly. "And so: Will you cut the hollies down, or will you prune them?"
"Neither."
Neither. Of course.
"Do you run a landscaping service, or not?"
He sighed and said, "Let's try this another way. A holly grows very slowly. These hollies are irreplaceable. They're also a valuable asset to your property, whether you realize it or not. Last but not least, that pair has overseen a fair amount of Nantucket history. I know that doesn't mean much to you nomadic types. But around here it counts for a lot."
"They're
not appropriate for their location," she said, digging her heels in.
"Appropriate, my ass!" he said, his patience exploding. "I'm sick of the word 'appropriate'! That's all we ever hear: It's not appropriate. A tree farm's not appropriate. The noise from a chipper-shredder's not appropriate. The tractor's too noisy, the rooster crows too loud for a residential neighborhood," he said, spitting the last two words out with contempt. "Well, I've got news for you and yours, lady. The farm was here before half these houses, and those holly trees were here before you. And if you don't like it—"
He brought himself to a screeching halt and glared at her with an absolutely furious expression on his face, as if she'd been some jaywalker who ambled onto the highway as he was rolling through in his Mack truck. Then, just as suddenly, he shifted down to a lower gear and continued quietly on his way.
"Look ... Miss Drew ... I was way out of line, there," he said, taking a deep breath. "Obviously there's a solution to this problem."
"I should think so," she said, wide-eyed and breathless, stunned by his vehemence.
"Just move the front door."
"What?"
"Sure. The porch is rotten anyway. Have your contractor move the doorframe to the east and rebuild the porch there; it's not that big a deal." McKenzie's face took on a relaxed, almost joyful repose; he'd solved the problem, at least to his satisfaction.
"Mister McKenzie. In the first place, I haven't found a contractor I can afford yet. And in the second place ... in the second place, I want the hollies out."
McKenzie pulled out a small, battered notebook from inside his shirt pocket. "Here's someone you can afford," he said, ignoring her demand. "His name is Billy Butkowski—Billy B., everyone calls him," he said as he scribbled the name and phone number. "His wife just had their second kid; he's hungry for all the work he can get."
He tore off the sheet and handed it to her with a neutral look.
Obviously they were at an impasse. Jane stared at the slip of paper. Then a thought occurred to her. She said, "What if we dig them up and move them? Could that be done?"
Beloved Page 9
