Passing Through Paradise

by Susan Wiggs

  If he had the money, Mike would buy it from her as is, on the spot. The place was that appealing to him—an old Victorian summer place on the beach. But most people didn’t want to spend good money for a never-ending home improvement project. And Mike didn’t have the cash—good or otherwise.

  “So what’s your price?” she asked.

  The woman didn’t mince words, he’d give her that. “Depends on what you want.”

  She laughed again without humor. “What are my options?”

  “A full historical restoration or just buffing up?”

  “Whatever will get me the sale.” She sounded weary and a little annoyed, but not at him.

  “That would be plan A—the full restoration in compliance with guidelines from the National Register of Historic Residences.”

  “That matters?” she asked.

  “Money in the bank. You’d get top dollar for a re-stored and certified vintage home, and it’d sell quickly. This is a rare place—the location and the house itself. If you slapped on some paint, fixed the wiring and plumbing, trimmed the hedges and did the roof and floors, it’d pass inspection, but you’d lose any chance of certification from the National Register.”

  “And that matters?” she repeated, her voice sharp with sarcasm.

  “You’d end up waiting longer for the right buyer, and you’d get a lot less.”

  “I’m used to getting less than I expect,” she muttered.

  “That chip on your shoulder will come in handy if we need to knock out any walls.”

  “Fine,” she said, “then I’ll hang on to it.”

  She stared at him, and maybe it was a trick of the light, but he had the weirdest feeling of recognition. He could see softness hidden behind the caustic facade. He saw the woman who’d saved a mouse in the woodpile, who collected refrigerator magnets and read herself to sleep at night. She was no longer a scandalous figure on the local news, thin and somber behind dark glasses as her lawyer hustled her to the car. She was totally different in person. She had enormous eyes, sort of brown, sort of gold, soft around the edges in direct contradiction to her prickly attitude.

  He’d seen the occasional photo of her and Victor in Rhode Island Monthly. The Winslows had been the state’s resident royalty, newsworthy down to the way they parted their hair. The society pages always showed her smiling up at Victor, maybe laughing. And something about seeing her now pierced Mike with a feeling of sadness.

  “What can you do for me, Mr. Malloy?” she asked quietly, the sarcasm gone.

  There was a world of meaning in that question.

  He hesitated, trying to figure out what he expected to come of this—besides a business contract. He wanted to make sense of the senseless, maybe, even though he knew it was futile. He now had a close-up view of the Black Widow of Blue Moon Beach.

  She made a terrible first impression, but their short meeting had convinced Mike of two things. First, the woman was holding something in. And second, regardless of her reputation, she was his best prospect in anotherwise bleak season.

  If he worked on her house, the Winslow family — Victor’s parents, who had once treated Mike as a second son—would probably regard him as a traitor. Or maybe not. Business was business, and they might be glad to see the last of their daughter-in-law. Fixing up her house would speed the process.

  “I’ll work up a couple of proposals,” he said. “One for a full restoration, and the other for cosmetic surgery.”

  “They both sound expensive.”

  “Anything you spend comes off your gain on the house when it sells, so you end up reporting a lesser amount to the IRS.”

  “All right.” She plucked at the bandage around her hand, flashed those bourbon-colored eyes at him. “I’d like that. I’d like to see a proposal.”

  “I’ll get it for you in the next couple of days,” he promised.

  “Okay.” She went over to a desk equipped with a laptop computer, a printer and stacks of paper. Mike idly picked up a framed photograph of her as a girl with tanned legs and bare feet, sitting on a porch swing with a man and a woman. From the sunlit dunes in the background, he could tell the picture had been taken at Blue Moon Beach.

  “Your folks?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” She didn’t elaborate.

  They looked ordinary, unremarkable and kind. You never really knew how your kids would turn out, he thought.

  “So you can call with your bid anytime,” she said. “I ‘m usually . . . home.”

  She stood close enough for him to catch another whiff of that womanly smell, part perfume, part chemistry. A phantom heat shimmered between them, and Mike tried to scowl away the sensation. Not her, he told himself. Not her.

  In his line of work, he’d had his share of come-ons from bored young wives of rich Newporters, left alone in their vintage houses. But the interest had always been one-sided, because he held himself to a strict policy of business only.

  Yet he couldn’t avoid a quick memory of the mussed bed upstairs, and he was all too aware that Sandra Winslow lived here by herself, more lonely than bored. And regard-less of her past, she wasn’t anybody’s wife now.

  Chapter 3

  Journal Entry—January 5—Saturday

  Ten Things to Do Before Selling the House

  49. Take Granddaddy Babcock’s steamer trunk to Mom and Dad.

  50. Figure out where I buried my coin collection in the yard back in 1972.

  51. Check references on Malloy.

  Malloy. Michael Patrick Malloy, according to his business card. Looking back at her overgrown list, Sandra realized his name had come up at least a dozen times, and she hadn’t even hired him yet. He preoccupied her, kept tugging at her thoughts, and she didn’t understand why.

  There certainly wasn’t anything personal between them, yet he reminded her sharply of how much she missed simple human contact. He was a handyman, she needed her house fixed, end of story. Nothing unusual about that. She’d hired fix-it men before, and had never found herself fantasizing about the plumber or the Roto-Rooter man.

  But there was something about the way Malloy had appeared, timing his arrival at her most lunatic moment. A knight in a rusty pickup truck, a tape measure in a holster at his hip. She didn’t want to think about what she would have done if he hadn’t shown up just then, but it was not overly dramatic to imagine he’d saved her from doing something desperate and stupid.

  Not that it would matter to him. He had been completely businesslike, walking from room to room, scribbling notes on a clipboard. Except he didn’t look like any businessman she’d ever known, in his Boston Red Sox cap, work boots and faded jeans. His hair was a little too long, his attitude too—

  A sudden pounding made her jump out of her seat, spilling her pen and notebook to the floor.

  She glanced at the door. It was broad daylight, she told herself, not the middle of the night. Still, she couldn’t keep from reaching for the fire poker next to the stove. Advancing toward the front door, she wished she could see through the sidelight, but a while back, it had been broken by a thrown rock and boarded up.

  Her fingers tightened on the brass handle of the poker and her breath came in quick gasps, inducing a brief dizziness. Given the threats and harassment she’d endured since Victor’s death, she had learned to respect and fear every bump and thump in the night. Or day.

  This is supposed to be over, she wanted to scream. It was an accident, damn it. But her lawyer had warned her that the ruling wouldn’t end her troubles. She’d learned to trust what he said.

  The knock sounded again. Louder, more insistent. Taking a deep breath, Sandra cracked open the door. The safety chain drew taut across the narrow gap. When she saw who it was, her knees turned warm and watery with relief. Thrusting the fire poker in the umbrella stand, she pressed the door shut, disengaged the chain and opened the door.

  The winter wind slung knife blades of penetrating cold into the drafty old house. Light-headed with relief, Sandra stepped asid
e to let her visitor in and quickly shut the door.

  She hadn’t been expecting her mother to make the drive from Providence, but somehow she wasn’t surprised to see her. “Come on in, Mom,” she said. “Come over by the fire, where it’s warm.”

  “Hello, sweetie. I brought you an afghan.” She held out a crinkly plastic bag.

  Sandra gave her a quick, tight hug. “Another Dorrie Babcock original. You spoil me.”

  “No, I knit like the wind.” Afghans were her specialty. She took up knitting in one of many attempts to quit smoking, and then she’d become one of those rare individuals capable of smoking and knitting simultaneously. “And where were you yesterday? I really wish you’d get an answering machine. I think you’re the only person on the planet who doesn’t have one.”

  Actually, Sandra did have one. She put it away soon after the accident—as soon as the anonymous messages started coming. “Sorry, Mom. You must’ve called while I was working outside. Chopping wood.” She held out her bandaged hands.

  “For heaven’s sake.” Dorrie smiled briefly before taking off her hat, then bent to unclasp the same plastic, shoe-shaped boots she’d worn for the past thirty-something years. As always, her hair was sculpted into lacquered dark swirls that, thanks to Miss Clairol, had not changed in decades, and only the deepening lines of character in her strong face betrayed her age.

  “So,” her mother said, hanging her coat on the hall tree. “Things are better, yes?”

  “Much,” she said. Aside from the fact that her mailbox was blown up and her house was falling down, everything was just peachy. But she forbade herself to complain to her mother. Throughout the ordeal, she’d done her best to shield her parents from the worst of the fallout—the constant hounding, the phone calls, the whispers and the doubts.

  Lord knew, Dorrie and Lou Babcock had put up with enough trouble from her when she was young.

  A framed picture of the three of them stood on the end of the desk. It had been taken when Sandra was about eleven. Her mother leaned against her father, hugging his arm while he grinned down at her. Sandra held her father’s hand, not quite smiling. She hadn’t smiled much when she was a kid.

  “I’ll go make tea,” Sandra said. She was a creature of habit. When company came, be it her mother or a party official, she fixed tea in cool weather and lemonade when it was warm. As she measured a spoonful of loose leaves into a chipped stoneware pot, she reflected that it felt strange to do something as normal as making tea when nothing was normal anymore. But that was the nature of life; everything didn’t simply stop and hang suspended at the top of the Ferris wheel while you sorted out your problems. Everything kept turning. Everything kept going.

  “How were the roads?” she called from the kitchen.

  “Icy. But traffic wasn’t bad.”

  “Mom, you know I ‘m always glad to see you. But you didn’t have to come,” she said, carrying the teapot into the living room. Sandra pictured her driving the Grand Marquis down from Providence over slippery roads. “I love having you visit, but I can’t expect you to come running every time the local news pounds another nail into my coffin. Since Victor died, I’ve been teaching myself to cope on my own.”

  “Of course you have, dear.”

  “At the very least, you should’ve had Dad drive you.” Picking up the large copper kettle from the plate on the stove, she poured boiling water into the pot, then set the lid on it to brew.

  “I’m fine driving myself. Perfectly fine.”

  Sandra set out the sugar bowl and filled the cream pitcher. Putting everything on a tray, she carried it into the parlor.

  “That’s lovely,” her mother said, patting the sofa beside her. She sent Sandra a warm smile.

  Sandra sank down next to her mother and leaned her head on Dorrie’s shoulder, inhaling the faint, comforting scent of Keri lotion, Aqua Net and cigarettes. “Sorry about the lecture, Mom. Thanks for coming, really.”

  Dorrie patted her knee and then leaned forward to pour tea through a strainer into their cups. “How are you?” she asked, then predictably answered her own question. “You’re too thin.”

  “I’m fine, Mom.” With ritualistic precision, Sandra measured sugar and milk into her cup. The lighthouse foghorn let out a long, mournful blast that rattled the windows.

  Sandra shivered at the sound. Turning sideways on the sofa, she tucked her feet under her, sipped her tea and said, “So I guess you saw the news.”

  Her mother’s gaze remained fixed on the tempered glass door of the woodstove, and the dancing flames within were reflected in the lenses of her glasses.

  “What did you think of the broadcast?” Sandra prodded.

  Dorrie turned her head to look at Sandra, blinking as though she had just awakened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What was that?”

  Sandra hesitated. Lately her mother had seemed a bit distracted. Was it the mess with Victor, or something else? Perhaps her mother was getting hard of hearing, or maybe something worse was going on. The thought made Sandra’s blood run cold, but she didn’t dare broach the topic with her mother. Dorrie tended to get defensive about medical matters.

  “I was just wondering what you thought of the news,” Sandra said. “You did see Providence Daybreak, didn’t you? Courtney Procter. I swear, she was gloating all through the story. I could hear it in her voice.” Sandra pulled her knees up to her chest and stretched her sweater over them. “How does it feel, being the mother of the Black Widow of Blue Moon Beach?”

  Dorrie laced her fingers together, squeezing hard. Probably craving a cigarette. “That woman is a clown. The whole news show is made up of sensational garbage.”

  “That’s why she gets such good ratings. What makes me crazy is that people around here believe her.”

  Dorrie took a thoughtful sip of her tea and set down her cup. “When something this bad happens, folks need to blame somebody. Or else they have to accept that God can be cruel. And you ought to know that no Winslow from the beginning of time could ever think such a thing.”

  Sandra pictured Victor’s parents, heartbreaking in their dignity as they sat listening to the medical examiner. Their son was officially and legally dead, even though there was no body to make the conclusion real. He had died in an accident—that was the part they didn’t accept. Accidents simply didn’t happen to people like Victor.

  “You always understood the Winslows better than I ever did,” Sandra observed.

  “Maybe so.” Dorrie brushed her hand over Sandra’s head in an old, familiar gesture. “Relax, honey. The investigation is over. What happened was a terrible accident. You’re finally free to grieve for your husband.”

  Sandra propped her chin on top of her drawn-up knees. Freedom to grieve was not what she needed right now. She pressed her jaws together to keep from blurting out the latest incident of vandalism. Someone had spray-painted the letters O.J. on the side of the garage. Though she didn’t sense any physical danger, the vicious implication of the act still shook her. But she was more angry than scared. She’d applied that anger to scrubbing off the graffiti, taking most of the paint with it. If that was grieving, she was getting good at it.

  She poured herself more tea, willing her nerves to calm. She used to think there was no problem so enormous that sharing a cup of tea with her mother couldn’t fix it. Now she had found that problem, and it was a whopper. And yet, just for these few moments, warmed by the intimacy of a shared cup of tea, she found it easier to breathe.

  “Hey, Mom,” she said, “what would you think if I sold the house?”

  Her mother’s eyebrows lifted behind her glasses. “You’re going to leave here?”

  “I have to face facts. Now that Victor’s gone, it’s time for me to pick up the pieces and put together some sort of life for myself. Somewhere else. Somewhere far from here.”

  Her mother studied her intently. It might have been a trick of the light, but Sandra sensed something more than the usual wisdom and compassion in her mother�
�s face. There was sadness, too. A sort of surrender.

  “Maybe you’re right, dear. Your grandparents left the house to you, free and clear. It’s your decision.”

  “This place has been in the family forever. Do you think Dad would be upset?”

  “The only thing that upsets him is making bogey when he’s shooting for par. Honestly, he hasn’t thought about this place in years.” She glanced around the room. “You’ll have to get some work done before listing it. Hire someone.”

  “I think I already have.” Sandra felt an odd little quiver inside, thinking of Malloy. On some level, she suspected she might be inviting more into her life than a simple contract with a handyman. “A . . . guy stopped by yesterday and looked around. He’s going to put together a proposal. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’m broke.”

  “That’s temporary. Victor’s life insurance belongs to you, and it’s high time you received it.” She ran her hand over the threadbare arm of the old sofa.

  “My lawyer’s handling that.” She didn’t add that after deducting legal fees and paying off the debts from Victor’s latest campaign, she’d barely have enough to cover the restoration work, but she was determined. She couldn’t stay here, walled off from the world, no matter how much she loved the wild shores of Blue Moon Beach. What had happened that night, what was said in the car, had changed her life. But she couldn’t let it destroy her. Thanks to the painfully drawn-out process of the inquest, she’d been obliged to stay in town. With the proceedings behind her, she was free to go at last.

  “So you want to leave Paradise.” Her mother gazed out the window at the wide winter sky. “You always seemed so at-home here. This was the place where . . . I thought you found what you were looking for.”

  “I did, but my only link was Victor. That’s become clear enough since the accident. Other than my hairdresser—who’s from Texas—these people were Victor’s friends, Victor’s constituents. I always thought of this house as my sanctuary, but it’s not anymore.”

  “Will you return to Providence, then?” her mother asked.