Painted Moon

by Karin Kallmaker

  The woman didn't say anything, though. Leah muttered, "Hang on," and started her descent down the steepest driveway in the whole Mammoth Lakes area. It put off casual callers, something that suited Leah just fine. Snow was already piling up against the garage door, so putting the truck in there was out of the question. She pulled onto the intermediate plateau above the house and said, "We'll have to walk down. Carry as much as you can. Maybe we won't have to make another trip."

  As Leah had expected, the paper bags tore when they picked them up. The woman shrugged out of her jacket and piled groceries into it without comment, then staggered down the hill fully loaded. She lost her footing near the bottom and slid the last few feet on her butt, landing against the drift accumulating against the garage. Her expression was such a funny mix of chagrin and annoyance that Leah felt like laughing — something she hadn't done for quite some time. But she had to admire her pluck; she picked herself out of the snow without exclamation or assistance and trudged up the steps.

  "Now look, I'm trusting you with this," Leah said to Butch. "You have to behave. We have company." She extended the plastic handle of the turkey's mesh bag toward Butch. Butch solemnly clenched the handle between her front teeth and obediently dragged the plastic-wrapped turkey down the snow-covered slope to the house.

  Using her jacket the same way the woman had, Leah was able to haul in the last of the groceries. She had misplaced the art supply box somewhere along the way, but that didn't bother her one bit, she thought as she dumped the bundle unceremoniously on the kitchen floor. She realized that Butch was now eyeing the turkey lustfully, so she removed it to a safer place in the back porch sink. "Turn up the fire," she said over her shoulder.

  When she came back into the kitchen, the woman was huddled near the stove. A pile of sodden clothing on the floor was growing as the woman yanked first one sweater, then another over her head and let it fall. "I n-need something to wear," she said. "I'm w-wet all the way through."

  Leah went into the spare room. Underneath all the layers of clothing had been a small-boned but well-filled-out woman. Sharla's clothes would be a better fit, she decided. Her own sweaters were too narrow in the shoulders and hips. She held a thick New Zealand wool sweater against her face for a moment, remembering the feel of it with Sharla’s soft, exquisite body underneath. She shuddered violently, her longing for Sharla flaring up through her spine. She knew she had to stop feeling like this.

  She gave herself a moment to regain her composure, then went back to the kitchen.

  The woman accepted the sweater, underthings and corduroy pants without comment, then asked where the bathroom was. Leah pointed it out and the woman hurried away.

  Well, this was the most awkward situation she'd ever been in, Jackie thought. Trapped in a winter cabin with a dour mountain woman about as sociable as her dog. "Turn the fire up." As if Jackie would play with a wood burning stove without instructions.

  Be nice, she told herself. This woman has saved you from freezing to death. She shuddered into the clothes and patted her hair, wondering if she should undo the braid so it could dry. No, it looked halfway decent as it was. She went back to the kitchen, thinking of the heat coming from the kitchen stove.

  "I feel almost human. Thank you," she said as she entered. Her rescuer looked up from poking inside the stove and immediately looked away. Jackie stealthily checked her fly... it was buttoned. It was as though Mountain Woman couldn't stand the sight of her. "I'm really sorry to be imposing on you like this. Do you know how far it is to the Carson place?"

  "About a mile and a half."

  "Oh. I thought maybe I could walk it." She kept me from freezing, Jackie reminded herself. I might not have made it.

  "Don't be stupid."

  Pleased to meet you, too, Jackie thought. The least she could do is look at me. "I know that's out of the question now. I got a late start. I should have been there hours ago. My boss kept me late. In San Francisco." She realized she was babbling. A near-death experience wasn't exactly calming.

  "Phone's on the wall. It might still work."

  "Oh. Thanks." Okay, we'll keep it to short sentences. Her relatives could come get her in the morning. She dug her fanny pack out from under her wet clothes and fished out her aunt's phone number. The connection crackled, then the call went through.

  Her aunt, no doubt expecting the phone service to stop at any moment, launched into speech as soon as she heard Jackie's voice. "I've been worried sick. The weather service just didn't do justice ta this storm. It's a doozy. Your mother'd have my hide if something happened ta you. Where are you?"

  "I'm at one of your neighbors. My car slipped off the road." Her aunt gasped in alarm. "No, I'm okay. Nothing even bruised." Except her rear end, but that had happened when she'd fallen down with the groceries. She turned to her rescuer who was dropping kindling and small logs into the stove. "Where am I?"

  "At the old McCormick place."

  She repeated the information to her aunt who gave a small gasp. "Oh, Jackie, maybe Hank can come ta get you... no, he's shaking his head. But I hate ta think of you there."

  Jackie heard the emphasis on the last word. Had she fallen in with the local bootleg gin manufacturer? Or a modern day Lizzie Borden? Her aunt most definitely disapproved. "I'm fine, really. My hostess has been very considerate."

  'I'll bet," her aunt said. "You just watch out for yourself. Hank'll be there soon as the weather breaks. Should be tamorra morning some—"

  The line went dead.

  Jackie tried calling back but there was no dial tone, so she gave up. "My uncle will pick me up when the weather breaks, Ms. McCormick."

  The woman actually smiled ... slightly. "I'm Leah Beck. I own it now, but this cabin will always be the McCormick place."

  "Sorry. Well, I can't tell you how glad I am you came along. I had no intention of being out in this kind of weather in a sports car." Leah rolled her eyes and Jackie felt stupid, so she defended herself. "It was my boyfriend's idea. I wanted to buy something a little more utilitarian than an MG."

  "Who are you?" Leah put the cover back over the fire and turned to face her as though braving herself to do it. Jackie wondered if she frightened Leah.

  "Oh, sorry. Jackie Frakes."

  "Any relation?"

  Jackie blinked. Not very many people associated her name with her mother's. "To whom?"

  "The sculptor."

  Jackie blinked. This antisocial, eccentric woman knew her mother's work? "Yes, she's my mother."

  Leah winced, then began picking up the groceries. Jackie bent to help her. "That's okay," Leah said. "I can do it."

  "I'm sure you can, but I need to do something to earn my keep."

  "Do something about your clothes. There's clothespins in the drawer closest to the stove. They'll all be dry in no time."

  Jackie gathered she was to hang them on the thin wire behind the stove. She examined it, discovered it had a clever pulley system, and hung everything up, including the sodden panties from her jeans' pockets. The heat coming off the stove was fierce and oh, so comforting. Jackie finally felt some sensation in her earlobes.

  "Have you had any dinner?"

  "Just a Big Mac about five hours ago," Jackie said. "I grabbed one as I went through Vacaville."

  "I was planning to heat up some leftover stew."

  "Sounds great." As if on cue, her stomach growled. Butch's head jerked toward her. "Nice doggy," she said. She'd never been great with animals; her father's work had kept them moving around too much to have pets.

  "If you call her a doggy she'll bite you," Leah said. She turned away, but Jackie still saw a trace of a smile.

  "Why Butch for a girl?"

  Leah kept her back turned. "Because she acts really tough, but when you get her on her back, she's a pussycat." There was something between laughter and pain in her voice.

  Strange name, Jackie thought as she held out her fingers. After a moment, Butch deigned to sniff them. Then she nudged them with he
r nose. Jackie scratched slightly and was rewarded by Butch sinking lower and lower until she was on the floor. She stroked Butch's side and Butch rolled over with a sigh. She closed her eyes when Jackie scratched her stomach.

  "I .see what you mean."

  Leah set a saucepan on the stove and went back to putting the groceries away as if Jackie didn't exist. Within a few minutes Jackie could hear the stew bubbling, so she got up to stir it. Leah noticed her existence enough to tell her where bowls and spoons were and then passed her a loaf of bread and a long-handled fork. Hah, thought Jackie. I'll bet she thinks I don't know what a toasting fork is. She doesn't know Daddy and his fondness for wilderness holidays.

  Leah didn't remark on the nicely browned toast Jackie produced from over the stove. She had been tempted to butter it while on the fork and then let it sizzle for just a few moments on the hot stove top, but that would be showing off. The stew was surprisingly good and it chased the last of her snow experience away. She wondered what on earth she and Leah would talk about. It was hard to have a conversation with someone who was as moody as hell. Butch was starting to look like the better conversationalist of the two.

  Leah pulled on her parka and boots and left Jackie to the dirty dishes she insisted on doing. Suddenly, all the lights flickered. Jackie told Leah when she came back in the house.

  "They do that when you turn the generator on. We're going to lose the electric before the night's out. The propane tank is full—we could last a couple of weeks." She stomped her feet on the floor, scattering ice and snow, then kicked her boots off. "Do you like classical music?"

  "Baroque, rococo or romance?"

  "All of the above." Leah actually did smile. Jackie was surprised and pleased. Leah seemed to warm up with time.

  Jackie made short work of the dishes, but there had only been a few. She trailed after Leah, who was programming a couple of CDs into the player. A lovely Bach suite swirled out of the speakers. "Very civilized," Jackie said.

  'Isn't it." Leah bent to stoke up the Franklin stove. "It'll warm up pretty quickly."

  Jackie rubbed her arms. 'It's amazing that it's so cold in here when the kitchen is so warm." The high ceiling was a classic A-frame with sky lights on either side. A loft took up the rear portion of the ceiling area. In the winter, Jackie was willing to bet it was toasty. In the summer the open skylights would bring a breeze across it.

  Leah cleared her throat. "Look, um, there's only one bed and that's in the loft. It gets heat from the kitchen flue. I wouldn't mind if we shared... it's king-sized."

  Jackie could tell that the idea bothered Leah a lot. "I can bunk down here on the couch. It's warming up already."

  "By three a.m. it'll be about twelve degrees in here."

  "I'm sure I'll be fine if you have lots of blankets."

  Leah shrugged. "Suit yourself. I’ve got a down sleeping bag and I'll throw a couple blankets over the clothesline. You can get them when you're ready to go to sleep."

  Jackie looked around the living room. It was finished with a high-gloss pine and comprised the main area of the cabin, with the loft overhead, kitchen door on one side and a short hallway to the bathroom on the other. If there was only one bedroom, up in the loft, what did the doors across from the bathroom lead to? Two rooms was a lot of storage. She meandered over to the shelves, which were jammed with books.

  "Help yourself to anything you'd like," Leah said. She closed the stove door and stood up.

  "You're a mystery buff." Every detective she'd ever heard of was represented in the collection, along with names she didn't recognize.

  "Not really."

  Jackie knew when someone didn't want to talk about something. She had inherited a sense of diplomacy from her father. Her mother would have probed and ended up with Leah's life story — and Leah would have felt better for it. She changed the subject. "What used to hang here?" There was a subtle rectangular outline faded into the wood between the bookcases.

  "A painting," Leah said. She took the tea kettle from the top of the Franklin stove and disappeared into the kitchen.

  "Fine," Jackie muttered. Moody as her mother when she was working on a new piece. She settled down with a recent Brother Cadfael mystery. If silence was what her hostess wanted, silence was what she would get.

  As Leah filled the tea kettle, Butch rubbed her head against Leah's feet. She glared at the dog. Traitor, she thought. You'll roll over for a pair of good hands and a pretty face.

  She was at a loss of what to say to Jackie. She wasn't the brainless teenager she'd first thought — definitely closer to thirty than twenty. She wanted to ask questions about Jellica Frakes, one of the few women in the arts Leah truly admired, but that would mean talking about who she was. And she didn't want to talk about herself or art. It hurt too much.

  She went back to the spare room — Sharla had called it the dressing room — where all their clothes and the linens were stored, and brought out the sleeping bag and two blankets, a pair of Sharla's flannel PJs and thick cotton socks. She draped the blankets over the top of the clothes on the line. She hoped Jackie would be warm enough. Sharing her bed with another woman was not a welcome circumstance. Especially a woman that would be wearing Sharla's clothes.

  She pled tiredness and left Jackie to enjoy the Bach and the book she'd become engrossed in. She changed into pajamas and climbed the ladder to the loft. To her surprise she found the sound of the music and turning pages comforting... sounds of life. It was a long time before she dozed off, but not as long as she had thought it would be.

  Something woke her up. Not Butch moving around... she knew those noises. Something else. It was dark below, but the flickering flame from behind the glass in the Franklin stove gave some light. She sat up, saw someone moving around, then remembered her guest. It looked like she'd gotten up for another blanket from behind the stove. There was silence again and Leah went back to sleep.

  The next time she woke she smelled something cooking. She sniffed. Soup? What was Sharla up to? She rolled over and blinked in the dim light coming from the skylight. And in the middle of the night?

  "You know you don't want this carrot, so stop begging for it," she heard a voice say. Her blood froze. A wave of pain hit her so hard in the chest she collapsed back onto the bed barely able to breathe.

  She's dead.

  It was so easy to forget because she wanted to so badly. To pretend that the woman moving around in the kitchen was Sharla. But she wasn't.

  For a long bitter moment, Leah wished she had left Jackie Frakes to freeze in the snow.

  "You'll be sorry if I give you this. You don't like onion, you know that you don't." Another waft of something delicious found its way into the loft.

  Leah wiped her eyes and looked at the clock. Just after eight... she wasn't used to getting up this early. In the winter she was early to bed and late to rise. It wasn't as though she had a reason to get up. It wasn't as though she could paint.

  Today she had to get up to find out what this stranger was doing to her kitchen. She forced herself out of bed and threw on a robe. To her surprise, the fire in the living room was going quite nicely. From the heat flowing out of the kitchen, she guessed that Jackie Frakes had figured out how to stoke up the stove.

  She headed to the bathroom without speaking. After her shower she glared at her reflection, aware that she looked at least five years older than her thirty-seven years. She started to put on her usual jeans and flannel shirt. She sighed and found clean black slacks and a sweater. Company.

  When she finally went into the kitchen, she found Butch watching Jackie's every move with rapt attention. A pot boiling on the stove was the source of the soup smell. The turkey sat in a roasting pan. Jackie was dumping chopped celery and onion into a large bowl.

  "Good morning," Jackie said. Much to Leah's relief, she was wearing her own clothes again. "I was going to make coffee, but I wasn't sure how you liked it... morning coffee is such a personal thing. I noticed you had a variety of beans
."

  Leah smiled slightly and busied herself with the coffee maker. She liked a mix of French roast and something flavored in the morning. This morning she felt like a dash of mocha almond. Thank God for Peet's mail order.

  After a minute Jackie said, "Happy Thanksgiving, by the way. I've got the giblets and neck boiling with some celery and carrot tops and onion. I chopped some celery and onion for the stuffing, but then I saw that you had bought apples and walnuts and I thought perhaps they were meant for the stuffing."

  Leah stared at her. What a whirlwind of activity.

  "You did want to have the turkey today, didn't you?"

  "Yeah, I'm sorry. You've done a lot. Um, no apples for me in the stuffing, unless you want some..."

  "I think it's vile."

  Leah laughed. She hadn't meant to. "So do I. I like a plain celery and onion stuffing with reasonable seasonings. The apples and walnuts are for separate consumption."

  "My mother went through a prolonged Indian cuisine stage, so we had apple and curry stuffing one year. With raisins. Never again." While she spoke, Jackie opened the bag of bread crumbs and dumped them in with the chopped vegetables. She added some melted butter and more of the boiling stock. Leah's stomach growled. She'd forgotten that Thanksgiving food smelled so good. She couldn't recall feeling this hungry in months.

  Jackie continued, "It's not that I don't like Indian food. I love it. Give me a good curry, chapati and chutney, and I'll follow you anywhere." She finished stirring the mixture and began shoveling stuffing into the turkey. "In fact, Indian stuffing is really good if it's what you're expecting to come out of the turkey. But if you're not expecting it, it's quite disgusting."

  "I know what you mean." Leah watched as Jackie rubbed the bird with buttered hands.

  "Do you mind if I cook the bird my way? It'll turn out," Jackie said. She rinsed her hands and then tented the roaster with foil. 'It's great to have a full kitchen at my disposal. My studio apartment doesn't have an oven and there's only two burners."

  "The oven's too hot, isn't it?" Both dampers were wide open.