We got busy eating, and for a minute or two, nothing in the way of meaningful conversation took place while we all filled our plates and our mouths. After a break, I looked over at Shannon. “I was looking at your earrings earlier.”
She tweaked one of them, causing prisms of light to play across the wall. Her nails were polished and tinted pale pink. “These old things? Josh gave them to me for Christmas a few years ago.” She grinned at him.
“Four,” Josh said, his mouth full of pizza.
“They were all the rage back then. Every girl in school had a pair. You did, too, didn’t you, Paige?”
Paige nodded. She was carefully dissecting a piece of pizza, blotting off as much of the sauce as she could reach with a napkin. “Josh got a pair for me, too. But then I lost one.” She shrugged.
“I don’t suppose you’ve ever been inside the house on Becklea?” I said.
Paige shook her head.
“You found an earring in there?” Josh said, interested. I nodded, digging in my pocket. He extended his hand across the table, and I dropped the shiny thing into his palm. He turned it over and showed it to Shannon. “Looks just like yours, doesn’t it?”
She nodded, her head practically on his shoulder. He tilted his head, and I could see his nostrils flare as he breathed in.
“It has to be older than four years, though, Josh.” She looked up at him, then she straightened before she added, “Nobody’s lived in that house for seventeen years, at least. Right?”
“That’s true,” Josh admitted. Ricky extended a meaty paw, and Josh passed the shiny trinket over to him. Ricky ran the tip of his finger over it, hunching so far forward that his hair totally obscured his face.
“We figure it probably belonged to the mother,” Derek said. “Or maybe the mother-in-law. I’m sure they had these kinds of earrings back in the 1980s, too.”
“No doubt.” I held out my hand, and Ricky placed the earring on my palm. I stuck it back in my pocket. “We’re considering sending it to the lawyer in Portland. The one the Murphy kid hired to help him sell the house. Just in case the boy would like to have it.”
“Sure,” Shannon said. Josh nodded, although he probably would have agreed with anything Shannon said.
“Of course,” my mother said a couple of hours later, after I’d changed into my jammies and was curled up on the newly upholstered loveseat in Aunt Inga’s front parlor talking on the phone. “I remember the Murphy murders. They made the news all up and down the East Coast. We lived in New York at the time, but it happened in Waterfield, so I took a special interest. Whatever would possess you to buy the old Murphy house, Avery?”
“Well,” I said. “Derek went out and made an offer on it while I was away in New York. We had just talked about going into business together. It’s taken all this time to come to an agreement with the owner. I mean, he showed it to me before we closed, and told me we could change our minds if we wanted to, but I could tell he really wanted it, so I couldn’t really tell him I didn’t want it, you know.”
“That seems a little inconsiderate of him,” my mother sniffed.
I heard a noise on the porch, like a footfall, and glanced toward the window. Was it Derek coming back for something he’d forgotten? “I do like it, and it’s going to be a ton of fun working on it, but I guess we could have discussed it more…”
Mother agreed. “But from everything you’ve told me about Derek, he doesn’t sound like an inconsiderate jerk.”
I shook my head. “He’s not. He’s actually a very nice guy. Much nicer than anyone else I’ve ever dated.” I kept my eye on the window but couldn’t see anyone.
“You did have some bad luck with the men you got involved with in your twenties,” mother agreed diplomatically. “And then of course there was Philippe…”
“Don’t remind me.” Lying, cheating, philandering-and that was without counting how he’d made me totally subjugate my creativity to his in business. “Derek isn’t like that. He values my input. He may not agree with it all the time, but when I suggest something he doesn’t like, he tells me why it won’t work or why I shouldn’t do it, instead of just putting his foot down or trying to make me feel stupid.”
There didn’t seem to be anyone on the front porch. It had probably just been one of the cats walking across the wooden boards. I had noticed before how Jemmy, with his roughly twenty pounds, could make himself sound remarkably like a human. Nevertheless, I unfolded myself from the sofa and padded toward the front door on bare feet, extolling Derek’s virtues as I went.
“He’s talented, and intelligent, and has a great sense of humor, and he was confident enough to follow his dreams and walk away from a medical career to be a home renovator instead, even if it meant possibly upsetting his father and although it definitely meant that his wife would leave him, not that she was much of a loss; things were already pretty rocky…”
I had to stop to take a breath, having talked myself into a semantic corner anyway. The outside light next to the door was lit, and I peered out, seeing nothing that shouldn’t be there. Carrying on, I said, “And he’s really good-looking, although not in a flashy way; you know, the way Philippe was…” My ex-boyfriend favored skin-tight leather pants and flowing poet-shirts open halfway down his tanned chest, while his replacement spends most of his time in threadbare jeans and soft, faded T-shirts that make me want to snuggle closer. “And although he likes it when I dress up and look nice, he doesn’t expect me to be perfect all the time, either. It’s very relaxing, actually.”
Away from the porch, down in the yard, a shadow moved. I leaned forward until my nose hit the glass in the carved front door. It was impossible to see who-or what-was there; the darkness distorted size and shape until all I was looking at was a slightly darker blackness, something sliding along the white pickets of the fence before slipping through the gate and out into the street. It might have been a cat or a dog, or maybe a raccoon or a fox. We see them occasionally. I let out a breath I wasn’t aware I’d been holding.
“Something wrong?” my mother asked.
I straightened up. “Nothing.” She was on the West Coast, clear across the country; there was nothing she could do about someone or something in my yard. Nothing except worry, and there was no point in that. Whoever or whatever was gone anyway.
“Oh,” mother said. “Well, I’m looking forward to meeting Derek. I don’t suppose you two have any plans to come out to California anytime soon?”
“None, I’m afraid. What about you? Any plans to come back east? There’s still a lot of Aunt Inga’s stuff sitting around for you to look through, just in case there’s something you’d like to have.”
I fully expected her to say she had no plans whatsoever of coming back to Waterfield, so I was surprised when she hesitated. “Between you and me, Avery, I’m trying to convince Noel to go to Maine for Christmas. I miss the snow, and being a native Californian, he’s never experienced a true New England winter. But it isn’t a done deal yet. I’ll let you know how it turns out.”
“I’ll put Derek on alert,” I said. Mother giggled, and we finished the conversation by making plans. It wasn’t until I was in bed, listening to the yowling complaints of Jemmy and Inky, who didn’t want to be locked in the utility room instead of stalking prey in the night outside, that I once again remembered the shadow in the yard. But by then I was so tired that all I had time to do was wonder who or what might have been sneaking around in Aunt Inga’s yard in the middle of the night, before I fell asleep.