Confessions of a Small-Town Girl

“It’s a nostalgia thing,” she justified when his only response was the faint pinch of his brow. “I never thought anything about this town would change,” she hurried to admit, because that much was true. If finding that damnable diary hadn’t been so necessary, revisiting the memories honestly would have been important to her. Some of the best times of her life had been spent in and around the buildings beyond him. “As much as this house meant to me growing up, I’d really like to see it before what I remembered doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t know if you have any places like that from your childhood. Old hangouts, I mean. But this is really important to me.”

Nerves had her rambling. Realizing that, she shut herself up before she could betray just how uneasy she felt with what she’d written about him, and how totally lousy she was at being less than up-front and honest. She really had loved being in this charming old place. But the abandoned gristmill across the stream had been far more important to her. She had spent hours poking around the mill’s dim interior, wondering what life had been like for the miller who’d lived there a century ago. She’d spent even more time by its slowly moving waterwheel dreaming of her future, writing those dreams and plans in the diary she needed to find before Sam discovered just how large a part he’d played in her mental musings.

Apparently she hadn’t silenced herself soon enough. The curiosity in Sam’s expression changed to scrutiny as his eyes narrowed on hers.

Feeling exposed, not quite sure what to say, her glance fell to the ground. She figured she’d be better off to stay silent. Being a detective, he could probably spot a con at ten paces.

Sam was actually far better than that. He could spot a fraud a mile away and the woman now avoiding his eyes clearly had something more on her mind than revisiting memories of old times. She wanted into the house. Rather badly, he concluded, considering that she was willing to bribe him to get there.

Intrigued, his glance drifted from the rapid and betraying blink of her dark lashes and down her long-legged frame. Certain her motive was something other than what she’d claimed, his mind should have leapt to questions, possibilities, objectives. But a heavy dose of pure male interest had joined his more analytical instincts. Indulging it, he found himself fascinated as much by her as with discovering her purpose for being there.

Kelsey Schaeffer was the antithesis of the women he’d encountered day after day living undercover. Women who blatantly advertised what she seemed to deliberately underplay. But, then, when sex was for sale, a little advertising was simply good business. Those “ladies” wore their blouses cut to their navels, if the fabric reached that far, and their skirts or pants were inevitably spandex or leather and fit like skin. Their exotic makeup wasn’t used to enhance so much as it was to hide the ravages of drugs, poor nutrition and bruises from their pimps or their boyfriends. Then, there were the women who were so strung-out they didn’t bother to take care of themselves at all.

Sam pulled back his thoughts as his glance drifted over the sky-blue pullover Kelsey wore with her white capris. Everything about her was subtle. Her understated clothes. The natural shades of her makeup. Her quiet sensuality. She was the first woman to draw his interest in longer than he cared to remember, but he could only imagine the shape of her small breasts and the curve of her waist under her loose, boat-necked top. And those legs. Even covered to midcalf, they seemed to go on forever.

Something hot gathered low in his gut. With the scents of warm cinnamon and apples taunting an equally basic sort of hunger, he conceded that, in this particular instance, he could be bought.

“It won’t look like what you remember,” he warned her. “It’s pretty torn up in there.”

She still wore her sun-streaked hair back and clipped at her nape. Brushing at a strand that had escaped its confines, she offered a quick smile. “That’s okay.” She motioned toward the pie. “I’ll just peek inside while you put that away.”

“I’ll take you in. Like I said, there’s stuff everywhere.”

“I don’t want to keep you from what you were doing.”

“It’s not a problem.”

Kelsey opened her mouth, fully prepared to insist that she was fine on her own.

The slow arch of his eyebrow stopped her. It seemed as if he were waiting for her protest. Or, maybe, he was just waiting for her to move ahead of him. As thoughts of protest collapsed to a quiet, “An escort would be great,” she couldn’t really tell.

All she knew for certain as she headed along the walkway cutting through the weed-choked grass to the porch was that she wanted to be upstairs alone. She wanted to get in, get what she’d come for and get out. She couldn’t let Sam think it mattered one way or another if he was with her, though. Watching him set the box on the only sturdy-looking section of porch railing, she also realized she couldn’t appear to be in too much of a rush to get upstairs.

The sagging steps groaned beneath his weight. Skirting the pile of new lumber on the porch, he pulled open the screen door and motioned her ahead of him.

With a murmured, “Thanks,” she stepped past him and into an echoing and empty space. The cozy living room of cabbage rose-print wall paper, Victorian-style furniture and lace doilies was long gone. What little paper hadn’t been stripped from the walls had grayed and peeled with age. The carved wood molding that had edged the floors and ceiling lay in neat rows on the bare hardwood floor.

“Take your time.”

Kelsey swore she could feel Sam’s eyes on her back as she pulled her glance from the narrow door near the end of the room. That open door led to the stairway and the second floor.

“We used to spend a lot of time in the kitchen.”

He lifted his hand to his left.

With a smile that felt fainter than she would have liked, she slipped past his scrutiny and into another room that had been stripped to its bones.

“You said this was your friend’s grandmother’s house?”

“My friend Michelle. Baker,” she expanded, wondering if he sounded skeptical or if her conscience only made her hear suspicion in his tone. “It’s Michelle Hansen now. She moved to Maine.”

“My sister said Mrs. Baker’s granddaughter married the local doctor and lives here.”

“That would be Jenny. Michelle’s younger sister. And she did. And does.”

Kelsey turned a slow circle in the middle of the room that no longer looked familiar at all. The old cabinets had all been torn out and the floor stripped of linoleum. The old-fashioned cookstove and rounded refrigerator were gone, too. The only thing that seemed familiar was the mint green paint where the cabinets had been. The rest of the room had at some point been painted a warm Tuscan yellow. From the looks of the large white spackled patches on the walls, that golden color would be painted over soon.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Sam leaning against the door frame. With his hands in the pockets of his worn jeans, his faded NYPD T-shirt stretching across his chest, he didn’t seem to be watching her so much as he seemed to be…evaluating.

Doing a little evaluating of her own, she felt a twinge of disappointment. The old woodstove was also gone.

“You said you came here often?” he asked.

“Michelle’s grandma was a widow so someone from her family was always checking up on her.” She looked into the pantry, quietly closed the door when she found the shelves missing. “I’d come by after school with Michelle sometimes. On weekends, some of us would come out to skate on the mill pond and come over to say hi.” She motioned to the empty corner and the now-covered hole in the wall that had once vented a chimney. “We used to warm our hands on the woodstove that was over there while Grandma B made us cocoa.”

“Grandma B?”

“Grandma Baker. She said we were all like granddaughters to her, so that’s what we called her. It’s like that around here,” she mused, thinking how sweet the elderly woman had been to her and her friends. “Neighbors are like family.”

She moved toward the back porch, stuck her head out the kitchen door to see what had changed out there. The door had already been replaced. So had the wood-framed windows. They were aluminum now, like the other new ones crated and waiting to replace those on the second floor. The broad steps she and her friends used to sit on were still there, but their lumber was now new.

What she’d just remembered had her turning back into the room.

“The best part about coming here was the slumber parties in the summer. Carrie Rogers and I would come out with Michelle. We’d pick berries in the woods and swim in the pond, then sit on the porch eating popcorn and talking until her grandma chased us up to bed. We wouldn’t go to sleep until the sun started to come up.”

Conquering the night they’d called it, she remembered, shaking her head at the silliness of what had seemed like such a big deal to them back then. If she stayed up all night now, it was because she was preparing for an event, wrestling with an administrative budget or personnel problem or, lately, she thought, turning away to run her hand along the new window sill, questioning the sudden developments in her career.

Propped against the door frame, Sam watched her check out his handiwork. He had no idea how something as inconsequential as a childhood memory could put such warmth in a person’s eyes, but that warmth had definitely been there in the moments before she’d turned away. It had lit her face, her eyes, curved the fullness of her mouth. He could barely recall his own childhood. It hadn’t been a bad one. He just never thought about it. Certainly he never thought about the innocence she had just so easily recalled of her own.

Swimming and skating on a mill pond sounded like something straight out of a Currier and Ives painting to him. Practical to a fault, cynical, distrustful and more hardened than he would admit out loud, he couldn’t begin to imagine something so idyllic.

He dismissed his failure as totally inconsequential. Distrust and doubt had saved his hide on more than one occasion. Doing what he did for a living, he’d come to regard the traits as skills. He wasn’t at all anxious to be rid of them.

She turned back, now studying the new plywood underlayment for the kitchen floor. “Do you mind if I go upstairs?”

Still curious about what she was up to, enjoying the distraction, he pushed himself from the door frame and idly motioned for her to proceed.

Seeing her smile in the general direction of his chin, he watched her slip past him and into the dim living room. The faint scents of cinnamon and something impossibly fresh drifted behind her. Her shampoo, maybe. Or her soap.

She headed for the door at the far end of the room, only to stop as she reached the fireplace a few feet from the stairs. Looking as if she might be remembering something about the fireplace, too, she slowly ran her hand along the carved wood mantel.

It had taken him an entire day to sand the mantel down and repair the cracked corbels. All he needed to do now was stain it the dark cherry his sister had picked out and apply a few coats of varnish.

“You’re doing all of this yourself?” she asked.

“My uncle helped me tear out the kitchen and bathroom. And he or one of his workers will help me install the new cabinets when they arrive next week. But other than that…yeah. Pretty much.”

“This feels like satin.” The tips of her fingers caressed the smooth surface, her brow knitting as if she were savoring the velvety feel of the grain. Or, maybe, marveling at it. “I thought you were a detective.”