turned to look at her, his features carefully neutral. “Cherokee. My grandmother.”
“I thought so.” A grandmother he’d loved, she just knew it.
Kayla was always interested in family stories; ordinarily she would ask him to tell her about his grandmother, but there was that don’t-go-there quality to Fitzgerald that discouraged questions. As though to prove her point, he turned away from her and stared out at the view again, which, from this angle, offered mostly treetops, and beyond, Shawangunk Ridge, with its single soaring pine tree reaching high into seemingly endless clear, blue skies.
The only expression on his face was a slight downturn of his mouth. “Nice,” he said.
“Something of an understatement,” she countered wryly.
“There you are,” Hank said from behind them.
She nearly jumped with surprise as he came up to them, wiping his hands on a large white handkerchief. “I can fix that leak in the basement. No problem.”
Kayla stepped out from under the archway and faced the older man. “I’m sorry, Hank,” she said. “Really I am. I already told you on the phone that Walter was adamant when it came to the church. Any repairs, anything that needs to be done, is to be performed by a restoration expert. I’ve called the man Walter used, and he’ll be up in a couple of days to look it over and give me an estimate. I just wanted to see if there is something I should do until then.”
Stubbornly, Hank shook his head. “Those people cost a lot of money. Hell, me and Paul and a couple of my guys could do it just as well, cost you a third of what them fancy experts charge.”
She could see that she was dealing with a bruised ego, and she felt badly. Hank had always been kind to her and helpful to Walter. “If it were up to me…” she said, then shrugged with an apologetic smile. “It’s out of my hands. It’s actually in the will.”
Again, he shook his head. “Damn foolishness,” he muttered. Then, resigned, he stuffed the soiled handkerchief into his back pocket. “Guess I can’t fight a will, now, can I?”
“How about we go back to the house and take a look at your list?” This abrupt change of subject came from Fitzgerald, who didn’t wait for a reply before taking off, around the church rather than through it.
As Kayla and Hank followed, she was thinking, once again, that it was time to dismiss him. Just because he’d admired the church didn’t make him someone she wanted around her all day. Besides, she reminded herself, she had way too strong a reaction to him, equal parts attraction and repulsion, neither of which she needed in her life at the moment. It was most likely the nurse in her that was stirred up by the pain she sensed beneath the man’s steel surface. He might need healing, but he wasn’t about to get it from her.
“Um, Mr. Fitzgerald?” she began as the three of them strode up the driveway to the house.
“Call him Paul,” Hank said genially.
Before she could go on to tell him that she wouldn’t be needing his new recruit, Fitzgerald had taken the list of chores from Hank, glanced at it and headed for the drainpipe that ran down the side of the house near the kitchen door. He knocked on the metal, then said, “I think it would be better to replace this instead of repairing it. I’ll clean out the rain gutters first and make sure there are no rats making nests. Or snakes.”
If he could have invented a better conversation-stopper, Kayla had no idea what that would be. “Snakes?” she squeaked.
Hank shrugged. “We got ’em up here, sure.”
Her hand flew to her throat. “I hate snakes.”
He shook his head sadly. “They’re part of the habitat, Miz Thorne.”
But Fitzgerald had already headed for the rear of the house and Kayla and Hank followed. He leaped up onto the porch, forgoing the three steep steps, and kicked some of the floor slats with his foot, then rapped his knuckles on several pieces of wood siding.
“Yeah, it’s old,” he said with a nod, “but it’s good solid wood. Oak. They don’t make them this way anymore. I’ll have to find some older house undergoing demolition, cut and shape some of the slats. I can do that in Hank’s shop, bring them up here, install them. No problem for me there, I’ve done it before.”
Paul was aware he was doing a blatant selling job, being chatty as a woman over the back fence. But he’d seen the look in Kayla Thorne’s eyes, the one that said she’d made up her mind and was about to give him the heave-ho.
He couldn’t allow that. He needed access to her. If his first stab at finding out about her family had gotten no response, if his little attempt to introduce the topic of her brother had taken him nowhere, there were still several more ways to bring up the subject.
But only if he had the time and opportunity to do so, and to have that, he needed to remain here, on the premises.
“Let’s look at the rest of the list, okay?” he said, trying for upbeat but doubting it came out that way. He no longer knew how to be or sound cheerful. Tension and anger had filled every day of the past four years and he wondered if it would ever go away completely.
Instead of waiting to hear her answer, he slid open the sliding glass doors off the porch, entered the living room and took the stairs, two at a time, to the upper floor. When he heard her footsteps behind him, a small part of his tension eased. At least she was letting him get this far without canning him.
For the next half hour, he toured the house with her, not giving her much of a chance to say anything. There was no problem he couldn’t handle and he let her know it. More squeaking floorboards, several window trims needing to be recaulked. A little electrical work, a jammed closet door. Stair treads needed to be replaced, a banister reinforced. A couple of bathroom fixtures leaked and the water pressure wasn’t strong enough.
They wound up again on the rear porch, where, this time, instead of kicking at loose slats, Paul got his first real look at the view.
It stopped him cold.
It was broader and more expansive than the one from the Memorial Arch, and it had it all: mountains, autumn-colored trees, the ribbon of a river cutting through a small valley. Houses nestled into the hillsides. Wisps of white clouds, a sun that was becoming stronger by the minute. And, to add to the perfection, a single eagle soared overhead, its wings stretched wide, riding the shifting wind currents as if it were the master of the skies.
His gaze shifted again from the eagle to the panorama before him, the whole thing hitting him like clean, fresh oxygen after being in smog all day. As he drew in a deep breath and exhaled it, something tight inside began to gradually loosen up, leaving room for a sensation that, at first, he had trouble identifying. But the sensation grew stronger and he let it take him over, until he could put a name to it.
Elation.
It was as though, while he stood there, his spirit was being cleansed. Garbage out, beauty in.
God! He was free!
He felt like shouting it out loud. After four long years behind bars, four years of a living hell, he was no longer a prisoner. Instead, he was way, way, way high up, above all the pain and violence, as unfettered as the eagle circling overhead.
Unexpected
