else and she might have given the truck an irritated beep of her horn to speed it up, but since it appeared that somebody was moving in, Melanie was patient. Heaven knows Channing Square needed all the residents it could get. Besides, she didn’t mind driving slowly because it gave her a chance to look around and to savor the late-afternoon spring in Channing Park, one of the oldest and most beautiful in the city.
Although she’d only lived here a year, as the recording secretary and official historian for the Channing Square Residents Association, Melanie knew this little corner of the city inside out. The park’s thirty acres had been dedicated in 1845, but the grand residences that surrounded it hadn’t started going up until after the Civil War. In the 1870s they had risen with a Victorian vengeance, one graceful Second Empire town house after another, and then the staunch redbrick Federals and the somber Romanesque Revivals. For a few glorious decades Channing Square had been the most prestigious address in the city.
Then, as happened in so many cities, the rich folks had moved on to bigger and better homes, leaving the mansions in Channing Square behind to suffer the consequences of the coming years. And suffer they did, especially during the Depression when most had been cut up into small apartments. By the 1980s the once-great neighborhood had become a slum with half of its homes’ windows boarded up and crack dealers holding sway on every corner. The beautiful park had been overgrown with trash trees and weeds, its lovely Victorian bandstand, which had once played host to the John Philip Sousa Band, becoming a place to turn quick tricks or to stash dead bodies in the dark of the night.
All of that changed in the mid-eighties when a few brave souls moved back from the suburbs. A few more followed, and a few more, until finally the reclamation was in full swing. At last count, a hundred twenty of the square’s two hundred houses were occupied and undergoing some form of rehab, all the way from the early, gritty stages of demolition to the delicate finishing touches of paint on the cornices.
Melanie had loved every minute of the year she’d lived here. Her own Victorian painted lady was on Kassing Avenue, just to the west of the park. After she’d moved out of Sonny’s loft, she’d bought the small limestone-fronted Second Empire town house from Dieter Weist, the architect who was rehabbing it on spec. He’d finished the first floor and two second-floor bedrooms for her in record time. All that remained to be done now was the nursery and the playroom that would take up the entire third floor. During the next nine months that was what she planned to do so everything would be ready for the arrival of little Alex or Alexis in January.
There were far worse places to raise a child, she’d decided. Channing Square was a neighborhood in every sense of the word. It was like a small town where the residents all knew one another, worked together, and looked out for their neighbors’ safety and well-being. If the crime rate hadn’t come down quite as far as she would have preferred, that problem ought to be remedied somewhat in the future by the Cop on the Block program.
When the moving van turned onto Kassing, Melanie smiled and made a little thumbs-up sign. All right! Now if it just stopped at the rattrap of a house next door to hers, the house everyone feared was destined to be the last to ever be renovated, her day would be complete. No, her next several years would be complete without the constant worry of living next door to an abandoned Victorian nightmare.
The van’s brake lights flared once more just before the driver signaled he was pulling over to park in front of the big red brick place at 1224 Kassing Avenue. Melanie waved cheerfully as she passed by to turn into her driveway at 1222.
Life was good. It was very, very good. Come Monday, it would be just about perfect.
The tradition in Channing Square was to welcome new residents as soon as possible with a small gift, usually something edible and preferably homemade. Being the soul of organization that she was, Melanie kept a stash of her buttermilk blueberry muffins in the freezer for just such an occasion, so she picked out half a dozen, tied quick blue ribbons on each one, and arranged them in a wicker basket with a blue-and-white checked napkin.
“Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart,” she thought as she trotted down her front steps, then followed two men and a king-size mattress up the steps and through the front door of 1224.
What a mess! With some of the windows still boarded, it was dark inside but still light enough to see that the place was a shambles. In what had once been a grand front parlor to her right, she couldn’t tell the pattern on the ancient wallpaper for all the dirt and water stains. A great hole gaped in the wall where a marble fireplace had once been. There was mold growing across the ceiling and trash—a Dumpster’s worth—all over the floor.
Her new neighbors certainly had their work cut out for them. Up until that moment her excitement had pretty much been confined to the sale of the property alone. But now Melanie actually started thinking about the neighbors themselves. She wondered if they had children. Her perfect world might become even more so if one or two potential baby-sitters moved in right next door, or even better, future playmates. A smile crossed her lips as she imagined a little girl calling, “Mom, I’m going next door to play with Alexis” or a little boy yelling across the yard, “Hey, Alex. Wanna ride bikes?”
She glanced around in the hope of seeing the people who would undoubtedly come to play such a huge role in her life. She’d feed their children peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with carrot sticks. Maybe she’d sit with them in little chairs at the kindergarten Christmas program. Maybe her daughter would marry the boy next door. All of a sudden, instead of welcoming new neighbors, she felt as if she were about to greet her future.
“Excuse me, lady,” somebody said behind her. Melanie stepped aside to let two men and a big-screen TV pass by.
“Is the owner around?” she asked.
“I think he’s in the kitchen,” one of the men said.
Assuming the kitchen was at the back of the house, Melanie picked her way carefully down the dark, garbage-strewn hallway. Her nose identified dust and mold along with countless other odors she didn’t even want to name. What a rattrap. If something small and furry skittered across one of her feet, she was going to toss her welcoming basket of goodies in the general direction of the kitchen and make a beeline for the front door.
If she’d had any sense she would have changed into her sneakers rather than wear the new pair of black Ferragamo pumps she’d worn to work that day. The soles kept sticking to the floor as she walked, and she could only hope it was bubble gum that she’d have to be cleaning off later. A little shiver of ickiness ran down her spine.
“Hello?” she called out. “Anybody home?”
When no one answered, Melanie decided she’d leave her welcome basket with a note saying she’d drop by tomorrow. She stepped through a doorway into a kitchen that was quite a bit brighter than the rest of the house and not nearly as trashed. There was a man standing at the sink, drinking from the plastic top of a thermos. His back was to her so all she could see was longish hair, a pair of wide shoulders, and the lovely hug of faded denim over one truly great male butt.
How come whenever she hired moving men they always turned out to be thugs with crew cuts and beer bellies rather than pure hunks like this guy? She was making a mental note to get the name and number of the moving company from the side of the van when the hunk at the sink slowly turned around.
Melanie made a little strangling sound deep in her throat, then gasped, “Oh, my God!”
He cocked his head, setting that killer grin of his on a sexy, almost perilous slant. “Hello, darlin’.”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing here, Sonny?”
