The Barefoot Believers (8 page)

“Well, maybe when I was younger, I did press my nose to those windows.”

“And?”

“And peeked through the old-fashioned keyhole in the back door.”

Jo folded her arms to show she could hold her ground as long as Kate could stall. Longer, probably, given that Kate's foot had already begun to throb. “And?”

Kate exhaled and leaned on her cane. “And dragged a crate from the garage so I could climb partway through an open window with a torn screen around back.”

“My word, Kate! You were guilty of breaking and entering.”

“I was not. That screen was already broken when I got to it. And I only entered my head and most of my shoulders, just so I could get a good look around, you see.”

“Well how do you do, Kate-the-cat-burglar.” Jo snickered.

“I didn't burgle a thing! C'mon. I was a good kid, just…curious.”

“Kate the curious,” Jo echoed, somehow making it sound as if she were disappointed she couldn't use a more unflattering label.

“Didn't
you
ever do a little harmless pretend spying of your own when we came down here as kids?” Kate tried to remember the two of them engaging in the covert action but couldn't.

Jo went back to the task of unloading their things. She heaved a gym bag onto a plastic tote filled with sheets and towels and shook her head. “I was too busy spying on you.”

“What?”

“Okay, not so much spying, since I didn't try to hide it. But the truth is most of my memories of this place center on you, not either of these cottages. From the time I can really remember coming here, all you cared about was going to the beach and hanging out with other teenagers and college kids.
You
didn't care about the house. So
I
didn't care about the house.”

“You weren't even curious?”

“It had always been there.” Jo shrugged. “I don't try to spy on my neighbors now, if that's any consolation to you.”

“It is, in an odd way.” Kate smiled, even though every second they stood there she could feel her medication waning. She took a deep breath and tipped her head toward the uneven walkway that led through the yard and around to the back. “Shall we?”

“Give me a sec.” Jo pulled a tape measure out of her purse and extended the yellow metal strip from the chrome casing. She narrowed one eye, lifted her chin, lowered it, wagged her head side to side then let the metal slide back into place with a decisive whisk and clatter. “I remember it being bigger.”

“What are you doing?” Kate scowled at her sister.

“Oh. This?” Jo blinked at the tool in her hand. “I, uh, force of habit, I guess.”

“You guess?” If
Kate
were to hazard a guess, she'd
guess
her sister was up to something.

This whole adventure had her on edge. More than the usual edginess she applied to every situation of every minute of every day of her life. It had all come too easily, hadn't it? This trip. This sudden interest in a place neither of them had seen in sixteen years. Nothing with Jo, nothing between the two of them or anyone throughout the patchwork of relationships that made up their family had ever come that easily.

Complications. It was something the doctor had warned her to avoid. He'd meant with her bones knitting, range of motion in the joints and with the tissue healing, but Kate couldn't help thinking it applied here as well.

So she let the slightly strange action slide. If people ever decided to start calling
her
on every oddball thing she ever did, she'd…she'd feel as if her father had returned. Kate blinked and in that instant she remembered this cottage for the thing it had once been—a haven from her father's scorn, frustration and, sometimes, rage.

With that thought it was as if the whole scene before her transformed. The layers of chipped and peeling paint fell away. The small Victorian-
ish
style cottage stood in her mind fresh in buttery-yellow clapboard and brilliant white gingerbread scrollwork.

“Is it a fairy house?” she had clasped her hands together and asked her mother the first time they had driven up.

“It's a fairy-tale house,” her father had muttered.

She had blinked, not understanding.

“Your father just means that there are no such things as fairies. But it certainly does look like a house straight out of a storybook.”

“Don't put words in my mouth. I meant that it's a fairy tale to think us buying this house down here will change anything, will make anything better.” He had laced his bitter grumblings with curses and name-calling. She wasn't sure, but the gist of it all was that she and her mother had come to this house with their hearts filled with hope and anticipation, and he wanted no part of it.

“You don't have to be here,” her mother had said in reply, her green eyes scrunched down into slits and her always impeccably made-up lips pursed. She looked as if she had just sucked a lemon, Kate remembered thinking.

And her father had looked as if he was about to spit fire.

“Good.” He had slammed the trunk of their car and dropped the suitcases on the drive. “I'll be back to pick you up in two weeks.”

Two weeks out of every year without her father. Then it had seemed the best of all worlds. Later, after he had gone from their lives forever and taken her younger sister with him, Kate had wondered if things would have been different if it hadn't been so easy for him to leave that first time.

Her gut twisted knowing she had not run to him, wrapped her arms around his legs and begged him not to go. If only…

“It's awfully old-fashioned, isn't it?” Jo tilted her head one way and then the other.

Kate startled, then forced her attention to the place, which again looked like a poorly aging, once-grand lady. “I think it looks a bit like those Victorian conch cottages you find down in the Keys.”

“And that would count for something if it were in the Keys. But here? It just looks…tired.” Jo withdrew the tape measure and let it snap back in place again. Her mouth twitched to one side then the other. “Hardly an ideal spot for a home or a vacation getaway.”

“Well, then it's the ideal spot for me, because I'm tired of standing out here. Make with the key so we can go inside and I can prop my foot up and start ordering you around.”

“Key? I don't have the key.”

“What do you mean you don't have the key? You were the one who packed up Mom's things after she sold the condo.” And took a cut of the Realtor's fee for doing it. Kate had never faulted her sister for that, thinking that anyone who had held open houses and contract negotiations with their mom had earned every penny she got. But still, now, with sensation slowly returning to her foot and her patience waning, all she could think about was how Jo tended to look out for herself first and everyone else…never. “You should have gotten the key. Where do you think it is?”

Jo gathered the bags she had just unloaded, slinging them over her shoulders, her arms and filling both hands. “It's probably in a box in that storage unit I shoved everything in.”

“Storage unit? Shoved? I thought you sifted through every knickknack and…paddy-whack, sorted it all out, bagged and boxed and organized…”

“Did I say I did all that?” She looked off at the cottage, her expression more inquisitive than evasive.

No, of course she hadn't said it. Kate had just assumed it. It was what
she
would have done on the occasion of her mother's latest big adventure, if Kate hadn't been so preoccupied with the disasters of her own life. In theory.

In reality, she'd probably have done anything to avoid dealing with it. Instead of the key being in a storage unit where their mother could retrieve it, under Scat-Kat Kate's care, it would probably have been moldering in a landfill.

Thunk.

Thunk.

Thump. Bump.

Thwack.

One by one, Jo divested herself of the luggage.

Kate exhaled and leaned on her cane. The tip sank into the rich damp soil beneath an island of thick, lush grass. “What now, then?”

“We call a locksmith.” Jo already had her sleek cell phone in one hand, pressing numbers with her thumb even as she spoke.

“You have a number of a locksmith in Santa Sofia, Florida, in your cell-phone contact list?”

“No, but I have one in Atlanta and I presume they have connections down here.”

“You are very good at your job,” Kate noted when her sister finished up the series of calls that had someone winging their way to the rescue.

“Thank you.” Jo tipped her head and her gorgeous blond hair—hair she hadn't had when she'd showed up at the E.R. five days earlier—went tumbling over her shoulder.

“How long?” Kate asked.

“How long have I been good at my job?” She seemed a bit more offended than a woman wearing someone else's hair should have been.

Kate chuckled. “No, how long until the locksmith shows up?”

“Oh. The locksmith.” Jo nodded and looked down. She took a moment to shuffle her feet over some bits of crumbling concrete in the drive. While she didn't have on the three-hundred-dollar pair of pumps she'd worn two days earlier, the strappy beaded sandals with glitter and curved acrylic heels probably cost more than Kate had spent on her whole wardrobe of sensible, arch-supported doctor-approved—and she knew because she was that doctor—shoes.

Kate nudged the side of Jo's shoe near the strap lacing over her hot-pink pedicured toenails with her quickly getting grubby purple cast. She managed to wriggle her own ashen toes in a way that actually seemed to taunt her sister for her frivolousness, saying flatly, “Yes, the locksmith. When can we expect someone to show up and let us in?”

“Well, about that…”

“They aren't going to show up, are they?”

“Oh, yes, absolutely. They are going to show up.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“What are we supposed to do until then? Sleep under the stars?” Kate actually could do that. She'd brought a tent and some camping gear, just in case they came down and found the place roofless or without power. But being prepared to do something like that in a pinch and being forced to do it because your sister forgot to bring the key were two entirely different things.

“Some lack of imagination from someone already versed in the art of breaking and enter—”

“I told you it was already—”

“Broken. Yeah, I know. Well, looking at this place, it wouldn't surprise me if it were already a little bit ‘broken,' too.”

“What does that mean?”

“How hard could it be to get in?” Jo raised her hands out at her sides. “The locksmith said to try the back door or any windows in the back first, anyway. They're usually the ones most likely to have been left unlocked. If not…”

“You want us to break in to our own mother's cottage?”

“Why not? It's not like she's around to call the police.”

“Jo!”

“I didn't mean it disrespectfully.” She folded her arms and rotated her foot at the ankle to work the heel of her shoe free from the soft ground. She scowled at the clumps of earth and dried grass clinging to her expensive shoe. “Besides, it's not like she'd ever call the cops on
you.
”

“Can we save the woe-is-me chorus by the Mom-liked-you-best singers until we figure out what we are going to do here?”

“We already know what we are going to do.”

“No, we do not.”

“Well, I know what
I'm
going to do.” And with that, she disappeared around the side of the house.

Kate would have followed but, from a practical point of view, by the time she got around to the back of the house Jo could well likely be inside already and have taken another route to the car to collect the luggage. Or she could have decided she couldn't
get
inside and come around to the front again. Kate was in no mood or in any shape to play a game of cat and mouse like that.

Besides, it had gotten darker as they'd stood out here talking and deciding what to do. The back of the house would be hard enough to navigate in daylight, what with the remnants of her mom's great rock-garden experiment. The whole back side of the house had been turned into a maze of hunks of lava rock, large chunks of petrified logs and a boulder shaped like the state of Kentucky. Kate couldn't imagine getting through that unscathed with two good feet much less…

“Jo! Jo! Wait!” She jerked her cane out of the ground with such force it sent her staggering backward. She did not let that impede her in her mission. Jo was literally walking into a disaster and only Kate could do anything about it.