Page 5 of Claiming the Grump

The Woman on the Fence

Maple Lane Falls looked like someone had set out to prove a point about autumn. The maples were full red, leaves banking against storefronts and curbs, and the smell of onions and woodsmoke drifted on the air. He had a hand in his pocket and nowhere to be, and the town was doing its level best to be exactly what it had looked like from the ridge when he’d driven in.

He’d spent his second shift doing more or less what he’d done on his first—riding with Tate, learning the roads, letting the county arrange itself in his head. The only thing worth noting had been two men outside the Book Nook in what turned out to be a heated but entirely amicable argument about baseball. Chief deputy in Maple Lane Falls was going to be a boring job, and Keith liked the sound of that.

He rolled his shoulders and let the shift go as he turned off Moss Street, grateful to be out of uniform and into jeans and a sweater, grateful to be moving through town on his own two feet instead of looking at it through a windshield. Everything felt different when you were behind glass. Flattened, somehow. Containable. On foot, a town had texture—the way the light caught the maples on the far end of the block, that smell of cinnamon wafting from the bakery, the sound of a screen door two houses down. He’d always learned places this way, walking until the map in his head stopped being a map and started being somewhere real.

The paper bag from Pistachio Sweets was warm against his palm. He’d gone in for a treat to take back to the apartment and ended up talking to the woman behind the counter for ten minutes about the difference between a good salted caramel and a mediocre one. She had opinions. He respected that. He’d bought more than he intended.

He always did with salted caramels.

His mind, unoccupied for the first time all day, went straight back to the previous night. That woman.

He turned it over the way he kept turning it over, trying to locate exactly what it had cost him. She’d sent him a ginger ale with a paper umbrella in it, walked out of the Maple Lane Cafe, stopped at his table on her way past, suggested he walk her to her hotel with baffling confidence. He’d said no. He’d smiled while he said it, but he’d said no, because Les had been sitting three feet away on his first night in a new town, and there were limits to what a man with professional ambitions could do in front of his new boss.

The smile she’d given him when she’d squeezed his shoulder—like she was filing him away for later rather than writing him off—had haunted him for two hours before he’d gotten to sleep.

He should let it go. She was probably long gone, back to wherever she’d come from, slotted into her real life. He was slotted into his. Three things he’d promised himself driving into this valley: ace the job, make chief deputy permanent, don’t fall for anyone. He’d watched what love did to people he trusted. He wasn’t interested.

He came to a house that sat empty in an unkempt garden. Tate had pointed it out on their first drive-through. The Morrison place, he’d said. “Ask Jenny about it if you like ghost stories.”

The house had been built a century ago and was the last of its kind. The other houses in the street were long gone, replaced by more modern, and no doubt more practical houses, or renovated in various degrees of commitment and skill. This one was still original. Not that this made it alluring.

Two stories of Victorian bones gone to seed—peeling paint the color of old bruises, a porch that sagged in the middle, and a yard that had decided ornamental was for other people. The iron fence listed at intervals. The gate hung slightly open, not invitingly.

Jenny, the dispatcher, had told him it was haunted. Tate had rolled his eyes without looking up from his desk, which told Keith exactly how much stock to put in that. Still, in the failing light, with jack-o’-lanterns grinning from the neighbors’ stoops and paper skeletons rattling in the maples, the house was doing a credible job of earning the reputation.

He stood at the corner and looked at it for a moment. Let it arrange itself in his mental map of the town. Old Morrison place. Sitting empty. Corner of Aspen and Second.

Filed.

He turned the corner and stopped.

Her. She had her head tilted back, studying the house like it was talking to her. She was wearing a long coat in a dark amber that was almost exactly the color of the last of the oaks, and her hair was down, catching the afternoon light. She’d crossed her arms at the waist, but loosely, not like someone cold or guarded—like someone settling in to watch things unfold.

Keith stood at the corner for a moment and just looked at her.

He noticed the lashes before he noticed anything else. He wasn’t someone who usually catalogued that kind of detail—he’d been a deputy long enough that he noticed exits and angles and what people did with their hands—but her makeup was precisely done in a way that drew the eye to specific things, and her eyes were one of them. Dark brown, from what he could tell at this distance. The lipstick was subtle, close to her own color. She knew what she was doing.

He walked toward her. “Hey there.”

She turned, and the smile that crossed her face was slow and deeply pleased, like she’d expected him and was too gracious to say so. “Checking out the haunted house. It’s amazing. They really committed.”

Keith looked at the Morrison place. The iron fence had gone to rust in patches. The garden had stopped pretending to be a garden some years back and was now just a dense argument between whatever had been planted and whatever had moved in since. A cobweb in the upper left corner of the porch spanned about three feet and had clearly been there long enough to be structural.

“That’s not the haunted house,” he said. “That’s down by the fairgrounds. This is the old Morrison place. It’s been abandoned for years.”

She blinked at him. A pause. “Oh.”

Another pause.

“Even better.”

She turned back to face the house, satisfied in a way that made no sense to him at all, and he found himself standing next to her at the fence without having consciously decided to do that.

“You’re serious,” he said.

“Look at it.” She gestured broadly at the wraparound porch, the turret at the corner of the second floor, the ornamental trim along the eaves peeling in long, curling strips. “The bones of this house. The porch alone—imagine that restored. Imagine sitting out there in the morning with coffee and watching the street wake up.” She turned to him. “You can’t see that?”