Kellan swallowed the sauce. It took a second, but his eyes bugged out and he lost all the color in his skin, going from a pleasant tan to a sort of pasty white-green. A sound escaped him, the noise a half-choke, half-gag.
Marilee lifted her gaze to his, and he quickly sucked it up, even managing a smile, though definitely a weak one.
“Well?” she demanded, hand on her hip. “Good? Great? What?”
“Um,” Kellan said, more green than white now. “Delicious?” he said with a straight face that was pretty admirable, considering that the moment Marilee turned her back, he gagged again.
Okay, so you wouldn’t catch a woman faking
“Glad you like it,” Marilee said with a composed smile. “I’ll make sure you get extra tonight at dinner.”
“Oh. Great.” Behind her back, Kel looked at me in horror.
Like I said,
“Would you like to see the rest of the house?” Marilee asked.
“Please,” Kellan answered quickly, clearly terrified that if we stayed, she’d want him to taste something else. He practically shoved her out of the kitchen, following her like the puppy he really was.
I pretended to follow, but instead executed an about-face and headed straight for the freezer.
I wanted a cookie.
Ah, who was I kidding? I wanted an entire box, all to myself, right now, now, now. I opened the freezer.
Neither box had been opened yet.
For a moment I stood there, wrestling with my conscience. What was the likelihood that the owner of said cookies would remember he or she hadn’t opened a box?
You are not that desperate, I told myself.
But I was. I
I reached for the box, ripped it open and shoved not one, but two cookies in my mouth. Frozen. Chocolate. Mint. “Oh my God,” I moaned, and added another, just as the kitchen door opened again.
I whirled around, mouth closed tightly over the remains of the two cookies.
Kellan raised a brow. “What are you doing?”
I shook my head. Nothing. See me doing nothing?
His eyes narrowed. “What are you eating?”
I sighed. “Cookies,” I admitted around the mouthful.
He laughed. “You stole cookies? That’s pretty desperate, Rach.”
“Oh really? You want to talk about desperate, lover boy?
He frowned. “I didn’t say that.”
“You might as well have.” I shoved one more cookie in.
“Stop,” he said.
“Easy for you to say. You’re a damn geeky bastard who doesn’t understand stress in the slightest.”
“Damn geeky bastard?”
“Hey, if the shoe fits.”
He shook his head. “You can finish insulting me later. She’s waiting to show us around.”
I gave one last, fond look at the freezer.
“Rach.”
“Fine.” I followed him out of the kitchen.
Marilee was waiting to give us a tour of Hideaway, standing in the foyer rearranging wildflowers in a vase there.
On the other side of the reception room was a great room, with an air hockey table and darts and a jukebox. “Keeps people from going stir-crazy in the winter,” Marilee explained, and showed us a small library and a laundry room.
From there we went upstairs, where we viewed four guest bedrooms on the second floor, then four more bedrooms on the third floor, which was reserved for staff. Each of the rooms had been decorated rustically, in a sort of country style, with pine furniture and four-poster beds. The floors were scarred hardwood, covered with a variety of throw rugs in different shapes and sizes. The place was in decent shape, each room sporting thick bedding, which Marilee assured us we’d need in extreme weather, and pictures on the walls that provided proof of said extreme weather. I looked at one photo of the inn, with snow up past the first floor, and gulped. “Yikes.”
Marilee just smiled grimly. “It isn’t the Bahamas,” she said.
All the rooms were empty. No sign of the two faces I’d seen earlier. I looked out the window and saw a small guesthouse.
“It’s Gert’s place,” Marilee said, and took us out there. She stood on the tiny porch, long hair shiny, eyes fathomless, as she peered in. “Here you go.”
I gestured her in ahead of me, but she shook her head.
“Oh, no thanks.”
I walked in. Gert had the place stuffed to the gills with Victorian furniture and lace, lace, lace everywhere. Looking at it all, I gulped at a new thought.
Kellan followed me, and sneezed, his allergies coming to life from the weeks of dust.
Marilee still stood just outside. She hadn’t moved or said a word, and yet her anxiety was palpable.
This, in turn, brought back my goose bumps. “What?” I whispered.
“You’re going to have to deal with her things,” Marilee whispered back, and entwined her fingers until the knuckles turned white.
“Why are we whispering?” Kellan asked both of us.
Marilee just tightened her lips and looked around uneasily, as if the ghost of Great-Great-Aunt Gertrude was watching us from above.
Or from wherever she’d landed.
“Seriously, this is silly,” I said, gesturing for Marilee to come inside. “Come in.”
“Oh no. I…couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’m…busy.” Marilee stayed firmly put on the threshold, and given the stubborn set to her jaw, nothing short of an apocalypse was going to budge her. If that. “Besides, Gert never invited us in.”
“Never?” I asked.
Wow. That seemed pretty harsh. It wasn’t as if the staff had a lot of places to go, which brought me to another question.
What did people do out here when they weren’t working?
“She’s gone,” I pointed out, purposely speaking in a regular voice, though I had to admit, I felt a little spooked. “Surely now that’s she’s gone-”
Marilee vehemently shook her head, her long, gorgeous hair flying around her face. “You’re on your own.”
“Okay.” I looked around, uneasy myself. “No problem.”
Yeah right, no problem.
Kellan ran a finger over the huge wooden snowshoes on the wall. “How did she get all this stuff up here?”
“Gertrude had a thing going with Jack’s grandfather.”
“A thing?” Kellan asked. “As in…”
“They were doing it,” Marilee said. “Right up until he kicked the bucket last year. Gertrude would order stuff from catalogs, but no one would deliver way out here. So she got Jack to bring her a piece every time he came up here. It took a while.”
Looking at the room, which was so stuffed that pieces were literally on top of each other, I could well imagine it’d taken a while.
Now I had to decide what to do with it all.
