Natalie grinned in spite of her aching lower back. “I meant both of you blowhards.”
She stood, massaging her sore spots through her lightweight flannel shirt. After the long drive south from South Dakota, her muscles were in dire need of some stretching. Maybe she should join Ronnie tomorrow morning in Ruby’s rec room during her yoga routine. Better yet, she could go for a morning walk and enjoy the sun coming up over the Tres Dedos Mountains to the east.
Then again, Gramps had said the temperature was dropping down to the low 30s tonight, which would make for a cold sunrise. Maybe she’d stick to a quick walk from Gramps’s Winnebago, where she was camping on the couch, to Ruby’s place and watch Ronnie do her yoga while drinking some coffee. That sounded like a winning compromise.
“While I’m over here wearing my fingers to the bone,” she told Chester and Manny, “you two wiseacres are talking my ears down to stubs about wild women and wooly times.” She lifted the glass of lemonade Ruby had brought out earlier, wetting her whistle with the sweetened drink.
“You mean wooly women for Chester,” Manny said. “Old bristle-top here prefers his hot mamas to have a good coating of hair on their legs in the winter.”
“Yep.” Chester grinned. “Adds more friction and heat. My feet get cold otherwise.”
Natalie tried not to visualize any of what they’d said. She’d had too many of their bawdy tales of boozy towns and babes filling her thoughts today. Nightmares were sure to follow.
“Stupid, freaking nails!” Claire kicked a board at the other end of what was left of Ruby’s deck. “I swear they’re cemented into place, and the damned heads keep popping off those I can manage to get the claw under.”
Natalie scowled at the third musketeer sitting quietly, smoking his cigar in the lawn chair to the left of Chester. His bald head gleamed in the sunshine while his blue eyes scrutinized every move Claire and she made. “Gramps, do we really need to worry about salvaging the wood? Half of this shit is dry rotted, and the rest is warped all to hell from the sun and heat.”
“Quit your bawling, crybaby,” her grandfather said with a quick smile to soften his words. “I can make picture frames out of that wood and sell them to the tourists in the General Store.”
Most of Ruby’s house was living quarters for her and Gramps and Jessica, Ruby’s teenage daughter and Natalie’s new but very young aunt. A small portion of the front of the house was the General Store, where campers paid for their spots and could buy odds and ends. Apparently, Gramps had plans to add picture frames to the store’s sundries along with the T-shirts Ruby already sold.
“Shelves, too,” Chester said. “City folk will pay high dollar for crap like that, especially if you say it’s wood from an old barn.”
“Some of that wood might make a nice headboard,” Manny added, wiggling his salt and pepper eyebrows.
Gramps crushed his empty beer can and tossed it at Manny. “Must you always have your mind in the bedroom, Carrera?”
“What can I say, Ford? Your daughter is a love machine.”
Natalie and Claire both groaned while Gramps cursed and Chester pretended to gag.
Last fall, much to everyone’s surprise, Manny had ended up in Aunt Deborah’s bed after a night of too much cognac and tequila. Their fifteen-plus year age difference hadn’t seemed to put a dent in their love life since then. A whirlwind courtship followed by an elopement to Las Vegas meant that Claire, Ronnie, and Kate had gained a stepdad, Gramps’s old Army buddy had become his son-in-law, and Natalie had a new uncle.
But that didn’t mean any of them wanted to think about Deborah and sex in the same sentence during their lifetime.
Claire looked out toward the row of campers to the west. Under the brim of her Mighty Mouse baseball cap, tension lined her forehead. “Why don’t you just give in, Gramps, and let me take the saw to the deck? Then we can wrap up a day of demolition work and get back inside.”
Get back inside? That didn’t sound like Claire, who usually preferred to work with her hands out under the clear blue sky. “What’s up with you?” Natalie asked her cousin.
“Nothing.” Claire’s brown eyes shifted to her sneakers, avoiding Natalie’s gaze.
“Nothing, my ass.” Natalie stepped around the pile of two-by-six planks they’d been able to salvage. “You’ve been watching over your shoulder since we started tearing this sucker apart, not to mention jumping every time a camper door bangs closed.”
“The diamond killer has her spooked,” Chester muttered around the cigar he was lighting.
“Shhhh!” Claire threatened Chester with her hammer.
“Diamond killer?” Natalie looked from Chester to Manny to Gramps. Each of them nodded, Gramps adding a grimace to his. She turned to Claire. “What are the three amigos talking about?”
Claire’s expression matched Gramps’s. “We have a slight situation we’re dealing with down here,” she said in a quiet voice.
“More like a shitload of wasps in our outhouse,” Chester said and blew out a smoke ring.
“What situation?” Natalie asked, her voice lowering to match Claire’s. “Is this something about your dad showing up at Christmas?”
Claire’s parents had divorced earlier in the year and Aunt Deborah was still struggling with the aftershocks rocking her world. According to Kate, her mother’s hasty marriage to Manny was more of a rebound after learning her ex-husband had moved in with his girlfriend, but Kate assured Natalie that Manny knew what he was getting into with their mother. It turned out the old charmer had married Aunt Deborah for her family as much as for her. He was tired of being a bachelor and craved
