That gravel patch was something else to be angry about. It was an eyesore before the beautiful, pink-brick Georgian home. This grand house had once belonged to her grandparents. When she was a child, her family spent weeks during the summer and holidays here. In her preteens, they’d moved in and lived here until her mother sold it. Then it had been chopped up into four separate apartments. That was before the paint on the wooden window frames had peeled and the trumpet vine had grown wild up one corner of the house. Before the bricks in another corner had begun to crumble and one of the chimneys neededto be patched. Before that strange, musty smell permeated the central hall.
And yet, despite its run-down appearance, the house was still impressive.
She slumped down petulantly in the driver’s seat of her car. Her breath had grown short, a sure sign she was getting rage-y. Her entire plan to buy back the house was in jeopardy now. She’d been saving for so long, since the moment she saw the For Rent sign on one of her weekly drive-bys a couple of years ago. She’d stalked this house like it was a cheating husband until she was finally able to snag one of the apartments.
Her great-grandfather, a honcho at the University of Texas in his day, had bought it when houses in this neighborhood were being built to accommodate the university elite. Both floors boasted a wide center hallway, constructed to encourage airflow in the days before air-conditioning. The rooms were spacious, the ceilings high and ornate. The floors solid oak. The backyard was deep and ran to a small creek tributary where Lorna and her sister, Kristen, used to catch frogs and minnows and an occasional garden snake.
When she and Kristen were girls, Nana would wake them up for pancakes and French toast, served with happy faces made using fruit and whipped cream. On spring afternoons, Nana would lay a quilt in the backyard, then serve them an English tea with finger sandwiches. The tea was iced, but Lorna still felt like a princess. In the winter, when it rained, Nana and Papa would create a scavenger hunt for the two of them, leading them to all the nooks and crannies in the house where they’d find little objects, like an empty Zippo lighter, a thimble, a deck of playing cards. When all the items were found, they were awarded with candy and permission to watch their favorite TV show—Full House.
Later, after her parents divorced, Lorna, Kristen, and their mother moved in with Nana, who was a widow then. Papa had died from a lung ailment as best Lorna could recall now. Lorna and Kristen had the two rooms on the top floor at the back of the house. Kristen learned how to climb out those windows and down a tree within a few weeks. Lorna had been too clumsy and too fearful of falling to try.
There was an old tomcat that came by every day and slipped into a hole in the skirting around the house and lived beneath them. Nana was allergic to cats, so they’d never had pets, but Lorna pretended that tomcat was hers. She walked every day to a small neighborhood school while Kristen was bused to a bigger middle school.
Every Halloween, they had the spookiest house, all of them eager to decorate with ghosts and witches. On the porch, they kept cauldrons of punch and candy. In the summer, their yard was the prettiest and most inviting—green grass, flowers in the window boxes, a tire swing beneath one massive oak. But the yard began to fade when Nana couldn’t tend it anymore. Barn swallows built their nest in the swing.
Lorna had believed they would live happily forever in that big rambling house. But then Kristen ran away, and Nana accidentally drank herself to death, and Mom sold the house and moved them into a garage apartment, and this house was chopped into four apartments with cheap, tacky baths and kitchens added in.
Lorna now lived where the dining room and kitchen used to be. The space had been unforgivably mutilated, a bath installed in what had once been the large walk-in pantry. She intended to restore the house to its former glory when she owned it.
And shewouldown it.
Last year, her landlord, Mr. Contreras, he of the bushy crop of white hair and bushier mustache, mentioned he was lookingto sell in the next couple of years, as the old house needed lots of expensive repairs. Lorna had told him then and there that she would buy it from him.
He’d looked down at her like a grand priest from on high. “Now why would a woman like you want to own a pile of bricks like this?”
She didn’t know what a “woman like you” was supposed to mean. “It could be restored.”
“Not without cash, baby. Alotof cash. The foundation alone would set you back twenty-five grand, and that’s using one of my contractors. Not to mention the property taxes are skyrocketing in this neighborhood. Nah, you don’t want this. No one will be able to afford a property like this except a developer. You a developer?”
“No. I sell workflow software.”
Mr. Contreras chuckled as if she’d meant that as a joke. But she hadn’t, because she was Not Funny. “Find yourself a good man and move to the suburbs like everyone else, sweetheart.”
Well, that was easier said than done, and that was assuming she even wanted the life Mr. Contreras had prescribed. But she couldn’t care less whether he underestimated her—she’d been saving like mad, pushing her team to the brink of revolt just so she could hit the highest sales mark. Thanks to her drive, everyone had made more money, and she was a shoo-in for senior vice president and its signing bonus and better salary, which, added to her savings, would be enough for a down payment on the house. It was a win-win-win-win-win.
Or it had been, until the egregious events of today.
She felt sick again. In a dull grip of panic. And furious, like she could pick up her car and hurl it down the street.
They couldn’t just get rid of her, could they? For the mistake of attaching a private letter to a work email? Thatattachmentwas for Kristen! Which was doubly frustrating because Kristenwould never read the letter. Mostly because Lorna would never send it to her sister in Florida, because she and Kristen were on a break just now.
Anyway, if that was how they were going to treat her, theirtop salesperson, then she should just find another job. That would show them.Way to chase off your best talent, Driskill Workflow Solutions.
Or...Or.She could at least consider meeting the conditions of the trust. But only as a last resort.
Her head was beginning to pound with the tension invading every inch of her body. She got out of her car and walked stiffly to the door. As she neared the entry, she could hear the thud of something hitting the house over and over.
Where once there had been a double door with twin sidelights, there was now a single door with reinforced glass and a keypad entry. She punched in the code and entered the building as another thud rattled the old house.
A stack of mail had been strewn across the console just inside the entry. Removal of the original door with its mail slot had necessitated the erection of a mailbox on the side of the house with four separate compartments. But, in the inimitable reasoning of the US Postal Service, they’d all been keyed the same. It had become the habit of the residents to empty all four boxes and dump the mail on the table for everyone to sort through. Lorna considered this a security breach of the highest order, but as Martin from upstairs had once pointed out, if someone broke in and stole all the offers for free window replacement estimates, no one would be harmed.
She found only two items of mail for her—both junk—and moved on to her apartment door at the base of the stairs: 1A, as it should be. She stuck her key in the lock just as Martin came bounding down the stairs with a backpack slung over his shoulder, his over-the-ear headphones on his head. The red earpads madehim look like he was wearing apples. “Hey, Lorna,” he said as he sailed past her.
“Martin,” she said crisply. She had not yet registered her complaint about his marching band rehearsals or whatever was going on upstairs at night, but she liked to give advance notice of her displeasure. Not that Martin noticed—he was out the door before she could ask him if he wanted to know what was bothering her.
There was that thudding again.
She opened the door to her apartment and stepped inside, placing her bag on the chair at her small writing desk. “Agnes?” Usually her dog was waiting for her at the door, dancing around on her short little corgi legs. But the apartment was still.
