“I have an idea,” I said. “Why not take the hand to Carl’s?”
“Carl? Who’s that?”
“Carl’s Arts and Crafts. It’s a store here in town. See what they say about fixing it. Get a professional opinion. You know, I’ve done a little work with papier-mâché in the past, and I doubt repairing this will be as hard as you think.” Sure, they were Christmas ornaments and I’d been five, but it was still papier-mâché.
He opened the van’s back doors, lifted the hand, and slid it inside. “Oh, right,” he said. “I walk into the local crafts shop and ask for their opinion on repairing a hundred-thousand-dollar sculpture.”
A hundred thousand dollars? I’d had no idea it was that valuable. I swallowed hard, hoping we could pull this off.
“Why take that kind of risk when we might end up making it worse?” he said.
“Because we might end up making it better. I’m sure it can be fixed. Everything can. Well, most things. If there’s a problem, there’s a solution. That’s what my father always said.”
The man looked at me for a moment as though he could see inside me, and his face softened. “You honestly believe everything can be fixed, don’t you?”
I smiled bravely. “Yes, I do. Maybe not matters of the heart…” I wasn’t going to get into that. “But most things. Look, I’ll go to Carl’s with you. It’s my fault, and, well, I’m actually very handy to have around when it comes to disasters.”
He broke into a smile. “You mean you can do something besides cause them?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Yes, I mean I can fix them. I’m an event planner. I handle disasters all the time.”
He shut the van’s back doors. Then he looked skyward as if he couldn’t believe what he was about to say. “All right, Miss Fix-It. I’ll go along with your suggestion. Let’s see what they have to say at Carl’s.”
I offered my hand. “The name’s Sara Harrington.”
He shook it. “David Cole.”
What a morning. And the day had barely begun.
Chapter 3
Carl’s
We got in the van, David at the wheel, and headed down the long driveway of the Duncan Arms, passing a cluster of Adirondack chairs on the lawn. The van rattled and shook as we flew over a speed bump.
“Sorry.” He tapped the brake. “I don’t usually drive this thing. It’s a rental and the suspension’s awful.”
I asked him what he normally drove, and he told me a Range Rover. That was definitely a cut above what we were in.
“Take a left at the bottom there.” I pointed. “Carl’s is just a few miles from here, a little after the downtown area.”
We pulled onto the main road, passing a field that stretched lush and green for twenty acres, the property bounded by a post-and-rail fence, horses grazing at one end.
“I take it you’ve been here before,” David said.
I grabbed my sunglasses from my handbag. “I grew up here. My mother still lives in town.”
“But you were staying at the Duncan Arms.”
I understood the confusion. Why would someone come back to a place where she had a family home and go to an inn? “I didn’t want to stay at the house. My sister’s there right now and…well, we’re not exactly speaking.”
“Families can be complicated,” he said.
I turned away and looked out the window as we passed an antiques shop. What could I say? How could I explain the way things were with Mariel? Sometimes the ice on our chilly relationship would thaw, and we’d become friendly again. Then we’d argue—usually over a topic we’d quarreled about too many times before. I’d tell her she should stop asking Mom for money. She’d say I should stop telling her what to do.
What I really wanted was for her and Mom not to exclude me from their conversations. It hadn’t bothered me as much when Dad was alive, because he and I were close. But in the years since his death, I’d felt like Mom and Mariel were living together in one bubble and I was off in another one.
“I hadn’t talked to Mariel in a year and a half,” I said. “Until last night. And I’m not sure I’d really count that as talking. We just happened to be in the same room for a couple of minutes.” We stopped at a traffic light; the engine idled. “Do you have siblings?”
“I don’t,” David said. “Not anymore.” Two girls walked their bikes across the road. “I did have an older brother. Beau. But he died when I was twelve.” His comment would have seemed matter-of-fact if I hadn’t caught the sadness in his eyes.
“I’m sorry. Was he…was he ill?” Too late, I realized I shouldn’t have asked, shouldn’t have pried.
“Nope. Not ill.” David stared through the windshield. “He dove off a cliff into a lake. He didn’t know the water was shallow. ‘Cervical spine injury secondary to blunt trauma.’ That was the official cause of death.”
“How awful. I’m so sorry.” I couldn’t begin to imagine the effect that must have had on David and his parents.
“It was a stupid, stupid thing to do.” His voice was tinged with anger, almost as though he were speaking to his brother instead of me. “We were really close. He was two years older, but we did a lot together. Played Nintendo, fished, skateboarded, watched movies from the video store. But he had this wild—no, careless—he had this careless streak. I wish I’d been with him that day, but I wasn’t.”
I could hear the regret in his voice, and as the light turned green and we drove on I wondered what it would be like to be that close to a brother or sister and then lose them. Especially that way. Devastating was the only word I could come up with.
I studied the dials on the dashboard, the bottle of water in the cup holder. “My sister and I were never very close,” I said. “It was better when we were young, but even then, she was always trying to compete with me. I took violin lessons; she took violin lessons. I learned to ride a pony, so she had to ride. When I was a senior in high school, I quit the school paper because she’d joined as a freshman. I had nothing of my own; she was always chasing me. The worst thing, though, was when she stole the guy I was in love with. Still am in love with. She’s marrying him in two weeks. Right here in town.”
David turned to look at me. “Your sister is marrying your ex-boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
He let out a low whistle. “Oh, boy.”
“Obviously, I’m not going to the wedding. I’m leaving town tonight.”
“Did she think you were going?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t care. I just want to get back to Chicago.”
We passed a grassy hill, the site of an old Indian burial ground. “So home is the Windy City?” he asked.
Was it? “I guess so, although it doesn’t feel like home. Not yet, anyway. I’ve been there only a year, so maybe that’s not surprising.”
“Where did you live before Chicago? Were you here on the East Coast?”