She stepped from the car. It was everything she could do not to run to the porch and hug the railing.
Instead, not yet ready to scare all her neighbors away, she padded across the lawn and grabbed the ‘For Sale’ sign from the soft earth. She carried it to the garage and laughed out loud as she extracted the ring of brass keys from her pocket. Each key held a little colored label. ‘Garage,’ ‘Master,’ ‘Study,’ ‘Shed.’
Sliding the garage key into the lock, she slipped into the cool interior and inhaled. It wasn’t a smell most people would relish, but in that moment, Charlie savored everything—the stale odor, the dust floating in the sunlight filtering through the windows, and even the mouse traps she could see in every corner, which she intended to throw away. The last thing she wanted was to come in and find a poor mouse, neck broken, struggling against the little wooden platform.
She set the sign down on the long work bench that occupied one wall of the garage. As she returned to the house, she made a mental note of what she needed. A few chairs for the deck and maybe a little table for glasses of ice tea, a cat to deal with the pesky mice she wouldn’t be trapping or feeding poison, and flowers for the large empty pots that flanked the wooden stairs leading up to the porch.
Before she slid the master key into the front door lock, she turned and gazed at the lawn, at the start of her new life.
Across the street, an older woman stood hunched over her porch rail, gesturing. “Howie, come on. Come here, sweetie,” she called out.
Charlie followed the woman’s gaze to a little black dog in the front yard. The dog watched Charlie, staring at her with such intensity she shivered.
The old woman looked up, eyes locking on Charlie’s. Charlie raised her hand to wave, but the woman didn’t respond. She scurried down the porch, snatched the dog into her arms and ran back to her house, nearly tripping as she crossed the threshold and disappeared inside.
Charlie dropped her hand. “Okay then, nice to meet you too, cranky lady across the street.”
She wouldn’t let one irritable old woman dash her excitement. Charlie unlocked the door and stepped into her new house.
The front hall, long wood floors gleaming, smelled of lemon disinfectant. Kate had left a welcome basket on the marble-topped buffet table in the foyer. It contained a bottle of red wine, a box of truffles and a card that read ‘Congratulations’ in big gold letters. Charlie flipped the card over.
Best of luck in your new home, Charlie! Yours truly, Kate.
Kate was her real estate agent, a bit of luck that Charlie saw as fate. She’d met Kate the morning she filed for divorce from Jared as she sat alone on a park bench, crying into the newspaper and likely startling the mothers of the children racing along the wooden play structure.
Kate had sat down next to her, reached into her purse and drawn out a plastic bag of tissues and a box of truffles, the same kind that now sat in her welcome basket. “Here,” Kate had said. “There’s no problem that can’t be quashed by a truffle.”
Charlie had laughed for the first time in days, eaten a chocolate, and proceeded to tell Kate her life story, though they’d only met twenty seconds before.
Eventually Kate gave a bit of her own story. She was a realtor visiting her sister in Pontiac. She was from Arizona. No kids, no husband. Been there, done that, she’d said. Not the kids—well, not her own. Two stepkids who’d hated her from the word ‘go’ and a husband who spent his money on dog races and strippers.
Charlie’s marriage too had failed, though it wasn’t a spending problem that had done them in. The last miscarriage had done it. Two dead babies in as many years. Each time she watched the blood swirl down the toilet, Charlie lost a piece of herself.
In the end, she wasn’t the same woman Jared had married, and he told her as much shortly before taking up with another woman at the healthcare company he worked for. She might have forgiven the indiscretion had the woman not left a pair of her pink-and-blue polka dot panties on Charlie’s bureau to find after a twelve-hour shift at the hospital.
Jared had made a half-hearted attempt to keep her, but the spark between them had long since died out. She’d packed her stuff and moved into a studio apartment that she’d furnished with items from a thrift store. She’d been living there for three months when she’d met Kate that fateful April morning.
Five weeks later and she’d bought a big old Queen Anne Victorian house and moved seventy miles north to Frankenmuth, home of the world’s largest Christmas store, to start a new life.
The previous owners had moved abruptly and left most of their furnishings behind. Charlie had been all too willing to accept the house as is. After all, she’d left all the furniture she’d bought with Jared behind. Try as she might, she couldn’t shake the image of him screwing his mistress on the table, on the heather-gray sofa, in the log bed they’d bought at an Amish furniture store on their honeymoon.
The long rustic farmhouse table in her new house had benches on either side. It was far too big for a single woman living alone, but she loved it. Charlie set the basket on the table and lay down on a bench, stretching out her legs and kicking off her white slip-on tennis shoes. She gazed at the white beams crisscrossing the ceiling. A white paddle fan hung from the ceiling and turned in slow lazy circles.
The kitchen cupboards were white, the floor a dark wood marred with scratches from a century of use. It was a sunny, light kitchen with windows and double glass sliding doors opening on to the back deck.
Kate had told Charlie that the house had been built in the early 1900s and renovated several times, though much of its original architecture remained. Prior owners had updated the kitchen to more of a farmhouse style, simple and open, but the rest of the house held to its original ornate character with crown molding, thick carpet and wood floors. The living room and master bedroom both included working fireplaces. In total, the house contained four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a living room, kitchen, laundry room, study and half a dozen closets.
Charlie could never have imagined affording it on her nurse’s salary, but Kate had told her it was a steal. The prior owners wanted to unload it. Charlie put an offer in on a whim, never expecting to get the house. The owners had accepted within twenty-four hours.
Now Charlie sat up and drew in a big breath. Boxes filled her car and waited for her to begin the unpacking. Her entire life fit into the backseat and trunk of her twilight-blue Ford Taurus.
She carried boxes inside and set them in the foyer, pausing every few minutes to marvel at the space. A tiny seed of fear rolled in her belly. Could she afford the house? The mortgage was one thing, but what of the utility bills in the winter? What if a pipe burst or the septic tank overflowed? What if the great deal had a scary underlying reason like black mold?
“Stop it,” she muttered.
Charlie paused in the hall and glanced in the mirror, adjusting the red headband she’d slid over her unwashed hair to keep it out of her face. An eyelash clung to her cheek and she leaned closer to her reflection, plucking it off. As she blew it off her fingers, another image in the mirror caught her eye.
A woman stood in the corner of the foyer, dark hair and dark clothes and worst of all dark eyes, black and angry, watching her.
Charlie screamed and spun around, snatching a candlestick from the foyer table and raising it above her head.