“That’s right.”
Accepting the handshake I told him, “I’m Charlotte Van Hoek. Everyone calls me Charley.”
“What do you like to be called?”
“Charley, actually.” I was surprised he would ask me. No one ever had before. It made me take a better look at him.
Up close it was clear that his tan was not really a tan, but his natural skin tone. He had a nice face—dark eyes, straight nose, strong jawline. More handsome than ordinary, but not so handsome you couldn’t look straight at it.
He had a nice handshake, too. Brief, firm, and self-assured.
Turning his left hand a little he showed me the bright orange tape measure held in his square palm. “Just checking the width of a window. I’m done now. You locking up?”
“Yes.” Since I’d already locked all the doors it was obvious he had his own key. “Which door did you come in?”
“This one.”
The front door, behind me. Meaning all the others were still safely locked. I gave a nod and started to unfasten my umbrella.
“That’s not going to be much help to you out there,” he warned me. “Where’s your car parked?”
“Over by the barn.”
“I’ll drive you over.”
Under normal circumstances I’d have never gotten in a car with someone I’d just met, no matter how nice and harmless they seemed, but I knew Malaika spoke highly of Sam Abrams and since I trusted Malaika, I told him, “Okay.” I was glad that I had, when we opened the door to discover the rain pelting down with a vengeance.
He’d parked his black pickup truck two steps away from the door, where the overhang sheltered the front stoop a bit, which explained why he hadn’t been soaked coming into the house in the first place. And he’d been right: my pink umbrella didn’t help me much at all as I sprinted around to the passenger side. I hadn’t had to climb into a pickup truck since high school, so I wasn’t very graceful as I hoisted myself up onto the seat. To my relief, he didn’t seem to notice.
He was studying the windshield as he put the truck in gear. “What kind of tires do you have on your car?”
Once again, not a question I’d ever been asked before. “All-season radials. Why?”
“Old or new?”
“New last summer.”
“You should be all right, then.” He steered the truck around to slowly roll across the narrow gravel parking lot towards the farther end. “I wouldn’t take the main road, though. It never drains right when there’s this much water, and you don’t want someone hydroplaning into you. I’d go the back way, down the shore road.”
He sounded like Niels, looking out for my safety. You sound like my brother, I wanted to tell him. Instead I cleared my throat of the small lump that had just blocked it and said, “Okay.”
“Have you driven on the shore road?”
“Once or twice.” It wasn’t a straightforward route. It had some twists and turnings, like the footpaths in the forest, and changed names at least once on its way down into Millbank.
I must have looked uncertain when he glanced at me because he said, “Well, that’s the way I’m going. You can follow me.”
He stopped alongside my blue Honda Accord and I thanked him and made the short dash to my driver’s seat, happy to hear my car’s engine behave when I started it. By the time I’d backed out of my spot, Sam had moved his truck into position to take the lead.
I wasn’t nervous of driving in bad weather, but I was happy to have him in front of me as we rounded the two western corners of the large Wilde property, approached the grid of residential streets, and turned instead to take the sloping road that led us back towards the bay. We were within the trees again, and sometimes they closed over us, but every now and then they opened up to let the rain sweep in and made me grateful for the truck’s red taillights.
He drove a little slower than he had to, putting his turn signals on well ahead of the corners we came to, and when we came to the place where the shore road—or whatever it was called here at the edge of town—passed underneath the shelter of the elevated highway that ran right across this north shore of Long Island, he pulled over to the shoulder, rolled his window down, and waved me up beside him to the stop sign.
I braked as I drew level with his truck and put my window down as well.
“Okay now?” Sam called over.
“Yes,” I told him. “Thank you.”
With a brief thumbs-up and nod he rolled his window up again and let me travel on ahead of him.
I didn’t have too far to go. But once I left the underpass my full attention focused on the windshield and the road, and so it wasn’t till I’d turned off and was halfway down the steep drive to the house and heard the friendly honk behind me as the pickup truck swished past that I discovered he had stayed behind me. Following me, possibly, to make sure I got safely home.
And because that was another thing my brother would have done, I found I had to sit outside a moment in my car, just by myself, until my cheeks were dry enough that I could blame their dampness on the rain.
Only a month ago, just walking into the house had been difficult. I’d almost conquered that now. It had helped that my brother had only been here for a year, and that I’d only been down one time for a visit at Christmas, so I didn’t have many memories of him in this place, and the house itself hadn’t absorbed very much of his character. Nor did it really have much of its own.
Niels had never been fond of old houses. He’d inherited that from our mother, most likely, since she had been born and brought up in the same old stone farmhouse outside Quebec City where her family had lived for a hundred and seventy years. By her reckoning, six generations had weathered the same winter drafts in that house and she’d left it as soon as the chance had presented itself, taking a job at a bank in Montreal, where she had met my father. The first house they’d lived in as newlyweds, at Mom’s insistence, had been clean and modern with no stone in sight. We’d always had new houses. Dad was no handyman, so when the gleam had worn off one house and things started needing repair, we’d moved on to the next. I’d enjoyed having new rooms to decorate, but to be honest I’d secretly loved that old stone farmhouse my French Canadian grandparents had never left, and my visits there had, I felt sure, been the start of my love of museums.
My brother had, by contrast, carried on just as my parents had and never bought a house if it was more than ten years old. Unlike Dad, though, Niels had never learned his limits when it came to wielding tools. He’d watched the home improvement programs on TV, and every home he’d lived in showed the scars of it.
The house he’d chosen here, in Millbank, was a plain two-storey house with horizontal siding freshly painted the colour of caramel fudge with lighter yellow trim framing the neat rows of windows, the peak of the roof, and the flight of broad steps leading up to the wraparound porch. The porch, in my view, was its finest feature, unless you were counting its setting, because that was fine, too—it sat in a hollow behind and below the main street leading into the town, with tall trees to each side of it and a sloping backyard that was half filled with reeds from the edge of the water where the mill stream widened into Messaquamik Bay.