A plus one for murder, p.20
A Plus One for Murder, page 20
“You guessed right.” Andy said something to the elderly man she couldn’t hear and then stepped down off the front stoop to meet her at the top of the driveway, his hand extended. “Welcome, Emma. I hope you were able to find us without any trouble?”
She felt, rather than watched, her hand disappear inside his as she found herself momentarily mesmerized by the yellow flecks that danced against the sunlit brown of his eyes. “No, no trouble at all.”
“I’m happy to hear that.” He swept his hand up to the front stoop and the elderly man slowly caning his way down the steps. “Pop? Where are you going?”
“I’m going to welcome our guest.”
Andy made haste back to the steps, only to have his offer of a hand brushed away in favor of Emma. “Welcome, young lady. I’m John—John Walden.”
“And I’m Emma and this”—she followed the elderly man’s eyes to the end of the leash—“is Scout. My dog.”
At the sound of his name, Scout abandoned all of the new smells along the edges of the driveway and trotted over to first Andy, and then John, his tail going a mile a minute.
“Well, would you look at this fella?” John said, shoving his cane into Andy’s hand and then bending over to pet a clearly elated Scout. “He’s the spitting image of Rocket—the dog my folks got for my brother and me right before the . . . Eh, don’t matter. You’re a beauty all your own, aren’t you, Scout? Though why that should come as a surprise looking at your momma, here, I don’t know.”
Emma felt her face warm at the compliment, and then grow warmer still when a glance back at Andy yielded a nod of agreement.
“How old is he?” John asked.
“He’s four.”
“Had him since he was a pup?”
“No. I got him at the shelter about six months ago.”
“Ahhh . . . a rescue.”
“I guess,” she said, shrugging. “But really, it was more a case of him rescuing me.”
John’s gaze slid up to hers. “From?”
“Eating alone every night, waking up alone every morning, and living what had become an unhealthy work-life balance.”
The elderly man’s gaze moved on to his son. “And I didn’t even pay her to say that, son.”
“Ha-ha, Pop. Well played.” Andy’s eye roll, while funny, did little to disguise the obvious love between the pair. “Moving on . . . So, should we head inside where we can sit and talk?”
“Of course.” She glanced down at Scout and then over at the trees to the side of the house. “Let me just get him situated over there and we can get started.”
Andy’s head was shaking before she’d even finished talking. “He’s welcome inside.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
She looked back at Scout. “Okay, boy, you’re coming in with us.”
“And he can come off that leash once we’re inside,” John said. “He and I can sit on the sunporch and talk dog.”
“Talk dog?” she echoed, grinning.
“It’s a language.”
“Pop . . .”
“Son . . .” John reclaimed his cane, turned toward the house, and held out his arm for Emma to take. When she did, he smiled triumphantly. “You’re a good girl, Emma Westlake. I can tell.”
“Thank you.”
Together, they made their way up the stairs to the front stoop, with Andy trailing them closely. At the top, he stepped around them to open the door, her answering intake of air bringing a smile to John’s thinning lips.
“See, son? It’s there.”
“Pop, this isn’t the time to—”
“This is . . . beautiful,” Emma said, releasing her breath. “It’s—it’s stunning, actually.”
And it was. A million times over.
The entryway, where she’d stopped, looked straight toward the back of the cabin and what was clearly the home’s main living space. There, she spied a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace against a wood-planked wall. Built-in shelves on the wall were filled with books and framed photographs and the kind of knickknacks she knew told stories about the men who lived inside this home. The scattered candles and comfy chairs spoke of evenings spent reading or talking rather than wasted hours in front of a television she didn’t see.
To her right, through an arched opening reminiscent of the front doorway, was the kitchen, a cozy nook with cushioned banquette seating around a table that was big enough to seat four yet was clearly appointed for just two. A floor-to-ceiling shelf next to the wall oven held dozens of cookbooks spanning multiple genres of food. “Who’s the cook?” she asked, glancing back at Andy.
“That would be Pop.” Andy pointed at Scout’s leash and, at Emma’s nod, unhooked it, much to Scout’s delight. “I try, but I’m not even close to him.”
“And I couldn’t design myself a doghouse, let alone a church, or an office building, or a house like this,” said John.
She stared up at Andy. “Wait. You designed this place?” she asked.
“He sure did.” John beckoned for Emma and Scout to follow. When they did, he led them through the second of two arched doorways off the living room. And once again, Emma found herself looking at the kind of room she’d imagined in every princess dream she’d ever had.
Here, as in the living room and kitchen, cozy found a rightful home alongside stunning in everything from the wall of windows looking down a mountain she hadn’t realized they were on, to the glorious sunlight that streamed through them and onto a cushioned settee that spoke to quiet moments of meditation and reflection.
“This is my favorite room in the whole house,” John said, settling himself down on the settee and patting the cushioned space to his left for Scout.
Scout, not one to turn down a comfortable spot to sit, jumped into place over the objection she started to give and Andy halted with a gentle hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. Really. I designed this place to be lived in, and nothing gives a house a more lived-in feeling than a dog sitting beside an old man, according to my father, right, Pop?”
“Go on now and leave us be. We’ll be fine in here.” John rested his hand on Scout’s back. Scout, in turn, settled his nose across the elderly man’s leg as if he’d placed it there a million times before.
With a nod of satisfaction, Andy guided her back out of the sunroom, across the living room, and into the kitchen. “Would you like a cup of coffee? A glass of soda?” Andy asked, motioning her to the table while he veered toward the prep part of the room. “Pop made up a plate of sandwiches and a little pasta salad for our meeting.”
“You didn’t have to make a fuss,” she said, taking a seat on the part of the cushioned bench closest to the window.
“Pop doesn’t know any other way. He hears someone is coming and he makes a beeline for the kitchen. Every. Single. Time.” Andy stopped in front of the refrigerator and turned back to Emma. “Drink?”
“Oh. Yes. Sorry. Could I just have a glass of water?”
“Sure.” Opening the cabinet to the left of the stove, Andy plucked out two glasses, promptly filled them both from a pitcher of ice water in the refrigerator, and then carried them to the table. He set one in front of Emma, and the other in front of the lone traditional (but still cushioned!) chair, and then headed back to the refrigerator for the bowl of pasta salad and plate of sandwiches. “Despite Pop’s occasional mobility issues, he gets around okay and is completely self-sufficient. That’s why I’m not looking for anyone to be here full-time while I’m gone, but, rather, stop by for a few hours each day to talk, play a few games, let him cook for you, that sort of thing.”
Emma took the bowl of pasta salad from Andy, scooped some onto her plate, and handed it back to him. “You want to pay me to let him cook for me?”
“It will be money well spent, trust me.” Andy took two sandwiches and passed the plate to Emma. “It was while I was at this same conference, last year, that Pop had a bit of a scare. He was doing something he shouldn’t have been doing and fell. Took him thirty minutes to crawl to a phone. Scared me to death when I saw the number for the local hospital come up later that day. He’d broken his hip. He ended up being okay, as you can see, but the crawl to the phone caused added damage that’s led to the cane. I’ve not forgiven myself for that.”
“You couldn’t know he was going to fall,” she protested.
“You’re right, I couldn’t. But I could have made sure he was better prepared when I left—insisted he refrain from all unnecessary tasks.”
“Would he have listened?”
His answering laugh filled the room with a lightness that warmed her from the inside out. “No. But at least now, if he falls, he has one of those buttons he can push that will bring emergency personnel if I’m not around. If you take this job, I’ll have your number added to the call list for use during my absence, as well.”
At his lead, she forked up a bite of pasta salad and popped it in her mouth, the explosion of flavors on her palate taking her by surprise. “Wow,” she said, looking from her plate to Andy. “What is in this? It’s incredible.”
“I have no idea. I just eat whatever he makes and love every bite of it.”
She took another bite and another. “If you’re worried about him being alone, I could stay here.”
“I appreciate it, and I’ll keep that in mind for the future, but Pop is good. He’s independent. I think you spending a few hours with him every day will be sufficient—that, and being on the call list should something happen again.” Andy finished off his helping of pasta salad and hooked his thumb across his shoulder in the direction of the sunroom. “That guy in there is everything to me. I need to know he’s okay while I’m gone.”
She took a moment to study Andy up close. Everything she’d catalogued from the car still held, but now, sitting across from him, she could see the little things. The fine lines around the outer edges of his eyes when he was deep in thought . . . The faintest hint of a dimple in his right cheek when he smiled . . . The quiet confidence he exuded just sitting there . . . The way his face grew animated when he talked of his father . . .
“You’re a good man, Andy Walden.”
His amber-flecked eyes lifted from his sandwich back to Emma. “If that’s true, it’s because of my pop. There’s no finer man on earth, in my opinion, than that man sitting in the sunroom right now with your dog. And if you take this job, you’ll come to see pretty quickly what I mean.”
“Sounds like someone I’d like to know whether I get the job or not.” She took a bite of her chicken salad sandwich and, once again, was stunned by its potpourri of flavors. “Wow. Just wow.”
His knowing smile called his dimple into action as he sat back against his chair and watched her eat. When she was done, he stacked her plate atop his own and carried it, along with the pasta salad bowl and sandwich platter, over to the counter. “Did you come here from your house?”
“I did.”
“Did you happen to notice how long it took, door-to-door?” he asked as he snapped a lid on the pasta salad and transferred the sandwiches into an airtight container.
“Just under twenty-five minutes.”
He carried the leftovers to the refrigerator and then turned back to Emma. “You okay driving rural roads like that at night if necessary?”
“Absolutely.”
“I know he didn’t when we were outside a little while ago and he was on a leash, but does Scout ever jump on people when he gets excited?”
“Never. He’ll lick your knees in shorts weather like nobody’s business, but he doesn’t jump up on people.”
“Okay, good.” Andy deposited the dirty plates and utensils into the dishwasher and then returned to his spot across from Emma. “As you can see, Pop loves dogs. So, by all means, feel free to bring Scout with you if you want. I’m heading out next Monday at the crack of dawn and I won’t be back until about 8:00 p.m. on Friday. I’m thinking, that first day, you could get here around two? Maybe stay through dinner? And then, over the next four days, you can vary your five hours to encompass breakfast, lunch, or dinner, depending on what Pop wants. Unless, of course, you have a set time with your other clients that might necessitate one here, as well?”
“No, no set schedule except one that has me at the gym with a client at five thirty in the morning on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.” Emma reached over to her bag, plucked out the folder she’d placed inside after returning home from Dottie’s, and handed it across the table to Andy. “This is a list of some people who have worked with me in the past and can vouch for my character and my work ethic.”
He opened the folder, pulled out the sheet of references, and gave it a thorough read. “This is great. Thank you.”
“My pleasure.” Looping her bag over her shoulder, she slid her way off the cushioned bench and stood. “I know you have a concert you want to get to, so Scout and I will leave you to your Saturday. You have my number if you need any more information after you speak with my references.”
“I’ll be back with you on this no later than tomorrow evening.” He, too, stood and followed her into the living room en route to the sunroom. “Thanks for getting back to me and thanks for coming all the way out here to meet with us. I really appreciate it.”
She paused beside a framed collage of pictures that, upon closer inspection, revealed themselves to be a visual timeline of the building process for Andy’s home. “It must’ve been so incredible to watch your vision coming to fruition.”
“It should’ve been more than it was but”—his shoulders rose and fell in a slow shrug—“yeah, Pop is right, what’s done is done. It worked out, in the end.”
Shifting her gaze across the collage, picture by picture, she stopped to point at the one in the center. “Oh. Wow. McEnerny Homes built this. I’m heading out to their office today to look at some floor plans with one of my clients. She’s looking to build a place with them in Sweet Falls, preferably.”
“Wish I could recommend them, but I can’t,” he said, palming his mouth.
“Oh?”
“I hired him to build this because he’s really the biggest name in the game around here. But the guy didn’t seem to grasp the concept of the word no. As a result, what should have been a fun experience became a bit of a headache, to say the least.” He motioned for Emma to follow him to a window overlooking the southern side of the house. “You see that? Trees as far as the eye can see. And the same thing is on the other side of the house. Fifty acres in all.
“Before this, I was living out in Seattle, working for an architectural firm. My parents had plans to build their forever home here on this land—land that had been in my mother’s family for generations. But they never actually did it, because they didn’t want to be that far away from me. I reminded them of the invention of planes, but . . . they just never did it. Then Mom passed from breast cancer, and I was left this land. It was what she and Pop wanted. They wanted me to have that connection to her past. Anyway, after her death, Pop was lost—absolutely lost. And, honestly, seeing him that way was eating me up even more. So, after a lot of thought, I decided to take my years of experience and strike out on my own, work-wise. Told Pop we were coming here and we were going to design the place together, and we did. I drew it up, of course, but I made sure to incorporate the things we both wanted—the vision we had for our house in the woods.” Andy again swept his hands and her focus toward the window. “Once we had the plans set, I did some research on local builders and brought Robert McEnerny in to build it. The second Robert saw the ridge I was building on and the sunsets it afforded, he went full-court press on me. I spent the entire building process telling him—over and over again—I wasn’t interested in selling any part of the land. That I didn’t want to be surrounded by houses to my left and houses to my right.”
“I wouldn’t want to, either,” she mused as her eyes lit on a mother deer and two speckled fawns making their way through the woods. “It’s so peaceful like this.”
Nodding, he pointed out a third speckled fawn she hadn’t noticed, and then folded his arms across his chest. “It is. But he didn’t see that. He saw only the dollar signs possible from building on a ridge like this. Next thing I knew, he was doing title searches and all sorts of stuff to see if there was some sort of loophole that would enable him to get this out from under me. There wasn’t, of course, but he sure gave it the old college try.”
“Wow.”
“Wait. It gets better. This guy actually had his attorney send Pop a letter letting him know he could contest my mother’s will and her choice to leave this property to me, as her spouse.”
Emma drew back. “Are you serious?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“What did your dad say?”
“He said nothing, and he advised me to do the same until after the house was finished. And when it was, I told Robert to get off my land, once and for all.”
She tracked the third fawn back to its mother and smiled at their sweet reunion. “As much as I hate to do it, I guess I’m going to have to tell Stephanie about this. It’s something I’d want to know if I was considering building.”
“Me, too. That’s why I agreed to speak to that freelance writer a few weeks ago. The one who died out by you . . .”
Spinning around, she snapped her gaze up to Andy’s. “Brian Hill?”
“That’s him.”
“You—you spoke to him?”
“I did. For an article he was working on about McEnerny. Pop thought I was making a mistake—that I should just let it go—but like I told Brian, when people are entrusting you with something as special as building their home, you should at least pretend to care about the process. McEnerny cares only about money and expanding his empire. He is incapable of grasping the word no, and he has absolutely no concept of enough is enough.”
“Enough is enough?” she rasped, as her mind’s eye flew to her phone and the poem she’d read so many times she knew it from memory.
