LITMIR.BIZ

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a smile that felt fainter than she would have liked, she slipped past his scrutiny and into another room that had been stripped to its bones.

      “You said this was your friend’s grandmother’s house?”

      “My friend Michelle. Baker,” she expanded, wondering if he sounded skeptical or if her conscience only made her hear suspicion in his tone. “It’s Michelle Hansen now. She moved to Maine.”

      “My sister said Mrs. Baker’s granddaughter married the local doctor and lives here.”

      “That would be Jenny. Michelle’s younger sister. And she did. And does.”

      Kelsey turned a slow circle in the middle of the room that no longer looked familiar at all. The old cabinets had all been torn out and the floor stripped of linoleum. The old-fashioned cookstove and rounded refrigerator were gone, too. The only thing that seemed familiar was the mint green paint where the cabinets had been. The rest of the room had at some point been painted a warm Tuscan yellow. From the looks of the large white spackled patches on the walls, that golden color would be painted over soon.

      From the corner of her eye, she saw Sam leaning against the door frame. With his hands in the pockets of his worn jeans, his faded NYPD T-shirt stretching across his chest, he didn’t seem to be watching her so much as he seemed to be…evaluating.

      Doing a little evaluating of her own, she felt a twinge of disappointment. The old woodstove was also gone.

      “You said you came here often?” he asked.

      “Michelle’s grandma was a widow so someone from her family was always checking up on her.” She looked into the pantry, quietly closed the door when she found the shelves missing. “I’d come by after school with Michelle sometimes. On weekends, some of us would come out to skate on the mill pond and come over to say hi.” She motioned to the empty corner and the now-covered hole in the wall that had once vented a chimney. “We used to warm our hands on the woodstove that was over there while Grandma B made us cocoa.”

      “Grandma B?”

      “Grandma Baker. She said we were all like granddaughters to her, so that’s what we called her. It’s like that around here,” she mused, thinking how sweet the elderly woman had been to her and her friends. “Neighbors are like family.”

      She moved toward the back porch, stuck her head out the kitchen door to see what had changed out there. The door had already been replaced. So had the wood-framed windows. They were aluminum now, like the other new ones crated and waiting to replace those on the second floor. The broad steps she and her friends used to sit on were still there, but their lumber was now new.

      What she’d just remembered had her turning back into the room.

      “The best part about coming here was the slumber parties in the summer. Carrie Rogers and I would come out with Michelle. We’d pick berries in the woods and swim in the pond, then sit on the porch eating popcorn and talking until her grandma chased us up to bed. We wouldn’t go to sleep until the sun started to come up.”

      Conquering the night they’d called it, she remembered, shaking her head at the silliness of what had seemed like such a big deal to them back then. If she stayed up all night now, it was because she was preparing for an event, wrestling with an administrative budget or personnel problem or, lately, she thought, turning away to run her hand along the new window sill, questioning the sudden developments in her career.

      Propped against the door frame, Sam watched her check out his handiwork. He had no idea how something as inconsequential as a childhood memory could put such warmth in a person’s eyes, but that warmth had definitely been there in the moments before she’d turned away. It had lit her face, her eyes, curved the fullness of her mouth. He could barely recall his own childhood. It hadn’t been a bad one. He just never thought about it. Certainly he never thought about the innocence she had just so easily recalled of her own.

      Swimming and skating on a mill pond sounded like something straight out of a Currier and Ives painting to him. Practical to a fault, cynical, distrustful and more hardened than he would admit out loud, he couldn’t begin to imagine something so idyllic.

      He dismissed his failure as totally inconsequential. Distrust and doubt had saved his hide on more than one occasion. Doing what he did for a living, he’d come to regard the traits as skills. He wasn’t at all anxious to be rid of them.

      She turned back, now studying the new plywood underlayment for the kitchen floor. “Do you mind if I go upstairs?”

      Still curious about what she was up to, enjoying the distraction, he pushed himself from the door frame and idly motioned for her to proceed.

      Seeing her smile in the general direction of his chin, he watched her slip past him and into the dim living room. The faint scents of cinnamon and something impossibly fresh drifted behind her. Her shampoo, maybe. Or her soap.

      She headed for the door at the far end of the room, only to stop as she reached the fireplace a few feet from the stairs. Looking as if she might be remembering something about the fireplace, too, she slowly ran her hand along the carved wood mantel.

      It had taken him an entire day to sand the mantel down and repair the cracked corbels. All he needed to do now was stain it the dark cherry his sister had picked out and apply a few coats of varnish.

      “You’re doing all of this yourself?” she asked.

      “My uncle helped me tear out the kitchen and bathroom. And he or one of his workers will help me install the new cabinets when they arrive next week. But other than that…yeah. Pretty much.”

      “This feels like satin.” The tips of her fingers caressed the smooth surface, her brow knitting as if she were savoring the velvety feel of the grain. Or, maybe, marveling at it. “I thought you were a detective.”

      “I am.”

      She glanced toward him. “Then, how do you know how to do all this?”

      He gave a dismissing shrug. “Where I grew up, nobody called a carpenter unless he was a relative. Same went for a plumber or an electrician. Dad did the repairs around the house and I watched.”

      “And helped,” she concluded, stroking the wood again. “A lot.”

      That was true, he thought, though he’d all but forgotten the hours he’d spent watching his dad turn wood scraps into picture frames or the little tables and chairs he gave away to his cousins and the kids in the neighborhood. Pete MacInnes was a cop, too. Nearing retirement now. But carpentry always had been his escape and he’d seemed to enjoy sharing it with his son. He had never said as much. His father had never been big on words. He still wasn’t. But he was a patient man. He’d been a good teacher. And a slap on the back was still high praise.

      “Yeah,” he finally murmured, pulling his thoughts back in. He didn’t want to think about his dad. Specifically, he didn’t want to think about what his dad had said about taking more leave than had been recommended.

      Take a little more time, son. Think about supervising. Or working internal affairs. Your mom worries about you when you’re undercover.

      He knew his mom worried. But his mom worried about everything. As for moving up the chain of command, the last thing he wanted was to sit behind a desk supervising a sting. He needed to be in the heart of it.

      “You do beautiful work.”

      As she spoke, Kelsey dropped her hand from the perfectly prepared wood. She’d had no idea all those years ago that they’d had so much in common. Years of watching and assisting her mom tend whatever had broken or malfunctioned around the diner had left her with a few eclectic skills of her own. She was probably the only student to graduate from the Boston Culinary Arts Academy who’d taken apart and reassembled a sink drain her first week of sauce class because another student’s engagement ring had been rinsed down the drain with her burned beurre blanc.

      She might have told Sam that, too, had she not noticed the small white

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