The Jewelry Case (6 page)

Now fully awake, Paisley was growing annoyed at being barged in on. Who showed up at this insanely early hour? It couldn’t be later than seven-thirty. Nor did she like the fact that this stranger had noticed so much about her so quickly. She reminded herself that he was just a handyman. Here to do a job, get paid, and leave. The quicker the better.

"Do you realize what time it is?" Paisley closed the door. "I thought you were the type that sleeps in late."

"Why would you think that? Oh, because of my behavior when I answered my phone yesterday. In my defense, I'd been up late the night before. I don't usually sleep all day. By the way, I already found your first problem," he added, nodding brusquely toward the front door. "The doorbell doesn't work. That's why I had to knock so hard to wake
you
up."

She bit her tongue as he continued inspecting the room, making notes on his clipboard. He missed nothing: the fraying carpet by the kitchen, the broken window pane, the electrical outlet that hadn't worked when she had tried to use it to recharge her phone last night.

Finally, he turned, pencil behind his ear. "All right, what were some of those other improvements you were thinking of?"

"Just what's necessary to make it habitable for the summer. I'm on a tight budget."

He shook his head. "Most contractors would say it makes more sense to bulldoze the place. If you're going to stay for a while, you'd be more comfortable in a motel."

She bristled. The motel again, she thought, disgusted. That was what Ray had said, and the receptionist too. But that odd sensation she'd felt upon first seeing the house returned, as tangible as a gentle hand on her shoulder. She
couldn't
allow bulldozers to knock over this charming house. That is, it would
be charming when the repairs were finished. Century-old houses didn't come along every day. Some buyer, some day, would thank her for preserving it. And she did have a little money tucked away, left over from selling the stocks. She had planned to use it to pay the last of her debts, but those could wait.

"I don't care if it doesn't make financial sense. I want to save the house."

To her surprise, Ian nodded. "Good," he said, crouching over a pile of mouse droppings. "It's a nice example of a Queen Anne, and the basic structure is sound, even if it does need some work. Are the services on?"

"The water is cold, but there's electricity." She flipped on the light switch to demonstrate. "I don't know who's been paying the bills, but..."

"Auto-pay." He echoed Ray's earlier guess. "If you inherited her bank account, I bet there's not much left. I'll take a look at the water heater later. Want to follow me around while I finish the inspection? Or would you rather
…
?" His gaze fell, and his eyes grew contemplative.

She looked down at the oversized T-shirt and, suddenly self-conscious, realized it barely reached the top of her thighs. The wide neck had slipped off one shoulder. Her face grew hot. "I'll get dressed," she said quickly, backing toward the staircase. "Join you in a minute."

"Sure." He started toward the kitchen. "The circuit breakers are over here, aren't they?"

"I haven't the faintest idea. Feel free to look around."

#

When she came back downstairs, modestly dressed in a flowered cotton top and neat linen shorts, Ian was staring at the photographs hanging on the wall by the kitchen. She'd noticed them earlier but had given them little more than a glance.

"Hey, you've got to see this," he said, beckoning her.

"What is it?"

"I noticed something weird when I first saw you, but I didn't realize what it was until I saw these."

"Weird?" She joined him, puzzled.

The jumble of pictures seemed rather ordinary to her: bland studio portraits of a much-younger Jonathan and his parents, mixed with older images of people who must be relatives.

"Look." Ian pointed at a gilt-framed black-and-white portrait of a married couple from the 1920s. The husband with luxuriantly curling mustaches wore a pince nez, a rounded cellophane collar, and a stern expression. He stood stiffly behind a slender seated woman, his hand planted firmly on her shoulder. Both man and wife appeared to be middle aged.

Paisley leaned forward to peer at the photograph. "Those must be Esther's grandparents, aren't they? So what?"

Ian stared down at her. "You don't see it?"

"See what?"

He gave her a long, considering look, then shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his shorts, while his lids slid half-closed over his eyes. "Never mind. Come outside. I need to show you something else. Something you won't be happy about."

He led her out the kitchen door and pointed up, at the eaves directly above the empty china cat bowl. Had the cat made an appearance, after all, and nibbled all the tuna she'd left out last night? Or had some other animal taken advantage of her largesse? She chose to consider the disappeared food a sign that the cat was still on the premises. She looked forward to meeting Esther's pet eventually.

Then Paisley looked upward and her moment of elation ended. "Termites?"

"Uh huh. And that looks like the source of the leak, up there."

"The roof's bad?" She suppressed a groan, temporarily forgetting the cat. She didn't know much about home repairs, except that roofs were notoriously expensive to replace. "Can't you just patch the part where the water gets through?"

"Maybe. Won't know for sure until I get up there. The good news is your water heater's fine. I relit the pilot light, and you'll have hot water in a couple of hours."

As he jotted something on the clipboard, she stood on tiptoes to look over Ian's shoulder, close enough to smell bacon and Irish Spring soap
,
and saw the list was disconcertingly long. She crossed her fingers behind her back for luck. "So, how much?"

"Depends on what you decide to have done." He chewed the nib of his pencil, and added one more item. "I'll write you up an estimate when I get back ho …back to the office, and give you a call with the total." A smile lit up his gray eyes. "Don't worry, I'll give you a good deal. Number two always tries harder, right? I bet I wasn't the first place you called."

"Well, no...."

He nodded, unoffended. "Bruce Harris would have sucked your wallet dry. It's a good thing he was too busy to take you on."

"How did you know…?" she began, then gave up. It was just another example of a small-town grapevine. Or, maybe, common sense. Bruce Harris was, after all, the only other local contractor in the phone book.

Ian held up his notepad. "Got all the information I need. I'll call you later with the estimate."

"Thanks." She followed him to the rusty green pickup parked in the gravel driveway, curiosity overcoming her. "By the way, what was it about that old photograph that seemed weird? Who was that woman?"

Ian looked at her, eyebrows raised. "That was Jonathan's great grandmother, Ruth Wegiel. They say she was a famous singer in her day. Couldn't you tell? You're the spitting image of her."

He ducked into the cab of the pickup, slamming the door twice before it stuck. Gravel stung her shins as the pick-up peeled away.

Chapter Four

Paisley watched the pickup grow smaller with an unsettled feeling and a host of unanswered questions. First, was the photograph really of Ruth Wegiel? How would Ian McMurtry know? Paisley wouldn't have been able to identify any of her own great-grandmothers if someone offered her a million dollars to do so. And Ruth wasn't even Ian's ancestor, not unless there was some unknown connection between the handyman's Irish Catholic family (as she deduced from his name) and the old-world Polish Jews from whom Jonathan was descended.

Even stranger, why had Ian pointed out the picture to her? He couldn't have known Paisley had dreamed of Ruth Wegiel twice since arriving yesterday.

Paisley hurried back to the hallway and took the framed photograph off the wall, to inspect it more closely. Then she caught her breath. Penciled on the back of the frame in the shaky handwriting she recognized from Esther's holiday postcards, was "Ruth Wegiel Perleman."

She stared at the name for a moment before hanging the photograph back on the wall. Score one for Ian. Maybe he was a member of the town's historical society, or maybe he had worked in this house before, and Esther had told him about the photographs. It would be natural for a lonely old woman to tell a visitor, even a construction worker, about an ancestress who had been the toast of eastern Europe. Why not?

Of course, that left unanswered the more disturbing question: why Paisley had dreamed about that very woman last night? Even before she had noticed Ruth's picture on the wall? For there was no doubt the woman in the photograph was an older version of the woman she had seen in her dreams, not with that name written on the back.

Paisley shook her head to clear it. There was no answer for why she had dreamed about Ruth, not once, but twice since arriving in the house. But it was natural that Paisley should feel some connection to Jonathan's famous ancestress. After all, they had several attributes in common. Both were opera singers, and, as Ian pointed out, the two women even shared a certain physical superficial resemblance: they were both petite and had black eyes and dark wavy hair.

She looked at the picture again. Ruth Wegiel stared stiffly back from the frame, her hair bobbed in the fashion of the mid-1920s, her husband's hand planted on her shoulder. Rather than satins and rubies, like in the dream, Ruth wore a high-necked, long-sleeved dress with a white lace collar and a brooch at the throat. Her dark eyes met the viewer's under thick, sharply pitched eyebrows. Spitting image? Paisley thought. Hardly.

Privately, she thought Ruth looked more like a middle-class housewife of her era than a glamorous opera singer, although there was a certain charm about the pointed chin, round cheeks, and large, expressive eyes. Of course, standards of beauty were different back then, and Ruth was a decade past her prime when the photograph was taken.

Then Paisley leaned forward to get a closer look at the brooch pinned to the woman's lapel and gasped. A cameo! Just like the one that lay in her jewelry box. Although it was impossible to make out the details of the blurry Grecian profile, Paisley had no doubt the pieces of jewelry were one and the same. It made sense. A family heirloom, passed down to Esther, and then to herself. Still, it was one more unsettling coincidence. What did it all mean?

Her stomach growled. It had been a long time since her last unsatisfying meal of Spaghettios. She'd have to walk to town today. There was only so long that she could rely on Esther's eclectic choices of canned food.

The boxes of cereal looked stale. She threw them away and heated herself a can of chili on the old electric range, before sitting at the kitchen table to eat her unorthodox breakfast while looking out at the large, overgrown back yard ringed with trees. This time, her thoughts turned to the strange, tall young man who had turned up to fix her house.

Who was Ian McMurtry, anyway? From his yawning performance on the telephone yesterday, she had expected a incompetent boor. This morning, she'd gathered the opposite impression: that of someone alert and intelligent. He was slightly annoying with his brashness and know-it-all air, but all that was overshadowed by another, more positive quality, that she found it hard to put a finger on.

The word popped into her head.
Integrity.
An old-fashioned word, which one didn't hear often these days. She knew better than to put too much stock in her impression, though. One read in the paper almost every day about old widows signing over their life's savings to some charming con man. Had Esther been one of those women?

After her unusual but filling breakfast, Paisley figuratively rolled back her sleeves. The shops in River Bend were not likely to be open yet, so she might as well spend the next hour or two cleaning up the house. Who knew? Maybe she'd find a few antiques worth selling. Now that she thought of it, it might not be a bad idea to go through with a notebook at some point and do a full-scale inventory.

For now, she just wanted to get rid of the worst of the dust. It appeared that no one had cleaned the place since Esther went into the retirement home.

Paisley put the Maria Callas record on the hi-fi full blast … it thrilled her to find the old equipment still worked … and found Lysol, rags, and a bucket under the sink. As she swept and vacuumed, she felt like Snow White cleaning the dwarfs' cottage, except there were no cute forest animals to help brush the dust under the carpets.

When she was done, she left the ancient, dust-belching vacuum cleaner in a corner, and went upstairs to take much-needed bath in the antique, clawfoot tub. Now that Ian had relit the pilot light, a steaming waterfall burst out of the tap when she twisted the knob, and she soaped her legs and arms until her skin was shiny and pink. She wished the other problems in the house would be as easily, and cheaply, solved.

Mentally she listed the items she would present Ian later: replace the bad roof tiles ... slap on a new coat of paint ... fill in the crack in the front steps.... Instead of depressing her, the prospect of fixing up the house lifted her spirits. The project would keep her mind off her problems and give her the sense of purpose she had been lacking these past few months. Besides, who knew? When the place sold, she might make back the money, or even make a profit. Some people made a living fixing up old houses.