Page 14 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

Chapter 6

Matt

Heather Starling texted me a dinner invitation the night after my first meeting with Elizabeth, and I spent the better part of a day deciding how to feel about it.

The message was friendly and completely unambiguous. We feed the people who work this festival. Dinner tomorrow, six o’clock. Bring nothing but an appetite. There was no polite way out of it that wouldn’t insult the whole family at once, and I didn’t want a way out of it anyway, which was the part that took me the day to admit.

Then Elizabeth texted me the morning of.

Elizabeth: Fair warning. My family is a lot, and they will devour you whole. Come out early, and I’ll walk you through who’s who before you’re outnumbered.

Me: I’ve served warrants. I’ll manage.

Elizabeth: Dinner is at six, but come a little early. Bring nothing. Tiffany will interrogate you regardless; this is just so you know which questions are traps.

Me: There are traps?

Elizabeth: Several.

Me: Copy. Show up early. I’ll wear something I can run in.

So that’s how I ended up on the Starling farm early, standing in the yard with a woman in a canvas jacket and a pen behind her ear while she briefed me on her relatives like I was going into a hostile building.

“Donna does not miss a word,” she said. “She’ll be elbow-deep in dinner prep with her back turned and somehow come out of that kitchen knowing what you said, who you said it to, and what you meant by it. Whatever she asks you tonight, she’s confirming, not learning. Aunt Tiffany’s going to ask you something wildly personal in the first ten minutes—that’s affection; she doesn’t do it to people she dislikes. Delilah’s sixteen and thinks all of us are idiots, and honestly she’s got a case. Beau’s twelve and will simply tell you things. He has no filter of any kind. It’s very relaxing.”

“Your mother?”

“My mother,” Elizabeth said, “already likes you, which means she’s going to be perfectly polite and you’ll never know what she actually thinks until she mentions it in passing at the co-op sometime next spring.”

“And your grandmother?”

Something flickered across her face and got smoothed over fast. “Under doctor’s orders up at the Big House. She’ll want a full report. She’ll get one, probably from Tiffany who can’t keep a secret from her even if she were paid.” She started walking. “Come on. We’ve got time to kill, and I’m not standing in a driveway.”

We came around the equipment shed, the barn stood up in front of us, and I stopped.

In daylight, off duty, with nothing to do but look at it, it was worse than I’d thought. The June storm had peeled the northeast corner of the roof back like the lid of a can, and the tarp strapped over it had only ever been a stopgap, lifting at a loose grommet, letting the weather work underneath. Rain had gotten into the decking. You could see the dark stain spreading down the inside wall where the doors stood open.

“Don’t,” Elizabeth said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You made a face. You made a very specific face at my barn.”

“That’s going to come through the first hard storm.”

“I’m aware.” She said it lightly, but she’d stopped walking too, and she wasn’t looking at me. “It’s on the list. It’s a long list.”

And there it was, that old pull starting up in me, the one I’m not proud of. A problem with a clear solution and nobody currently solving it. It isn’t a noble feeling. It feels like relief. A problem I can fix is a problem that can’t surprise me, and a man who’s busy fixing things doesn’t have to stand still long enough to be asked what he wants.

Jonas came around the shed with a coil of rope over one shoulder.

Donna’s oldest is a big man, but he carries it easy, all of it earned off this farm rather than out of any gym—forearms hay bales built, a jaw that hadn’t seen a razor in a few days, dark hair shoved back under a ball cap. He has a tape measure on his belt and the deeply unbothered expression of a man who says what needs saying and not one word past it.

He followed my eyes up to the wounded corner of the roof.

“That decking’s rotting from the top down,” I said. “You got a ladder?”

Jonas looked at the barn. Then at me, off duty in a flannel, clearly not dressed for a roof. Then back at the barn, and something crossed his face that was close kin to relief—the look of a man who’s been trying to solve a problem alone and just heard a second set of boots on the gravel.