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I thought about the time Vince had made me climb to see Burney, a horrible climb, up the cell tower at the top of the highest hill in town. The entire valley had spread out beneath us, and we really could see everything. And that made me think that Cash seemed easier than Vince—Cash was never going to make me climb a cell tower—but what he showed me was nowhere near as clear and true as what Vince showed me.
“That’s fascinating,” was all I said now. Nothing I said or did was ever going to make Cash as good a guy as Vince, so there was no point in telling him it wasn’t all of Burney.
“We could make a difference here, Lizzie,” Cash said now, trying to put his arm around me. “You and me.”
I turned on him, scowling. “What do you need me for?”
“Everything was always better with you,” he said, moving closer. “We’re meant to be, Lizzie.”
“No.”
“The town is dying,” Cash said, which was an odd thing given he was talking about rehabbing the biggest building in town. “The development is going to replace so much of everything. You can be at my side as we build it. I’ve got a great lot set aside for us. You can build your dream house.”
“No.” Right there was proof he didn’t know me: He was confusing me with someone who had a dream house.
A spasm of anger flickered across his face so fast that someone who didn’t know him well might have missed it. That’s when I noticed his eyes seemed off.
“I have a proposition for you,” he said, and he flashed me that smile that used to make me weak in the knees.
“No.” One thing getting older gives you: stronger knees.
“There are a lot of papers here,” he said, and I stopped saying no. “All kinds of records. We’ve just been piling everything in boxes, but we could set up Cleve’s office for you, put all the papers there, and you could organize them, write a history of the factory. It’s your family’s factory, Lizzie. It would mean a lot if you wrote it. And you could help me a lot if you found the deed to this place. Lavender must have lost it, and I can’t do much more without it. You’d be a great help.”
I was getting ready to say, “No,” when he added, “I’ll pay you, of course.”
Anybody who has ever freelanced for a living knows that those three little words—“I’ll pay you”—are magic. So, I said, “I’ll come by tomorrow and look at the papers and we can talk money then.”
“You know where the real money is?” he went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Vermillion Inc. I can get you in there—”
“Tell me you didn’t name that company,” I said, annoyed with him again. He had to know I was loyal to Anemone, and she owned ECOmena, the company rival to his, so unless he thought he could get me to switch sides with a smile, he was just wasting my time.
“What’s wrong with the name?” he said, confused.
“Who names a company ‘Red Ink’?”
He stared at me confused until it dawned on him what I meant, and then he closed his eyes for a moment, and I wasn’t sure if that was because he was annoyed with me or appalled that he hadn’t realized that before. “Only you would think of that,” he said.
“It’s right there in the name,” I said. “Look, this is really great, I’m glad you showed it to me, but I have work to do. Get the papers together and I’ll come back tomorrow and go through them, see if there’s anything there.”
I headed down the spiral staircase, and Cash followed me.
“I’d really like your help with this place,” he said when we got to the doors. I started to say no, and he added, “And all the papers and records we’re finding.”
“Uh huh,” I said, trying to sound uninterested.
Many years of ghostwriting memoirs have given me a real lust for paper, especially paper with writing on it. Words, lists, numbers, diagrams, anything that some human being had thought was important enough to put marks on paper for, that was where people’s lives were written. And this had been my family’s factory. I’d only known I was a Blue, Cleve Blue’s brother’s daughter, for about two months, so the idea that I had a family tree was still new to me. The chance to look into the factory that the people on that family tree had built? Pretty tempting.
I stopped at the door and looked at the paint. It really was a beautiful blue, but the walls were a mess, chunks of the plaster cracking and falling away from the lath. I picked up a piece of plaster from the floor and took it over to the eye windows.
“Lizzie?” Cash said.
“It’s a pretty blue.” A blue somebody in my family had picked out. I put the plaster in my bag. “Thanks again,” I said, and got out of there.
When I got down to the Camry, I pulled out the painted plaster and thought of Vince in our new bedroom and drove to a hardware store in the next town over where they copied the color for two gallons of eggshell paint.
I’d had enough of meat-locker white. And Cash.
But I really liked the Blue’s blue. And Vince.
