It felt like she’d gone to bed hours ago, but it had only been about forty-five minutes since she’d slipped under the covers beside him. Ginny yawned with her hand over her mouth, hoping nothing else came up and out. The light from Sean’s clock dimmed, then went out, but not before she caught a flash of something in the hall. Something bright, reflective. Something like eyes.
“Turn that light on,” she whispered.
Sean had already fallen back to sleep, or mostly, and he let out a muffled “hmmph?”
Ginny rolled over to turn her bedside light on, which made Sean grunt and throw an arm over his face. “I saw something in the hallway.”
Sean sat up at once. “What?”
Her pumped-up heartbeat wasn’t helping the reflux. “I saw something like…eyes.”
“The cat.”
“No,” she said. “Unless Noodles is now the size of a Great Dane and standing on her back legs on a box.”
Sean got up and went to the half-open door and pulled it all the way to show the empty hallway. “Nothing there. Probably something reflecting off of something. Or the window at the end of the hall. Or the night-light, maybe it was that.”
She knew he was right, of course he was. The quick, bright flash might’ve even been her imagination or a quirk of the shadows. It could’ve been some light coming in through the window, splitting shadows she hadn’t yet come to know.
Sean’s warm hand on her back reminded her of how chilly she was, and Ginny turned off her light to snuggle back under the blankets. The reflux was fading with every swallow, just like the memories of her dream. She rolled to face her husband, who was sprawled on his back with one arm flung over his head. His slow, even breaths soothed her. She put a hand on his belly, first on top of the soft T-shirt, then slipped her fingers underneath to lay them on the warm skin beneath. Then, lower.
“Oh yeah?” Sean sounded sleepy, but amused. Beneath her fingers, he responded.
“Yeah,” Ginny said. “Definitely.”
She moved to pull him on top of her, but Sean resisted, rolling her on top of him instead. “Don’t want to squish…you.”
The baby. He meant the baby. Ginny sighed, straddling him. It felt awkward now. Unwieldy, when she’d simply wanted him to move inside her, but now she had to do some sort of gymnastics routine to get things going. She kissed him when he pulled her down to his mouth, but all at once she couldn’t stop thinking about the landscape from her dream and the inconsistent amount of hot water and the errands they needed to do the next day, which would come way too early the longer they were awake.
“No?” Sean murmured into her ear, his breath warm. He pushed a hand between them, but the position wasn’t quite right and the pressure against her was more pain than pleasure. “I thought you wanted to.”
But it was lost, and she didn’t want to tell him so because she’d been the one to start this. It would be unfair to back out now. So she took him in her hand and shifted to slide him inside her, and she moved the way she knew he liked her to move.
And when it was over, in the dark, she listened to the sound of his breathing slow and deepen beside her. She listened to Noodles’s rhythmic purring. She listened to the soft scritch-scratch of something inside the walls of her house, and it was that sound that finally soothed her into sleep.
Chapter Six
The exterminator was much cuter than he had any right to be. Over six feet tall, dark hair, ice-blue eyes. Dimples in both cheeks when he grinned, which he did the second Ginny opened the door and wished she’d put on something nicer than a pair of yoga pants and one of Sean’s old college sweatshirts.
“Mrs. Murphy?”
Technically, she was not Mrs. Murphy since she’d kept her maiden name, but it was easier to nod than explain. She stepped aside to let him in. “Yeah. Come on in. Thanks for getting here so fast.”
“No problem. It’s my job, right?” He turned in a slow half circle, looking up at the ceiling before focusing on her. “I’m Danny.”
He held out a hand for her to shake, surprising her. Ginny’s hand was engulfed inside his fingers. “Ginny.”
“You have mice?” Danny asked as he let go. He set down the tool bag in his other hand and put both hands on his hips. He wore a dark-blue coverall with his name on a patch over his heart. Big black boots.
“I think so.” Ginny tried not to ogle his ass when he turned again to look up, but didn’t manage very well. It was a pretty stellar butt, hard to ignore even in the baggy coveralls. “I’ve heard things in the walls and ceiling. We just moved in—”
“Yeah, I thought you must be new. I’ve been doing this neighborhood for a few years now, but this is the first time I’ve been called to this house.”
Something in the way he said “doing this neighborhood” made her think of housewives clad in leopard-print robes, martini glasses in hand, standing on top of chairs and screaming while cartoon mice ran around them. “We’ve been in for not quite a week.”
“Guy who owned this place before never had a contract with us, not even just the standard maintenance. Your husband signed you up for that, so I can take care of that for you today too. If you want.” Danny’s grin made Ginny think he’d take care of lots of things she wanted.
She shoved that idea away as absurd. She was easily at least ten years older than him, face bare of makeup and inadequately showered. And pregnant. And married, she reminded herself. Still, looking wasn’t touching, and she admired Danny’s dimples again.
“Did he?” she remembered to say. “What does that mean?”
“Means I’ll come out every three months to treat your place for spiders, bees, wasps, check for termites. Whatever you need. And if you have any other problems, I’m your guy to take of that too. Like mice.” Danny winked.
Ginny blinked.
Danny pulled a flashlight from the tool bag and shone it along the crown molding. “Termites usually aren’t a problem in this neighborhood, but you get a lot of spiders and silverfish. Being so close to the creek, you can get millipedes and stuff in your basement too.”
“But…you’ll take care of all that. Right?”
Danny clicked off the flashlight and gave her another of those grins. Ginny wondered if he practiced them. “Yep. All of it. If you want to show me into the basement first, I can take care of you from the ground up.”
Oh, I bet you could, Ginny thought. Top to toe too. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep a straight face and pointed down the hall. “Basement door’s to the right there, in that alcove. I have a cat. You won’t put anything down that’s poisonous to animals, right?”
Danny shook his head. “No, ma’am.”
Jesus. Ma’am. It should’ve made her feel old and possibly respected, but instead made her flash on a vision of herself in librarian glasses and a pencil skirt, with her hair in a bun and a ruler in her hand.
She pointed the way toward the basement, but didn’t follow him down. She was in the middle of not only a cutthroat game of online Scrabble, but also finishing up some final files she needed to send in to the company she no longer worked for. The word game was winning her attention, because while the files were important, they were also the last link she had to her job. As soon as she turned them in, she’d have no more reasons to think of herself as a working woman.
She got so engrossed in trying to figure out where to use her Q, U and Z tiles for the best results that she didn’t hear Danny until he appeared in the kitchen suddenly enough to make her scream. “You scared me,” Ginny said unnecessarily, one hand on her heart. “God.”
“Sorry.” Danny looked serious. “I need to talk to you about your basement.”
That sounded bad. Ginny hadn’t actually been in the basement since they’d moved in. She remembered it as being unfinished and dry, the only thing she’d really cared about. Sean had talked about making it into a rumpus
room, a place for a home theater. Sean talked about a lot of things.
“My husband has big plans for it,” she said. “Aside from that, what’s the problem?”
“It’s your ductwork. Oh hey, puss.” Danny crouched to offer a hand to Noodles, who sniffed it with disdain but let him pet her. He stroked the cat’s fur, then looked up at Ginny. “It’s all over the place down there.”
“Umm…?” Ginny had no idea what ductwork was supposed to look like.
“Plenty of places for rodents and pests to hide. Basically, like a little superhighway for mice. But it’s okay. I put some glue traps in there, and I’ll add some bait traps in the attic. That’s where you heard them, right? But you’ll have to be sure your cat doesn’t go up there.”
Ginny looked at Noodles, busy licking her paw, and then at him. “She doesn’t go in the attic. Hell, right now she doesn’t even go into the basement. The door’s always closed.”
Danny frowned. “You’ll have to check the glue traps, which, honestly, I don’t love. Bait traps are more effective, for sure. But you do risk the chance then that they might not go all the way outside to…”
“Die?”
He nodded. For an exterminator, Danny seemed awfully delicate.
Ginny sighed. “So what, then? They’d get stuck inside the wall someplace and…rot?”
Danny nodded again. “But, you know, mice. They’re small. It would only stink for a little while. If you had a squirrel or something bigger, a raccoon, say…”
“Jesus,” Ginny muttered. “Do you think we might?”
“I won’t know until I go up and check. This close to the creek, you might get rats.” Danny made a pow-pow gesture with his fingers. “But it’s probably just mice. You heard noises in the walls?”
“And ceiling. Yeah.” For a moment she thought about mentioning the shape she thought she’d seen that first night here. The eyes. “Rats…they can get pretty big?”
Danny smiled. “Sure. Huge, some of them. When I was working in the city, I’m not even kidding you, I once saw a rat that was bigger than a Chihuahua.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.” Danny nodded, eyes wide and serious for a moment before the grin was back. “But around here? Nah. You’ll get field mice and squirrels, sure. Sometimes a raccoon. Sometimes bats. But even if you do get rats, they’re probably not that big.”
Not Great Dane size anyway. That was only in the movies. Ginny frowned. “But you’ll put out enough poison to take care of whatever it might be?”
“Yep. If you’ll show me the attic, I can get up there and take a look around. Do I need a ladder?”
“No. There’s a pulldown.”
Upstairs, she showed him the door in the ceiling and he pulled the cord, dropping the stairs. Ginny had left Sean to inspect the attic, but watching Danny’s feet disappear into her ceiling, she decided to follow him. She stayed on the stairs, and stuck only her head through the hole. There was no floor up there, just a few boards placed across the beams, and the steeply pitched roof made it impossible for anyone but a child—or a super tiny adult—to stand upright except in the center.
“I thought it would be bigger,” Ginny said. “Like the size of the house.”
“You have those gables and dormer things.” Danny shone his flashlight into the corners, but didn’t move more than a step or two from the hole in the floor. The beams creaked under his boots. “Crawl spaces, right?”
“Oh. Yeah. But still…” Ginny gestured, though he wasn’t looking, “…I guess this isn’t what I was expecting.”
He grinned at her over his shoulder. “Could be worse, right? You could’ve come up here and found something really creepy.”
“Yeah, like Gary Busey.”
Danny obviously missed the reference to the 80s horror classic Hider in the House. Busey had played a crazy guy who built a secret room in Mimi Rogers’s attic, then stalked her. Ginny had meant it as a joke, and if her brother, Billy, were here he’d have laughed. He’d watched that movie with her so many times they could both quote the dialogue back and forth. Ginny thought briefly of explaining, but couldn’t muster the effort. Danny shone his light around the room, pausing to spotlight a round vent at one end. Then one on the other side, identical except for the mesh covering.
“There’s part of your problem. That vent should have the same protection on it. That’s how stuff can get in.”
Ginny had a hard time believing mice would climb up the side of the house and in through a vent, but she supposed squirrels could. Or bats. She grimaced. A bat had flown into her college apartment once. All she could remember was some drunken frat boy her roommate was screwing going after it with a tennis racket.
“Can you fix that?”
Danny shook his head and pointed the light at the beams under his feet. “Sorry. I can only spray for bugs and put down bait traps. But I’ll do that up here. I see some droppings, not a huge amount, looks like mice. Kinda old, but, still, definitely some evidence that you have something going on. I’ll put some glue traps in here too, along with the bait, okay?”
“Sure. Yes. Perfect, thanks.” Ginny backed down the rickety stairs carefully.
Danny was there for about another hour, during which time Ginny managed a crushing win in her word game, but also completed all her final files and sent them off to where they needed to go. All done. All gone. She was officially unemployed for the first time since she was fifteen years old.
When he came in one more time, Danny found her at the kitchen table, staring at her laptop’s blank screen. A tiny bouncing icon alerted her to her sister Peg’s instant message, but Ginny was ignoring it for now. She had her hands folded in front of her, not touching the keyboard or even the mouse she used because the laptop’s small trackpad drove her crazy.
“Ma’am?”
Ginny turned. “Finished?”
“I put the traps out. I found a few places out here your husband will want to check out too. Your house has a brick front, but the rest is aluminum siding. The places in the corners of the house where the siding comes together, those are open on the bottom. Sometimes they’re capped, but the caps fall off. Rodents climb up in there, that’s how they get in the walls. Just have him shove some steel wool up there. That should solve it.”
Ginny pushed her chair back with a long screech on the linoleum. “Thanks.”
“You writing a book or something?”
Taken aback, she looked at the laptop. “Huh? Oh. No. I’m not a writer.”
“Oh. So you’re the painter?”
This took her even more aback, literally, as she stepped back. Her calves hit the chair. “What?”
“The easel and stuff, I saw it upstairs when I was putting some traps in your crawl space. You sure your cat won’t get into them, right?” Danny, bless his pretty face, looked worried. “Even if she gets into the crawl space, she shouldn’t be able to get into the bait, but…”
“It’ll be fine.” Ginny wasn’t sure how to feel about him not only helping himself to her crawl space, which, honestly, was what he was there to do, but also noticing her…stuff.
“My girlfriend took a couple art classes this summer. She’s really into watercolors. What do you paint?”
“Nothing,” Ginny said too fast. “Well. Nothing lately.”
“Did you do the ones in the basement?”
This stunned her so much she sat down. “What?”
“There were a bunch of canvases in the basement. Mostly flowers and stuff, big flowers.” Danny demonstrated by holding his hands apart, shoulder width.
“Yes,” Ginny said after a moment. “Yes. Those are mine.”
“They’re pretty good. You ever think about showing them in a gallery or something?”
“No. They were just for fun.”
Danny nodded like this made total sense, then paused t
o look at her more solemnly. “So…it’s not fun for you anymore, or…?”
“I just haven’t had time. That’s all. I’ll get back to it,” Ginny told him, but from his look she thought he didn’t believe her, any more than she did herself.
As soon as she closed the front door behind him, cutting off his cheerful reminder that he’d be back in three months to “squirt for bugs,” Ginny went to the basement door. Noodles was suddenly at her feet, winding around her ankles and meowing plaintively—the cat had put on too much weight when they let her eat at her leisure, and she was reminding Ginny it was overdue time for her to be fed now. Ginny bent to pick her up and scratch her under the chin, then tossed her gently toward the kitchen and opened the basement door to squeeze through it. Noodles managed to run after her anyway, barely missing getting the tip of her tail caught. Bell collar jingling, she rocketed down the stairs in front of Ginny, who at least wanted to wait until she’d turned on the light.
She didn’t have to go far to see the paintings. Someone had stacked them up against the wall closest to the foot of the basement stairs. Carelessly, without so much as a single sheet of bubble wrap or anything between them to protect the canvases from getting scratched. The movers must’ve done it, she thought, since she surely wouldn’t have packed them that way. She hadn’t packed them at all.
For a moment, Ginny saw herself crossing the short distance and flipping through those paintings, which represented not only hours of her time, but an entire rainbow of memories in every single shade of gray. She saw it so clearly—how her hands would shift and move them, separating them into chronological order or by color scheme or theme. She closed her eyes and saw every single painting she’d ever done that had been worth saving.
The problem was, just like she hadn’t packed them, Ginny hadn’t saved them, either.
Chapter Seven
Don’t forget, I have class tonight.
Sean had sent the text that morning, but though once not so long ago Ginny’d carried her phone around with her like it was attached by an umbilical cord, she’d gotten out of the habit now that she wasn’t working and also home full time, where she could be reached on the landline. She’d have remembered about his class when six o’clock arrived and he didn’t come through the door, but it was good he’d reminded her. She could have a dinner of leftovers while she watched TV and tried to ignore the mess in the living room. At least the boxes made it easy for her to find a place to put her plate.