And definitely, no one was going to be comfortable if she couldn’t get the heat running.
Or the lights to come on. She studied the dark light hanging from the ceiling. It refused to light up, no matter how many times she flipped the switched up and down.
Maybe the previous renters had shut off electricity at the fuse box. Digging her cell phone out of her purse and switching on the flashlight app, she went in search of it, flicking light switches as she went in the off chance that the living room bulbs might just have been burned out.
Apparently, all the lightbulbs in the house were burned out, because when she finally found the box in the very back of the house, in the narrow laundry room that did double duty as an enclosed back deck and mud room, she studied the set of the light switches and nothing looked as if it was off.
Pulling up a search engine on her phone, she found a listing for what she hoped was the local power company and called them.
“Nope,” the receptionist who answered the phone said. “We shut off power there when the last folks moved out. It discourages squatters, especially for those folk who don’t winter in town.”
“What do I have to do to get it turned on?” Stace asked, rubbing her head.
“Just come on down to the office and fill out the paperwork, pay your down payment, and we’ll get you on the roster to turn back on.”
There were three miles of muddy dirt roads between the cabin and town. Trying not to be a Debbie-Downer, she typed the address into her notes app, and then started looking for where they’d put the baby stroller. She found it buried under twogarbage bags of clothes, after which, she dug down into one bag after another until she found a sweater.
Her mother-in-law had been the one to pack all the things she’d been willing to give back to Stace. A lot of her things had gone missing, her heavy winter coat and boots being among them.
“Anything bought with his money,” her mother-in-law had said, “is part of his estate, and nothing to do with you. All you get is what you brought into the marriage with you.”
Never mind that she’d been working throughout the course of her and Jim’s marriage. She’d bought a lot of her own things with her own money, and it had hurt to have to leave them behind. But that was the funny thing about the realities of losing a spouse. One was only protected under the law if one could afford a lawyer, and her in-laws had theirs come with them to the funeral parlor when they showed up with a cease and desist.
They had her and her husband’s joint account locked down by that afternoon, freezing her access to it. They changed the locks on the house, robbing her of all access to that two days later, although out of “kindness,” they did offer to let her continue to stay there, her and the child they’d never accepted as their son’s, for thirty days.
Her breath fogged the air when she sighed, wiping at her eyes with both sleeves. She ought to resent them for what they’d done to her once their son was no longer a protective barrier between them. She didn’t. Mostly all she felt was sad. A smarter person would have picked up on how deeply they’d disliked her before her husband of five years went to prison.
A more observant person would have done a better job protecting herself and her child. But she hadn’t known, not until it was too late. Once the lawyer introduced himself and she realized what was going on, she still hadn’t protected herself. She’d just gone along with it. Because she missed him too, and ithad seemed so reasonable for his mother, caught up in the grief of losing a child to the penal system, to want to keep everything she could of his.
It was perfectly reasonable, and Stace had gone along with it because in the beginning she had missed Jim, and what werethingscompared to that? It took her a couple weeks to come out from under her shock at how fast everything changed, beginning with the sentencing and ending with her in-laws taking everything with Jim’s full knowledge and agreement. By then, they had her bank account and had hired a lawyer, leaving her no way in which to fight back.
So, here she was, starting over in Myrtle Creek with as close to nothing as she’d ever been in the whole of her adult life, and a baby innocently depending on her.
She was wasting daylight. Setting up the stroller, she checked to make sure Lily was warm beneath her bundled clothes, and then she did the best she could for herself, pulling on another t-shirt, the sweater and then finding a hoodie sweatshirt since her coat was covered in mud. She lay it over the outside railing to dry, changed her socks and found her grubby sneakers, which had a hole in the side, but which at least were dry. As ready as she could be for the long walk into town, she gathered up Lily and the stroller and took them outside.
In the short time since Brock had left, another car had pulled up into his driveway. Someone else come to interview for the job she had hung too many hopes on winning for herself. She looked away, swallowing the instinctive bitterness that came with knowing she wasn’t going to get it, and got the stroller set up. The ground beneath the grass was too wet and soft, the narrow wheels on the stroller sinking into it even under Lily’s light weight. She took the long way around the big rig, traversing the ginormous mud puddle of her driveway back to the road.The shortcut would have been nice, but not if it resulted in her getting bogged down in more mud.
Her dry shoes were soaking up the wetness from all the puddles she tried to pick and choose her way around as she walked. Behind her, she thought she heard someone call her name, but the only someone who could have was her new neighbor. The big, handsome, lumberjack of the man who knew exactly what kind of shape both she and the cabin were in. The man who had been so sure of his assessment on her qualifications that he hadn’t even mentioned the interview, which had never transpired.
She didn’t turn around. She didn’t so much as glance back over her shoulder to make sure it really was him calling after her. She just quickened her step, feeling the wetness soaking into the holes in her shoes and the cold infiltrating through her inadequate layers of clothing. She was going to have to hurry if she wanted to get to town with time enough to turn on her utilities, maybe shop for a winter coat if the second-hand shop wasn’t closed like the souvenir shops, and perhaps buy something warm to eat. The trucker hadn’t stopped for anything but gas, and the only thing she’d had to eat today was a bag of salted almonds, a cup of strawberry yogurt, and a single serving of milk.
She pushed that thought out of her head before her empty stomach could remember just how hungry she ought to be, and quickened her step. Everything would get better now that she was here. She just had to get to town, get her power turned back on, and then everything would be just fine.
***
Brock was having a hell of a time concentrating on his interview with Miss... he checked her resume again... Kathy Brown. Atforty-two years of age, she had the experience he was hoping for. She’d worked in two care homes for the disabled before spending the last ten years in private home placements. The longest she’d worked in any one place was two years, but she was never out of work for long and she had good references, and when it came to caring for elderly patients, it was just a sad fact that they didn’t live forever.
“What kind of pies do you like to bake?” Pops asked from his end of the table, where he now sat working on a crossword puzzle.
“I’m not fond of sweets,” she told him kindly, then turned her attention back to Brock and the questions he ought to be asking if only he could get his mind focused on something other than the little—woman, not girl, he told himself sternly—but the mental image was already planted. She was such a tiny thing. Tiny and petite and had seemed so sad and lost, that it was all he could do to respect her wishes for him to leave when everything else inside of him ached to... to what? Kiss it and make it all better?
Brock shut his brain down before it could come back with something only a jackass would think toward a woman who’d just been assaulted in his yard.
It wasn’t his place to make anything better. He wasn’t her Daddy. She wasn’t his Little girl. In fact, the odds of having a true Little move in next door to him would have to be astronomical. Although every moment that he’d been with her, everything she had done had screamed Little at him. From the way she’d wiped her face with the backs of her hands, to the way she’d stubbornly insisted she could do it herself. She hadn’t stomped her foot, but he’d seen the desire as she’d stood up for herself in that cold, empty cabin of hers.
She didn’t even have a bed.
Hell, she didn’t even have a coat.
