Page 124 of Rules to Love By

The plywood, already weather-worn where recent rain had pooled along the windowsills, had been tagged more than once. Some of the brightly coloured spray paint trailed over the stone foundation and painted wooden window frames.

“Just paint,” Tris said, twining his fingers through Marcus’s. “We can clean it up.”

A lump formed in Marcus’s throat. He nodded, but no way could he get words past the gluey mess. He blew the flop of hair out of his eyes and gazed upwards.

The ground floor might be in bad shape, he consoled himself, but the upper stories retained all their former glory. The façade of intricate brickwork and stone lintels showed off carved reliefs of grapes and horns of plenty over the windows.

Perhaps it had been built with the intention of feeding people. It made Marcus wonder, suddenly, if it had always been a restaurant. He remembered Tris reciting the history of Lucky’s youth shelter. The house had always been a refuge of some sort, just as Kreed’s B and B had started her life as a boarding house. Each building seemed happiest serving the purpose it had been built for.

Marcus ran his hand over the door frame, lumpy with layer upon layer of paint. The current colour, an orangey brick red to complement the bricks surrounding it, made him smile. He’d been happy here as a kid. Even as a teenager. Hell, he’d been happy right up until Iris hired Johnathan, then got too sick to keep an eye on the asshole.

“Come on.” Ozzy patted his shoulder as he slipped past them to the door. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

“He doesn’t waste any time,” Eli muttered.

“He does not.” Tris relinquished Marcus’s hand to Eli. “But he’s usually right. Let’s get this over with.”

Eli’s hand, big and warm after the chill of Tris’s slender fingers, banished a bit of the arctic anxiety seeping under Marcus’s skin.

“Ready?” Eli asked.

Again, Marcus could only nod, and they followed the others through the door.

He needed to catch his breath, to take a moment before he took stock of the place, so he stopped just inside, putting his back to the rest of the room to talk to the locksmith. He ignored the sounds of human dismay and the scrape and grind of furniture being moved around.

“I appreciate you making time on such short notice,” he said.

The balding little man, skinny and slightly bent, grinned at him. “No worries.” He patted the door frame. “Used to have my breakfast here every morning.”

Marcus studied him. Something about the man’s hooked nose and bushy eyebrows twigged a memory. “Ham and cheese omelette and brown toast,” he remembered, the man’s wrinkled, angular face swimming up out of the fog of the past few weeks.

The man grinned. “Exactly right. Farmyard scramble, I think you called it?” He ran a hand over the new lock he’d just finished installing. “She made this pretty easy, if I do say so.”

Marcus narrowed his eyes. “She?” He glanced into the darkened building, made gloomy by the plywood covering most of the windows. He almost expected to see Iris behind the counter and shook himself, letting the fog settle back into the nooks and crannies of his mind.

The locksmith held out a set of keys. “You’ll need these. I’ll go have a look at the back entrance, then the apartment entrance.”

“How much is all this going to cost me?” He peered through the floating dust motes. “Maybe the apartment—”

But the gnarled man patted his shoulder, almost as gently as he had the building. “Already paid for, son.”

“By who?”

Pointing at Ozzy’s broad back, the man picked up his belt full of tools. “Your contractor.”

“He’s not my—”

“Good man, that,” the smith went on, completely ignoring Marcus’s protest as they made their way past the waist-high wall by the door. “Heard he’s working on a few old places. Not many would take on these old buildings. I respect that. Hope he does right by them.”

Marcus sighed. “Yeah. He does good work.”

The man nodded. “I best be getting on with it, then.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“Happy to help. This is a grand old building. Interested to see what you do with her.”

“Hey, Marc?” Tris’s pale face appeared out of the gloom, looking almost like a ghost memory of so many times in the past. “Lights don’t work. Is there a main switch somewhere?”

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