Page 57 of Drawing Home
“Exactly,” Emma said.
“Can I pack some things to bring over?”
Emma considered this. “Okay. But just enough for a few days. We’ll go on weekends or some nights to swim and be on the water. But ourhomehome is still the house we live in.”
She repeated this at the table in front of Angus, and he nodded his approval.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?” Penny asked him when she came down for breakfast.
“Young lady, I am going to work.”
During the fifteen-minute ride to the house, Penny chatted to Emma more than she had the entire past month. No matter the strangeness of the situation, no matter Angus’s misgivings or her own, Emma was relieved to see Penny so happy and animated.
Emma hadn’t been to the house since she’d taken the impulsive water-taxi ride late at night, but when she walked into the kitchen, she realized something was different.
The sink had two used coffee mugs in it.
“Penny, wait a second,” Emma said. “I need to look around. Someone has been here.”
And she was sure she knew who that someone was.
Emma walked to the airy breakfast room just off the kitchen, the space with sliding glass doors to a patio and where the floating stairs led to the north wing of the house, the wing with the master suite. She climbed the stairs.
“Hello?” she called out. Nothing.
She passed the library and office and found the door to the master bedroom open. The room was pristine, but on the bedside table, a pair of reading glasses. A cashmere wrap was folded on top of the dresser.
Emma slid open the closet door and found a collection of Chanel, St. John, and Lilly Pulitzer that could only belong to one person.
“The nerve of that woman!”
Emma ran back down the stairs and found Penny outside on the deck.
“All right. We need to move into our bedrooms,” she said.
Emma knew from her late-night exploration of the place that there were three guest rooms located on the side of the house opposite the wing with the master suite. The two parts of the house were connected by the central living space: kitchen, dining room, and living room. The guest rooms on the first floor each had its own full bath.
Furious, she swung open the first bedroom door and found large men’s sneakers by the foot of the neatly made bed. An empty beer bottle rested on the nightstand.
Emma closed the door.
“What’s going on?” Penny said.
“Those people are living here. The old woman.”
“Why?”
Emma sighed. “Because she’s a stubborn pain in the butt, that’s why. Come on. Let’s just put some things in the other two bedrooms. I’ll deal with her later. This shouldn’t spoil our day.”
She let Penny choose her room of the two that were left. One had a four-poster bed of dark wood made up with stark white linens and half a dozen white pillows. The bedside table was glass and chrome, and each wall featured one of Henry Wyatt’s paintings.
The final room had a softer feel to it, with a blue ceramic lamp, block prints on the bedspread, and, at the foot of the bed, a tufted blue bench with Lucite legs. On one wall, a gilded mirror, and next to it, a metal sculpture.
“I like the other room best. That bed is huge!” Penny said.
“Go for it,” Emma said, sitting on the blue bench and dropping her bag. “And when you’re done unpacking, meet me out by the pool.”
Emma changed into her bathing suit, a white two-piece she’d bought on sale at the end of last summer. She was relieved to see that she was still in decent shape, considering her only exercise was biking to and from work and running up and down the stairs of the hotel. Apparently, that was enough for now. Still, every morning she saw women walking along Main Street in their yoga pants, carrying their rolled-up mats. She sometimes wondered what she was missing. But then, that was how she felt about most things in life.
