Page 38 of The Seven Rings
Once they had the desk and chair in place, they brought up the monitor and keyboard.
“The printer’s small, but I still don’t want it sitting out. We’ll find something for it.”
“Good luck with that. Jones and I have to take off. We’ll be back later. Three hours, maybe four.”
Sonya checked the time. “I guess I’d better put that pork on. It cooks for hours.”
“Want help?” Cleo asked her.
“I think I’ve got this part, but I’ll send up an SOS if I run into a wall. I’ll come back up.”
She walked down with Owen, the dogs, the cat, while Trey and Cleo went back to attic duty. Then she split off to go back to the kitchen.
Odd how quiet and still the house felt, she thought, and pulled up the recipe on the kitchen tablet.
“Okay, Clover, I could use some confidence music as I transform this hunk of meat.”
Sia’s “Unstoppable” fit the bill.
It took longer than she’d anticipated—but what cooking deal didn’t, in her estimation. Eventually she had chunks of spice-rubbed pork browned up, then swimming in beer.
She hauled the Dutch oven to the wall oven, slid it inside.
“That’s supposed to do it for about three hours. Fingers crossed.”
She set a timer on her phone, then looked around the kitchen.
“Molly, I hope you don’t mind cleaning up. I’d like to get upstairs.”
Clover answered with Stevie Wonder. “Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing.”
“Thanks!”
When she reached the second floor, she heard Trey and Cleo in the guest office, so walked down to it.
She saw a drum cabinet against the left wall, the love seat moved to the right, along with a two-tiered piecrust table topped by a pretty lamp that favored the deep green wallpaper with its pink and white roses.
“Still looking for the right desk lamp,” Cleo told her, “but that works for the printer. And it looks better with the love seat here.”
“No coffee table. It’d crowd the room. Maybe an occasional chair there.”
“Reading my mind.” Hands on hips, Cleo glanced around. “And I’m thinking—we get nice light in here—maybe bring up one of the potted plants from the solarium. There’s that big African violet—the purple one.”
“I like it! And I’d like a mirror in here, a wall mirror.”
“I guess we’re going back up. But before we do.”
Trey reached for the box and took out a stack of paper. “Kids’ drawings.”
“We found the stack of them in a drawer,” Cleo said. “Cute mostly, and mostly what you’d expect. Crazy, colorful scribbles, or drawings of houses with big yellow suns, stick people. But there’s one.”
“SignedJack.” Trey took it off the top of the stack.
“Our Jack, you think? Oh.”
He’d drawn the manor, and well for a child so young. The turrets, the big entrance doors, the shades of the stones. The weeping tree at the corner, not as tall, but leafy green as it was now in summer.
He’d drawn a boy—himself, no doubt—and a large spotted dog in the front yard. Both looked up.
