Page 3 of Mountain Grump
I take another step and lift my gaze.
Jack’s front door is open.
The garage door is open.
His truck is parked half in, half out of the garage.
But it’s not Jack I see in front of the house.
Standing with their back to me is a stranger. And they’re hanging…
I narrow my eyes.
Is that a string of fucking crystals?
No, it’s definitelynot Jackhanging crystals from a tree branch.
It’s a woman.
A woman with long lilac hair curling past her bare shoulders.
A woman in a pink dress so short that when she reaches up as high as she can to hang another string of crystals, I can see her underwear.
Bright white, full-coverage cotton panties.
They shouldn’t be sexy.
They’renotsexy.
But the plump ass they’re plastered to…
The soft, curvy body that’s wearing them…
The expanse of smooth bare legs below them…
I swallow.
Then I feel like a total creeper.
Dragging my eyes away from the stranger’s ass, I sweep my gaze over the property.
It doesn’t look like the front door was broken in.
There are no signs of anyone else. No vehicles except Jack’s old pickup.
But there is…stuff. Like the cardboard moving boxes visible through the open door.
What the fuck is going on?
If Jack sold the place, I’d know about it.
If he sold this place,everyonewould know about it. Lonely isn’t a large town. And even though we aren’t all buddies around here, news travels fast. And a house going up for sale is considered news.
Looking at the front of the house, left to right, you see the window over the kitchen sink. The front door with two low concrete steps leading up to it. A trio of windows that look into the living room, with a pair of bushes under the first and third windows—the middle one died a few years back. Next is the single bedroom with the single bathroom, but the view of that is blocked by the garage, which is attached to the front of the house. Making the structure an L shape.
The driveway comes up from behind the garage and continues all the way to the front door. There aren’t really lawns at elevation this high. The growing season is short, and grass grows in clumps. But scattered around on either side of the driveway are a handful of trees.
And each and every one of them has strings of crystals hanging from their branches.
