Restoring the Castle Ch. 06

"And how is he—your father?"

"He's dead now. He died yesterday. That's why I was going to come over the mountain today."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"As I said, he was a cantankerous soul. And now he's free. So are the rest of us. End of story, I think. Other than I'll have to come back for the cremation in a couple of days. I'll need time for that—if, of course, you still need and want me back on the job."

Hugh was looking down at the table top, unable to look Ally in the eye. Her heart went out to him, and not just because of the painful story he had just related to her. The effect of his boyish good looks and being exposed to his vulnerable side was stirring something inside Ally, something she hadn't felt since Chad's reaction of awe when she'd first given herself to him. She leaned over and put a hand gently on his arm. He turned his face up at her then, with a look of surprise and utter gratitude. Their eyes locked for only a second, but Ally felt the electricity in the brief moment, and she thought that Hugh did as well.

They were sitting in the middle of a restaurant during the lunch hour. This was neither the time nor place. She didn't know if she really wanted there to be a time a place at all. But this was not it. She looked away.

"I think it might be more complicated than that," she said. "Your coming back on the job at the castle."

"How so? You don't want me around for other reasons? Had it become too obvious that I liked talking with you, being with you?"

"Oh, no, nothing like that." She was really blushing now, completely caught off guard. "I hadn't been thinking that at all. I don't know how anyone would get that idea. I'm several years older than you for starters."

"Not all that much older," Hugh muttered. "What, four or five years? That doesn't mean anything."

It was only then that Ally realized her hand was still lightly placed on his arm. She pulled it away with a guilty twinge and turned her head from him. When she looked back at him, he looked a little confused—like he knew something had just happened, but he wasn't sure what. And more than that, he wasn't sure what had broken the spell.

"It might be difficult for you to come back to work," she said, "because Sheriff Shiflet is looking at you as a murder suspect—for that body found in my wall."

"A suspect in that murder? I didn't know that. I just thought he wanted a statement from me on what I knew about whatever."

Ally gave him a hard look. "I swear I didn't know that, Ally. I didn't think that that had anything to do with me. All I thought was that I had to be off the job and taking care of my dad for a spell . . . honest." The last was said, haltingly, because Ally hadn't changed her expression.

"The sheriff thinks you were working at the castle about the time they estimate the body was put in the wall."

"How did he get that idea? I've never worked at the castle before."

"Jake Monroe told him he thought you had."

"Well, Jake Monroe is . . . wrong about that."

The way Hugh had hesitated made Ally think that he really wanted to say that Jake was intentionally lying about that. For what reason? To clear the way to her for Jake? Did Jake see Hugh as a threat in that way? Perhaps she'd been so numb to the world that she hadn't seen this dynamic develop on her construction crew.

"I guess Sheriff Shiflet needs to hear that directly from you, then," she said to Hugh, not wanting to think about anything more complicated in her life than that. "And you need to convince him, or he isn't going to stop hassling you."

"OK, I swear I'll go directly from here over to Washington and talk to him. If I clear that up, do I still have a job at the castle?"

"I haven't been able to find a replacement yet. So, you talk to the sheriff and we'll see what he does before I make a commitment on that."

"Do they know who the body is—was—whatever?"

"Not yet, but I trust we'll have an ID sometime soon. The sheriff thought it would be a couple of weeks, and it's almost that now. If they know anything, they aren't releasing it. And, there are more questions. Like why the mysterious appearance looking for an electrician's job with a professor's background?"

"You talked to me about why you were back in Virginia and why you were restoring the castle. And I didn't tell you anything about the place I was at, did I?"

"No you didn't. I felt that was a bit one-sided even then. There aren't too many people I can talk to about my Chad—even if my mother wasn't fading away mentally she would not have wanted to hear about Chad—or any other man. But you were a good listener and I opened up to you."

"And all that time you were opening up to me, I wanted to be opening up to you too. But I just couldn't. It was too soon and too painful."

They sat in silence for a few moments.

"You aren't going to press me on it, are you?" he asked.

"If you want me to know, you'll tell me. If you aren't comfortable telling me, it will be no different than before. It was good for me to talk about it. But it was pretty one-sided, you know."

"I know. I know it would have been better if I'd talked too. Thanks for not pressing, but it's really pretty simple."

Silence again, as she waited him out.

"I wasn't alone at Georgia Tech. I was married. Her name was Ann. She was working on a doctorate too—in poetry. Imagine that, a poet trying to be married to an electrical engineer. You can just imagine the deep conversations we could have in sharing our work." He gave a dry laugh. His face was contorted in an inner pain.

"And she left you?" Ally asked quietly. She couldn't help it. This long pauses were getting to be too painful for her.

"In a way, yes. We were going to have a baby." Another pause. "I lost them both."

"Ah."

"So I was escaping. I came home to Luray, although I didn't really want to be in Luray, even though folks here were bending over themselves to be supportive. They knew about my wife and baby—it's probably a good bit why they haven't been telling Sheriff Shiflet where he could find me. Still, I didn't want to be around my dad any more than anyone else did—and especially not under the circumstances in which I'd come home. I heard about someone working up at the castle. So, I took Dad's old Airstream and I came up there. And you know the rest."

"Yes, now I know the rest."

"And I was just about to tell you all that when my dad decided to die—and to take his time doing it—and you decided to take that wall down yourself. I never could fault my dad on his timing being malicious."

They sat there in silence, each staring at the congealed cobbler and the cold coffee that neither had touched.

"We can't eat those now," he said.

"No," she said.

"Shall I have them rustle up another round?"

"No, I think not. I don't have the appetite for cobbler any more today. And my guess is that you don't either."

"No, I guess not. But I promised you a dessert."

"You can get me one someday when we've worked hard up at the castle and need a nice break."

"Thanks," he said. His voice sounded a bit choked up, knowing by what she'd said that he was welcome back on the job. If he'd been looking at Ally closely, he probably could have told that he was welcome to much more than that.

* * * *

Hugh Coles arrived at the castle that afternoon about two hours after Ally had done so. She had meant to pick her mother up at Lois' and take her up to the castle for a half hour or so for the first time that day. But the meeting with Hugh had pushed her off her stride and she decided she'd do that another day. When Ally got to Banffy, she found Jake and his crew busy there. They were working on putting the flooring back in between the first story and the second in the central section, which was a major job. After this was done, one crew could work on refinishing the first floor, and another crew could be brought in to work on the walls and a roof over the second story. The intricate woodwork and plastering would have to wait until that section of the castle was back under roof. The work was going very fast; the interest in the project had attracted workers, and Ally had the money to pay them.

They were really making progress now Ally could see as she drove up to the building. And they really needed an electrician working full time as well. There was electricity to the building, but not nearly enough plug-ins for the number of tasks that now needed to be going on at once.

She went to her rooms and changed and came out, hard hat and all, and walked around, doing her contractor "thing," and making sure all of the men and women were doing what they were supposed to be doing. Since the escapade where she took the sledgehammer to the partition wall in the ballroom, Jake had backed off on trying to change her mind about anything that she said she wanted done. He no longer was questioning if that was the way she wanted it. Now it was a discussion on how they were going to get done what she wanted done. All of the construction workers were giving her added respect as well.

The rumble of the Airstream being pulled back up the road through the grape vine stands was enough to bring all of the workers to a door or window to check it out. Jake came too, and Ally didn't miss the big frown that swept across his face when he realized that Hugh was coming back. Ally hadn't bothered to tell Jake this ahead of time.

Perhaps she should have, she now thought. Jake looked like he didn't like this development at all.

As Hugh parked the Airstream right where it had been before, Ally went out to meet him.

"You weren't as long as I expected," she said.

"There wasn't much the sheriff could do. I gave him telephone numbers he could call in Luray to verify where I'd gone—and why. Some of the leading citizens there are ready to back me up, so he didn't give me a lot of grief about that. And as far as me ever having worked at the castle before, he didn't have any proof I had—at least yet, he said. So, as long as he knew I was going to be up here, he said, I could be here instead of in his jail. He admitted he didn't have enough to hold me on any charge and said things might be different when the body was identified. He said something about having learned that some of the guys I ran with up here during my college summers weren't accounted for. That doesn't surprise me a bit, though. A lot of them were drifters."

"I'm glad he let you come on up here," Ally said. "There's plenty of work needing to be done."

Hugh looked a bit amused. "That's what I told the sheriff, and he became almost cooperative after that. I got the impression that he's just a bit scared of you. What do you have on him?"

Ally fought hard not to show Hugh that he'd hit a mark he was only joking about—that she'd caught the sheriff running a still in the woods in back of the house and hadn't turned him in.

"I think he's beginning to see the tourist industry possibilities of a completed castle," she said. It was a bit weak for a rejoinder, but Hugh obviously wasn't serious and didn't expect a logical response.

They were both turned so that they could see the façade of the castle, and Jake was still standing there in the entry door, glaring out in their direction.

"Guess I should go check in with Jake," Hugh said. "I think I've got a bone to pick with him."

As he turned to go, Ally reached out and put a hand on his arm. He looked down at her hand and then back up into her eyes. His face had the same expression on it that he'd had when she'd touched him in the Luray café.

"Ally," he said in a strangled voice.

"Not now, Hugh. People are watching. Jake is watching."

"But surely sometime."

"Yes . . . I think . . . sometime. Now go on and talk to Jake. But try not to get too belligerent about it," Ally said. "That's why I stopped you. I don't want any fighting now. I need both of you working together on this project."

"Yes, ma'am, boss lady," Hugh said, not being able to keep a grin from stealing across his face.

Ally watched him stride across the lawn and driving circle to where he stood facing Jake from below the entry. They both were standing rigid, with clinched fists, obviously talking to each other in tense tones. It didn't last very long, though. Both turned their faces toward Ally, and she knew that one or both of them were saying exactly what she'd told Hugh—that she expected them to work together without a lot of display of animosity. There was only one construction foreman here. It was Ally. If she wanted Hugh working here, that was her call. But if she wanted Hugh to keep out of Jake's way as much as possible, that was her call as well.

After she could see that World War III wasn't happening, she walked around the side of the building, checking the walls for cracks. When she got to the back of the building, her eye picked up movement from the direction of the overgrown fire trail that she'd seen Jake's red truck go up the day of her first return to Banffy. The movement materialized as a hiker, coming down the trail. He stopped as soon as he realized that there was a castle rising again from the plateau and gawked for a moment. Seeing Ally, he walked to her, picking his way through the overgrown ornamental garden. Ally stood there and waited for him to approach. She hadn't seen a hiker coming down here from the Appalachian trail since she'd returned to Virginia. But she'd seen them occasionally when she was in her teens and living here. She assumed that this was where the mountain man, Hank Morris, who had harassed her mother had come from that summer before Ally went to college.

She steeled herself. The young man looked harmless enough, but the memory of her mother's trouble with a man coming from that direction put her on edge. He was dark skinned and was wearing first-class hiking gear, with a backpack, and looked pretty clean cut to Ally. He didn't look like a country boy.

"Hello," he hailed her when he was some thirty feet away.

"Hello, yourself," she called back. "Are you lost? The trail's at the top, behind you."

"No, I'm not lost. My name's Tom Black," he said as he drew closer. "I won't play games here. I'm a features reporter with the Washington Post. I've been talking with one of your contractors, Jake Monroe. He said there were several good stories here. I saw one of them as soon as I came off that trail. This looks like a real castle. Is it?"

"It was once. And it will be again, Mr. . . . Black, did you say? And Jake told you there was a good story here? Why are you coming from the mountain? No one much uses the trails in the park in this area." She was so confused by that, she wasn't thinking of the more obvious question of what she felt about the press being here.

"Mr. Monroe said he didn't know if the police would still be here when I could arrange to come—he said I might be stopped at the bottom of the hill."

"But still you thought you'd be welcome up here?"

"Jake seemed pretty sure you wouldn't bite me."

They shared a little chuckle over that. He continued. "There are great stories here. I wouldn't be a nuisance, I promise. There's the mystery of the body you recovered from the wall. And you and your ordeal in the Middle East make a story in themselves—"

That quite evidently wasn't the right thing to say, and he looked like he'd swallow that last sentence if he could. But of course he couldn't.

"I have no interest in a story being published on my experiences in the Middle East. And I imagine the State Department wouldn't want that either. So, if that's—" Ally turned to leave him standing there alone.

"No, please, wait. We don't need to go into that if there's a problem. But the crime story, that's really free game one way or the other. I don't want to upset you, though. Because I see an even better story now."

"A better story?"

"The castle itself. The restoring of the castle. And that you are doing the contracting yourself. This is going to be a beautiful building, I know. You must want to share it with others. I see a series of articles following the restoration as you go along."

"I don't know . . ."

"Jake says you hope to sell the place after you restore it. The publicity would be great for doing that quickly at a really good price. There aren't many who will be able to afford something this spectacular and will want this location. You will reach them with a Post series."

"Well . . ." He was making good sense. But she was going to have something to say to Jake about this.

Sensing victory, Tom Black was already fishing around in his backpack and pulling a notebook computer out.

* * * *

Ally was sitting in a dressing gown at her mother's dressing table, in a pool of light from a bare bulb hanging from a cord overhead. She was brushing her hair and examining for perhaps the thousandth time the left side of her face, trying to decide whether anyone could tell that it had been partially reconstructed. And how did it compare to how she'd looked before? She wasn't sure she even remembered how her face had looked before. And how would it look ten years from now? Would there be anyone who cared ten years from now? How old would Hugh be when she was forty-five?

"It's perfection."

She didn't flinch. She had sensed that she wasn't alone in the shadows of the castle. When she'd first been aware of it, she had wondered what she wanted to do, how she would react to the presence. But she had already decided. She looked toward the doorway to the suite of rooms she had made out of her mother's last stand in the castle. He was standing in the doorway, arms crossed, just in sleeping shorts, leaning against the door frame.

"I thought I heard something in the night in the central section. I came to check it out."

"Yes, thanks," she said. She wondered whether Hugh understood what she was saying yes to.

"I think if anything was there I must have scared it off."

"Yes."

"I meant to tell you something the other day—in the café in Luray, when we were talking about that day I left without telling you personally I was going."

Ally said nothing. She sat there, hairbrush suspended in air, and looking at Hugh in the shadow of the doorway in the reflection of the mirror.

"I was being pulled two ways that day. Hard. My dad was dying and even though we'd never gotten along, I think a son owes it to his dad to be there at the end—even if no one else is."

Another brief pause. Ally didn't move. She didn't even feel like she could take the next breath.

"I saw you there, sitting on the end of the ambulance, the blanket held tightly around your shoulders, and trembling something awful. There was nothing more I wanted to do just then than come and sit beside you and hold you and tell you everything was going to be all right. But I knew that if I came near you—even to say why I had to go—I wouldn't have gone. And, well, you are strong and alive and, with you, I could hope that there would be a future. But with my dad . . ."

He couldn't finish the sentence and Ally gave him no help.

Hugh cleared his throat and then spoke again in a low voice. "Well, I just needed to say that, and if there's nothing, I think I will . . ."

"Yes," she said, standing and turning and reaching for the tied ribbon holding her dressing gown closed.

She was reclining back on her mother's chaise lounge, on her elbows, her head flung back and moaning, as Hugh knelt between her thighs, his arms wrapped around her waist and his faced pressed into her cleft, his tongue lapping at her clitoris. She had already exploded once, and he was bringing her to a series of smaller, but more intense explosions. Her mind was obsessed with what she had seen when he had stripped. He was a slender man—not as muscular as either Chad or Jake, but he was as thick as Chad and nearly as long, outstripping Jake in both departments.