Софи Райан - A Whisker Оf Trouble

“You met him?”

“He was in here maybe half a dozen times altogether. Twice for lunch and the rest for coffee. He always took a table right in the center of the room and he’d sit there and work on his tablet.” He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms over his white apron. “He knew a lot about wine, obviously, but the guy wasn’t a snob. He got talking to Carmen about Feast in the Field and he made some suggestions for this year. She said they weren’t all that expensive.”

Feast in the Field was a festival of fine wine, food and spirits held in the fall, a fund-raiser for charity. We’d had tourists from as far away as Oregon. Hotels and bed-and-breakfasts were booked up months in advance. The festival got its name from the open field where it was staged, a place where local lore held that a farmer and his two sons had held off a British garrison with nothing but pitchforks and an ornery bull.

According to Charlotte, who had taught history among other subjects before she became a principal, the real story was that the farmer had found two British soldiers, no more than fifteen years old, who had somehow gotten separated from their comrades hiding in his barn, hungry and half-frozen from the early winter, one of them with an ugly wound on his leg.

The farmer’s wife, mother to two boys close to the same age, had insisted on feeding the two young men and bandaging the wound before sending them on their way.

“Did you ever see Mr. Quinn with anyone?” I asked Glenn.

He shook his head. “Aside from Ethan Hall, no. He made small talk with a couple of people while he was having coffee, but nothing more.” He made a face. “It’s hard to believe his old man got conned. Edison Hall wasn’t a stupid man, you know. He only went as far as sixth grade in school, but he got a job with the railroad and worked his way up to supervisor.” He shrugged. “He’d come in sometimes. He liked my coffee. Said it was strong enough to float an iron wedge.”

“That’s why I like it,” I said.

Somehow I’d managed to eat the entire muffin. I brushed the crumbs off my fingers. “What was he like?” I asked.

Glenn gave a snort of laughter. “Edison Hall was a stubborn cuss, no doubt about it, but he was different when his wife was alive. After she died he didn’t go out as much and he got kind of sour about people, about life, it seemed to me.”

He pushed off from the counter. “I saw Edison just a couple of days before he died. He was moving a little slower, but hell, aren’t we all?” He grinned at me and I thought how creaky my own back and shoulder had been when I got up.

“There was nothing wrong with his mind,” Glenn said. “He was sharp as a tack to the end, so if someone managed to con him into buying all those bottles of wine that turned out to be worthless, whoever it was ran a pretty good con. Ronan Quinn said pretty much the same thing.”

A timer buzzed then. “That’s my cupcakes,” Glenn said.

“And I better get going.” I grabbed the bags of rolls. “Thanks,” I said, heading for the back door.

I dropped the rolls off at the school office and then drove over to the shop. There was a light on in the old garage and I found Mac there sanding the arm of an old church pew.

“Good morning,” he said, pushing his dust mask up onto the top of his head.

“Hi,” I said. “How long have you been out here working?”

Mac shrugged. “A while. An hour, maybe” He gestured to the empty coffee mug sitting on top of an old wooden trunk. “That’s my first cup.”

“You want another one?” I asked.

He rubbed the side of his neck. “Please. Sanding these arms is turning out to be trickier than I expected.”

The wooden pew was almost twelve feet long. It had come from an old country church that was being torn down. We were restoring it as a gift for a retiring Episcopal bishop who had begun his ministry in that little church. We didn’t usually take on commissions like this, but the bishop’s friends who were planning to surprise him with the pew had been persistent. They’d kept offering more and more money until it seemed silly to keep saying no.

Mac and I had wanted to leave the bench the way it was and just strengthen and rebrace the bottom, but our clients had insisted the pew be stripped and refinished. They wanted it to look the way it did when it had first been installed in the church more than eighty years ago.

The wood was beautiful under several coats of paint and varnish, but I still wished we’d left the old finish intact. I walked the length of the piece, trying to imagine it being built all those years ago.

“What’s the bishop going to do with this?” I said to Mac.

He got to his feet, brushing the dust off his jeans. Elvis made a face and took a couple of steps backward. “I don’t know,” Mac said. “Maybe he’ll stick it in his living room and use it as a sofa.”

“It doesn’t look that comfortable.”

“I don’t think it’s supposed to be.”

I looked at the long expanse of wooden seat and the unyielding rolled armrests. “It needs Jess,” I said to Mac.

He wrinkled his nose at me. “I don’t know how we’d wrap her.”

I made a face back at him. “I mean we need Jess to make some pillows and maybe some kind of long cushion to sit on.”

“That’s a good idea,” he said.

“I’ll call her later on and see if she can stop by later today or tomorrow.” I yawned. “I’ll go start the coffee and then I’ll come back and give you a hand.”

“Sounds good,” Mac said. “Did Rose come with you?”

“She’s not working until this afternoon. I think she and Mr. P. are working on their case.”

“Did you talk to Nick last night?” Mac asked. He was wearing a long-sleeved, paint-splattered T-shirt and he pushed the sleeves up his arms, showing off the dark skin of his forearms.

I shook my head. “I called, but all I got was his voice mail and I didn’t know what to leave for a message. ‘Sorry you got bested by a bunch of senior citizens’ seemed a little mean.”

Mac laughed. “Has he always been such a . . .” He hesitated.

“Tight-ass?” I finished. I laughed. “Don’t worry. I’ve called him that a couple of times to his face when he was driving me crazy.”

“I was going to say responsible person, but I guess in some ways it’s the same thing.”

I stuffed my hands in the pockets of my red hooded sweater. “Yeah, he has. He was a kid when his dad died. It wasn’t as though Charlotte had any expectation for Nick to be the man of the house. You know Charlotte. She’s very capable.”

Mac nodded.

“But Nick seemed to think he had to take on that role. He cares about people very, very deeply. And sometimes that comes across as though he’s trying to tell us all how to live our lives.” I felt a twinge of guilt. I’d been a bit hard on Nick lately.

“He wasn’t going to college, you know,” I said to Mac.

“I bet that didn’t go over well with Charlotte.”

I could still see Charlotte standing next to the dining room table in my gram’s old house, back and shoulders rigid, hands clenched as Nick explained, at dinner to celebrate my brother Liam’s college acceptance, that he hadn’t been accepted anywhere because he hadn’t mailed any of the applications.

I gave Mac a wry smile. “No, it didn’t. Gram had a little sunroom on the back of the house. She marched the two of them back there, told them to work it out and then stuck the back of a chair underneath the doorknob so they had to stay in there and talk.”

“I take it they worked it out,” Mac said.

“They did. But that doesn’t mean Nick is good at compromise.”

Mac laughed. “Neither is Rose. And she’s been at it a lot longer.”