Ruth Wind - Beautiful Stranger

“You don’t know,” she said miserably. “You don’t know what those girls say about me. I hate them.”

Marissa knelt, trying to be as ladylike as possible in a straight skirt. That was one thing her old tent dresses had afforded that she’d never truly appreciated—freedom of movement. “You want to walk back to school with me? We can talk in my room. I don’t have a class for an hour.”

She shook her head. “I want to go home. Can you call my uncle?”

“Sure.” She reached into her purse and took out a tiny cell phone. “What’s the number?”

Crystal looked up. “It’s a beeper.” She gave the number and Marissa punched it in, then held the phone loosely as she examined the girl. “Someone hurt you today?”

She blinked. Nodded, her mouth tight. “I know how it looks, you know, but I’m not a slut. I never was.” She raised her head. “I swear it on a stack of Bibles.”

“I believe you.” She hesitated. “Is it different people or someone in particular? If there’s someone in particular, I can make sure it stops.”

“Get real.” She rolled her eyes. “Like I would rat someone out like that.”

The phone trilled lightly in her hand. “Hello?”

“This is Robert Martinez,” he said. That voice—it rolled over her in a wave of color, a rich sienna, like the skin on his arms. “You beeped me?”

“Yes. This is Marissa Pierce, Crystal’s math teacher. She’d like to come home. Is that all right?”

“Is there something wrong? Is the baby okay?”

“They’re both fine. She’s just had kind of a bad day.”

“A bad day? What does that mean?”

Crystal said, “Ask him if I can walk over to where he’s working and I’ll tell him what’s going on.”

Marissa repeated the information.

“That’s fine. Look, I know she’s right there, but is there something going on I need to know?”

“Yes,” Marissa said.

“Can you bring her over? Or meet me somewhere?”

“Sure, I’ll bring her.” Crystal rolled her eyes. Marissa grinned. “Where are you?”

He gave her directions. It was only three blocks west, in the heart of the historical district. “We’ll be there in five minutes.”

Marissa stood, brushing her skirt down. “Come on, kiddo.”

Crystal stood, wiping hard at her face with her sleeve. “Why are you always so nice? Don’t you know people take advantage of you?”

“I’ll take my chances.”

When Robert’s beeper had gone off, he’d been high on a ladder in the foyer of a Victorian ruin. His crew was working on the restoration of a mansion that had been built with mining money just before the turn of the century. Neglected for more than twenty-five years, rumored to be haunted, Rosewood would provide the centerpiece for a historical renewal project that the town of Red Creek hoped would attract summer tourists to replace the income lost when skiers looked elsewhere for entertainment.

Robert had been tearing out the plaster and lathe of a particularly rotten stretch of ceiling, his hair and face covered with dust and old spiderwebs, when the pager had beeped loudly.

He’d checked the number with a sinking feeling. He only wore the beeper so that Crystal could get in touch with him anywhere, anytime, and it could only be her paging him. He’d scrambled down, brushing off his face and arms as he went, then had called out to Tyler Forrest, in charge of the meticulous restoration of the wood, and Robert’s direct superior. “Need to borrow your cell phone, man.”

The number was one he didn’t recognize, and when he’d called it and got Marissa Pierce, he’d felt a frisson of…anticipation over the sound of her voice. And then sadness that Crystal was still having so much trouble.

He handed the cell phone back. “I gotta take a break. Crystal is going to come here, and I’ll need to take her home and get her settled. Shouldn’t take long.”

“Is everything okay with the baby?”

“Baby’s fine.”

Tyler nodded. “Take as long as you need. Kids come first.”

“Thanks.”

“Wait a second, man.” Tyler reached into a leather satchel. “My wife found these. Why don’t you take a look while you’re waiting?”

He took the folder. “What is it?”

Tyler gestured to the boarded area above the landing of the stairs. “Photographs of the original window. Black and white, but at least it’s a start.”

Robert shook his head with a wry smile. “You’re a damned pit bull, you know it?”

“So they say.” Tyler grinned. “Just take a look.”

He carried the folder out to the shabby porch, patting his shirt pocket for cigarettes in an automatic gesture. It was empty, as it had been for three years. The habit of reaching for them would probably be with him when he was ninety. He took out a wooden match instead, stuck it between his teeth and flipped open the folder.

The window was enormous, and it was not simply painted glass, as had been fashionable at the turn of the century, but the real thing—stained glass in lead. It was also enormous, stretching from the base of the landing to nearly a story and a half above. Robert whistled. It was good work—no, better than that.

It was also well beyond anything he had attempted. He’d done small restorations for private homes, usually a small round in a door, a pair of matching windows alongside a fireplace, things like that. He’d done one large window for an Indian church, but not even it came close to this in size. Tyler would have to find someone else.

With a shake of his head, he closed the folder and paced to the end of the porch and back again, peering every so often down the sidewalk in the direction from which they’d come.

Chill, man, said a voice in his head, and he exhaled heavily, got rid of the match and forced himself to sit on the wooden railing that surrounded the porch. A breeze, smelling of pine resin and sunlight on a carpet of old leaves, swept down from the mountains, as light and clean as anything he could imagine. It was one of the things he liked best about this place, that weightless, scented breeze. It rattled the aspen leaves together overhead, startling a squirrel who skittered down the trunk and nearly across Robert’s feet before it realized its mistake and scuttled off in the other direction.

The tension in his chest eased. Whatever the problem was, he and Crystal could figure it out. As long as they had each other, a roof over their heads, food to eat, there would be an answer.

But when she appeared on the sidewalk, he wondered. Her head was bent in misery, her arms folded across her chest. She was too skinny. So miserable. She would not say a word about the boy who’d made her pregnant, wouldn’t say anything about her life back in Albuquerque at all, come to that.

Next to her, Marissa provided such a contrast of healthy womanhood that Robert nearly resented her. Sunlight caught in the fall of her elegantly cut dark hair, hair that swung in a thread by thread flow that came only from a very expensive set of scissors. Today she wore a royal blue blouse, silk by the low luster, together with a simple straight skirt. Lush breasts and round hips, a complexion clear as a bowl of milk, teeth as straight and white as a picket fence.

He didn’t move immediately, caught by a swift, sharp surge of lust, rare and surprising. He narrowed his eyes, wondering what kindled it, noticed the fine heavy sway of flesh beneath her blouse, the unconscious swish of hips—she had a very female kind of walk, one you didn’t see much anymore. Like one of those old-time movie stars, Marilyn Monroe or Rita Hayworth. Yeah, she had a very Rita Hayworth look, a siren in silk.

It was only then that he realized how he must look himself, covered in hundred-year-old plaster dust. The recognition, couched as it was in the obvious wish to look better for her, annoyed him, and although he brushed a little at his shirt and face as he walked down to meet them, he dared her to look down on him for being a working man.