Neighborly Complications (Stories of Serendipity #1) (20 page)

As she slipped out the front door, as silently as she could, Claire heard Max call out sleepily, “Claire?” A sob escaped her before she shut the door and ran to her own house.

She knew she only had a matter of moments before he would be over there, if he was coming, and Claire wasn’t sure she could face him. Not after her revelation, so she grabbed her car keys and ran to her car, to see Max burst through the azaleas, holding up his jeans at the waist.

“Claire! Where are you going?” He ran towards her, blocking her attempt to open her door, slamming it shut with his hand.

She shook her head, tears spilling down her cheeks. Max wrapped her in his arms and tugged her against his chest, whispering in her hair.

“Please. Tell me what’s wrong?”

“I can’t do this. I thought I could, but I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“Why? Why can’t you do this?” His voice held the promise of unshed tears, which only made Claire cry harder.

“I can’t give you what she did.”

“I don’t want that from you.” He clutched her tighter. “I can’t. You’re not Katherine. You’re a totally different woman, and God help me, I love you.” He pulled her away by her arms and looked her in the eyes. His forehead was wrinkled, and the anguish in his eyes was clear. “I love you. Please don’t leave me.”

“I didn’t know what you expected from me.” She sniffled, unable to stop the flow of tears, or the pounding of her heart, or the gulps of breaths.

“I don’t expect anything from you, except to stay and let me love you.” He pulled her close again. “Claire, please. Just let me love you.” A harsh sound escaped his throat. “I can’t lose you.”

Claire let him hold her, standing in her driveway, until her tears subsided. His words reverberated inside her head, on a loop that repeated.
I love you. Don’t leave me. I can’t lose you.

Then, something absurd struck her. “Max?”

His voice against her hair sent a tickle down her spine. “Hmmm?”

“How many women have you been with, since…?”

“None.” He wasn’t letting go of her, if anything, his grip tightened.

“Then why do you have a giant box of condoms by your bed?”

He chuckled, then he got genuinely tickled, because the chuckle turned to full on laughter, until both their bodies shook with it. Claire pulled back to look at him, one eyebrow raised.

“Les thought I needed to get back in the saddle. That was his idea of me getting over Katherine. Misguided, but well-meaning.” He brushed a piece of hair out of Claire’s eyes. “I’m glad he gave them to me. I would have gone apeshit if we didn’t have them.”

The relief that filled Claire was immediate, and she hugged Max. “Let’s go inside. I’m not going anywhere just yet.”

“Your place or mine?”

“Mine. I need to draw up a game plan if I’m going to stay, but will you go get some food for us to eat? I’m starved.”

Max grinned, then swooped down and brushed his lips against Claire’s in a tender kiss. She grabbed his face in her hands and extended it, pushing her tongue in his mouth until he lifted her in his arms and started to carry her into her house.

“I’ll get the food later,” he growled against her lips. She wrapped her legs around him and let him carry her to the door. He leaned her against the porch wall and held her there while he fumbled with the door, never breaking the kiss. It got a little awkward, and Claire giggled against his mouth.

“Hey, can you guys take a little break? We need to tell Claire something.” Brent and Summer stood on Claire’s porch watching with matching smirks on their faces.

Claire and Max turned their faces to the duo, cheeks together, and Claire allowed her legs to slip down from around his waist.

“It can’t wait?” Max grumbled.

“Well, technically, it can…but it’s about the gold.” Brent started.

“We figured Claire was needing the gold so badly that we needed to come on over and make a new plan to find it.” Summer finished.

“Yeah. That’s just what we were coming inside to do.”

Brent smirked at them. “Yeah, that’s what it looked like y’all were going inside to do,” he drawled.

Max pulled away from Claire, adjusting his groin pointedly. “I’ll run and get the food.”

Claire led Summer and Brent into the house, seating them at the kitchen table before going to the bathroom to splash some water on her face. When she returned with a notebook and a pen, Brent and Summer weren’t in the kitchen anymore.

She found them in the living room, where all of Claire’s shoes had been moved to and arranged in a circle. They were standing at the edge, looking at it, a puzzled expression on Brent’s face, a slightly more fearful one on Summer’s. She was holding Brent’s arm as if he would protect her from something.

“It’s okay, guys. That’s Edie messing with me again. She thinks it’s fun to put my things in a circle.”

Max chose that moment to walk in with bags of food in his arms. “What’s going on? Who did this?” He was looking from the circle to the front door, as if someone had broken in to rearrange shoes.

Claire sighed. “I was just telling these guys that it’s Edie, my ghost.”

Max’s jaw dropped. “You know you have a ghost?”

Summer looked relieved. “That’s why we came over. Brent and I were talking about your troubles with the house this morning, and Nana came up, because she used to play with your Uncle Eddie and Edie and stuff.”

Brent said, “Let’s go back into the kitchen. That brisket was good last night, I want more. We can talk and eat in there.”

Claire, Summer and Brent sat at the table while Max started heating up the leftovers.

“So, what did y’all come up with?” Claire was feeling impatient. If they had come up with something beneficial, she really could use the information.

Brent looked at Summer. “Edie’s really still here?”

Claire sighed with exasperation. “Yes. What did y’all come up with?”

Summer couldn’t contain herself any longer. Good old Summer. “She knows where the gold is. She’s trying to tell you.” She actually clapped her hands, like a little kid who got to spill the secret.

“How do you know?”

Brent raised an eyebrow at his sister. “Because she lorded it over Nana. We remembered Nana talking about the gold, how it was Confederate bars someone had stolen during the Civil War, and hidden here. Edie had caught her parents hiding it, and told everyone who would listen that she knew where it was, but it was a secret, and she couldn’t tell.” He leaned back in his chair while Max set a plate piled with food in front of him. “Apparently, she was quite the brat about it.”

Claire mumbled to herself, “Edie a brat? I can’t imagine…” Max set a plate in front of Claire before going back to fix one for Summer and himself.

Summer leaned forward eagerly. “So, what clues has she given you? We can help solve the mystery.”

Claire chewed thoughtfully. “All she’s done is put all my stuff in circles. I thought that she was making the letter o or something.” She cut into her meat. “Or a zero.” A depressing thought came to her. “Maybe she’s telling me there isn’t any gold.”

Summer chewed her bottom lip. “I don’t think so. If there wasn’t any gold, then she wouldn’t have a reason to be here. I think that’s her purpose, to help the next living kin find the gold.” She looked up at Claire. “When you find the gold, she may pass on to her family.”

“But a bunch of circles? That doesn’t make sense to me.”

Max sat down with his plate. “What about what your uncle said, about the gold being protected good?”

“Well protected.”

Brent raised his eyes from his corn. “What?”

“He said the gold was well protected.”

Max muttered, “Well, that explains it.”

“What?” Claire asked him.

“The day you were attacked, I didn’t hit that guy with the frying pan. I thought I was losing my mind, but I saw it fly through the air by itself to hit him.”

“Edie!” Summer exclaimed. “She’s the protector! That makes sense! She’s the one who hit those guys with the pan, when they broke in to steal the gold!”

Through a mouthful of food, Max said, “Yeah, but that’s hardly a hint to the location. It’s more of an FYI: there’s a ghost living here who will conk you if you try to take what’s not rightfully yours.”

“Tell us everything Edie’s done since you moved here.”

Claire thought. “Well, she drew circles on the walls with paint, she scared the bejesus out of me drawing one in the fog on my mirror while I was showering…” Max chuckled at that and Claire shot him a look to silence him. “She arranged my makeup in a circle, my packing boxes, my books, my dishes, my potted plants…”

“Was there something about the location maybe? Were all the circles in the same room? Same part of the house?”

“No. The shoes were in the living room, makeup and fog in the bathroom, the books were in the guest room, boxes in the dining room, plants around the old well, paint in the study…”

“Wait! You said well?” Brent interrupted her.

“Yes…”

Max looked at Brent, his eyes wide. “Could it?”

Brent looked at Claire, “Is the well functioning?”

She shook her head, “No. It’s been filled with concrete.” She tried to stop the blush at the memory of her and Max’s first meeting, but it never had a chance to rise because Max was already on his feet.

“I’ll go get some tools.”

“I’ll come with you.” Brent was following Max out the back door at a run, leaving the door swinging open behind them.

Summer got up to close it. “Do you feel that? I think we’re on to something.”

Claire sat quietly to try to feel what Summer was talking about. Sure enough, the hair on her arms was standing up, and she felt slightly cooler in the room.

“You may be right.” For the first time in several weeks, she allowed a ray of hope to come into her consciousness. “I hope you’re right.”

“Well protected…” Summer mused. “He wasn’t hinting, he was telling you. None of the old-timers around here really speak like that. If he was talking about Edie, he would have said ‘protected good’ or something like that. None of the locals use adverbs correctly around here.”

Fifteen minutes later, Max and Brent came back, arms laden with chisels, sledgehammers, and buckets.

“I wish I had a jackhammer. That would be so much easier.” Max said breathlessly as he dropped everything in a pile in the kitchen floor. “Do you have flashlights? I only have two.” He looked at Claire.

“Um…Yeah, I have one maglight.” She rose to go get it, but Max caught her in his arms and hauled her against him.

“You know what this means, don’t you?” His heart pounding against his chest told her he was as excited as she was.

“You don’t have to buy my house and make me a kept woman?” She teased.

“You don’t have to go anywhere.” His mouth slanted over hers in a kiss so full of promise she couldn’t breathe.

“Yeah. That too,” she gasped, when he let her come up for air. Max released her and she went to get her flashlight.

When she returned, the guys were pacing the kitchen ticking off things on their fingers as they made a plan.

“Somebody needs to stay in the front of the house and keep watch while we work. We don’t need any unexpected company, and the neighbors are liable to know exactly what we’re doing when they see us digging up that old well.”

Claire looked at Max, opening her mouth to ask the question, but he knew what she was going to ask.

“That gold is a legend in this town. The neighborhood has gossiped for years about where it is. As soon as they see us digging up the old well, they’ll know we’re looking, and want to come ‘help’.” He used air quotes with the word help, so Claire knew helping wouldn’t really be on anyone’s agenda.

“Gotcha.”

“I’ll be lookout. It’s not like more than one person would fit down there anyway,” Summer offered.

Brent studied her. “Do you have your cell phone? Put one of us on speed dial, just in case the meth heads come back. And don’t you dare confront them, just call one of us to come running.”

She nodded.

Claire ran around the house, turning on all the lights. “It’s going to be dark soon. I’ll make sure it looks like someone’s home.”

Max looked at Claire. “Do you want to wait until it’s dark? It’s only about thirty minutes away…”

She shook her head. “Nope. Let’s get this party started.”

S
ummer went out the front door to sit on the porch, while Claire made sure she had her cell phone in her pocket, set to ring. She didn’t want Summer to get into any trouble while she was on watch. Then she followed the guys around to the side of the house where the well was.

Effortlessly, Brent pulled the plywood off the well, and Max lowered himself into it. Anticipation set in and Claire eagerly handed him the tools. Her heart started pounding with the surety that this was what Edie had meant. The well was circular, and suddenly all of Edie’s and Eddie’s hints made perfect sense, and she couldn’t believe it had taken this long for her to figure it out.

The well’s circumference was just big enough to accommodate Max’s frame, but there was not enough room to swing the sledgehammer. Holding the chisel between his feet, he dropped the sledgehammer straight down as hard as he could, muscles bunching in his back. A small piece of concrete chipped away.

“This is going to take a while,” he grunted.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I’ll hand you pieces of concrete. You can put them in the bucket and dump them somewhere when it gets full. That’s about it, for now.”

Quelling her excitement, Claire watched with Brent as Max, piece-by-piece, managed to break a layer of concrete out of the old well.

“How deep do you think it is?” She asked, after watching for a few minutes.

“There’s really no telling. These wells can be eighty feet deep, and I have no idea how long I can keep this up. But I’ll do it for as long as I can, and then Brent can take a turn.”

“Okay.” She continued watching him, plunging the sledgehammer down on top of the chisel, chipping the concrete away, bit by bit.

As she watched, excitement swelled in her chest. “How much do you think there is?” She was trying not to be greedy and start counting on the windfall, but she couldn’t stop herself from imagining a priceless treasure buried under all the concrete.