“Vinnie’s married?”
“With one and a half kids. They live down in South Point and throw exceptional barbecues.”
Maybe Vinnie had changed, Eli thought as he continued to scan the room. He remembered a rail-thin guy, perpetually high, who’d lived for the next wave and dreamed of moving to Hawaii.
The beam passed over the bed, then came back to shine on the hand towel, the pipe-smoking fish. “Really?”
“I’m going to see if I can manage a guard dog next. Maybe a rottweiler or a Doberman. Maybe it’ll work.”
“You’re going to need a bigger towel.” He scanned her face in the dim light. “You’ve got to be tired. I’ll take you home.”
“More wired than tired. I should’ve skipped the coffee. Look, you shouldn’t stay here without any power. It’s going to get colder, and no lights, no pump, so no water. I’ve got a more-or-less guest room and a really comfortable sofa. You can take either.”
“No, that’s okay. I don’t want to leave the house empty after this. I’m going to go down and bang on the generator.”
“All right. I’ll go down, too, make girl noises and hand you inappropriate tools. You’re gawky yet, but you should be able to stomp on any spiders. It’s wrong, I know, considering the good work they do, but I have a thing about spiders.”
“I can make manly noises and get my own inappropriate tools. You should get some sleep.”
“I’m not ready.” She gave a kind of shaking shrug. “Unless you have strong objections to my company down there, I’d rather stick around. Especially if I can have a glass of wine.”
“Sure.” He suspected, whatever she’d said to Maureen, she had nerves about being alone in her own house.
“We’ll both get drunk and bang on the generator.”
“That’s a plan. I did a kind of half-assed cleaning down there before you came, at least in the main area, the wine cellar, seasonal storage. I don’t really go beyond there, and I don’t think Hester has in years. The rest of the place is huge and dark, dank and just pretty scary,” she told him as they started downstairs. “It’s not my favorite place.”
“Spooky?” he said, and turned the flashlight under his chin for a horror-movie effect.
“Yes, and stop that. The furnaces make grunting and grinding noises, things clang and creak. And there’s too many strange little rooms and spaces. It’s The Shining of basements. So . . .”
She stopped in the kitchen, got out the wine herself. “Courage from the grape, which may also counteract the very late-night coffee and adventure. How was everything at home? In Boston?”
“It was good. Really.” If she needed to talk about something else, he could talk about something else. “Gran looks stronger, my parents look less stressed. And my sister’s expecting her second child. So there was something to celebrate.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“It switched the gears, if you know what I mean,” he said as she poured wine for both of them. “Instead of being careful not to talk about why I moved here, we stopped thinking about it.”
“To fresh starts, new babies and electricity.” She tapped her glass against his.
After one sip she decided to take the bottle down to the basement. Maybe she would get a little drunk. It might help her sleep.
The basement door creaked. Naturally, she thought, and hooked a finger in one of Eli’s belt loops as he started down. “So we don’t get separated,” she said when he glanced back.
“It’s not the Amazon.”
“In basement terms it is. Most houses around here don’t even have basements, much less Amazon basements.”
“Most aren’t built on a cliff. And part of it’s above ground level.”
“A basement’s a basement. And this one’s too quiet.”
“I thought it made too many noises.”
“It can’t make them without the furnaces, the pumps and God knows what other intestines are down here. So it’s too quiet. It’s waiting.”
“Okay, you’re starting to freak me out.”
“I don’t want to be freaked out alone.”
At the base of the steps, Eli took a flashlight from its wall charger in a well-stocked and meticulously organized wine cellar.
There’d been a day, he imagined, when every niche would have held a bottle—the hundreds of them systematically turned by the butler. But even now he calculated a solid hundred bottles of what would be exceptional wines.
“Here. Now if we get separated you can send me a signal. I’ll get the search party.”