Chapter Three
“Who was that?” Abbie asked.
The little girl’s voice distracted Emma from her inspection of the white carpeting on the steps leading up to the loft. She’d noticed a few faint smudges of dirt, but nothing that looked like paint or glue or ground-in clay, nothing a vacuum cleaner or a little rug shampoo couldn’t remove. At least she hoped so.
She wondered if the condition of the floors mattered anymore. The guy was kicking her to the curb, literally—or as literally as possible, given that the road leading to the house didn’t have a curb. Whether or not the carpet was in pristine condition seemed irrelevant. He would probably confiscate the security deposit just for the hell of it.
She didn’t want to discuss him with Abbie and Tasha, but she wasn’t about to lie, either. “He’s my landlord,” she said as she joined the girls at the work table, which held a chaotic clutter of construction paper, cotton balls, satin ribbon, aluminum foil, toothpicks, fabric, salvaged giftwrap, and magazines, pages of which had been scissored to shreds. Although Abbie and Tasha insisted they were old enough for pointy scissors, Emma had supplied each with snub-nose scissors—they cut just as well as pointy ones, so why tempt fate?—and a jar of rubber cement.
She loved having her young students create collages, which encouraged the children to think abstractly about shape and texture and the juxtaposition of images. Collages were messy. They were fun. And they didn’t require fine motor skills. Not everyone could draw or paint. But anyone could make a collage.
The collaging materials with which she’d armed the girls were indeed messy, strewn and scattered across the work table. They were messier than Emma’s hair or her clothes, messier than the drop cloths protecting the carpeted floor. She supposed she should be grateful that Max Whatever hadn’t come upstairs and seen Emma’s class in action.
The hell with gratitude. If he’d climbed the stairs to the loft and viewed the bedlam of two exuberant eight-year-olds creating collages, Emma’s fate would have been no worse than it already was.
He was evicting her. Now, he’d said.
“What’s a landlord?” Tasha asked.
Emma pasted a brave smile on her face. Tasha and Abbie’s mothers were each paying her thirty dollars an hour to teach their daughters some basic art skills. They weren’t paying her to whine about her imminent homelessness.
“A landlord,” she said, bending to pick up a linty cotton ball which had migrated from the table to the floor, “is someone who owns a house.”
“My daddy is a landlord,” Abbie bragged.
“Well, it’s someone who owns a house—or a building—and rents it out to other people to use. That man owns this house, but he rents it to Monica and me so we can live in it.” Using a present-tense verb to describe what the man was doing didn’t seem quite accurate, but Emma decided a shade of dishonesty was allowed, under the circumstances.
She needed to phone Monica to warn her that Max Whatever was in town—and worse, that Max Whatever was ousting Emma from his home. Possibly Monica, too. He’d seemed mad enough to kick them both to the non-existent curb.
Yes, he was mad. Mad Max.
She suppressed a bitter laugh and reached for her cell phone. Just a few minutes ago, she’d been about to tap in the emergency number, summoning the police to the house to save her and the girls from an intruder. Wouldn’t that have been fun. Maybe the cops would have carted Mad Max away before he could give Emma the boot. A mistaken arrest would have pissed him off even more, but the result wouldn’t have been any worse for Emma. It couldn’t be worse.
She stared at her phone for a moment, then shoved it back into her pocket. She couldn’t call Monica while her students were present. Besides, when Monica was working, she usually turned off her cell phone, which meant Emma would have to try to reach her through the inn’s switchboard, and that in turn might mean having to leave a message with an assistant. This was not a situation about which Emma wanted to leave a message.
She checked her watch, peeled a blob of dried rubber cement off its face and said, “Class ends in five minutes. Let’s finish what you’re doing and tidy up the studio.” Calling the loft a studio made the entire enterprise seem just a little more professional.
Which would no doubt piss Mad Max off even more.
While the girls scrambled to adorn their collages with a few final items—gummed gold stars in Tasha’s case, a heart-shaped patch of paisley fabric in Abbie’s—Emma gathered a few more fallen bits and pieces from the floor surrounding the table. While she tossed the detritus into the trash pail, she thought. About her impending homelessness. About how miserable she’d been sleeping on Claudio’s cousin’s couch before Monica had rescued her by inviting her to move to Brogan’s Point.
About Max.
He wasn’t what she’d pictured the few times Monica had mentioned their landlord. Max seemed like an old man’s name, but Max Whatever couldn’t have been much older than thirty. He was tall and thin, clad in jeans, sneakers, a brown wool blazer and a muffler wrapped several times around his neck, the kind of knitted scarf a girlfriend might make for her guy.
Emma tried to imagine Max’s girlfriend. Tall. Thin. Bristling with self-righteous indignation, like him.
Beautiful, like him.
Only now, when he was safely out of the house, could she allow herself to contemplate the intriguing lines of his face, the contrast of his straight, narrow nose and his thick, wavy hair, the juxtaposition of that dark hair with his pale blue eyes. His eyelashes had been downright phenomenal.
Not that Emma paid attention to a man’s eyelashes, except in a detached, appraising way. She painted portraits. She noticed facial details—professionally. Men’s eyelashes did nothing for her personally. As an artist, however, she found them intriguing.
In fact, she had found all of Max’s features intriguing. The faint hollows beneath his cheekbones. The sharp angle of his chin. The hint of bronze in his complexion. Even if Monica hadn’t mentioned that he lived in California, Emma would have guessed that he hadn’t spent the past few cold, snowy months in Massachusetts.
As riveting as his features were, he’d tried hard—with reasonable success—to keep his emotions hidden. His anger hadn’t exploded from his face. She’d noticed it in the tension around his mouth, in the flinty chill in his eyes as he’d regarded her. But unlike, say, Claudio, who used to erupt like Vesuvius at the slightest provocation, Max had been restrained, his emotions held in check.
That only made him seem madder to Emma. She was used to people who flung their emotions around like confetti on New Year’s Eve. Artists didn’t erect many walls between themselves and the world. They needed to be able to see, feel, experience everything around them. You couldn’t pick up on the subtle details of a flower or a seascape or a face if you had a thick wall of self-protection separating you from everything out there.
Painting Max’s portrait would be a fascinating challenge, she thought. Especially painting it as a Dream Portrait, with his amazing face surrounded by his dreams. Unlike Ava Lowry, who dreamed of being a princess, Max probably dreamed of…what? Being obeyed by his tenants? How would Emma depict that visually on a canvas?
The doorbell rang, and she flinched, panic seizing her at the possibility that Max had returned with a constable in tow, perhaps, or a sheriff. Who was in charge of evicting tenants? Was it something the local police could take care of? Would they point a service revolver at her and force her to pack all her things and remove them from the house while they watched? Fortunately, she didn’t own much, other than her art supplies.
Where would she store her easels and paints if she wound up living in a cardboard box on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and South street? Would the teeny-tiny apartment Monica had access to at the Ocean Bluff Inn be big enough? Doubtful. Monica’s wardrobe alone was at least three times as big as Emma’s, and then Monica had all her make-up and toiletries. She wouldn’t have room for Emma’s things
as well as her own.
Emma realized that the person ringing it was probably Tasha’s mother. The girls’ mothers carpooled, and Abbie’s mother had picked them up after their last lesson.
The girls snatched their collages from the table and raced each other to the stairs. Emma watched them clamber down to the first floor, giggling and elbowing each other. What if one of them fell? Would she be sued, or would Mad Max, the home owner, be held liable? What sort of insurance would he need for her to hold her art classes here? Would he require special insurance if Emma didn’t call them art classes? What if she said they were simply occasions when she invited a couple of young friends over to make collages?
Fortunately, Abbie and Tasha were agile. No falls, no injuries. If anyone had gotten hurt, it wouldn’t do them much good to sue her. She had no money to pay any claims.
Correction: she had sixty dollars, the two checks Tasha’s mother handed her before oohing and ahhing over their collages. She thanked Emma and chased the girls down the front walk to her van, parked at the edge of the road. Emma waved them off, then turned away and closed the door.
Her vision took in the entry hall, with its stark white walls and white carpet. The walls needed some paintings hanging on them. Better yet, they needed color. The kitchen had slate-gray tile on the floors, and the living room sofas were a dark gray. The furnishings had come with the house—a good thing, since Monica, having grown up in a hotel, didn’t own much in the way of furniture, and Emma owned even less. But as much as she loved living here, sharing the airy rooms and the splendid views with her best friend, Emma didn’t much like the décor.
Not only was Mad Max a nasty landlord, but he was also a tasteless one. He’d had the good sense to purchase this fabulous house, but he’d given it a chilly, colorless ambiance. Emma decided she hated him.
She’d still like to paint him, though.