off one of the bottles, almost purring when the scent of sun-warmed honeysuckle hit me.
I swung around toward him. “I call dibs on the shower.”
“How about we go check out the rest of the place before you bathe?” He extended the weapon.
I eyed it, then eyed him, and it hit me that I trusted him. “You can keep it. For now.”
His pupils pulsed in surprise.
“It’s a better weapon than your pen,” I added a touch mockingly.
As he trailed me back into the hallway, he said, “You’d be surprised the damage you could inflict with a well-placed pen.”
I grimaced.
A light switch on the wall caught my attention, and I flipped it. When it flooded the dark space, I sighed. Audibly. Bee’s Place felt like the eye of the storm, and I was planning on taking full advantage of the calm and comfort. We could even use it as our base while we built something to reach the portal.
As Remo opened the door to yet another empty bedroom, I spun to face him, which made him jerk the gun down and grumble, “Do you have a death wish?”
I rolled my eyes. “My own dust can’t kill me.”
He popped an eyebrow. “Except it isn’t your dust.”
I sucked in some air. Even though it felt like mine, he was right . . . it wasn’t. How could it have slipped my mind? “For the time being, and quite possibly forever if we don’t find a way out of here, it’s mine.” I didn’t add that he was probably right about the killing-me part, because Remo Farrow didn’t need any more strokes to the ego. “Which brings me back to what I was about to tell you. I was thinking that I could make a rope with it.”
A groove furrowed his brow.
“To hook onto the portal.”
His eyes widened, but then his tangible surprise vanished underneath a layer of caution. “First we’d need to scale the cliff, and it looked even steeper than in the last cell.”
“I could make a tool out of my dust to help with that. A pick or something.”
He bobbed his head. “We could try.”
“After my bath.”
“After your bath.”
“Won’t you take one?”
“Possibly. But first, I want to meet the person who baked the pie.”
Hope had filed the baker into a recess of my brain. Sighing, I shadowed Remo as we entered the remaining bedrooms. All were unoccupied. The beds were made, and the bathrooms fully functional. On the way out of the last one, the largest on the floor, a wall of framed pictures caught my attention.
After we’d ascertained the bedroom was empty, I stepped closer to the still shots, unhooked one, and lifted it. Two women stood in front of the inn, one old, one Nima’s age. Their eyes were squinted as though the sun was particularly bright. The younger one had her arm around the older one’s shoulders, and her straight black hair was blowing sideways.
“I think that’s my grandmother.”
Remo frowned. “Milly?”
“No. The one who died when Gwenelda rose from her grave. Nima’s birth mother.”
From the stories Pappy and Nima regaled me with, I felt like I’d known Nova, the woman who’d cried during every showing of Titanic even though she knew how it ended; the friend who’d taken meticulous care of others, whether alive or dead (she’d been the town embalmer); the mother who’d painted the door to the basement morgue yellow so her daughter wouldn’t look upon it with fear.
I also felt like I knew her thanks to Gwen. Giya and Sook’s aunt still carried my grandmother’s mind and memories within her. Although she didn’t share them often, or freely, from time to time, over a tribal ritual that brought our families together, a reminiscence would trickle off Gwen’s tongue, and I would lap it right up. If Pappy was in the vicinity when this happened, his lanky chest would swell with sorrow, which prompted Gwen to apologize, even though he always insisted it was a gift.
When I was younger, I always wondered if this made Nana Em jealous; after all, Pappy had never stopped loving his first wife. One day, while we were tending to the pink drosas, which had not only taken residence on one of her house’s walls but crawled all over her roof, I found the courage to ask her. She’d set down her watering can, brushed my hair back, and said that it didn’t make her jealous, that Pappy’s fond recollections made her feel lucky.
Lucky? I’d asked her.
Lucky that such a good man