Page 20 of Just a Number (Magnolia Row #2)

RHODES

W hen I get back to the hotel, I talk to the girl in the lobby about extending my stay for one more night—which is no issue since this place is always half-empty—then go to my room and collapse. I’ve been up for nearly twenty-four hours at this point, and my whole body hurts.

But it was worth it to be there for Micah. I’m so glad she wasn’t alone. My heart ached for her in those hours at the hospital. It was excruciating to watch, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

I sit on the edge of the bed, take off my shoes, and sit for a moment, staring into the beige nothingness of the floral wallpaper.

It’s almost as if I’m too tired to sleep, so I go into a trance.

I take a deep breath to snap myself out of it, then take off the rest of my clothes and crawl under the covers.

I’m asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow.

* * *

W hen I wake, it’s lunchtime. My stomach howls and I’m desperate for coffee. I check my phone, but Micah hasn’t reached out. I send her a quick text, letting her know I’m thinking about her and to let me know if she needs anything.

I take a quick shower, put on the extra set of clothes I thankfully brought, and go to Main Street to Bonny Beans Coffee Shop. I recognize the girl behind the counter as one of Micah’s friends.

“Hey, SAM,” she says when I get to the register.

I turn to make sure no one else is behind me. “You must have me mistaken?—"

“No, I don’t. You’re Sexy Architect Man.”

I raise my eyebrows and stare at her. This is awkward.

“I’m Micah’s friend. That’s what we’ve been calling you in our group text. SAM.”

I smile and nod, unsure whether to be embarrassed or flattered. “Yes, I’m the architect.”

“Speaking of Micah,” the girl says. “I got a text from our friend Patsy. She said her car wasn’t at the antique store this morning and it looks like the place hasn’t opened. She’s not answering our texts. Is everything okay?”

“No.” I tell her about Ms. Barbara and our night at the hospital.

“I’m glad you were there for her,” she says, her eyes wide and brows furrowed in concern. “Coffee’s on me, whatever you want.”

I order a latte with double espresso and a bagel. She makes it for me, then disappears into the kitchen with her phone.

Once I finish eating, I wave goodbye to Sistine and return to the hotel. Part of me wants to go to the hospital to check on Micah’s grandmother myself, but I also want to give her the space she needs. So, I wait.

* * *

A few hours later, she texts me and asks me to pick her up at her house at eight o’clock. I breathe a sigh of relief. If she’s wanting to go out tonight, it must mean her grandmother is doing better.

When I arrive at her house, she’s waiting for me on the patio with a small backpack.

Her face is still puffy and I notice it’s also free of the make-up she normally wears.

Her hair is pulled back in a high, bouncy ponytail, like one of those vintage Barbie dolls.

She’s also more casually dressed in wide-leg jeans and a Cattywampus Brewing t-shirt.

“Sorry I look like a ragamuffin,” she says. “I figured after you saw me at my worst last night, you could probably handle me without all the fixins.”

“You’re beautiful regardless,” I say, giving her a hug.

She looks in my eyes. “Wow,” she says. “You really mean that.”

“Of course I do,” I answer. I almost kiss her there in the porch light, but she pulls back and tells me she has a surprise for me.

We get in my car and drive back towards town, down Main Street and past the brewery in the direction of the old Victorian Village.

As we drive, she tells me her grandmother is doing—and looking—much better since we left her at the hospital early this morning.

Micah spent most of the afternoon there, and apparently after I told Sistine what was going on, her friends showed up to visit as well.

I’m glad she had the support, and the fact that she has such devoted friends speaks volumes. I respect the hell out of it.

Streetlights stop after we pass the Florablanca Inn, which looks like something out of a horror movie at night, so the path is dark and there are no cars or signs of life.

Micah points out the cemetery where she and her friends would hang out in high school.

It’s old, with an iron fence, leaning headstones, and Spanish moss hanging low enough to touch the ground.

You’d have to go to Salem to find a spookier place.

Past the cemetery, she tells me to slow down. She leans forward like she’s looking for something.

“There,” she says, pointing straight ahead. “Right over there. See the break in the weeds? There’s a dirt road.”

I turn right onto the road as instructed, and all I can see is an old, ornate iron gate.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“Do you remember when I told you about the abandoned house my friends and I would go to in high school?”

“Yeah?” I see nothing but darkness.

“This is it.”

“How do we get back there?”

“Climb the gate,” she says, as if it was no big deal.

“Isn’t this illegal?”

“Yes, but Nana knows the chief of police. It’s fine.”

My stomach is in knots as I park the car in front of the gate. I’m not sure if it’s the spooky house or being alone with Micah that makes me so nervous. Maybe it’s both.

Micah pulls two red electric lanterns from her backpack and turns them on before my headlights darken. I follow her to the fence and she hands both of them to me. She reaches a high bar on the gate and climbs over. She’s clearly done this before.

“Oof,” she says, wiping her hands on her jeans once her feet hit the ground. “I was afraid I’d gotten too fat to do that.”

My heart drops. “Don’t call yourself fat,” I say.

She rolls her eyes. “Sorry,” she says. “Force of habit.”

Micah reaches through the gate and takes the lanterns from me.

I also give her my keys, wallet, and phone before scaling the gate myself.

I must say, she made this look a lot easier than it is.

She has to talk me through it and tell me on which bars to place my hands and feet.

When I’m safely on the ground on the other side, I breathe a sigh of relief before remembering I’ll have to do it again when we leave.

“Don’t worry,” Micah says, as if reading my mind. “It’ll be easier the second time.”

I take a lantern and we walk down the long dirt driveway. I can vaguely make out a white house in the distance when the clouds finally part and the moon shines on the overgrown yard that was once a large homestead.

I gasp once it comes into view, then turn to Micah, who is absolutely beaming in the moonlight.

“It was built in the 1890s by a man in the lumber business,” she says. “If we walked past the house, we’d see the river over the hill.”

The home is gorgeous. It’s a square Victorian, complete with belvedere and a wraparound porch.

It has floor-length windows, though the glass has been broken in most of them.

Someone spray-painted a picture of a marijuana leaf on the door and, between two of the windows, a picture of Snoopy with red eyes.

But, despite the damage, I can still get a sense of the grandeur this property once conveyed.

“The graffiti wasn’t us,” Micah says. “That’s new.”

We walk up the stairs to the porch and let ourselves in through the broken window.

Beer bottles and dirty clothes are scattered around the floor, but the home retains a lot of its original charm.

The stairs have the original balusters, which are hand-carved with a magnolia design on each spindle.

The house is a four-square layout with a single hallway running through the center.

Cobwebs coat the chandelier in the foyer, which looks like it’s missing a lot of its crystals.

At first I’m surprised the wallpaper isn’t peeling off, then I realize it’s not paper; the plaster was painted by hand. While I was disheartened by the graffiti outside when we arrived, I’m glad they spared the interior walls.

We walk through, room by room. Broken furniture is overturned and the rugs have been eaten away by time and rodents, but the floor seems solid.

When we enter the back bedroom, I’m startled by my glowing, fractured reflection in a broken mirror above the fireplace in an elaborate frame as tall as I am.

It looks to be original and was hung at an angle with the top a few inches away from the wall, allowing those on the floor to look up and see the full room.

I haven’t seen this in a house in a very long time, and I’m surprised it’s still in place.

As we navigate the space, Micah tells me stories about her friends coming here with tarot cards and ouija boards, trying to summon the dead, when they were in high school.

“The only things we ever managed to summon were rats and the occasional opossum,” she says, laughing.

All her stories involve Sistine, Patsy, and Kendall.

It’s a rare gift to have a core set of friends from grade school through decades of friendship.

I can’t help but feel a sense of envy. My high school was huge, and we all scattered after graduation.

I run into some of them from time to time in the city, but we aren’t close.

“Where is the kitchen?” I ask once we’ve made a complete circle around the first floor.

“Outside,” she says, pointing out the window to a small outbuilding on the side of the house. “They updated the house with plumbing and electricity over the years, but never brought the kitchen to the main house.”

We go upstairs, careful to avoid weak points in the tread.

It’s not as disheveled as the downstairs, probably because trespassers over the years were afraid they’d fall through the boards.

I’m surprised by how many elements are unchanged despite the passage of over a hundred years.

The original tile and ironwork on the fireplaces are in excellent condition, and I recognize a stamp from a foundry that operated in Birmingham around the turn of the century.

We stop in one of the front bedrooms and I catch Micah looking out the window across the lawn. The moonlight catches her face and makes her skin glow like an angel. She looks like she belongs in this space, her old soul in a home that has witnessed more than a century of life. It just seems right.

“I always wished I could live here,” she says, turning to me. “I’d have each room decorated in a different color and throw fabulous parties.”

I imagine myself in that life with her. I couldn’t ask for a better future for myself, or for us.

“It’s a wonderful dream,” I say. “Thank you for bringing me here. It’s magical.”

“You’re welcome,” she says. “I wish we could go up to the top. You can see all the way down the river from there, but last time I was here there were too many broken stairs.”

“Who owns this place?”

“No clue. It’s been abandoned since before I was born.”

“That’s a shame.”

She looks heartbroken. “It really is. Places like this should be filled with love.”

I put an arm around her. She leans into me and puts her head against my cheek for a moment before walking back downstairs. I follow her, careful to only step in spots where her feet have been.

Once we get downstairs, she turns in the foyer and takes one last look around, but my eyes are glued to her.

I step towards her, putting down my lantern and taking hers to rest it beside mine.

I cup her face in my hands. Her big green eyes look up at me with a nervous intensity, and when our lips meet, I swear our feet come off the ground.