Nerd Gone Wild (Nerds, #3)(14)
Author: Vicki Lewis Thompson

Betsy laid several strips of bacon in an iron skillet. “It sticks, right? I should have warned you about that. I need to get up there and plane off about a quarter inch below the lock and it’ll be fine.”

“Well, that’s not the problem.” Mitch cast another look at Ally, but she’d abandoned him. “See, it was locked, and Ally was in the shower, and I heard her squeal. Turns out it was the water going cold, but I didn’t realize that, so I—” Sitting here at the breakfast table, he couldn’t believe he’d done such a stupid-ass thing. And all to save Ally from a cold shower.

“Jimmied the lock, I suppose.” Clyde nodded in understanding. “Wanted to check on her to see if it was a mouse or something. I would have done the same, son. I can help Betsy with that lock if it doesn’t work right, now.”

“The lock’s no big deal,” Betsy said as she began to beat a bowl of eggs with a wire whisk. “Now the door itself, I couldn’t replace that. It’s a hundred years old, at least. But locks are no problem. Don’t worry about it, Mitchell. You have bigger fish to fry, if you get my meaning.”

“The door’s… uh… how old?” Mitch wondered how much snow he’d have to shovel to make up for this.

“At least a hundred years.”

“The frame, too?”

“The whole shootin’ match is that old. Frames and doors. That particular one sticks a mite, but the rest are perfect. I’m real proud of those doors. No warping, no cracking, nothing. As good as the day they were made. People knew craftsmanship back in those days.”

“Well, the door may not be quite as good as the day it was made.” Mitch felt completely miserable. “Not anymore.”

Holding the bowl of whipped eggs against her hip, Betsy turned toward the table. “What’s wrong with the door?”

“I sort of… broke it down.”

“Whoa, Nellie!” Clyde’s eyes widened.

Betsy’s jaw dropped. Then she put the bowl back on the counter and turned off the flame under the bacon. “Guess I’d better see about this.”

“I’ll go with you, Kitty-cat.” Clyde pushed back from his chair.

“I’ll come, too.” Mitch thought he should be there for the first viewing. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as he thought.

“Me, too.” Ally stood.

“That’s okay, Ally.” Mitch figured she was enjoying watching him twist in the wind. She probably wanted to witness the scene when Betsy laid into him. “Stay and enjoy your coffee.”

She met his gaze and shrugged. “I’m partly to blame. I’m the one who squealed.” Instead of mockery, there was sympathy in her eyes.

He was surprised, but he’d take whatever help he could get. “It’s not your fault, but if you want to come up with us, that’s fine.”

“I think I should.”

“Thanks.” Appreciative for the show of support, he gestured for her to go ahead of him out the kitchen door. “A hundred years old,” he murmured to her as they climbed the stairs behind Betsy and Clyde. “Man, I hated to hear that.”

“I know. I was hoping she’d picked it up at Home Depot.”

“Yeah.”

“Some places can make really good reproductions,” she said.

“They can?” He valued her encouragement more than she could know. He hated damaging something in his care. Although he hadn’t realized he was dealing with a one-hundred-year-old door, it had been temporarily under his care. And he’d busted it.

Betsy used a key she pulled out of her pocket to unlock his room. Then she turned on a light and stood there silently staring at the door propped against the splintered frame. Mitch hadn’t realized until now that the door itself had a sizable crack in it. A good kick and it would split in two.

Turning toward Mitch, Betsy looked him up and down. “There’s more to you than meets the eye, isn’t there?”

He coughed and pushed his glasses more firmly on his nose, typical nerdlike behavior. Maybe then he wouldn’t look quite so much like a black belt who could do serious damage with his feet. “Adrenaline. Makes people stronger for a few seconds.”

Betsy didn’t look convinced.

“Kitty-cat, I think we can save it.”

Walking over to the door, Betsy ran a loving hand over the wood. “We can sure try. But in the meantime, you don’t have much privacy, Mitchell.”

“Doesn’t matter. And I’ll pay for the damages. Whatever you think is fair, considering the value, and the work you’ll have to put in.”

She ran a finger down the crack. “How are you at shoveling snow?”

“Decent.”

Ally glanced at him. “How can you be good at shoveling snow? You live in Southern California.”

“But I spent the first twenty-two years of my life in Chicago.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

Betsy turned back to them, her expression resolute. “Okay, Chicago boy, I couldn’t come up with an amount to charge you for the door, or the labor, for that matter. We tend to work a lot on the barter system here in Porcupine, so I’m putting you on snow shoveling detail.”

He accepted his punishment, knowing this wasn’t the kind of thing that an influx of money could fix. “Okay.”

“I’ll help you,” Ally said.

“You don’t have to,” he said immediately.

“Yes I do. I feel partly responsible for this.”

“Let her help. She was the one who squealed when she got hit with a little cold water.” Betsy crossed her arms under her br**sts. “But I would love to know something. What happened after you broke the door down?”

Mitch and Ally spoke in unison. “Nothing!”

Betsy studied the two of them like a parent who wasn’t about to swallow the story. “You break the door down like some hero in a B movie, and she’s in there nak*d, and nothing happened? What’s wrong with you two?”

“It’s the younger generation, Kitty-cat,” Clyde said. “They see it all the time on TV—bashing down doors, nak*d women right out of the shower, you name it. They don’t get excited about things like we do.”

Mitch wasn’t about to correct that impression. Let all three of them think he’d been totally cool when confronted with Ally and a skimpy towel.

“And the second thing,” Betsy continued. “I get up this morning to find a package of sliced caribou, a loaf of bread, cheese, and the blackberry pie missing.”

“Caribou,” Mitch muttered. “So that’s what it was.”

“That wasn’t just any caribou, either,” Clyde said. “That was a town institution. See, we had this caribou in Porcupine who had the habit of going around peering in people’s—”

“We ate the Peeping Caribou?” Ally cried out, her expression horrified. “Eeuuww!”

“You have to admit he’s delicious, though,” Betsy said.

Ally clutched her stomach. “If I’d known, I never would have had any. The way you described him, I thought of him as a town character, with a personality.”

“I thought so, too,” Clyde said. “But some folks got sick of him putting his nose in everywhere, and finally Ziggy Berluski shot him. We divided him up.”

Ally looked a little green, and Mitch’s stomach didn’t feel all that wonderful, either. From now on he was asking a lot of questions before he put anything in his mouth.

“We’re getting off the subject,” Betsy said. “I want to know how it can be that two people insist they have no intention of doing the wild thing, but one has already seen the other pretty much nak*d, and besides that, they obviously raided the refrigerator together, too. Now that takes some cooperative effort.”

“We liked each other better then,” Ally said.

“I don’t dislike you, Ally.”

She turned to him, her gaze hard. “No, but I’m just one of your projects, one you want to run smoothly.”

“No you’re not. I—”

“Enough!” Betsy raised both hands. “We’re going back downstairs, because I can smell the biscuits and they’re done. And I don’t want to hear any more arguments from you two during breakfast. It disturbs the digestion.” She started out of the room and Clyde followed.

“She knows what she’s talking about,” Clyde said over his shoulder,

“Damn straight I do,” Betsy said as she clomped down the stairs. “And after checking out that door, I know something else for sure.”

“What’s that, Kitty-cat?”

“I definitely need to lay in a good supply of condoms.”

* * *

After a breakfast that included bacon from a pig nobody had named or even knew very well, Ally was ready to tackle the snow-shoveling. So was Mitchell, after Betsy informed him that he would freeze his privates if he went out there dressed like that. Betsy had some outfits stored in the lodge’s attic, items of clothing her various husbands had left behind.

Consequently Mitchell appeared for shoveling duty looking more studly than Ally thought was possible. He wore ski pants that hugged his butt, making her aware of that part of his anatomy, which she hadn’t been until now. Nice. Buns to brag about. Who knew?

The borrowed flannel shirt in muted browns and greens complemented his dark hair and brown eyes. And Ally could really appreciate his eyes, because he’d tucked his glasses in his shirt pocket after saying that he really didn’t have to see that well to shovel snow.

On top of Mitchell’s new and improved outfit, he wore a tan parka with a hood instead of the orange monstrosity he’d arrived in. Ally wondered if Betsy deliberately had chosen clothes for Mitchell as a way to improve his look and his chances with Ally. Betsy seemed to have the matchmaker gene.

But she had an uphill climb if she hoped to get Mitchell and Ally together. Betsy could dress him up any way she wanted, but he would still be the overprotective anal guy who wanted Ally to make his life easier by never doing anything risky. She didn’t intend to make his life easier.

While Clyde took a shower in Betsy’s bathroom, Betsy addressed her two shoveling recruits in the kitchen. “The back porch is never as bad as the front, on account of we have trees to block the wind and snow.” She handed Mitchell a small shovel.

Mitchell looked doubtful as he took the shovel. “This is it?”

“This is the shovel I keep in the pantry to shovel my way over to the storage shed on the far side of the porch. In there you’ll find a couple of real shovels.”

“And a snowblower?” Mitch asked hopefully.

Betsy laughed. “Oh, you’ll find one, but you won’t be able to use it. The blower’s for the little storms, like what you get in Chicago, I expect. Once you get the shovels, your best bet is to see if you can walk on top of the snow down the alleyway around to the front, where you’ll start tunneling in. But be careful. The snow can cave in on you.”

“Wow.” Ally found herself looking forward to snow like that.

“Couldn’t we use snowshoes?” Mitch asked.

“Sorry. I checked my supply a week ago and a mouse has been chewing on the webbing. I got the mouse, but haven’t replaced the snowshoes. Besides, I think trying to shovel in snowshoes is awkward.”

Ally glanced at Mitch. “See, it could have been a mouse in the bathroom.”

“You don’t seem spooked about it.” Mitch sounded slightly impressed by that.

“I wouldn’t have been spooked. I have an affinity for all kinds of animals. I would have tried to take its picture.”

“Not me,” Betsy said. “I would have tried to kill its ass.”

“But you don’t cook them, right?” Mitch asked.

Betsy regarded him with disdain. “What do you think we are, uncivilized?” Her eyes sparkled. “We eat ‘em raw, like oysters.” Then she laughed so hard she had to lean over and clutch the kitchen counter for support. “You should see your face, Mitchell. You believed me.”

Ally didn’t want to admit she’d believed Betsy, too. She decided a change of subject was in order. “What about the main street, the one that runs in and out of town? Does some state agency plow that for you?”

“A snow like this, they’re busy with the main drag, and they don’t get around to us for days. So we have Ernie do it. He’s the only guy in town with a tractor, and he plows when he feels like it.”

Ally really wanted that road open, to give Mitchell a way out and Uncle Kurt a way in. “Do you suppose he’s feeling like it today?”

“Don’t think so. Saw him tossing back quite a few at the Top Hat last night. Everybody talks about taking up a collection to buy a plow for the town, one any of us could drive if necessary, but then Ernie goes on the wagon and swears he’ll plow all the time, and we forget about it.”

“So he’s off the wagon,” Mitchell said.

“I’m afraid so. See, Ernie inherited that tractor from his daddy, who used to plow all the time for the town. But Ernie’s a throwback, doesn’t really believe in motorized transportation. He thinks we should all travel by dogsled, like he does. Control freak, if you ask me.”

“Hm.” Ally eyed Mitchell, who was another one.

He lifted his eyebrows. “What?”

“I can see that you’re happy there won’t be traffic in or out of town today, that’s all. If I didn’t know you were here last night, I’d think you’d been over at the Top Hat buying rounds for Ernie.”

“Ernie buys his own rounds,” Betsy said. “Got a big court settlement from the state of Alaska when a bush pilot on state business crash-landed on Ernie’s property, knocking over the outhouse. See, Ernie doesn’t believe in indoor plumbing, either.”