Silver Girl by Elin Hilderbrand Page B

holds four thousand gallons of water, but this job is so big I may need to hook up to your outdoor spigot to fill my reserve tank. Can you show me where that is?”
    “I can,” Connie said. “It’s around here.” She led him to the side of the house and showed him where her garden hose was coiled. He wasn’t looking at the house, however—he was looking at the view of the ocean.
    “You have quite a spot,” he said. “In good old Tom Nevers. I forget how breathtaking it can be out here.”
    “Yes,” she said. “The land had been in my husband’s family since the nineteen twenties, but we only built the house fifteen years ago. And then my husband died in two thousand nine, so now it’s just me.”
    “Funny,” Dan said, still looking at the water. “My wife died in two thousand nine. Breast cancer.”
    “Brain cancer,” Connie said.
    They were quiet for a moment, and Connie couldn’t help but think of her friend Lizbet who had, for two and a half years, been encouraging Connie to go to a support group so she could meet people who were going through the same thing she was.
    Connie looked at Dan Flynn and smiled. “I’ll go take care of those windows,” she said.
    “Great,” he said.

    Connie bounded into the house. She felt more energized than she had in months.
    She closed the windows on the first floor and watched Dan move around his truck, turning knobs, pulling out a thick blue ridged hose. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and running shoes. He had a buzz cut, brown hair turning gray, and a day of growth on his face like that newly retired NFL quarterback, which she found sexy. Sexy? She couldn’t believe she was thinking this way.
    Connie caught sight of herself in the mirror. She had lost a lot of sparkle in the past two and a half years—but did she really look so bad for fifty? Her hair was still strawberry blond, more strawberry in the winter, more blond in the summer. She had her mother’s good genes to thank for that because Veronica had gone to the grave at sixty-eight with a full head of natural red. Connie had green eyes, a light tan, some freckles, some sun spots. Her skin wasn’t great; she had never been able to stay out of the sun. She was out of shape although she was very thin from skipping meals. Her nails were a mess, and her eyebrows. She needed to start taking care of herself again. She needed to exercise.
    Ha! All this in response to the cute power-washing guy. Meredith was going to die laughing.
    Connie went upstairs to close the second-floor windows. Dan had started working. The noise was incredible; it sounded like the house was being attacked by fighter jets. Connie hurried to shut all the windows. She could see Dan Flynn bracing the hose against his hip, shooting a stream of water at the house that was moving so fast, it looked solid. Dan’s body was shaking like he was operating a jackhammer; all the muscles in his arms were popping. The whole thing was rather phallic.
    “Meredith,” Connie said. “Come here, you have to see this.”
    There was no response. Connie was pretty sure the paint was coming off. There were green puddles in the yard now, the color of radioactive waste.
    “Meredith?” Connie called.
    Connie finished with the windows facing the front of the house and, just to be safe, she shut the windows on either side of the house, even though those rooms would get murderously hot. The house had central air-conditioning—but, like the alarm system, Connie never turned it on.
    She moved into the hallway. The door to Meredith’s room was shut. Connie remembered the blank look on her face as she sat at the table, and the way she recited the names of the investors. (She had committed nearly three thousand of the names to memory, she said, as a kind of penance. It was how she’d filled her days in the New York apartment after Freddy had been taken away.)
    Connie had a bad feeling. She knocked on the door.
    “Meredith?” she said. No answer. She could