Tiffany Girl by Deeanne Gist

“That is quite enough.”
    He flexed his fists. “I’ll not have you becoming ill. She can jolly well wait until I’m done and the room has warmed or she can come back tomorrow.”
    “She will be working tomorrow.”
    “Then she can go straight to the de—”
    “ Mr. Wilder. ” Another warning, this one fiercer than the last.
    He cranked the stem with sharp turns until the gears came to the end of the wick carrier.
    “He’s right,” Miss Jayne interjected into the yawning silence. “Quite right. I wasn’t thinking. I’ll wait.”
    Finally. Some inkling of sense. Praise the saints that be. Maybe now she’d leave.
    “Come and sit beside me, then, while we wait.” Mrs. Dinwiddie’s voice held great affection and not a little reassurance, as if Miss Jayne were the one who’d been wronged. Grabbing the wick with two fingers, he lifted it up and pulled it out of the carrier.
    “No, no,” she said. “That’s all right. I’ll just do some warm-up sketches.” Her charcoal began to scrape along the pages of her sketchpad.
    Mrs. Dinwiddie did not pick her sewing back up. A sure sign of her displeasure. With him. And it was all Miss Jayne’s fault. He and Mrs. Dinwiddie had been having a perfectly fine visit until she’d entered into their conversation, then actually shown up in the flesh.
    Lining the cotton tails of the new wick onto either side of the wick tube, he held them in place with one hand, brought his pocketknife to his teeth, opened it, then used it to tuck the tails down inside the tank. As he worked the wick down, the hairs on the back of his neck began to rise. Somehow, someway, he knew he was being stared at. Not by Mrs. Dinwiddie, but by her .
    He slanted a glance at her. She was drawing on her sketchpad. She flicked her gaze to him and froze. He immediately returned his attention to what he was doing, refusing to look at her again. It took a little persuasion, but he finally slid the wick down until the adjuster made contact with the wick carrier.
    He wiped his brow with his shoulder. The gears were meshed. By the time he leveled the burning surface, reassembled the tank, filled it with fuel, and installed it back into the heater, the extended silence in the room had caused the tension to rise to even greater heights.
    “We’ll need to give it fifteen minutes to soak up the kerosene before I can light it,” he said, collecting the discarded wick and drop cloth.
    “That will be fine.” Mrs. Dinwiddie’s voice was civil, but not warm. Nothing like it normally was.
    He looked at her.
    Her lips were pressed together, her eyes full of censure.
    His chest tightened. Scooping up his mess, he scrambled to his feet, swept past Miss Jayne, and headed out back to dispose of it. It wasn’t until he returned to light the heater that he saw Miss Jayne’s sketch.
    He pulled up short. A muscular man with broad shoulders and curling, untamed hair held a gallery in one hand, while he crammed a wick into it with the other, elbow out. The lines were quick, rough, and careless, yet he knew immediately what it was. Who it was.
    She sat in the chair beside Mrs. Dinwiddie, both of them looking at him. They’d ceased speaking when he’d appeared. Had they been talking about him?
    “Excuse me,” he mumbled, then lit the wick, closed the heater, returned the Vaseline to the dresser, and left, feeling angry, confused, and hurt. A hurt not unlike the one he’d felt many times before when he’d been shut inside his room at his grandparents’ house and stood in front of the bolted-down window, looking out at the world from behind a barrier as impenetrable as a solid brick wall.

CARTOON—PAPER PATTERN—COMPLETED WINDOW  12

“Pressing down with her stylus, she outlined each individual color on a giant cartoon Grace de Luze had painted with watercolor.”

CHAPTER
    16

    M r. Tiffany had been sequestered in Agnes Northrup’s office for almost forty-five minutes. Flossie glanced again at the woman’s