Love, Special Delivery. Melinda Curtis

       CHAPTER ONE

      “TELL ME THIS isn’t where we’re going to live. It’s too...too...icky.”

      “What’s wrong?” Mandy Zapien’s heart had been clinging to a position in her throat for the last hour of the drive to Harmony Valley. It clawed a degree higher as she pushed past her teenage sister to get a good look inside the house they’d left seven years earlier.

      Same dark chocolate shag. Same tan-and-navy plaid couch under the front picture window. Same oak side table with Grandma’s sewing basket next to it and the fake ficus in a plastic planter Mandy had Bedazzled when she was ten. Nothing was new or out of place.

      Mandy’s heart slid back into her stress-strapped chest.

      Icky? It was home and it was vacant. The choke hold on her emotions loosened. “It’s perfect.” Just the way Grandpa, Mandy and Olivia had left it after Grandma died. A testament to the life Grandma and Grandpa had built together before lost jobs had forced them to move. Just the way Grandpa had wanted it to be when he returned after retirement.

      “Seriously?” Olivia darted around Mandy, holding her cell phone and panning around the room, videotaping. “I opened the door and there was a nuclear explosion of dust.” Her yellow flip-flops snapped as she made her way into the kitchen. Her pale bare legs looked long because her jean shorts were too short.

      Mandy had considered asking Olivia to change this morning and throw away the shorts, or at the very least roll down the thin cuffs, but as the guardian of a seventeen-year-old, she had to pick her battles and not break eggs. Today, moving day, was not the time to upset her little sister.

      Mandy moved to the fireplace, pressing her hand against the solid red brick. It was as sturdy as their grandparents had once been. Would they approve of what she was doing? “I have good memories of this place.”

      “Really? I don’t remember much about Harmony Valley.” Olivia’s voice bounced off bare walls.

      The dust. The emptiness. The relief.

      Mandy breathed deeply. Their grandparents may be dead, but they were going to be all right. It didn’t matter if her sister didn’t remember life here. Olivia claimed not to recall the tinsel-covered Christmas tree their grandparents put in the corner every year. Or the photos they’d staged of the girls on the hearth on Christmas morning wearing the annual holiday sweaters Grandma had knitted.

      “Hey, the fridge is running.”

      “Is it...” Mandy’s heart crept back into her throat. “Is it empty?” Mandy hurried into the kitchen in time to see Olivia pry the sticky refrigerator door open.

      “Ew. That’s disgusting.” Olivia stopped filming and covered her nose.

      Mandy peeked in. What once might have been a small basket of strawberries (based on the fermented smell) was now a glob of mold. That hadn’t happened overnight. Mandy shut the door, more convinced than ever that no one had lived here recently. More hopeful that no one would visit while they stayed a few weeks.

      Olivia and her flip-flops snapped their way down the hall toward the bedrooms. “Hey, I recognize our room.” She disappeared inside. “Why did we leave the bunk beds?”

      “Why?” Mandy leaned against the door frame. There were more good memories in this room than bad. “Because I’d slept on top for ten years, and at twenty-five I wasn’t going to do that anymore. And don’t get any ideas.” At thirty-two she was too old to be sleeping on a bunk. “These are out. We’re bringing in your bed and you’re sleeping in here alone.” She’d take her grandparents’ room. “No arguments.”

      “It’s freaky how you can read my mind.” But Olivia looked happy, which was a welcome change since they’d had to leave her friends and support group behind.

      “Do you remember this?” Mandy closed the door, shutting them inside. They had time for a little reminiscing before the day’s summer heat made it too hot to unload their truck. “This is where Grandma tracked our height.” On the white frame of a tall slim mirror on the back of the door.

      The two crowded into the reflection. Mandy, the tallest of the pair, looking too thin and too young with her slight smile and thick dark hair in messy ponytails. Her red tank was as baggy as the circles under her eyes. She’d been worried about her new job, about the move, about the bills, the house, Olivia, about...well...everything.

      Olivia’s frame was deceptively solid, as if she’d put on extra adolescent weight preparing for a growth spurt. Her soft brown hair was only an inch long, making her brown eyes and wide mouth seem more prominent.

      “Was I ever that short?” Olivia leaned closer to the door, peering at a mark about three feet off the floor.

      “You were a petite thing.” Mandy nudged her aside and opened the door, leading the way to the master bedroom. “You should feel lucky you didn’t get my height or my shoe size.”

      Neither one of them opened the second bedroom door.

      Grandma’s wide bureau sat in the master bedroom in front of a wall with maroon-striped velvet wallpaper. The solid cherry dresser had a white marble top and a large framed mirror attached to the back.

      “Grandpa and I couldn’t lift this, so we left it when we moved.” Mandy opened a top drawer. It was filled with her grandmother’s colorful polyester scarves. “He left most of her things.” And then she said with forced casualness, “Do you remember Grandma’s wedding ring?”

      “Only because you told me it was made of brass.” Olivia opened the closet. “Her clothes are still here. They smell of lavender.” While Mandy fingered her grandmother’s scarves, Olivia moved clothes across the rod, scraping wire hangers over wood. “There aren’t very many clothes in here.”

      Dismay made a special delivery to Mandy’s gut with a one-two punch. “That can’t be.” Grandma had never walked out of a clothing store without a purchase. She’d believed in retail therapy. When they’d moved after her death, Grandma’s closet had been jammed full of pants, blouses and dresses, many with the tags still on.

      But the clothes with price tags were gone. Mandy rummaged through the mostly empty bureau. Only the scarf drawer seemed untouched.

      An old memory lurched from her past, like a zombie coming to life after a long restless sleep.

      Grandma’s voice, pitched low. “If you need money, Teri, ask. Don’t go searching through my drawers.”

      “I was just admiring your scarves.” Mandy’s mother slid the drawer closed, looking like a model in a short, clingy black cocktail dress and black heels more appropriate for a hotel bar than Harmony Valley. “They’re so pretty.”

      Neither one of them acknowledged eight-year-old Mandy lingering in the hallway, eavesdropping as she held on to the hope that Mom wasn’t going to leave again.

      “Save that tone for your father. You hate those scarves.” Her grandmother’s voice wasn’t sweet. It didn’t comfort, not the way it did when she talked to Mandy. “Those scarves remind you of my cancer. They taunt you because I didn’t die.”

      Mandy had stumbled back in the hallway and then ran into her room. It wasn’t until the door was closed and she’d burrowed under the covers that she’d realized her mother was laughing.

      “Do you think...?” Olivia came to stand near Mandy, unable to complete her question.

      It didn’t matter. Mandy knew what her