by Carrie Doyle
“I’m Antonia.”
He wore a barely perceptible smile on his face, and yet his expression warmly conveyed a feeling that they were both in on the same joke. It was an intimate gaze, one that wholly embraced a person and created a cozy space for just the two of them. Antonia knew intellectually that it was just Nick Darrow’s innate charisma, but he had it on a much higher level than most people. That’s why he’s so famous, thought Antonia. He just has a spectacular, glowing energy.
Whatever it was, Antonia was totally starstruck. She couldn’t believe this was happening; it was surreal. And it was all so casual, as if he were just some guy on the beach. But he wasn’t; he was Nick Friggin’ Darrow! And although Nick was now in his late forties and definitely not the gorgeous poster boy that he once was, age totally agreed with him—he was more smoldering than ever. He still had very thick dark hair, albeit now graying at the temples, a strong jaw, blue eyes, which were amped up by the orange Patagonia that he was wearing, and plump lips. Kissable lips, Antonia thought. Yes, everything about Nick Darrow was sexy, including the zesty aftershave that she could slightly smell from a few feet away and the way his faded jeans hugged his muscular legs.
“So, are you on vacation? Some people would say you picked the wrong time of year, but I’d say you picked the very best time to be in East Hampton,” said Nick with a smile. “I love it when the town clears out.”
He bent down and picked up a ball and threw it near the breaking waves. Both of his dogs took off in furious pursuit.
“No, I actually moved here a few months ago.”
“And you waited for the worst possible days to take up walking on the beach?”
He motioned to the barren sand around them. The sun had barely peeked out, and the breeze was ripping through the dunes as if getting the hell out of dodge. Even the waves appeared grumpy, lazily smacking the shore like a teenager dragged out of bed too early. The air was chilly, though the weatherman had promised temperatures in the high fifties.
Antonia laughed. “No. I used to walk later in the day. But now for work it’s better for me to leave early so I can be there when the guests wake up.”
“Where do you work?”
“I bought the Windmill Inn on Main Street.”
“Oh, that’s you.”
He said it in a way that made Antonia feel self-conscious. Had he heard about her? Was this a practical joke? Antonia peeked around to see if some camera crew would pop out of the bushes. Maybe he was a Nick Darrow impersonator? She studied him with squinted eyes. No, it was definitely him.
“Yes, I bought the inn. I did indeed,” said Antonia. I did indeed? She didn’t really talk like that. What was she, eighty? She wished she could say something really cool right now, but all she could think of adding was, “and I’m the chef at our restaurant.”
“Really?” he said in a drawn-out, interested manner. “What kind of food?”
“I guess you’d call it American. Just sort of home cooking. Things people like to eat. Or at least, things I like to eat.”
He smiled. “And what do you like to eat?”
“Oh, you know, well, to be honest, my favorite food is bread. I could eat that all day long. And I don’t discriminate: it can be sourdough, raisin nut, olive, pretzel rolls, you name it…” she realized she was rambling, and about gluten too. “But as I can’t serve bread exclusively, I also have things like roast chicken with crispy skin, baked stuffed lobster with bourbon-spiked butter, grilled pork loin, hash browns cooked in duck fat. Butterscotch pudding with whipped cream.”
“Wow! Sounds great! You’re making me hungry.”
“You’ll have to come by. I mean…if you’re around. Come by. No pressure.” She was embarrassed she was so forward, so she quickly added, “You know where the inn is, right?” She felt herself become redder.
“Of course. Everyone knows.”
“Yes, it’s been there for over a hundred and fifty years.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“Sure. It’s a small town.”
“Right.”
Antonia wasn’t sure what to add to that. One of Nick’s dogs returned and dropped the slobbery tennis ball at his feet and he, in turn, picked it up and hurled it across the sand. Antonia could sense the strength of his muscles even through his fleece. The dog took off again, bounding across the sand to retrieve it, with Nick watching him. Antonia realized that she was watching Nick watch the dog and instantly felt foolish. Was she supposed to linger or should she keep walking? The uncertainty made her blush deeper. To her relief, Nick returned his attention to her.
“So you’re not worried about the curse?”
“The curse?”
“Sure, you have to have heard about it before you bought the inn.”
“You mean that the innkeepers there die under suspicious circumstances?”
“Yes, that one.”
Whatever red was hovering in Antonia’s cheeks now drained. “Well, no one told me before I bought it. In fact, the first time I heard anything about it was last night. Now you’re the second person to alert me. So what’s the deal? Am I like, the biggest moron in town? Did I make the biggest mistake of my life? Which by the way, by all accounts, now sounds like it will end shortly.”
Nick Darrow laughed. He had a big, booming, hearty laugh that made the people who made him laugh feel intensely gratified.
“I don’t know. I’m sure it’s just local legend. I mean, there was nothing suspicious about the last guy who died. I think it was a heart attack.”
“I’ve heard it might have been a bee sting.”
“Bee sting, whatever. A bee sting isn’t suspicious, actually.”
“A bee sting in August isn’t suspicious,” replied Antonia. “But a bee sting in December is.”
Nick smiled. “True.”
“What about the guy before that guy?”
“I don’t really know, I just heard maybe he poisoned himself or something and they weren’t sure what happened.”
“Poisoned himself?” asked Antonia, her voice rising. “Great, just great. How many months do you give me?”
Nick put his hand firmly on Antonia’s shoulder. The warmth from his palm trickled down all the way to her toes.
“I have total faith that you’ll break the curse.”
She looked deep into his eyes and wished desperately that she was another type of woman: the type who could now reel off a coy, flirty little response, but instead she blurted, “I have bad luck.”
“You do?”
Antonia instantly began to backtrack. There was nothing tackier than someone unloading all his or her problems on a total stranger. Especially total strangers who happened to be movie stars. “I mean, just kidding. Anyway, how does everyone seem to know about this curse? Is there a library book I could take out to get to the bottom of it?”
“I don’t think anyone has written a book about it just yet,” said Nick.
“Okay, then how am I going to prepare myself to stave off my potential suspicious death? I need to be ready in case I accidentally pick something poisonous from my garden and make a soup out of it.”
“You know what you can do? I’ve got a friend at the East Hampton Star, Larry Lipper, who covers the crime beat. His office is on Main Street. Just stop by and tell him I sent you.”
“The crime beat?”
Nick laughed again. “Yeah, I know. He mostly writes about DUIs or reports on those 911 calls that people make where they think they heard something but it turned out to be a neighbor. But it doesn’t matter. If there was anything to the inn story, Larry will know.”
* * *
Antonia was oscillating between two extremes as she made her way back to the inn. On the one hand, she felt extreme elation at the fact that she had just had an entire conversation with Nick Darrow. He was
handsome, he was nice, and he acted totally normal. It was literally as casual as talking to the guy at the hardware store, total chitchat. And yet this was a guy who had been voted People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive”! But all of that excitement was tempered by the confirmation that the inn had a curse, and if lore proved true, her untimely demise was imminent. Antonia smacked her steering wheel as she headed along Ocean Avenue. Damn, had it been a totally stupid move buying the place? What had Genevieve talked her into? She had wanted a new start, a new adventure, but one that ended in homicide wasn’t exactly what she had in mind. She felt duped. Should she call her broker and give him a piece of her mind? Demand her money back? The inn had already given her a fair share of problems in the six months she had owned it.
For one, the rambling three-story Georgian Revival building was built in the late 1840s and required constant maintenance. It was so run down when Antonia purchased it that it had taken a solid five months to update the rooms and bathrooms and renovate the kitchen to a professional chef’s kitchen that would accommodate the restaurant. She had totally missed the summer season and had to delay her opening, which was a major loss of potential income. And when one upgrade was finished, something else always needed to be done: the exterior had to be repainted white, the shutters needed a fresh coat of green, the front yard had to be nuked and new sod laid and the brick path needed to be fixed before someone fell down and broke their neck. The to-do list was endless, and the fact that she was a bit of a control freak/perfectionist didn’t help. The one thing Antonia had on her side was naivete, because if she had known what she was getting into, she never would have done it.
But now, to be honest, Antonia was glad that she had been ignorant. She loved her inn. She loved the antiques that she had chosen for the parlor and the crooked floors in the entryway and the unpredictable twists and turns of the hallways. And she loved East Hampton. The fluidity of the place appealed to her; she appreciated the way that the population ebbed and flowed, just like the tides at Georgica Beach. And now she loved everything a bit more because she had just met Nick Darrow and although it was silly, it was so cool that he had even heard of her. Or well, not her, but that he had heard that someone had bought the inn, and that was her. Did that even make sense? she wondered.
The interaction had put a spring in her step and even made her a little flaky. She was usually good with names but upon returning to the inn, when she went to greet the couple from Rhode Island who was staying in room 2, their names escaped her. And later, when the farmer came from Pike’s to take her order for next week’s vegetables, she completely blanked that she needed potatoes, which would require a phone call to amend. In fact, she was so distracted all morning that she didn’t even notice when Lucy Corning, the manager of the inn, came to find her in the kitchen. Antonia had been stirring the mix for ricotta doughnuts, dreamily fantasizing about kissing Nick by the dunes on the beach when she felt a tap on her shoulder.
“Antonia, are you okay?”
“Huh?” Antonia jumped, startled back into reality. She blinked several times before realizing where she was, and unfortunately, where she wasn’t. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”
“I was calling your name, but you looked like you were a million miles away.”
Antonia blushed. “I was just thinking about something.”
A slight smile crept across Lucy’s face as if she knew exactly what Antonia was thinking about, but she immediately dismissed it and got down to business.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt you. But we have a situation.”
Antonia sighed. She glanced at the small mousy woman in front of her. Lucy was probably in her early-to-mid-forties, waif thin, with one of those nondescript hair colors (Is it brown? Is it dirty blond?) and one of those nondescript hairstyles (Bob? Shoulder length?) She was neither unattractive nor attractive—somehow just neutral. And clearly somewhere along the line, Lucy had been encouraged to go with an eclectic, vintage look because she insisted on wearing quirky black-framed glasses, and either her trademark cashmere sweater set and retro A-line skirts, or dresses that made her look like an aging 1950s schoolgirl. Come to think of it, Lucy had even mentioned once that she worked at a vintage clothing store and found her style there. Antonia had raised her eyebrows, but kept mum.
Antonia didn’t mean to be judgmental because Lucy had proven to be a competent employee—so competent, in fact, that Antonia had promoted her to manager from her previous position of bookkeeper. Lucy was amazingly prudent in helping keep Antonia in line with a strict budget. It was like having an in-house system of checks and balances. And it was a bonus that she had been working for the inn under Gordon, because she had the technical hospitality background that Antonia didn’t possess yet. Antonia had high hopes for her, except she did notice that Lucy seemed to appear gleeful every time she had to report bad news, like a cancellation or a broken toilet.
“What’s up?” Antonia finally asked.
“It’s not good,” said Lucy gravely.
* * *
“Ladies, ladies, be quiet! It’s Saturday morning, many of my guests are sleeping in. Please stop, oh geez, stop!”
There was so much yelling that Antonia’s voice fell on deaf ears.
After working her way around the bottom of the staircase, with Lucy hot on her heels, Antonia swiftly inserted herself into the middle of the two women who were loudly fighting in the front hall of the inn. On one side was a voluptuous blond woman around the age of forty-five, who wore a jean jacket over a scoop-neck spandex floral dress. On the other side was a wiry, pencil-thin brunette of about sixty, clad in a white zippered windbreaker over blue slacks. Both women were shrieking obscenities at each other, with the brunette desperately trying to seize hold of the small cardboard box that the blond was clutching in her arms.
“Stop this right now!” bellowed Antonia at the top of her lungs.
They momentarily fell silent. From the doorway, Lucy gave Antonia a decisive nod of approval.
“Now, I don’t know what is going on, but I know that this is my inn, and you ladies can’t act like this here. Now tell me, what the heck is going on?”
They instantly spoke at once, their words accusing and angry, and the tone rapidly rose from normal speaking voices to a shouting match. Antonia put her thumb and index finger to her mouth and blew a whistle. (She was so proud that she knew how to do that; the lifeguard at the YWCA pool had taught her when she was fourteen.)
“Let’s try this again. I’ll start with you, Naomi. What is this about?”
The brunette—Naomi Haslett—shook her head with exaggerated dismay. She was the late Gordon Haslett’s sister, and had been the co-owner of the inn along with him. Her hair was pitch black—the color of shoe polish—and cut bluntly into a Louise Brooks bob, with razor-straight bangs slicing across her wrinkled forehead. Her face was pale and craggy, and Antonia couldn’t help but think that her hair color actually aged her. Naomi would do much better with a softer look across the board, especially since every interaction Antonia had had with Naomi proved that her character was as sharp as her haircut.
Naomi pointed at the other woman, the sexy blond whose name fittingly happened to be Barbie, and who was Gordon’s girlfriend at the time of his death. “Antonia, I think you should call the police. She is trespassing on your property.”
This was interrupted by Barbie’s furious rebuttal. “I am not! It’s my stuff!”
“Barbie, you will have a chance to talk,” said Antonia, silencing her. “Naomi, continue.”
Naomi gave Antonia a slight smile while Barbie glowered. “Like I said, Barbie is stealing. That box in her hands? It’s yours—”
“Is not! It’s mine!”
“Barbie!”
“Listen, Antonia,” said Naomi. “When I sold you the inn, I sold it lock, stock, and barrel. Everything from the doors to the hinges, right?”
�
��Yes,” concurred Antonia.
“Well, according to our agreement, that included the boxes that were in the storage areas. And now this woman has snuck into your inn and is taking your box!”
“It’s mine!” protested Barbie.
Antonia turned to Barbie. “Now let’s hear from you.”
Barbie Fawcett pressed the box firmly to her chest, smashing her ample bosom in the process. “You said, Antonia, that I could take any of my belongings out of the inn. I had forgotten about this box, so I came here to retrieve it.” Her voice was flustered and husky, and in the tussle with Naomi, bits of mascara had flaked off her lashes and landed in black dots on her rouged cheeks like measles.
“It’s not your box,” snapped Naomi.
“Yes, Naomi, it is mine.”
“May I ask, what is in the box?” asked Antonia.
From behind Antonia, Lucy spoke. “It’s nothing, some old notebooks that Gordon used to jot down to-do lists and things like that.”
“Lucy, stay the hell out of it,” snapped Barbie, craning her long swan neck in Lucy’s direction.
“Barbie, that’s not necessary…” said Antonia.
“Does she really need to be here for this?” asked Barbie impatiently. “I’m just wondering when that woman will disappear forever. She’s like a tick that just keeps hanging on. Doesn’t know when to leave. Lucy, it’s over. Go home.”
Lucy reddened. “Say what you want, Barbie. But I ran Gordon’s office. I went through everything when he died. I’m not sure what you’re looking for, but it’s just a bunch of office notes.”
Barbie tapped her foot impatiently and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Is this how you’ll get your revenge?”
“I’m telling you the facts,” insisted Lucy.
“See, Barbie? You’re not going to find anything that you claim is here because it doesn’t exist,” said Naomi impatiently.
“I’m lost here. What is Barbie looking for in the first place?” asked Antonia.
Naomi shook her head with irritation. “She claims my brother had another will in which she stands to inherit the inn,” said Naomi. “But it’s all a lie. An exasperating lie. We just came from court where she is still trying to obtain a piece of my inheritance. But Gordon would have never left this…this…person…anything. I’m positive.”
