Warm Nights in Magnolia Bay

by Babette de Jongh

  Abby hadn’t embraced her gifts yet, but one day, she would. One day, Abby would receive a communication that couldn’t be denied or passed off as her imagination. Reva wished she could do more to help Abby to recognize her abilities. But as Grayson had told her many times, “You can’t push the river.” She could only toss seeds upon the water and hope they would float to a fertile place that would support their growth.

  Still feeling Grayson’s presence beside her, Reva wheeled her suitcase out a set of double doors to a curbside pickup lane that smelled of car exhaust and stale cigarette smoke.

  At the preappointed spot, a spindly, bored-looking man wearing camo pants and a plain green shirt leaned against a white-paneled van. Reva had expected a vehicle with a logo for the wildlife center on the side, but this looked more like a prison van. All her insecurities and doubts about the wisdom of leaving home for so long rose up to choke her, but she swallowed them down. “Hello?”

  Immersed in his cell phone and his cigarette, the van guy seemed not to notice her. He took a slow drag from his cigarette, blew the smoke out sideways, then looked at her through one squinting eye. “Sorry. I’m a little hard of hearing. Come again?”

  She spoke a little louder. “Is this the transport van to the wildlife refuge?”

  “Yep, and you’re the last to load up.” He dropped his cigarette and ground it into the pavement with his boot. “You ready?”

  She remembered the feeling of being protected and guided by Grayson, and she pulled that feeling around her like a blanket until she almost felt as if his hand rested at her waist. “I’m ready.”

  The driver hauled her suitcase into the back of the van, then waited while she dug into her purse and brought out a few dollars to plunk into his palm. He pocketed the money and grinned. “Get on in.”

  The row seats behind the driver were all filled with college-age students, many of whom had backpacks taking up the space beside them. Reva hovered in the van’s open doorway. “Hello, everyone. I’m Reva. It’s nice to meet y’all.”

  A chorus of unenthusiastic “hey” and “hi” and “hello” responses were even further diminished by the fact that only one of Reva’s fellow passengers managed to look up from their cell phones. But from the middle seat, a pretty girl with purple-tipped dreadlocks waved and smiled. “Hey. I’m Dana. You can sit next to me.”

  Dana scooted closer to the window and stowed her backpack under the seat. Reva squeezed past the beefy guy with military-short blond hair on the end of the row to take the middle seat.

  Startled, he looked up from his phone, then smiled. “Oh, hey.” He took out one earbud and moved his long legs out of her way.

  Reva got settled, then held out a hand and introduced herself to each of the kids on her row. As the van trundled out of the Miami International Airport complex, the kids in the two other rows looked up from their devices and started chatting with one another. A girl from the back put a hand on Reva’s shoulder and introduced herself. A guy from the front turned around and said hi. Feeling more included, Reva relaxed. She reminded herself that kids these days used their phones as a way of coping with social anxiety the way she had once kept her nose buried in a book.

  Once the van passed the brightly lit streets and began to bump along dark highways and back roads toward their final destination, everyone disappeared again into their electronic devices. She turned to her own cell phone for solace as well.

  Hey, Abby, she typed. My flight landed safely and I’m on my way to the internship. Wish me luck! I hope everything’s going well back at the farm. How was the school tour today? How is the new kitten? Did you get an appointment at the vet’s office for tomorrow?

  She hit Send, then tucked her cell phone into her purse’s side pocket. Then she stared out the window at endless pine forests until the lumbering lurch of the van lulled her to sleep.

  * * *

  Quinn put on his headphones, turned up the volume on his playlist, and began the painstaking process of regrouting the vintage floor tiles in the pool-house bathroom.

  First, he scraped out the top layer of the old grout with a grout saw—a small, handheld, inefficient tool that made his hands cramp.

  The whole time he did it, he fumed.

  How in the hell was he going to sell this place for a profit with a damn petting zoo next door? He might’ve just sunk a bunch of money—the last of his money, in fact—into a horrible mistake. Even after agonizing over all the potential pros and cons, he had failed to uncover a bigger con than his worst imaginings could have conceived of.

  He scraped grout until his knees ached from inching along on the hard floor. Then he applied new grout, using a float to smash the gritty goop into the lines and smooth it level.

  Why would Delia sell him this place without full disclosure of a deal-breaking drawback? Had she deliberately shown the property on a weekend knowing that weekdays sounded like schoolyard-playground mayhem all day long?

  He pulled out one earbud to check if the mayhem was still ongoing.

  Yes. The screaming went on all fucking day long.

  “Time for a break.” He would have to let the grout set for exactly thirty minutes before wiping off the hazy residue. His knees creaked when he stood with all the grace of an elderly monk rising from another round of useless prayers. When he reached out to steady himself on the doorframe, his fingers felt like sandpaper on the smooth painted surface. The grout had sucked all the moisture out of his skin. His hands felt—and looked—like the Sahara in dry season.

  He had earned a beer by the nasty green pool. Yes indeed, his crepe-dry fingers assured him, he had.

  But the beer he opened by the pool lacked the promise of respite, because any hope of relaxation was swamped by the happy shrieks of children running and playing next door. And, good God, was one of the little heathens climbing the hedge-covered chain-link fence between the two properties?

  Quinn stood and stalked to the hedge, which some grimy-faced young boy had just managed to conquer. The kid’s triumphant gap-toothed grin faltered a fraction when his eyes locked with Quinn’s hostile gaze. “Hello, misther,” the kid lisped as his spindly body draped over the hedge’s bowing branches. “Don’t be mad. I’m just playin’ around.”

  “How ’bout you just play around on the other side of the fence where you’re supposed to be? I’d hate to have to tattle to your teacher.”

  The kid looked over his shoulder and back again. “You don’t know my teacher.”

  “Wanna bet?” Quinn pulled his cell phone from his back pocket and started punching in random numbers. “I know her well enough to know that she’ll make you sit by yourself in the bus for the rest of the day while everyone else gets to have fun at the farm.”

  The boy’s eyes opened wide. “Please, misther. Don’t tell her. Don’t…” He backpedaled and fell off the hedge with an “Oomph.”

  Quinn stepped onto a sturdy low-hanging branch and looked over the hedge to make sure the kid hadn’t been hurt when he fell. Apparently not; all churning elbows and trailing shoelaces, he was sprinting back to the safety of the group.

  Quinn hopped off the hedge, then chuckled and took a sip of his beer.

  But his mirth was short-lived. If the current commotion next door was any indication, no matter how much money, time, and effort he sank into this place, the perfect buyer he had imagined would never materialize. He had thought that it would be a recently retired couple. His mind’s eye conjured the visual of a stout man who enjoyed fishing and a plump woman who enjoyed gardening.

  The man would launch his aluminum fishing boat from the adjacent dead-end street that ended in a cracked concrete boat ramp—or from their own private boat dock if Quinn managed to acquire the waterfront land. The woman would sit by the pool and read romance novels. She’d use a monogrammed shovel from Restoration Hardware to plant daylilies in the estate’s rich, well-draine
d soil, an ideal mix of sand and silt washed up from the bay for the last hundred years.

  Quinn was pretty sure that neither of those imagined retirees would be enthused about the idea of baby outlaws climbing the hedge, falling into the pool, and drowning so the kids’ parents could sue them for everything they’d worked for all their lives.

  He sat in the folding stadium chair and kept an eye on the empty hedge. Feeling antsy and unfulfilled, haunted by the image of the perfect retired couple and the futility of renovating a property they’d never decide to purchase, he made a quick decision. No time for making a list of pros and cons; something had to be done. It had to be done now, and it might require drastic measures.

  Chapter 3

  Quinn had invested everything in this plan to move here and rebuild his reputation, his life, and his relationship with his son. He could have turned his back on the past, bought a condo in the Keys, and left all his regrets behind. But one thing—one person, his son, to be exact—held him back. If there was any small sliver of a chance that he could be a part of Sean’s life, he had to take it.

  He dialed the realty office, and some peon answered on the second ring, her voice way too chirpy for his taste. Blah, blah, blah—he held the phone away from his ear until she got to the important part: “How may I help you?”

  He might have unloaded some of his frustration on the poor receptionist, but whatever. Anyway, within minutes he was speaking with the agent who’d sold him this piece-of-shit property.

  “Delia,” he roared. “Were you aware…” He went off on her about how he’d gambled everything on his plan to flip this property and make a sorely needed profit. She knew all this already, but it felt good to vent.

  To her credit, she listened and said nothing but “Um-hmm, I hear you,” until he’d worn himself out talking.

  He needed a win. Goddammit, he’d been doing nothing but losing for so long, he needed—no, he deserved—a win. “Look,” he finished. “I won’t be able to flip this estate—and you won’t be able to make the commission you’d been hoping for on the resale—unless we get rid of the petting zoo next door. What do you propose to do about this problem?”

  She talked for a while about zoning and variances and grandfathered permissions to keep livestock on land that had been annexed into the city of Magnolia Bay.

  “I don’t care about any of that.” He took another healthy swig of beer. “I just want you to fix the problem. Call City Hall. Circulate a petition. Do whatever you have to do. Just get that damn zoo gone. I have to be able to sell this place to a nice retired couple who can afford to buy it.”

  “Quinn, I’ve known you for almost a year.” Had sex with him a few times, too. “And I know you don’t really mean what you’re saying right now. Can’t you just talk to your neighbor and work it out?”

  “You want me to go over there and say, ‘Pretty please, stop making your living the way you have been for the last decade or so?’ How well do you think that’ll go over?”

  Delia whined about the time and effort and red tape involved in rescinding grandfathered permissions to keep farm animals in the city limits.

  “I don’t care,” he said again. “You showed me this place on a quiet Sunday afternoon, and I’ll bet you scheduled the showing then for a reason.”

  “Aw, Quinn, come on. Stop being dramatic.”

  “Come on yourself, Delia. You never even answer your phone on the weekends. I should have known something was up when you couldn’t meet me here during the week.”

  She declined to respond to that one. “I guess you need to vent, Quinn, so go ahead. I’ll listen till you’re done.”

  “Your lack of candor has caused me a big problem, and you need to fix it.” If he couldn’t sell this place, the money he had squirreled away for renovations wouldn’t be worth a thin dime. “Tell you what. I’ll pay you a ten-thousand-dollar bonus when you sell this estate for double what I paid for it. That’s on top of your normal commission.” He paused for a minute to let that sink in. “And remember that other little property you told me about.” Quinn gazed out over the landscape where a hundred acres of marshland met the bay. “If and when it goes up for sale, we can both quadruple our profits. Now. Can you, or can you not, make the zoo next door go away?”

  He heard her take a breath, then let it out.

  “Well?” He took another pull at his beer, only to find that the bottle was empty.

  “I’ll do what I can,” she said. “If I can.”

  “Fine. I’ll trust you to handle it, for your benefit as well as mine.”

  “I will,” Delia answered. “I’ll handle it.”

  “Good. Keep me posted.” Now that he had vented, he felt much more relaxed and easygoing than he had a half hour before. He strolled into the pool house, dumped the empty bottle in the kitchen’s recycle bin, then went to wipe down the bathroom tiles.

  He hummed and scrubbed, clinging to his pie-in-the-sky vision of the retired couple who would enjoy their happily-ever-after lives in the dream home he was determined to create here.

  * * *

  That evening, Abby dumped the day’s trash bags into the can by the road, thinking about the For Sale sign the motorcycle dude had discarded in the weeds in front of the neighboring estate. She had completely forgotten to tell Aunt Reva, and maybe that was a good thing, because Reva deserved at least a few days of bliss before hearing that the animal shelter she’d been campaigning for would never happen. Abby slammed the trash-can lid. “Oh well.”

  Reva had begged the Magnolia Bay City Council to buy the abandoned estate next door and convert it into a much-needed animal shelter for the city. She had even offered to run the shelter as an extension of Bayside Barn, since all the strays got dumped there, anyway.

  Abby looked down at Georgia. “Any bright ideas from the canine quarter?”

  Georgia, as usual, was on it. She tunneled through the tall grass toward the downed sign. Her gray speckles and black spots disappeared in the vegetation, but her white-tipped tail waved above the tasseled grasses, setting dandelion seeds free in the warm Louisiana air. After a minute or two of consideration, she came back grinning as if a direct line to the powers that be assured her everything would be okay.

  Abby wasn’t so sanguine, but Reva’s dog encouraged her to take the long view. “You think the city will buy the marshland behind here instead?” Not likely, since the bayside marshland behind the estates on this road wasn’t for sale. In addition, the water-soaked bog filled with snakes and alligators was unsuitable for anything but a great view unless someone had a fortune to spend on fill dirt.

  In other words, the land was unavailable, unsuitable, unattainable. Sort of like the men in Abby’s life.

  Bored with the ongoing conundrum, Georgia crossed the blacktop and sniffed at a tangle of smothering vines that edged the easement. While beautiful, cat’s-claw could strangle every living thing for miles, and it had made a good start here.

  Georgia growled and peered into the vine-covered forest with her hackles up.

  “What’s with the mean fur?” Abby imagined a pair of predatory gold eyes staring through the vines, watching. A chill poured through her. The fine hairs on her arms rose and she shivered. Cat walking over her grave, Reva would’ve said.

  Abby scolded herself the way her mom always had. “Abby Curtis, your imagination is as wild as your hair. There are no cougars or wolves in Louisiana.”

  The eerie feeling of being watched wasn’t just Abby’s imagination, though. Georgia felt it, too. The little dog barked at whatever was hiding in the cat’s-claw, threatening it with a don’t-make-me-come-in-there-and-get-you tone.

  “Come on, girl,” Abby coaxed. “Let’s go home.”

  Without warning, Georgia darted into the forest, sounding an alarm that would make most animals exit the scene immediately. But Georgia’s barking came from a fixed location
now. God only knew what poor creature cowered on the receiving end of her scolding. Not more kittens; Georgia never barked at cats. Probably a snake…

  Abby’s ever-present stream of worry escalated into a roaring river of panic. “Georgia!”

  * * *

  Wolf sat on his haunches under the canopy of vines. The little multicolored dog shot into the cat’s-claw forest and charged at him. Hackles raised, she lowered her copper eyebrow spots into a fierce scowl and growled. “You don’t belong here.”

  Wolf looked away, showing deference.

  Georgia advanced. “What are you doing here? Go away.”

  Wolf hunkered down and crawled backward, retreating farther into the shadows. He refused to meet the challenge in her intelligent brown eyes, but he tried to use his body language to send a message of peace. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “You aren’t supposed to be here,” she insisted. “Go home.”

  He eased back until his tail brushed the front wall of the half-roofed house hidden beneath the grasping vines. He’d been sheltering here ever since his human caretaker drove him far from home and shoved him off the back of the truck.

  Discarded in disgrace.

  He didn’t understand why, even after days of hunger and thirst and thinking, thinking, thinking.

  The woman’s voice called out. “Georgia. Get back here, now.” Beneath the command was fear, concern, love. His chest felt as heavy as the water-filled doormat he had once—in his exuberant puppyhood—dragged off the porch and torn up.