The Cliffside Inn

by Jessie Newton

  Her mind wandered along the path where Aaron was, and bit by bit, the room lost the flowers and stripes her father had once loved. She normally tossed everything in a huge garbage bin in the middle of the room, but she didn’t stress out if she missed. There was always stuff to pick up and place in the bin, and she sometimes had to empty it in order to be able to lift it and take it out to the main Dumpster.

  She’d upgraded that to getting emptied three times a week since her progress on the inn was moving faster than she’d anticipated. With Robin, Alice, and Kelli coming to help, they’d been able to clean out almost all of the rooms now.

  Eloise had two left on the second floor, and after she took all the trash out of the room where she’d spent the morning, she set up her trash can, her Bluetooth speaker, and a fresh bottle of ice-cold water in the second-to-last guest room that needed to be demolished.

  She’d had a plumbing expert out to the inn yesterday, and he was supposed to be texting her a bid to upgrade all the pipes, put in another water heater, and make sure the pool lines were up to code. She hadn’t gotten it yet, and she hope it wouldn’t put a massive dent in her remodeling budget.

  On Monday, she had a meeting with a master electrician, as the inn had been built eighty years ago, added to, and then taken care of by her father, who read manuals to know how to wire things.

  Eloise didn’t want to go to bed at night with the worry of something sparking behind the walls and lighting the whole inn on fire. Everything she’d been paying for over the past sixteen years would go up in flames, and Eloise reminded herself that she needed to call for commercial insurance too.

  “Monday,” she told herself as she went downstairs again. She hadn’t tackled the kitchen yet, as it needed the most work, and she figured she could get the rooms cleaned out and repairmen in to work on those while she then turned her attention to things like the kitchen, the outdoor grills, the swimming pool, and the outdoor volleyball court.

  She’d completely forgotten about that gem, and it sat down a set of steps on another terraced level that overlooked the ocean below. She needed to put up nets, because she could see many volleyballs going over the edge of the cliffs and being lost forever.

  If that area could be used, she’d also need to put up a ten-foot wall, so people couldn’t go over the side too. The last thing she needed was to be responsible for the death of a teenager trying to get a ball to win the point.

  Eloise pushed those thoughts out of her head. It was much too hard to keep everything she needed to do on a list in her mind. She had physical checklists for that, and she looked at them each day, made adjustments, and focused on what she could do in eight or nine hours.

  The end.

  Anything else would drive her past the brink of madness, and Eloise didn’t want that.

  She hadn’t stayed with Aaron since Tuesday, when she’d had Robin and Alice to the inn to help. She’d gone to lunch with them on Wednesday, but Kelli couldn’t come, because she’d taken a job at the junior high.

  Alice had come yesterday morning to help at the inn, and Robin had come in the afternoon. Both of them seemed distracted, but Eloise didn’t mind.

  They worked hard, and it was nice to have a companion there with her. Plus, they didn’t ask about Aaron when they were distracted with the details of their own lives.

  Eloise didn’t have any more answers when it came to Aaron. She’d called him Tuesday night after her friends had left and said she was going to stay at her inn. He hadn’t acted strange about it at all.

  He’d just said, “Okay, El. When will I see you again?”

  She liked that he’d asked that. She also knew he was terribly busy with back-to-school, because there was always something they’d forgotten to buy. Notebooks, pens, socks. He had all of his men and women out to make sure school zones were safe and ferry stations were manned for those kids who had to travel in from the outer islands alone.

  Billie had been texting Eloise that week to say how things had gone at junior high. Eloise smiled just thinking about the thirteen-year-old. She’d asked for a first-day-of-school picture, and Billie had sent her a selfie in the bathroom mirror. She’d worn the pink pair of shorts with a cap-sleeve, tie-dyed T-shirt. Eloise couldn’t believe tie-dye was back in fashion, but it sure seemed to be.

  She’d asked Billie about her classes, and she got long texts about who was in them with her, what the teachers were like, and what she thought would be hard or easy.

  Eloise loved the girl a little bit more every day, and her heart squeezed with impatience.

  She compartmentalized those feelings as she pulled out a salad she hadn’t eaten with her pizza last night. She’d learned to order more than she could eat, because then she had lunch the next day.

  Thirty minutes later, Eloise returned to the second floor and started pulling down more wallpaper. The fan in the room barely put a dent in the heat, but she’d learned to simply sweat all day and shower away the stickiness at night.

  She pulled off one piece and found a huge depression in the wall. “Great,” she muttered to herself. That was one risk she took by demo-ing everything to replace it. Unknown damage could be found.

  She bent down to examine the wall, and it crumbled beneath her touch. She started ripping it away, tossing the soft drywall over her shoulder. She’d have to pick it up piece by piece later, so she got up and dragged the garbage can closer.

  She yanked on one portion of the wall, and a big chunk came off, revealing a clean edge. “Someone’s cut into this wall,” she said to herself, examining the edge.

  Her eyes followed it up and easily found the top of it. Beneath a fold in the sheetrock, she found a hinge.

  This was a hidden a compartment in the wall.

  Eloise stood, her heart pounding. Her mind raced as she tried to recall what had been in this room.

  As far as she knew, it was just a guest room. Her father had kept safes in the main office for valuables, so there was no reason for a hidden compartment in the wall—behind the wallpaper—in a guest room.

  Eloise’s pulse calmed as she asked herself what she expected to find. “A dead body?”

  She took a deep breath, trying to imagine the worst thing she could find hidden in the wall.

  “Definitely a dead body,” she said again, and she got down on her knees and switched on the flashlight on her phone.

  With that, she peered inside and found the outline of a wooden box. Gingerly, as if the box would come alive and bite her, she reached inside and pulled it out.

  In the brighter sunlight, she examined it. The box was about the size of a large jewelry box, but somehow, Eloise was sure she wouldn’t find anything like bracelets or diamonds inside.

  The lid creaked as she opened it, and she noticed there was no lock or clasp on the box at all.

  Eloise peered inside the box, her heart still pounding at a rapid pace. Old, yellowed envelopes sat in the box, and she saw the tremble in her fingers as she reached into the box and pulled them out.

  A yelp came out of her mouth as a spider scuttled across the top envelope, and she threw the whole stack away from her.

  She fell backward onto her tailbone, and pain shot up her spine. She braced herself with her hands and paused, taking in lungful after lungful of air.

  “It’s fine, Eloise,” she told herself. “It was a spider.”

  She got up and gathered the envelopes, reading the names on them as she did.

  Stevenson Ranch.

  Galveston Distillery.

  Proffit Beach Property.

  Coilstone Cabin.

  In all, there were seven envelopes, and each bore a name. She opened the first one and pulled out several pieces of stapled paperwork. She wasn’t a lawyer or real estate agent by any means, but she knew enough to read and understand a contract when she saw one.

  “This is a property,” she said, her voice so loud despite the music still playing from the windowsill. Gary Stevenson owned a ranch in Montana—or
he had until he’d signed it over to Eloise’s father.

  The transfer of ownership paperwork was pinched right there in her hands.

  The date was 1997.

  Her father’s name was listed as the beneficiary.

  “This makes no sense,” she said, flipping the pages. Gary Stevenson had signed the last page, with her father’s handwriting below it.

  She stared at his signature, because she hadn’t seen anything of his like this in a long time.

  She couldn’t identify the feelings moving through her. Shock, disbelief, anger.

  Her father had acquired all of these properties, and she needed to go through the guest register and see if these people had stayed at the inn.

  Her memory fired, and Eloise looked up from the sheaf of paperwork that had made a ranch in Montana—somewhere Eloise had never been, and she was sure her father had never been—his.

  A line from his will ran through her mind.

  Except the Cliffside Inn, all properties, accounts, and investments, I leave to my daughter, Eloise Hall.

  She’d gotten his bank account, which at the time, had thirteen hundred dollars in it. With the inn specifically being left out, Eloise had simply gifted the house to her mother and moved on with her college career. She’d bought the inn a year later, and she could admit it was mostly out of spite. Her father hadn’t seemed to want her to have it, but she’d gotten it anyway.

  But if these were his properties too…

  She refolded the papers and put them back in the envelope. Every one she opened had the same contract, but a different name and a different property.

  He owned a cabin in Utah, a beachfront property in South Carolina, a whiskey distillery in Kentucky, a horse farm in Texas, a vacation rental in the San Juan Islands, and what looked like a large parcel of undeveloped land on Rocky Ridge.

  Eloise looked up. She needed to talk to Alice. She’d be able to help her make sense of all of this.

  “Alice.”

  Eloise returned her attention to the undeveloped land on Rocky Ridge. With horror, she realized it was no longer undeveloped.

  Alice’s house was within that parcel of land, as were several other houses.

  Confusion filled her mind. What had the ranch, the distillery, the vacation property, and all the other things in these envelopes been doing for over two decades?

  If her father owned them, wouldn’t they be vacant? Abandoned? Deteriorated?

  She shook her head and slipped the Rocky Ridge paperwork back into its envelope. The last one said Oakwood IOU, and Eloise’s chest pinched.

  She reached into the envelope, noting that it was much thinner than the others. Only two pages came out, and Eloise read that a man named Karl Oakwood owed her father a 1992 sum of half a million dollars.

  She sucked in a breath. Had that been paid? If so, where was that money? If not, was this a binding contract that she could collect on?

  Horror filled her. She didn’t want to collect on this debt. She had no idea who Karl Oakwood was, but she’d known what kind of man her father was. Whoever he’d gotten involved with would not welcome her back into their lives.

  She needed to talk to someone about all of this. Lay it all out for them to look at and make sense of. Then maybe then they could explain it to her.

  Aaron was the first name that popped into her mind, but Eloise bit her lower lip in indecision. He was so busy with work, and he’d take the completely legal stance on anything he saw.

  She wanted to do that too, but she could hear Aaron telling her to put everything back in the box and forget about it.

  She couldn’t go to Alice, as it now seemed that her house sat on land that Eloise actually owned.

  Eloise dismissed all of her friends. She needed more information before she went to any of them. She didn’t want to explain that her father had been a horrible drunk that cheated people out of their properties at the inn she’d loved so much.

  “Oh, no,” she moaned. Her father had loved to gamble—how had she forgotten that? He’d obviously gotten these people drunk and then raised the stakes on them, stealing things from them.

  “Then why put them in this box in the wall?” she asked. “Why not tell someone about them?”

  She thought of her mother, and how cheaply she and Eloise had lived after her father had left. How dare he have all of this opulence and wealth and not say one thing?

  Her anger rose within her, and whenever Eloise had felt this angry and this helpless, she’d gone to one place—the lighthouse.

  She looked into the wall one more time, almost as if she had a sixth sense there’d be more there. She didn’t immediately see anything, but she reached in and ignored the cobwebs and grime.

  Her hand met the distinct feel of paper, and she got her fingers around the large, legal-sized envelope. She took it out, and the word on the front stole her breath for at least the third time in the past fifteen minutes.

  Bank accounts.

  She didn’t waste time sifting through the paperwork, though there was probably half an inch of it in the envelope. She got to her feet, left everything in the room just how it was, and headed downstairs to her car.

  The ferry ride to Diamond Island seemed to take an hour instead of only twenty minutes. The ride to the lighthouse drained the rest of her patience.

  A few cars sat in the parking lot, but Eloise was past seeing at that point. She paid the RideShare driver and leapt from the car, the dirty box and grimy envelope tucked into her purse.

  She strode up the sidewalk that led to Kristen’s cottage, calling the woman’s name as she twisted the doorknob.

  She’d burst into the house and taken two steps when she realized Kristen wasn’t in the living room, where Eloise had expected her to be.

  Instead, she stood in the kitchen with Kelli. Alice sat at the bar, a drink in her hand.

  All three of them looked at Eloise with wide eyes and surprise on their faces.

  Kristen recovered first. “Eloise, dear,” she said, glancing to Alice and then Kelli as she stepped past her. “What are you doing here?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kristen felt Alice’s displeasure on her back as she walked toward Eloise. A slight pinch of guilt accompanied the hug she gave the brunette, but Kristen refused to let the emotion take root and influence her decisions.

  Kelli had called before she’d come over. So had Alice. Kristen had told them to come at the same time, and she’d barely gotten off the phone with Robin before Kelli had arrived, twenty minutes early.

  Alice had also come early, and Eloise had shown up out of nowhere. Kristen certainly couldn’t help that.

  “Hello, dear,” she said to Eloise as she stepped back. “How are you?”

  Eloise pushed her purse back behind her elbow as she adjusted the strap. “Fine.”

  Kristen didn’t think so, and she didn’t like beating around the bush. “Come in. We’re just sitting down to lunch.”

  Kelli rounded the kitchen counter as Kristen turned back to them. Neither she nor Alice looked pleased to see Eloise, but Kristen painted on a smile. “Eloise is here, girls.”

  “Hey, El,” Kelli said.

  “Eloise,” Alice said, her voice so formal that Kristen threw her a pointed look. Alice used to wither under such looks from Kristen, but she had more backbone now. She had more confidence.

  They’d both called claiming to need her advice and help, and Kristen welcomed them with open arms. There was nothing she wanted more than to feel useful and needed, and she’d put together a simple lunch of cheese and fruit, chilled shrimp and cocktail sauce, and a vegetable platter. According to Robin, Alice had been eating better, but both of them had picked very little from the trays of food.

  “Help yourself,” Kristen said, picking up a paper plate. “Kelli was just going to tell us something.”

  “No,” Kelli said. “Alice was going to go first.”

  “I have something too,” Eloise said, joining Kristen in the ki
tchen where Kelli had been. She glanced at the other two nervously, and Kristen’s heart flipped over, beat, and then returned to a normal position in her chest.

  “Okay, girls,” Kristen said, not used to addressing them this way. She loved them each so dearly, and she didn’t want them to have anxiety here. They’d always—always—been able to come to her and the lighthouse for comfort.

  She didn’t want to lose that. Just the fact that all three of them were there, in her small cottage, meant the world to her.

  “You need each other. I don’t know why you don’t know that, after all you’ve been through in the past four months together. Heck, the past thirty years.” She glared at Alice first, because she could take the brunt of it. Then Eloise, who had the good sense to drop her head, and then Kelli, who nodded with a brave look in her eyes.

  “You’ve all come here today for something, and I’m pretty sure you’re not going to get it from me. But from each other.” She surveyed them again, and finally Eloise nodded.

  “I’ll call Robin,” Alice said. “See if she can come.” She slipped off the barstool and stepped a few feet away into the living room, her fingers moving over her phone.

  “I can video conference in AJ,” Eloise said. “If she’s available. I did it last week.” She started texting too, and Kristen picked up a few shrimp and put them on her plate, as if this Friday afternoon luncheon was the most pressing thing on her schedule.

  Secretly, a vein of excitement wound through her. She’d been so lonely in the past few weeks, and she’d been looking forward to Eloise’s return to the cove.

  Yes, she had her Wednesday lunches to look forward to, but she needed more than one event each week.

  Alice returned, her phone tucked under her arm as she hugged herself. “Robin said she’d try to come.”

  “Try to come?” Kristen asked.

  “She’s talking to Duke,” Alice said. “She sounded frustrated.”

  “Oh, dear.” Kristen looked at the food on her plate, and she didn’t want to eat any of it. She suddenly understood Alice on a whole new level, and when the woman picked up a baby carrot and put it in her mouth, Kristen admired her.