Newport Dreams: A Breakwater Bay Novella

by Shelley Noble

  Doug was one of the best project managers in Newport. Bruce always tried to work with him. Before he’d crashed through a supposedly inspected floor to the marble of the floor below, he’d been one of the best restorers in town. He knew the business and the people in it and he didn’t usually make these kinds of mistakes. What the hell had he been thinking to hire Geordie Holt?

  Meri glanced from Doug to Bruce. “She seemed okay to me. She got lots of shots.”

  “Yeah, but of what? I caught her doing multiple close-ups of curling wallpaper. And not in a way that could possibly be useful. What the hell is that about? Didn’t the grant request go through?”

  “Yeah, it did,” Doug said. “And she isn’t an intern.”

  Bruce stopped pacing and turned to face the project manager. “A volunteer?”

  Doug shook his head.

  Bruce got a terrible sinking feeling. “She’s a professional?”

  Doug nodded.

  “You saw her credentials?”

  “I saw her portfolio. The woman takes a good photo.”

  “This doesn’t sound like you.”

  “Look, Bruce. No one I like working with was available, which was just as well, since she was part of the bargain.”

  Bruce pulled out a chair and sat down. A really terrible feeling. “Let me guess, somebody’s niece, granddaughter, or spoiled daughter and who contributes to the board. I knew it.”

  “Maybe. She applied, we hired her. There wasn’t a lot of choice out there. And I had to cut some corners.”

  “Which you’d know if you didn’t have your head in the restoration clouds.” Carlyn said. She was slightly flushed. “Geordie Holt isn’t the only one who isn’t focused on the here and now.”

  Doug grinned at her. “That’s what we have you for. To keep us on the straight and narrow.” Carlyn was the financial whiz kid, accountant, development coordinator, publicist, marketer, lunchtime gopher and whatever else came her way. She was devoted to Doug. And best friends with Meri.

  “So they held you hostage until you hired her?”

  “We’re not paying her, the board is.”

  “What? Never heard of such a thing.”

  “Well, I think we should wait until she uploads her photos before we judge,” Meri said.

  “So we’re stuck with her?”

  Doug shrugged. “Pretty much.”

  “What a couple of jaded old grumps. Maybe it’s her first project. She’s probably nervous and you didn’t exactly make her feel welcome. She was practically quaking when she left.”

  Bruce glowered at her. “I was nice.”

  “As ice,” Carlyn said under breath. “You just don’t like her because she drives a fancy sports car.”

  “It’s not about cars, it’s about expertise.”

  Meri rolled her eyes and stood. “I’m going to check out my ceiling. Give her time to settle down. Don’t worry. We got the grant and if we have to do a little extra until she gets up to speed . . . Doug and I know our way around a camera. We do most of our own documentation anyway. Cheaper that way.” Meri headed to the door.

  “Be careful out there,” Doug said.

  “Aye, Aye, Captain,” Meri saluted and disappeared.

  “Guess I’ll go chose small or smaller for an office so I can start moving my equipment in.”

  “Carlyn,” Doug began.

  “I know, be careful. Have I ever not been?” She headed to the door.

  “So what do you really think?” Bruce asked as he sat down across from Doug.

  “I think you’re too stressed out over this photographer and this project. We haven’t even started yet.”

  Bruce sighed. He knew he was. He was taking on way more work than he had time for just so he could make enough real money to moonlight on independent projects like Gilbert House.

  It was a diamond in the rough. He had a feeling about it. So did Doug. And Doug didn’t miss much. When he’d called Bruce to tell him he’d found a hidden wonder, Bruce didn’t hesitate to say yes. And once he’d seen the building for himself, he was hooked. Even before he’d run the inspections to make sure it was recoverable, he was totally committed.

  That’s what he liked about Doug and his team of restorers. They were a practiced crew with a master at the helm. That’s what was so infuriating about this photographer.

  Everybody had to carry their weight and more. Had to wear several hats at once, and be willing to work for little remuneration. Geordie Holt with her designer jeans and manicured nails was fluff. And none of them had time for fluff.

  BRUCE WALKED HOME, hands in his pockets and his head in a quandary. He should be happy. Gilbert House had good bones. But he wasn’t.

  He stopped at the deli, looked at his reflection in the glass door before going inside. It was that girl, woman, the photographer, Geordie Holt.

  He opened the door and went inside.

  His reaction to her had been over the top. She had an attitude, but creative people sometimes did. And she was creative, if the way she crawled around taking shots of stuff they would never need was any indication. But they didn’t need creative, they just needed meticulous documentation.

  At least she seemed to be into details. Too much so, he thought, as he remembered her taking several close-ups of a windowsill from various angles. Not to mention candid shots of the crew. What was with that? He’d asked her what she was doing.

  She’d ignored him. Or maybe she hadn’t even heard him. Maybe she had some kind of Asperger’s.

  She obviously knew her photography but it was equally obvious that she was inexperienced in the field of restoration photography. Of course they dealt with inexperience all the time; when you worked on a shoestring budget you took on a lot of interns and volunteers.

  She was also obviously rich and spoiled, by the looks of her clothes and all that equipment. And that attitude. That wasn’t what bothered him. Actually it wasn’t her at all. She just happened to be the most recent annoyance in a string of annoyances.

  Geordie Holt wasn’t really the problem. It wasn’t her fault that she had the things he wanted, was the kind of woman that interested him. And as far from his reach as possible. The truth was he was barely making it.

  He ordered his usual evening meal, sandwich and salad, grabbed a newspaper and continued on his way.

  He’d been so sure of himself when he’d picked up and left the architectural firm to strike out on his own. He thought that being his own boss would give him more time to do more restoration work. Gradually build a reputation so he would be able to segue into full-time restoration.

  Just as soon as he paid off all those student loans.

  It had taken him a good six years to work and borrow his way through college. Maybe he should have stuck it out in a larger firm for a few more years, but he’d been impatient.

  So far he’d been pretty successful on his own. He had more work than he could handle. Plenty of clients. Unfortunately quite a few never paid him on time.

  He climbed the steps to his house, grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat down at his computer to eat his dinner and catch up on the paying work he’d let slide while spending the day on a recce at Gilbert House.

  When Doug called a few weeks before, waxing enthusiastic over a house he’d found and looking for a consultant he could trust and who worked cheap, Bruce couldn’t say no. It hadn’t even occurred to him to say no.

  How could he? Doug had a genius for finding teardowns and turning them into showplaces. One look at Gilbert House, and Bruce knew Doug had done it again.

  It was a mess. Would take loads of work, a knowledgeable crew. More money. Daunting, but Bruce had confidence in Doug. And he could see Gilbert House’s future in his mind, as clearly as if he was looking at a color photo of the finished product.

  The idea of which pissed him off
all over again. They could have brought in an unpaid intern and used Geordie Holt’s salary for more pressing needs.

  Sandwich forgotten, he tugged on his beer and looked down at the plans on his drafting table. Not plans for Gilbert House, but a renovation of a townhouse bathroom, marble tub and vanity. Tumbled tile floor. There was nothing wrong with the bathroom they had now, but they had to have the very best and newest fad. The damn place was only ten years old. But at least they paid on time.

  He looked around his own house. It had plenty of period detail and was in need of some major TLC. But it would have to wait. It always had to wait. He’d managed to gut the kitchen and bathroom, thinking that once those two were finished he could tackle everything else piecemeal. But the plumbing sucked, had to be completely changed out.

  Now the plumbing was fixed but he’d spent way too much money—and time. He’d had to keep the old appliances and leave the linoleum floor instead of reclaiming the old flooring. So now he worked late every night and on weekends, subsisting on deli food and frozen dinners heated in the microwave.

  Hell, his house wasn’t in much better shape than Gilbert house. And the heat? Nonexistent. That would be another money suck. But it would have to be remedied. Winter was just a couple of months away.

  GEORDIE SAT AT her desk spotlighted by the glow from four computer screens that filled the dining niche of her apartment. She had state-of-the-art equipment and she thanked her lucky stars that she’d bought it while her family was still supplying her every whim. It gave her a cutting edge in the business, whatever that business turned out to be.

  But she was beginning to see that having things made easy by her family had made her ill equipped to take care of herself. Hell, this apartment wasn’t even hers, just a pied-à-terre her family kept for visiting clients.

  And now their wayward daughter.

  Well, what was she supposed to do until she saved some money and could make it on her own? Maybe that was the problem. She didn’t have to make it on her own.

  Her family was rich. Had indulged her every whim. They’d indulged her sisters, too, but they had lived up to the family expectations, had respectable careers, married well.

  But not Geordie. Even as a child she could never settle for one thing. Always felt different. She was different. Had never quite measured up. Now she had to show them that all their indulgence had been worthwhile. That she was worthwhile.

  And that same feeling of panic set in, the need to get out, go somewhere, anywhere that captured her imagination, kept her busy. Find a place that said Stay here, this is where you belong.

  It wasn’t like she hadn’t been looking. She’d been desperate to find something that would show that she was a mature adult and didn’t have to be scolded every time something didn’t turn out the way she’d expected.

  Like being a fashion photographer. She loved photography. Some of her best shots were of people. But models posed, did what they were told to do. Some of them transcended the genre. But for the most part, Geordie had found that their facades and their “looks” were already finely honed, strong. And trying to cut through all that sleekness to reach something essential was too exhausting.

  She had taken some good shots. But her best shots were caught when the models had finished, were tired. Leaning over to take off a shoe or sitting before a makeup table with no makeup. Of course those were unusable. But for Geordie, that’s where photography belonged. When the subject was unsuspecting. Caught when all the external stuff was forgotten, in a moment of indecision, anger, introspection, fatigue. Moments like that gave you a window to a person’s soul.

  Without them even knowing it.

  People face-to-face made her nervous. That was obvious this morning when she’d blundered into her latest fiasco with enthusiasm and intensity only to flounder and embarrass herself.

  The architect hated her, thought she was a flake and clueless. And what made it worse, was he was probably right. She’d taken hundreds of photos on-site, but most of them would be totally unusable for what the team needed.

  She swiveled her chair from her large graphics monitor to a smaller one. Several rows of thumbnail-size photos stared back at her. More than could fit on the screen. She’d taken more than a hundred shots today and as she looked them over, she realized she might not have taken enough.

  Okay, not enough of what she was supposed to look at. But she’d just followed her eye. At a certain level the house was fascinating. All that light and dark play through shuttered windows. Like this one. She clicked on it and an enlarged photo appeared.

  A perfect triangular dash of sunlight, its point pricking the dark oak windowsill like a shard of glass, unleashing the life of the wood and sending the grain racing away from the point. And the one she’d caught immediately after, as Carlyn stepped into the same light and a halo appeared around her curly hair. And the two together . . .

  She opened the photo in her graphics program and spent the next few minutes enhancing and clarifying and playing with the contrasts, overlaying and editing, fragmenting and enhancing—until she remembered that she was supposed to be organizing her documentation of the day’s work.

  She pulled her eye from the computer screen, checked the time, and realized that it had been more then a few minutes; she’d been playing with that same photograph for more than an hour.

  She saved the work and clicked out of it. Returned her attention to her rows of photos and began to organize them according to subject matter and time of day.

  After two hours her eyes were burning, her back was aching, and her stomach was growling, but she had twenty different files of architectural details.

  She looked over the files, wondering if there were too many. That was one thing she hadn’t been able to learn: how to organize the files in a useful way rather than a creative way. To recognize what was wanted and what was superfluous. Well, she could learn.

  She stood up. Stretched, touched her toes and hung there until her back stopped hurting, then walked across the wooden floor to the balcony doors. She opened one and stood just inside the threshold and let the cool air energize her.

  In the distance, lights were blinking around the harbor. She was hungry. She could go out, but she hated eating alone—almost as much as she hated sleeping alone in the sleek king-sized bed in the next room.

  This was no ordinary pied-à-terre. It was a huge loft in one of the harbor buildings downtown. White walls, open space, big and clean enough to be an art gallery. Perfect for her enlarged and mounted photos that were lined up against the wall on the floor. God forbid she stuck a nail in those pristine walls.

  She slid the door closed, walked back past her belongings piled in one corner and went to the kitchen, carefully avoiding the mail and the envelope that had arrived that morning on schedule just as it did every month. Anytime now, the phone call would follow.

  “Did you get the check?”

  “Yes, Dad. Thank you.”

  “How’s the job hunt coming?”

  “Fine.”

  “You know there’s a place—”

  “I know.”

  He’d grunt. They’d say good-bye and wait another month to have the same conversation when her next allowance check arrived.

  The fridge was stocked with the usual: pâté, gourmet cheese, bottled designer water, two bottles of Moët champagne. Plenty of ice in the freezer for the stocked liquor cabinet. The cabinets held caviar, crackers and other nonperishables for her father’s clients.

  She looked at the caviar, then reached onto the top shelf, where she’d stashed a loaf of twelve-grain bread and a jar of peanut butter. She didn’t bother with the bread but got a spoon out of the drawer and carried the jar, spoon and a bottle of Vichy water back to her workstation.

  She sat down and pulled up a straight-back chair and put the water and peanut butter on the seat. She’d learned the ha
rd way not to take a chance with food or liquid near her computer.

  She stared at the screen while she licked peanut butter off the spoon, and selected the best—or maybe not best but most definitive for documentation—photos and dragged them into one folder that could be presented as a slide show. Then she cross-referenced them to the more inclusive folders.

  For the next hour or so, she referenced and cross-referenced, culling out the “arty” photos that she’d taken for herself and putting them into their own folders. She did a quick sweep through the folders again. Closed the program. Stretched her back. Groaned out a yawn.

  But instead of going to bed like a responsible working adult, she opened the folder with her photos in it. The ones she’d taken without planning, with no particular purpose other than that they’d caught her eye. The ones that called to her.

  “And that’s more of your nonsense,” she told herself and jumped at the sound of her own voice. It sounded awfully like her father’s on their last visit.

  That thought, more than her fatigue, should have driven her to bed. But instead, like the stubborn young lady—her mother’s words—that she was, she logged into her graphics program and began to play.

  Slowly an unidentifiable detail took on a life of its own. She selected two versions, color and black-and-white, overlaid the two, slightly offset in alternating layers, so that if you looked one way it was a color photo and focused another it appeared in black and white. Then relayered in Carlyn’s sundrenched face and hair until a nimbus ran through the entire sequence, the sections nearly transparent as they fanned out like a deck of cards.

  She leaned back in her desk chair and surveyed her work. The result sent shivers up her arms. Nice. Really nice. Almost spookily nice. And totally useless. Still, she felt good—a moment of contentment until she noticed the time on her computer screen.

  It was past three and she needed to be sharp to navigate the Bruce Stafford-infested waters tomorrow. She hurriedly saved her work and closed the program.

  She intended to be there early to set up a projector so she wouldn’t have everybody leaning over her to view the stills on her computer screen. She needed to keep her distance. From everyone, even the nice ones.