Brett scrawled some notes and then sighed. This might be a hopeless mission.
But the fact was that Rosetta wasn’t even beginning to scratch the surface of possibilities here. The hotel, which her brochure described as having “Old-Fashioned Sea-Side Charm,” was so hopelessly outdated that he couldn’t believe she had managed to stay open this long. The rooms were tiny, with hideous wallpaper, threadbare carpets, and old creaky beds. Everything had a musty smell. Only a handful of rooms had air-conditioning, and although Brett knew that air-conditioning was only a necessity here for a small part of the year, travelers sought comfort, and sweating it out on a hot night in this tiny room was anything but.
And the bathroom. It was like something from a horror movie. Cracked titles on the floor, rust-stained toilet bowls, shower stalls with cheap vinyl sides. It looked clean, or as clean as something so old and worn could look, but that did not really improve matters.
If they put up a new, all-amenities hotel, they could pack this place all summer, and with a few special promotions they could keep the traffic flowing throughout the off-season, too. They’d done it in other “summer” places, and with great success. You just had to find the right gimmicks to attract a young crowd with deep pockets. At the moment, it seemed the median age of island guests was 65. Not Sweet Water’s target audience.
That bakery, though. That was something. They’d have to cut a deal with Casey, hire her on to run the hotel’s coffee shop. They could offer her a better salary than she was making now. She could have charged him double for the lattes he’d gotten there and he wouldn’t have blinked. She was underselling herself.
But they could change her life. They could give her security, better pay, and more help. That morning she had looked exhausted. She had still been stunning—her bright red hair (which suited her, even though it was obviously dyed), her big hazel eyes and full lips, her slender arms, that tattoo. She was absolutely beautiful. And not his type at all.
He didn’t go in for angsty alterna-chicks. Not anymore. Twenty years ago (okay, ten years ago), though, she would have been irresistible to him. Ah, the mistakes of youth. He used to be drawn to the deep, romantic, damn-the-man types back in the day. The problem was that once he got to know them, they were never that deep, their down-with-the-mainstream attitudes were just posturing, and what seemed like a romantic disposition at first usually turned out to be more like a mood disorder.
And why was he even thinking about this at all? He should be thinking about Ashley. She wanted to meet up when he got back to Los Angeles, and he needed to figure out how to win her back. The fact that he really didn’t want to return to Los Angeles was beside the point. If he could make this deal work, and if he could convince his bosses to relocate him here to see it through and get it up and running, if he could convince Ashley to come with him, they could have a great life. She would love it, if she’d only give it a chance.
He glanced at the clock. 8:30. Only 5:30 in L.A. Ashley would be teaching her evening class. There was no point in calling her for the reassurance of hearing her voice, and anyway that hadn’t gone great the last time. He grabbed his wallet and hotel room key (This place still used actual keys! How ridiculous! He hadn’t been to a hotel with actual keys since he was on vacation at the Jersey shore with his parents back when he was a kid!) and headed for the White Sails Tavern, the island’s “upscale” bar and the only “fine dining” on offer.
The decor—fishing nets, harpoons mounted to the walls, lobster traps hanging from the ceiling—didn’t exactly scream fine dining, nor did the menu: Baked haddock with a Ritz cracker crust, scallops baked in a cream sauce and topped with Ritz cracker crumbs, baked stuffed fish rolled in (you guessed it) Ritz cracker crumbs. Apparently Ritz crackers were the height of sophistication here on Devil’s Back Island. There was no beer list full of interesting micro brews, no cocktail menu full of exotic drink possibilities, and the wine list had exactly three options in red and three in white.
Actually, when he was done guffawing about it, Brett sort of enjoyed the novelty of it all. When was the last time he ate at a place like this? Probably when he was visiting his grandparents as a kid and they’d taken him out to their favorite restaurant where the bread basket featured slices of white, store-bought bread (Wonder Bread, perhaps?) and little packets of cold, hard butter.
He ordered a Miller Lite, and when the bartender slid the drink in front of him, he also offered a basket of pretzels, which Brett happily accepted. It was kind of fun being away from all the phoniness he was used to, everyone philosophizing over their beer, describing the character of the hops and the floral notes of the whatever. What was wrong with just having a regular old beer, nice and cold, with some plain old boring pretzels?
Sitting at a bar alone led him into a philosophical frame of mind. What was wrong with a nice, simple restaurant like this? Did every restaurant in the nation need to serve parmesan truffle fries and artisanal cheese slates? Over the years, he’d grown used to the shiny surfaces of everything Sweet Water. When he first started working for the company, he was in awe of the polished splendor of it all. Then he’d begun to take it for granted. And then later, he’d gotten acquainted with the underside of all that glitz, and that had led him to develop a conscience that kept nagging him about his current career path.
For one thing, the environmental toll was outrageous. The carbon footprint of people flying all over the world to escape their lives. The water needed for the daily laundry for a massive hotel. The fossil fuels burned to generate the electricity required to keep hotel rooms a comfortable 68 degrees in tropical climates. The mountains of trash hauled away from a hotel each day.
Then there was the actual impact on local people. Yes, Sweet Water offered jobs, but they were unskilled positions with low wages. The people who worked in the resorts had excessive wealth paraded in front of their faces daily, while they were barely making enough to feed their families. However glowing the surface of a Sweet Water property was, the truth underneath was toxic. The glow wasn’t heavenly light; it was radiation. But what else could he do? He’d devoted eighteen years to keeping that poisonous surface prosperous, and he didn’t know how to walk away.
He was starting to feel downright melancholy when he glanced down the bar and saw Casey wander in. He motioned to the bartender for a refill and brushed away thoughts of the economy of exploitation in which he participated. This was his chance to show Casey he wasn’t just some jerk trying to take up space with a laptop. It was show time.
Chapter 27
St. Nabor Island, South Carolina
Calliope was not at all what Angela had expected. Randy swore the woman was the real deal, but when she showed up in her flowing black dress, utterly decked out in layers of costume jewelry, Angela had to stop herself from rolling her eyes.
But when they set up for the—Angela wasn’t sure what you’d call what they were doing. Was séance too middle-school cliché? What had Randy called it? Another investigation, she supposed—it started to feel real.
Calliope brought a large round cloth, like a tablecloth, with writing and symbols on it, which she spread on the floor of Angela’s mother’s office. She set two candles on the top of the desk and one in the center of the cloth, and then she asked Randy and Angela to sit on the floor. She sat, too, so that they were forming a little triangle at the edges of the cloth.
Calliope closed her eyes, said something so softly that Angela couldn’t make out the words, and then leaned forward, making a sort of circling gesture over the candle’s flame with her hands, as if she were ushering the light or smoke or scent of the candle up toward her face. Then she opened her eyes and dropped her hands to her knees. She looked like an oddly dressed yoga teacher, cross-legged on the floor like that, back straight, first finger and thumb of each hand touching while her other fingers were relaxed.
They sat in silence for what could have been five minutes or fifteen. Angela’s feet went numb, but Calliope and Randy were
both remaining so still that she wasn’t sure she was allowed to adjust her pose, so she tried to ignore it.
And then the candles—all three simultaneously—flickered as if someone had tried to blow them out. Calliope raised her hands like a priest at church, palms up, and took several long, slow breaths. She closed her eyes, cocked her head, nodded, as if she were in conversation with someone. Angela couldn’t hear whatever Calliope was hearing, but she could hear sounds, a low rumbling like an engine in the distance or distant thunder, except the sound was inside her head, the way her mother’s voice was when Angela heard it in the night.
At last, Calliope opened her eyes, looked at Angela, and smiled. “It’s your father,” Calliope said. “There are things he needs you to know.”
Angela frowned and shook her head. “My father is alive.”
“He’s in a nursing home,” Randy added. Angela thought she detected a hint of concern on his face.
Calliope was utterly unruffled by this news of her failure. She closed her eyes again, listening to something only she could hear. When she reopened her eyes she said, “He says he’s your father. He says you need to find your mother.”
Randy grasped Angela’s hand and squeezed it and then said, “You’ve got it backwards. Angela’s mother recently died. Her father is still alive.”
Calliope pursed her lips and shrugged.
“Cal, Angela visited her father just the other day, and just a couple of weeks ago, she buried her mother. You’re wrong on this one.”
Behind Randy, the candle on the desk flickered out. All three of them turned to look.
“This is no time for playing games,” Randy said.
Calliope raised her hands as if she were under arrest and shook her head. “No lies, my friend. I tell y’all what the spirits tell me. This spirit says he’s her father.”
Angela felt a lump rising in her throat. Her parents had lied about so much. They had hidden dozens of relatives from her. Could they have lied about this, too? And what had Belle, the so-called psychic, said? She had thought Angela was estranged from her mother. She had been surprised when Angela said she was dead. “It’s okay, Randy,” she said. “Ask him his name.”
But just as Calliope began to do the deep-breathing thing she did while communicating with the spirit world, the doorbell rang. At the sound, Angela, who had been expecting the angry voice to fill her head again any moment now, leapt, knocking over the candle on the floor. Calliope snatched it up before all the wax could spill, before the cloth could catch fire, and Randy jumped to his feet.
“Who’s that?” he asked, looking at Angela.
She had no idea.
“Do you think it could be Grace?”
She shook her head. Grace seemed not to have noticed that for the past several nights Angela hadn’t come home, returning instead in the morning to shower and change. She was the most hands-off host imaginable. There was no way she’d come out in the night looking for Angela.
“Maybe it’s,” Angela paused, swallowed, felt her hands tremble, “Maybe it’s like the computers the other night, an electrical fault or something.”
Calliope shook her head. “That’s no ghost ringing the bell.” She began gathering up her things. Apparently the investigation was over.
The bell rang again.
Randy took the lead and went downstairs and opened the front door. As it swung open, Angela found herself face to face with her mother. Then she passed out.
***
Angela came to on the sofa. Randy was kneeling beside her, patting her hand. As her eyes focused, she didn’t see anyone else in the room, but when she recalled the sight of her mother in the doorway, her heart raced, and she sat up and looked around. Randy gently pressed her back down against the sofa and offered her a sip of water.
“Did you see her?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Angela hadn’t expected that answer. She blinked and waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t, so Angela said, “You saw my mother?”
“She says she’s your aunt,” Randy said.
“You saw the pictures of my aunt,” Angela said, struggling to follow what he was saying. The woman at the door had been her mother—her mother’s eyes, nose, chin, height, but not the hair. Her mother’s hair was blonder, tidier.
“Not your dad’s sister. Your mom’s sister,” Randy said.
“My mother’s sister?” Angela repeated, feeling stupid and confused and exhausted. Her mother had long-lost siblings, too? How far did her parents’ trail of lies go?
Chapter 28
Devil’s Back Island, Maine
Casey waited until she was sure Jason was gone, and then she stood up, scraped the grilled cheese sandwich into the trash, and grabbed her wallet. She couldn’t possibly sit around alone in her apartment all night. Instead, she went to the closest thing Devil’s Back Island had to a night spot, the bar at the White Sails Tavern.
The tavern, like her café, was in a house that had been converted from a private residence to a restaurant. Unlike the café, which had been a cottage, the tavern was a large salt-box. It was the oldest remaining building on the island, built in 1822. That was half of its claim to fame. The other half, regrettably, was not the food, but the lore of the tavern ghost. Casey had no interest in the history, the food, or the ghost, on that early fall evening. She was interested only in the bar.
She waved to Michelle, the hostess, and passed through to the bar, which was in the part of the house that had originally been the kitchen. The original fireplace, where the women would have cooked over an open fire, had been restored, and on chilly evenings, there was always a welcoming blaze, but tonight the weather was warm, the fireplace was cold, and the restaurant was crowded. The bar ran along the back wall, and as Casey approached, she noticed Brett sitting at the far end near a window. Just her luck. She stood up a little taller, took a breath, and then walked up to the other side, hoping to escape notice. She ordered a beer, and as she awaited it, she felt Brett looking at her. She glanced in his direction, and he waved and gestured for her to join him. Just what she needed. A night of making conversation with Mr. Charm. She decided she’d say hello, finish her beer, and then go home.
“I thought you’d be resting up for our big adventure tomorrow,” Brett said, as she climbed onto the barstool next to his.
“Tomorrow?” she said, taking a swig of her beer.
“Don’t tell me you forgot! You don’t seem like the forgetful type.” He smiled and she wondered how he kept his teeth so white. They practically glowed.
She blinked. Tomorrow. Tomorrow was Tuesday. No, tomorrow was Wednesday. Her day off. Her day off on which she’d agreed to take the preppy vegan on an island tour. And as she remembered that promise, she also remembered that she’d left the café in a state of disaster, when in her exhaustion she failed to recall that the next day was her day off. Shit and double shit.
“Sorry,” she said. “Long day. What time tomorrow?”
“Actually I was hoping you’d tell me.”
“Why?”
“I thought we should take some kayaks out. That will give me the best sense of it all.”
“You know the water is freezing cold, right?”
He smiled his charming, white-toothed smile. “I bet it’s warmer now than it was for half the summer. I hear the water in September is as good as it gets.”
She leaned over the bar and waved to the bartender. “You got a tide chart around here?” she asked.
He returned a moment later with the Island Advisor, a seasonal bulletin put out by the tourism bureau, which was basically just Rosetta. Low tide tomorrow was at eleven-thirty in the morning. She considered how long it would realistically take for them to get around to the other side.
“You kayak much?” she asked.
“Actually, I’ve never done it before,” he said.
Great. She’d have to teach him to kayak in addition to guiding him.
“It looks easy enough.
I work out a lot, so I’m sure it’ll be fine.” He said this as a simple matter of fact, without any irony or boastfulness, as if he thought whatever workouts he did at his fancy gym at home would qualify him to be a natural in a kayak.
“I guess, to be safe, we should leave at nine,” Casey said. Her one morning of the entire week to have a slow start was officially ruined.
“Rosetta said that the ghost sightings at Lover’s Leap have all been at low tide.”
Casey let out a little derisive laugh. Ghost sightings. For heaven’s sake. Casey could think of few ghost stories that were more clichéd and suspicious than the ones Rosetta cooked up for tourists. Was there a cliff in the universe that hadn’t been dubbed Lover’s Leap?
“What?” Brett asked.
Casey took a huge sip of her beer before looking back at him. “You’re a smart guy. You don’t believe those stories?”
“Seems like the closest thing the island has to a tourist attraction.”
“Oh, God,” Casey said. She finished her beer and set the glass heavily on the bar.
“Besides, there are loads of things that are beyond explanation,” Brett said. He waved to the bartender and ordered them each another beer. “I have seen some freaky things in my travels, stuff that would make a believer out of anyone.”
Casey rolled her eyes. She did not disagree that there were loads of things beyond explanation. Actually, she had no doubt that ghosts existed, but she was certain they weren’t anything like what Rosetta invented for her Halloween Fest, and Rosetta knew it, too. That said, she wasn’t in the habit of discussing her family’s talent for talking to spirits. Growing up, she’d been so embarrassed by her mother’s obsession with paranormal activity. She’d seen it as a sign of mental illness, until she, too, experienced it. It wasn’t something to boast about. It was one more thing to hide.
“But it’s fun, isn’t it?”
What She Inherits Page 17
