The Weekenders

by Mary Kay Andrews

  33

  Nate tied up the skiff at the Holtzclaw dock. Or, what was left of it. He tugged at the line to make sure the piling wouldn’t turn to dust at his touch, and was amazed when it held. He studied the weather-beaten silver decking, which had so many missing and rotted boards he was already having second thoughts about his mission.

  He looked down at the swirling brackish waters of Fiddler’s Creek. The tide was up, and a mullet flopped lazily at the edge of the muddy creek bank, where the partially submerged hull of an old metal johnboat had become one with the oyster bank.

  Then he shrugged and jumped onto the dock. A new wooden gate had been erected at the end of the dock, with a stern NO TRESPASSING sign tacked to it. Nate ignored the sign and easily clambered over the gate. If all went as he hoped, he’d own this dock and the fifty acres that went with it by the end of the week.

  He picked his way carefully down the dock toward solid land, testing each plank before putting his full weight on it. He didn’t dare look up until he’d reached the grassy shore.

  The rambling wooden farmhouse loomed tantalizingly close before him, thirty yards away, but an ugly new six-foot-tall chain-link fence with a sturdy padlocked gate and yet another NO TRESPASSING sign had been strung across the back edge of the property.

  “I’m too old for this crap,” he muttered to himself, shoving one foot into a link and laboriously climbing up and over the fence.

  Once he was on the other side he paused and studied the house. The old structure hadn’t been occupied in at least twenty years, and even when he was a boy, the Holtzclaws, who lived somewhere in the mountains, didn’t mix much with Belle Isle’s weekenders or the locals.

  But the house, which rose three stories high, with wide tin-roofed porches extending across the back, was a landmark on the winding Fiddler’s Creek, where its profile was visible for miles.

  As Nate picked his way across the weedy yard dotted with blackened fire circles and piles of trash from unauthorized campers, he noted the telltale metal pins and pink-flagged surveyor’s tape. He turned and looked back at the water’s edge. The property sat at the widest opening of Fiddler’s Creek in a natural oxbow, with half a mile of deep-water frontage and easy access to the ocean. No wonder Wendell Griggs had been willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get his hands on this prize.

  But right now it was the old house he was drawn to. He put a foot on the bottom step of the porch and tested, then climbed onto the porch. A trio of ancient rocking chairs with rotted split-cane seats were upended against the wall, and he saw that most of the row of windows were broken out. Beer cans and the remains of a Styrofoam cooler were heaped at the far end of the porch. There was a door in the middle of the wall, and it hung partially open.

  Nate frowned. This place was a magnet for vandals and kids. It was a wonder it hadn’t burnt down. He’d need to do more to secure the property as soon as the sale was complete.

  The old floorboards groaned as he walked toward the door. He pushed the door inward, and the rusty hinges rasped loudly.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice. “Who’s that?”

  * * *

  Riley Griggs didn’t look the least bit guilty to be caught trespassing. She was standing in front of a massive rock fireplace, her hands on her hips. “Nate. What are you doing here?”

  She was dressed in faded blue jeans, a cornflower-blue T-shirt, and sneakers, with a baseball cap jammed down over her hair. She had her cell phone in her hand, and Nate guessed she’d been photographing something when he’d busted in on her.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” he said easily.

  “I asked first,” Riley countered.

  He gazed around the high-ceilinged old room. It had been handsome once, not fancy or grand, but the island-milled cedar walls were a soft silver, and the pine floors gave it a rough sort of dignity. Exposed wiring dangled from the ceilings and walls, where light fixtures had been ripped away and stolen, and soot blackened the granite masonry of the fireplace.

  “This old place has always fascinated me,” Nate admitted. “My buddies and I used to sneak over here and fish off the dock as kids. You could almost always catch a mess of flounder or the occasional big red when the tide was right, and the blue crabs that hung around those pilings were the biggest and sweetest on the island.”

  “My dad used to bring me over here to visit Miss Josie when I was a little girl,” Riley said, her expression taking on a dreamy quality. “Dad said she was partial to girls because she didn’t have any of her own, just the two sons who didn’t come to the island that much.”

  She pointed to a partially burnt-out skeleton of a sofa. “She always kept a cut-glass jar of sour lemon jawbreakers on a coffee table that used to be there. I thought they were the most exotic thing in the world.”

  “Is that what you’re doing here?” Nate teased. “Looking for jawbreakers?”

  “No,” Riley said. “I guess I wanted to see for myself what my husband bought with the money he stole from my trust fund, before somebody else buys it from the bank.”

  * * *

  “You’re saying Wendell took money from your trust fund? And you didn’t know about it?”

  “It turns out there was a lot he was doing that I didn’t know about,” Riley said.

  He was at a temporary loss for words. Should he tell her what he was planning? To what end?

  “I’m so sorry,” Nate said. “Have you talked to a lawyer? Is there anything you can do about it? That’s gotta be some kind of bank fraud, right?”

  Riley held up three fingers and ticked off the answers to his questions. “I’ve talked to a lawyer, but since Wendell apparently cleaned out all my savings, I can’t actually afford to pay her a retainer. And, anyway, who do I sue? Wendell? He’s dead. Besides, my father saw fit to put Wendell’s name on my trust account, so it appears he had full legal access to my inheritance.”

  “Unbelievable,” Nate said. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not particularly,” Riley said. “I really did just want to take a good look at the house. Wendell intended to tear it down, you know. I wasn’t privy to many of the details, but I did know he planned to build a second marina here, with condos and apartments and all manner of marvelously hideous ‘improvements’ to the island.”

  Nate pushed at one of the worn wooden floorboards with the toe of his shoe, surprised that it didn’t give way.

  “At first glance, it looks like the house is in pretty rough shape, at least from the outside, but it’s not nearly as bad as I expected in here.” He pointed upward. “High ceilings, and it doesn’t look like the roof has leaked. And the floors seem solid. How old do you think it is?”

  “I know my great-uncle sold the property and the house to the Holtzclaws sometime in the early thirties, so it was probably built in the twenties, by the looks of the place. My grandmother told me this was originally built as a sort of boardinghouse for all the construction workers who were brought over to clear the land and build the first homes.”

  “I never knew that,” Nate said, intrigued. “So this house is old, but not as old as your parents’ house. Not anywhere near as fancy either, from what I can remember of Shutters.”

  Riley cocked her head and appraised the sly grin on his face. “What do you remember about our house?”

  “I remember being totally intimidated the first time I showed up to take you out,” he said.

  “By the house, or my mother?”

  “Both, now that you mention it. Your mother was pretty imposing. And Shutters was easily the fanciest house I’d ever been in. Marble floors, crystal chandeliers, and a wood-paneled library.” He whistled at the extravagance.

  “That’s only because my great-granddad built the house as a sales tool to sell the rest of the lots and spec houses in the early days when he and my great-uncle were trying to get Belle Isle up and running,” Riley said.

  “According to Parrish Godchaux, you’re currently a multi-multimillionaire
, so I bet you wouldn’t find Shutters quite so fancy now, and anyway, I seriously doubt there’s much that intimidates you these days.”

  “Not true,” Nate said, looking directly at her. “You intimidate me.”

  “Me?” Riley scoffed, gesturing at herself. “Look at me. I’m a forty-two-year-old widowed has-been. I don’t even intimidate our twelve-pound pug puppy.”

  “I sincerely hope you don’t believe that,” Nate said. “You’re beautiful, intelligent, and talented. And don’t give me that crap about being washed up. I’ve seen your television work, and I know about the regional Emmys you’ve won. You were really good at what you did.”

  “Oh! You’re telling me you saw my work while you were out in California making your first million?” Riley taunted.

  “I made my living off the Internet,” he reminded her. “You should try Googling yourself. You’d be surprised by how many video clips of your work there are floating around out there.”

  “That was a long time ago, back in the days when I was actually a serious journalist. A lifetime ago. Haven’t you gotten the memo? Middle-aged women are officially invisible.”

  “Not to me,” Nate said.

  Riley took a half step backward. “If I didn’t know better, Nate Milas, I’d think you were trying to hit on me.”

  He closed the gap between them. “What if I was? What would you do?”

  Riley felt something she could have sworn she’d forgotten: a warm tingling in her scalp that traveled all the way down her spine. And then she had the oddest sensation. Her give-a-shit up and left.

  They were standing only inches apart, so close she could see the gray stubble on his chin and the laugh lines worn into his deeply tanned face. Her eyes met his. They were warm and kind. She took a deep breath. “I might just let you.”

  Nate reached out and tilted up the bill of her baseball cap. He placed his hands on either side of her face and tilted it up so that his lips met hers.

  The kiss was tentative at first. But when she didn’t protest, or back away, he pulled her closer, flattening his body against hers, kissing deeper, teasing her lips apart with his tongue.

  “Okay?” he murmured.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck. “So far, so good.”

  34

  As she sank further into Nate’s embrace a tiny part of her brain—the only part of her body not preoccupied with the pleasure of being in a man’s arms again—kept insisting that one of them would have to come to their senses soon and break away.

  After all, they were standing in an abandoned house, in broad daylight, making out like a couple of horny teenagers.

  But then, Nate’s hands slid slowly, slowly around her waist, slipped under her T-shirt, and were definitely headed north, while his lips were unmistakably headed south, hovering now around her collarbone.

  “Whoa,” she whispered.

  He looked up, genuinely puzzled. “Whoa? Does that mean slow down?”

  “It means,” she said, catching his right hand just as it reached her right nipple, “what’s going on here?”

  Nate nuzzled her neck. His breath was warm on her skin. “Well, I was hitting on you, and I thought it was going pretty well.”

  “Yeah, it was going great until you suddenly went from hitting on me to swinging for the fences,” Riley said.

  Nate sighed and stepped away. “Too fast. My bad.”

  “Again,” Riley said.

  They both laughed, temporarily breaking the tension of the moment.

  “It’s getting late, and I really want to see the rest of the house,” Riley said abruptly, heading for the stairway.

  “Are you running away from me?” Nate asked.

  “Absolutely,” she called over her shoulder.

  He caught up with her on the wide second-floor stair landing. She was standing in front of the open door to a bedroom, with her hand clapped over her nose and mouth, pointing inside the room.

  “Gross,” Nate said, peeking inside. He kicked at a mound of rotting trash, walked inside, and quickly retreated, pulling the door closed.

  “It looks like a family of raccoons moved in here after the Holtzclaws moved out.” He pointed toward the ceiling, where a hole had been chewed in a section of rotting boards.

  “This stench!” Riley made a gagging sound in the back of her throat.

  Nate moved over toward a window and tugged at the sash, but it didn’t budge, so he took a step backward and kicked out the glass.

  Riley raised an eyebrow, but he pointed at the rotted window frame and she nodded in agreement.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “I kinda want to keep going and see the rest of the space up here.”

  “You go first,” she said, pointing down the hallway.

  In all, they discovered that the second floor held six bedrooms but only two bathrooms, both of which featured cracked and stained porcelain tile floors, wainscoting, and enormous cast-iron claw-foot bathtubs.

  “No showers, just like Shutters,” Riley noted. “And I guess the concept of creating a master bath never occurred to the Holtzclaws. My dad used to say Dr. Holtzclaw was so cheap he squeaked when he walked.”

  “I can tell now that it was built as a boardinghouse,” Nate said. “And it would probably take a couple hundred thousand dollars to at least make it livable. Probably another reason Wendell decided it was a teardown, aside from the fact that the location and the deep-water access makes it a perfect spot for the marina he was planning.”

  She regarded him with surprise. “You sound like a prospective buyer.”

  Nate looked notably uncomfortable.

  “You dodged the question earlier, when I asked you why you were here. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re interested in buying this property.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That is why I’m here.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she processed that information. “You’re a single guy. Why do you need a house like this? Never mind. Don’t tell me.” She shook her head in disgust and headed down the stairs.

  “Wait up,” Nate called, but she was taking the stairs two at a time in her haste to get away from him. “You asked me a question. At least let me try to explain.”

  She stood by the front door, glaring at him. “If I stand here and listen, are you going to tell me the truth? Or are you going to hand me a load of bullshit, like every other man in my life?”

  “I will tell you the truth. You’re not going to like it, but I promise, I will not lie to you.”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I can’t wait to hear it.”

  “Can we back up a little, to earlier? Starting with what happened in the living room?” he asked.

  “Yes. Let’s do start with that kiss. And end with it, too. That was a mistake. I should know better. I do know better, but you caught me at a weak moment.”

  “Why?” he asked. “What’s wrong with me kissing you—and you kissing me back, if that’s what we both want?”

  “You want a list? Let’s start with the fact that my husband’s ashes aren’t even buried yet. And I don’t even know you. Yeah, I used to, a long time ago, I thought. But I don’t know you now, and I don’t even know if I want to. The last thing I need right now is a hot fling, especially with another smooth operator, wheeler-dealer like you.”

  “Hold up!” Nate said, his face reddening. “I know my timing sucks, but didn’t you tell me you and Wendell were getting a divorce? I can slow down if that’s what you want, but let me be clear about something, Riley. I’m not looking for a hot fling, as you put it. I really care about you. Your situation sucks right now, and I’d like to help you out, if you’d let me.”

  “No way,” she shot back. She gestured at the house. “You do what you’re gonna do with this place. Buy it, tear it down, build an amusement park, if you want. I’ll take care of myself, thanks very much.”

  Nate stood in the open door of the decrepit old house. He watched while she climbed onto the golf cart she’d parked under an old carport. Ri
ley didn’t look back, and this time, he didn’t call out to her. He’d blown it—his last chance to tell her all of it—the whole thing. She’d find out for herself soon enough, and that would be the end of his stupid folly, of thinking that he could have it all—the island, the girl, the family, the life.

  35

  Parrish parked the car on the street in front of the Baldwin Community Bank. She smoothed the skirt of her navy Prada suit and tucked a loose strand of hair into the severe French twist she’d fashioned earlier that morning.

  Then she turned to her best friend, sitting in the passenger seat. “We’re agreed, right? I’ll do the talking. I’ll be calm but firm, and hopefully we’ll manage to snow her into giving us what we want. But you need to know, this might not work. In fact, it probably won’t work.”

  “It’ll work. You look terrifying in that suit, and with your hair pulled back like that,” Riley said admiringly. “If you showed up in my office, I’d totally pee my Spanx and then spill my guts.”

  “Let’s hope so. It’s a good thing for you that Ed had this old briefcase stashed in the downstairs coat closet. I haven’t carried one of these things in years. Also, you do know you’re the only person in the world who could get me back into panty hose and heels in June, right?”

  “I’ll owe you forever,” Riley vowed.

  “Okay.” Parrish nodded to herself. “I’m psyched. Let’s do this.”

  Parrish’s black Ferragamo high-heeled sling-back pumps clicked across the marble floor of the bank. Tellers turned their heads to watch her progress as Parrish made her way toward the glass-walled office on the far side of the room.

  “Uh-oh. Looks like the FDIC,” one of them murmured to her coworker.

  Melody Zimmerman was on the phone when the two women glided into her office and seated themselves opposite her desk.

  She looked startled to see her visitors and held up a finger to indicate she was otherwise engaged.

  “We need to talk,” Parrish said loudly.

  Melody frowned, but hurriedly ended her conversation.