The Last Whistle

by Jamie Bennett

  When I’d finished, Gaby was silent for a moment. “Well,” she said slowly, “I could see how you felt a little threatened. It certainly isn’t friendly, but Ainsley is a tough lady. She sure drives a hard bargain.”

  “You’ve worked with her before?” I read the name on the signature line. “Ainsley Evette. You know her?”

  “Well,” Gaby said again, even more slowly, “yes.” She cleared her throat. “Well, it’s the reason I was calling you, actually. There’s an offer on your bookstore,” she told me.

  “Ow!” As the rest of the anger-energy totally deserted me, I had sunk down onto the deck, landing on the head of one of the nails that I had failed to completely drive into it. I felt gingerly over my cutoffs, but there was no hole to indicate a puncture wound this time. “What did you say about an offer?”

  “There’s an offer on your bookstore,” she repeated. “A good one.” She read aloud the details, and it was a great offer. “Aren’t you happy?”

  Happy? “Yes,” I said, and tried to feel that way. Keep your chin up, Hallie. “Yes, that’s great. Who’s buying it?”

  “Uh, that’s the unusual thing. It’s why I recognized that name, Ainsley Evette. She’s representing the buyer in the sale.”

  I had a weird thought but it couldn’t have been right. “Who is the buyer?” I asked again, but suspiciously this time.

  “Well…”

  It took me a long while to limp my way over to the Feeney place, even using a pair of crutches that I’d dug out of the closet. They were from when I’d been in eighth grade and were a little short, and on top of that, there was something that looked like a moat being dug around Gunnar’s house, and that impeded my progress. “If he fills this with alligators, I swear…” I muttered to myself as I climbed over the far edge. I tried vainly to brush the dirt off my knees but then shrugged and kept going.

  “Gunnar Christiansen put in the offer on the bookshop,” Gaby had told me. Gunnar Christensen. Was his plan to take away everything that meant anything to me? What was next, the locket that had been my grandma’s? My flat iron? I thumped up the ramp to the front door, startling a guy coming down it carrying rolled-up construction plans.

  “Can I help you, miss?” he asked me, and then blinked. “Oh! You’re the girl who fell off the roof! Hey, Victor,” he called to another worker. “Here’s the girl who took the header!”

  “Yes, yes. I’m looking for Gunnar,” I told him. “Gunnar Christensen.”

  “He’s not here right now—”

  “I’ll wait.” I thumped the rest of the way in.

  The house was an anthill of activity, with so many people working that they practically bumped into each other. I noted that the stairs that I had descended when Gunnar had first shown me the deed were already gone from the half-bath, which I felt that future users of the room would appreciate. It would have been hard to go, wondering the whole time if another person would suddenly pop down the stairs to join you.

  Despite my anger, I got interested in the other things happening around me as I waited for Gunnar. After my roof incident, I’d been reading a lot about construction and had gotten a few more books from the college library, too, about architecture and design. I walked around looking at what had been done to the house and noticed immediately that, along with the removal of a number of staircases, there were also a lot fewer doors to the outside. The house was starting to look normal, not like someone had constructed it as a scary human maze or Escher drawing.

  “Wow,” I said to a man leaning over a makeshift table of plywood and sawhorses. He looked up from the drawing of the first floor. “You guys have made amazing progress. I’m so impressed.”

  “Um, thank you.” He stared at me, at my bandaged ankle and my other foot wearing a construction zone-inappropriate flip flop. “And you are?”

  “Hallie Holliday,” I told him. “It’s my real name, not made up.” He called to another guy, giving him directions. “Are you the general contractor?” I asked.

  “I am,” he said warily. “Can I help you with something?”

  I pointed to the plans. “I’m wondering about this opening between the living room and kitchen. Would it be possible to make it taller and wider?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  “Well, that way when you walk in the front door, you’d have such a great view of the lake.” I hadn’t noticed how amazing the views were when I’d been here before with Gunnar. I had to give them credit; despite their overall weirdness, the Feeneys had done a good job of situating the house on the lot. “Also, Gunnar is so big and tall,” I pointed out. “I think he’d be more comfortable with wider doors. It would feel more like this house was made for him.” Although, why I would care about his feelings about his house was beyond me. It was really only that I was interested in design after reading the books I had checked out.

  The contractor studied the plans. “If we did that, this cabinet would have to shrink,” he said, tapping the paper.

  I pointed to another spot. “Not if you moved it here, and that would make more sense with the window, as well.”

  “That’s a good idea.” He nodded at me. “See anything else?” I gave him a few more thoughts I had about the house and we ended up walking through the building together, slowly, so I could keep up on my ankle. It was so interesting to hear what he had to say about framing, plumbing, and electrical work and I learned a lot that I hoped to apply to my own house.

  “Thanks for showing me around,” I said at the end of the tour. “I appreciate it.”

  “Sure,” he told me. “Thanks a lot for your input. I’m going to suggest that we make those changes.” We shook hands. “And you’re not an architect? You don’t have any experience in drafting or design?”

  “I wish,” I said, and sighed. “You should see where I live.” I pointed to where it was located, and then remembered why I was here. Because Gunnar wasn’t just constructing his perfect house next door, he was trying to steal everything I owned. Or buy, as the case might be. “You don’t happen to know when Gunnar will be back, do you?”

  “He’s mostly not here. I don’t know how he can stand to live through this, in all this mess, especially with how hard he’s working with the season starting soon against the Cottonmouths.” The contractor’s face lit up with a familiar expression: Woodsmen worship.

  I had no desire to participate in a football discussion at that moment, even if I had looked a little at the stats of some of the Cottonmouth players and thought it would be a tough matchup. “Could you let him know that I was here and needed to talk to him?” I asked quickly, before the conversation deviated further into the Woodsmen.

  He said yes and I started the long slog back to my house, over the rutted yard and through the dry moat. I had thrown my crutches over the top of the far side and was scrambling up after them when I heard someone call my name in a deep voice, one that I recognized.

  “You know, you could avoid this climb by walking around on the road,” Gunnar pointed out. He suddenly loomed above me and bent to offer me a hand.

  “You’ll hurt yourself,” I huffed out, and ignored it. His answer was to grab me under my arms and haul me out of the ditch. “Thank you,” I told him stiffly, and pulled down my shorts over my thighs. A clod of dirt dislodged from somewhere on my person and fell on my foot.

  “You’re welcome,” he answered. “I really would suggest the road rather than climbing.” He pointed to my dirty foot. “It’s safer, and definitely cleaner.”

  “There has always been a path here, because Mrs. Solomon used to walk over to visit with my grandmother,” I responded coldly.

  “You’re trying to recreate it on your hands and knees?” He looked like he was trying not to smile. “What were you doing over at my house?”

  My anger, previously muffled by the interesting construction discussion, suddenly came roaring back. “I came to talk about my bookstore!” I told him. “You—why—you’re buying it out from under me?”r />
  His eyebrows shot up. “Out from under you? You put it up for sale. And yes, I put in an offer. Aren’t you glad? My lawyer seemed to think that the building would sit on the market forever.”

  “Your lawyer,” I repeated. “That’s another thing!”

  Gunnar sighed. “Can we go sit down if we’re going to argue again? I had a long practice and it’s hard to talk to you when I’m afraid you’re going to fall backwards into a ditch.”

  “Well, we can’t go in there,” I said, jerking my head toward the Feeney place and almost unbalancing myself enough to slide back into the moat, just as he’d said he feared. But I kept upright without assistance, even if it was hard on one foot. “That’s a three-ring circus. Gus said that everyone has been on top of each other for days.”

  “Gus?”

  “Your contractor,” I explained shortly.

  “I knew that, but how did you? Why were you in there?” He held out his arm to me. “Let’s go to the beach. Can you navigate it?”

  I limped past his arm. “No, let’s go to my cottage. I worked on the rusty nails in the loose boards in the deck so it’s safer to sit there.”

  “Nothing about that sentence sounded safe,” he told me, but did follow me down what was left of Mrs. Solomon’s path toward my house.

  “Where’s the trillium?” he asked as we passed through the trees on our way. “I looked that up after you yelled at me about stepping on it, but I don’t see any.”

  “I didn’t yell!” Maybe I had been slightly annoyed. “They’re spring flowers. But you can’t pick them or hurt them, because it’s illegal.”

  “Since you’re obviously mad at me again, I bet I could count on you to make a citizen’s arrest,” Gunnar said.

  “That’s funny, you talking about the law when you sicced your lawyer on me!” I wheeled around and the branch I’d been holding back out of the path rebounded and smacked him. “Sorry,” I said automatically. “No, I take that back. I’m not sorry, because that letter was a terrible thing to do to me! I thought we’d worked things out, and then you have someone write to threaten me? How did you think that would make me feel, joyful and delighted?”

  “What are you talking about, threaten?” Gunnar rubbed the bronzed skin on his arm where the branch had slapped him. “Show me this letter.”

  I shook my head at his feigned innocence and swung myself as quickly as I could on the short crutches back to my house. He waited on the deck while I retrieved the letter, the thick paper very crumpled from me balling it up earlier in my fury.

  He helped himself to a chair, flattened the paper, and read through it. Then he puffed his cheeks and blew out a breath before he looked up at me. “She was supposed to send you a letter, but just to clarify where we were with the situation. That you and I had amicably agreed that the new property line is correct and that we aren’t going to argue about it anymore.”

  “That’s not what this letter says. It says that you’ll pursue any and all remedies against me! And then you go behind my back and buy my bookstore? Why? Just to kick me when I’m down?”

  Gunnar’s blue eyes blazed. “Why is taking a heavily mortgaged property off your hands kicking you in any way? You put something up for sale and I bought it. I don’t see the issue.”

  “The issue is…” I sat down too and plunked my chin into my hands. “The issue is that I’m losing everything and you’re getting it.” That was the heart of it. “And once again I’m yelling at you for something that isn’t your fault. It’s not your fault that my dad sold our land, and it’s not your fault that I have to sell the bookstore. I’m sorry.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “No, but this letter is my fault. I’ll talk to my attorney, because she’s not representing me as I want her to when she sends out stuff like this. It does sound like a threat. And I should have told you before I put in the offer that I was thinking about buying your store. I didn’t want to get you worked up.” He smiled slightly. “Too late.”

  “Why do you want it?” I asked anxiously. “What are you going to do with it? Please don’t make it something terrible.”

  Gunnar’s smile dropped and now he looked offended. “Why would I do something terrible? And what would that be, exactly?”

  “I don’t know, some kind of ugly, tacky football thing that would ruin our town. Or a gentlemen’s club or something.”

  “You think I’d open a topless bar? Right in between the hardware store and the barber?” he asked angrily.

  I threw up my hands. “I don’t know what you’ll do! You’re very sneaky.”

  “Sneaky.” Suddenly Gunnar laughed. “I’m the least sneaky person around. I’ve never been able to get away with anything in my whole life. Even when I was a kid, my sisters could read me like a book.”

  “I didn’t know what you were up to,” I countered.

  “I wasn’t trying to sneak,” he told me. “I bought the Feeney house not knowing that the property lines had moved and you weren’t aware of it. I bought the bookstore without telling you in advance that I was going to, yes, but I did it in my own name, not trying to hide it. And I’m sorry about the letter from Ainsley, I really am. That surprised me, too.”

  I nodded slightly. “Ok. I accept your apology about that. But I wish you had talked to me about buying Holliday Booksellers.”

  “I thought I’d put in the offer, you’d be happy, and then we’d talk. You’re not the easiest person to approach,” he noted.

  “I’ve been told that before,” I said huffily. On a few thousand occasions. “A smile won’t hurt you,” my dad had reminded me, many, many times. I sighed. “So, what are you going to do with the building, if no bare breasts? Gaby said that your offer included the contents of the store, too. What will you do with all those books?”

  “Sell them.”

  “Like, to a wholesaler?” I asked curiously.

  “I’ll sell them just like you were doing,” he said. “It’s still going to be a bookstore.”

  I sat up straight. “Are you serious?”

  He shrugged. “Why not?”

  “Well, it’s your money to burn, but you might remember that the business recently failed!” I told him angrily, but stopped myself. “That wasn’t entirely because it was a bookstore. There were other circumstances.”

  Gunnar nodded like he knew what I was talking about. My dad’s money problems may have been a secret from me, but as I’d learned from Carey Winslow, word had gotten around town. I was sure that super-attorney Ainsley Evette had also done all the due diligence she could on the background financials of the store. “I think I can make a go of it. Things were difficult for you,” he said carefully, “but I have some resources that you didn’t.”

  His resources were definitely multiple millions of dollars more than mine. And yes, things had been difficult, and not just at Holliday Booksellers. At times, I struggled to see how they were going to improve, and this was one of those occasions. Gunnar would own the bookstore, I told myself, testing it out in my mind. It would belong to him. I pushed back some stray curls that the wind had loosened up and thought about driving through town and seeing someone else’s bookstore there, another name painted in gold on the window…no.

  I thought instead about taking alternate routes so I wouldn’t have to witness any of that. I didn’t know if I could stand to look at a monument of my failure to my family, a monument to how good our lives had been and the turn they had taken when I’d left.

  Gunnar was watching me. “This must be hard to take.”

  “Honestly, the past few months have been hard to take,” I said. “I left here thinking that things would never change. Then everything changed, and I don’t like it. Not at all.”

  “Change sucks,” Gunnar agreed. “It really does.”

  “But you’re choosing to make the changes in your life, they’re not being forced on you,” I argued. “You chose to move and renovate the Feeney place, you’re choosing to buy the bookstore. Why did you want it?”
I asked him curiously. “Is it because of scuba diving?”

  His eyebrows raised again. “Scuba diving?”

  “You said you were looking for something to fill your time and it looks like diving won’t be it. Is the bookstore something else you’re trying?” I asked.

  Gunnar looked out towards the lake, what you could see of it through the trees I still hadn’t trimmed back. “Speaking of filling things, how’s the hole in your roof?” he asked suddenly, and stood to walk inside my kitchen.

  “It’s fine!” I said, scrambling after him. The roof wasn’t exactly fine, but there also were some other problems that I wasn’t interested in him seeing.

  “Lots of books,” he noted when he walked in the living room. He turned around, looking at the shelves that covered all four walls.

  At least he was focused on that rather than the dust and spiderwebs. Cleaning had remained at the bottom of my list of priorities. “We all loved to read,” I explained, shoving a stack of volumes with my uninjured foot and nearly toppling over. “And I also emptied out my apartment in Chicago and brought everything here, so it got crowded. I haven’t had time to organize. I’ve also been trying to save the store and figure out the diamond mine that my dad invested in to try to recoup some money from that, and also there are a lot of repairs to the cottage I need to do, and also I have the tutoring job and Marley has her exams this week, and also I’m trying to return to my career and looking for another part-time job, as well. I’ve been busy,” I summarized.

  “I like the books. I do,” he told me. He picked up a pile and looked at the covers. “Your house feels…cozy.”

  “Cramped” and “shabby” were more the words that sprang to my mind. “Thank you.”

  “My house is awful.” He sighed, and wiped his hands on his shorts. It really was dusty in here. “I don’t even want to go inside when I pull up the driveway.”

  “It must be hard to live through it right now, but it’s going to turn out so well,” I assured him. “It’s going to turn out beautifully, and you’ll love it. You’ll be really happy there.”