by April Hill
I wanted desperately to turn around and look back to see if Rob McCaffrey was still watching me.
* * *
As impossible as it seemed, the shop had barely changed. The lead-mullioned windows were a little grimier, the blue shutters a bit more faded, and the weeds had taken over the tiny front yard to the point that the meandering brick walkway that led to the front door was barely passable. The oval wooden sign hanging on the door from a rusted chain read, "Sorry You Missed Us! Please Come Again!" as though the proprietress had simply locked up and gone home for the day, to return first thing in the morning.
The snug little building housing The Four Winds, Far Corners Book Shoppe was already seventy years old when I was born, yet here it stood, looking as it always had. Mom had once printed up hundreds of ads with a color sketch of the shop, claiming that there was a legend that said both the cottage and the island itself were enchanted––a place where time stood still. We plastered the stupid fliers on every tree and fence post near the ferry dock on the mainland. It rained that night and turned our fliers to mush. Yet another fruitless attempt to entice tourists over to buy books they could get for less almost anywhere else.
I dropped my bag, leaned the bike against the building and sat down on the crumbling brick wall to study the aging bungalow where I'd spent so many happy hours as a kid. It was a little more forlorn and windblown than it had been on my last visit six years earlier, and the left shutter on the front bay window was hanging from one hinge. Mom wasn't big on fixing things and always claimed that she was leaving it "natural" to discourage thieves from breaking in to look for money or drugs. Since she usually sold a book on the average of twice a week and had always operated on the basis of "pay me next time, if you like it," her explanation for the store's condition never made a lot of sense. In retrospect, though, she may have been right. There had never been a robbery at Four Winds, Far Corners—with the exception of a shy, inhibited lady named Fiona Wycliffe, who came in now and then and shoplifted another sex manual.
After rummaging about in my purse, I found the yellowing photo I'd carried around with me since I left the island. I was twenty-five then, standing with Mom in front of the shop. Dad had died that spring, and I was spending the summer with Mom after completing my master's, sweating through a year in a publishing internship and finishing my first year as a genuine, full-fledged assistant editor. A sub-sub assistant editor to an associate editor was more like it, but McDowell-Parsons was one of the most prestigious publishing houses in the city. It had seemed like a great beginning to a promising career.
I met Bradley that fall, just after I returned to New York. He was attractive, financially well fixed and forceful, and he promptly convinced me that I would do better working as his "protégé"—in the advertising field. More money, more excitement, faster promotions. I fell for it, of course, almost as quickly and carelessly as I had fallen for Bradley.
My first account was for a manufacturer of "adult toys." For the next four years I promoted everything I had always hated, from cigarettes to war toys. My advertising career eventually ended in fireworks when I declined a fabulous opportunity to hawk a line of glitzy makeup, sexy underwear, and Dolly Parton-type glamour wigs to parents who signed their toddlers up for beauty pageants. Bradley was outraged that I didn't see the business potential in tiny sex queens, and I was outraged that he did. I moved out that evening, stayed with a friend and began disentangling myself from Bradley. Two days later, I discovered that most of what I had earned over the Bradley years had gone into the lavish Manhattan apartment we shared, but Bradley owned.
I slipped the photo back into my purse. There was no point crying over spilled milk or even soured milk. Not when you're the one who spilled it.
When I walked around to the back and found the rear door unlatched, I wasn't too surprised. I couldn't remember a time when the shop was kept locked. We actually lived in a carriage house that belonged to Miss Tulip Prendergast, the woman who owned the island, and my mother's best friend and customer, but during my adolescence, Mom's "open door policy" at the shop had provided a convenient, reliably private place in which to take my first tentative puffs of low-octane pot and to conduct my earliest romantic liaisons—such as they were. After brushing years of spider webs out of the doorway, I poked around the small studio apartment at the rear of the shop, hoping to find it reasonably weather-tight and still livable. Fortunately, I'd still been poor longer than I'd been rich, so the improvised two-burner "kitchen" and the rudimentary bathroom weren't too great a shock. The two rooms and cooking alcove would have fit into Bradley's spare bedroom, with enough space left over for his workout equipment. But our elegant "pied-a-terre" didn't have a panoramic view of sun-dappled Jewel Box Bay or a pull-chain toilet with a nest of mice behind the tank.
By late afternoon I'd unpacked what I brought up the hill with me, but the apartment was still a mess. Mom had been living with Tulip since Dad passed away, so the apartment had been empty for all that time. The smell of must and mildew permeated every corner, and everything in the place would have to be laundered or aired out. A thorough sweep and a little dusting rendered it marginally livable, and that was good enough for me—for now. Fortunately, my housekeeping standards have always been on the minimal side.
I had called ahead, so the power was already on. The water spurted from the taps like brown sludge at first, but eventually cleared enough to wash with and to drink, once I exhausted the stock of room-temperature diet Pepsi I'd found in the defunct fridge. The refrigerator hummed but didn't get cold, so I unplugged it and decided it would do nicely as a safe place to store things in case the mice took it in their adorable little heads to help themselves to my groceries. I was already sharing my tiny bathroom with the mice, and when I snuggled into my musty bed that night, I discovered I had company there, as well—inside the box springs.
Okay, so the place was a wreck, but the important thing was that it was my wreck. All of it. Tomorrow I'd begin work on the shop—and the rest of my life.
The following morning, after a restless night spent remembering every delicious detail of Bradley's well-stocked pantry and fridge, I made my way up the hill to Guillemot Cottage—to announce my return to Tulip.
Tulip is a wonderful human being, but she's a little complicated to explain. To start with, she owns Jewel Box Island. That's right. All of it. Every square, scruffy inch. From the ancient hilltop mansion her father built more than a hundred years earlier, to the island's coves and beaches and rocky shoreline. If she could have found someone dumb enough to buy the island, Tulip Prendergast could have been as rich as Croesus, or even Oprah Winfrey.
At the age of eighty-nine, Tulip had never attended school, traveled more than forty miles from the island or set foot in a large city. She had lived alone in a decaying house with nine bedrooms for the fifty years since her father died. She was still a virgin—a fact she had accepted as her lot in life, but was fully prepared to change if the right gentleman appeared. She thrived on detective stories, and though she'd never met a real-life gangster, she'd absorbed so much dialogue from cheap detective thrillers that she often sounded like a character out of a Mickey Spillane novel. Most people who didn't know her well regarded her as just that—a "character." For many years I thought of that as an insult, but the older I got and the more "normal people" I met, the more complimentary it seemed.
I hadn't told Tulip I was coming, but she didn't seem especially surprised to see me and greeted me at the door with a sour expression. "So, you finally left that cold-blooded prick. I hope you cleaned the sonuvabitch's clock before you skipped town."
"I stole a lot of his towels," I said, hoping that a bit of post-relationship larceny might improve my image. "The expensive fingertip ones, with the monogram." (Bradley's last name is Harding. Mine is Harris. Hence, the towels.)
Tulip shook her head in disgust, apparently unimpressed by my paltry take. "You always were a damned imbecile where men are concerned—like that dickhe
ad mortician you let walk all over you in high school. Well, now that you're here, you might just as well come on in. I'm glad you're home. You look like shit."
Since the old carriage house where I'd once lived was decaying with dry-rot, Tulip spent half the afternoon trying to persuade me to move into the cottage with her and the other half telling me what a halfwit I was for leaving the island and going off to take up with that worthless city-bred asshole in the first place. While listening to the familiar tirade, I managed to take a quick bath in a real tub, eat the two steaming bowls of clam chowder and the two-and-a-half grilled cheese sandwiches she forced on me, plus down a package of Oreos and a half-quart of milk. Finally, bearing canned goods, a lot of kitchen stuff and two sets of sheets that had been mine as a child, I tottered back down the hill to the shop, juggling the several cardboard boxes and a small toaster-oven. Inside the first box, tucked inside Tulip's old stainless steel percolator, I found five hundred bucks in twenties. I was touched but not surprised by her generosity. Tulip is a notorious skinflint, but she's always had a soft spot for me. I crawled into bed, where I could feel sorry for myself and stay warm at the same time. When it began to rain, I lay awake for a couple of hours listening to the storm, grateful for the comforting sounds of the mouse family scrabbling busily around somewhere in the box-springs—just beneath my pillow.
The next morning I woke up feeling confident and cheerful, eager to take on the task of cleaning the shop, dusting and restocking the shelves. I was dancing around the room with a broom, singing the happy little work song from "Snow White" when I saw an old enemy coming up the walk. Mayor George Dooley was paying me a visit, and he looked unusually grim. I set my broom aside, and went outside to greet him.
"I was hoping to stop you before you started moving back in," he said irritably, waving his hand at the mess I'd created in the front of the store. "You'll have to find somewhere else to live. This building has been condemned. Didn't you see the notice on the door?"
Okay, so I had noticed the notice, but I hadn't read the notice. Not every little detail of it, anyway. I had assumed it was a clerical error. Treating official-looking documents on my door or in my mailbox as clerical errors was a longtime habit. It never prevented disaster, but it sometimes bought me a little time.
"Condemned?" I cried. "Why? This building is as solid as a rock!" My little speech might have been more convincing if the shutter hadn't fallen off as we stood there. Dooley just shook his head.
"That's exactly what I'm talking about."
I looked around. "What?"
He picked up the shutter and leaned it up against the wall. "You know perfectly well, what. The Town Council assumed that Miss Prendergast would be willing to take you in."
"I don't need to be taken in," I growled. "This sounds to me like a conspiracy and some sort of greedy land grab."
"Don't be ridiculous," he snapped. "You couldn't pay me to take this dump. It should have come down years ago. It's always been an eyesore, and the only thing holding it up now is the cobwebs and rusted pipes. If you won't leave voluntarily, we're going to have to get the law involved."
He handed me a sheet of paper that looked ominously official.
"You'll note that this second order is signed by the new Chief of Police."
"We have police?" I asked, a bit taken aback.
"We will," he explained. "The funds for two additional uniformed personnel are included in the proposed five-year city improvement plan."
"So, this new guy you hired is sort of Chief of the Proposed police?"
Dooley glared at me. "Are you trying to be a wiseass?" he snapped. "You were a wiseass as a child. Always had your nose in damned book, just like you mother—when you weren't running around like a godless heathen, getting into trouble and poking your nose in where it didn't belong. My father used to say that what the two of you needed wasn't another trip to the library, but a good old-fashioned trip to the woodshed."
I considered the source and chose to ignore the remark. Besides, there was an element of truth in what old George had said. I wasn't the most well-behaved of children. "What does he do now, this sort of proposed chief?" I asked.
He pointed to the signature on the official looking paper and smiled. "That's one thing he does. He signs eviction notices. Thirty days, and if the roof comes down on your head before then, you have no one to blame but you and your own stubbornness."
As he stormed off down the hill, I went back inside and resumed sweeping. I was fairly sure that the eviction notice was no big deal, and that Dooley was merely being his usual, officious pain in the butt. Besides, it was anybody's guess when the issue would come before the trio of argumentative senior citizens islanders called the Town Council. Everything of a civic or quasi-legal nature on Jewel Box had always moved at a snail's pace or got dropped for lack of interest.
But I made a mental note to have a word or two with this new Chief of Police when I finally ran into him. About private property rights and the U.S. Constitution. That kind of thing.
Please Enjoy Chapter One of Vengeance Creek by April Hill!
Vengeance Creek
Chapter One
Claire Parkins walked slowly through the spacious rooms of the once-grand old house, noting with sadness the glassless windows and the rotted floorboards that creaked and groaned beneath her step. Outside in the barren front yard, bright flowerbeds had once bloomed every spring. But now the ground was baked dry, dotted sparsely with dry clumps of brown weeds and strewn with splintered slit-wood shingles that had fallen from the sagging roof. The only remaining signs of the thriving vegetable garden she remembered from her childhood were shallow furrows in the parched clay. Yes, repairing the house was going to be a problem, but not the biggest problem. The biggest problem would still be Thacker, as it always had been. Claire slipped her hand in her pocket and touched the bank check again, comforted by the reality of it, but conscious of just how small it really was and how far it had to go.
Twenty years ago, when the house belonged to her grandfather, Noah Parkins, the Circle P ranch was the largest spread in the valley, and its elegant longhorn bulls were siring much of the quality beef in the territory. Claire was a small girl then, trailing behind the old man wherever he went and dreaming of the day when she would be a real rancher like the grandfather she adored. But that had been before the long years of drought came—years that brought financial ruin and made Grandpa old before his time. For Claire the saddest part was that Noah Parkins had died knowing that the spread he'd carved out of the wilderness and spent forty years building to greatness had crumbled into neglect. He'd lived just long enough to see the Circle P's vast herds sold off to strangers and its expansive lands auctioned off for pennies on the dollar. Most of it had gone to neighboring rancher Linus Thacker, of course, whose fortunes had soared as rapidly as her grandfather's had failed.
And that's why Claire had come back. Her dream was to rebuild not just the melancholy old house but the ranch itself—to reclaim it from the dust and make it great again. Maybe not as big as it had been in Grandpa's day—that would take more money than she had or ever would have, but as close to Grandpa's dream as she could. A place with the sturdiest breeding stock with the finest bloodlines—steers that would provide the beef a growing nation needed as its borders expanded westward. Beef to feed its children and its rail workers, and ….
She smiled to herself. Even her daydreams sounded like Grandpa's. Big words and bigger dreams, she thought, brushing off enough dust to sit down on the steps of her badly leaning porch. Unrealistic dreams, probably. Here she sat, an inexperienced woman, alone in the middle of hundreds of acres of empty grassland with only a ramshackle house and the bank's one-thousand-dollar loan check in her pocket. Grandpa would have made the effort, though, however impossible it seemed. Her father would have done it, too, if he hadn't died in the war. Now, with every last penny she had to her name tied up in a rundown ranch, Claire looked out across the barren plain and sighed. Her fut
ure looked a lot bleaker than it had three weeks ago, when she had left Chicago and a life of ease and comfort.
She'd been sitting on the hot porch for close to an hour when a lone horseman appeared on the top of the ridge and stopped, obviously watching her. Moments later, horse and rider came down the hill at a full gallop and skidded to a stop in a cloud of dust in what had once been the vegetable garden.
"There ain't no goddamned squatters allowed here, lady," he shouted. "You need to move along. Didn't you see them no trespassin' signs over there? The ones posted along the fence, yonder, and on the damn gate?"
"I tore them down," she said simply.
"Tore 'em down? Why the fuck would you do a fool thing like that?"
"Because the fence and the gate belong to me, along with this house and what's left of the porch I'm sitting on. And now that I think about it, mister whoever you are, you're trespassing on my front yard. And I'll thank you to move that horse of yours. He's standing right smack in the middle of my vegetable garden."
"The hell I will! You're fuckin' trespassin'!" he bellowed. "This here's Mr. Linus Thacker's place, all the ways past the creek and a damn far piece beyond that! Now, just get your ass movin, or...."
Claire stood up. "The county records will show that this property belongs to me, including that stretch of the creek," she said firmly. "If you or Linus Thacker or anyone else would care to see a copy of my grant deed, you're welcome to ride into town and look it up. Meanwhile, get your damned horse out of my turnips."
The man looked down at the bare dirt. "I don't see no fuckin' turnips."
