by Lisa Wingate
An old part of me, the part that had once found satisfaction and some misguided sense of self-actualization in those types of relationships, reawakened, whispered, Why not? At least somebody wants you.
I needed comfort right now. A distraction.
“A little.” I tested the waters.
A slow smile added to the billboard-photo illusion. It wasn’t a false sort of smile. He actually seemed like a nice guy.
The gold cross eased from under his camera strap, as if to offer reassurance that he could be trusted. Unfortunately, it reminded me of my mother’s necklace and the argument with Clyde. My stomach compressed into a hard, tight ball. Maybe this wasn’t a pickup attempt, but a mercy mission. Maybe he’d paddled ashore here, sensing that an epic meltdown was under way. Perhaps the dinner invitation was an attempt to … counsel me? I wasn’t up for that. I couldn’t deal with well-meaning advice right now.
“Let me go bring the kayak in.” Slipping the camera strap over his head, he moved to set it beside me with the bug spray. “Hang on to this for me.”
I stood up, finding myself strangely off balance. “You know what, on second thought, I’d better go back home. I …” The excuse I’d been about to make, I left my stepfather without any dinner, wouldn’t even form itself in my mouth. There was food in the refrigerator. Clyde could manage.
But a dinner invitation from someone who’d just … paddled up out of nowhere? Probably not such a good idea, especially in my present state of mind. Maybe I’d just go back to the Excelsior and spend all night on the second floor, piecing together Alice’s letters and searching for more clues … in the dim light of the bulbs that still worked … with the shifting shadows and the noises … and the squirrels … and the nutria rats …
“It’ll only take a second,” my outdoorsman rescuer, my convenient distraction, offered pleasantly. “Think about what you’re hungry for. We can walk downtown if you want, or hop in the car and run over to Kitty Hawk. Hit the Black Pelican, maybe. Or whatever else sounds good. No strings. Just dinner, I promise.”
Just dinner … I needed dinner … and someone to talk to. “All right.” Downtown, maybe, because there was no way I was getting in his car. I was emotionally wrecked, not stupid.
He started back to the kayak, then paused, turned to me again, and offered a friendly handshake, along with another winning smile. “Sorry. I should’ve introduced myself. Casey Turner.”
The blindside surprise left me temporarily speechless, trying to reel up my chin before he could see my brain tripping over itself. That was why he looked familiar—the photo on the business card I’d found tucked in the shutter my first day here.
Don’t tell him your name. Give him a fake one. The thought was ridiculous and tempting all at once.
Stay away from Casey Turner. The man’s a leech, Mark’s warning chimed in.
“Whitney Monroe,” I offered, and Casey didn’t seem surprised. I had a feeling he’d known all along. Maybe that was why he’d stopped and been so determined to engage me. Maybe this wasn’t a pickup attempt or a mercy mission … but a business call?
As he walked away, I caught myself checking to see if anyone was watching. We were right out here in the open. If this got back to the Rip Shack, Mark would be all over it.
Then again, why did I care? It was my prerogative to have dinner with anyone I chose. If I decided to make arrangements to sell my building, I could do that, too. Maybe Casey Turner was interested enough to make some sort of contingency deal and offer cash up front, even knowing that he would have to wait to actually execute the sale and claim possession of the building until after Clyde finally left.
The only thing I had promised Mark was that I would let him know thirty days before I sold to anyone else. Casey and I could work that out too, if he was interested enough in the property. The man was wearing hundreds of dollars of designer outdoors wear for a simple evening of kayaking. He’d just left me with several thousand dollars in camera equipment. He could probably afford to do anything he wanted.
I tried to put Joel and Mark and the story about the Seaside House charity out of my mind. You can’t save the world if you can’t save yourself, Whit. That was the truth of it. I had families to worry about at home.
My mind was turning, firming up thoughts, slapping mortar on new barricades as I watched Casey effortlessly hoist the kayak onto his shoulder and carry it to the porch of a nearby building, where he leaned it against the wall like he owned the place. Maybe he did. How would I know? And maybe he wasn’t the creep he’d been made out to be. How would I know that either? All I had was Mark Strahan’s word, and he had an agenda. More than one, actually.
“So, where to?” Casey pulled the car keys from his pocket as he came back across Creef Park. “Your choice.” He glanced over his shoulder toward town, as if he thought I’d opt to walk someplace close by.
“The Black Pelican sounds good.” The suggestion seemed to surprise him almost as much as it surprised me. “I haven’t been there in years.”
Whisking off the ball cap, he shook out his hair and stuffed the cap inside his knapsack. I picked up the camera and bug spray.
“Sounds perfect.” His words held a sense of anticipation that should’ve worried me, but for some reason didn’t. I was up for almost anything tonight. Anything but returning to the Excelsior, with its mysteries and shadows and its impossible tangle of unanswerable questions.
On the other side of the old boathouse that was now the Maritime Museum, a gold sports car was waiting for us. Convertible. BMW. It matched the shoulder stripes on Casey’s dry shirt perfectly.
“So did you get some good pictures of the dolphins?” I made conversation as he opened the passenger door so I could slide in.
He motioned to the camera in my lap. “Take a look. See what you think.”
I obliged, scanning the images as we started toward Kitty Hawk and Nags Head.
“Did I get anything?” He turned off the radio, and the quiet seemed more in keeping with the acres of wild salt marsh and lowland maritime forest. In the distance, the sun slowly sank into the water. The dash lights came on in the car, and a plethora of electronic gadgets cast a glow over the camera.
“These photos are awesome.” The stop-motion shots captured dolphins breaching, their bodies in sleek, graceful arcs, everything about them radiating pure joy and abandon, sprays of water frozen against the setting sun. “I mean, like, National Geographic gorgeous. You’re an incredible photographer.”
“It’s just a hobby.” He was surprisingly modest about it. I hadn’t imagined him as the modest type, based on the clothes and the car and what Mark had said. “Stress relief. I donate the photos to a group that supports sea turtle preservation. They use them for Tshirts, calendars, sell them as stock photography to raise money. It’s a good outlet for something I’d be doing anyway.”
Sea turtles. Casey Turner was nothing like I’d pictured. Not the ruthless, bulldozer-wielding, skyscraper-building creep Mark wanted me to believe. In fact, right now Mark seemed the more underhanded one of the two. He had blackmailed me over the squirrel trap, after all.
“That’s great.” I turned off the camera and set it down. “I have a restaurant in Michigan. A few of my employees are really good amateur photographers. I’ll have to mention the idea to my business partner. Maybe they could hook up with a conservation group that focuses on the Great Lakes. She loves getting the kids who work for us involved in the community.”
He laughed, regarding me with a quirky, sideways look.
“What?” I caught myself smiling back.
“Kids.” He laughed again. “That struck me as funny. You’re just a kid yourself.”
I gave Casey a closer look. At first glance, I’d assumed he was around my age. Maybe he was older than I’d thought, midforties but well preserved. It didn’t matter, really. So far, I was enjoying the evening out, and there was the temptation to keep it just that. An evening out, not a business meeting.
“I’ve never seen it,” I admitted as we pulled into the parking lot of the Black Pelican, an Outer Banks landmark housed in an old Coast Guard lifesaving station. Long ago, my mom had told me the story of how rescuers were dispatched to ships sinking in the treacherous waters off the Outer Banks.
“Never?” Casey exited the car, and I caught myself reaching for my door before I realized he was coming around to open it. He offered a hand to issue me out of my lowlying seat and I slipped my fingers into his. “I thought you were a longtime regular. I had the impression that you grew up here.”
It was the first thing he’d said to indicate that he’d had knowledge of me before we met in the park—that he knew exactly who he was taking out to dinner tonight. A twinge of uneasiness struck unexpectedly. I’d accepted the dinner invitation fully intending to talk about the building, assuming he wasn’t asking me out because of my delightfully grime-smeared clothes, lovely hair, and tearstained face.
Why the second thoughts? Why did I feel so unsure of this? I usually considered myself a good judge of people and an excellent judge of business. Now I felt like the insecure middle school girl again, all arms and legs and doubts.
You didn’t even know your own mother, Whitney. And if it weren’t for your overconfidence, the Bella Tazza 2 disaster never would’ve happened.
The voice of insecurity hit with paralytic force. I hated that voice—the one that had haunted me since I was old enough to understand what happened to my father. I’d learned to drive those whispers away with logic, with rational arguments. My father’s suicide had been the result of his violent mood swings, most likely bipolar depression he was too proud to admit to—unstable brain chemistry that had gone untreated. There was nothing a little girl could have done to cause it or to stop it … or to deserve it.
But somehow this place, all the questions here, stirred old emotions. I got this had turned into This has got me.
Suddenly, I just wanted to go home.
“Something wrong?” Casey cast concern my way while the hostess seated a group of girlfriends enjoying an early season beach trip.
“No.” Was I telegraphing my thoughts? “Everything’s fine.”
“You keep looking at the door.” His mouth quirked upward in a way that said he knew I was thinking about bolting.
Fortunately, the hostess came back before I had to answer, and I pulled myself together on the way to our table. This was a business negotiation. Business negotiations, I could do in my sleep. One disastrously unforeseen situation with a restaurant did not negate that.
After we perused the menu and ordered, Casey slipped back to the conversation about the sea turtle charity and his pictures. He’d traveled all over the world on photography vacations. I’d worked in some of the places he was talking about. Bali, Curaçao, the Gold Coast. We actually had a lot in common. “It’s really a shame that you haven’t seen a turtle hatch. The loggerheads and the greens are just coming up to nest now. If you’re still here in a couple months when they start, I’ll take you down and let you see a boil.”
“A boil?”
He laughed softly. “When the babies come up out of the sand. It’s called a boil.”
“Ohhh … I’d like that.” I let the thought settle a minute, sank temporarily into a fantasy of life on this long strip of sand surrounded by sea … dating a guy who’d been all over the world, just like I had … except he didn’t need a job to get there. He could simply buy a ticket. The fantasy whirled away as quickly as it had come, disappearing like a balloon with the string untied. “But I don’t think I’ll be staying that long. There’s a lot going on with my restaurant right now.”
“You could come back.”
“Maybe … I’ll have to see how things turn out. I’m really only here to take care of the crisis with my stepfather and see about the building.”
There was a flicker of some involuntary response on Casey’s part. It came and went too quickly for me to identify it, but clearly, a covert thought had slid past the perimeter of our conversation. Was all the talk about watching a sea turtle hatch just a way of gauging my intentions for the building and how long I planned to be in Manteo? Was he trying to charm me or romance me … or both?
“I heard you were cleaning out the second floor.” He paused as the waitress delivered the mixed drink he’d ordered. She offered a shameless flirt along with it. He noticed, was polite, but didn’t return the attention in a way that would’ve been insulting to a dinner date. I couldn’t help taking note.
“I’m trying to sort a bit while I’m here—decide what to keep and what to get rid of.”
Sitting back, he stirred his drink, extracted the little paper umbrella and offered it to me, our fingers brushing before he relaxed against the chair, crossing his legs at the knee and hooking an arm comfortably over the backrest. “I might be interested, if you’ve got things for sale. I’m a bit of an Outer Banks history buff. I like to include some of it in my properties, give the residents and the vacationers a feel for our heritage and what it means.”
“That’s nice.” The davenport desk, the ship’s manifest, the taffrail device, the ruby brooch with the crest, the scrimshaw and the carved bone necklace … How much might they be worth?
And what about Alice’s letters? What about the family secret I was only beginning to piece together? I’d found the first letter hidden away with the ruby brooch and the bone necklace. Were the items and the letter hidden together for a reason? Did they tell parts of the same story? If I separated the elements, would I ever understand the whole?
Yet here was a man who would probably offer cold, hard cash. A way out of the financial mess Denise and I were in. An easy escape.
“I haven’t found a lot yet.” It wasn’t exactly a lie, but it wasn’t the truth either. “A few antiques that belonged to Grandmother, a little jewelry, some old letters that I’m trying to piece together. I don’t know that any of it has much value, other than sentimentally speaking.”
“I’d love to take a look. Be happy to give you an opinion. I’ve bought quite a bit of maritime memorabilia over the years. I’m a pretty good judge.” He was using the hard sell now. Switching tactics.
Interesting …
“Sorry,” he said, as if he’d noticed that I’d noticed. “I didn’t mean to push. I’m sure you have emotional attachments there. It’s not easy to think about cleaning out. My granny had a farm in the Smoky Mountains when I was a kid—my favorite place in the world. Trees to climb, creeks to wade, lakes to fish in. The view from the porch went for miles. Man, I loved that valley. Cohler House had been in the family since the mid-1800s. It was a tobacco plantation, back in the day. My parents sold the whole thing to pay for college for my sisters and me. That was about the saddest day of my life. I went back to see about buying it later on, but the coal companies had taken over the property and torn it up. None of it was there anymore. Not the house, not the barn. Nothing. Just slag heaps and coal roads and the pads from operations trailers.”
“That’s terrible. I’m really sorry.” I felt the tug of sympathy between us and again realized that Casey Turner and I had much in common.
We talked about his grandparents’ farm until the waitress came with our food, her visit changing the mood at the table—a little laughter, a little obvious flirtation. Her efforts were almost embarrassing. I got a vague feeling that she knew Casey.
“Well, anyway, if I can be of help with the cleanout, let me know,” he went on once she’d left. “I could send some muscle if you need it. We run a program out at the resort where we bring in exchange students, keep them employed for a year, let them work on their English and learn about the country. When they’re finished, they get the chance to travel. So … all that to say, there’s always plenty of l
abor around, if you need any. No sense breaking your back.”
I nodded, thinking of Mark’s warning about involving Joel in the process. The more people involved, the more likely the word would get around. There was almost no security for the upper floors of the building—no alarm system on the stairwell, no one in the shops at night, just rickety locks on old doors that would probably collapse if someone leaned too hard.
Casey took a sip of his drink, studied me deeply, his eyes a seawater blue. “I’m not trying to pry. I just got the impression at the park that you might have a little too much on your plate.”
A thistle bloomed in my throat, prickly and raw and unexpected. I swallowed hard. “Thanks. A lot. I’ll keep it in mind. The problem right now has more to do with dealing with my stepfather than anything. He’s not healthy enough to keep living in the residence alone, but so far he refuses to think about changing anything. He and I are not … close, so it’s been pretty much impossible to even talk about options. I tried inviting his sons into the conversation, but they don’t want anything to do with him.”
“Bring him over to see our retirement colony at the Shores. It’s a great assisted-living facility. He might really like it. Might solve your problem.”
If only things could be that simple. “I don’t know how I’d ever get him to come. Besides, Clyde doesn’t have the kind of money a place like that costs.”
Casey’s gaze held mine, offered a host of hidden meanings I could only guess at. “We’ll work something out.”
Was he still talking in theory, or was he making the very offer I’d been hoping for … and fearing the most?
MAY 1, 1936
Dearest Queen Ruby,
Happy May Day, Dear Sister! I hope you will find someone with whom to wind a maypole by the sea. Here in the mountains, I have yet to see one.
