The Sea Keeper's Daughters

by Lisa Wingate

  His lips pulled to one side, and I caught myself watching in a less-than-platonic way. That massive house he lived in had a woman’s touch because he’d purchased it fully furnished, not because there was a wife or girlfriend involved. But it seemed to be … waiting for something. For someone.

  It wasn’t the kind of place a guy bought and kept as a bachelor pad.

  It was a home for a family.

  What did the owner of the Rip Shack really want from life?

  “I think you have to be careful of taking things at face value.” He frowned, and I had the sense that those words referred to me, not the necklaces. “The whole setup has high theatrical value. It could’ve been manufactured to hype a book and a movie. Word is that, so far, they’ve found nothing to corroborate the journal, and nothing about Louisa Quinn, who wrote her manuscript based on the journal. If you ask me, it smells like a publicity stunt. But again, it’s good for the Outer Banks, and after all the hurricanes, we need it. The cheap Chinese knockoffs of the story keeper necklaces are cheesy, but that’s not all bad either.”

  “I guess not.” I imagined Alice stroking the Maltese cross as she fell asleep beneath the flickering kerosene light in the cave house. Her letters were real enough, and she’d had one of those necklaces in her hand in 1936.

  Mark leaned in, catching my gaze. “So … what’s going on in there, Whitney? You went somewhere else for a minute.”

  “I did?” Evade, deny, hide. The reaction was instant.

  “See now, if I had you on the witness stand, I’d be drilling down, looking for what’s underneath.”

  “Good thing I’m not on the witness stand, then … right?” We were playing at this back-and-forth banter, yet we weren’t. In some sense, I was on trial with him, but that went both ways. I couldn’t quite decide what to think of Mark. All the evidence seemed to add up to one thing—that he really was a decent guy. The kind you didn’t meet every day.

  But I couldn’t trust the evidence.

  He rested his hands on the waist of his jeans. “Sorry, once a lawyer, always a lawyer. I’m still in recovery.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “I get it. I can’t go in a restaurant without analyzing the food, the flow patterns of the waitstaff, and the plate time. I’d be back in the kitchens checking those out, too, if I could do it without getting arrested.”

  “You must be a tough dinner date.” The warm tone and a glance toward town said he was thinking about it. In reality, I was too. I wanted him to ask even though I didn’t need the distraction, couldn’t spare the time, and Clyde was upstairs waiting for sustenance. Plus there’s the dog. You can’t take Ruby to dinner with you.

  Excuses, excuses, excuses …

  There were plenty of reasons why not. And one reason why.

  Him.

  The phone rang in my pocket. I took it out and looked at who it was, felt my chest seize up. “I have to take this. I’m sorry.” And I was, in a way, but another part of me was relieved. I had the feeling that comes with realizing you’ve narrowly avoided something potentially dangerous, like a car accident.

  Turning a shoulder to Mark, I answered the phone and asked what was up. Denise didn’t leave me in suspense for long. “Nothing good, I’m afraid, Whit.”

  “Oh no … what?”

  Mark politely wandered a few steps away, checking on Ruby.

  Denise’s answer came in a rushed whisper. “Tagg Harper and a group of his buddies are sitting at table number six. He just … walked in here like he owned the place. Amber was running the front end, and she didn’t have any idea who he was or not to seat him. Melissa took his order. She didn’t know who he was either.”

  “Tagg Harper is in our restaurant?” I couldn’t even give her time to finish the story. I was livid. I wanted to grab Tagg by the scruff of his neck, drag him to the door, and throw him into the parking lot, then kick him across it until he was off the property. Right now, I felt capable of doing it—evicting all three hundred pounds of him. “Well, tell him to get out. Tell him we’re not cooking him anything. Tell him I said it, if you want to.” Sometimes Denise was just too nice. Too passive. It drove me crazy.

  “Calm down, Whitney.”

  “I am calm, Denise. But you do not have to serve that jerk. Showing up there is just one more way of trying to intimidate us. He’s gloating because he’s so sure he’s won. He thinks he can force us out of business.” I sank onto the bench, trying to breathe.

  “They’d already ordered, and their meals were half plated by the time I even knew they were here. I was working in the back. Kenny’s home sick with the flu. I’m just hoping no one else catches it.”

  “Well, if you think anyone else has symptoms, have them plate up Tagg Harper’s food.” Every muscle in my body tightened and burned.

  Denise gave a weary groan. “Thought about it. But I guess the good news is, for the most part, the Tazza 1 staff doesn’t seem to know who Tagg is, which means the Tazza 2 staff have kept it quiet, like we asked them to.”

  “I guess that qualifies as good news.” I rose from the bench, paced, sat down again. “Ohhhh, I wish I were there.”

  “If you were here, I don’t think he would’ve come in. It’s you he’s wondering about. He asked Melissa a whole bunch of questions about where you’d gone. And you know Melissa—if she thinks there’s a tip in it for her, she’ll spill almost anything. Fortunately, she hasn’t a clue why you left or where you’ve been. It’s pretty clear that Tagg is worried about it, though.”

  “I’m sure he’s trolling eBay every five minutes, waiting for us to put the equipment from Tazza 2 up for sale. It’s probably driving him crazy that we haven’t.”

  “Yes, that’s pretty much the impression I got. He’s seriously desperate for news.”

  “Well, it’s nice to think of Tagg Harper as desperate.” Thank goodness I’d asked Mrs. Doyne not to tell anyone about the phone message that had brought me to the Outer Banks.

  “Yeah, true.” Denise sounded shaky, obviously nervous. There was something more that she wasn’t telling me.

  “Denise, what else is wrong? You don’t sound good.” How much pressure was Tagg laying on? With me gone, was he working even harder on Denise? “Did Tagg Harper threaten you?”

  “No … I don’t know …” She was still deciding whether or not to burden me with whatever was burdening her.

  “Denise … what is wrong?”

  “Mattie said there was a man outside her window the other night, that’s all.”

  “She what? There was someone outside Mattie’s window? At your house?” I felt dizzy and sick, my heart pumping. “Did you go look? Was someone there?”

  “Mattie was home with Grandma Daisy. Grammy just thought Mattie was making excuses not to go to bed, so I didn’t find out about it until I got her up for school in the morning. She’d slept in my bed, and I asked her why. She told me it was because of the man outside.”

  “Could you see any evidence that someone had been prowling around your place?” What now? Was this just a stunt? A way of getting me to resurface? Or was it a genuine threat? Everything pivoted on one central balance point, the most important one of all: what was Tagg Harper really capable of?

  “I looked, but I couldn’t tell anything. Her bedroom does face the park, though. It would definitely be possible for someone to walk across. But … then again, the whole thing really could be Mattie not wanting to sleep in her own bed. Anyway, I put the old nursery cam in her room and pointed it toward the window, just in case. She’s sleeping in my bed for now.”

  “Denise, if you even think someone’s been stalking your house, call the police. Promise me. If it’s Tagg or one of his guys, they’re probably just trying to scare us, or maybe to see if I’ll show up at your place. But if Tagg is worried that we’re mounting a new defense for the code commission hearing, there’s no telling what he might try.”

  “I am being careful. But if I can get his face on the nursery cam, we’ll have—” />
  “I mean it, Denise. Do not take any risks to catch him.”

  “Yes, I heard you. Hey, Whit, I need to go. I just peeked out and orders are stacking up.” That was probably true, but she was also brushing me off.

  “Okay. Listen, I’ll try to check with the museum tomorrow. If I can get in touch with anyone on Sunday, I’ll ask whether they can speed things up, and I’ll get back home.”

  Denise and I said good-bye, and I started formulating plans. I needed help finishing my search of the Excelsior’s second floor. Maybe it would be worth asking Joel, despite Mark’s concern about the company he kept. After what’d happened last night, and especially if he was staying at Mark’s house, Joel would hopefully be keeping his nose clean. Working with me in the building would give him something productive to do in his off hours.

  “Sorry about that.” I walked to where Mark and Ruby were mirror images, watching a tree squirrel watch them. There was no point pretending that Mark hadn’t heard my entire conversation with Denise.

  “That didn’t sound good.” He frowned.

  “No, it’s not.” I was about a scant half inch from cracking apart and dissolving into a weeping, moaning, ranting basket case. Instead, I ran the practical next steps through my mind. “This does mean that I need to step up my time frame here in Manteo. Before I go back home, I have to at least finish a thorough search of the second floor. I guess you can see why that’s important.” The cat’s out of the bag, but what does it matter? Reality is reality.

  What was he thinking? What, exactly, was behind that concerned expression?

  “I know it sounds mercenary, Mark, but the things in the hotel building, they’re … I realize that some of it is historical, and I want to do the right thing with whatever we find, but I’m out of time, and … it’s not like I have an emotional attachment to any of it.” That wasn’t true. I was attached. I just couldn’t let myself be. “It’s only stuff. Just … possessions. I have employees depending on me at home … and my cousin. I was the one who convinced her to go into the restaurant business in the first place.”

  Could he see that I wasn’t some horrible person? That I was just desperate and doing the best I could to thread my way through the minefield of a horrible situation? “Do you think it’d be okay if I hired Joel to help me for a few days? I know almost no one here, and I need to wrap this up, and there are still boxes and closets and dresser drawers to dig through.”

  A skeptical look darkened Mark’s face, and I rushed on before he could answer. “I just thought … if Joel’s staying with you right now, he wouldn’t be out running around with … whoever… .”

  Mark watched a boat idle toward its slip, letting the idea perc a minute. “That’s the tough part, to tell you the truth, and that’s the reason it hasn’t done a lot of good when Joel has moved to my house before. I’m gone a lot. I still own an interest in a law firm over in Norfolk, and there’s the Rip Shack. I’m not home to watch Joel, and Joel doesn’t do too well on his own. His girlfriend works odd hours a lot. You leave Joel by himself for the evening and he wanders off, looking for something to do.”

  “The building could definitely keep him busy for a few days.” Even as I said it, I realized there was no way I’d be out of here as quickly as I’d led Denise to believe … whether I had Joel’s help or not. I could put off decisions about what to ultimately do with the building, but I still had Clyde and the dog to worry about.

  Two tons of bricks descended again. I felt their crushing weight.

  Mark’s expression turned sympathetic. “Listen, Whitney, I know you and I got off on the wrong foot when you came here, but I might be able to do something to help. I don’t really practice law anymore, except for handling a few corporate clients who’ve been with me a long time, but I’d be happy to take a look at the situation with your restaurant, do a little research, see if I can come up with any angles for you.”

  My instinctive reaction was to pull back, to be careful, to question. Why would he offer to do that? What did he want in return? Lawyers didn’t give away their services for free. Of course, he did want to keep me from making hasty decisions about the Excelsior… .

  Maybe you should be leaning in instead of pulling away. The urge hit me completely by surprise, so foreign I didn’t even recognize the voice whispering in my head. It came from someplace outside the person I knew. Maybe there’s a reason that phone call came while he was around to hear it.

  “You’re wondering what my motives are,” he preempted.

  “Stop that.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop trying to read me.” Hugging my arms close, I looked away, felt the wind of new possibilities pull against the mooring lines of old habits. Did I have the courage to cast off the ties to the life I’d been living since I was five years old and trust had become a liability?

  Mark shifted his weight, tucked his hands loosely in his pockets—a patient, unhurried posture. “You’re hard to read,” he admitted, “and I’m usually pretty good at that.”

  His observation left me briefly triumphant, then sad. “In business, you have to be careful … about people.”

  “In business, or in life?”

  “Both.” The admission was so close to the core, I couldn’t believe I’d let it come out. I looked away, watched some kids laughing and joking, daring each other to bail off as they crossed the arched bridge to Festival Park.

  Overhead, a pair of grackles raised a ruckus in the trees. Mark waited for them to quiet. “Then I guess the question you have to ask yourself is, ‘What’s he really after?’ Maybe I’m just trying to make sure you have time to really think about the future of the Excelsior.”

  I turned back, and he was watching me intently, his warm brown eyes pulling me in, a slight smile toying, as if he were enjoying the attempt to decipher me … as if he relished the challenge. “But maybe I’m after something more.”

  I held the letter closer to my face, then farther away, then closer again, trying to make out as many of the water-stained words as I could.

  “That one’s not easy to tell much about.” Clyde paused across the card table. The remains of two takeout dinners were stacked between us, slowly drying into sculpture, and we had dragged in floor lamps from everywhere, trying for better light as evening dimmed the room. I’d lost track of how long we’d been sitting there, but my rear end and the chair had slowly become one. My clothes felt itchy and tight. For hours now I’d been vaguely conscious that I’d be much more comfortable if I’d just get up, walk down the hall, and change into my sweats and T-shirt.

  But there was a sense of magic in the air, and if either Clyde or I moved, the spell would be broken. I could feel Alice and Thomas there with us, or perhaps I was with them as they struggled through unfamiliar country, forced off course by rains that had flooded the only available river crossing. The main bridge was out of service until WPA workers could build a new one, stone by stone.

  Even here, so far from the cities, Roosevelt’s controversial New Deal was in evidence. There was talk of the ongoing construction of the Appalachian Scenic Highway, which would traverse the Blue Ridge from Virginia through North Carolina. In the tiny theaters of mountain hamlets, newsreels lauded progress and the ability of the country to “tighten its belt a notch” to survive hard times. Thomas had insisted on stopping to take the girls to the matinee showing of Captain Blood, featuring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Able had never seen a picture show, a theater, or the ocean.

  Neither Thomas nor Alice had realized that, before the main feature, a newsreel would explore the tragedy of the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas. The filmmaker had recorded not only skies blackened by blowing dirt but the shack camps filled with refugees. There, he’d interviewed hopeless families and filmed bone-thin children dressed in rags, their hair hanging in brittle, dirt-encrusted mats, their expressions hollow and bleak. Their eyes were haunting, their skin sunbaked and scabbed by the effects of pellagra and other diseas
es of malnutrition.

  Alice’s letter had described the somber mood in the theater, making me feel as if I were there.

  Oh, Ziltha, you cannot imagine how sad the moment when adult realities land hard upon your child. Emmaline threw her hands over her face and wept, and Able leaned close to my ear. “Them folk be a far piece off yander, you reckon, Miz Lorrin’?”

  “Yes, Able, Oklahoma is quite a distance.” I dabbed at my eyes, silently questioning whether I should be collecting relief pay for my writing when the funds could be used to feed starving children. There are those who say that make-work projects like ours steal food from the mouths of babes. Perhaps they do.

  Beside me, Able startled in her chair as the tail of the film whipped loose, the projector flipping light, then dark, then light, then dark, until the theater worker caught and stilled it. “There be a train there like that’un the fella livin’ in the cave rode hisself on with his woman and young’uns?”

  “Yes, Able, they do have trains in Oklahoma. Although there may be such sand drift over the tracks that the trains no longer run.”

  Able nodded, her lips set resolutely. “We oughta git us a big ol’ basket’r two, and hist us on up the mount’n. I can find some cottonwood bud and boil a Gilead mash fer them scabs. If’n you got a lil’ whiskey, it’ll make up right pearly, even. The pawpaws is a ripenin’ now too. I seen some not fer off from here. Reckon we can find us a big ol’ mess and send ’em on that train to them folks over yander? Pawpaws is good eatin, ’n’ keeps purdy awhile too.”

  Alice had lifted an arm to hug Able, but the girl shied away. Thomas took Alice’s hand instead, and she didn’t stop him from it. Later, she reprimanded herself. As they left the theater, she told herself that she shouldn’t encourage him. In her letter, she confessed to her sister that she knew Tom had taken a fancy to her. She referred to it as “a schoolboy crush” and spent paragraphs analyzing the difference in their ages, pointing out the fact that he was just a boy, and she a widow and a mother. He was the age of the college students she’d helped in the dean’s office.