The Shore House: An emotional and uplifting page turner (Dewberry Beach Book 1)

by Heidi Hostetter

  “Ryan, I don’t think you fully understand the urgency of this. You have to find a way to get up there—you have to leave now.”

  “Get up where?” In the distance, Ryan thought he heard the bells on the ice-cream truck making its rounds in the neighborhood. He wondered if he could buy a Bomb Pop; he used to love them as a kid.

  “Haven’t you been listening to me?” Sean’s voice was tight. Ryan pictured him red-faced and clenching his fist, like a toddler throwing a tantrum. The image made him smile. “Did you hear what I just said? Jeff shared documents he had no business sharing. His actions set off a chain reaction that affects everything. We should have cut off Jeff’s access a long time ago, I told Todd that.”

  “What do you mean, cut off his access?” Ryan shifted in his chair. This was what he was waiting to hear, exactly how involved Sean was in shifting control of the company. “Jeff is a partner, why would you cut him off?”

  “That’s not important right now.” Sean sniffed and cleared his throat.

  Ryan pushed back. “It is important.”

  “It isn’t,” Sean retorted. “Ryan. We have to focus. The most important thing is for you to get to Boston. If you leave now, you can be there by late tonight. I’ve sent info about the guys at UMD. I need you to read it and update our company work schedule so we stay ahead of them.”

  “Was it you that fired my team or was that Todd?”

  Sean sighed. “Okay, fine. You want to do this before you leave, we will. The decision was made by both of us and I see now that it might not have been the best idea. You can hire them back—all of them. I don’t care. Just come up and talk to the VCs about your algorithm. Make them see that what we have is better than what the UMD crew came up with.”

  “You were only in it for the payout at the end, weren’t you? You never had any interest in what the program could do. You only wanted money.” Ryan knew it, but the words were still painful to say.

  Sean’s silence told him everything he needed to know.

  “Okay, well I guess that’s it then. I should go now.”

  “To Boston?” Sean sounded so relieved that Ryan almost laughed.

  “No. I won’t be going to Boston. I’m going outside to watch the thunderstorm. Maybe catch the ice-cream man before the rain hits.” Ryan drew the curtain and rose from his chair. “You should know that I’ll be exercising my options, and since Jeff already did, the company’s yours. Congratulations.” He paused and allowed himself a smile. “One more thing. I’m taking my patent with me and I plan to defend it vigorously. So I guess what I mean to say is that you can have what’s left of the company. I hope you and Todd and all of them will be very happy.”

  “How can you do this?” Sean growled. “We’re friends.”

  “Were friends,” Ryan corrected. “We’re not anymore.”

  Ryan hung up the phone and turned off the ringer.

  Later that evening, with the dishes done and the kids in bed, Stacy, Ryan, and Brad sat around the firepit, chatting and tossing twigs into the flames. The passing thunderstorm had cooled the air and dampened the ground, sending them back inside for long sleeves and camp blankets. Their summer at the shore was more than half over; they’d be gone by the end of next month, back to their lives in Morristown. Carpool and ballet lessons, soccer and playdates; Stacy wasn’t looking forward to any of it.

  “You missed the excitement earlier,” she began. “Mom invited Billy Jacob to the house. She wanted him to speak at her book club next week.”

  “The author whose book you worked on?” Ryan watched the flames. “That seems like a pretty big get for a local book club.”

  “It is.”

  Brad poked the logs with a stick and watched a column of embers rise. “A dinky local book club can’t be the reason Billy Jacob came here. What would a big author like him be doing in Dewberry Beach?”

  “He came for me actually.” Stacy straightened as she felt both her brother and her husband turn to look at her. “He’s asked for my help on his second book.”

  “Wow. My sister the Big Deal.” Brad’s teasing was good-natured, but Stacy ignored him. It was Ryan’s reaction she wanted.

  “And do you want to?” Ryan asked.

  “I think I do, but I told him no.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a big job and I won’t be able to focus if I’m distracted watching the kids. And that’s not what this summer was for anyway.”

  “What about me? I could help watch the kids so you can work,” Brad offered.

  “I appreciate that, but I need more than ‘help.’” Stacy shifted her gaze into the flames, not realizing how much she wanted to work with Billy until just that moment. “I need someone to take over—all the time, every day—and I can’t expect you to do that. You’re busy with other stuff.”

  “Well, you’re in luck.” Ryan shifted in his chair. “It just so happens that I’ve just been awarded some extra time.”

  He told them about Sean wresting control of the company they’d all started, about Jeff leaving but not being permitted to tell anyone, about Todd firing his team in an effort to get them all to work harder, and about the proprietary papers that Jeff had made public, changing the dynamics of the entire company. Finally, Ryan told them that he’d quit his job but kept ownership of the algorithm that started it all.

  “Dude,” Brad whispered. “This is what you’ve been doing all summer?”

  Stacy reached for his hand. “Why didn’t you tell me things had gotten this bad?”

  “It happened pretty quickly,” Ryan scoffed. “And I didn’t expect it to turn out the way it did.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” Ryan turned to Stacy. “We have my payout from the partnership agreement—that should last a while. In the meantime, I’ll make some phone calls to line up a few interviews. So don’t worry.”

  The fire popped and a spark shot into the darkness.

  “I’m not worried,” Stacy said. “We have savings and we’ll be okay. But you’ve been working so much lately that maybe you should use this time to unwind?”

  “Nah, I don’t need it.” Ryan shook his head. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine.” Stacy squeezed his hand. “Sean and Jeff have been your best friends for as long as I’ve known you. What they did to the company you all started must have affected you. I wish you’d told me sooner. Maybe I could have helped.”

  “Maybe Jeff and Sean are on drugs.” Brad tossed a rock into the flames and watched the embers spark. “People get weird about money and drugs.”

  After a moment, Ryan spoke again.

  “I think you should do it.” He drew a breath and faced Stacy. “Maybe you’re right about me taking some time off. I’ll start by watching the kids so you can work with Billy.”

  “You mean it?” Stacy felt her heart thump in her chest. “Entertaining those kids is more work than you think.”

  “Sure.” Ryan gestured to Brad. “Brad and I can double-team them. We got this.”

  Nineteen

  The first thing to do, of course, was talk to Emmerson to sort the truth from Billy’s perceptions. Though Stacy left several messages, it took a couple of weeks for him to call her back. In the meantime, she thought about beginning work on the story while they waited, but Stacy wasn’t sure Emmerson would agree with the plan and she didn’t want to get Billy’s hopes up.

  So, they waited.

  When Emmerson finally returned her call, her proposal to reinstate Billy’s contract was met with disbelief.

  “Let me get this straight: the book was never written?”

  “He had an outline.”

  “But nothing more?”

  “No.” Stacy drew a deep breath. “But he came to me for help, doesn’t that count for something?”

  “I don’t know why you think it would.” Emmerson sniffed. “The boy lied about his manuscript. I won’t ever trust him again.”

  “Then trust me,�
� Stacy blurted.

  “What?”

  “Trust me,” Stacy repeated. “We’ll have the book to you by deadline. I promise.”

  “I don’t know, Stacy,” he drawled in his soft Memphis accent. “The boy’s got talent, no doubt about it… cutting him loose wasn’t an easy decision.”

  “Then reverse it.” Stacy leaned back in her father’s desk chair. “Winter has made a lot of money for you, Emmerson. The second edition is in the charts again, and there’s talk about a movie and a video game. Seems to me that the whole world is waiting for the new book. Don’t you want to be the one who publishes it?”

  Emmerson chuckled. “You sound like an agent.”

  “I’m just trying to show you how important this book is.”

  “It’s not a question of importance, Stacy. We’ve come to the point where we just don’t believe we can get a story out of him. We’ve extended his deadline twice; did he tell you that? There are editors here who have threatened to quit rather than work with him—in any capacity.”

  “I can do it. I can get a story out of him.”

  “Just out of curiosity, what’s your plan to make this happen?”

  “We work well together,” Stacy lied. “We’ve done it before and we can do it now. Provided you extend Billy’s contract and hire me as a freelance editor to work with him on A Promise of Spring.”

  “I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but you haven’t worked in the industry in six years. Things have changed,” Emmerson pointed out. “I’m not saying you can’t pick it back up again, because you can. But Billy is not the author to test the waters on, and this is not the book to dive into.”

  “He wants to write the book and I want to help him.”

  In the silence that followed, Stacy could almost hear Emmerson rubbing his forehead and that was always a good sign. Finally, she heard a deep intake of breath.

  “Okay. I think you’re in over your head but it’s your life and we have nothing to lose.” The phone muffled as she heard him address someone in his office. “Tell him I’ll be right with him.”

  Stacy held her breath as she waited.

  He returned to their conversation. “Tell you what I’m going to do. Since you don’t seem to mind jumping back into the crazy pond, I’ll give you two until August fourteenth to deliver a polished draft. That will give me time to read it and decide what to do with it. And by polished, I mean action on the page and a plot a reader can follow. Not an outline, not author notes. I want movement. I want dialogue. I want setting. You still up for the challenge?”

  An August fourteenth delivery was three weeks less than she’d hoped for. It meant three weeks instead of six to produce what Emmerson wanted.

  She drew a breath and forced a smile. “Absolutely.”

  Emmerson laughed. “Well, I think you’re crazy but if this is the way you want to spend the rest of your summer, who am I to tell you no? I’ll have Tara write up a new contract and email it to you. And as for your fee, what do you say to our normal freelancer rates, plus a bonus on publication?”

  “That’s more than fair. Thank you, Emmerson.”

  “I still think you’re biting off more than you can chew, but the bigger part of me really hopes you can pull it off.” The phone muffled again as Emmerson rose from his chair. “So I guess I’ll talk to you in three weeks?”

  “You will. And thank you.”

  “Good luck, sweetie.”

  “Oh, no,” Billy lamented as he sagged dramatically against the metal bistro chair at Mueller’s Bakery. “I can’t possibly have a draft finished in three weeks.”

  Stacy looked at him, stunned. She’d tracked him down the moment she’d come off the phone with Emmerson, anxious to share the good news because she thought he’d be eager to get to work.

  “What do you mean you can’t do it? You asked for this—you came to my house and begged me to help you. Do you have any idea what it took me to get this extension?”

  He dropped his gaze to his lap and she glared at him, fuming.

  People were starting to stare, so she leaned forward, lowering her voice to a hiss.

  “You told me you wrote the first book in a week. Now you have three.” A thought occurred to her, so terrible it took her breath away. She leaned back and stared at him. After a moment, she found her voice. “Were you lying to me, Billy? Were you lying when you said you wrote the first book in a week?”

  “No, of course not.” He looked up. “Everything I told you was true.”

  “Then what’s the problem?” She squeezed her hands together in her lap, frustrated at his shift to apathy.

  Billy reached for a paper napkin and began to tear it. “I never expected the first book to go anywhere. I told you why I wrote it. The second book is different. I have loose ends to tie up, characters who need attention. It’ll take months just to outline.”

  “We have an outline. We made it six years ago.”

  He threw up his hands in frustration. “I’ve had ideas since then. Different directions for the characters and the story.”

  “You came to me, Billy.” She leaned forward again, leveling him with a stare she’d learned from her mother. “Let me tell you what it took to make this happen. I tracked down Emmerson and leaned heavily on our friendship to convince him to give you another chance. He offered you an extension despite waiting six years for this book and never seeing so much as a draft. For my part, I am sacrificing three weeks of summer vacation with my family because I believe in your talent.” She dropped her voice to a low growl. “So, let me tell you what’s going to happen now: You will write from the existing outline, stopping only to sleep and eat. On August fourteenth, we will deliver a complete draft of A Promise of Spring to Emmerson.”

  Billy blinked. “Fine. Let’s go get my stuff.” He heaved a great sigh as he rose from the table. “You didn’t have to be so mean about it.”

  The Dewberry Beach Motor Lodge was located in a relatively isolated section of town, away from the shops and beach access. Years ago it had been marketed as a family campground; the wide flat lawn was perfect for pitching tents, and the banks of tall trees provided shade and privacy. When the founder died, he left the camp to his children with the hope they’d continue to run it. The children had other ideas. They converted the outbuildings into single-room cabins for tourists, but the construction was cheaply done and the result was a disaster.

  Billy pushed open the chain-link gate. The metal frame was warped, the fittings rusted. It screeched as he walked through. “Don’t ever tell me I don’t suffer for my art.”

  “I thought they shut this place down years ago,” Stacy commented.

  They walked across the courtyard, past the drained and chipped swimming pool, the twisted lounge chairs and the broken umbrellas, to a cabin on the far end of the lot. It seemed to be the only one open.

  “Ignore the smell.” Billy inserted the key and twisted. The door creaked as he pushed it open.

  The room was a throwback from the seventies, still decorated in shades of yellow and brown. The wallpaper was a faded mess of yellow flowers splattered against a muddy dark background. Two narrow twin beds were covered with polyester bedspreads in the same faded yellow, with a lumpy pillow at the head of each bed. The room’s only window was covered with the remains of an old shower curtain, cracked and spotted with mold. Finally, at the far end of the room, a tiny pedestal sink and a dull mirror indicated the bathroom, and a wheeled clothes rack served as a closet.

  Stacy pulled the curtain from the window and kicked it to the side. The window was filthy, but letting the sunlight in was an improvement. “There. That’s better.”

  She turned, taking in every detail of the room. There really was no angle that made it seem less dire, but of course she couldn’t tell Billy that.

  Billy moved past her, toward the clothes rack, and set his suitcase on the bed. “The pictures were very different. You think I’d stay here if I had a choice?” He pulled a shirt off the plastic hang
er and threw it in the bag. “Anyway, it’s over now. I’ll just be a minute.”

  “Where are you going? Did you find another place to stay?”

  Billy hesitated. “I assumed I’d be staying with you, in one of your guest rooms. I’d prefer something on the top floor, near those sweet dormer windows, but I can be flexible.”

  Stacy sat on the edge of the desk chair, careful to avoid an unidentifiable stain. “Billy, we don’t have any spare bedrooms. There are seven people in that house; we’re using every bit of space.”

  “Well, in that case I’m sure you know another place I can stay.” Billy went back to tossing clothes into his suitcase. “I’ll leave the details to you, but my preference is a room filled with natural light that overlooks water—the ocean or the bay. The sounds of seagulls overhead and waves crashing to the shore would do wonders for my inspiration.” His smile shrugged as he turned to his work. “But really, anything is fine.”

  “Billy, you’re not going to find anything like that here. We don’t have oceanfront hotels with room service, or concierges, or spa services. Nothing you’re used to. Dewberry Beach is a family town, very low-key.”

  He tossed a pair of sneakers in and zipped the bag closed. “I admit to being disappointed, but I’m nothing if not a team player. If you don’t have the right hotel, we’ll just have to widen our circle a bit, branch out. I don’t mind traveling.”

  They had three weeks to produce an entire novel. According to the schedule that Stacy had drawn up, there would barely be time to sleep. And if he allowed himself to be distracted by hotel amenities like room service or a minibar, they’d never meet their deadline.

  “This is fine,” Stacy said.

  “What’s fine?”

  “This room. It’s perfect, in fact.” Stacy set her work bag on the plywood desk. “We’re going to work here.”

  “Oh, no. No. No. No.” Billy held up both hands and squeezed his eyes shut. “This place is horrid, you said it yourself. It smells.”

  Stacy retrieved the schedule from her bag and set it on the desk. “I’ll bring you a lavender candle. You won’t even notice the smell after a while.”