Quinn clenched his jaw and pressed a thumb against his temple that throbbed as if someone had jabbed an ice pick into his head. His decision to sink every penny of his equity money into this place might have been a Very Bad Mistake.
After a lifetime of following his gut and making snap decisions that often had negative (okay, disastrous) consequences, Quinn had recently promised himself that from here on out, he’d write out the pros and cons of any major decision before making it. He’d done that before buying this estate.
Maybe the problem wasn’t with his decision-making process. Maybe he was just good at finding gold and spinning it into straw.
He walked down the long gravel drive to the paved road and looked across the blacktop where a sea of yellow-flowering vines stretched to the distant horizon. It had seemed like such a grand idea to buy the crumbling estate across from all this wild extravagance. The invasive cat’s-claw vine smothered trees and pulled down structures, creating a thriving and beautiful wasteland, the first of four selling points for the property he planned to flip:
Acres of yellow flowers across the street.
Bayside view at the back—with the potential for waterfront access.
Lonely country road on one side.
Only one neighboring property, well hidden behind an evergreen hedge.
He walked past that tall hedge to get a better look at the property next door. A double-panel iron gate stood open, flanking the entrance. A thick stone pillar surrounded an oversize mailbox. Under the mailbox, a brass plaque read:
BAYSIDE BARN
8305 WINDING WATER WAY
The ice pick jabbed into Quinn’s skull again.
He remembered hearing about this place when Sean’s class went here on a field trip in the third grade. Sean had come home sunburned, exhausted, and overexcited from a day at the barn and the hour-long bus ride to and from his elementary school in New Orleans. Sean had talked nonstop about the experience for the rest of the evening, then fallen asleep at the dinner table. For the rest of the month, he had galloped around the house every afternoon after school, waving a souvenir cowboy hat and yelling, “Go, Bayside Buddies, go!”
The place next door was a damn zoo.
***
Reva stepped onto the horrifyingly long escalator to the ground transportation level, steadied herself as the step unfolded beneath her, then wrestled her too-big suitcase onto the step behind her as it, too, unfolded. She gripped the shuddering plastic handrail and held on, closing her eyes for a blessed moment.
God, she missed her husband.
Grayson had always taken charge of, well, everything. When they traveled, he was the one who made the arrangements, knew where to go and when to be there, and wrangled their luggage along the way.
What the hell was she doing here, so far out of her comfort zone that her heart hadn’t stopped pounding since she left the house this morning? Did she even want to do this anymore? Without Grayson by her side, she felt untethered. Her parents were gone. Grayson’s brother, Winston, and his wife—Abby’s parents—had never warmed up to her. She and Grayson had made the decision not to have children, but to devote their lives to something larger, a mission to help animals. They’d built Bayside Barn together on the homestead he’d inherited from his grandparents.
This had been their dream. But was it still hers, if it meant doing it all without him? Grayson had been a force of nature, something between an exhilarating whirlwind and an unavoidable undertow. When the neighbors next door had moved into an assisted-living facility, Grayson convinced the city council to buy the land for an animal shelter, which she and Grayson would run. But then Grayson died, and the penny-pinching mayor vetoed the plan. He didn’t see the upside of building an official animal shelter when the unofficial one at Bayside Barn worked well enough.
Without a doubt, Grayson’s passion and vision would’ve convinced the mayor to go along. With his whiskey-colored eyes and lopsided grin, he could melt the hardest heart. God, she had loved that man. Still did, always would. He’d been gone almost two years, and Reva was still a little bit pissed off at the universe for letting Grayson’s unwavering commitment to physical fitness lead to his own untimely death.
He had always teased her about her lack of interest in physical exercise and healthy eating. He’d poke her soft belly and claim that he would still love her when she got fat from lounging in the pool with a glass of wine while he swam laps. She slept in and rested her other side while he put on his running shoes and logged his five miles each day.
And then came the knock on the door that woke her from a sound sleep the morning that an inattentive driver—
“Hey!” A big hand gripped her arm and steadied her when the escalator steps leveled out and she stumbled over the ledge that devoured each step. Her eyes flew open and she grabbed onto a man’s hard shoulder as he dragged her and her suitcase away from the steps that were being swallowed by the floor. “Lady, are you okay?”
She looked into the concerned green eyes of a very tall, very young black man. He still held onto her, and she still held onto him. In fact, she was afraid that if she let go, she might crumple down to the floor. Her ankles felt boneless; her knees felt like Jell-O. “I’m so sorry. I swear I only closed my eyes for a second. I didn’t know it would move so fast.”
“No worries, lady.” His strong, reassuring grip didn’t lessen. “You look a little shaky. You okay?”
She held onto his arm and took stock of herself. Steadier, she let go and stepped back. “I’m okay. Thanks for keeping me from falling on my face—or my backside.”
“Lucky thing I was standing down here watching you.” He smiled. “Not being a creep or anything; I’m waiting for my girlfriend to come down on her way to baggage claim. I noticed you because your face looked so…peaceful, I guess…like you were thinking of something beautiful.”
She felt an answering smile bloom, first in her heart, and then on her lips. “You’re right. I was.”
The young man moved off to embrace his girlfriend, and Reva headed for the ground transportation exit. For the first time since she’d left the house this morning, she felt like she was doing the right thing, and that Grayson’s spirit would support her in fulfilling the dream they had shared. It was only right that Abby should come to Bayside Barn for healing and, in turn, give Reva the space she needed to find a way to move forward in her own life.
In a way, Abby was the child Grayson and Reva never had. Ever since Abby had been old enough to spend the night away from home, she had spent her summers at Bayside Barn. That old homestead was in her bones, and the animals that lived there were her childhood friends. Reva knew that Abby would take care of the farm and the animals as well as Reva could. And maybe the experience would deepen Abby’s connection to the animals and allow her to practice her ability to communicate with them telepathically. Reva had shown her how, and though Abby’s parents did their best to undo that teaching, Reva knew that Abby possessed the ability.
Abby hadn’t embraced her gifts yet, but one day, she would. One day, Abby would receive a communication that couldn’t be denied or passed off as her imagination. Reva wished she could do more to help Abby recognize her abilities. But as Grayson had told her many times, “You can’t push the river.” She could only toss seeds upon the water and hope they would float to a fertile place that would support their growth.
Still feeling Grayson’s presence beside her, Reva wheeled her suitcase out a set of double doors to a curbside pickup lane that smelled of car exhaust and stale cigarette smoke.
At the preappointed spot, a spindly, bored-looking man wearing camo pants and a plain green shirt leaned against a white-paneled van. Reva had expected a vehicle with a logo for the wildlife center on the side, but this looked more like a prison van. All her insecurities and doubts about the wisdom of leaving home for so long rose up to choke her, but she swallow
ed them down. “Hello?”
Immersed in his cell phone and his cigarette, the van guy seemed not to notice her. He took a slow drag from his cigarette, blew the smoke out sideways, then looked at her through one squinting eye. “Sorry. I’m a little hard of hearing. Come again?”
She spoke a little louder. “Is this the transport van to the wildlife refuge?”
“Yep, and you’re the last to load up.” He dropped his cigarette and ground it into the pavement with his boot. “You ready?”
She remembered the feeling of being protected and guided by Grayson, and she pulled that feeling around her like a blanket until she almost felt as if his hand rested at her waist. “I’m ready.”
The driver hauled her suitcase into the back of the van, then waited while she dug into her purse and brought out a few dollars to plunk into his palm. He pocketed the money and grinned. “Get on in.”
The row seats behind the driver were all filled with college-age students, many of whom had backpacks taking up the space beside them. Reva hovered in the van’s open doorway. “Hello, everyone. I’m Reva. It’s nice to meet y’all.”
A chorus of unenthusiastic “hey” and “hi” and “hello” responses were even further diminished by the fact that only one of Reva’s fellow passengers managed to look up from their cell phones. But from the middle seat, a pretty girl with purple-tipped dreadlocks waved and smiled. “Hey. I’m Dana. You can sit next to me.”
Dana scooted closer to the window and stowed her backpack under the seat. Reva squeezed past the beefy guy with military-short blond hair on the end of the row to take the middle seat.
Startled, he looked up from his phone, then smiled. “Oh, hey.” He took out one earbud and moved his long legs out of her way. “Come on through.”
Reva got settled, then held out a hand and introduced herself to each of the kids in her row. As the van trundled out of the Miami International Airport complex, the kids in the two other rows looked up from their devices and started chatting with one another. A girl from the back put a hand on Reva’s shoulder and introduced herself. A guy from the front turned around and said hi. Feeling more included, Reva relaxed. She reminded herself that kids these days used their phones as a way of coping with social anxiety the way she had once kept her nose buried in a book.
Once the van passed the brightly lit streets and began to bump along dark highways and back roads toward their final destination, everyone disappeared again into their electronic devices. She turned to her own cell phone for solace as well.
Hey, Abby, she typed. My flight landed safely and I’m on my way to the internship. Wish me luck! I hope everything’s going well back at the farm. How was the school tour today? How is the new kitten? Did you get an appointment at the vet’s office for tomorrow?
She hit Send, then tucked her cell phone into her purse’s side pocket. Then she stared out the window at endless pine forests until the lumbering lurch of the van lulled her to sleep.
***
Quinn put on his headphones, turned up the volume on his playlist, and began the painstaking process of regrouting the vintage floor tiles in the pool-house bathroom.
First, he scraped out the top layer of the old grout with a grout saw—a small, handheld, inefficient tool that made his hands cramp.
The whole time he did it, he fumed.
How in the hell was he going to sell this place for a profit with a damn petting zoo next door? He might’ve just sunk a bunch of money—the last of his money, in fact—into a horrible mistake. Even after agonizing over all the potential pros and cons, he had failed to uncover a bigger con than all of his worst imaginings.
He scraped grout until his knees ached from inching along on the hard floor. Then he applied new grout, using a float to smash the gritty goop into the lines and smooth it level.
Why would Delia sell him this place without full disclosure of a deal-breaking drawback? Had she deliberately shown the property on a weekend knowing that weekdays sounded like schoolyard-playground mayhem all day long?
He pulled out one earbud to check if the mayhem was still ongoing.
Yes. The screaming went on all fucking day long.
“Time for a break.” He would have to let the grout set for exactly thirty minutes before wiping off the hazy residue. His knees creaked when he stood with all the grace of an elderly monk rising from another round of useless prayers. When he reached out to steady himself on the doorframe, his fingers felt like sandpaper on the smooth painted surface. The grout had sucked all the moisture out of his skin. His hands felt—and looked—like the Sahara in dry season.
He had earned a beer by the nasty green pool. Yes indeed, his crepe-dry fingers assured him, he had.
But the beer he opened by the pool lacked the promise of respite, because any hope of relaxation was swamped by the happy shrieks of children running and playing next door. And, good God, was one of the little heathens climbing the hedge-covered chain-link fence between the two properties?
Quinn stood and stalked to the hedge, which some grimy-faced young boy had just managed to conquer. The kid’s triumphant gap-toothed grin faltered a fraction when his eyes locked with Quinn’s hostile gaze. “Hello, misther,” the kid lisped as his spindly body draped over the hedge’s bowing branches. “Don’t be mad. I’m just playin’ around.”
“How ’bout you just play around on the other side of the fence where you’re supposed to be? I’d hate to have to tattle to your teacher.”
The kid looked over his shoulder and back again. “You don’t know my teacher.”
“Wanna bet?” Quinn pulled his cell phone from his back pocket and started punching in random numbers. “I know her well enough to know that she’ll make you sit by yourself in the bus for the rest of the day while everyone else gets to have fun at the farm.”
The boy’s eyes opened wide. “Please, misther. Don’t tell her. Don’t…” He backpedaled and fell off the hedge with an “Oomph.”
Quinn stepped onto a sturdy low-hanging branch and looked over the hedge to make sure the kid hadn’t been hurt when he fell. Apparently not; all churning elbows and trailing shoelaces, he was sprinting back to the safety of the group.
Quinn hopped off the hedge, then chuckled and took a sip of his beer.
But his mirth was short-lived. If the current commotion next door was any indication, no matter how much money, time, and effort he sank into this place, the perfect buyer he had imagined would never materialize. He had thought that it would be a recently retired couple. His mind’s eye had conjured the visual of a stout man who enjoyed fishing and a plump woman who enjoyed gardening.
The man would launch his aluminum fishing boat from the adjacent dead-end street that ended in a cracked concrete boat ramp—or from their own private boat dock if Quinn managed to acquire the waterfront land. The woman would sit by the pool and read romance novels. She’d use a monogrammed shovel from Restoration Hardware to plant daylilies in the estate’s rich, well-drained soil, an ideal mix of sand and silt washed up from the bay for the last hundred years.
Quinn was pretty sure that neither of those imagined retirees would be enthused about the idea of baby hoodlums climbing the hedge, falling into the pool, and drowning so the kids’ parents could sue them for everything they’d worked for all their lives.
He sat in the folding stadium chair and kept an eye on the empty hedge. Feeling antsy and unfulfilled, haunted by the image of the perfect retired couple and the futility of renovating a property they’d never decide to purchase, he made a quick decision. No time for making a list of pros and cons; something had to be done. It had to be done now, and it might require drastic measures.
Chapter 3
Quinn had invested everything in this plan to move here and rebuild his reputation, his life, and his relationship with his son. He could have turned his back on the past, bought a condo in the Keys, and
left all his regrets behind. But one thing—one person, his son, to be exact—held him back. If there was any small sliver of a chance that he could be a part of Sean’s life, he had to take it.
He dialed the realty office, and some peon answered on the second ring, her voice way too chirpy for his taste. Blah, blah, blah—he held the phone away from his ear until she got to the important part: “How may I help you?”
He might have unloaded some of his frustration on the poor receptionist, but whatever. Anyway, within minutes he was speaking with the agent who’d sold him this piece-of-shit property.
“Delia,” he roared. “Were you aware…” He went off on her about how he’d gambled everything on his plan to flip this property and make a sorely needed profit. She knew all this already, but it felt good to vent.
To her credit, she listened and said nothing but “Um-hmm, I hear you” until he’d worn himself out talking.
He needed a win. Goddammit, he’d been doing nothing but losing for so long, he needed—no, he deserved—a win. “Look,” he finished. “I won’t be able to flip this estate—and you won’t be able to make the commission you’d been hoping for on the resale—unless we get rid of the petting zoo next door. What do you propose to do about this problem?”
She talked for a while about zoning and variances and grandfathered permissions to keep livestock on land that had been annexed into the city of Magnolia Bay.
“I don’t care about any of that.” He took another healthy swig of beer. “I just want you to fix the problem. Call City Hall. Circulate a petition. Do whatever you have to do. Just get that damn zoo gone. I have to be able to sell this place to a nice retired couple who can afford to buy it.”
“Quinn, I’ve known you for almost a year.” Had sex with him a few times too. “And I know you don’t really mean what you’re saying right now. Can’t you just talk to your neighbor and work it out?”
“You want me to go over there and say, ‘Pretty please, stop making your living the way you have been for the last decade or so?’ How well do you think that’ll go over?”
Secrets in the Sand Page 18
