Cassie nodded. “I know. It’s so weird to be here and know she’s not.” They each took a moment to gather themselves. Then Cassie said, “Well, I’m here to help. Mom’s got the store under control, so we’re at your service for a couple hours, me and Gordie. What do you need?”
“Oh, you dear girl.” Mary stepped forward, took Cassie’s face in her hands, and kissed her on the cheek.
The side door opened just then, startling both of them. Cassie recognized Caroline’s daughter, Emerson, dressed in baggy, gray drawstring pants and a loose black T-shirt, as she stepped into the room.
“Sorry,” Emerson said quietly. “I don’t mean to interrupt.” She cleared her throat and jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “There’s, um, no coffee in the cottage.”
“No, your mother was a tea drinker.” Mary gestured to the full pot on the counter. “Help yourself. Mugs are in the cupboard above. Sugar’s right there. Cream in the fridge.”
“Thanks.” Emerson busied herself fixing a cup, and Cassie studied her from behind. There had been so many people at the services, Cassie’d never gotten the chance to really look at Emerson. Her blonde hair was cut short and exposed a long, elegant neck. The cotton pants hugged what looked to be a very pleasing figure, slim hips, and long legs. She was tall—a good three or four inches taller than Cassie, which would put her around five-ten. And today she was wearing what Cassie recognized as Caroline’s fuzzy slippers instead of the heels that had made her that much taller at her mother’s services. Gordie positioned himself to Emerson’s right, sat, and waited politely for her to notice him, which she did.
“Hey, dog,” she whispered, gave him a pat on the head.
“Emerson, have you met Cassie Prescott?” Mary asked by way of introduction.
Emerson turned to regard Cassie with the most beautiful ice-blue eyes Cassie had ever seen. “Hi,” she said and held out a hand.
Cassie took it and held on to its surprising warmth, not wanting to point out that they’d met at both the wake and the funeral services, and also attended the same high school, albeit three years apart. “I’m so sorry about your mom.”
“Thank you.” There was a beat of awkward silence, then Emerson let go of Cassie’s hand. She gave an uncomfortable half-wave, murmuring, “Well. I’ve got to get back,” and left the way she’d come, the mug of coffee in her hand. Mary and Cassie watched her go, and a moment passed before Mary turned to Cassie and rolled her eyes.
“I don’t know what to make of that girl,” she said, almost to herself.
“Why do you say that?” Cassie asked as she followed Mary back out to the counter.
Mary shook her head. “I sometimes feel like she’s never been here before. The way she walks around all fish-out-of-water? You’d never know she grew up here. Not only that, she was a minor celebrity. She called Caroline of course, but the last time she was here was five years ago.”
“Five years?” Cassie was stunned. “I didn’t know it had been that long. I can’t imagine not seeing my mom for five years.”
“Well, Caroline visited her once or twice in California, but that was it. She missed Emmy so much.” Mary’s voice was soft.
“What will happen to the inn?” Cassie was almost afraid to ask, but it was something she’d been wondering for a couple days now.
“I’m not sure.” Mary’s gaze was fixed on the monitor as she tapped some keys on the computer. “I know Caroline had a will, but I’m also pretty sure she didn’t think she’d be gone so soon. I don’t know how up-to-date it is.” She swallowed audibly. “I imagine it will be passed to Emerson. God, I hope she didn’t leave it to Fredrik, that ass.” She grimaced at the mention of Caroline’s ex and Emerson’s father as she tapped a few more keys. “Okay. Here we go.” She shifted noticeably from quiet sadness to business. “Rooms three, five, and six are all checking out this morning, so they’ll need to be cleaned. Two of them will have new guests by three.”
As if on cue, a middle-aged couple entered the sitting room and set their suitcases near one of the leather couches.
“Ugh,” the woman said, leaning heavily on the counter. “We don’t want to leave. Don’t make us.”
Mary smiled. “You are welcome back any time, Mrs. Todd.” As Mary typed on the computer and printed out the couple’s final bill, Gordie sat next to Cassie’s feet, his whole body thrumming with the desire to greet these people.
“Stay,” Cassie commanded softly.
The woman heard and peeked over the counter. “Oh my god, he’s beautiful. Is he an Aussie?”
Cassie nodded, then said to Gordie, “Okay. Go say hi.”
Gordie zipped around the counter faster than a fleeing centipede, and the woman squatted to lavish attention on him while Mr. Todd paid the bill.
“Seriously, we love it here,” he said to Mary. “We’ll be back next year.”
“Or sooner if I have anything to say about it.” Both Cassie and Mary laughed, as neither of them could see Mrs. Todd, but her voice was clear as could be. Her husband shook his head good-naturedly.
Mary finished up the paperwork, and with a last goodbye to Gordie, the Todds grabbed their luggage and headed for the door.
“See you next year,” Mrs. Todd promised.
Mary sighed as the door closed behind them. “I hope we’re here next year.”
Cassie spent the next three hours cleaning the vacated rooms, changing sheets, running the vacuum, and thinking about what Mary had said. How strange that it hadn’t occurred to her that The Lakeshore Inn might be closed. Caroline only had one child, Emerson. Her parents were gone and there were no siblings. Of course she’d have left the inn to Emerson. It only made sense. But Emerson didn’t live here. Emerson hadn’t lived here in more than ten years. What were the chances of her staying in Lake Henry and keeping The Lakeshore Inn up and running?
“Pretty slim,” Cassie whispered as she threw a load of sheets into the high capacity washing machine in the inn’s laundry room. Her cell phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. Checking the screen, she saw that it was Jonathan.
“Good morning, gorgeous,” he said by way of greeting.
“You sure know how to make a girl feel good,” Cassie said. “We should date.”
“Bitch, please. You could not handle this much sexy.”
Cassie barked a laugh. “That’s true. Also, you’re way too high-maintenance for me. Girls are much easier.”
“How are you doing, sweetie?” Jonathan’s voice gentled. “Are you at the inn now?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want Mary to have to do everything herself.”
“You’re a good friend, Cassandra. How’s our favorite innkeeper doing? Hanging in there?”
“As well as can be expected, I guess.” Cassie finished loading the sheets one-handed, set the washer, and pushed start. “But I think she’s worried about what’s going to happen to the inn. I never even thought about that. I mean, what happens now? It’s not hers. It was Caroline’s.”
“So it probably passes to the Ice Princess. Shit.”
“Or Fredrik.”
“The Ice King? No way.”
“If Caroline’s will is old, it could very well leave everything to him.”
“God, let’s hope not. This town isn’t big enough for his ego. The Ice Princess is the lesser of the two evils.”
“I saw her today,” Cassie told him. “I mean face-to-face. We shook hands.”
“You did? Were hers blue and freezing cold?”
Cassie chuckled. “No. She was nice enough. Didn’t say much. And I think she was in her pajamas.” Cassie flashed back to the outfit, the blue of those eyes. “She’s really attractive.”
“Yeah, well, looks aren’t everything, my dear.”
“Wait. What? They’re not? I’m sorry, who is this, and what have you done with my friend Jonathan?”
“Hardy har har. I’m just saying the woman is cold. She was practically royalty here once upon a time, and then she just up and left and never looke
d back. All those people who helped her, supported her? She just left them in her dust.” Altering his voice to a deep, resonating bass, he added, “Her heart is two sizes too small.”
Cassie couldn’t help but laugh. “Okay, Dr. Seuss. I get it. We still on tonight?”
“Are you kidding? There is nothing I want more than to sit with you and watch grown men skate around on the ice, slam into one another, and hit each other with sticks. I am so there.”
They said their goodbyes, Cassie still smiling and shaking her head as she ended the call and put her cell back in her pocket.
CHAPTER FOUR
Emerson flopped back onto the couch, kicked off her pumps, propped her feet on the small coffee table, and groaned in frustration. Bringing the wine glass to her nose, she took a moment to enjoy the bouquet of the smooth Cabernet before taking a sip. The wine rack in the corner held about fifteen bottles, and she’d ended up doing eeny-meeny-miny-moe to decide which to open.
Flavors of plum and black cherries coated her tongue, and the wine finished with a slight hint of vanilla. Delicious, she thought, and felt her entire body relax into the cushions. She finally allowed herself to look around the small cottage and really study her mother’s living quarters.
It wasn’t a large place, really no bigger than a sizable one-bedroom apartment would be, but her mother had made it very cozy and welcoming. The living room held a couch and a reclining rocker. Emerson could picture her mother in the rocker on a cold winter night, covered with an afghan and reading a mystery. A large stone fireplace took up one wall, and Emerson noticed it had been altered to accommodate a gas insert. A stack of nicely aged wood looked ready to go, but she realized it was just for show. She picked up the remote on the coffee table, pointed it at the fireplace, and clicked. The flames blazed to life. Probably won’t be long until this needs to be used regularly, Emerson thought. In Los Angeles, she didn’t have much occasion to sit by a roaring fire, and she was not happy about the appeal she suddenly felt for it. Along one wall was the kitchen, simple in its make-up, but functional. A breakfast bar separated it from the living room, three high-backed barstools serving as the only place to eat a meal in the cottage.
Another large swallow of wine allowed Emerson to shift her gaze to the pictures that decorated much of the room. Some on the walls, some propped on a table, all were of Emerson. There was one picture of her and her father, Fredrik. He was young, blond, and ridiculously handsome, a wide-eyed Emerson sitting on his lap, holding up his Olympic gold medal. In the rest of the photos, she was in ski attire, often holding up her own award or trophy. Slalom. Giant slalom. Alpine downhill. Regional. States. Emerson had won almost every major skiing competition she could enter as a teenager. She was just like her father, and at almost nineteen years old, she was poised to make the US Ski Team and compete in the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
That was before she’d completely lost her mind and done something inexplicably and selfishly stupid.
Shaking the memories from her head, she took another slug of wine and shifted her focus to the current problem at hand: The Lakeshore Inn. It was hers now.
Except she didn’t want it.
She couldn’t live here in Lake Henry. She already had a home. Well, an apartment. In L.A. On the other side of the country. What was she supposed to do with a small inn on a small lake in a small town in upstate New York?
Her cell phone rang before she could complete the thought. A glance at the screen told her it was Claire. Emerson took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and hit Answer.
“Hey there.”
“Oh, hi, honey.” Claire’s voice dripped with sympathy. “How are you? Doing okay?”
“I am. I’m just tired.” Emerson sipped her wine.
“I bet. Did you meet with the lawyer today? How’d that go?”
“It was…ugh. I don’t know.” Emerson could picture Claire sitting at her big mahogany desk in her office, the surface littered with sheets of numbers and data. It was late afternoon on the west coast, and she’d be getting ready to wrap up her day as an accountant for a large pharmaceutical company.
“Yeah? How so?”
“Everything was left to me.”
“Not surprising.”
“True. But now I have to figure out what to do with it all. There’s the inn, the cottage she lived in—where I’m currently staying—a commercial rental property in the village, her car, all her stuff.” Emerson groaned. “It’s a lot.”
“What do you want to do with it all?”
“Sell it, I guess. I don’t know. I mean, according to the lawyer, the rental property is set up with a rental company. My mom didn’t have to do anything. She kept an account with money in it in case of repairs or something. The rent from the tenants gets deposited into that account, and she took money out if she needed it, though I don’t think she made much on it. The lawyer said she hadn’t raised the rent in ages, which is typical of my mom. But it’s basically hands off, which is good.”
“So, you could keep that running the same way, but do it from afar if you want.” Emerson could hear Claire shuffling papers on her desk; her ability to multitask was amazing.
“I could, though I’d still have to deal with any big problems, which would be really hard to do from clear across the country. The inn is a different story. Did I tell you about its original layout?”
“No, I don’t think so.” The shuffling stopped, and Emerson could picture Claire cocking her head to the side in curiosity, her chestnut brown hair probably pulled back in a complicated knot of some sort.
Emerson finished her wine and got up to refill her glass, talking as she went. “The original Lakeshore Inn was three buildings: the main building up on a hill on the other side of the street, overlooking the lake, a smaller building of eight waterfront rooms right on the lake, and a separate cottage, also on the water. It all belonged to my grandparents way back before I was born. When they died, it was passed on to my mom. I think that was eighteen or nineteen years ago. I was in high school. Anyway, my mom was not a great money manager back then, and it wasn’t long before she was in the red in a pretty significant way. Luckily for her, she got an offer she couldn’t refuse from a real estate developer from downstate. Initially, he wanted the whole business, all three buildings, but Mom couldn’t bear the thought of losing the entire inn, so they struck a deal where he bought the main building overlooking the lake and Mom kept the waterfront building and separate cottage. And she got to keep the name The Lakeshore Inn. He changed the main building to The Lakeview Hotel.”
“Wow. So different, those names,” Claire said with sarcasm.
Emerson laughed and returned to her spot on the couch. “I know, right? But it ended up being a good deal, I think. Mom brought in Mary O’Connor, and they’ve been running the place together for years.”
“Just the two of them?”
“I’m sure Mom hired a few others here and there to help out.” Her brain flashed on Cassie Prescott, whom she’d seen through the cottage window dragging a vacuum cleaner from one room to another, her dark ponytail bobbing as she walked, her dog following on her heels. “It’s a lot of work. And I’m sure there must be a gardener or landscaper of some kind. And somebody to plow in the winter. These are things I need to look into. I wish I knew more.” A pang of guilt poked her in the stomach.
“What’s your next step?” Claire asked. “Want me to come out there?”
“No,” Emerson said quickly, then wondered if Claire had felt it. She liked Claire. She was fun and attractive and smart, and the sex was great, but Emerson preferred her in small doses. After spending more than several hours with her, Emerson always found herself looking frantically around for an escape route. “No, it’s fine. I’m fine. I don’t plan on being here much longer. I need to check in with work, and then I’ll put my nose to the grindstone and figure out what to do here.”
“All right. As long as you’re sure. I can be there in a flash if you need me. Just say
the word.”
“Promise.”
They chatted for a few more minutes about mundane things until Emerson could hear somebody else enter Claire’s office and speak in hushed tones. They said their goodbyes so Claire could bustle off to a meeting.
Sipping her wine and sitting quietly, Emerson sank deeper into the couch, feeling more relaxed than she had in months.
Her knee took that moment of relaxation to make itself known, sending a shooting pain up through her thigh. She winced and rubbed at it with her fingers.
“I wish I could quit you,” she said softly to the heels she’d dropped on the floor, then shot them a glare for good measure. She did her best to avoid the prescription pain killers her doctor had given her, but every so often, she caved. This was one such occasion. Too much standing at the wake, then the funeral service, then off to the lawyers, and the damn cobblestones didn’t help. There really was no reason to wear the heels here, and she knew it. With a sigh, she got up, hobbled to the bedroom and her luggage, and took out the pill bottle.
Knowing the meds would most likely make her tired within the next thirty minutes, Emerson decided she should check in with her office while she was still coherent. She picked up her cell and dialed into her voicemail.
“We’re sorry. You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please check the number and try again.” The recorded voice was robotically female.
“That’s weird.” Emerson tried again and got the same message.
Shifting her focus, she dialed the main number of McKinney Carr. Maybe her voicemail had gone screwy and Maggie, the receptionist, could connect her manually.
“We’re sorry. You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please check the number and try again.”
“What the hell?”
She tried again from her mother’s land line, only to get the same results. With her hand resting on the handset, she stood still and tried to think. Work friends weren’t something she had many of, but she suddenly recalled the cryptic message from Brenda a day or two ago. Something about some “funky shit” going down in the office. She returned to the couch and her cell phone, scrolled through her recent calls list, and found Brenda’s number.
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