The second result stopped Rosetta cold. It was another obituary. Deborah Ellis, mother of Angela and wife of Richard, had passed away two weeks earlier. Wife of Richard. How many Deborah and Richard Ellises with twenty-year old daughters could there possibly be? This had to be them. Why and when they’d left Massachusetts was anybody’s guess, but Rosetta was certain now that she’d found Casey’s little girl.
After saving the article, Rosetta tried searching for Angela Ellis, and this time she narrowed it down to Angela Ellis from St. Nabor Island, South Carolina. The search took her to a Facebook page, but when she clicked on it, she got a message saying the page was private and asking her if she wanted to “friend” Angela. She closed the window and sighed.
It was that easy, after all this time, even with so little information. A few minutes’ work and she had uncovered what Casey had kept secret all that time. No wonder Casey refused to use the Internet. How could she have avoided the temptation of looking for her baby?
Rosetta thought the news that Deborah Ellis was dead might be enough to change Casey’s mind about attempting to contact Angela. Certainly that information was important. Why should Angela believe herself motherless when in fact her biological mother was right here, where she’d spent most of her adulthood regretting the decision to give her baby away?
***
Casey dragged the kayak up to the shed, but she didn’t bother putting it away. One of Rosetta’s peons could do that. She needed to confront her aunt and find out what was going on. When she thought of the way Rosetta had manipulated her that morning, her insistence that she only had Casey’s best interest in mind, fury rose in her chest. How dare Rosetta pretend she cared about what was best for Casey when she was selling the hotel to a resort developer. What Casey needed was for the island to stay as it was, a perfect hideaway from the world. If Brett planned to turn it into some kind of tourist trap destination, it would be ruined. The one good thing she had would be gone and she’d have nowhere to go.
She found Rosetta in her office going through a stack of paperwork. The documents pertaining to selling the hotel? Casey wondered.
“You’re selling out?” Casey asked by way of hello.
“Sit down, Casey,” Rosetta said, gesturing toward the chair opposite her desk. She got up and shut the door. When she came back to the desk, she said softly, “You aren’t the only one who has made mistakes.”
Casey listened as Rosetta explained the dire financial situation she was in. She wasn’t only selling the hotel. She was also selling the cottages and the White Sails Tavern and the craft gallery. Basically, she was selling everything she owned on Devil’s Back except the Beach Plum Café. Casey was stunned. Rosetta had never so much as hinted at financial hardship. Phil had been an investment banker back before they bought the hotel and opted out of the fast lane for island life. Even after he’d changed his business focus, though, he had invested for them, and as Casey understood it, he had known how to get a serious rate of return. When he died, he did so on a large pile of money, plenty for Rosetta to continue with her comfortable lifestyle and to keep running the hotel.
“I don’t understand. How did things get so bad?” Casey asked.
Rosetta blinked and Casey saw tears in her eyes. Rosetta picked up a framed picture of Phil from her desk and smiled at it sadly. Then she set it down and looked back at Casey.
“Phil would never forgive me,” she said. “I made a bad investment decision, and I went all in.”
“It can’t be that bad,” Casey said.
“Bernie Madoff.”
Casey couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Surely she was too smart to fall for a Ponzi scheme.
“I can’t keep operating in the red, and at my age, I can’t take out loans. This is a young person’s game. I have to sell. That’s all there is.”
“But they’ll ruin it,” Casey said. It couldn’t be as bad as Rosetta was saying. How much debt had she racked up? And then Casey had a thought: How much of the debt was on account of the café?
“I think Brett understands how special the island is.”
“He took a video of hermit crabs!” Casey said, louder than she intended to. Someone who couldn’t enjoy a nice day in nature without videotaping it couldn’t possibly get how special the island was.
“That hardly seems like a crime,” Rosetta said.
“That letter from my mother,” Casey said. “There was more than what Jason saw. There’s money. She left half of her estate to me. I wasn’t going to take it, but I can, for you. It’s not millions, but it’s about two-hundred thousand. Would that be enough for you to turn things around? You can have it all.”
“And by this time next year, we’ll be right back where we are, looking to sell, and you will have lost your inheritance,” Rosetta said, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Casey. I’ve failed you, and I’ve failed Phil, but this is the only way.”
“But what does that mean?” Casey felt panicked and short of breath. This couldn’t be happening.
“I’m going to retire. That’s all.”
“It’s not supposed to be like this.”
“I was going to have to retire someday. I can’t keep running myself into the ground over this place forever. This is a little sooner than I’d planned. Nothing’s going to happen to the café, though. I’ve made sure of it.”
She couldn’t believe Rosetta would betray her this way. She could have told her about her financial problems and what she was thinking of doing. Casey could have found a way to help before things got so out of control.
“The resort will have its own coffee bar. I’ll be out of business in months,” Casey said, as if what she cared about most was business.
“They won’t be able to compete with your baking,” Rosetta said.
Why does everything I love get taken away from me? Casey wondered.
“Listen, I did some research after we talked this morning—” Rosetta said.
Casey interrupted her. “I have to go. I can’t be here right now.”
“But it’s about your—” she faltered. Daughter. Casey’s daughter. The idea was still overwhelming to her. “It’s about the baby. Your baby.”
“I don’t have a baby. I gave birth to a little girl and I gave her away. That’s all in the past. I never should have told you.”
“But she’s out there, she—”
“Of course she’s out there!” Casey felt her rage turning into a ball of words that she knew she’d regret so she tried to swallow them.
“Don’t you want to know—”
“I can’t know! I can’t!” She stood up and walked out of Rosetta’s office without another word. There was nothing to say. She’d spent twenty years trying not to think about the daughter she gave up, twenty years in which not a day went by that she didn’t wonder, that she didn’t see a little girl of about the right age without feeling a stab of regret and loneliness. Still, it was better to wonder what she missed out on than it was to know.
***
When Brett got back to the boat shed, Casey was long gone. He clumsily lifted his kayak onto an empty space in the boat rack, and then he put away Casey’s, too, since she’d left it in the doorway. He couldn’t believe she had no idea about the development deal. But then again, she had never asked him what he was doing here, and he had never said. He assumed Rosetta had told her.
It was a big deal, and he understood that. If all went according to plan, his company was going to transform the island completely, although he hoped he could find a way to retain the spirit of the place, because for the first time in his 18 years with Sweet Water, he’d found a location that he didn’t want to sanitize and standardize.
Most of the Sweet Water properties he’d worked on were truly improvements to their settings, replacing dilapidated beach shacks and trashy fried food stands with attractive, clean, well-maintained, all-inclusive resorts and providing at least slightly better jobs for the locals than they’d had before. Tourism was an economy
of exploitation, no matter where the tourism was taking place—rich tourists making other rich people richer on the backs of impoverished locals. At least Sweet Water resorts looked good in the process. There were worse developers out there.
And the fact was, even on this beautiful little island that he was coming to appreciate more and more each day, a Sweet Water resort would constitute a benefit to the local economy. If the hotel and restaurant went out of business and weren’t quickly replaced by something else, how long could the year-rounders realistically afford to stay here? They relied on that commerce. And would the summer people want to keep their pretty little cottages if all the businesses faded away? Locals might not initially like the idea of a resort, but if they wanted to stay on the island, they’d come around.
Paddling with Casey that morning, he’d finally come up with an idea that he thought might work for everyone. He always had his best ideas when he was working out. Kayaking proved to be both good exercise and good inspiration.
He would scale back the development plan from a three-hundred room hotel complex to clusters of two to four bedroom condos, none more than two stories high, designed to blend attractively into the surroundings, and with every attention to the best in green building practices and long-term environmental sustainability. There would be fewer beds available that way, but the rental value of each condo would be triple that of a hotel room, and anyway if the idea was to sell privacy, peace, and quiet, condos made far more sense than a hotel. Where the inn currently stood, they’d make a community center with a big pool and hot tub, exercise facilities, a convenience store, a coffee shop, a bar, banquet facilities—all the typical resort amenities. It would be a best-of-both-worlds arrangement: The entertainment, comfort, and ease of a hotel-resort, the privacy of an exclusive island escape. He had a conference call with Charlie and some of the other top execs scheduled for that evening. He’d go draw up some plans and get ready to pitch it to them.
He’d been hoping to talk to Rosetta about the café, though. It was the one property she wasn’t selling, aside from her own home, and it was in a prime location, up the path from the pier. Sweet Water needed that location to make an island welcome center. As much as he hated the idea of hurting Casey’s business, he knew for a fact that Sweet Water could offer her more than what she had now. He could transform her life.
Given her reaction to the news today, however, he understood how steep a climb he would face to bring her around to the idea. With Rosetta’s help, though, maybe he could make her see that the changes he wanted to bring were not only not bad, they were essential to the island’s survival. He needed to talk to her, calmly and rationally, to make her see.
The way it had felt when he kissed her. That kiss was more than lust. He didn’t just want to sleep with her. He wanted to know every single thing about her—her likes and dislikes, her past and her dreams for the future. He wanted to press his body against hers not merely for pleasure but as if to absorb some essential part of her through his skin. He wanted to see her smile and to comfort her when she was sad.
As a generally sensible person, Brett understood how illogical the intensity of his feelings was. He’d only known her a week, had only spent a few hours with her, and for half of those, she’d been roaring drunk. He understood the basics of the pheromones that people give off and the way attraction happens as a result of hormonal reactions, so he understood that what he was feeling might be explained away by body chemistry, but if this was indeed his hormones taking over his senses, he was willing to give himself over to them, because when was the last time he’d cared for anything or anyone this much? He’d never felt this way about Ashley.
What would it take to get her to give him a chance? Short of going back in time, quitting his job, and then magically finding his way here as a mere tourist, was there anything he could do?
He could abandon the project. He could go through with quitting this time and move to Maine and see where things went with Casey. In the absence of a time machine, a fresh start was the only option he had. He could get away from the corporate insanity that had been his life since college, do something quiet and easy like work in a bookstore or something. It wouldn’t even matter if he suddenly found himself scraping by, paycheck to paycheck—not if he was happy.
But if the deal failed, the entire local economy would collapse, and Casey would lose everything and have to leave this island where she so clearly belonged, which meant that, even though it might make Casey hate him, Brett had to make the deal go through.
He went back to his hotel room to perfect his pitch. He had to get his bosses on board tonight.
***
After Casey left, Rosetta pushed aside the account statements she’d been going through and buried her face in her hands. Casey was right that she was selling out. She was a failure. She’d been a failure for a long time now, but she’d been able to keep up the facade. No longer, though. Even if she didn’t sell the hotel, she’d have to close for good at the end of the season. It was over. She’d had a long run and now it was time to face defeat.
Since the whole Madoff scandal exploded, she’d been treading water and she was exhausted. The timing of it. In retrospect, she wished she’d started running low on cash sooner. Maybe she could have gotten her money out before the whole scheme collapsed. Instead, she’d been running in the red for years, assuming she had that big payoff to count on, and when she was ready to draw on it—poof. What a dark magic trick it was. Four years later and she still hadn’t gotten back so much as a penny. Maybe she never would, or if she did, it would be too late to save her legacy.
She could no longer keep her head above water, but thanks to Brett, she had a lifeline. She wasn’t going to drown after all. And anyway, she was far too old for this. She was seventy-eight years old, for God’s sake. She deserved a quiet retirement, and she needed money to make that happen, even if it meant letting Casey down. She couldn’t hold Casey up forever.
Still, when she considered Sweet Water’s initial offer, as big as the number sounded, she could see that when all was said and done, she’d need to be frugal moving forward. She hadn’t had to be frugal since the day she married Phil, over fifty years ago. It would be a hard change, but even hard change didn’t have to bad, she knew. She had lived long enough to know that one must adapt or die, and she certainly was not ready to die yet.
She got up from her desk and called Bentley, and together they went out to the hotel’s patio overlooking the beach. It was a beautiful day. The sun glittered on the water, and the air, though warm with the midday sun, carried the crisp smells of ripe apples and fall leaves. When was the last time she actually got to enjoy a day like this, instead of running herself ragged keeping this place from falling apart?
A few more concessions from Brett, and then she’d sign and be done with it all. She was ready.
Chapter 37
St. Nabor Island, South Carolina
Randy had driven them all to Deb’s house for the séance or whatever you wanted to call it, and once the ridiculous charade was over, they climbed in his car to go home. As he drove, Marilyn wondered how worried she should be about Angela. Had she unwittingly walked in on a Shakespearean tragedy here? All this talk of ghosts was unsettling to say the least. The kid seemed way too smart to go in for smoke and mirrors and voodoo magic tricks, but Angela had clearly believed they had made contact with the spirit realm tonight. The most frightening thing that Marilyn had experienced all evening was seeing how convinced Angela was that she had heard her mother’s voice.
They pulled up at the hotel and Marilyn asked Angela to walk her to the door. She needed to talk to Angela alone for a minute.
“Why did you want me there tonight?” Marilyn asked.
“I thought you might want closure,” Angela said, not meeting her eyes.
Marilyn did want closure, but the evening’s air of Ouija board foolishness had only put her further away from it.
“You know that was all a lo
t of nonsense, right?” Marilyn said, hating how condescending her words sounded. She meant to sound concerned, but it hadn’t come out that way. She had no practice talking to kids, even twenty-year-old kids.
“I don’t know what I think.”
“And all that stuff about calling a priest. Look, I may be a lapsed Catholic, but I wouldn’t go mentioning all this ghost hunting stuff to any priests if I were you.”
“But the Hail Mary’s helped. She quieted when we prayed,” Angela said.
“Honey, if prayer helps you, then pray, but chasing after ghosts?”
“What about purgatory? I mean, don’t we pray for the souls in purgatory?” Angela asked.
Marilyn struggled to think of an answer that would make sense to Angela, who had been a Sunday school student much more recently than Marilyn had. At last she shrugged and said, “I don’t know about purgatory, but I do know that when we die, we die.”
“Yeah, well, I guess it doesn’t feel that way to me,” Angela said. She brushed her hair out of her eyes and gave Marilyn a weary look.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Marilyn said. “My flight’s at three.” When she’d booked her flights, she figured forty-eight hours was enough. Enough for what? She didn’t know, as she hadn’t exactly had a clear-cut plan, but she had to get back to work, anyway.
“Tomorrow?” Angela asked, a furrow creasing her brow.
“I can change it if you want. I don’t have to go right away,” Marilyn said.
But Angela had regained her cool composure. “No, don’t trouble yourself. You have a life to get back to.”
“Look, I don’t want this to be the end for us. I want to get to know you.”
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