by Hope Ramsay
“Whoa, wait,” Kerri said, putting her hands out palms forward. “I think you misunderstood. Colton is rooting for you. He just—”
“Spent the whole night talking about me?” Jessica met Kerri’s stare.
“Well, not the entire time,” Kerri said. “We did talk a little about the chamber of commerce and the general business climate. But otherwise.” Kerri’s normally straight shoulders slumped. It was clear that her landlady had an unrequited crush on Colton.
Because Colton was an idiot.
“Good grief.” Jessica looked away, studying the morning sunshine pouring through her front windows. If she had any skills at matchmaking, this would be the time to whip them out. But alas, she was a dolt when it came to relationships.
“You know, Jess, I’d give my right arm to have a man like that worry about me,” Kerri said.
That was probably true. But Jessica liked her right arm a lot and didn’t want to give it away for anyone, not even Colton. She turned back toward Kerri. “You’re right,” she said. “Colton is a great guy. But he’s my friend, and that’s it. So if you want to make a play for him, go right ahead. You have my blessing.”
Kerri put her empty cup on the desk and met Jessica’s stare. “Really? You’re not ticked off that I had dinner with him?”
“I’m not his keeper,” Jessica said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m super busy. I’ve got that City Hall project to finish.”
And by golly, just like that, she had found a way to push Colton out of her mind. If the man was running around town talking about her, then her anger was entirely justified.
Chapter Four
Late Tuesday afternoon, after prowling around Rose Cottage like a caged beast, Topher screwed up his courage and limped his way down the crushed-shell pathway that bisected Howland House’s broad lawn. The path led past an ancient live oak that overlooked Moonlight Bay and a small swimming beach, which would be abandoned this time of day.
Ashley didn’t have that many guests this week. So he had a reasonable chance of being left alone while he floundered around in the water. But maybe, if he came out here and swam every day, he’d get stronger. And maybe, by the time his house was finished, he’d be able to climb the stairs to the top of the lighthouse.
The thought made him smile. Once, climbing to the top of the light had been so much fun. Although, now that he thought about it, there had been lots of other fun times out on the island. He and Granddad used to take camping trips out there all the time. On those lazy summer days, they’d sailed all over the inlet, spending nights telling pirate stories around the campfire and eating catfish they’d caught off the pier. Those had been some of the best days of Topher’s childhood.
He would get strong enough to climb those stairs, if for no other reason than to prove his newly hired architect wrong. Not that he would ever admit how her words had affected him in the last twenty-four hours.
The funny thing was that she hadn’t called out his disability to be cruel. She’d simply noted it down like one of the many observations she’d put in that notebook of hers. Like his frailty was something to be weighed and measured.
Well, screw that.
He skirted the live oak as quickly as he could, not wishing to linger where much sadder memories ran deep. He’d spent a lot of lonely time up in that tree after his mother died. Aunt Mary, Ashley’s grandmother, had helped to raise him.
He followed the footpath down a set of concrete stairs to a small sand beach, where he abandoned his cane and towel. Walking along the sand was hard work and required the use of muscles that had atrophied over the last few months.
It was a relief when he finally reached the water’s edge. As he waded out into the bay, the water buoyed him up. Feeling momentarily weightless, he could walk along the sandy bottom without nearly as much pain. And when he submerged himself, he discovered that he could swim without any pain at all.
He was out of shape and easily winded, but swimming every day would change that quickly. The discovery lifted his spirits for the first time in ages.
It was getting close to dusk when he finally emerged, the gravity pulling him back to earth. The pain returned, and his legs felt rubbery under him. Even after he’d dried off and rested a few minutes, climbing the three stairs from the beach to the lawn was like hauling himself up every single stair circling the lighthouse.
He blew out a frustrated breath. He wasn’t going to recover in a day of swimming. But he was impatient enough to want that. He leaned on his cane and rested, breathing hard as he studied the live oak. The tree called to him, but he resisted.
Instead, he headed back up the path toward the cottage, but a movement in his peripheral vision caught his attention. He stopped and turned his head.
What was that? A shadow against the deeper shadows of the evening? He blinked, his heart still thudding in his chest from his swim. Was it the ghost?
No. There was no such thing. It was only the kid—Ashley’s son, Jackie. The kid was sitting under the tree, his knees drawn up against his chest, his forehead pressed against them in a picture of familiar misery.
Topher pulled himself upright, wrapped the towel around his shoulders, and left the footpath. His cane sank into the soft lawn as he hobbled toward the old tree and the sad little boy.
“So, what’s the story?” Topher asked when he finally made it across the lawn. The kid had been lurking around the cottage for days, as if he’d wanted to start a conversation but had been too frightened to try it.
Not surprising given the state of Topher’s face. But he wasn’t about to walk by and leave the kid looking so miserable. Topher had spent his share of miserable days under the canopy of this particular tree.
“Go away,” the kid said to his updrawn knees.
“Didn’t have a good day at school, then?”
The kid looked up, giving him a daggerlike stare despite the sheen of tears on his cheeks. “And what would you know about it, anyway?” he asked.
Whoa. Topher expected the kid to give him the stare, or maybe run away screaming. But instead the boy met his gaze as if he wasn’t at all frightened by Topher’s disfigured face.
“I know a lot, actually. I was kind of a nerd in school,” Topher said.
“I bet you didn’t have people calling you a liar all the time, did you, huh?”
“Um, well…no.” He leaned against the oak’s lowest branch, the bark abrading his palm. When he’d been Jackie’s age, it had taken some doing to swing up onto it. But he’d grown a lot since then. He was tired, but he still managed to pull himself up onto it and straddle it like a horse.
“There’s a spot up at the very top of this tree that’s like a crow’s nest on a ship,” he said, choosing to ignore the kid’s question.
The kid looked up at him, his face pale in the growing twilight. “You know about that?”
Topher smiled at the bittersweet memories. “Yeah. I do. I used—” He cut himself off.
“What?”
Maybe he shouldn’t encourage the kid. Topher knew all about Jackie and his fixation on the ghost of William Teal—the pirate who had lost his life in a shipwreck down the bay hundreds of years ago. So maybe telling the kid about how he used to pretend to be a pirate wouldn’t be the right thing to do.
Maybe instead, he should take Granddad’s tack and buy the kid a football and show him how to throw it.
“Nothing,” Topher said. “I just used to like climbing up there.”
The kid turned away, and they sat quietly for a long moment before the boy pushed himself up from the ground. “I gotta go before Mom figures out I’m not upstairs watching TV. It’s Tuesday. The Piece Makers are coming.”
Jackie headed off across the lawn, leaving him stranded in the tree. Topher had forgotten that it was Tuesday. His cousins Karen and Sandra would be coming over, and they’d find a moment to swoop down on him with a zillion questions about how he was feeling. They would probably have twin coronaries if he ever told them he’
d been out here swimming.
Or if they ever found out he’d climbed a tree.
And he’d have no trouble keeping those things a secret from them if he could just find a way to get back down to the ground. The lawn below seemed impossibly far away, but he was not going to be an excuse for Ashley to call in the fire and rescue.
He inhaled, swung his bad leg over the side, closed his eyes, and slipped back to earth. The pain jangled all the way up his spine, but miraculously, he didn’t fall on his ass.
* * *
Ashley Scott rarely made caramel cake. It might be a delicious staple of the South, but it took forever to whip the caramel icing—twenty minutes in the stand mixer to get the right frothy consistency.
But Jackie loved caramel cake. And since today marked the end of his summer vacation, she’d made a whole cake just for him. He’d already had a slice after dinner. And there would be plenty to pack in his school lunches for the rest of the week.
Maybe that would improve his mood. Jackie was too smart for his own good sometimes. And he was also just a little odd, her boy. What with his imaginary pirate friend…who might be a ghost.
Kids teased him, and school wasn’t his favorite place, especially at recess or lunchtime. Ashley sometimes wondered what Adam, her late husband, might think of their child. Would her husband, who’d been a man’s man, be ashamed of the boy who got perpetually bullied at school?
Probably.
But she wasn’t ashamed. She worried about Jackie. And loved him with all her heart, which was why she’d made a double recipe of caramel cake—so Jackie could have his own cake and the ladies of the Piece Makers quilting club could have theirs.
The quilting group met every Tuesday at Howland House, and they’d been getting scratch-made cake every week for decades. The cakes were a tradition that Ashley’s grandmother had started when she’d formed the group during World War II. Ashley had taken over the tradition after her husband and grandmother had died within a year of each other.
It seemed impossible that it had been three years since Adam had been killed on deployment. She still cried for him, especially at night, but she’d been learning to live with the loneliness. Besides, her bed-and-breakfast kept her too busy for self-pity most of the time.
Grandmother might not have liked the idea of turning Howland House into an inn, but it had been the only way Ashley could keep the old place in the Howland family. Her married name was Scott, but she’d been born a Howland—a direct descendant of Rose Howland, the woman who had planted the daffodils that had given Jonquil Island its name. Magnolia Harbor, the largest town on the island, had been founded more than a hundred years after Rose had died. But her daffodils remained.
Ashley checked the oven clock. It was nearly seven. The quilters would be arriving shortly. Their cake now took pride of place in the newly refurbished kitchen, sitting on Grandmother’s milk-glass cake stand beside a stack of her china plates and the silver cake server.
Cake had been served on those plates almost every week for eighty years. The sheer longevity of the Tuesday-night meetings made them both a burden and a joy to be a part of. Ashley didn’t dare end the tradition, but sometimes she wished the group would meet elsewhere, or maybe give up the old-fashioned practice of hand quilting. They could make a lot more quilts if someone would invest in a long-arm sewing machine capable of machine quilting. The truth was that sometimes Ashley wanted a Tuesday night off.
The sound of the big front door opening pulled Ashley from her dissatisfied thoughts. A moment later, Sandra Jernigan and her sister, Karen Tighe, came into the kitchen. Sandra and Karen, like Grandmother, were members of the Martin family. They had been Grandmother’s nieces, which made them Ashley’s cousins once removed or something like that.
In any case, Ashley, Sandra, and Karen were part of an extended family that included Topher, who was even more removed, relation-wise. But in this town family counted, especially if your surname was Howland or Martin. The Howlands and the Martins had founded Magnolia Harbor.
“How is he?” Sandra asked the moment she arrived, utterly ignoring the caramel cake that her sister immediately dived into. Sandra didn’t have a sweet tooth, but Karen did.
“I assume you’re asking about Topher?” Ashley said.
Sandra nodded.
“Well, he’s still not eating meals with the boarders. But I saw him leave the cottage and come back with a bunch of grocery sacks. I have no idea what he’s eating, but he’s eating something.”
“You should have offered to go shopping for—”
“No, Sandra, she shouldn’t have offered to shop for him,” Karen said, interrupting her sister around a mouthful of cake. “Topher needs tough love.”
Karen and Sandra bore a family resemblance if you looked hard enough, but the two of them tried their best not to enhance it. Karen rarely wore a skirt while Sandra was a bit of a fashion plate, although her sense of style was about twenty years out of date.
“The poor dear,” Sandra said, giving Karen a glare. “We really need to make an intervention.”
“And do what?” Ashley asked. Her cousins were meddling in Topher’s life. She was resisting the urge, although clearly the man needed help.
“I don’t know,” Sandra said, her voice laced with deep and genuine concern. “He’s so alone. He’s been alone since his father died.”
“Before that,” Karen said on a long, mournful breath.
Oh boy. Yes, Topher had lived a difficult life, losing his mother at the age of four and his father when he was eighteen, shortly after starting his freshman year at Alabama. Still, he’d managed, and he’d done well for himself until the accident.
Not surprisingly, Sandra and Karen, who had been babying him most of his life, wanted to swathe Topher in Bubble Wrap now that he was hurting.
“He’ll be okay,” Ashley said, trying to invest her voice with more conviction than she felt. Topher was desperately injured in both body and spirit. But maybe all he needed was a little time.
Ashley had met Topher only once or twice as a kid, when her father’s military service had allowed Daddy to return home to Magnolia Harbor for family celebrations. She remembered Topher as a nerdy kid. Sort of like Jackie, now that she thought about it.
That brought her up sharp because Ashley hadn’t been kind to Topher when they were younger. She was four years older and had hung out with their cousins Steven and Timothy. The older kids made a point of excluding Topher from their games, leaving him to play with the little girl cousins.
Melanie, Alicia, and Lindsay had adored Topher. Like him, they were all in their thirties now. Each one had checked in with Ashley over the last few weeks, concerned about him. Apparently Topher was not returning phone calls and seemed to have forgotten that his extended family loved him no matter what.
“I heard from Isaac Solomon down at the marina that Topher took his boat out yesterday,” Karen said.
“He did?” Ashley asked. “I guess I didn’t notice that he’d left the cottage. I was busy doing back-to-school shopping with Jackie.”
“Well, apparently he did. He sailed to Lookout Island with Jessica Blackwood. I called Donna, and she confirmed that he’s hired her niece to do a site visit for a house out there.”
Ashley brushed an imaginary crumb from her marble countertop. “Well, I guess that’s not a surprise. He’s been talking about building a house out there since he returned to Magnolia Harbor.”
“Yes, but I thought he’d give it up once he was back home with family. We can’t let him run away from his problems. And besides, it’s not safe for him to live alone out there,” Karen said.
Ashley studied the veins in the marble but said nothing.
“Tell me you don’t disagree,” Sandra said.
“I guess I do agree. But I don’t feel right intervening.”
“But we must,” Sandra said. “Can you imagine him living out there alone during a storm?”
No, Ashley couldn’t. But storms
had nothing to do with it. She couldn’t imagine how anyone would choose isolation over family.
Loneliness was one of Ashley’s constant companions. It had been that way even before Adam had died, when he’d been deployed to some godforsaken place and managed to call only every once in a while.
She’d hated the loneliness then. But when Adam had been killed, she hadn’t taken a deep dive into self-pity.
No. She’d moved here, where people poked their noses into her business. And then she’d become an innkeeper, with a constant crowd of guests coming and going. She was still lonely, but she wasn’t alone.
She understood Topher’s grief, but she had no clue how to make him return to the world of the living. She had hoped he would take his meals with the rest of her boarders. But he hadn’t. He wouldn’t even let the cleaning lady in to tidy up.
“No,” she said aloud, looking up. “I wouldn’t want him out there in the middle of the bay living alone. Not in a storm or on the calmest summer day.”
“Okay, then,” Karen said. “We need to put our heads together and figure out a way to stop him.”
Chapter Five
Jessica threw herself into the City Hall project, working late into the night on Tuesday and Wednesday. By Thursday afternoon, the proposal was as good as it was going to get. Messing around with it for another twelve hours would only make her crazy. If she filed it today, she’d have time on Friday and over the weekend to generate a few ideas for Topher’s castle.
So at half past noon on Thursday, she sent the electronic version of her City Hall design via email to the selection committee’s administrator. But she also needed to provide one set of paper drawings, and since she was within walking distance of the old City Hall and in desperate need of stretching her legs, she left the office and walked down to hand deliver the package.
Big mistake.
No sooner had she set foot in the old building on the corner of Tulip and Mimosa than she ran headlong into State Representative Caleb Tate, who was coming down the hall with Councilmember Harry Bauman in tow.