She tiptoed around the back of the site trailer, being careful not to step in any of the patches of dry, brown summer grass around the perimeter, just in case they made a crunching sound and gave away her whereabouts. She knelt down in the space under the trailer’s back window, steadying herself with one hand on the grass and one on the plastic siding of the trailer. It was like waiting with the stud-finder all over again, only now her spy prop just looked silly. She waited and waited to overhear even a hint of conversation coming from Remi’s desk, but he wasn’t talking and her calves were screaming from her awkward crouch.
Patience frayed, Julianne hopped up onto her tiptoes and peered in the back window of the trailer, careful to keep her head down and her mane of curly hair—always a dead giveaway if someone was trying to spot her from a distance—out of sight. From her new vantage point, Julianne found she was able to hear much more clearly than when she had been hunched behind the trailer. She could hear the drip stop of the coffee pot by the desk and the whir of the photocopier in its power-save mode. Then she heard a squealing sound from inside the trailer. Squealing tires are secret-agent pay dirt, she thought. Shifting to get a better view, Jules was just able to make out the trailer’s bathroom door opening. Her mind worked hurriedly to figure out what sneaky, no-good things Remi was up to in the trailer bathroom, but before she was able to formulate any sort of convincing hypothesis, the door slid all the way open and Remi appeared in her line of vision. Wearing nothing but a towel.
Jules felt her eyes grow wide as her gaze followed Remi’s body across the trailer. Hanging around the construction site had been kind to him; his muscles were smooth and well defined. Even the farmer tan from his rolled-up work shirt sleeves showcased how strong and tight his arms were. Julianne had always thought that “rippling muscles” was just a figure of speech, but as Remi made his way across the room she had to admit that his muscles were, in fact, rippling. A few stray drops of water from the shower lingered on his chest, clinging stubbornly, until one by one they slid way down to six-pack abs, tracing a trail down his stomach, then finally disappearing into the towel.
As Julianne peeped through the window, trying to control her breathing, she heard a series of mechanical knocks on the door of the trailer. It sounded like someone was banging a cookie sheet with a baseball bat, and the noise was just enough to startle Jules into ducking her head out of view. Huddling against the back of the trailer, she heard the clomping of business shoes on the front steps. Julianne pressed her ear against the wall.
“Remington, I presume this isn’t what passes for business casual on a site these days.” Julianne heard a sharp baritone scolding Remi. She couldn’t imagine anything more humiliating than one of his bosses from Dawson and Dawson popping by to check on the project site and, instead, finding him half-naked. She felt a pang of sympathy for him.
“Dad?” Remi gulped. “What are you doing here?” Julianne felt as shocked as Remi sounded—she never would have guessed that the voice belonged to Remi’s father. He sounded so cold and businesslike.
“I think a better question, young man, might be what are you doing? Last time I checked, pants were still required at work,” Barton Moore countered. Ouch, thought Jules. He clearly just took a shower. His hair’s still wet!
“Would you believe an unfortunate drywall accident?” Remi asked gamely.
“Not particularly,” his father barked back.
“Well, that’s a shame. Because that’s exactly what happened. I was completely covered with powder and I figured it was better to clean up and change now, rather than walk around all day looking like I’d been caught in a freak snowstorm.” Julianne heard Remi trying to be his casual self, but she also heard the tension in his explanation.
“Remington, that’s a pathetic excuse,” Mr. Moore responded icily. Julianne held her breath, waiting for Remi’s response. She couldn’t help but feel that Mr. Moore was being unduly harsh—it wasn’t like he’d walked in and found Remi playing Wii on the job. He was cleaning up after a work accident and heading back to his crew. Clearly there was some precedent for this sort of thing; why else would these trailers include showers in their bathrooms?
“I’m sorry you feel that way, sir,” Remi replied. Julianne felt herself soften, detecting the tiny tremble in his voice.
“Listen, Remington,” Mr. Moore continued. “It’s about time you grew up and learned to handle responsibility. How am I going to trust you to take over my business when you can’t stay on top of one project crew?”
“But—” Remi began to protest.
“But nothing.” His father charged on. “Are you on the site supervising your crew, or are you hiding in this trailer like some spoiled celebrity?”
Julianne gasped at Mr. Moore’s nastiness and clapped her hand over her open mouth. She hoped that the sound was muffled by the wall of the trailer. She felt the sting of recognition as Mr. Moore continued to lay into Remi—after all of her faux pas on the site over the past few weeks, she knew all too well what it felt like to get called out for an innocent mistake.
“You can’t expect your crew to respect you,” Mr. Moore concluded solemnly, “until you give them a reason. I challenge you to earn their respect, Remington. And mine.”
“Yes, sir,” Remi answered. Julianne was shocked that Remi wasn’t fighting back—anyone could see how well-respected he was around the site. Guys two and three times his age, who had been in this business longer than Julianne had been alive, asked Remi’s opinion on pretty much everything. The newbies looked up to him as an authority. Hell, she’d hoped against hope that he would just disappear into thin air, but even Julianne had to respect the job Remi did. He was that good. And, what’s more, Julianne noted in spite of herself, he did it all without ever tearing any of the other guys down or trying to make them feel small—which was more than she could say for his father.
Julianne felt the little hairs on the back of her neck prickle and stand up as an uncomfortable thought worked its way into her brain. Maybe Remi really didn’t have anything to do with the construction of his parents’ McMansion. Mr. Moore seemed sort of…tyrannical. It was impossible for Julianne to imagine him asking anyone’s input, especially someone he treated the way she’d just heard him treat Remi. Clearly, she had some more detective work to do.
When Julianne got home from work that evening, the house was empty. Dad was at his monthly meeting of local children’s book authors, and Chloe had left a note saying that she’d be home from the hospital around ten o’clock.
Julianne tossed her things onto the living room sofa and headed upstairs to her room. When she logged on to her Gmail account, she saw one new message. She hoped it would be a long, newsy update from Kat in Spain, but instead the message was from Chloe, reading simply, “How did it go?” Julianne moved the message into her trash folder and turned on her Internet browser. After a few minutes of distracting herself with homemade bags, prints, and jewelry at etsy.com, Julianne logged on to MySpace. Before she knew it, she was back at Remi’s profile, combing it for clues.
As Julianne embarked upon her first solo MySpace “recon” of “the subject,” she got a little twisting feeling in her stomach. Was she taking this too far? The guy on this MySpace page wasn’t some sort of teenage Donald Trump. MySpace Remi listened to good music, and read good books, and had lots of funny friends who wrote clever comments about the time he’d been in an ostrich race or the time he’d built an exact replica of someone out of toothpicks.
Consciously, Julianne knew that she needed to do whatever she could to take the fuel out of the Moores’ assault against her family and their beach. But the tiniest of tiny pangs at the bottom of her gut kept complicating things. Julianne was so surprised by her own inkling of a thought that she swatted at her head to chase it away. She knew what side she was on. She needed to do what was right for her family, and nothing was going to get in her way. She logged out of MySpace quickly. But, before she could clear her head, she clicked into Google
and entered the search term “Barton Moore.”
Chapter Ten
Julianne was close to discovering the perfect color of blue. She was covered from head to toe in various shades of blue oil paint—battle scars from struggling to finish her mom’s painting. As she swirled her brush on the palette, she felt the tension and frustration of the past few weeks begin to melt away. She traced circles in the sand at her feet with her big toe while she mixed her paint and hummed to herself. Her oversize sunglasses were perched on top of her head, and her hair was pulled back into two braids, all of her speckled with at least three different colors of blue.
She tried to shrug off the last few weeks of confusion. It was all she could do to keep focused at work with Remi around every corner. And, as every super spy knows, being undercover is exhausting. The hardest part for Julianne, though, was coming home and feeling like she wasn’t able to snap out of her Remi-induced work-day funk. Every time she took out her mother’s painting, something didn’t feel quite right. The light was off, or her oils were too thick, or her brush strokes were too uneven. It was always something.
But today the light was perfect, and it was like Julianne had been given brand-new eyes to appreciate it with. She was mixing blue that was almost too vibrant to be real but was the exact color of the afternoon ocean. She cranked up her iPod and laughed at the absolute perfection of it all. Keeping her eyes on her canvas she stood up and stretched her arms out to soak in the glorious day. Then a deafening noise erupted, making her wheel around, terrified that it might have been a car crash.
But the real cause of the ruckus was even worse.
Julianne stared down the beach toward the Moores’ house. The confrontational-looking fencing erected around their sprawling property had multiplied and was now nearly blocking off all access to the beach. Behind them, a parade of huge shiny bulldozers and backhoes were lined up like enormous, angry hornets. One by one they rolled out and started leveling the entire area. Julianne felt like she was being punched in the stomach.
Leaving her things on the ground, she crept closer to the action, trying to put her newly acquired spy skills to good use. She turned off her iPod, leaving the earphones in, so that anyone who saw her would think she was just enjoying an afternoon on the beach—or what was left of the beach—with a sound track. Ducking down near the fencing behind one of the many towering dunes created by the bulldozers, Julianne was basically invisible to anyone in the area. She shivered as she curled up into herself, waiting to see what would happen next. She didn’t have to wait long.
“Hey, guys! Coffee break?” A voice bellowed from the top of the dune. Julianne heard the echo of four keys turning off four ignitions, and then the clomping of eight individual work boots scampering down the beach toward whichever grunt had been sent on a Dunkin’ Donuts run. (Okay, maybe she was projecting a little bit on the last part…)
“So, what’s the game plan for the afternoon, Tom?” she heard a deep voice call out across the dune.
“More demolition. We need to clear this entire area. No brush left. It needs to be buildable ground,” Deep Voice Number Two, presumably Tom, called back.
“How much ground are we talking here?” asked a third guy.
“The whole thing. We’re taking out this entire pen.” Tom didn’t hesitate for a moment.
“What are they building?” Deep Voice Number One asked. “Pretty big demo order for a house.”
“A gym, I think,” Tom said offhandedly.
Julianne scanned the dunes around her and let her eyes rest on the ocean. It shimmered another new shade of turquoise in the afternoon light. She shuddered. How could anyone think that a gym, or a sauna, or any other extravagant convenience was more important than this beach? There were gyms all over. Already built and good enough for everyone else she knew.
“Like an LA/Sports Club?” joked another guy.
“Nah, not a franchise or anything.” Tom laughed. “They’re building a gym addition onto the house. A waterfront gym.”
Julianne felt like she was going to burst out of her skin. A gym? The Moores were destroying this beautiful beach, taking land away from people who had loved it their entire lives, so that they could have a better view from their elliptical machine? Why couldn’t they just put a couple of machines in their basement like normal people? Or work out on the actual beach? Maybe they should hire a live-in spin instructor too! Just when she thought there couldn’t be a more stupid, ridiculous, petty reason for the Moores to keep building onto their monster mansion, they completely surprised her by raising the bar yet again. What could three people need so much space for? Two people, when Remi went back to school! Julianne was appalled.
She felt a burst of cold air as a new shadow fell over her. She shivered and crossed her hands over her bare arms. Then the shadow cleared its throat. Julianne’s eyes shot up in alarm. Remi was towering over her, his no-longer-so-skinny arms crossed in front of his chest, looking much more imposing than the twelve-foot dune.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Nothing. You know. Just listening to my iPod,” Julianne said casually, trying to shrug while slowly standing up.
“I hear the sound quality’s a lot better if you actually turn it on.” He raised one eyebrow. Crap.
“Thanks for the hint. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to be left alone.” Julianne tried to capture her sassiest comeback voice.
“Left alone to do what? Continue eavesdropping on my father’s construction crew?” There was self-righteousness rising in Remi’s voice, mingling with teasing amusement. Julianne felt her pulse rising along with it.
“I think you mean demolition crew,” Julianne corrected, matching him note for sarcastic note. “I don’t see any construction going on here—just a whole lot of bulldozing. And I don’t need to explain myself to you. Some parts of this beach are still public. At least for now.”
“Julianne, what the hell is your problem?” Remi burst out, clearly frustrated. Julianne felt a pang, seeing Remi’s usually handsome face contorted and shouting. “This is my dad’s dream house, and they’re making great progress.”
“Progress? This isn’t progress! It’s…it’s…greedy and selfish. Your family is grabbing up every last morsel of space, every last grain of sand, so that you can have all of it to yourselves. It’s not about making something—it’s about proving that you’re the biggest kid in the sandbox.” After weeks of lying low and “monitoring progress,” it felt so good to just yell and let her anger pour out.
“I don’t understand why you’re taking this so personally!” Remi bellowed back at her. “My dad is an amazing architect and this is his home. It’s all he’s ever wanted—it’s his legacy. Why does that bother you so much?”
“You are defending this? What’s with the infinite faith in your dad? How can you be so sure that he doesn’t have it all wrong?” Julianne posed the question half as a challenge and half because she genuinely wanted to know.
“He’s a brilliant architect!” Remi exclaimed, stretching his arm toward Julianne as if to put his hand over her shaking hands.
“And that means he can’t be wrong? Why? He’s wrong about you! He doesn’t even think you can handle your own job site, but you trust him completely? That’s just weird!” Julianne pressed on, undeterred by the fact that she had just inadvertently spilled the beans about eavesdropping earlier in the week.
“He’s my dad, Jules. And he’s worked his entire life for this,” Remi said quietly, seeming to ignore Julianne’s slipup.
“Well, did it ever occur to you that other people have worked their entire lives to afford the tiny slices of space that they live on? To sit at their windows and take in the view that you guys just bulldozed? The beach you’re wiping out to make your gigantic glass jungle gym belongs to this entire neighborhood!” The words were tumbling out of Julianne’s mouth, rolling over and over each other like marbles. Her mouth was thick with emotion and she was choking back tears. “
Some people barely have anything left, Remi,” she wailed. “Do you really need to take the beach away from them for some house?” It was all Julianne could do to keep from sobbing. Her throat was burning from the screaming and from swallowing angry tears. She knew she probably wasn’t making any sense, but she just needed him to hear her now.
“Maybe this is bigger than just ‘some house’!” Remi shouted back at her. “My dad has been working for this for so long. I can’t even tell you what it means to him—this is his artistic vision…” As he babbled on about his father’s dream, his voice was so earnest that Julianne knew he meant every word. All he wanted was to make her understand.
But she couldn’t stand it anymore. She had to cut him off. If anyone needed to understand the real importance of this beach, it was the Moores. “Name one life that’s being made more beautiful by what is happening here, Remi!” Her feet dug into the sand as she tore off down the beach to grab her easel. “Want to talk about artistic vision?” she cried, spinning back to Remi. “You know who had it? My mom! And her vision was all about this beach. The one your family is destroying! I can barely see her beach anymore. Soon it will be impossible to remember what she must have seen. But if you think I’m going to give up her beach without a fight, Remi Moore, you have another thing coming. This beach is more than just sand to my family—it’s all we have left of my mother. It’s the only place where she still feels alive. And I’m sorry if my family’s past is getting in the way of your dad’s bright, shiny future, but that’s too damn bad!”
Out of the corner of her eye, Julianne saw Remi’s mouth open to speak, his eyes wide. But there was nothing she wanted to hear from him right now. The sand flew up behind her as she raced to her easel.
Julianne’s afternoon of perfect blue was perfectly ruined.
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