“It is true.”
“All right. I don’t question your story, but the island belongs to me now, and any agreements you had with my aunt are no longer applicable. If I see fit to raise your rent, I am well within my right to do that.”
He clasped his hands in his lap and shook his head slowly. “Nope. You’re not. Millie assigned all lessee’s rights to her tenants in the event a new landlord took over the property. I’ll let you take a look at my lease. You might be able to fight it, but it would be expensive and time-consuming.”
“And with my luck someone actually would kill you before I won the case,” Sara said. “It wouldn’t be any fun unless I had the satisfaction of seeing your expression when I beat you.”
A genuine grin split his face for the first time, and Sara found herself disliking him a little less. But if she had to accept this man’s living arrangements on Thorne Island, then she and he were still a long way from bridging the gap from dislike to tolerance.
“Cheer up, Mrs….?”
“It’s Miss. Miss Sara Crawford.”
He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “There you see, things could be a lot worse between us.”
“I don’t see how.”
“You could be married or ugly. And you’re neither one of those things. I think we’ve got a future, Miss Crawford.”
She gritted her teeth. “I think we’ve got a problem, Mr. Bass.”
“Nick! Nickie! Everything all right up there?”
A low, booming voice rolled up the staircase and down the hall to Mr. Bass’s room, and Sara nearly jumped out of her skin. “Who’s that?”
“That’s Dexter Sweet, former linebacker for the Cleveland Browns. He’s a big man with thighs the size of tires, but don’t let him scare you. The goodness in his soul could make nightingales sing. And that yelling thing he just did—that’s how you enter someone’s house.”
“Oh, please, will you—”
“Everything’s fine, Dex,” Nick Bass called. “We’ve just got company.”
An African-American male filled the doorway. Sara couldn’t tell anything about his soul, but the rest of Nick’s description was absolutely accurate, though he might have mentioned Dexter Sweet’s height. It was just shy of a California redwood.
Dexter spared her a quick, astonished glance before settling a worried gaze on his friend. “I heard Captain Winkie’s boat and thought something was wrong. He’s not due back till day after tomorrow. Then I couldn’t find Ryan, and Brody was still snoring when I looked in on him.”
Nick extended his hand to indicate Sara. “Dex, meet Miss Sara Crawford, our new landlady. Sara, this is Dexter Sweet.”
Amazingly, despite his size, there was something about the man’s round boyish face that made his last name seem appropriate. She stood up, offered her hand and looked into Mr. Sweet’s perplexed brown eyes. “Did you say ‘Captain Winkie’?”
He nodded.
She couldn’t stop herself. Exhaustion and shock had taken their toll. Laughter bubbled from her throat and she could barely get her next words out. “I’m standing here with Mr. Sweet and Mr. Bass, and we’re all talking about Captain Winkie. Somehow I feel like I’m in the middle of a Saturday-morning cartoon.”
The two men exchanged a look that was part male commiseration and part she’s-a-woman-that-explains-it. Sara wouldn’t have been surprised if they both put a finger to the side of their heads and made circles.
“Tell me something, Mr. Sweet,” she said through a continuing fit of laughter, “do you pay rent on this island?”
“Yeah.” He dragged the word out with caution. “Been here almost six years now.”
“And how much do you pay?”
“A hundred a month.”
“Terrific. And are your checks stored in a drawer somewhere?”
“Yeah, Nick’s.”
Nick Bass opened the desk drawer, withdrew a stack of checks similar to his own and brought them to her. Each one was dated and signed by Dexter Sweet.
It wasn’t even enough to cover the back taxes, but it was a start. “Thank you, gentlemen,” Sara said. “Now I think I’ll go find a room for myself. Do we have any fresh linens?”
“I’ll let you use mine,” Nick said. “The cupboard down the hall that they’re sitting in is yours. But the spare sheets belong to me. Share and share alike I always say. Pick any room you like, Miss Crawford. Make yourself at home.”
“I am at home, Mr. Bass.”
A SHARP PAIN shot up Nick’s leg. He limped back to the desk chair and sat down.
Dexter frowned at him. “Are you doing your exercises, Nick?”
“Sure, I’m doing them, just like you told me,” he said without looking Dexter in the eye. “But I figure after six years a guy’s just got to live with a little discomfort.” He gave his friend a crooked smile. “It beats the alternative, anyway.”
Dexter grunted his agreement and sat in the chair Sara had vacated. “What’s going on here, Nick? Who is this Crawford woman?”
“I told you, Dex. She’s our new landlady and Millicent Thorne’s great-niece. Millie died last week and left the island to her. She showed me the deed, and it looks like everything’s in order.”
“What does that mean for all of us?”
“Actually, Dex, now that I’ve had a few minutes to think about it, Millie did us a favor.”
“But Miss Thorne was the best landlady we could ever have had.”
“True, but we knew she wouldn’t live forever, and when you think about all the possible outcomes for Thorne Island, having Millie’s niece as the owner seems like the best one. Sara Crawford will probably hang around for a couple of days, flex her landlady muscles a bit and then take off. You saw what she was like—nice clothes, educated manners, soft hands.” His mind wandered to Sara’s other obvious attributes, but he refrained from listing them. “She won’t have any interest in staying around here.”
Dexter nodded. “Yeah, why would a woman like that want to hang around a bunch of independent cusses like us?”
“Exactly. I give Miss Crawford three days tops, then she’ll be history.” He grinned at his own private thought. “Though I imagine she’ll make us send in our rent checks on time.”
Dexter’s answering grin curled into his cheeks. “She makes a darned pretty chapter of Thorne Island history, though, doesn’t she, Nick?”
Nick nodded slowly. “Yep. She’s not hard to look at.”
Dexter stood and headed for the door, but stopped before leaving the room. “By the way, Nick, did she see what you had on the computer screen?”
“No. She wasn’t the least interested. I use the name Nicolas Bass in the top margin, so she wouldn’t have suspected anything, anyway. She doesn’t seem like the type who’d be curious about the ramblings of a grumpy, thirty-eight-year-old hermit.”
JUGGLING BED LINENS and her suitcases, Sara chose a room at the opposite end of the hallway from Nick’s. She flicked the light switch beside the door. A single bulb hanging from the ceiling crackled and spit, finally casting a sickly yellow light on more furnishings covered with sheets. Cringing at the potential cost of electrical repairs, Sara dropped her belongings onto the floor.
She snapped open one neatly folded sheet and fluttered it over a gray mattress. A fresh scent—familiar from Sara’s childhood—filled the room. She hadn’t smelled that clean aroma since the days her mother had folded the family’s laundry from the backyard clothesline. Bass must dry his laundry in the open air, she thought. Probably because the inn didn’t have a working electric dryer.
She doubted the island had many modern conveniences. In fact, considering the condition of the Cozy Cove, she’d been dumbfounded to see a computer in Nick Bass’s room. She’d tried to read the screen, and once she’d recognized standard manuscript format, she’d been doubly curious. But she hadn’t gotten close enough to actually read the words.
Strange, she thought now as she tucked a corner of the top sheet
between the mattress and box spring, she wouldn’t have been a bit surprised to see a racing form or even a video game on Mr. Bass’s monitor. But a scholarly-looking bit of text—somehow that didn’t fit the picture she’d formed of the man so far.
There’s an old saying, Sara, she said to herself. You can never tell a person by his dopey-looking golf shirt. She was glad she had a full week to devote to this island project. It might take that long to understand her bizarre tenants, especially the aggravating—but oddly appealing—Mr. Bass.
CHAPTER THREE
THE ROOM Sara had selected turned out to be almost cheerful. She removed the sheet that had been thrown over a cedar wardrobe and found dainty floral stenciling on the doors. When she uncovered a pair of colonial arrow-back chairs flanking a fireplace, she discovered bright chintz cushions on the seats. She gave the shutters at the windows a thorough dusting, which gave new life to the well-polished slats.
Yes, she would be quite comfortable in this room, once she solved the immediate problem of food. Since the Cozy Cove obviously wasn’t a working hotel, it probably didn’t have a restaurant or the personnel to run it. A snack breakfast on the airplane and a nonfat yogurt cone in Put-in-Bay wasn’t nearly enough to sustain Sara. Surely the inn had a kitchen. She went downstairs to raid the refrigerator.
Behind the registration counter and opposite the parlor, she located a spacious dining room with sheets hiding what appeared to be a long table and eight chairs. In the near darkness of dusk, she felt her way through that room to a kitchen beyond. She flipped the light switch by the entrance, and another single overhead bulb glared down on a red brick floor.
Sara made a quick inspection of the appliances and decided they had once been used to prepare meals for a large number of people. But they hadn’t been operated in some time. She ran her hand across the porcelain top of a six-burner stove, and years of smeared grease stuck to her fingers. Hardened boil-over remains coated the sides of the oven. When she opened the door of an ancient refrigerator, she grimaced at the streaks of mildew.
The rest of the kitchen was in much the same condition. Pitted kettles hung from brass hooks in the ceiling or lay any which way on the rough wood of the countertop. An old oak worktable surrounded by four simple ladder-back chairs had an assortment of alien substances embedded in its scratched surface. Sara’s stomach, which just moments before had growled to be fed, nearly revolted at the conditions under which its next meal would have to be prepared.
That was until Sara saw a little corner of the kitchen that made her heart—and stomach—rejoice. Sparkling under the unforgiving light, next to a modern apartment-size refrigerator, was a scrupulously clean area of counter. A gleaming-white two-burner stovetop and a microwave oven sat side by side on the varnished pine surface. A cabinet above this miraculously neat oasis held two spotless pans, a pair of matching skillets and assorted clean tableware. If these items existed in this chaos of dirt and grease, could decent food be far away?
She began a search for cans, bottles and jars, checking cabinets in the tidy corner of the kitchen.
“Can I help you, Miss Crawford?”
Like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar, Sara slammed a lower cabinet door and stood up. “Mr. Bass, you don’t have to sneak up on me.”
Another of those smug grins tugged at his lips. “Now we’re even, eh?”
He crossed the threshold into the kitchen and came toward her. A pair of brown chinos accentuated his long, lean legs and matched the sand traps on his shirt. Sara detected a slight limp in his gait, though it might have been caused by the uneven old brick flooring. She pulled her gaze away from him and continued her search for food. “I wasn’t aware we were keeping score.”
She sensed his amusement even though she couldn’t see his face and hated the flush of embarrassment it brought to her face. “Oh, yes you were, Sara,” he said. “You’re just miffed because it’s a tie.”
“What nonsense,” she responded, acutely aware that he’d called her by her first name. A chuckle rumbled from his throat and seemed to reverberate down her spine.
“What are you doing in my kitchen—oh, pardon me, your kitchen—going through my things?” he asked.
She banged another cupboard door closed. This one contained various cleaning supplies, and she tucked the information away for later use. “I’m looking for food. And while we’re on the subject, may I say that under your supervision, my kitchen has fallen into a state that isn’t fit for pigs.”
“Then it’s fortunate we don’t have any pigs, or I don’t know where they’d eat.”
She scowled at him, though judging from his teasing grin, her glare had lost its effectiveness. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Mr. Bass, I need something to eat. You’re not going to let me starve, are you?”
“You can buy food on the island.”
“Thank goodness. Where?”
“At Brody’s cottage. He’s an ex-marine and he calls our supply store the commissary. He orders the groceries and we buy them from him. But he’s not there now. He fishes every day at dusk. But no, I won’t let you starve. In fact, you can even use my part of the kitchen, which I maintain for my own use.”
She uncrossed her arms and managed a tight smile. “Thanks.”
“What kind of soup do you like?”
Soup. She could almost feel a steaming mug of delicious broth between her hands, almost taste the savory herbs and spices. “That sounds wonderful,” she said. “I like all kinds—broccoli and cheese, roasted chicken and wild rice, any of the new low-fat soups are delicious….”
“That’s fine, but I meant, do you like Chicken Noodle or Tomato?”
“Those are my choices?”
“Brody volunteered to keep us supplied, but he isn’t particularly imaginative.”
“I see. Tomato, then.”
Nick went to a tall pantry cabinet near the back door and produced the trademark red-and-white can, which he set on his clean counter. Then he went to his small refrigerator. “Now, what kind of meat for your sandwich?”
“Do we really need to go through this again?”
“No. We have salami.”
He took bread and meat slices from the refrigerator. “And to drink?”
“You tell me.”
“Actually I have six different brands of beer—”
She wasn’t surprised.
“—and one Mountain Dew.”
“Shall I fight you for the Mountain Dew?”
He took the can from the refrigerator and tossed it to her. “No. I’ll let you win this one.” He pointed to a stool next to the counter. “Have a seat. I’ll even cook.”
The entire meal process took less than thirty minutes from preparation to cleanup. And during that time the few sentences Sara and Nick spoke to each other involved passing the condiments and a smattering of comments about Millicent Thorne. Sara admitted that she hadn’t known her great-aunt very well and even expressed her guilt about that situation.
“It’s too bad,” he said. “You would have liked her. In fact, I see similarities between the two of you.”
Since he didn’t elaborate, Sara decided to accept his statement as a compliment.
Once the dishes were put away, Nick went out the back door and stood on the stoop. “Will you be needing anything else from the refrigerator tonight?” he asked through the screen door.
“No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“I always turn off the generator before I go to bed. Can’t see wasting fuel. The food stays cold all night if the refrigerator door’s not opened, and I’m an early riser.”
He was turning off the generator? Sara’s stomach did a somersault of alarm. “But does that mean the lights won’t work?”
“Sure does. Take one of the lanterns from the parlor. They’re not just decoration. There should be plenty of oil in the well. You’ll find a flashlight in the pantry, too.”
Resigned to the conventions of Thorne Island, she got the flashlight
and watched Bass step down from the back porch. His limp was more obvious now. In fact, a tightening of his facial muscles indicated that he was in pain. Since they’d just shared a few companionable moments, Sara felt comfortable enough to ask, “Are you all right, Mr. Bass?”
He looked up at her from the yard. “What do you mean?”
“Your limp. I couldn’t help noticing.”
“And you want to know why I have it?”
“I don’t mean to pry, but if you’d like to tell me…”
“A few years ago I was shot. The bullet entered at the base of my spine and pretty well screwed things up.”
The flashlight clattered to the floor. “You were shot?”
“Yep. So when I told you earlier that if you meant to kill me, you’d better use a gun, I really wasn’t relishing the idea all that much. Good night, Sara.”
That was obviously all the information she was going to get. She picked up the flashlight and spoke to his dark form as it blended with the angular shadows of the inn. “Good night, Nick.”
THE NEXT MORNING Sara awoke to the sound of voices filtering through her second-story window. She got out of bed and opened the slats of her shutter just enough to peek outside. A cool breeze washed over her, and she breathed in the fresh, heady scent of the flowers in the porch baskets.
Four men stood in the overgrown front yard of the inn just beyond the edge of the porch eaves. Sara could see three of them clearly and just an arm and a foot of the fourth. She recognized Dexter Sweet, his huge arms bulging from the short sleeves of an athletic T-shirt. She heard the low timbre of Nick Bass’s voice coming from under the porch. She didn’t know the other two men, but assumed they were the pair Dexter had mentioned the day before—Brody and Ryan.
One man was short, thin, with brown, shoulder-length hair bound in a leather strap at his nape. The other was medium height, with a middle-aged paunch and slumping shoulders. “Ol’ Brody,” Sara concluded. He wore a canvas fishing hat with an ageless collection of rusty lures pinned to every square inch. Definitely the island’s unimaginative grocer.
The Men of Thorne Island Page 3