Beach Town

by Mary Kay Andrews

  Eb glanced at the document, then shoved it aside. “Fine. File it. Do what you need to do.”

  But Sawyer wasn’t done. “I understand you’re the mayor of Cypress Key?”

  “I am.”

  “And that’s an elected position?”

  “Yes.” Eb looked bored.

  “But you’re also the city engineer? And that’s a salaried, appointed position?”

  Eb gave Sawyer a hard look. “My salary, as you refer to it, is five hundred dollars a year. And I’ve never cashed that particular paycheck. What’s your point?”

  “My point is that it’s a conflict of interest for you, as mayor, to also appoint yourself city engineer,” Sawyer said.

  “It’s fuckin’ nuts, is what it is,” Bryce muttered.

  Vanessa clamped her hand on top of his, a not-so-subtle warning gesture.

  “I didn’t appoint myself,” Eb said, leaning forward. “And I don’t appreciate your inference that the appointment is somehow shady or unethical.”

  Sawyer dug yet another document from his briefcase. “This is a copy of the minutes of the Cypress Key City Commission meeting where you were appointed city engineer two years ago.” He tossed it toward Eb. “Does that look familiar?”

  Eb picked up the sheet of paper and scanned the print. “Yes. And if you’ve read it, you’ll see that Rev. Maynard, the mayor pro tem, made the motion to appoint me city engineer, and that I abstained from voting on that item.”

  Sawyer smiled. Greer was painfully familiar with that particular facial expression. It was his version of “Gotcha, sucka!” Sawyer was clearly enjoying himself. She wished she could have warned Eb about what would come next, but it wouldn’t have done any good.

  “Oh, I saw that, all right,” Sawyer said. “And while I was at it, I noticed that you seconded the motion. Pretty cute little joke, huh?”

  “We joke around a lot at meetings. It’s a small town and a small board of commissioners,” Eb said.

  “Seconding the motion to appoint yourself to a salaried city position is a clear conflict of interest, and of the notion of separation of power in that city,” Sawyer said. “Any judge who takes a look at these minutes is going to rule your appointment improper. And every single permit or application you’ve approved or denied over the past two years is going to be invalidated.”

  Eb stared down at the minutes he’d so casually brushed aside moments earlier.

  “This is nuts. The city attorney was at that meeting. He’s at all our meetings. He didn’t say anything.”

  “Your city attorney is a joke!” Bryce said.

  Sawyer gathered the documents he’d just arranged around the table, packing them into a neat stack.

  “Here’s my point, Mr. Thibadeaux. I don’t want to have to file a writ of mandamus with the circuit court here. I also don’t want to have to ask a judge to vacate your appointment as city engineer. Frankly, that’s all bush league stuff. It takes up my time, and it’s gonna cost the city money to defend those actions, which you’re not going to win. You’re just not.”

  “Give us our demo permit,” Bryce said. “Today. That’s all we want. Time is money, and we’re running out of both.”

  Eb looked from Vanessa, to Bryce, to Sawyer, and then back to Vanessa.

  He grabbed the file folder with Greer’s completed demolition application, opened it, and scribbled his name at the bottom of one of the forms. Then he stood and slapped it down on the table in front of Vanessa.

  “Here’s your permit. You always get what you want, don’t you, Vanessa? Doesn’t matter who it hurts or what it costs, you’ll do whatever it takes.”

  “I did warn you, Eb,” Vanessa said. “This is a business decision. There’s no need to take it personally.”

  Eb’s eyes met Greer’s. She blushed and looked away.

  “Don’t take it personally? I’ve been told that before,” Eb said. “But I’ve found that whenever people say that, what they actually mean is, ‘I won. You lost. Get over it. Don’t hold me personally responsible for whatever selfish, destructive actions I’ve rammed down your throat.’”

  “You’re impossible,” Vanessa said, her voice cold.

  “So I’ve been told.”

  Sawyer stood now, too, and extended a hand to Eb. “Thanks for coming today. Sorry about the way things worked out, but I think, in the end, you’ll see this will all be to your advantage. Great meeting you.”

  Eb ignored the gesture. “Fuck you, too.”

  48

  “Fantastic!” Bryce reached across the table and high-fived Vanessa.

  “Excuse me,” Greer said. She hurried out of the house and caught up with Eb as he was getting into his truck.

  “What? You want to shake my hand, too, and tell me it’s nothing personal?” he asked.

  “You know this is not how I wanted things to go,” Greer said. “I had no idea you’d be sandbagged like that.”

  “Whose idea was it to fly in your old boyfriend? That was Sawyer the lawyer, right?”

  Greer took a step backwards. She felt as though she’d been slapped in the face. “You can’t really believe I had anything to do with that. I haven’t talked to him in over two years. I feel just as ambushed as you do.”

  “No, you don’t.” Eb climbed onto the front seat and stuck the key in the ignition. “Maybe it was a little awkward for you, running into him this way, but you’ll get over that. You don’t have any real skin in this game. You never do, right? Like you keep telling me, it’s your job.”

  “That is totally unfair,” Greer said. “But I guess I should have expected it. You really want to believe the worst of people, don’t you? Because then you can go on feeling morally superior to everybody around you.” She pushed his door closed and turned and went back toward the house.

  She heard soft laughter and the clink of ice and glasses as she stood in the hallway of Vanessa’s house. They were drinking, celebrating their rout of Eb Thibadeaux. But she didn’t have the stomach to join in the party.

  One of the golden retrievers was sprawled out on an Oriental rug in the entryway, his muzzle resting on his paws. She wasn’t sure if this was Luke or Owen. The dog turned and regarded her with mild indifference. She kneeled down on the floor and scratched his long, silky ears.

  When she heard footsteps, she looked up. Sawyer stood there, a bemused expression on his face. “If you like dogs so much, why didn’t you ever get one?”

  “I don’t know. I travel so much, it wouldn’t be fair to a dog to leave it all the time.”

  “You could get a dog sitter.”

  “And then what would be the point of me having one, if I’m not going to be the one to take care of it?” She didn’t get up, just kept scratching the dog’s ears.

  “Hey,” he said softly. He extended a hand. She took it and stood.

  He reached over and plucked something from the front of her T-shirt and held it up for her to see. It was half of a tomato-smeared pepperoni. “Late lunch?”

  So she’d just sat through an entire business meeting with half a pizza hanging off her boob. She felt her face begin to burn. Damn him for having that effect on her, for always making her feel unbalanced and inferior.

  “I was sorry to hear about Lise,” he said. “I left you a message on your phone. Did you get it?”

  Greer stared down at her red Keds. “Maybe. I don’t know. So many people called, and sent cards. The whole experience was surreal. It’s a blur to me now.”

  “Your mother was a trip,” Sawyer said, grinning. “The world’s a duller place without Lise Grant in it.”

  “She liked you a lot,” Greer said. “But then, she was always a sucker for a pretty face.”

  “Dearie wasn’t so hot about me. I never could quite win her over to my side.”

  Greer shrugged.

  He jerked his head in the direction of the dining room. “Bryce and Vanessa want to take us out to dinner. To celebrate. You coming?”

  “Don’t you have to
get back to L.A.?”

  “It’s too late to get a flight out today,” Sawyer said. “Come to dinner. Okay?”

  “I’m a hot mess,” Greer protested. “I’ve been up since dawn, and now I’ll have to work double time to get everything lined up to shoot the explosion at the casino.”

  “One dinner,” he said. “What could it hurt?” He lowered his voice. “We can get a drink together after. Just the two of us. Catch up.”

  She thought about things—not about Sawyer standing here, begging her to go to dinner, but flashing back to the scene a few minutes earlier: Eb Thibadeaux hurling one last accusation at her. How could she really have thought his opinion of her would change? And why was his approval something she so desperately needed?

  Funny, she’d felt that way about Sawyer once. Pined for him, really. Every time he’d pushed her away it had made her want him more. How sick was that?

  “Greer?” Sawyer glanced over his shoulder, toward the dining room, where they could hear Bryce and Vanessa chatting.

  “I’ve missed you. Crazy, huh?” He touched a strand of her hair, let it curl around his little finger. Sometimes, when they were in bed together, just before he dropped off to sleep, Sawyer would coil her hair around his fingers.

  What was crazy was the fact that right now he was standing there, touching her, telling her he missed her. And she felt … nothing. Not the searing rage that had burned in her chest for months and months after the breakup, not the bone-bruising sadness and sense of loss. She felt nothing.

  “How’s Erica?” Greer asked.

  He quirked an eyebrow, then shook his head. “I suppose that’s fair. I haven’t seen Erica in over a year.”

  “I guess she must have healed you, huh?”

  “You probably don’t want to hear this, but Erica actually helped me a lot. Helped me understand myself, what drives me, why I have problems connecting with people.”

  “You didn’t seem to have any problem connecting with her that morning I walked in on the two of you,” Greer said.

  His face changed and the charming mask slipped, just a little. “I see you haven’t changed. Still want to point fingers, lay blame. Okay. I get it. I guess that’s the reason you’re alone. Why you’ll probably always be alone.”

  “How do you know I’m alone?” she asked, surprised.

  He took a step backwards. “Forget it. I thought maybe there was a chance for us. My bad.”

  “No, seriously,” Greer said. “What? You were checking me out?”

  “I saw the stories in the trades, heard the talk. After that fire up in Paso Robles. I actually felt bad for you. And then I saw Lise’s obituary. I really did call, you know.”

  “Okay. Thanks, I guess.”

  “Never mind.” He made a dismissive gesture. “Run along after Mayor McCheese.”

  “Don’t call him that,” Greer said.

  He raised that eyebrow again. “So it’s like that. Wow, Greer. What? You’ve gone native?”

  “Maybe. Maybe I’ve finally got some skin in the game.”

  49

  Eb pounded the steering wheel with his fist. He’d blown it with Greer. Again. And why? Because he was angry and disgusted—at himself, for failing to see the handwriting on the wall. At all the Vanessa Littrells and Bryce Levys of the world. And especially at all the slick-haired Sawyer the lawyers of the world.

  He could still see the stung look on Greer’s face, as though he’d hauled off and slapped her, back there on Seahorse Key.

  Why had he insinuated she’d known her old boyfriend would be at the meeting? He’d seen her face when she encountered him. Her face had gone pale and still, two bright pink spots blooming on her cheeks. Almost like that first morning in her room at the motel, when she’d spotted the roach on her pillow.

  So why lash out at her? Why blame Greer when he was the one to blame? Clearly he’d been outgunned back at Vanessa’s house.

  He pounded the steering wheel again, glanced at the speedometer, and realized that in his anger he’d floored it and was now doing nearly eighty. It wouldn’t do to have one of Arnelle Bottoms’s officers pull him over for speeding.

  Eb eased off the gas pedal, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Greer.

  50

  Greer was so absorbed in the legal complexities of the city’s fire code that the sharp rapping on her motel room door caused her to literally leap off the bed.

  “Hey, it’s me,” CeeJay said in a low voice. “Let me in, okay?”

  She unfastened the chain latch and CeeJay pushed her way inside, closing and locking the door behind her. She was dressed in her bikini, with a towel wrapped around her waist.

  “Can I hang out in here for a while?”

  “What’s going on?” Greer asked.

  “Just some creeper hitting on me,” CeeJay said, moving over to the window, where she parted the venetian blind slats to peer out into the corridor.

  “Creepers hit on you all day, every day,” Greer said.

  “Right. Usually, I handle this stuff. I either shut a guy down or, sometimes, I just roll with it, to see if he can come up with something original. But this guy would not let up.”

  She closed the blind and stepped back from the window. “Okay, he’s gone. I just saw him leave on a golf cart.”

  “Who was it? Somebody on the crew?”

  CeeJay moved to the bathroom, where she was combing her damp hair. “I don’t think so. I’ve never seen him around before. I was swimming laps, hoping my new fella would happen along and decide to join me. Minding my own business, right? And I got the sensation that I was being watched. But there was nobody around. And then I saw the guy. He was on one of the chaise lounges, in the corner by that one big clump of palm trees, and he was sitting there, watching me, drinking beer. He’d drink one down, throw the bottle in the bushes, then open another one. I could hear the bottles clinking as he tossed ’em.

  “It spooked me so bad I kept swimming, hoping somebody would come along. Finally my legs were cramping up, so I got out of the pool, and this guy is standing there, holding my towel, like he’s going to dry me off.”

  “Eww,” Greer said.

  “I tell him no thanks, and then he starts rubbing my back with the towel!”

  “Double eww.”

  “I take my towel and walk over to the chair where I left my stuff, and he’s right there, hitting on me, offering me one of his beers. Wants to know if I’m working on the movie, if I’m staying here. I’m giving him no information, of course, just being vague. I tell him I’m waiting for my boyfriend to join me, but he still doesn’t take the hint. Finally, the guy is acting so sketchy I tell him I have to go because I have an important business call to make. I grab my stuff and start heading for my room, then I realize he’s following me!”

  “So you lead him to my door?” Greer asked. She went back to the window and peeked outside, but the corridor was deserted.

  “Sorry. I didn’t know what else to do. I figured he wasn’t going to break in on two of us.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Big, muscle-bound type. With a little pigtail. Like, in another life, somebody who’s not me would consider him good-looking.” CeeJay shuddered.

  Greer sat back down on the bed where she’d been working. “That’s Jared Thibadeaux.”

  “Eb’s brother?”

  “And Allie’s dad. He’s staying here. I wonder if I should let Ginny know he was bothering one of the guests here?”

  “No,” CeeJay said quickly. “It’s no biggie..”

  She sat down on the only chair in the room and pointed at the cardboard pizza box on the dresser. “I thought you hated the pizza place.”

  “I do, but this was a desperation dinner. After the meeting at Vanessa’s today, I’m so behind on work it’s pathetic.”

  “How did it go?”

  “That depends on your perspective. If you’re Bryce and Vanessa, it went great. They got everything they wanted, and more. If you’r
e Eb, it went lousy.”

  “But how was it for you?”

  Greer uncapped a bottle of water and took a drink. “It was … different. I knew Vanessa had hired a lawyer from L.A. that Bryce recommended. What I didn’t know was that it was Sawyer.”

  CeeJay whipped her head around. “No way!”

  “Way.”

  “I would have liked to have seen that,” CeeJay said with a chuckle.

  “It wasn’t pretty. I nearly wet my pants when I got to the house and Vanessa casually mentioned his name. It was all I could do to pretend I was cool. And then it got worse. Sawyer basically mowed Eb down, buried him in a blizzard of legalese—writ of mandamus, conflict of interest, lease termination. He did everything but slice Eb up and serve him on a platter with a slice of lemon.”

  CeeJay was fastening a bath towel around her damp hair. She looked like a movie star. She always looked like a movie star.

  “How did Eb take it?”

  Greer shook her head, remembering the way he’d looked at her back at Seahorse Key. “He thinks I had something to do with bringing Sawyer out here to humiliate him and get that damned demo permit.”

  “Oh man,” CeeJay said. “That sucks.” She sat down on the bed next to Greer and crossed her legs Indian style. She nudged Greer in the ribs. “So. How did he look?”

  “Eb? He looked like he’d been run over by a bulldozer.”

  “No. Sawyer.”

  “He looked okay. Some gray in his hair … just enough to make him look distinguished.”

  “Knowing that weasel, he probably has it colored that way.”

  Greer laughed. “He wanted me to go to dinner. I begged off.”

  “Good for you. What else?”

  “He told me he’s not with Erica anymore but that, thanks to her, he has a whole new level of connectedness.”

  “Whole new level of bullshit, more like,” CeeJay said. “What a waste of a penis that guy is.”

  “It was good on one level, though,” Greer said. “It made me realize how over him I am.”

  CeeJay patted her on the knee. “That’s my girl. But what about Eb?”