Man Trouble

by Melanie Craft

  Molly sighed. There was indeed an outline—a depression in the earth still dotted with partially buried stones and knee-high chunks of wall, but it covered an area far too big to have been the great house for any eighteenth-century plantation. Not even the governor of Antigua could have built a house that size. The young man wasn't completely wrong, though.

  “Based on the location,” she said, “I think that we're looking at the perimeter wall that encircled the great house. The house itself would be inside there, and much smaller.”

  “Oh,” said the guide. “I thought you said that she was really rich.”

  Molly ignored him. She had tried to convince him to wait in the car, but he had stuck doggedly to her side, and she was beginning to suspect that he had been given instructions to do so. Last night, Cora Berenger had mentioned something about construction in the area, and the terrible condition of the ruins, and their concern for her safety. She had insisted that Molly go with a guide, as if Molly were a doddering old crone who couldn't make it over a pile of rocks without the help of a man. It was ridiculous, in Molly's opinion. She hadn't seen any sign of construction, and the ruins were in much, much better shape than she had dared to hope. The island's remote location and lack of steady habitation had saved the site from being dismantled by locals looking for cheap stone and metal to use in newer buildings. The two windmill towers were still standing, in various stages of decay. In one, the huge iron gears and crushing rollers were still there, though they had long since fallen into a rusted pile, half buried by dirt. Buildings that Molly assumed to be part of the old sugar and rum factory had mostly collapsed, but they were sitting on solid foundations, and were obvious candidates for excavation.

  “There isn't much to see,” the guide said. “I guess you're probably pretty disappointed.”

  “Not at all,” Molly said. “This is even better than I had hoped. Look, why don't you go back and wait in the car? I just want to take a peek over there, past those trees, where I think the main house must have been. I won't be long.”

  The guide looked alarmed. “Oh, no,” he said. “You can't do that.”

  Molly frowned. “What do you mean? Why not?”

  “Too dangerous.”

  “It's a grove of trees,” Molly said. “What's so dangerous about that?”

  The guide shook his head. “They told me that you shouldn't go near the old buildings. They aren't stable. It's not safe.”

  “Nonsense,” Molly said. She walked through a gap in the crumbling perimeter wall, heading for the trees.

  “Wait,” the guide said anxiously, following her. “No, really. Ma'am, I'm sorry, but I'm just doing what they told me, and they specifically said that you shouldn't go near the old…”

  “I'm not going to climb on anything,” Molly said, still walking. “There's no danger at all. I just want to see how much of the main house is still there. The trees are blocking my view.”

  “You can't.” He surprised her then, by taking hold of her arm. She stopped and raised her eyebrows at him. He looked very unhappy, but also very stubborn. “I'm really sorry,” he said again, “but you're not supposed to go over there. It's not safe.”

  He was still gripping her arm. Molly stood silently for a moment, reading the discomfort on his face. Something strange was going on. He definitely didn't want her to go into the trees, but she couldn't imagine why. Was there something inside there that she wasn't supposed to see? If this were one of her own novels, it would be something thrilling, like a secret excavation for a buried pirate treasure. But she had never heard of a treasure connected to Mary Morgan. Bonny Mary may have financed the start of her plantation with stolen doubloons, but she had died a prosaic businesswoman, with her fortune in sugar and rum.

  “I can take you up to Falcon's Point on the way home,” said the young man hopefully. “The view is amazing. We take guests up there all the time, and they get great photos.”

  “Okay,” Molly said slowly, watching him, and saw the relief on his face. “Yes,” she continued, “I definitely don't want to go over there if it isn't safe. That wouldn't be very smart, would it? We should head back. I'd love to see the view.”

  They walked back to the car, an open-air Jeep, and Molly kept up a steady chatter about how much she was enjoying the comforts of the resort and how beautiful it all was. Just as she had settled into the passenger seat, and the guide had started the engine, she said, “Oh!”

  He looked at her, and she smiled at him. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm afraid that I'll need to make a rest stop before we go.”

  She could see that he didn't understand. “You know,” she said coyly, “a rest stop. To the little girls' room.”

  Comprehension dawned, and he suddenly looked terribly embarrassed, as men in their early twenties did when confronted with female bodily functions. “Oh,” he said. “Sure.”

  Molly fluttered her eyelashes at him. “I'll just be a few minutes,” she said. “I'm going right over there, behind those bushes by the windmill. Please don't look. I'm very shy.”

  Idiot, she thought as she left the car and ducked behind the ruins. That had been almost too easy. The boy—he was less than ten years younger than she was, but to her he was definitely a boy—would wait there for her until she'd had a chance to slip over to the area of the main house and have a quick look around. It probably wouldn't be the first time that he had wondered why women always took such a long time in the bathroom.

  When Jake reached the end of the dirt road that led to the ruins, he was briefly pleased to see one of the open-air Jeeps idling there, as if it were about to leave. But then he saw that there was only one occupant in the car, the young man that Cora had sent to babysit the professor.

  The staffer was slouched in the driver's seat, looking bored. Jake pulled up next to him. The young man looked over, then straightened up hastily when he saw who had just arrived. His mouth opened slightly, in alarm. Jake was familiar with this reaction.

  “Where is she?” he demanded.

  The young man—Jake had no idea what his name was, and wasn't close enough to read his tag—turned red and began to stammer.

  Jake cut the engine and swung down from the driver's seat, and the young man quickly did the same. “Where is she?” Jake repeated. “You had very specific instructions to stay with her, and I sure as hell don't see her.”

  “She's…uh…she's over there, sir,” the staffer said, pointing to a clump of bushes a short distance away. His name, Jake could now see, was Brett. “I was with her the whole time, and then we were about to leave, to go to Falcon's Point, like Mrs. Berenger suggested, and then she…uh…had to go to the bathroom, so she went…over there.”

  Jake narrowed his eyes. There was not even a flicker of life in the area near the windmills. “When did she go over there? Just a minute ago?”

  Brett was looking very unhappy. “Uh,” he said. “No. It's been…kind of a while, actually, sir. I was just thinking about checking to see if she was okay, but I didn't want to bother her…”

  “Oh, for God's sake,” Jake muttered.

  “Do you want me to go get her?”

  “No,” Jake said. It was very obvious that this had become a situation that he would need to handle personally. And carefully. “Take your car back to the resort. I'll collect the professor. Believe me, I have no problem with the idea of bothering her.”

  Jake did not even trouble himself with stopping near the windmills to see if the professor was still back there in the bushes. He headed straight for the wooded area behind the crumbling wall of rock. Brett had been instructed to keep her out of there, and the professor, being no fool, had seen right through whatever excuse he had used. From the small access road, none of the early construction work was visible, but if you went through the grove of trees and walked around to the far side of the ruins, the story was suddenly very different. Cora had assumed that letting the professor get a quick look around the untouched parts of the site would be enough to placate
her, but she should have known better.

  Through the trees, Jake saw a flash of navy blue, a color that did not occur naturally in the island flora. He exhaled impatiently. “Dr. Shaw,” he called.

  The navy blue shape stopped.

  “Stay right there,” he said. At least he'd caught her at it. She would be embarrassed and on the defensive, which would give him the upper hand.

  He skirted the last of the ruins and came through the back of the grove of trees. She was standing there, on the edge of the newly cleared area, her hands on her hips.

  Spread out before them was a vista of disturbed ground waffled with bulldozer tracks and dotted with orange construction flags. Some of the earth-moving equipment was already in place, but the real work was not scheduled to begin for several months, in April, when the spring tourist season had passed.

  She turned as he approached, and he saw her eyes widen at the sight of him. She had expected Brett. He didn't know if she recognized him or not, but it didn't matter. Welcome to the majors, lady, he thought. I sent the babysitter home. You're dealing with Daddy, now.

  But before he could say another word, she attacked. She glared at him, and he could have sworn that she bared her teeth. “You!” she exclaimed. “Good, this will save me a trip to your office. Okay, Mr. Celebrity Billionaire, suppose you tell me what the bloody hell is going on here?”

  Jake flinched. He was accustomed to hearing women curse like men, and never thought twice about it, but hearing this kind of language issuing from the lips of someone who looked like Molly Shaw made it seem much more serious.

  “Do you really think I'm that stupid?” she continued. “You sent me over here with a kid to herd me around like a senior citizen on a bus tour, and that might even have worked if you had picked someone with enough sense to do a good job of lying to me. Leaving aside the whole issue of what you're doing to Mary's estate, I am frankly offended, Mr. Berenger, that you would send such a nitwit to be your watchdog. Only a complete moron would have believed that kid. Do I look that stupid to you?”

  No, Jake thought. Unfortunately, you don't look nearly stupid enough. He was wondering how he could have considered her mousy. Her hair was pulled up into a ponytail, exposing an unexpectedly pretty face. Her skin was pale except for her flushed cheeks, and something about her appearance reminded him of his fourth-grade teacher. She was the proverbial girl next door. Gone homicidal.

  “Anytime that you feel like jumping in here with an explanation,” she said, “feel free.”

  Jake gritted his teeth. If he played this right, he had a chance of calming her down, charming her, and defusing a potentially disastrous situation. He could practically see the headlines now: “Berenger Sued Over Preservation of Feminist Heritage Site.”

  Damn her, he thought. Damn her, her pirate, and women in general. At this point, there was only one thing to do. He smiled at her, and lied. “Dr. Shaw, it sounds to me as if Brett gave you the wrong impression. You've got nothing to be upset about. We're not doing anything to Mary Morgan's estate.”

  “If you're not doing anything to this site, then why, may I ask, did Brett have instructions to keep me away from here?”

  “Because the ruins aren't safe,” Jake said. “We don't bring guests back here because the walls of the old house haven't been stabilized. It wouldn't be very good PR for my resort if you were accidentally squashed like a bug, would it?” He paused for a moment, enjoying the thought.

  “Hah,” said Molly Shaw scornfully.

  Jake raised his eyebrows at her, and she continued. “You called me Dr. Shaw, so I presume that you know who I am. I specialize in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, Mr. Berenger. This is my field of expertise. From the looks of your construction zone, you're about to bulldoze over whatever is left of the workers' village and the old cane fields. When is the rest of the estate scheduled for demolition?”

  “Workers' village?” Jake said. He had a feeling that he knew what was coming, and he didn't like it at all.

  “Slaves,” Molly said coldly. “African workers and tradesmen. By all accounts, Mary Morgan was a modern thinker who ran a liberal operation, and she was known to have provided a good life for her workers, under the circumstances. My guess is that she knew from her years onboard ship that her success depended on the loyalty of the people around her, so she did her best to earn it. There was a thriving village here, and I believe that you're about to flatten an important part of Afro-Caribbean cultural history.”

  “Great,” Jake muttered. “Berenger Sued Over Preservation of Feminist AND Minority Heritage Site.” This was getting worse by the minute.

  “Didn't you have a historical analysis done on this area before you started building on it? What are you building? A football stadium? It looks huge.”

  “It's a golf course,” Jake said grimly, “and no, I didn't have an analysis done. We leased the island from the Antiguan government, and it came without restrictions. There are hundreds of these old plantations all over the West Indies, and they've been knocking them down for years. There's a windmill tower over in St. John's that's been turned into a burger joint. We're not talking about priceless cultural resources here.”

  “This is not just a random plantation,” Molly said. “This belonged to Bonny Mary Morgan, who was a famous female pi—”

  “I know who she was,” Jake said. “I was at your lecture last night.”

  She looked surprised. “You were? I didn't see you.”

  “I was standing in the back. You told some very thrilling stories, but you didn't mention any sources to back them up. Your lecture sounded more like a paperback novel than a scholarly presentation—”

  Molly inhaled sharply, and he was surprised by the expression on her face. She looked as if he'd just slapped her. These academics take themselves way too seriously, he thought. He continued. “It made me wonder if you have any proof that this estate actually did belong to your female pirate. Do you? Have proof?” He waited, mentally crossing his fingers.

  “I can find proof,” she said.

  He grinned, not missing the sudden apprehension in her eyes. She didn't have it, and she wasn't sure that she could find it. Things were suddenly looking much better. “So,” he said, “this is all just speculation.”

  “It is not! Mary gave up piracy and retired to a small island near Antigua, where she ran a sugar plantation. There are very few islands that fit that description.”

  “Very few means more than one. For all you know, your progressive feminist pirate never set foot on my island, and this estate actually belonged to some macho male colonist who abused his family, was cruel to his workers, and deserves to have the remains of his rotten life bulldozed.”

  “Mary Morgan lived here,” Molly Shaw insisted.

  “So you claim,” Jake said. He was now feeling almost cheerful. “Bring me some proof, and then we'll talk.”

  “I will,” Molly said ominously. “You'll see. But regardless of that, this is a very well-preserved site. You should restore it and turn it into a museum. It would be a wonderful addition to the resort.”

  Jake suppressed the urge to laugh. She was serious. It was almost endearing. “Professor,” he said, “I realize that this will shock you, but the average Gold Bay guest doesn't care very much about the eighteenth-century Caribbean. If my customers had to decide between visiting an old ruin shined up to look like a museum, or playing eighteen holes on the most beautiful golf course south of Miami, do I really need to tell you which they would choose?”

  Molly Shaw glared at him, and Jake mentally checked himself. He did not need to make an enemy out of this woman, if there was any other option left. Without proof that the estate was special, she would have no leverage with the press, but even so, it would be foolish to antagonize her. He didn't want to do anything that might lead to the project being tied up in court.

  “This may also shock you,” he added, “but I'm not your enemy. If you can find me solid evidence that this plantation did belo
ng to Bonny Mary Morgan, then I'll take it to my board and try to convince them to rework the plans for the golf course.”

  It was a deceptively magnanimous offer. If she had the proof and the will to start a public fight, then Berenger would have no choice but to rezone the golf course and exclude the sugar estate. They couldn't afford the negative publicity. But with luck, Molly Shaw's pirate would turn out to be nothing more than a colorful local legend, and she would admit defeat, go away quietly, and the project would proceed as planned.

  Molly was frowning slightly, as if trying to figure out whether he was trying to trick her. Finally, she nodded. “Okay,” she said. “That sounds fair. When is construction supposed to start?”

  “Immediately,” Jake said, lying again. He saw no reason to hand a single advantage to this woman. He had never had any problem with lying, as long as it wasn't to his family or his shareholders, and Molly Shaw did not fall into either category. “But I'm willing to push the start back another week, or even two, if necessary. Would that give you the time you need to settle this?”

  She looked stunned. “It might,” she said. “I'll start checking the records right away. Thank you. That's…very kind.”

  “My pleasure,” Jake said, trying to look noble.

  She was still staring at him, as if he'd grown a second head—a nicer one, this time. “I didn't expect…I mean, you don't seem like the kind of person who would care about…”

  “Anything but money?”

  She flushed slightly. “I didn't mean that.”

  “I feel very strongly about the preservation of important cultural heritage sites,” Jake said, glad that they were alone in the wilderness and nobody had this moment on tape. “But my own personal feelings have to take a backseat to the needs of my company and my shareholders. I have a duty to them. If we can confirm that this was Mary Morgan's estate, then I'll do my best to negotiate an acceptable compromise.”

  He was rewarded with a smile so genuine that he actually felt guilty. Incredibly, Molly Shaw was beautiful when she smiled. Her eyes crinkled at the corners and her whole face seemed to light up. She suddenly reminded him of someone else, someone who he couldn't place. An actress, maybe. Someone he had met socially, but didn't know well.