“Actually, I can,” Kendall said. “I started my own business four years ago. Until then, I would have been pretty much off the grid. I didn’t even have a checking account.”
“Ah. Well, that makes sense. They mostly search public records in order to narrow down the most likely candidates for a given name.”
“What no one has explained to me is the sense of urgency. What’s the big deal if the property went back to the county anyway? I mean, thank you for bringing it to my attention . . . but why are you so invested in doing the right thing? You could have just let it revert.”
“This isn’t your run-of-the-mill housing track. This property is . . . special.”
Kendall stared at him. “Special? Special how?”
He stayed silent for a long moment, studying her. “I think maybe it’s better if you see for yourself.”
Chapter Three
GABRIEL BRANDT LOCKED THE DOOR to his office and gestured for Kendall to follow him down the hallway and back out onto the street. Even after Matthew told him that the long-lost heir was coming to Jasper Lake to make a claim on Connie’s estate, Gabe hadn’t quite believed it. The six weeks between when they’d located her and when she’d finally responded to the letter had felt interminable, like a slowly ticking time bomb they were powerless to defuse. And in many ways, that’s exactly what the unclaimed property had become.
“Your grandmother’s home is on the other side of the lake,” he explained. “If you don’t mind, we can take my car.”
“That’s fine,” Kendall said easily. “And please don’t call her that. I never knew her as my grandmother. As far as I’m concerned, she’s a complete stranger who happened to give me a winning lottery ticket.”
Gabe’s eyebrows rose at the cold assessment. He hadn’t exactly grown up in Jasper Lake, but he’d spent his teen years here, and there wasn’t a resident who hadn’t known and loved Connie Green. She had been something of the town’s grande dame, with her elegant white hair and infectious laugh. The chair of every celebration committee, a member of the historical society—at least until the town flooded and destroyed most of their records—and the Sunday school director at Jasper Lake Presbyterian Church. In fact, if you grew up Protestant in this town, most of your early biblical education came courtesy of Constance Green.
But then, Kendall and her mother had been estranged from Connie, for reasons that Gabe didn’t understand. His own grandmother might have, as she had been a close friend of Connie’s, but she’d passed away not long after Kendall’s grandmother. His grandfather had little to say on the subject, either because he didn’t know or because he didn’t feel it was his business. The end result was the same.
Gabe stopped in front of his vehicle—a Ram with big tires that had his friends joking that he was compensating for something. But the winch on the front wasn’t purely decorative, given his place on the Clear Creek 4x4 Rescue, a volunteer group that bailed out stranded travelers who got on the wrong side of the thirty-plus-inch monthly snowfall in the winter. Kendall didn’t seem to bat an eyelash when he unlocked the door and opened her side for her, just gripped the grab handle and hoisted herself into the passenger seat.
Gabe circled to the other side and climbed in, then started the truck and backed it out of its parking spot. He glanced at Kendall, suddenly at a loss for words. She wasn’t what he had expected. When the investigator had forwarded her information to him, he’d had little more than a tiny thumbnail on her design business’s website to go off of: she’d looked stylish and very California-casual. Well, that still held. The slim-cut North Face jacket and fur-cuffed boots were the type of thing flatlanders thought they should wear when they came to the mountains. Functional, but it made her stand out as a visitor as surely as if she had been wearing a neon sign.
No, that was exactly as he’d thought. He just hadn’t expected her to be so . . . attractive.
Pretty, yes. Pretty was a dime a dozen and had as little effect on Gabe as a coming snow forecast. But sharp intelligence glinted in Kendall’s green-gray eyes, and both her sly smile and husky voice hinted at depths of humor he suspected but hadn’t seen yet. Not to mention the way she placidly endured the jostling of the dirt road as he left the town’s main drag and circled around the lake. California chic, maybe. But her spurt of cynicism left no doubt that whatever else she was, Kendall Green was tough.
Now, that . . . that he didn’t see often.
When Kendall didn’t speak, Gabe cleared his throat and reached for a topic of conversation. “What do you know about the town?”
She glanced at him, a smile playing at her lips. “Only what Wikipedia told me. Elevation 9,200 feet. Annual snowfall, 180 inches. Chances of getting charged by a moose, high.”
“Did it actually say that?”
“Not in so many words. I extrapolated.”
Gabe grinned. So he’d been right about the sense of humor. “Let me fill you in. You do, in fact, have a moderate chance of being charged by a moose, but only if you get too close during rut or you run up on a cow with calves. However, that’s not nearly our most interesting feature. Jasper Lake was founded in the late 1880s, the exact date unknown, by miners looking for the holy trinity of ore: gold, silver, and lead. In fact, there’s a nearby town called Trinity for that very reason, because it’s the only region in Colorado that has all three in high concentrations near to each other. Jasper Lake is thought to have been named for the semiprecious mineral that’s found in abundance around here.” He broke off, realizing he was in danger of sounding like the town’s website. Well, he was the mayor. People expected him to be knowledgeable about its history.
“Interesting. Any old buildings up here? I remember going to a ghost town with my class when I was a kid, but I can’t remember where it was. You don’t pay attention to local geography when you’re a child.”
“That’s right; you grew up in Denver. I forgot.” Gabe broke off. “I’m sorry. It’s weird that I know so much about you and we just met. I read the report when they found you in California.”
Kendall shrugged. “It’s not like I keep it a secret. It’s just not anything I like to talk about.”
Noted. Somehow he’d pegged her as the chatty type, but so far she seemed satisfied to listen to him talk. “Anyway, you asked about old buildings. Yes, there are still some prospectors’ cabins up in the hills, and there’s a smattering of turn-of-the-century brick buildings from when it turned into a proper town and not just a mining camp. But the most interesting ones are the ones we’re about to go see.”
Kendall perked up. “Connie’s property was old?”
“You could say that.” He glanced at her intrigued expression. Of course being a designer who specialized in antiques, she would be intrigued by old houses. That was exactly what he was banking on.
Jasper Lake itself was shaped like a jagged kidney, no more than a mile long at its furthest point and approximately half a mile wide, but its frequent inlets and coves and natural bays meant that the meandering lakeside road took nearly twice as long to traverse as it would if it were a straight shot. Kendall was looking out the window at the scenery with interest, however, just as he’d planned. He could have gone out to the highway, across the county road, and back to the other side of the lake in half the time, but he was banking on the town’s natural beauty striking a chord in her. The decisions she made in the next few days would affect them all.
“During the summer, there’s boat and kayak rentals near town. On this side of the lake, we have both a sailing club and a rowing club. We host regattas every summer that draw people from all over Colorado.”
“And during the winter?”
“Ice fishing. We’ve just started hitting our first hard freezes of the year, but given another month or two, the lake’s surface will be solid enough to walk on.”
“Too bad I won’t be here to see it,” she said, and she actually did sound like she thought it was too bad. “Even though I’ve never been much of a cold weath
er person.”
“You never skied?”
She shot him a look, and he inwardly cringed. Of course she hadn’t. The words ward of the state had been prominent in the heir finder’s report. He imagined not many foster parents took a kid skiing.
The conversation fell stagnant for several moments until Kendall spoke again. “So you’re young. I’m guessing, what? Thirty? Thirty-one?”
“Thirty-two,” he said.
“Right. So how does a thirty-two-year-old guy become mayor of a town that, so far, looks to be largely populated by the over-fifty set?”
She had done her homework. “Probably because said over-fifty set is worried about the future of their town if we don’t start attracting younger families. Eventually the older generation will die and there will be no one left to take their place.”
“Which makes sense,” she said. “But why you exactly?”
There went the full force of her attention on him, her gaze fixed on his profile while he drove. He felt the sudden urge to reprise his mayoral campaign for her and then just as swiftly gave himself a mental kick in the rear for being stupid. “Short version or long version?”
“Depends. You know how far away we are. I’m a captive audience.”
They were coming to the turnoff to the Gable Pines neighborhood, so he settled on the short version. “Undergrad in sociology, master’s in urban planning. Six years of experience with a nonprofit in Detroit that created workable plans for revitalizing depressed neighborhoods. And I happened to spend my teens here, living with my grandparents. Also, I ran unopposed.”
Kendall barked out a laugh, obviously not expecting that. “So what about the—” she did a quick mental calculation—“108 people who didn’t vote for you?”
“Abstainers. Some only live here during the summer and so weren’t present.” And some had long memories and couldn’t forget the troubled thirteen-year-old he’d been when he arrived, angry at the world and determined to make everyone as miserable as he was. When he remembered the mouthy—and destructive—punk he’d been back then, what he wanted most was a time machine so he could go back and slap himself upside the head. Fortunately, the rest of the town considered him a success story of their way of life, an example of what outdoor activity and attention and a takes-a-village mentality could do for difficult children. There might have been an element of truth in that, but Gabe knew it was due more to his grandparents’ patience and unflagging faith that God had more planned for him than his initial delinquent direction.
Gabe slowed as he made a sharp turn down a dirt road, which transitioned back to pitted asphalt half a mile down. Kendall was busy oohing and aahing over the gorgeous view of the lake out the driver’s side window, something that required her to partly lean over the console toward him. He wasn’t complaining. It also meant that she was looking in the utter wrong direction when he finally pulled to a stop. “This is it.”
Kendall whipped her head around, and her jaw dropped. “This is it?”
She grabbed the door handle and levered it open before he could respond, jumping to the gravel shoulder with a crunch. The wind immediately whipped the stray tendrils from her blonde bun, and she quickly zipped up her jacket against the cold. “I don’t know what to say. When we were talking about old houses, I didn’t expect this.”
“No one does. To our knowledge, there are no other Victorians like these in the county. Maybe even in the state.” Gabe came around to stand beside her, feeling something suspiciously like pride as he gazed at the neighborhood.
Or at least it was intended to be a neighborhood. Whereas the rest of the homes on this side of the lake were spaced haphazardly along the shoreline, here five structures perched close together, proud and straight as if they were part of the gracious neighborhoods of Chicago or San Francisco, all sweeping porches, gabled fronts, and bright colors. Some of them were better kept than others; a sagging front porch on one and a shutter swinging on a single hinge on another spoke to the fact they’d been left vacant for some time now.
Kendall stared for another long moment, the expression on her face somewhere between fascination and awe. “Which one is mine, then?”
For once, Gabe wasn’t even mad at the way Matthew had bumbled his duties, because it meant he got to see her shocked expression when he told her:
“All of them.”
Chapter Four
“ALL OF THEM?” Kendall snapped her gaze toward Gabe and her voice came out as a squeak. It was enough of a surprise to find out that the home she’d inherited wasn’t the rustic cabin or characterless lake house she’d been expecting, but to know that she’d actually inherited five houses? Her mouth opened and closed several times before she could make sense of that statement.
“And quite a bit of the land around it, in fact. Connie was fairly well-off, and as the town population began to dwindle, these houses went vacant. She began buying them up from the owners as they moved out. She thought renovating them and using them as short-term vacation rentals might help with tourism in the town.”
“And did it?”
“She never got that far. She fell ill, and before she could follow through with the plans, she died.” Gabe studied Kendall’s face, his expression sympathetic. He seemed to be concerned about her emotional state; he still didn’t understand that to Kendall, Constance Green was a complete stranger.
A stranger who, despite leaving Kendall everything she owned, hadn’t cared enough to track her down in the twenty-four years since her mother had abandoned her.
“Can I look inside one of them?” she asked finally.
Gabe nodded. “Sure. Let’s take a look at the middle one. This was your—this was Connie’s place, so it will be the most intact.”
Kendall hugged her arms to her body against another gust of wind and followed him across the street. The third house was indeed the most well-kept of the five, its wood siding painted in a seafoam green, its brickwork recently repointed. “These aren’t Victorians, by the way,” she said, standing aside at the front door while he pulled a ring of keys out of his pocket.
“They aren’t? What are they?”
“Gothic revival. Carpenter Gothic, to be exact. There’s probably a number of these up here, though I doubt many were this elaborate.” She looked over the porch, sure of her assessment. The pointed-arch window, the board-and-batten siding, even the gingerbread trim. It was all characteristic of the style, even if the sprawling wraparound porches were indeed far more Victorian. “Probably some architect putting his own twist on the style. I would have guessed 1870s, but this porch is more American Queen Anne, so I’m going with 1880 or 1890.”
Gabe threw her a curious glance. “I thought your specialty was antiques, not architecture.”
“They go hand in hand, especially in restoration work. You have no idea how many unholy mismatches of eras I run into. It takes a bit of detective work to uncover the original details. Which, fortunately, is my specialty.” Excitement spread through her, similar to when she was about to view a client space for the first time. “Can I go in?”
“Of course.” Gabe twisted the key in the lock, which sprang free with a well-oiled click, and stepped back for her to pass.
Kendall pushed the door open slowly. A single step landed her in a small, closed-off foyer spread with an oriental rug. She caught her breath. It was . . .
Not what she expected from the outside. In fact, for all her surety about the Carpenter Gothic exterior, she wasn’t even sure how to categorize the interior. She took a tentative step forward and pushed open the second door that led into a front hallway. Gleaming wood floors—because surely they had gleamed; she could tell that even under their current dull coating of dust—stretched in all directions, punctuated by a variety of Persian rugs in tones of red and blue. Quartersawn oak paneling covered the walls three-quarters of the way up, above which was plaster painted the palest shade of cream. Ahead and to the right lay a staircase with an ornately profiled wooden banister; to e
ach side, rooms that appeared to be a library and a parlor respectively. She stood there, taking in the wooden beams and molding. The overall effect was Craftsman, but in place of simple Arts and Crafts corbels, these displayed miniature carved renderings of columbine flowers.
Gabe came up behind her, jingling keys in his hand. “Pretty impressive, isn’t it?”
“Very.” Kendall moved off to the library, which was papered in a William Morris print—she couldn’t tell if it was original or reproduction on the first look—and glanced around the room, her excitement building. For all the distinct historical flavor, Connie Green hadn’t been a slave to architectural style. If she wasn’t mistaken, that was an original Eames lounge chair in the corner, its saddle-colored leather blending into the room just as well as the simple Danish modern cabinet. If she knew only one thing about the person who had left her this home, it was that she had impeccable taste.
And for the first time, this began to seem like more than just a trip into her mysterious past or a financial stopgap. It was beginning to feel like the solution to Kendall’s problems.
She kept a running tally as she moved from room to room, admiring not just the house’s architecture but also its exquisite antique furniture. Dozens of Persian rugs, some in perfect condition, some threadbare . . . all worth a fortune to her Los Angeles clients. Furniture spanning eras from classical to mission, Danish modern to American mid-century, even a couple of pieces that looked like British Victorian antiques. Belatedly, she thought to pull out her cell phone and begin snapping pictures, annotating them quickly with her sketch app, while Gabe trailed silently behind her.
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