Provenance

by Carla Laureano

  “Yeah, he did. Connie was a Christian?”

  “She was. She was an elder in the church, taught Sunday school for years. She was a wonderful example to the town.”

  “It figures. I’m glad she cared about something.” Kendall tapped her bag to indicate the sandwich. “Thanks for breakfast.”

  Only once she was out on the sidewalk did she take a deep breath. It all made sense now. The paragon of Christian virtue had been shamed by her promiscuous daughter and either turned her out or made her feel so bad about getting pregnant that she left on her own. And then once Carrie figured out that she wasn’t cut out to be a mother, she’d cut Kendall free. Like an animal who chewed off a limb to get out of a trap.

  To both Connie and Carrie, Kendall had been a necessary sacrifice.

  She’d like to believe that she was just imagining this, but she’d had too much experience with Christian virtue to think otherwise.

  The revelation soured her mood, but she let the fresh air and morning chill wash it away as she walked into town. By the time she made it to Main Street Mocha, the smile of greeting she gave Delia was almost genuine.

  “Morning, Kendall,” she said. “What are you having?”

  “Surprise me. The chai yesterday was amazing.”

  “How about a Lake Fog then? My tea specialty.”

  “If it’s caffeinated, I’ll take it.” Kendall paid, then found a table where she could continue the work she’d fallen asleep in the middle of.

  She’d barely set up her laptop when a figure blocked the early morning sunshine. She looked up to find Philip Burton standing over her. Dislike instantly spiked through her.

  “Kendall Green.” Burton pulled up a chair without asking and crossed his legs. He regarded her for a moment. “I was hoping I would have heard from you by now.”

  “I’ve been busy. A lot of possessions to sort through at the house.”

  “Understandable. I heard that the judge closed the probate case finally.”

  Kendall cocked her head. “You’re well-informed. I haven’t even heard that.”

  “I expect you’ll be getting a call from Matthew Avery sometime today. He might not even know yet.”

  The dislike intensified. It was clearly a power play, meant to show her how well-connected he was and how small she was in comparison. It fired every stubborn instinct in her being. “What can I help you with, Mr. Burton?”

  “Now that you’re the legal owner of the properties, I’m prepared to make you a very nice offer.” He took a notepad from his vest pocket and scribbled a number on a sheet. Then he ripped it off and slid it toward her.

  $750,000.

  She laughed, a genuine laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “It’s fair. The houses aren’t in great condition. They may look nice on the outside, but they need an extensive amount of foundation work due to the proximity to the lake. I don’t think you have the money for the repairs.”

  “Maybe not. But I also know that the land is worth more than that to you. No thank you.”

  He folded his hands, making a show of patience. “What were you thinking then?”

  She opened her mouth to answer what she actually thought it was worth—a million and a quarter—but that wasn’t what came out. “Three million.”

  The pleasant expression slid from his face. “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve done my research too. I know what land would cost you in similar towns, and I know how much it’s going to be worth after you build the development. So if you’re in such a rush and you really want that land, it’s going to cost you three million dollars.” Kendall held his gaze, her expression blank, even though her heart was beating so hard she was sure he could see it through the puffy down of her jacket.

  “Fine,” he said, and for a brief, shocked moment, she thought she’d won. Then he kept talking. “I offered you above market value considering the issues with the homes. But you’re not interested in doing business.”

  “Not if you’re going to lowball me, no.” She forced a smile, hoping it looked calculating. “I’ll consider any reasonable offer, Mr. Burton.”

  “That was the most reasonable offer you’re going to get.” He smiled too, and it chilled her. “I hope you don’t come to regret your decision.”

  Kendall sat there stiffly and watched him leave the coffee shop. As soon as he disappeared from the frame of the plate-glass windows, she slumped in her chair. What had she done? She had potentially alienated the only person who was willing to pay a decent price on her properties. It wasn’t the $1.7 million she needed for her Pasadena home, but it was almost halfway there. She could do a lot with three-quarters of a million dollars. Her stomach churned with anxiety.

  “Here.” Delia set a ceramic mug near her hand and then slid into the chair across from her. “That was something to watch. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone stand up to him that way. I mean, sure, people yell profanity at him, but that’s not the same thing.”

  Delia’s humor cut through her numb sense of horror, and Kendall cracked a smile. “I don’t know what got into me. I just . . . I hate that guy. I have no real reason for it either. He’s just so . . .”

  “Smug? Smarmy? Pleased with himself?” Delia cocked her head. “I guess that’s the same thing as smug, but it bears repeating.”

  “I feel sick,” Kendall muttered, but she reached for the tea and tasted it anyway. It slid down her throat and left a warm trail all the way to her stomach, taking a bit of the nausea away. “This is good though. What’s in it?”

  Delia grinned. “Trade secret. But mostly tea and coconut milk.”

  “Well, your trade secret is delicious. Thanks.” Kendall took another sip. “You’re a business owner in this town. How do you make it all work?”

  “That’s another trade secret, but it’s addictive and possibly illegal.” Delia chuckled when Kendall’s eyebrows rose. “No, I’m joking. Honestly, a lot of sleepless nights and prayer. I work hard and worry harder sometimes.”

  The prayer thing snagged in her psyche, but Kendall let it go because she immediately knew this woman wasn’t cut from the same cloth as Connie Green. For all she knew, Delia was praying to Buddha. “Wouldn’t it be good for you if this became a resort town? A lot of people staying in hotel rooms translates to a lot of money for the coffee shops and restaurants.”

  “Honestly, it would be. But I moved up here because I needed a respite from my life down below, from all the mindless hustle. The pace of life is what drew me to Jasper Lake, the fact that everyone knows you and has your back. You just don’t find that these days.”

  “No, you really don’t.” The front door opened with a ding, and Delia cast a look toward the newcomers. Kendall waved her away. “Go. Don’t let me keep you.”

  Delia stood but she glanced back at Kendall. “We’re still on for girls’ night, right?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.” Kendall smiled as she left, but the minute she was alone, the sick feeling came back. Telling Burton off had given her momentary satisfaction, but it was short-lived.

  What had she done?

  Chapter Sixteen

  WHEN GABE ARRIVED at the house, fueled by a mug of Delia’s best drip coffee and his grandfather’s famous blueberry muffins, Kendall’s rental SUV was already parked there. Gabe bounded up to the front door and knocked, but when no one answered, he tried the door. It swung open easily.

  “Kendall?”

  “Up here!” Her voice drifted down, and slowly he climbed the stairs to find her on her hands and knees beneath a dressing table in one of the guest bedrooms.

  He leaned against the doorframe, repressing a smile. “Already hard at work, I see.”

  She backed out from under the furniture and scribbled something on the notepad he’d been using yesterday. “I’ve been here since eight. Woke up early and figured there was no point in wasting an early start.”

  Gabe studied her as she stood and moved on to the dresser beside the table. There wa
s something . . . off . . . about her today. She was always perky, but this was the first time he’d ever seen this kind of frenetic energy from her.

  “What’s going on?”

  Kendall looked at him wide-eyed. “Nothing.”

  “Liar. What happened?”

  She plopped onto the edge of the bed. “Phil Burton found me in the coffee shop this morning.”

  “And?”

  “Made me an offer I had no problem refusing . . . $750,000.”

  Gabe’s eyebrows arched upward. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “I know it is. Which is what he was counting on, me getting blinded by the zeros and forgetting that the property is worth double that—more, considering he needs it for his development.”

  “So you refused.”

  “I countered.” She grimaced. “Three million dollars.”

  He just about choked. “Three million? What did he say?”

  She gave him a crooked smile. “Let’s say he was less than pleased with that counteroffer. I have no idea what got into me. It’s just that his smug face—”

  “—makes you want to punch him in the nose and then take a baseball bat to the headlights of his Lexus?” When Kendall stared at him, he grinned. “Not that I’ve thought about it or anything.”

  “Yeah, trust me, I get it.”

  “So what’s the problem? I mean, I imagine he didn’t accept your offer, but that’s no surprise.”

  “I don’t know. Once I had his attention, I said I’d accept any reasonable offer, and he said this was as reasonable as he was going to get, or something to that effect. It felt like a . . . warning.”

  Gabe narrowed his eyes. He already disliked Burton, but now it sounded like he was trying to bully Kendall, and that shifted the dislike into fury. “Did he threaten you?”

  “Not in so many words.” She shook her head. “You know him. He’s so slippery, you come away from a conversation not entirely sure if he really said what you think he said. I know not all developers are like him, but his kind definitely give them a bad name.”

  “Especially when they make their fortune elsewhere and then come back to pick over the bones of their hometown.”

  Kendall blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “You didn’t know? That’s part of the reason everyone hates him so much. He grew up here. I mean, he’s our parents’ generation—” he grimaced at the involuntarily reminder that meant nothing to Kendall—“but he went to the same high school we all did. Left for an Ivy League college, became this big businessman, always claimed he was going to come back and fix what was wrong with this town. Apparently, what’s wrong with this town is that it’s not Park City.” Even saying it aloud made him itch to wipe the self-satisfied smirk off Phil Burton’s pampered face. He might have once been a local, but there was be no doubt he thought he was too good for them. When Gabe had challenged him in the city council meeting, Burton had accused him of having a townie chip on his shoulder.

  Which might be correct, in some sense, but only when faced with jerks like Phil Burton.

  He realized that his internal monologue had run away with him and Kendall was just sitting there mulling the revelation. “Don’t worry. There’s really nothing he can do to you. As soon as the estate is settled, you’re the official owner and you can do what you want with it.”

  “That’s the other thing. He told me it’s already been settled and that I should be getting a call from Matthew Avery today. Implied that he knew before my lawyer did.”

  “So quickly?”

  “It was left to me and I’m the only claimant. They were probably happy to get the case completely off their docket.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  Kendall opened her mouth and then closed it and sighed. “I have absolutely no idea.”

  For a moment, she looked so disheartened that he realized exactly what she had given up. Three-quarters of a million dollars was a lot of money, and it would have made a fine down payment on her house/office in Pasadena. The fact she had turned it down suggested that she was no more anxious to see these homes demolished than he was, but what other choice did she have? Gabe had been so focused on keeping Burton out that he hadn’t spent much time considering the alternatives. If he had one flaw—and God knew he wished there was only one—it was that he could jump into things without proper planning, trusting that the right side would win. He called it optimism; Madeline had called it naiveté. Maybe it was. But he had to believe that there was more than one outcome to this situation.

  “Right now, we finish doing the inventory of the house,” he said finally. “What do we have?”

  She handed him the notepad and he saw that she’d already gone through the other bedroom, and with this one almost completed, all that was left was the master. Looked like she had saved it until last.

  “Are you ready for this?” he asked quietly.

  Kendall shot him a smile, but he didn’t have to be a lifelong friend to see the unsteadiness beneath it. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  Kendall tried to hide her anxiety with a smile, but from the look on Gabe’s face, he wasn’t fooled. And why would he be? He had to know how hard this was for her. Guest rooms, living spaces, they were all fairly generic. But the master bedroom was something else, filled with her grandmother’s clothes, her personal items, her photographs. She’d left it until last because part of her didn’t want to see what she’d find.

  Her brave words to Gabe had been a lie, but she had no choice. She scanned the room while she decided where to begin. It was just like the rest of the house: a four-poster bed that didn’t strictly fit the Craftsman details of the home, a nice highboy and lowboy pair, some oil paintings that seemed to be more folk than fine art. “Let’s start with the bed.”

  She took a few photos from different angles, but it took supreme force of will to actually approach it. It was a pretty piece, but she knew even before she evaluated it that she would not be taking it with her. “Cherry, quasi-Craftsman, but it’s obviously a new piece and not an antique. Doesn’t fit any appreciable style, so it doesn’t hold any particular value for collectors.

  “Lowboy next.” She took more pictures, rattled off details, and then pulled open the first drawer and stilled. Shirts filled the drawer, each one folded to precisely the same size and placed in one of three distinct stacks. The musty smell of the drawer said that it hadn’t been opened in a long time.

  Well, of course it hadn’t. Connie had been dead for five years.

  Still, Kendall couldn’t resist reaching out and touching the top one, a preppy white- and black-striped polo shirt that seemed at odds with the image she’d formed of Connie Green. She’d assumed there would be racks of silk blouses and knife-edge creased trousers, not something so normal as cotton polos. She quickly closed the drawer and opened the next to find lingerie, mostly sensible, but a few trimmed with wisps of lace. She shut that just as quickly. In the bottom drawer, beneath stacks of folded jeans and chinos, she found what she was looking for: a stamp, along with a metal medallion. “Stickley,” she said.

  Gabe looked impressed. “Even I know that. It’s expensive, right?”

  “Compared to IKEA, definitely.” She threw him a smile. “But this piece isn’t antique. It’s 1980s, maybe even early 1990s. Good reproduction, though.”

  “I’m so disillusioned. I never thought Connie would have anything reproduction in her home.”

  “Don’t be too disillusioned. It’s still good quality furniture and would have cost a couple thousand dollars new. Hold on to it for another fifty years, and it will be a treasured antique.”

  “Are you taking it?” he asked.

  “Maybe.” She wasn’t sure about anything at this point. There were some nice pieces, but they all felt so . . . personal. As if they were too linked to their owner and should stay here in the house for as long as it stood. Which might not be that long, all things considered.

  That thought made her chest squeeze tight
. Maybe she didn’t have any personal connection to the house, but working in it for the last few days had given it a familiarity that she found appealing. She could see how this could be a home for someone.

  She could see how this should have been a home for her.

  “Kendall?”

  She blinked and snapped her head around to Gabe. “Yeah. Sorry. Zoned out there for a minute. Let’s move on?”

  It didn’t take long to catalog the rest of the items in the room, and then she had no choice but to move to the closet. She opened the door, stepped into a spacious walk-in, and was overcome with a feeling of inertia, like being thrown into the past. She hadn’t misread Connie Green after all; here were the silky button-downs and trousers, the sleek sheath dresses. She’d obviously been a woman of taste and money, as if that had been in question at any point. Running her fingers over her clothes made her feel like she knew her, at least a little bit.

  And sparked an anger in her chest that almost blotted out her ability to speak.

  There was a small stack of drawers built into one side, and she opened them one by one to find belts, silk scarves, and a tray full of simple, tasteful gold jewelry. It said something about this small town that they knew there was this much of value in the house and yet it had survived for five years, abandoned but intact and untouched. It also served as a reminder that money hadn’t been a barrier to Connie’s choice to seek out Kendall—or not to.

  She shoved the drawer closed, shutting away the glint of all that gold, and looked to the shelves above the hanging rods. There were several white cardboard banker’s boxes marked paperwork with years on them. As much as she really didn’t want to go through old files, there might be important documents relating to the houses. Still, she left them where they were. She wasn’t ready for the intimate details of Connie’s life.

  She retreated from the walk-in and shut the door. “That, of course, wasn’t original to the house. She must have put it in sometime in the last few decades. In fact, all the furniture in here is relatively new. Makes me think she did a remodel on the master bedroom.”