Sunshine Cottage

by Barbara Cool Lee

  "What's that?"

  "A book written by the newspaper editor about all the old legends in town." He peered at the bookshelves. "I think there's a copy somewhere. We've been putting any books we find in the house up here in the library."

  He pointed to a paperback with a red cover, and she got up and pulled it off the shelf. There was an image of the lighthouse on the cover. "By Alexander Quincy O'Keeffe," she said aloud. "Do you think I can buy a copy in town?"

  "Take this one," he said. "In fact, you can borrow any of these books if you want. If you have time, I was going to ask you to do an inventory of them. We'll eventually give them to the library, if they ever get the money to expand." He leaned back again. "But in the meantime, borrow anything you want to read."

  She didn't want to embarrass herself by acting excited, but the thrill probably showed on her face because he laughed again. "You're in the right profession," he said.

  To change the subject, she said, "so tell me about your mother. Do you remember her at all?"

  "She died the day I was born."

  "Oh."

  "Don't get me wrong," he said quickly. "I'm not traumatized about it or anything. I have great parents. My dad and my mom, who's technically my stepmom of course, they're great. I have a great family."

  "Any siblings?"

  "Four brothers."

  "Four? Wow."

  "And you?" he asked.

  "One sister," she said quietly.

  "Older or younger?"

  "Older. So about your family," she said, again trying to shift attention away from herself.

  "Yeah. Mom, Dad, and the four brats." But he said it fondly. "All younger, of course, since Mom married Dad when I was about two. But I don't really ever think about that. Except since I've started working here. I had never actually set foot in Sunshine Cottage until I got the job."

  "Sunshine Cottage? I like it. Less stuffy than Roi Soleil."

  "And easier to pronounce. Old Langston King would have had a cow if he'd heard, but that's what the whole town has always called this place."

  "It's adorable."

  "Yeah. Adorable is pretty much what Pajaro Bay is famous for. Didn't you know anything about the village or the cottages before you came here?"

  She stuttered out, "well, I just wanted to get a job and wasn't really particular about where." She pulled herself together, and asked, "so does knowing your mother lived in this house make it hard to work here?"

  He stared at the fireplace again. "No. Not really. But the family history is really staring me in the face every day, so I've been thinking about it."

  "So tell me the story," she said. "All about the ghost and all that."

  "Well, the ghost thing is probably fake, but the rest of it is true. As far as I know it goes like this: Langston King was, like I said, a guy with big ambitions. He worked his way out of the Flats, earned a law degree, built this house to lord it over the town, married a girl from college, and they had a baby, named Soleil. The wife died, and he raised his little princess to be the perfect daughter: private schools, ballet lessons, trips to Europe, all that kind of thing."

  "Then she married your father?"

  "Nope. Then she became the assistant in Langston's law office, and she lived here in the little pink child's bedroom stuck in a time warp, and she was the hostess for the lavish parties he threw. And she stayed by his side as his dutiful daughter until she was 34 years old. Then he reached his goal: he became mayor."

  He laughed again. "That was it. That's what he had worked all his life to achieve. He wanted to be the first non-Madrigal mayor of Pajaro Bay."

  "The Madrigals owned Los Colores across the street."

  "They owned way more than that. They had the Spanish grant in the 1700s for the land the town was built on. They owned most of downtown, and the amusement park, and pretty much anything else they wanted to own. And the mayor of Pajaro Bay was always a Madrigal."

  "Always?"

  "Always. But then one day, for the very first time in the village's history, there wasn't a Madrigal available to be mayor. And that was Langston's chance. He won the election and took over the position."

  "For twenty-three days."

  "For twenty-three days," he agreed.

  "So what went wrong?"

  "Soleil came to him to tell him she was pregnant. The father was the teenage boy who was installing the cobblestone pathway in the lawn."

  "And they kicked Langston King out of office for that?"

  He shook his head. "Of course not. That would be a pretty minor scandal in the grand scheme of things. But he was humiliated."

  "Why? Because she wasn't married?"

  He shook his head. "He might have been willing to overlook that, but she was in love with a penniless Portuguese boy from Wharf Flats. That's the wrong side of the tracks in this little village, and the place Langston had worked all his life to run away from."

  "Oh. Logan King Rios. Of course."

  "Yes. His perfect princess had fallen for a day laborer half her age. That was a bridge too far for him." Logan waved his arm to encompass the magnificent house. "All this was about impressing the world, showing off how important he was. He thought the whole town would laugh at the know-it-all snob whose unwed daughter was having a baby with a bricklayer."

  "But after the baby came, did they get a chance to reconcile?"

  "When she told him, they had a big fight. His housekeeper told police he broke things, smashed his arm through a glass cabinet, sat down at his desk and, the blood from his arm dripping on the paper, hand-wrote out a will disowning his daughter while she was still standing in front of him. Then he ordered her to leave his house and never come back. It must have been quite a scene. She drove off down Calle Principal, in the pouring rain, in the dead of night, heading presumably for Wharf Road and Gene, my dad, who was waiting for her in his little shack down in the Flats. She skidded out of control and crashed into the barrier at the end of the block. I was born in the clinic that night, just an hour before she died. Three months premature. I was about two pounds."

  She glanced at his hulking form. "You got over it, I see."

  He laughed. "Yeah. Eventually." He ran his fingers through his hair and stared at the image of his mother on the tiles.

  "So you never met her. How did her father—your grandfather, that is—live with himself?"

  "He didn't. He locked himself in the house, never spoke to anyone again, and then ran off and committed suicide two days later."

  "I'm sorry."

  He shrugged. "I don't remember any of it, of course. I was a newborn baby." He looked away from the tiles. "It would have been nice to meet her, though. And it must have been hard on my father. He was only nineteen and had no family. And I was in the NICU at Stanford for months. I can't imagine. How do people survive stuff like that?"

  "You do what you have to do to survive," she said. "You just deal with it."

  "Right. I've never had any problems to deal with. I'm pretty spoiled."

  "Except your knee."

  He shrugged. "That was just an accident. I'm as lucky as a man can get. My father eventually took over the bricklaying business, and bought his little shack in Wharf Flats, which I grew up in. He married my mom when I was two. I have great parents, and four crazy younger brothers. It's a zoo, my mom says, but she loves it. She has the patience of a saint."

  He clapped his hands, shaking off the past. "So, enough of that. Sunshine Cottage sat in limbo because Langston changed his will, disowning his daughter. So after they were both dead it went through a long probate, then sold to an out-of-town investor who let it sit unchanged while he tried to get permits to build a big hotel on the land. He lost the zoning battle after many years, so took the tax write-off of selling it at cost to the guy who now owns Los Colores. Who, with perfect irony, is a Madrigal."

  "Of course."

  "He donated Roi Soleil to the village, possibly also for the tax write-off, but also because he's a pretty nice dude
and likes preserving historic houses. Now we get a community center out of the whole mess."

  "So wait a minute," she said, picking something out of the house's complicated history. "You mean this would have been your house if your grandfather hadn't disowned your mother?"

  "I suppose. Now it's the village's house. And we're going to make the most of it."

  He stood up. "So, this will be your office."

  "This?" She looked at the gorgeous turret room. "I get to work here?"

  "Yup. I know it's small, but it's the only quiet space we have right now. I figured you would be pretty much separated from all the construction noise up here and it would be easier for tutoring. It's okay with you, isn't it?"

  "It's f-f-fine," she stuttered. This would be her office. This library tower in the sky, overlooking the village and the ocean, with the sun streaming in and the books all around her.

  "We have an elevator going in that will reach this level," he was saying. "But for now, you'll have to use the stairs. I happen to know you'll have one student who has some trouble walking. If he can't make it up the stairs—"

  "—I can meet him in the garden, or somewhere else—whatever he needs."

  "I was going to say you could use my office. It's on the first floor, and I'm usually running around and not in it."

  His phone beeped, and he read the text. "Okay. Gotta go. And you need to rest, I'm sure. So we can meet back here tomorrow morning and I'll show you where everything is, all the schedule sheets, and who has already signed up for tutoring. How you do scheduling is up to you, so Kate will show you how to do timesheets to get paid for your time and all that, and you can work it out any way you want."

  "Okay," she said, wondering if this was the time to explain to him she'd never scheduled appointments for anything except meeting strange men in hotel rooms.

  She looked at this charming young man with his open smile and friendly face. Nope. Not a good time to mention that.

  So she said, "I'll see you at—?"

  "9:00 AM?" he said, and she nodded.

  He put out his hand again, and again she shook it, firmly, then quickly let go.

  He reminded her to pick up her pack in his office, gave her a tip to take the back door through the garden as a shortcut downtown, and then she left, feeling his eyes on her back, watching her go.

  Logan headed down to the kitchen, his track shoes squeaking on the polished oak stairs. He held onto the railing to take the weight off his knee, reminding himself to call the contractor again to nail down a firm date on getting the ADA-compliant elevator installed.

  Teri Forest was totally out of his league. She wasn't just gorgeous—though her heart-shaped face and laughing brown eyes were certainly pretty.

  He had talked too much, trying to spend as long with her as he could before letting her get on with her day. He was supposed to be a professional, but he was flirting with a fellow staff member like a schoolboy.

  She was different than anyone he'd ever met. He couldn't pin it down. She dressed like a kindergarten teacher, but spoke with a kind of sophistication he supposed made sense for a librarian. Still, the wise-beyond-her-years look in her eyes gave him the impression she'd already lived a full life.

  He felt very young around her, like she was older than he was, even though she wasn't. According to her job application, she was actually five years younger than him, only twenty and fresh out of community college. But she had been recommended by the local sheriff's captain, and that was good enough for the town council. She came highly recommended, with the backing of the big shots in town.

  He, on the other hand, was on probation. The new guy. He didn't have any champion on the council, and he knew most of them still pictured him as the local high school baseball star, someone way too young to be running the community center. "Wet behind the ears," board member Mabel Rutherford had labeled him in her scathing dissent to his appointment.

  But he was determined to prove them wrong. He noticed the way Teri had looked at him when she'd first seen him, and he got the impression she, too, thought he was wet behind the ears and completely unqualified.

  He stood in the kitchen and thought of the expression on her face when he'd first spotted her. She had seemed startled, like he was so different than what she'd expected she was unsure how to react.

  He was going to have to prove himself to her, too.

  "Wrench?" asked a muffled voice.

  The handyman was lying on his back in a growing puddle of water, with his head somewhere under the sink cabinet.

  "Yeah, sorry," Logan said. He had to crouch down in the water to hand Jack the wrench.

  "She's cute, but how about we clean up one mess before you get into another one," the old guy said calmly.

  "Good plan," Logan said. "So where do we start?"

  Teresa headed out through the back garden to the alley, trying as hard as she could to not be a little bit in love with Logan King Rios. He was so different from any man she'd ever met, almost like a young version of Detective Graham, someone with goodness in his heart who treated her with kindness.

  That's all it was. She just wasn't used to men who weren't losers and users. She wasn't used to a man gently taking her hand and gazing at her in wonder like she was the prettiest girl he'd ever seen. That little thrill of his hand touching hers—it wasn't anything. It wasn't love, or even attraction. It was just nothing.

  She kept telling herself that as her feet crunched on the gravel path past musky geraniums and the prickly old roses that scrambled up the back fence, as she went through the rusty little gate that led to the alley, as she made her way all the way back onto Calle Principal. Once there, she turned away from the ocean and in the direction of the market.

  This was just a normal town, she told herself. It wasn't fantasy land. Just a normal place with normal people going about their normal lives. No fairy tales, no handsome princes, no castle turrets overlooking the sea. And no way was she going to get caught up in the feeling that this was her home, that this was a chance for a new life, a chance to make new friendships—or a chance to find new love.

  Normal. Just like any other town.

  A woman passed her on the street. She was of indeterminate age, something from thirty to fifty years old, with a soft face that was as pale as the moon, and two long golden braids. She was dressed in a floaty, swirly something of multiple layers, all colors of the rainbow with no rhyme or reason to the pattern. She stopped in front of Teresa, looked her up and down with a gentle smile, and said, "you have the most beautiful chakras." Then she floated off.

  Maybe normal wasn't exactly the right word for it.

  She still held that slip of paper that had "Logan King Rios" written on it. She smiled at it, thinking how the name couldn't be more perfect for the golden prince in a fairy tale.

  Below his name was another: "Robin Madrigal at Robin's Nest, down the alley from the Surfing Puggle." Now that she knew what a Madrigal was, she only had to figure out what the rest meant. Robin's Nest would be her next stop.

  If she could find it.

  She came to a snooty-looking art gallery with modern art on display in the window—canvases that to her looked like they'd been painted by toddlers. She considered going in to ask if they could direct her to Robin's Nest, but then noticed the storefront next door had a sign that said Sheriff's Substation Pajaro Bay.

  Her instinctive reaction was to recoil, to turn and go in the other direction. But Logan had said the sheriff's captain had recommended her for the job, so she was curious.

  A young Latino man in a deputy's uniform came rushing out the door, and she stepped back out of his way. "Sorry, Ma'am," he said in a rush as he blew past. He spoke into a radio clipped to his shoulder. "Tell them not to move." A voice on the radio came back with, "They are halfway up the cliff and the kid is slipping."

  He ran to the SUV parked at the curb and got in. She watched him go, then walked on.

  Kids climbing a cliff, and a cop rushing to r
escue them? It was a different kind of cop than the stereotype she'd known. Were these police like Detective Graham? Maybe he wasn't the only good one.

  She went another block, still searching for the elusive "Robin's Nest" and "Surfing Puggle" among all the cute little cottages, and then stopped in her tracks when she got to the next corner.

  THE OWL, a wooden sign on hooks stated. It was hanging from chains off the eave of a tiny turreted cottage. At every breath of the ocean breeze, the sign swung back and forth, the chains squeaked, and the little carved owl peering over the top of the sign seemed to glance her way.

  The Owl had obviously been built by the same person as the community center. But this cottage was more like the others she'd seen: tiny and cute like a gnome's house, with a little turret that served as its entry, and a peaked roof of mauve pink barrel tiles that complemented its gray siding. Even a cobweb that clung to one eave glistened, a gossamer string of pearled dewdrops hanging from it.

  But none of that even mattered, because the words printed beneath the name of the cottage made her heart jump: VILLAGE LIBRARY.

  She went inside.

  Chapter Five

  This was nothing like the libraries she had known. The little former house was still divided into several rooms, and each held one part of the book collection: CHILDREN, FICTION, NONFICTION, REFERENCE, LOCAL HISTORY, and a room next to the door had a sign for STOCKDALE-ROBLES ROOM. She felt like a local since she understood what that last one meant.

  She passed an empty front desk and headed for fiction. What book could she get for tonight? There were so many worlds in front of her, each one a new place to escape to.

  She paused, her hand on a Nora Roberts romance. What was she thinking?

  She was dying to escape to a novel that would sweep her up in some perfect fantasy of a world where kind and decent people lived in a safe and beautiful place.

  Look around you. Look at the street you've just walked down. Look at the room you are standing in. And look at that amazing office that's yours now, a place where you could pass on your love of the written word to new readers—and, most amazingly, be paid for the privilege of sharing the world of books with others.