Hatteras Girl (Heart of Carolina Book #3) (3 page)

I get out of my truck. “This place is always safe to me.” Then I look into his round, rosy face. “What are you doing here?” The Bailey House is on a cul-de-sac and not exactly a location you end up unless you’re lost or want to be here.

He avoids my question and leans out of his window as his gaze roams over the large home. “Needs some fixing up, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yeah,” I breathe, looking at the dandelions congregating under a faded birdhouse, yet also noting that the lawn has been recently mowed. “It’s just not what it used to be.” Swiftly, like a torchbearer in the Olympics, I head up the steps toward the front door. “Here, there were two potted plants.” With my hands, I motion to where they once stood. “On both sides of the door. In the spring and summer, they were flowering like geraniums or impatiens. In the winter, they were ivy topiaries.”

“Ivy topiaries,” he says with fingers cupping his chin. “Now that is something I know nothing about.”

Laughing, I add, “And you probably don’t care about them, either.” Mrs. Bailey sure did, though. I remember how she scolded one of her visiting grandsons when he knocked over the right topiary while throwing a football.

A ticking noise stops me from saying any more. There’s a click, and then the electric lantern hung on a black pole to the left of the stairs sprays out a beam of light.

“Must be on a timer,” observes my uncle.

I glance around to see if any other lights have come on and then walk down the steps. “Have you ever been to the garden back here?”

He shakes his head.

“It’s like being in a magical world,” I say, catering to his adventuresome spirit.

He turns off his car and together, under flowering crepe myrtles the color of ripe peaches, we walk to the rear of the house. I unlatch the garden gate, give the handle a tug, and Ropey follows me inside. We make our way over the stone path to the patio, past deteriorating flowerbeds overgrown with fat weeds. A solitary burgundy rose dangles from a thorny stem. Honeysuckle bushes spread out over the backside of the house like octopus tentacles. At the wooden pergola, covered in twisted wisteria vines, Ropey bends down to study a section of cracked stones in the patio. I walk over to the pond.

The crevices in the low retaining wall around it are caked green with algae. A spider crawls along the mermaid-shaped fountain that sits in the middle of the pond. When the fountain is turned on, water bubbles from the mythical creature’s navel, a sight Minnie and I grew to love. Now a feathery web stretches from the mermaid’s left hand to her right.

Standing in the diminishing light, I recall the last time I ventured to the Bailey House, in late winter when a layer of ice coated the pond. The wind blew fall’s leftover leaves around my shoes, and my nose and fingers grew numb from the cold. I asked God to let it happen. “I want this bed and breakfast,” I said, zipping up my fleece jacket to my neck. I could hear the lapping of the Sound’s water over the far fence. Lifting my face toward the stark branches of the lone oak, I took a cleansing breath. “This place just feels like it’s mine already.”

Uncle Ropey squeezes his body onto the two-person glider, the very glider Minnie and I sat on years ago after our afternoon snack of lemon cookies and soda. Now the wood is chipped and faded—the color of aged newspaper.

He starts to speak, but I interrupt. “Where’s the birdbath?”

Ropey’s head turns to scan the silent fountain and moss-covered patio. “Don’t see it at all.”

“There was a marble birdbath. I could have sworn it was here last time I visited.” I scope out a pair of stones on the retaining wall that look less green than the rest, and sit down to face my uncle. “The birdbath was a clamshell. Well, a large thing made to look like a scalloped shell. Minnie and I said the mermaid left the pond to sit in it and comb her hair while all the guests slept.”

Amused, Uncle Ropey pulls a cigar from his breast pocket. “I thought she would have had a rendezvous with the prince.”

Actually, we’d also thought of that. “She did, after brushing her hair.”

“Where have you been tonight?” he asks.

I’m annoyed that someone would steal a birdbath, but I try to focus on the here and now. “Bad date.”

“You look dressed up.”

For me, dressed up is whenever I wear makeup or jewelry, and my relatives know that is about the extent of getting me to look more
presentable
. Tonight I did apply mascara, eyeliner, and gold hoop earrings instead of my usual tiny studs, and even a bracelet I found at the back of my dresser in a gift box. I went way beyond my level of comfort and wore a skirt, albeit a denim one.

“So what was wrong with him?”

How to say it without sounding self-centered? “He . . . he never asked anything about me.”

My uncle’s eyes widen under his black-rimmed glasses. “Nothing?” He takes a drag from his cigar.

“Oh, I take that back. He did ask how I drink Diet Pepsi.”

“Did you tell him—with a straw?” My uncle’s eyes twinkle.

I find a small smile. “He didn’t really want to know the answer. He was too preoccupied with all his stories.”

“Guess his mama didn’t teach him no manners.”

I stretch my legs. I’ve always liked my long legs, an attribute I inherited from my dad, who is six-three. I note how tanned they look in the dusk. Then I think that it wasn’t a completely
horrible
date. It could have been worse. At least his name wasn’t Cuddy.

I snicker when I think of the tactic I used to get away.

“What’s so funny?”

“I was just realizing that I left him alone at the Grille. Your niece cut the date short.”

“Think he’s still sitting there? All lonely? Want me to go check?”

A tinge of guilt enters, and I try to shake it off. “He didn’t seem to care about getting to know me at all.”

“One of Sheerly’s finds?” He exhales as the scent of rich tobacco envelops the entire garden.

“Yeah, she keeps trying.”

“We all want you to find The One.”

I think it might be time to give up. I change the subject. “How about you? What are you up to?”

“Well . . .” Uncle Ropey takes his cigar from his mouth and lets out a yawn. “Bought a few yards of rope that I think will make some great works of art.” My uncle constructs crafts with that white rope used on sailboats, a hot-glue gun, and shells. Tourists pay outrageous prices for his creations at a little shop in Buxton near the lighthouse. He prices them and then the owner of the shop marks them up at least twenty-five percent, so one shelled-rope tied in a fancy knot and framed in a glass case can retail at twenty dollars. Due to this fondness for rope art, he long ago earned the nickname Ropey.

“When I get this place,” I say as I remember how it felt to sit in the glider with the sun beaming through the gaps of the thick wisteria, “I want to display your nautical pieces in every room.”

“Still have your heart set on owning this place?” He gestures toward the house.

“I do. I just can’t seem to figure out how to make it happen. I’ve called a few Realtors. No one tells me anything I can use.”

Suddenly, Ropey stands, adjusts his pant legs, and announces, “I need a donut.” Crushing the cigar stub with his shoe, he heads toward the gate. I wait as he makes his way around the house. I hear his car door open and close.

When he returns, he has a box of Krispy Kreme donuts. My uncle lived off these donuts until Aunt Beatrice Lou made the doctor tell him to limit his intake to only one per day. She’d read too much about clogged arteries in medical journals at the library where she works. Some are addicted to cigarettes, alcohol, or diet pills; Uncle Ropey’s addiction comes in the form of glazed sugar.

The sky is streaked now with trellises of fading pink and lavender clouds. We eat donuts as we enjoy the view. I stand to peek over the wooden fence that circles the property and take in the quiet Sound, its edges thick with marsh grasses. When my uncle reaches for his third glazed treat, he makes me promise I won’t tell Beatrice Lou.

“I wouldn’t dare.” I note how romantic the sky looks, and as a robin settles on the top of the gate, I imagine what it would be like to sit here holding the hand of a man I’m in love with. This was the garden where Minnie and I talked of boys, and now, suddenly, I’m feeling old and lonely, like I should reside at the Morning Glory Nursing Home.

My uncle rubs his fingers together and then licks the tips. I bet he did that same action as a kid. Like Aunt Sheerly tells her patrons, “You can’t take the boy out of the man.” I ask him, “Any luck with the speedboat?”

The desire my uncle holds for a fast boat is not met with approval by his wife. Ever since Ropey’s back started bothering him—he seems to knock it out of whack every few months—he’s been told not to overdo it. Ropey doesn’t agree with that. He wants to ride like the wind over the Sound, pretend his mirror lies and feel twenty-five again. Beatrice Lou would rather have him walk along the beach at least a mile each day, eat sunflower seeds and granola, and trim down to two hundred pounds like he weighed when he was twenty-five.

My uncle uses his secretive voice to say, “That’s the reason I came down this way. Casey Luweigneson—he lives about a block away from here. He has an eighteen-footer for sale.”

I’ve heard of Casey Luweigneson. His name is one you can’t forget. Sheerly says he sits on his front porch and drinks Pabst Blue Ribbon while telling tales about schooners that were lost at sea. He boasts of being related, somehow, to every smuggling or looting hooligan who survived each vessel’s wreckage, even claiming that his great-great-great-grandmother was once married to Blackbeard. Sheerly says his stories grow more elaborate after seven beers.

“Are you going to buy it?” I ask as Ropey brushes sugar from his lips.

“I reckon it would be a perfect match for me. Three years old, still in good shape.”

“Did you check to see if any treasure chests are hidden in the bow?”

Ropey laughs at my attempt to be comical.

I offer, “If you kept the boat at his house, then Beatrice Lou would never have to know.”

“Ah,” he says. “There are some things that I can get away with in a marriage. But nothing that large.”

I smile.

“So how’s your bustling household? Zane’s thumb okay?”

My household, as he calls it, consists of Minnie, Zane, and myself; we live together in a duplex in the little town of Waves. Last week Zane got his thumb slammed in a kitchen cabinet when he was trying to shove all his toys into it. Minnie hoped that maybe since the thumb was hurt he’d no longer have the desire to put it in his mouth, but such is not the case. Zane stuck his sore thumb in his mouth and complained that it stung.

“Zane is Zane,” I answer as I think about how he screamed last night because we couldn’t find his stuffed squirrel, Popacorn.

“The kid misses his dad.”

“I miss his dad, too.” My voice is soft, like the breeze surrounding us. When I think of Minnie these days, it’s hard not to hear her sobs, no matter where I am.

“Maybe you and Minnie need to bring Zane over to the house.”

“I can manage the kid most days while Minnie works.” Manage— this is not a word I typically say; I think I might have picked it up from the man who fell off a jeepney.

We’re silent for a moment, breathing in the cool, damp air. I stare up at a window on the second floor and recall another Bailey House memory. All the guests had checked out and the maid was pulling the sheets off one of the king-sized beds. She asked if I wanted to help her, and I did. Later, she complimented my assistance in front of Mrs. Bailey, and lemon cookies and raspberry cream soda were presented to me in the sunroom.

“What’s up with this place?” I ask Ropey. “Do you know anything?”

“Sheerly says it’s as haunted as the day is long. Spooky, so the owners left. They said Blackbeard’s ghost lives in the basement.” He burps, excuses himself, and burps again.

“There is no basement.” I know the layout as well as I know my own duplex and have memories of so many of the rooms, including the laundry chute we used to throw Minnie’s poodle purse down when no one was looking.

“Sheerly’s got some story about it. I thought I heard her say the basement held a dead body.”

There are times my aunt’s love of a good story overrides her common sense. She makes fun of Casey’s tales, yet expects her own stories to be taken as gospel truth. “Mr. and Mrs. Bailey were too old to run it and went back to live near family in Cincinnati.”

“Then there was another couple,” Ropey says.

“When?”

“Let’s see. About the time Beatrice Lou wanted me to lose weight.” He pats his stomach for emphasis. “I reckon it was about six years ago.”

“What happened then?” It must have been when I was away in Charlotte, working after college at
The Daily Pulse
. I served as an intern at the weekly paper and then when they offered me a full-time position after graduation, I took it without a second of hesitation. But I do remember Minnie mentioning something about the Bailey House opening under new management. It wasn’t long before I got the job with Selena at
Lighthouse Views
.

“They got scared by the ghost and left.”

“Really?”

Ropey laughs, long and full, reminding me of my dad’s laughter. The two are brothers, with Sheerly in the middle. “You know Sheerly. She extracts every piece of information she can from her clients as she does all that stuff with their hair.” We both have learned that Sheerly Cut is more than a salon. It’s a culture, a society of women. “You should dig around a bit and find out more. My guess is that people just aren’t talking.”

His voice sounds funny, so I ask, “What do you mean?”

“Secrets.” My uncle wipes sugar off his cheeks. “This region is full of them.” He lets another donut find its way into his mouth.

I know he’s right; one of the first lessons of being a reporter is that there are two sides to every story, and somewhere in the middle, you’ll find the truth.

I feel satisfied as the moon bobs into the night sky and we return to our vehicles. While the date with Douglas Cannon didn’t go as I’d hoped, the time with Uncle Ropey has been fun. Life is a cornucopia of good and bad, and any time the good outweighs the bad, it’s time to be grateful.