Summer Rental (30 page)

“I was,” he said, gesturing to the paper sack with the remnants of cheeseburger and French fries. “I ran out for a little midnight snack. But now I’m back. What were you doing down there? Going for a midnight swim? Not to scare you or anything, but there are sharks out there.”

“I went for a walk,” Ellis said, leaning against the deck railing. “What time is it?”

He consulted his watch. “Nearly midnight. Must have been a hell of a stroll. I’ve been out here for over an hour.”

She slumped down onto the deck, her legs suddenly rubbery with fatigue. “I guess I lost track of where I was going. God, I must have walked a couple of miles along the beach. And then the tide started coming in, and I sort of freaked out. At night, in the dark like this, all these stairways look alike.”

“I’ll give you a tip,” Ty drawled. “Tomorrow, when you go out on the beach, look up at the stairways. Most of ’em have metal address numbers attached to ’em. Ours even says
EBBTIDE
, although you have to really get pretty close up to see it.”

Ellis leaned her head back against the railing and stretched her legs out on the deck planks, which still retained some of the heat from the sun. She wanted to jump up and run down the walkway, back to her room, away from Ty Bazemore. But she was exhausted. Physically and mentally.

Ty sat back in his chair and looked at her expectantly. Waiting for her to blast him again.

“Maybe,” she said, after a couple minutes of awkward silence, “maybe we could just pretend tonight never happened. You could go back to your garage and computer, and I could go back to … whatever.”

He got up from his chair and sank down onto the deck beside her, sitting so close that they were brushing shoulders.

“Why would we want to do that?” he asked. “I mean, was there any part of tonight that you enjoyed?”

“Seriously?” she asked, shaking her head in disbelief. “Are you telling me you had a good time tonight?”

“You didn’t?”

“I asked first,” she pointed out.

“But I paid.”

“Okay,” she relented. “Are you sure you want me to go off on you again?”

“Why not? Everybody else does.”

“As far as first dates go?” she said, brushing at the sand on her shorts and her legs. “This was pretty awful. Catastrophic, you might say.”

He tilted his head and looked at her. “If you had to pinpoint it, where would you say it all started to go wrong? The jacket? I guess it has gotten a little short in the sleeves.”

“The jacket was fine,” Ellis said. “Except for the dry-cleaner’s tag attached to your right sleeve.”

“You coulda said something.”

“You could have told me you own Ebbtide,” Ellis said. “So we’re even. Anyway, it was a first date. You don’t tell that kind of stuff on a first date.”

“Oh.”

Ty went back over the evening in his mind again. “I did notice you didn’t eat very much. So, you didn’t like the restaurant? I considered a steak house, or Italian, but then I thought, seafood. Who doesn’t like seafood at the beach?”

“I loved the restaurant,” Ellis said, hesitating.

“But?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Swordfish. Ugh. Hate, hate, hate swordfish.”

“Again, you could have said something.”

“I was trying to be polite,” Ellis said.

“Next time, just tell me what you want to eat,” Ty said, exasperated.

“Next time maybe you could ask me what I want to eat. Wait,” she said. “There’s going to be a next time?”

“I only ordered the swordfish because it was the most expensive thing on the menu,” he went on. “I was trying to impress you, in case you didn’t notice.”

“Really?” She tilted her head and considered him. “That’s sweet.”

“Okay. Aside from the swordfish, and the dry-cleaner tag, and the finding out about Mr. Culpepper thing, what else was bad?” Ty asked. “You know, so I can improve on my technique.”

Ellis rolled her eyes. “It’s not your fault, I suppose. But it’s still pretty awkward running into your old girlfriend and her husband when we’re on a date.”

Ty made a choking sound. “That wasn’t an old girlfriend.”

“No? You could have fooled me. I definitely sensed some history there. Also hostility. Not so deeply repressed hostility, I might add.”

“Oh, Kendra and I have history, all right,” Ty said ruefully. “If you consider two years of marriage to be history.”

“Marriage? You were married? To her? For two years?”

“It seemed a lot longer at the time,” Ty said.

“Wow. Just … wow.” Ellis said. “How long have you been divorced? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“It was a long time ago.”

Ellis hugged her knees to her chest, to warm up a little. “She’s beautiful.”

“She certainly thinks so,” Ty agreed. “And I guess most people would agree.”

“You must have thought she was pretty at some point,” Ellis said. “You did marry her.”

“We dated in high school, got married after college,” Ty said. “Everybody always said we were perfect for each other.”

“And then?”

“Kendra is the kind of girl who always has a plan,” Ty said. “I guess she gets that from her old man. Boomer used to be in politics, was in the state house, like that. Now he concentrates on running his law firm. And his daughter’s life. And that’s fine with Kendra, fits right in with her plans.”

“But it didn’t fit with yours?”

“It did at first,” Ty admitted. “Law school seemed like a great idea. I made decent grades in high school and as an undergrad. We got out of college, worked for a couple years, mainly so I could save money to go back to grad school, but then Kendra got the bright idea we should go to law school together. I thought, why not? We both applied to law schools. Kendra got accepted a bunch of places. Me? Looking back on it, I think Boomer probably pulled some strings to get me in at Carolina. He was on the board of visitors.”

“And then what? If you don’t mind my asking?”

“Ancient history now,” Ty said with a shrug. “It just wasn’t a good fit for me. Kendra and I were doing okay. We lived in a ratty little apartment off Franklin Street, and we were starving law students, just like all our friends. Or at least, I was. Kendra had a separate bank account, and her daddy kept it filled up all the time. So we fought about that. And a lot of other stuff. And by the time I was halfway through my second year, I knew, absolutely, that law school was not the place for me. But I stuck it out, finished the year. Then, when I told Kendra I was dropping out, she
announced that she was dropping me.”

“Ow,” Ellis said. “Ryan?”

“I prefer to think of him as Fuckface,” Ty said. “They were on the law review together. According to Kendra, things just … happened.”

“Where have I heard that before?” Ellis sympathized.

“She claimed they were ‘just friends,’” Ty said. “Of course, when she moved out of the rat hole, she moved in with him. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.”

“Again, ow. What did you do then?”

“I got a job working as a glorified office boy at a stock brokerage firm in Chapel Hill. Kept my eyes and ears open, started doing some trades, and figured out I kind of liked it. Turns out, I’m an information junkie. The guy I worked for taught me a lot, and I hit some lucky breaks. I stayed with his firm for a couple more years, then moved to Charlotte to work for another couple years. But I always missed being on the coast. I lived lean, saved my money, and eventually moved back here to Nags Head.”

“To Ebbtide,” Ellis said.

“Nah. I moved in with my dad,” Ty said. “Ebbtide belonged to my mo
m’s family. When my grandmother died, she left it to my mom’s brother, my uncle Ralph. He lives out west and didn’t really have much interest in the place. He was gonna sell it last year. By that time, real estate prices here were in the tank, and I’d managed to squirrel some money away, so I got the bright idea to buy it and keep it in the family.”

“I think that’s nice,” Ellis said. “Has your family always owned it?”

“Always,” Ty said. “And until I bought the place, virtually nothing had been done to it in all those years. Turns out, the joint is a money pit. It needs a new roof, new plumbing, new electrical. And you see the shape the kitchen and the bathrooms are in. I moved in right after I bought it and started working on it, but then the stock market did a nosedive, and I ran out of money.”

“The economy sucks,” Ellis said sympathetically. “I know, that’s what happened to me at the bank I worked for in Philly. We got swallowed up by another bank, and everybody in my department got pink slips.”

“Have you got another job lined up?”

“Not yet,” Ellis admitted. “I’ve got résumés out, but…”

“Yeah,” Ty said. “I feel your pain. When I first moved back here, I tried finding a job, but let’s face it, Nags Head ain’t Charlotte. It’s all about tourism here. Anyway, I’m tired of working for other people. I’d rather figure it out on my own, even if I have to live on next to nothing while I do that. That’s why I moved into the garage apartment and started renting out the big house. But it was too little, too late.””

Ellis shivered and hugged her knees tighter.

“You’re cold,” Ty said. He slipped an arm around her shoulder and pulled her to him. “We could go inside,” he offered.

“I’m all right,” Ellis said. She looked up at him. “What Ryan said tonight, about Ebbtide? Is it really in foreclosure?”

“Prick,” Ty muttered. “Yeah, that’s right. I got in over my head, pure and simple. I don’t want to sound too melodramatic, but if I don’t figure out a way to raise some money, fast, by September fifteenth, I’ll lose Ebbtide. That’s why I’ve been moonlighting at Caddie’s.”

“It would be so sad to lose your family home,” Ellis said. “Isn’t there anything you can do? Have you talked to anybody at the
bank? I mean, I was never in the mortgage side of things, but it seems to me the last thing a bank wants right now is to have to manage another foreclosed property. Maybe you could work something out with them?”

“I’m trying,” Ty said, “but they’re not local. The bank I got my mortgage from got taken over by another bank, in Virginia. I’ve called and written letters, but I can’t ever seem to get in contact with a real human being. And in the meantime, the clock is ticking. The legal ads have started to run. And the vultures have started to circle.”

“Like Ryan and Kendra,” Ellis said.

Ty’s face darkened. “I’ll burn it to the ground before I let them get their hands on my house.”

Ellis’s eyes widened at the ferocity of his response.

“Not literally,” Ty said. “I’ll think of something. Anyway, could we change the subject?”

“What did you have in mind?” she asked.

Ty pulled Ellis closer. He nuzzled her hair and her neck. “I was hoping maybe we could discuss your giving me a do-over on this evening.”

Ellis reached for the paper bag he’d left sitting beside his chair. “Only if you agree to share whatever’s in this bag. I didn’t have much dinner, remember?”

“Later,” Ty said. He turned her face to his and found her lips in the dark.

30

There was a knock at Julia’s bedroom door. When she opened it, Madison stood there, holding her cell phone in her hand. “We need to talk,” Madison said, her dark-ringed eyes still and serious. Her unwashed hair hung from a center part, and her cheap brown T-shirt was wrinkled and shrunken from the wash. She limped into the room without being invited, and sat down on the edge of a rickety orange-painted wooden chair.

The chair was one Julia had found at a charity thrift shop on Croatan Highway over the weekend, and in a fit of boredom, painted a shade called Valencia.

“Hey,” Julia started to say, but Madison held her hand up, palm outwards, stopping her before she could get started with any fake outrage.

Julia sank down onto her bed, which she’d just made up with a cheap cotton spread with bright pink, orange, and turquoise stripes, picked up at the Target store on her way back from the paint store.

“What’s up, Madison?” Julia asked, smoothing out a nonexistent wrinkle in the spread.

“What did you say to him?” Madison asked.

“Who?”

“Him!” Madison said, thrusting the phone at Julia. “Look, I know you think you’re smart, messing with my phone, checking my messages. But you have no idea who you are messing with here. So just cut the act and tell me exactly what he said. And what you told him.” She crossed her legs and added, “Please.”

Julia sighed. “Is Maryn your real name?”

“That’s none of your business.”

Julia leaned forward. “Oh, but it is my business. You’re living under the same roof as me. I’ve got a right to know who you are and what you’re doing here.”

“Okay, fine. You got me. I lied. Now tell me what you told him.”

“You mean Don? I didn’t tell him anything. Who is he, anyway?”

Madison’s face was taut. “He told you his name?”

Julia thought about that. “No. He asked for Maryn, I told him you weren’t there. He asked who I was, and then he hung up.”

“You’re sure that’s all that was said? Julia, this is really important. What did you say when he asked you who were?”

She shrugged. “I said I’m Julia Capelli. Who the hell are you? When the phone rang, the caller ID just said ‘unknown caller.’ After he hung up, I listened to some other messages on your phone from ‘Don.’ It was the same voice.”

Madison crossed and uncrossed her legs. She nibbled on a ragged bit of cuticle. Julia noticed that she wasn’t wearing the big diamond engagement ring. “You actually told him your name?”

“Why wouldn’t I tell him my name?” Julia asked. “Madison, why don’t you just tell me what’s going on here and stop with the twenty questions? Who is this Don guy? And why are you running away from him? What’s got you so scared?”

Madison shook her head violently. “You wouldn’t understand. Anyway, it’s not your problem.”

“The hell it isn’t! I told him my name!”

Madison looked down at the phone. “His name is Don Shackleford. He’s my husband. I found out he’s into some bad stuff. So I left. End of story.”

“Nuh-uh,” Julia said. “You didn’t just leave. You ran. And you’re traveling under an assumed name. I think you owe us an explanation.”

“The only thing I owe you guys is the rent on that crappy room upstairs,” Madison said. “Which I already paid. And if you hadn’t been so damned nosy, messing with my phone and snooping in my private life, none of this would be an issue.”