Текст книги "Summer Rental"
Автор книги: Mary Kay Andrews
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 27 страниц)
10
It wasn’t until her stomach rumbled that Maryn realized how hungry she was. She pulled the car into the next strip shopping center she passed. The place was called The Picky Pelican. Stupid name for a restaurant. But she was really, really hungry.
And she was desperate to talk to Adam. Her one friend. Funny, when you thought about it. Adam Kuykendall was the least likely candidate for a best friend that Maryn could think of. Short and stocky, with thinning blond hair, geeky glasses, and a scraggly soul patch on his chin, Adam and Maryn had bonded as soon as she’d started work at Prescott and Associates, a midsized family-owned insurance agency in Cherry Hill.
The other women in the office wanted nothing to do with Maryn, giving her disapproving sideways glances, pointedly excluding her from their lunchtime cliques and after-work drink outings. Most were older, married, with kids, even grandkids. Adam was the only male nonagent in the whole office.
So they were both outsiders. At first, Maryn had just assumed he was gay. But he was surprisingly good company, and he’d won her over her first week at work with his wickedly cutting comments about their bitchy female coworkers. Within a week of meeting, they’d established their rituals—lunch from the Italian deli around the corner, Friday night happy hour, Sunday movie matinees—chick flicks for her, slasher movies for him.
And then Don came into her life eighteen months ago. And everything changed.
She had to talk to Adam right away, warn him. Don knows. I’m gone. I’m afraid. Afraid he’ll come after me. Afraid he’ll come after you. Be careful. I’m gone.
Adam would have to wait, though. She yawned, got out of the car, locked it, and looked around, automatically tensing at the sight of a black SUV and, quickly, rebuking herself. This SUV was an Explorer, not an Escalade. Don Shackleford did not know where she was. Yet.
Inside the restaurant, all the tables were full. There was one seat vacant, at the counter, between a guy who looked like a construction worker and a young woman her age, with a sunburnt nose, who looked to have just walked in off the beach.
The restaurant smelled like hamburgers and French fries. Maryn’s stomach growled again. She needed food, a bed, a new name, new identity, new life. But for now, a seat at the counter at The Picky Pelican would have to do.
11
Dorie sat alone at the luncheonette counter. Even though it was nearly two, the place was still mobbed with a late lunch crowd. “Here ya go, hon,” the waitress said, as she carefully poured the chocolate shake from the stainless-steel shaker into the tall, frosted glass and then placed it on the fluted white-paper place mat. “Wait,” the waitress said. She turned to the back bar and returned with a can of whipped cream in one hand and a maraschino cherry in the other. “There now,” the waitress said, plopping the cherry atop the mound of whipped cream.
“Thank you so much,” Dorie said, shooting the waitress a smile. “This looks awesome.”
She plunged the straw into the shake and took a deep sip. The sensation of the ice-cold chocolate sent a chill down her sunburnt back, but that didn’t slow her down. When she’d woken up back at the beach, Ellis and Julia were gone, and she was starving. Again. She’d washed the sand off at the outside shower, slipped into her cover-up, and gone in search of something to eat. The little luncheonette was called The Picky Pelican. It sat in the middle of a strip shopping center only a few blocks from Ebbtide, and it reminded her of Clary’s Soda Fountain, back home.
So she’d found the seat at the counter, but when the waitress brought the menu, nothing really appealed to her. Except a chocolate milk shake.
Dorie tried to take her time finishing the shake. She’d felt a little guilty, leaving without telling the girls where she was going, but then, hadn’t they gone off without her while she was sleeping on her lounge chair?
She pulled a magazine out of her beach bag and flicked idly through the pages.
“Ah-hem.” A woman in expensive-looking designer sunglasses cleared her throat.
Dorie looked up from her magazine. “Hello,” she said.
“Would you mind if I sat here?” The woman gestured at the empty stool beside Dorie’s. It was the only vacant one at the counter.
“Not at all,” Dorie said.
“Thanks.” The woman sat down and silently picked up a menu. She was attractive, maybe a little younger than Dorie, and with her tailored black slacks, black sling-back stiletto heels, and clingy silk leopard-print blouse, she looked distinctly out of place amongst the T-shirts-and-shorts-wearing beach crowd in the restaurant. Dorie went back to her magazine, forcing herself to take tiny sips of her milk shake. What she really wanted was a second shake. But this one cost nearly four bucks, and she’d have to leave a buck tip, and that was five bucks that she hadn’t budgeted on spending. Five bucks she really shouldn’t spend.
She looked down at her cell phone, and for the tenth time that day, tried to force herself to call her sister. Willa had plenty of money. Arthur was rich, and Willa hadn’t worked a day since she’d married. It was rotten of her to cancel at the last minute, and even rottener not to offer to pay her share anyway. Back when she’d invited herself to come along with the others, she’d even hinted to Dorie that she’d be happy to pay for both their shares. Of course, she’d never mentioned the offer again.
She shouldn’t have come, Dorie thought glumly. When Willa had canceled, she should have stayed home too. She had no business spending all this money for a month at the beach. Especially now.
The waitress came over, and the woman next to her ordered a club sandwich and an iced tea. Dorie’s stomach growled. Suddenly she felt she would kill for a club sandwich. Even though she’d had a grilled-cheese sandwich for lunch back at the house, not to mention a mound of potato chips.
Dorie turned back to her magazine and tried to concentrate on an article offering “Ten Tips to Save Money Now.” The article was a joke, advising readers to cut corners by giving up their Starbucks and doing their own nails. Dorie didn’t go to Starbucks. And she hadn’t had a professional manicure in years.
A few moments later, the waitress was back with the woman’s food. “Can I get you anything else?” she heard the waitress ask.
“Um, well,” the blond woman said, her voice low. “I’m looking for a motel room around here. Nothing fancy. It doesn’t have to be on the beach or anything. Just something clean and cheap, maybe with a little kitchenette. Would you have any suggestions?”
“Cheap?” the waitress laughed. “Honey, this is high season at Nags Head. I guess that would depend on what you call cheap. My cousin and her kids stayed at a little place over on the inlet. Joint didn’t even have a pool. And they had to give close to two hundred bucks a night.”
“Oh.” The blonde’s voice sounded tired, defeated even.
“You might want to drive on down the road, check someplace like Elizabeth City. I think they got a Motel 6 over there.”
“Thanks,” the blonde said. The waitress drifted away.
“Excuse me.”
Dorie looked up from her magazine.
“Could you pass the pepper, please?” Maryn pointed at the pepper shaker directly in front of Dorie.
“Here you go,” Dorie said, sliding the shaker over.
Maryn deconstructed her club sandwich, carefully removing each layer of bread, and with a knife, scraping off the excess mayonnaise before sprinkling the thin slices of bloodred tomato with an avalanche of pepper.
She caught Dorie watching her with interest. “I wish, just once, they’d ask before slathering mayo all over everything,” she said.
“I know,” Dorie agreed. “I’m the same way with mustard. A little goes a long way, if you ask me. But that sure is a pretty tomato.”
“Um-hmm,” the blonde said, restacking her sandwich. “We don’t get tomatoes this nice until really late in the season back home. But there’s nothing like a Jersey tomato.”
Dorie laughed. “You haven’t tasted one out of my daddy’s garden. He grows these huge ones, he calls ’em Mortgage Lifters, I could eat ’em ’til I’m sick.”
“Are you from around here?” the blonde asked.
“Nope,” Dorie said. “I’m from Savannah, Georgia. How ’bout you?”
“Jersey,” Maryn said, deliberately vague. She took a delicate bite of her sandwich and dabbed with her napkin at a bit of mayo on her lip.
“My friends and I are here for the whole month,” Dorie volunteered.
“Oh?” the blonde put the sandwich down. “At a motel? Isn’t that pretty expensive?”
“We’ve got a house,” Dorie said proudly. “Right on the beach. There are three of us, and we share expenses, so it works out to be way cheaper than a motel. Of course,” she added ruefully, “it’s more expensive than we’d planned, because my sister canceled on us at the last minute.”
“A house,” Maryn said thoughtfully. “How do you go about finding something like that?”
Dorie laughed. “Ellis, one of my girlfriends? She’s a planning freak. She put this whole trip together. I think she found it on VRBO. Or maybe Craigslist.”
“VRBO?”
“Vacation Rentals by Owner. It’s like an international website for rental houses all over the world.”
“Never heard of that before,” Maryn admitted. “Maybe I should check it out. I’m looking for a place to stay around here for a couple weeks.”
“Good luck on that. I think things get booked up around here pretty early. Ellis booked our house months ago. Of course, that’s when we were planning to have five people instead of only three.”
“This was sort of a last-minute decision,” Maryn said, shrugging. “Guess I’ll maybe look for a place in Elizabeth City. Although the idea of a Motel 6, that’s kinda grim. I was hoping to find something on the beach.”
Maryn returned her attention to her sandwich.
And Dorie had an idea. Her bedroom—the one she and Stephen were to have shared on the top floor, was lonely. She’d felt isolated with Ellis and Julia on the second floor, so she’d moved down to the room that would have been Willa’s.
She eyed the blonde warily. She was expensively dressed, well groomed. Was it crazy, this idea taking root? She’d been obsessed with money worries since arriving at Nags Head. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t such a crazy idea.
Dorie cleared her throat. “Um, don’t take this the wrong way, okay?”
The blonde turned and raised her sunglasses. Her eyes were a clear cornflower blue. “Yes?”
“Look,” Dorie said, blushing a little. “I had an idea. You’re looking for a place to stay at the beach, and as it happens, we’ve got an extra bedroom and bath.…”
“Oh,” the blonde said. “Well, I don’t know.…”
“It’s pretty private,” Dorie went on. “You’d have the top floor of the house. My husband and I were going to stay there, but he couldn’t come at the last minute, and then my sister canceled too, so we’ve got all this extra space.”
The blonde stared at her, as though she were inspecting a head of cabbage at the supermarket. Dorie felt herself blushing again. What the hell was she doing? Inviting a total stranger to move in with them? The girls would think she’d gone nuts.
“I could use the kitchen?” the blonde asked.
“Uh, yeah. I mean, of course,” Dorie stuttered. “You can have access to the whole house. We’re pretty casual, it’s just the three of us. I’m a schoolteacher, and my friend Julia is a model. And Ellis works at a bank. Or, actually, she used to work at a bank.”
“How much?” Maryn asked.
Now it was Dorie’s turn to stare back. The blonde’s clothes looked expensive. And her jewelry looked even more expensive. She wore a huge diamond solitaire on her right ring finger and a diamond tennis bracelet on her left wrist. The handbag she balanced on her lap was white ostrich skin, the size of a small dog. The zipper pull bore a Prada nameplate. And the gold letters on the sleek tortoiseshell sunglasses perched on her head spelled out DIOR. Dorie was no expert, but the pocketbook and the sunglasses looked like the real thing to her.
She did the math in her head, adding an extra five hundred-dollar cushion, and named the price.
“Hmm,” the blonde said. “I wasn’t thinking anywhere near that much.”
“It’s the nicest bedroom in the house,” Dorie pointed out. “With beach access. And off-street parking.”
“Is there a garage?” Maryn asked eagerly.
“Yeees,” Dorie said, though she had no idea if the garage guy would be willing to let somebody else park in it. Maybe if they offered to throw some of this woman’s cash his way, he’d agree to share.
“Does it have a private entrance?”
Dorie bit her lip. There was an outside spiral staircase leading up to the third floor, but it was narrow and scary-looking, and none of the girls had even thought to try going up it. Still, it was technically a private entrance. And this woman was anxious to have a room with a garage and a private entrance. And she obviously had the money to pay for both.
“It has a private entrance,” Dorie said, nodding for emphasis. “But if you want to park in the garage, that’ll be an extra hundred bucks a week.”
The blonde took a sip of her iced tea. She put her glass down on the counter, and twisted the diamond solitaire ring for a moment. Dorie found herself holding her breath.
“Fine,” she said finally. “I’ll take it.”
Dorie grinned. “Great. But we’ll want the rent in cash. In advance.”
Maryn shook her head. “I’d prefer to pay half now, half at the end of the month. In case I have a change of plans.”
“Deal,” Dorie said, putting out her hand. “By the way, my name is Dorie Dunaway.”
The blonde hesitated, and then took Dorie’s hand. “I’m Madison. Madison Venable. When can I move in?”
Dorie looked down at her watch. “How’s four o’clock? I’ll want to let my friends know you’re coming and make sure your space in the garage is empty.”
“That’ll work,” Madison said. “I’ve got some things to take care of this afternoon, then I’ll be over.”
“The house is called Ebbtide,” Dorie said, putting her money on the counter beside her empty glass. “It’s three blocks north of here, on the beach road, which is Virginia Dare. There’s a sign at the entrance to the driveway, and you’ll see my red van.”
12
Julia and Ellis were sitting on the front porch, painting each other’s toenails a ridiculous shade of neon green. “There you are!” Ellis cried, as Dorie flopped down onto a rocking chair beside her. “Where’d you disappear to?”
“I woke up and you guys were gone,” Dorie said accusingly.
“We went for ice cream,” Julia said. “We didn’t think you’d care.”
Dorie laughed. “That’s what I did too, only it was a milk shake.” She licked her lips. “Yummy. I don’t know when the last time was that I had a real milk shake made with real chocolate syrup and ice cream and the works. Not to mention whipped cream and a cherry.”
“Sounds divine,” Julia said. She held the bottle of nail polish aloft. “It’s called Lime-a-Lishus. Want to be next?”
“No thanks,” Dorie said. “I did my toes right before I left home.”
“We were just talking about what to do about dinner,” Ellis said. “It’s your turn tonight. Got any thoughts?”
“Not yet,” Dorie said, sitting on the edge of the rocking chair so that it leaned into the girls. “Listen, you guys, I just did something kinda crazy.”
“What? You picked up a guy along with your milk shake?” Julia laughed. “Now that’s our old Dorie!”
“Lord no!” Dorie said. “Here’s the thing. I kinda rented out the top floor of this house to a woman I just met.”
“Sure you did,” Ellis said lazily, flexing her toes and admiring her daring new look.
“For reals,” Dorie said, sitting up straight. “I totally did. Her name’s Madison, she dresses like she’s got plenty of bucks, and I overheard her asking the waitress about renting a motel room with a kitchenette. She was sitting next to me at the restaurant, and we kind of struck up a conversation. So I offered her the room that was going to be mine and Stephen’s. And she took it. She’s going to pay us six hundred dollars more than Willa would have. So what do you guys think?”
Julia put the bottle of nail polish on the floor. “I think,” she said slowly, “that you have lost your freaking mind. You can’t be serious, Dorie. Do you mean to tell me you just invited a total stranger to live with us for the next month? Don’t you think that’s something you might have run by Ellis and me?”
Dorie bit her lip. “Yeah, I guess. But the money will more than make up for what Willa would have paid. I just thought, I mean, it’s sort of my fault Willa let us all down. She’s my sister, and I’m the one who talked you guys into letting her come. I should have known she would pull a stunt like that. I just figured it was my responsibility to fix things. So I did.”
Ellis took Dorie’s hand. “You’re really worried about the money part, I know. But honey, you’re not responsible for what Willa did. And Julia and I aren’t mad at you about it. That’s just Willa.”
“I am worried about the money,” Dorie cried. “I mean, Ellis, you’re out of work, and Julia’s not working as much as she used to, so I think money’s tight for all of us.…”
“Who says I’m not working?” Julia said, bristling. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” Dorie said, backpedaling.
“Julia!” Ellis said sharply. “Cut the crap. You just told me yourself that you’re not working as much. And anyway, you know Dorie didn’t mean it like that. The truth is, money is kinda tight for all of us. But Dorie, you really should have talked to us about this before you offered to rent out your room.”
“I know,” Dorie said, sniffling. “God, I’m such a screwup. But, it all happened so fast. And it just seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“What do you even know about this girl?” Julia asked.
Dorie hesitated. “She’s from New Jersey, and on vacation, sort of a spur-of-the-moment beach trip … and, oh yeah, she hates it when they put too much mayo on a sandwich.”
“Oh, she’s a mayo hater, is she? Say no more! That seals the deal for me.” Julia rolled her eyes.
Dorie bit her lip. “I guess I could tell Madison we’ve changed our minds.…” Her voice trailed off. “She’s coming over at four. I’ll tell her then.”
“Well.…” Ellis cleared her throat. “It is a lot of money.”
“And the room’s just sitting there, empty,” Dorie reminded them. “It’s not like she’d be rooming with us. Not even on the same floor as the rest of us.”
“But she’s a stranger, Dorie,” Julia said. “You don’t really know anything about her. Maybe she’s a pathological liar. Maybe she’s really from Arkansas. And maybe she actually adores mayo and can’t stand ketchup. Who knows? She could walk down those stairs one night and murder us all in our beds, as we’re sleeping.”
“But, why would she do something like that?” Dorie asked, digging in her heels. Julia’s bossiness was starting to wear thin with her. The more Julia protested Madison’s coming, the more Dorie thought it was a good idea. “Anyway, if you’re that worried about her, we could all get locks on the bedroom doors.”
“Surely, that’s not necessary,” Ellis said, her voice trailing off.
Dorie studied Ellis, knowing she was the swing vote on the matter of Madison.
“Just meet her, please?” Dorie said, keeping her eyes on Ellis. “You’ll see, she’s perfectly nice. And the setup is perfect. Madison could come and go by that outside stairway around back. That’s what she wanted, a separate entrance. And she wanted to make sure she could use the kitchen, and of course, I told her that would be fine. You guys, she seems like somebody we could trust. She agreed to pay cash—half up front, half at the end of the month. I watched her drive off. She’s got a new-looking Volvo SUV. And she’s got some major-league diamonds. And, I mean, she was wearing Dior sunglasses and carrying a Prada bag. I guess they were the real thing, I don’t really know a lot about that kind of stuff.…”
“I do,” Julia said quickly. “I can spot bootleg Prada from a mile away.”
“Okay, when she comes over, you can totally check out all that stuff,” Dorie said. “What do you say?”
“It couldn’t hurt to meet her,” Ellis said. “Right, Julia?”
“Whatever,” Julia said, mustering a stern look. “But when this homicidal maniac slashes you to pieces with a butcher knife, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Then it’s settled,” Dorie said happily. “Unless you guys get just a really weird vibe, Madison is in. Now, I’ll just run upstairs and leave some clean towels in the bathroom. It’s the least I can do, since she’s taking up Willa’s slack.”
“I’ll give you a hand,” Ellis volunteered.
“There’s just one more thing,” Dorie added. “Madison wants to be able to keep her car in the garage. I told her we’d have to charge her a hundred dollars more a week, and she didn’t bat an eyelash.”
“We don’t have access to the garage,” Ellis said. “Garage boy keeps his Bronco there.”
“There’s room for two cars,” Dorie said. “Maybe Ty Bazemore wouldn’t mind. Maybe you could ask Mr. Culpepper for permission.”
“Maybe,” Ellis said, sounding noncommittal. “I’ll check and see.”
