Driftwood Point Page 4

  But comfortable or not, Lis was going to have to make a trip across the drawbridge and hunt down Alec and interrogate him. It was the least she could do for Ruby. Someone had to protect her interests.

  She didn’t know where she’d find him, but St. Dennis wasn’t all that big, and if he was into contracting, someone would know where to look. She sure as heck wasn’t going to ask Ruby for directions.

  Lis followed the rocks back to the beach. She considered returning to the store to get her car, but then she’d have to face Ruby, and chances were her great-grandmother would know exactly where she was going and why. Better to walk to town—it was only a few miles. Lis had walked that and more every day when she was living in Manhattan. Even after her move to a small New Jersey suburb, her daily routine had included a long morning walk.

  It was still early, not quite nine, and the sun had yet to burn off the dew. Lis walked across the dune, sticking to the well-worn path, the grasses brushing against her legs as she passed. While she put her sandals on, a car pulled into the store’s lot, and Estelle Detweiler got out. Lis knew that Estelle, the older sister of Hedy, the island gossip, was good for keeping Ruby occupied until noon. She set out for Bay Road and the one-lane bridge that separated the island from St. Dennis.

  She paused at the bridge to permit a car to pass. The driver waved and Lis waved back, an acknowledgment more than a greeting, then walked across to the other side. She smiled as she stepped over the gridwork where the two points of the drawbridge met, just as she had as a child. Every kid who grew up on the island knew that if you stepped on that exact spot where the bridge opened, a troll would arise from the depths of the river in the blink of an eye, and just that fast, it would grab you and take you down into his lair and you’d never be seen again.

  The morning was cool for late June, the large trees along Charles Street filtering the sun. She walked along the shoulder of the road—marveling that there were still no sidewalks on this end of the town’s main street—past a pond where a heron fed, and then, further down the road, the Inn at Sinclair’s Point, one of the town’s landmarks. Back in the day, Lis had gone to school with Ford Sinclair, the youngest of the three kids whose family had owned and operated the inn forever. She wondered if they still owned the place, then realized if they’d sold it, it would have been considered the kind of news that someone—Ruby, Owen, or her mother, who still had friends on the island—would have told her.

  She passed a park—she couldn’t recall the name but remembered it had ball fields, though she’d never played there—and on to the center of town. St. Dennis still had only one traffic light. It was at the corner of Kelly’s Point Road and Charles Street, and it marked the beginning of the shopping district. Lis slowed and noted the new arrivals since she’d last been back. The flower shop, Petals and Posies, had been there for years; likewise, Lola’s Café, an upscale eatery. Cuppachino had opened right before her last long visit, and she fondly remembered the excellent coffee she’d had there. Across the road was Sips—beverages only—which had been around when Lis was in high school. Next to it, however, was a fancy-looking shop that had all manner of gorgeous things in the window, things like shoes and bags and swimsuits, sundresses and one knock-out dress-up dress, a black sleeveless V-neck number with tiny sparkly things scattered on it like stars against a dark night sky. The name of the shop—Bling—was painted on the window as well as on the door. She’d passed it numerous times on her previous visits home, but since she rarely stayed beyond two or three days, she’d never had the occasion to stop in. This time around she might check it out when she had a moment. But that moment wasn’t now. She was on a mission.

  The light was red and the DON’T WALK sign was flashing, so Lis waited at the corner for the go signal. There was a sign with an arrow pointing down Kelly’s Point Road for the municipal building, the marina, Captain Walt’s Seafood Restaurant, and One Scoop or Two, the local ice cream shop. Hadn’t Ruby said that Alec had the skipjack at the marina? That was as good a place as any to start.

  Lis headed left down the road, which had been sand and gravel the last time she’d been there. The macadam was a nice improvement: Stones had gotten into her sandals the last time she’d walked that road, a few years back when she was home for Owen’s wedding. His bride had wanted the photos taken along the dock overlooking the bay. The photos had lasted longer than the marriage.

  Must have been something he’d said, Lis mused. No one had liked his wife, Cindy, and no one had so much as blinked when she left him and filed for divorce less than a year later. Some guys weren’t meant to settle down. Lis suspected Owen might be one of them.

  At the end of the road a wooden boardwalk went left and right. To the left was One Scoop or Two, and the marina lay to the right behind Captain Walt’s.

  The sign out front of the marina read ELLISON’S—BOATS FOR THE BAY SINCE 1896. The building was as wide as it was long, of weathered white clapboard that was showing its age. The roof was slate and large double doors opened along the bay side. Windows ran across the front on both sides of a glass door with the name painted on it in black. Lis tried the door and found it locked, so she walked around to the side and followed the sound of machinery through the open double doors.

  Ten feet in, the skipjack Eben Carter bought in 1932 was perched atop a series of cinder blocks. Pieces were missing from the hull and the rudder lay on the floor next to it. The boom, as long as the boat itself, lay alongside the empty hull. The mast, a full sixty feet long, stood at a wide angle to the wall. The whining noise from the other side of the boat was deafening. Lis covered her ears and ventured close enough to peer around the bow.

  His back was to her, but she knew instinctively that she’d found the man she was looking for. He wore a pair of ripped khaki shorts and a gray T-shirt that had holes near the shoulder and the sleeves ripped off to show deeply tanned arms. His blond hair, mostly hidden by a baseball cap worn backward, was just long enough to inch over the back neckline of the shirt. He held a sander, which he ran back and forth over a length of wood.

  Lis waited till the whining of the sander paused before saying, “That’s my great-uncle Eb’s boat.”

  Alec glanced over his shoulder and gave her a once-over, top to bottom. “Good to see you again, too, Lis.”

  He wore goggles upon which a layer of fine dust had accumulated. He wiped the lens with the bottom of his shirt and turned the sander back on. Lis waited for him to finish. When the machine finally went silent, Alec set it on the concrete floor.

  “So what brings you to town?” he asked without turning around.

  “I want to know what’s going on,” she said, annoyed that he’d taken his time in turning off the sander.

  “In St. Dennis?” He lifted the smooth board and turned to face her, his eyes still the cornflower blue she remembered. “Well, let’s see. The parade is on for Fourth of July, just like always. The annual garden tour starts in another week or so, I forget just when. I never did make it to that. But you know, you can pick up the latest St. Dennis Gazette and get the whole calendar of events from now right on through December. Grace Sinclair does a fine job tracking down everything that happens in town.”

  “You know that isn’t what I meant.” She glared at him. “What’s going on with you and my great-grandma?”

  “What’s going on is that I’m helping her to stay in her home, keep her business going, without her ending up in the hospital with a broken hip or worse or inviting a lawsuit from someone who trips over those loose floorboards in the store.”

  “I didn’t notice any loose floorboards.”

  “That’s because I nailed them down.”

  “How did you talk her into letting you do everything you’re doing?”

  “Maybe you should be asking her that.”

  “I already did.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And her answer wasn’t r
eally an answer. I want to know how it came about and how much it’s costing her.”

  “Don’t you think that’s her business? Hers and mine?”

  “Not if she can’t afford it.”

  “She can afford it. That all?”

  “No. I don’t get it. Owen and I both have tried for years to get her to make some changes in the place but she wouldn’t hear of it. Now I come home and there’s a whole new living space . . .”

  “No way a hundred-year-old lady should be climbing stairs a couple of times a day.”

  “. . . a new kitchen . . .”

  “Old stove was about to set the place on fire.”

  “. . . new bathroom . . .”

  “She couldn’t get in and out of that old tub without falling. One of these days she was bound to break something and that would’a been the end of her and the Cannonball Island General Store would have been closed for good. No way was that going to happen.”

  “. . . a new back porch . . .”

  “Oh, now, that was a necessity. That thing was headed south in the next big storm. Scared the life out of me to just walk past whenever a big wind kicked up.” He nodded, his hands on his hips. “Yeah, replacing that was the first thing that had to happen.”

  “How did you talk her into it?” Lis was all out of patience.

  “Well, since you’re all hell-bent to know and you somehow feel you’re entitled—I didn’t ask her. I just started to work on it. She stuck her head out the back door, and I said, ‘Miz Ruby, I’m fixing this old ramshackle porch of yours before it falls down on someone. So if you hear some noise out back, it’s just me and my hammer. With your permission, of course.’ ”

  “And just like that she said okay?”

  “No, she said, ‘Go on, then, boy.’ Took me a couple of weeks, but once it was done, she liked it.”

  “Is that when she said, ‘Gee, thanks, Alec. Take my boat’?”

  “Our payment arrangement is between the two of us.” He walked over to a cooler that sat on the floor and opened it and took out a bottle of water. He twisted off the cap and took a long, deep drink.

  “Bottle of water?” he asked.

  “No, thank you,” she said, though she was thirsty as hell.

  She tried not to watch as he lifted the front of his shirt and wiped the sweat off his face, but it was too much to ask that she look away from the sight of that tanned, toned torso.

  “If you’re worried that I’m taking advantage of her, that I’m going to bankrupt her or, God forbid, end up owning the general store, I can assure you that no one is taking advantage of anyone. She’s being charged a reasonable amount. Let’s call it the friends-and-family discount. Anyone else would have charged her a hell of a lot more. Believe me, the value of this old heap was a drop in the bucket for my time, but we called it an even exchange.”

  “If the work is worth more, why not charge her what you’d charge anyone else? Why take just the boat as repayment?”

  “Because the boat is a bit of history. It was the first skipjack that Clifford Ellison built here in St. Dennis.”

  “So?” The name meant nothing to her.

  “As to why didn’t I charge her what I’d have charged anyone else? Because she isn’t anyone else.” He ignored the first question and finished the water before tossing the bottle end over end into a trash can near the door. “She’s Ruby Carter. The last of her kind and one of the wisest people I’ve ever met. She’s a legend around here—a treasure—which you’d know if you’d spent a little more time with her.”

  “Excuse me, but I’ve spent plenty of time with her over the years. I lived with her, remember?”

  “Right. Seventeen years ago. How long has it been since you’ve spent more than a weekend home?”

  “I’ve spent plenty of long weekends here—three and four-day weekends, actually—but I don’t have to have that conversation with you.”

  “Hey, you brought it up. You want to know why I spent so much of my time over there?” He leaned against the hull of the skipjack, which Lis had to admit was rotted through in several places. “You being family, you’d have to know that Ruby’s store is one of the original structures still standing on Cannonball Island. It’s like something out of a movie set, with those old wooden floors and shelves and that oak counter—God, you can see how it’s been worked smooth over the years from the wear it’s taken. That’s original glass in most of the windows on the first floor. The front door is four inches thick. And that Coca-Cola sign over the front door? It still works, still lights up, did you notice? I keep telling her she should have that thing insured. The store should be on the National Register of Historic Places. As soon as I have time, I’m going to work to see that gets done.”

  “Why does that matter to you? You’re not an islander.”

  “Cannonball Island is a place unto itself, with its own strange history, its own mythology, and its own stories. It has its own heroes and its own villains. But it’s going to undergo some changes in the not-too-distant future. The time to preserve what’s there is now.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? What kind of changes?”

  “Ask Ruby, she knows. Now, if your interrogation is over, I’d like to get back to work.”

  He put the goggles back on and picked up the sander.

  “Oh, hey. I almost forgot to congratulate you. I hear you’re a big-time artist now. Galleries in New York City displaying your paintings, celebrities lining up to buy them, appearances on TV, people writing about you. I heard there’s going to be a special showing at the new art center.” He set the sander on a nearby cinder block. “What kind of paintings do you do, anyway?”

  “Landscapes, mostly. Cityscapes.”

  “Cityscapes, eh? Tall buildings, bustling traffic, that sort of thing?”

  “Some. There’s nature in the city, parks, too.” He was making Lis feel defensive, but she wasn’t sure why. “Lots of trees, some ponds.”

  “Trees and ponds.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “So you left the island and went all the way to New York looking for natural subjects to paint, and you found trees and ponds. There’s a certain irony in that, don’t you think?”

  Before she could respond, he turned his back, flipped the switch on the sander, and went back to work.

  Chapter Three

  Alec finished sanding the board that he would eventually replace on the hull of the skipjack. He’d been working on the boat since early spring, since the morning Ruby Carter had agreed to hand it over in return for the time he would spend renovating the old general store and building new living quarters for her on the first floor. The only money that had changed hands since then went to materials. He had paid the plumber, the electrician, and the occasional helper he’d had to hire from his own pocket. When it was all added up, Alec figured Ruby was still ahead of the game in dollars, but he’d come to own the boat he’d been dreaming about since he was a kid, so in terms of overall satisfaction—as happy as she was with her new living space—he figured he was the clear winner.

  Alec stood back to admire the Annie G. Even now, with her partially rotten hull and holes in the bow, to Alec, she was beautiful. He knew that part of her allure was due to the legend that surrounded her, that of the mysterious disappearance of her namesake, Anne Gregory. He’d heard the story over and over as a child, every time old Eben Carter had come into Ellison’s to shoot the breeze with Alec’s uncle Cliff and the two bachelors—the old one and his younger counterpart—would share a brandy or two. Alec would sit quietly at Cliff’s desk doing homework or reading comic books, all the while listening to the tales the older men would tell. By the time he was twelve, Alec knew all the stories by heart, but that never stopped him from hanging on every word.

  “Clifford, she was the prettiest girl on Cannonball Island.” Eb would sit on one of the old metal folding chairs Cliff ke
pt in the shop, and he’d prop his feet up on whatever was handy—a toolbox, some concrete blocks, a tall stack of newspapers Cliff kept in the shop to wipe off paintbrushes. “Loved that girl the first time I laid eyes on her, back when we were just kids. Even then, I knew she was the only girl for me. Yessir, it was love at first sight. Couldn’t believe my good luck, that she loved me, too.”

  “No explaining love, Eb. No rhyme or reason to it, best I can see.” Cliff would lean against whatever boat he was working on that day and light one of the cigarettes that would, in time, take his life.

  “Yep. She was a beauty.” Eb’s eyes would glaze over. “Worst day of my life, the day she disappeared. Searched for her every which way, but it was like she just went poof! And she was gone like she was never even here.”

  Once Alec asked his uncle what Eb was talking about, what had happened to Annie.

  “Nobody knows, Alec. That’s the tragedy of it.” Cliff’s eyes had shifted to the photograph of Eb and his boat that hung on the wall. He’d taken it just before the skipjack races the previous spring. “Young woman vanishes into thin air like that, it’s just not right. No one who knew her will ever know peace. For sure, old Eb won’t.”

  “Who was she?” Alec persisted.

  “Girl from Cannonball Island. Eb’s sweetheart. They were going to be married that year at Christmas.”

  “Maybe she ran away,” Alec had suggested. “Maybe she didn’t want to marry Eb and have her name on the back of his boat.”

  Cliff had nodded. “More than one said the same thing back then, but according to everyone who knew her—including her sisters and her best friends—she was crazy about Eb and wanted to marry him.”