Carolina Isle

  “How was it?” Sara asked as soon as they were inside the pretty room.

  Ariel collapsed onto the sofa at the foot of the bed, while Sara scurried around and got all the things she knew R.J. would want—which was pretty much everything he’d brought with him except for his clothes.

  “He sleeps naked,” Ariel said.

  “Did I forget to tell you that?”

  “Yes, you did. You forgot to tell me a lot of things, like that his computer gets a funny screen on it and he expected me to fix it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Turned it off, then back on. What I know about computers you could put on the head of a pin. Does he walk around naked in front of you?”

  Sara was putting R.J.’s recharged camera batteries in his case. “Why are you so interested in his naked body?”

  “I’m not. It’s just that …”

  Sara looked out the window and saw David and R.J. standing close together. Too close. Rather like dogs circling each other. “We have to get out there,” she said. “Here, take this.” She thrust a briefcase and camera bag onto Ariel’s lap.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that R.J. won’t like David.”

  “Why not?” There was disbelief in Ariel’s voice. “David is so boring that everyone likes him.”

  “Boring?” Sara said, looking at Ariel sharply. A man with the ambition to be president is boring? Not quite. “R.J. had to work his way up from the bottom and David’s had everything handed to him. David is the kind of man R.J. despises.”

  “Does that mean that if R.J. knew who I was he’d despise me too?”

  “You’re too pretty for R.J. to dislike,” Sara said.

  “Today you’re the pretty one. I need about three more hours of sleep and a hairdresser. You, on the other hand, look great. You have on Prada and I’m in … what is this?” Ariel asked.

  “Liz Claiborne, I think, but I don’t memorize the labels in my clothes. Whatever it is, it looks great on you. Really. And the shorter hair suits you. Come on, he’ll be blowing the horn in another minute.”

  “Not really?” Ariel said, and her voice sounded a bit breathless. “He’s really an exciting man, isn’t he?”

  “You’re going to find out how exciting he is if you don’t get out there immediately.”

  “What will he do?” Ariel asked.

  “Not whatever it is that you seem to think he’ll do,” Sara said as she piled Ariel’s arms full and pushed her out the door. They’d be back by night fall and, if she was lucky, Sara would have a few days alone with David. She smiled at him from behind Ariel and thought about being in the backseat with him on the three-hour drive to King’s Isle.

  But R.J. thwarted her. “You’ll have to sit in front with me since you’re to be my navigator, my co-captain,” he said. Since this made sense, there was nothing Sara could think of to protest, so she took the seat next to him, while David and Ariel got into the back. They headed east toward North Carolina’s notoriously dangerous coast. Hurricanes, shipwrecks, and a long history of pirates overhung the many islands dotting the coast. Some islands were large and well inhabited, and some were just spots of land sticking up in the way of the ships trying to get to the mainland.

  “Think we’ll see Blackbeard’s ghost?” R.J. asked Sara as soon as they were underway.

  Since she was pretending to be someone else, she couldn’t give him her usual monosyllabic replies, but she wanted to. She didn’t like the way he was flirting with the woman he thought she was. “Is it Blackbeard’s ghost or his treasure you want to see?” she asked.

  “Maybe the ghost would lead me to the treasure.”

  “I would think that you had enough treasure, Mr. Brompton.”

  “Everyone wants more, Miss Weatherly. It’s called ambition and it’s highly prized in this glorious country of ours.”

  “It’s also called greed,” she said, but she made herself smile as she said it.

  Sara pulled the sun visor down and saw in the little makeup mirror that David and Ariel were head-to-head in the backseat, whispering. I wonder what they’re plotting? Sara thought, then put the visor back up.

  “Come on, Miss Weatherly—and, by the way, I told you to call me R.J.—hasn’t there been something in your life that you wanted so much that you were willing to work hard to get it?”

  “It’s good to try to better yourself,” she said as primly as she could manage. “But when you get to the point where you have too much and still want more, it’s time to stop.”

  “I guess you mean me,” he said, smiling. “But, Miss Weatherly, it’s not as though you work for me and have to keep your mouth shut. Tell me what you think. Surely Sara has told you some things about me.”

  “I don’t reveal confidences,” Sara said as she glanced over her shoulder. What were they talking about?

  “So tell me everything about Arundel,” R.J. said. “I’m thinking about buying a vacation house there.”

  “Do you want to know about the people or the land values?”

  He laughed. “You know, even if I didn’t know you were Sara’s cousin, I’d know it. You two sound and act very much alike.”

  “I couldn’t possibly do all that Sara does,” she shot back. “Sara is a saint.”

  “I quite agree,” he said quietly, looking in the mirror at the two in the backseat. “On the other hand, she’s a terrible secretary. Just the other day, she nearly spilled a pot of hot coffee on me.”

  Sara had to turn her head away so he wouldn’t see the anger in her face. After everything she did for him, all he could remember was that she’d almost spilled some coffee! Right now she wished she could erase the “almost.”

  “Tell me about the people of Arundel,” he said. “Tell me about your life there.”

  Sara put some of her acting training into use and calmed herself. She made herself into Ariel and began talking about all that she’d memorized. She told him about her mother, and her childhood with her homeschooling. She told him about the old families in Arundel, and how they still named their children after the founding fathers. Sara did her best to sound lighthearted, as though she hadn’t a care in the world—the way she’d seen Ariel’s life until she met that virago who was her mother.

  Sara had memorized the way to get to King’s Isle, so she gave him directions at every junction.

  “What made you choose King’s Isle?” she asked.

  “Ever hear of a man named Charley Dunkirk?”

  “Sara and I have been corresponding for years, so I know a bit more about you and your business than you’d think.”

  “I can’t imagine that Sara ever wrote you a word about me. Most of the time she acts like she hates me. The stories I could tell you! Oh, well, where was I?”

  Sara narrowed her eyes at him. “Mr. Dunkirk,” she said stiffly.

  “Oh, yeah. My best friend. Charley has a wife he pretends is a pest to him, but he’s mad about her. Former beauty queen.” He glanced at Sara. “She grew up in Arundel.”

  Sara said nothing. What could she say? Ask where the woman lived in town? If Ariel heard the address she’d know if the woman lived above or below the cotton mill.

  “Anyway, Charley came to me and said that his wife, Katlyn, wanted him to buy an island off the coast of Arundel and he wanted me to take a look at it.”

  “Why you?”

  “I have no idea. Charley didn’t know either. At first he thought Kat and I had something going on, but—”

  “You wouldn’t do that to your best friend, would you?”

  “Not unless she—” R.J. was grinning, but at one look at Sara’s face, he stopped smiling. “Of course I wouldn’t. Code of honor, that sort of thing. Anyway, Charley told me that Kat wanted him to buy an island and open a resort on it. A rich resort. He said …”

  R.J. sat up a bit straighter and deepened his voice. When he spoke, he sounded very much like Mr. Dunkirk, but Sara as Ariel wasn’t supposed to know that,
so she had to work to keep from laughing.

  “‘No twenty-grand-a-year, Mom-and-Pop-with-the-kids place,’” R.J. said in Charley Dunkirk’s voice. “‘I want celebrities. Multimillionaires who crave privacy. This King’s Isle is the only island left that hasn’t already been exploited. It’s like the place has been left for me. It has flat land on one end that could be used for an airstrip. There’s no beach, but what’s a beach? Sand, right? So we bring in some sand.’ “

  Sara had to look away again to keep from laughing, but R.J. saw the muscle in her jaw twitching so he went on.

  “‘I was thinking of an island in the Caribbean, but Kat wants North Carolina, so that’s what I’m gonna give her. Maybe she wants a business to run after I’m gone. Maybe that’s it. I don’t know why, but she wants you to go look at the place for me. You’ll do it?’”

  R.J. returned to his normal voice. “I told him I’d look at the island and that I’d even take my camera.”

  “‘Vacation,’” R.J.-as-Charley said. “‘This could be a vacation for you. I’m gonna take one of those one of these days.’ Sure you are, I told him. We all are. One of these days.”

  Sara kept looking out the side window. She remembered the day she’d seen Mr. Dunkirk half carried out of R.J.’s office. She’d thought then that R.J. had made the old man drunk on purpose, but maybe Charley Dunkirk was just a drinker.

  “So you agreed to help an old friend,” she said.

  “Not without doing a lot of research first. It took a lot of work.”

  Sara had a vivid vision of R.J. stretched out on the big leather couch in his office, his laptop on his chest. Lot of work, indeed! “Didn’t Sara write me about helping you find out about the island?”

  R.J. looked in the rearview mirror at David and Ariel, then lowered his voice. “Naw, she was too busy helping me tie up loose ends so I could go. I did the research by myself.”

  “And who said Hercules had a lot of tasks?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, okay, so I dump a lot into her capable hands, but I did find out about King’s Isle myself.”

  “And what did you discover?”

  “Nothing that you, as a resident of Arundel, don’t know.”

  “It’s always nice to hear an outsider’s point of view,” she said, smiling. “So enlighten me.”

  “It’s a weird place.”

  “Everyone in Arundel knows that. But what makes it strange to you?” She was trying to sound as though she knew everything but wanted to hear more.

  “Nothing important, but I think it might have great money-making potential.”

  “The most important thing.”

  “Have to feed the bottom line, but, touristwise, that island does have an interesting history. Apparently, the inhabitants refused to take part in either the Revolutionary or the Civil War. When the patriots won, they refused to change the name of their island to what the new government suggested, Freedom Island. And when soldiers in the War Between the States landed, no matter what side they were on, the King’s Isle people burned their war boats, then put the soldiers in rowboats and sent them back to the mainland. When President Lincoln heard of it, he said that if all the states did that there wouldn’t be a war. He didn’t allow his troops to waste ammunition blowing up the island, as many people wanted to do.”

  “Too bad everybody didn’t do that,” Sara said.

  “Yeah, too bad. By the early 1890s King’s Isle was poverty-stricken, with just a few hundred people living there. Then natural hot springs were discovered bubbling up from the rocky center of the island and a year later, King’s Isle was the place to be. The rich went there to play and to lounge in the waters. They built big summer houses, put in roads, and almost overnight, King’s Isle became rich.”

  “It isn’t rich now, so what happened? The spring dry up?”

  “Sort of. Around the turn of the century there was an explosion—nobody knows what caused it—and in an instant, the springs were gone. Since then, the island has declined and now there are only about two hundred and fifty inhabitants on its five square miles. The big old houses are still there, but the Internet sites said they’re rotting into the ground, and the current residents have become squatters. The kid who delivers groceries might be living in two rooms of a ten-thousand-square-foot house that has crumbling marble floors. A lot of the residents pay no rent.”

  Sara could see the possibilities. If there was anything that newly rich people liked, it was making people think they’d been rich for a long time. Old mansions would do that. “Why hasn’t someone fixed up the old buildings and made the island into a resort before now?”

  “From what I could find out, quite a few people have tried, but every businessman has been sent away. It seems that the current residents are just as inhospitable as their ancestors.”

  “You’ll do it,” Sara said before she thought.

  “Think so?” R.J. said.

  “Sara’s told me that you’re very persuasive.”

  “Did she?” R.J. asked, smiling. “I hope she’s right. I’d like to get that island for Charley. I was thinking that with modern mining methods, maybe the springs could be uncovered. Charley was right that most people like the caché of going to a tropical island, but a place off the coast of the U.S. with hot springs? That has enormous possibilities. Maybe an ad campaign could make people believe the waters had healing powers.”

  Sara liked everything that R.J. had told her—except, of course, for the lie about advertising the waters as having healing powers. Maybe she could persuade him to let her work on the project. She could live in Arundel and work on King’s Isle. Doing what? she wondered.

  “There it is,” R.J. said and she looked ahead. In front of them was the water, a huge dock jutting out from it, and in the distance was the island. There was no ferry. R.J. pulled the car to the side of the road and cut the engine. “Anyone hungry?” he asked.

  “Heavens no!” Ariel-as-Sara said from the back. “After the breakfast at the inn, I may never eat again. You should have seen it! Thick slices of bread stuffed with cream cheese and soaked in syrup. I think I gained three pounds.”

  “I had a big breakfast too,” David said.

  Sara didn’t turn to look at R.J., but she doubted if he’d eaten that big breakfast at the B and B. About two months ago, he had been on his fourth Danish one morning and she couldn’t resist saying, “I see you’re turning in your six-pack for a keg.” As far as she knew, he hadn’t eaten a doughnut or a Danish since. “I’m hungry,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he murmured, but she wouldn’t look at him.

  He started the car, turned it around, and drove back to a little mom-and-pop restaurant about a mile down the road.

  “So, Mr. Brompton,” David said as soon as they’d ordered, “what’s your purpose for going to King’s Isle? Other than to exploit the people, that is.” David was smiling as though he was making a joke, but it fell flat. “That’s what you do for a living, isn’t it?”

  R.J. leveled his eyes at David. “Of course it is. That’s what all of us working-class stiffs do. We use up the world’s resources. So, tell me—what was your name again, sonny?—what have you done in the world?”

  “Studied how to save it.”

  When Sara saw the two men looking at each other like clashing elks, she wanted to walk out and never return. What were they so angry at each other about? She looked at Ariel to see if she had any answers, but then saw that Ariel was leaning toward R.J. in a way Sara had seen many times. He seemed to fascinate some women. R.J. was ruggedly handsome, with that brash, aggressive, pulled-himself-up-by-his-bootstraps look, while David had a clean-cut, never-had-to-work look about him.

  This has to stop, Sara thought.

  “My money’s on the old one,” she said loudly. “He’s older, but he has a ruthlessness that young one has never had. It’s my guess that this man would stop at nothing to get what he wanted, while the kid has a conscience and scruples. Those are great ideals, but they aren
’t needed in the business world. And if these two take their juvenile whose-is-bigger fight into the alley, I believe the old one will win. What about you?” she asked Ariel.

  “The younger one, definitely,” Ariel said. “He can be quite persevering when he wants something. He doesn’t quit. Nothing makes him stop. When your old man is worn out, the kid’ll still be fighting. He might have broken bones and missing teeth, but he’ll keep on fighting. David doesn’t give up.”

  Sara glanced at R.J. and saw that he was thoroughly enjoying every word of what the lovely young women were saying, but David was red to his ears. Whatever the men were thinking, Sara had successfully shut them up.

  After they finished their lunch, they went back to the car, where R.J. smiled at Sara in a conspiratorial way, as though he were a prizefighter and she’d just bet on him to win over a kid half his age.

  By the time they got back to the dock, the ferry was there. It was a fairly modern thing, able to carry four cars. R.J. mumbled that he’d expected a man with a raft and a pole. Sara nudged Ariel to pay the five-dollar charge—that’s what the assistant does, after all—and R.J. drove the car onto the steel surface. Theirs was the only car on the ferry; they were the only people going to King’s Isle.

  Once the ferry was underway, they all got out of the car and walked to the end of the rail to look out across the water toward the little island in the distance. After a while, Ariel and David moved away, talking in low voices about something urgent.

  “Think Sara will marry him?” R.J. asked quietly.

  “I beg your pardon,” Sara said.

  “Him. The jock. Think she’ll marry him?”

  Sara had no idea what to say, but she knew that R.J. was up to something, so she let him talk. “I guess Sara’s told you that she’s always saying she wants to quit her job. I should let her. I should give her a big severance bonus, then let her go do whatever it is that she wants to with her life. From the way she was looking at that jock at lunch, I think they’re already half-engaged. She could live in a big, old Victorian monstrosity in Arundel and grow prize-winning roses. Why she wants that kind of life, I’ll never know. I guess you know that she trained to be an actress.”