Wingfield and Tanya Carnahan were in the midst of a very public and very bitter court battle over their daughter. Carnahan claimed that her former fiancé was a serial cheater who was indifferent to their daughter’s needs, while Wingfield claimed that Tanya Carnahan, who’d had only modest success with her acting and modeling career, was an unfit mother.
Friends of the couple say the two were introduced by Scarlett Carnahan, who at the time was employed by and in a relationship with Evan Wingfield. The relationship ended when Wingfield turned his attention to Carnahan’s troubled younger sister, a recent arrival from Atlanta.
“Troubled?” Letty exclaimed out loud. “She wasn’t troubled until she hooked up with that scumbag.”
Maya, startled, looked up at her aunt, her mouth puckered.
“It’s okay, ladybug,” Letty assured her. “Everything’s okay.”
The child smiled, uncertainly, before turning her attention to a handful of seashells they’d gathered during yesterday’s morning walk on the beach.
According to one friend, the 42-year-old real estate entrepreneur struck up a relationship with Scarlett Carnahan when she was working as a waitress at the Lazy Daizy diner in Tribeca.
At the time, Carnahan was struggling to find acting work, and needed a new place to live after roommates evicted her from her apartment in Queens.
“Evan befriended her, let her stay in an apartment he owned nearby, even gave her a job managing some of his real estate,” the friend said. “He helped her find a new agent, who got her some acting gigs. Eventually they started dating, in a casual kind of way. Letty then invited her younger sister, who’d been living and working in Atlanta, to visit her in New York.”
But as soon as Tanya Carnahan arrived in the city, the friend said, everything changed.
“Evan fell hard for that girl. Letty, obviously, was furious. It caused a serious rift between the two sisters. They didn’t speak for years.”
Maya patted her knee and held up her juice box. “All done.”
“Okay,” Letty said, taking the empty box. “Would you like some Goldfish?”
“Pees,” Maya said, holding out a rather grubby hand. Letty took the bag of cheddar crackers from her backpack and poured some into the child’s hand.
“What do you say?” Letty prompted.
Maya shoved all the crackers into her mouth and chewed happily. “Fank you,” she said, sending showers of orange crumbs down the front of her swimsuit.
Letty resumed reading the Daily News story, fuming. She knew exactly which of Evan’s bitchy pals the reporter had quoted.
Sascha Hallowell was married to Evan’s Princeton classmate Skipper. She’d pretended to like Letty, but as Tanya later confided, “She thinks we’re both a couple of hillbilly hayseeds. What Sascha doesn’t know is that good ol’ Skippy tried to put his hand up my skirt the last time we had dinner at their place.”
7
After the ferry docked, Nate Milas steered his golf cart back toward Duck Inn, the cabin he’d bought at Sandy Point.
Some cabin, Nate thought, as he pushed through the unlocked door. The place had been a hunting shack, thrown together by members of his father’s hunting club in the late sixties with odds and ends of leftover lumber and building supplies pilfered from construction sites around the island. The shack’s title was murky, because so many of the original hunting club members had died or moved away over the ensuing years, but he’d finally tracked down the last surviving self-styled Dirty Dozen club member at his home in Pittsboro, and paid eighty thousand dollars for the property. Which was probably a hundred times what his father’s pals had paid.
“All mine,” Nate said, surveying the cottage. The floors were scarred oak and the walls were whitewashed planks of rough pine. The original floor plan had been simple: one big main room contained a combination living room and dining room, originally heated only by a potbellied stove installed in a huge rock-faced fireplace at the rear of the room. On either side of the living area were two high-ceilinged bunk rooms. And that was it. For the first ten years of its existence, the shack had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. A cookhouse had been built a few yards to the east of the shack, connected to the main house by a covered walkway, and a bathhouse, with a communal shower and a two-holer outhouse had been built to the west.
Over the years, the club members had gradually (and grudgingly) upgraded the shack. Electricity and plumbing were added in the early seventies, and the cookhouse had been picked up and tacked onto the back of the original cabin in the early eighties. Bathrooms had been added to each of the bunk rooms.
But there was still no central heat or air-conditioning. And no insulation. Only one burner on the propane-fueled oven worked, and the roof leaked. The furnishings consisted of whatever castoffs the club members’ wives had donated over the years. Still, it was home. For now.
Nate sat down at the dining room table, a rickety maple faux Early American number, and powered up his laptop computer. The first improvement he’d made to the cabin was having Wi-Fi installed. Now he clicked over to the Baldwin County legal advertising site and scrolled down the listings until he found the one he wanted and read it for the third time that day.
He still couldn’t believe this was really going to happen. His mother had heard gossip in the past couple of years, of problems at Belle Isle Enterprises, but he’d never given them much credence. Wendell Griggs was a sharp operator. He had an MBA, and he’d learned the real estate business from this father-in-law, who also happened to be the shrewdest man on the coast, W. R. Nolan himself.
To beat back the monotony of waiting in hospital rooms during his own father’s illness, Nate had started poking around at the courthouse and in online records, and he’d been dumbfounded by what he’d discovered. It was all true. Actually, things were much worse than anybody could have guessed.
Then he clicked over to his bank’s Web site. Good. The funds had been transferred from his California bank to his new bank in North Carolina.
He tapped a button and the computer screen darkened. He sat back in the chair and wondered at the state of his emotions. Dread. A heavy, sick feeling of dread bored up from his belly, accompanied by an uneasy sense of guilt.
None of this was new to Nate Milas. He’d tried to quash these emotions. None of this was his doing. This was all on Wendell Griggs, who’d managed to take a thriving family business, and in the space of only two short years, driven it to bankruptcy and beyond. The stalled hotel project, the cleared but unsold new subdivision lots, and the empty and padlocked retail spaces just a block from his family’s own modest Island Mercantile? Not to mention that pretentious and weird spaceship-looking home he’d had built on Sand Dollar Lane? That was all Wendell.
Not Nate’s problem. Not Nate’s fault. Then why, he wondered, did this whole business feel like such a betrayal?
He couldn’t forget the hurt, stunned look on Riley’s face when she’d been served on the ferry. Had she really been blindsided by all of this?
8
It was a closely held family secret. Although Riley’s mother, Evelyn, fancied herself a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, the truth of the matter was that her grandfather, James Thomas Riley, was an Ohio-born carpetbagger—a successful storekeeper who moved to the South in the years following the Civil War to make his fortune.