“How does all that affect the wildlife sanctuary?”
“No biggie,” Wendell said. “Your grandfather left it in the family trust. We’ll do a land swap, move the sanctuary to another part of the island. It’s done all the time.”
“Does Riley know about this?” Billy asked.
He shrugged. “Your sister and I have a difference of opinion on some of the fine points, but she’ll come around. Anyway, what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her, right?”
There it was, the implied threat, again. In the end, he’d had no choice but to write the check and swallow his fears. And after his visitor left, as Wendell knew he would, Billy had cracked open the Stoli and swallowed it, too.
* * *
“The money’s all gone. You know that, right?” Scott said gently.
“I do now. Six weeks ago, Wendell came back to me, and he seemed panicky. Not like himself at all. He said the hotel people were threatening to pull out of the deal. He wanted more money, to sweeten the pot, offer them more incentives. I told him I was tapped out, and asked about my investment. He beat around the bush, but finally told me that if the hotel went south, all bets were off.” Billy gave Scott a curious look.
“You already knew about the hotel thing, didn’t you? I mean, the seafood and steak restaurant, that was going to be your baby, right?”
“Right. ‘Was’ being the key word. I only found out after Darren Cruikshank, the chef, called me, as a courtesy, to tell me the Belle Isle project was off. He’s putting his steakhouse in a hotel down in Lauderdale instead.”
“What happened?” Billy asked. “Wendell swore up and down this was a sure thing.”
“A sure thing is never a sure thing where real estate development is concerned. Darren told me that in the end, the hotel’s finance committee decided the demographics weren’t a good fit. So they pulled the plug. Wendell borrowed millions to buy all that land. The bank that did most of the financing is now out of business, and the bank that assumed that loan portfolio—which includes Riley’s house—is going to auction all of it off.”
“That bastard Wendell. I swear to God, if he weren’t already dead, I’d kill him myself,” Billy said. “My only regret is that somebody beat me to the punch.”
33
Nate tied up the skiff at the Holtzclaw dock. Or, what was left of it. He tugged at the line to make sure the piling wouldn’t turn to dust at his touch, and was amazed when it held. He studied the weather-beaten silver decking, which had so many missing and rotted boards he was already having second thoughts about his mission.
He looked down at the swirling brackish waters of Fiddler’s Creek. The tide was up, and a mullet flopped lazily at the edge of the muddy creek bank, where the partially submerged hull of an old metal johnboat had become one with the oyster bank.
Then he shrugged and jumped onto the dock. A new wooden gate had been erected at the end of the dock, with a stern NO TRESPASSING sign tacked to it. Nate ignored the sign and easily clambered over the gate. If all went as he hoped, he’d own this dock and the fifty acres that went with it by the end of the week.
He picked his way carefully down the dock toward solid land, testing each plank before putting his full weight on it. He didn’t dare look up until he’d reached the grassy shore.
The rambling wooden farmhouse loomed tantalizingly close before him, thirty yards away, but an ugly new six-foot-tall chain-link fence with a sturdy padlocked gate and yet another NO TRESPASSING sign had been strung across the back edge of the property.
“I’m too old for this crap,” he muttered to himself, shoving one foot into a link and laboriously climbing up and over the fence.
Once he was on the other side he paused and studied the house. The old structure hadn’t been occupied in at least twenty years, and even when he was a boy, the Holtzclaws, who lived somewhere in the mountains, didn’t mix much with Belle Isle’s weekenders or the locals.
But the house, which rose three stories high, with wide tin-roofed porches extending across the back, was a landmark on the winding Fiddler’s Creek, where its profile was visible for miles.
As Nate picked his way across the weedy yard dotted with blackened fire circles and piles of trash from unauthorized campers, he noted the telltale metal pins and pink-flagged surveyor’s tape. He turned and looked back at the water’s edge. The property sat at the widest opening of Fiddler’s Creek in a natural oxbow, with half a mile of deep-water frontage and easy access to the ocean. No wonder Wendell Griggs had been willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get his hands on this prize.
But right now it was the old house he was drawn to. He put a foot on the bottom step of the porch and tested, then climbed onto the porch. A trio of ancient rocking chairs with rotted split-cane seats were upended against the wall, and he saw that most of the row of windows were broken out. Beer cans and the remains of a Styrofoam cooler were heaped at the far end of the porch. There was a door in the middle of the wall, and it hung partially open.
Nate frowned. This place was a magnet for vandals and kids. It was a wonder it hadn’t burnt down. He’d need to do more to secure the property as soon as the sale was complete.
The old floorboards groaned as he walked toward the door. He pushed the door inward, and the rusty hinges rasped loudly.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice. “Who’s that?”
* * *
Riley Griggs didn’t look the least bit guilty to be caught trespassing. She was standing in front of a massive rock fireplace, her hands on her hips. “Nate. What are you doing here?”
She was dressed in faded blue jeans, a cornflower-blue T-shirt, and sneakers, with a baseball cap jammed down over her hair. She had her cell phone in her hand, and Nate guessed she’d been photographing something when he’d busted in on her.
“I could ask you the same thing,” he said easily.
“I asked first,” Riley countered.
He gazed around the high-ceilinged old room. It had been handsome once, not fancy or grand, but the island-milled cedar walls were a soft silver, and the pine floors gave it a rough sort of dignity. Exposed wiring dangled from the ceilings and walls, where light fixtures had been ripped away and stolen, and soot blackened the granite masonry of the fireplace.
“This old place has always fascinated me,” Nate admitted. “My buddies and I used to sneak over here and fish off the dock as kids. You could almost always catch a mess of flounder or the occasional big red when the tide was right, and the blue crabs that hung around those pilings were the biggest and sweetest on the island.”
“My dad used to bring me over here to visit Miss Josie when I was a little girl,” Riley said, her expression taking on a dreamy quality. “Dad said she was partial to girls because she didn’t have any of her own, just the two sons who didn’t come to the island that much.”
She pointed to a partially burnt-out skeleton of a sofa. “She always kept a cut-glass jar of sour lemon jawbreakers on a coffee table that used to be there. I thought they were the most exotic thing in the world.”
“Is that what you’re doing here?” Nate teased. “Looking for jawbreakers?”
“No,” Riley said. “I guess I wanted to see for myself what my husband bought with the money he stole from my trust fund, before somebody else buys it from the bank.”