Carolina Girl (11 page)

“You have a computer here?” Clay asked quietly.

Aurora indicated the door to the master bedroom with a nod.
Cissy had taken over the other end of the trailer when Mandy was born. Aurora
had stored her furniture and simply moved into her old room when she returned.

She instantly had second thoughts about allowing this almost
total stranger into her private quarters, but her protective instincts overcame
any lingering need for privacy. She lived in a trailer, after all. Privacy had
been a moot point since she moved back here. “I can’t imagine
you’ll find anything on Commercial Realty, though,” she told him.
“They’re a front.”

He ignored that. “Password?”

“Sugarbaby.” Aurora grimaced at his raised
eyebrows, but neither of them wasted time on commenting. If what they suspected
was true, they had a nasty problem on their hands.

Clay strode off in the direction of her bedroom, oblivious
to the stares of her family. He had such an easy way of slipping into his shell
without regard to anyone else that Aurora almost envied it. Especially now.

Mandy was pattering her mother with questions that Cissy
eagerly fielded, describing the lot, the neighbors, the closeness to the harbor
and town. Aurora crushed the shrimp shell in her hand.

Maybe the deal was legit. Maybe someone wanted to build a
gas station here. That would be all right, she thought. Some local fellow with
big dreams—he might even let Pops keep the workshop. It wasn’t
logical, but hope never was.

Cissy threw her a worried look when Rory didn’t leap
into the excited discussion. But what could she say? The park didn’t even
exist on paper yet. She couldn’t believe some outsider had already heard
about the park and seen the potential for development.

Clay had warned her that they would stir things up with the
zoning petition. Having her home bought out from under her wasn’t what
she’d thought he meant.

There wouldn’t be any way she could tell Cissy no.

She didn’t want to tell her sister no. She wanted this
to be legit.

She cracked another shrimp shell and prayed.

“You’re not very excited,” Cissy finally
called over to her. “Do you think it’s a bad deal?”

“I’m afraid it sounds too good to be
true,” Rory answered cautiously. “I always examine the undersides
of rainbows.”

She hated the defeated look that entered her sister’s
eyes. Cissy might be the eldest and the closest thing Rory had to a mother, but
she looked to Rory for the money decisions.

“I knew it,” Cissy said in discouragement.
“I should have just hung up the phone. What do you think they’re
trying to pull?”

Before Rory could find an answer, the back door slammed open
and Jake entered. “Thought I heard you come home. Got enough of that
shrimp for me?”

The sisters exchanged looks. Even if the offer was
legitimate, here was the main stumbling block. Where would Jake go if they sold
the land and Cissy moved to a development? He lived in a small set of rooms off
the workshop and ate most of his meals here. The statues littering the yard
were the only income he possessed. He wasn’t old enough for social
security, and he’d never saved a dime in his life.

“Sure, Pops. Want to make some of that hot sauce you
like? I know you don’t like the pesto.” Rory reached in the
refrigerator for the ingredients, praying Clay came up with an answer soon.

They didn’t have high-speed Internet lines out here,
and Cissy couldn’t afford cable, so any Web search would be slow.
He’d have to have magic fingers to drag out information fast enough to
give them answers now.

“Got any fries? That’ll do me.” Jake
grabbed the ketchup and Worcestershire and began mixing them in a small bowl
Rory handed him.

The silence from the living room was almost deafening.
Operating on automatic, Rory found the ingredients for her father’s
supper, for the salad, for the pesto. Growing up, she’d learned to cook
in self-defense since Jake didn’t cook and Cissy was always working.
Figuring she ate three times as much as her sister, it seemed only fair at the
time. It was a comfort now.

“What are y’all so silent about?” Jake
demanded, finally noticing the quiet. “You hiding a man in the
bedroom?”

Mandy giggled. Cissy rubbed her nose, a certain indication
she was hiding something.

Relieved to find a different direction for her thoughts,
Rory opened a beer and handed it to her father. “Yup. We trussed up your
friend McCloud and threw him in the bedroom to use later tonight.”

“Don’t doubt that.” Jake threw back a
swallow of beer and set the can down before continuing with a twinkle in his
eye. “Heard y’all had a good time at the harbor today.”

Oh, sugar
. Word traveled entirely too fast in this
town. Turning red, Rory grabbed a box of pasta and dumped it into the boiling
water. “
He
was having a good time. I just went along for the
ride.”

“That was some ride,” a dry male voice said from
the bedroom doorway. Once certain he had the attention of everyone in the room,
Clay held up a sheet of paper. “Commercial Realty is apparently the real
estate arm of your local bank. It appears they’re acquiring property on
the island and using the realty as a holding company.”

Flying, friggin’ maggots.
Of course the bank
was behind it. They knew about the parkland and had a developer all lined up.
She knew how that worked.

Ripping off her apron, she stormed out the back door and
slammed the screen.

“Was it something I said?” Clay asked
rhetorically, tossing the paper to the coffee table and heading after her.

No one stopped him.

“Aurora, stop it.” After watching her rage up
and down the garden path half a dozen times, Clay stepped in front of her and
caught her arms. It had worked pretty well when he’d done this before.

This time, though, she glared at him. He threw up his hands
in surrender. “Throwing a tantrum won’t solve anything.”

“You’d rather I exploded all over the trailer?
I’d blow the roof off.” She stormed past him again, but her step
faltered slightly. She swung around, and he could see tear tracks down her
cheeks.

Oh, jeez
. He couldn’t handle tears. He liked it
a hell of a lot better when she was storming around town with righteous ire and
justice for all in her voice. Or laughing at the foibles of life. Or even
laughing at him. That was okay, too. He liked it that she didn’t always
take him seriously.

He sought for some means of making her feel better and
failed.

“Cissy gave up
everything
for me and
Mandy,” she cried in a voice breaking with tears. “She used to get
the best grades in class. She was so pretty, she had boys asking her out all
the time. But she had to work and go to school and raise me first, and then
when I was old enough to stay home on my own at night so she could finally have
a little fun, she got pregnant with Mandy and had to drop out. It’s not
fair
,
Clay.”

“We didn’t sign a contract at birth saying it
would be.” That was as lame a thing as he’d ever said, but it made
her wipe her eyes angrily so the tears went away. Tears made him feel helpless.
Anger he could handle.

“She deserves something good to happen,” she
insisted. “I’ve not seen her so excited in years. She deserves a
good life. I’m working on it, but there is only so much I can do. How can
I deny her this?” She sounded more unhappy than mad.

Clay watched Aurora rub her hands up and down her bare arms
and wished he could do that for her. She’d left off her jacket, and in
her silk shell she looked more like a woman than an impersonal suit. He wanted
to kiss her until she forgot her problems, but he figured he’d pretty
much pushed his luck as far as it would go in that department. She’d sock
him one if he tried it again. Rightly so, under the circumstances. He just
wasn’t certain where to go from here.

His family hid feelings as thoroughly as hers exploded with
them. Just call him emotionally handicapped. Dysfunctional.

“You sure you ought to deny her this?” he asked,
not knowing a better way of phrasing it. “The bank should be reasonably
legit, shouldn’t it?” He knew better. He knew banks were out for
the biggest bang for their buck like anyone else. But he wanted it spelled out
in concrete terms he could understand, not emotional fireworks that left him
staggering.

“Banks don’t buy real estate on
speculation,” she said tiredly. “They’re acquiring for
someone who doesn’t want their name involved yet. And if they don’t
want their name revealed, you can guess it’s for a reason.”

Yeah, if some place called Sunbelt Development started
knocking on doors, land prices would skyrocket, he calculated. “You could
try explaining to Cissy what happens if hotels and condos are built out
here.”

She looked up at him with a hint of desperation. “And
make her feel guilty if she still wants to sell? She’s thinking of Mandy.
How can I ask her to choose between Mandy and what’s best for the
island?”

Since he was presumably opposing the sale for his brother
and his family, Clay couldn’t answer that one. “Don’t you
think she ought to at least make an informed decision?”

“The bastards are picking on Cissy for a purpose,
probably because I’m putting those petitions out there. I bet Jeff
Spencer is behind this.” She hugged herself and looked away. “They
figure Cissy is the weak link, that she’ll agree to the sale, and once
the land is gone, I’ll lose interest and leave the swamp alone.”

“But the land belongs to both of you, doesn’t
it?” he argued. “She can’t sell without your consent.”

She shook her head. “That’s what this Bingham
thing is all about. The law says all they need is one owner’s signature
on a sales agreement. They can take that to court and ask for a property partition.
My signature is irrelevant. They don’t have to offer me anything.”

“The court will order your land auctioned to divide
it?” he asked in disbelief.

With a look of misery, she nodded. “Cissy
doesn’t understand that the sales agreement is only for her share. Once
she signs, they don’t have to offer me anything. They’ll simply
demand that the court divide the property. The deed doesn’t specify which
of us owns which part of the land, so the court would have to divide it up in
lots and sell it.

“An auction will generate peanuts because no one else
in their right minds would want this land, much less bid against the bank, so
there will be only one offer to buy—theirs. Under the agreement she
signs, they may pay Cissy ten thousand an acre for half the lot, but
they’ll offer squat for my half. Unless I can bid against them,
I’ll be left with inaccessible, worthless swamp.”

“Explain that to your sister.” Since he’d
had considerable luck with repositioning her earlier, Clay caught
Aurora’s elbow and steered her toward the back door. She dragged her
feet, but he figured she didn’t have anywhere else to run. That she
actually listened to him filled him with wonder. She didn’t strike him as
a woman who listened to just anyone.

He had the insane urge to find her a million dollars and
solve all her problems. She looked as if he were marching her to the guillotine
when he opened the door to usher her in.

The gathering inside slipped away from the back windows and
pretended they were setting the table as he and Aurora entered. Clay thought
this was the moment to make his exit. He wasn’t the kind of social animal
who fit well into his own family’s get-togethers, much less someone
else’s. But Aurora took a stack of plates from her sister and handed them
to him, and he didn’t know how to escape her expectations.

He’d never set a table in his life, but he placed a
plate in front of each chair while Aurora stirred her pasta and haltingly
explained how the bank could be hoping to stop her rezoning petition by buying
their land.

She explained how the state could use the same tactics to
auction off the Bingham land right out from under Grandma Iris, giving the
heirs almost nothing. After she told them the buyer could pave the marsh clear
down to the state park line and cover it in condos, the silence from her
audience filled the room and threatened the seams holding the house together.

“Bastards,” Jake muttered when she was done. He
crumpled his beer can and flung it at the wastebasket. Aurora automatically
leaned over and picked the can off the floor where it fell.

Cissy remained silent as Clay helped her into one of the
chairs at the table. There were only four, but Jake seemed more comfortable at
the counter with his purple cast stretched out to one side.

“If you agree not to sell, will you trust me to make
this up to you?” Aurora asked, placing the bowl of pasta and shrimp in
the center of the table. “I’ll pay you back.”

Mandy glanced anxiously from mother to aunt and
intelligently reached for the pasta rather than speak. Clay thought he’d
rather sit at the counter with Jake, but Aurora handed him a beer and indicated
a chair. Awkwardly taking his place with the three women, he tried to stay out
of the argument.

“I can’t make the home-equity payments without a
job or ask you to spend all your money on us.” Cissy poked listlessly at
her salad. “They’ll do whatever they want anyway. You can’t
change anything.”

That had been Clay’s belief, but Aurora didn’t
strike him as the type to give up without trying. Viking blood, he decided, watching
all her pretty feathers ruffle and the gleam of battle light her eyes. She
could almost make him believe anything was possible
,
including waking
his slumbering concern for the world outside his.

Cynicism had slammed the doors of his world long ago. Aurora
battered holes in the doors, giving him glimpses of new views. Scary, but
interesting.