My Way Home (St.Gabriel Series Book 1) (St. Gabriel Series) (27 page)

“The Willows Inn?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s it. How did you know?”

“That’s the inn we stayed at when I was here with Aunt Loretta last summer. If it’s the same Jeremy, he was working at the front desk.”

Race was helping me do the dishes after dinner that night, and he said, “Tell me about this Jeremy.”

“He seemed like a nice young man.” Should I tell Race he wasn’t in school because he was taking a break?

“Is he a student?”

I should have known he’d ask. “I think he was. He said he was taking some time off.”

“To do what?”

“I believe he said he worked in the summer and played in the winter.”

Race didn’t ask any more questions, and I felt a little guilty that I had ratted Jeremy out. Later, Janie and Race went for a walk down by the lake, and I guessed they were probably playing a round of Have You Thought About?

At the end of their visit, we took Paul and Janie to the ferry and none of us wanted them to leave. We’d had such a great time, and we didn’t know when we would all be together again.

Paul would spend the summer with his research team and then go back to California to finish his Master's. Janie was off to New York. Until she found a place of her own, she would be staying with Loretta, which made both Race and me feel a little better about her moving to the big city.

Despite our invitations to George for dinners and outings, he had made himself pretty scarce during the two weeks the kids were visiting. Paul had joked, “Maybe he’s actually a ghost.” He did show up to take their luggage to the dock and to bring their bikes back to the lodge.

At the ferry Race and I hugged our children goodbye, and then he and I had dinner in town. Afterwards we were walking down the sidewalk hand in hand, and I was thinking of how St. Gabriel was a small island but, during the tourist season, it was still packed with summer residents and workers, Landers, and Gabies. What were the chances that Janie would meet Jeremy and they would hit it off?

I was in the middle of my pondering when James Alexander came out of The Stick Club carrying a guitar case. He practically stepped in front of us—cazingydink!

“Oh, I’m sorry, excuse me,” James said before he noticed it was me standing in front of him. We were both surprised.

“Cammy, hi. How are you?”

“Hi, James. I’m good. How are you?”

“Fine.”

“James, this is my husband, Race.”

They shook hands.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you.”

Very awkward.

“How’s everything going at the lodge?” James asked.

“Other than the hold up in getting our plans approved by the Community Development Board, and the Historical Society, the place is very clean.”
And haunted,
but I didn’t say that.

An uncomfortable silence hovered, so I began drooling words without first processing my thoughts. “Was your band playing inside?” I asked,
Duh.

“Yes.”

I looked at Race and said, “James plays in a band.” Again,
duh
, and I tried to recover. “With his twin sister.”

Another long pause.

“Well, it was nice to see you Cammy, and nice meeting you, Race.”

“Good to meet you, James.”

James stepped around us and walked away.

I took Race’s hand and we continued down the sidewalk to where we’d parked our bikes, and I said, “And that was James Alexander.”

“That it was,” said Race.

And we didn’t talk anymore about it.

The following week I got a call from Barbara at the Historical Society and she told me, “Your plans have been approved. I’ll send them over to the Island Building Department, and they’ll call you when your permit is ready.”

A week later we got the call that the permit was ready. We were on the fast track.
James.
I didn’t tell Race what I was thinking, but I guessed he may be thinking it too.

I got on the phone and called in the troops. For the carpentry I chose a husband and wife team who lived on the island. They would also be hanging the drywall. Joel Morrison would be out the next Monday with his plumbing crew. And Ralph Cummings and his fifteen-year-old son Matthew would start right away on the electrical. A roofer from the mainland would start as soon as he had finished up his current job.

Race and I sat at the table on the porch of the cottage and looked over our financial statements and the bids. When we had reviewed everything, I slapped my hands down on top of the papers and exclaimed, “Let the bleeding begin!”

If All Went Well

With some exceptions, having crews of carpenters, electricians and plumbers around is like having a house full of teenagers. They are all trying to get their work done so that they can go and play, and no one picks up after themselves. So when the workers arrived, we had our own little circus, featuring power tools.

I held a meeting in the lobby with all of the crew leaders, the first of many that we usually would have on Monday mornings, meetings that were dubbed the pow-wow by the crew. I made sure everyone had copies of the plans and detailed lists and instructions. I emphasized that the work was to be done without disturbing anything that didn’t need to be disturbed,
especially the ghosts.

“You got it, Chief,” said Joel Morrison, a.k.a. plumber extraordinaire, and then he had the group stand up and salute.

“Fine,” I said, “I can see how this is going to be. Next time there will be no coffee and pastries. You will all get bread and water instead.”

Kurt and Lisle, the husband and wife carpentry team, showed up with Lisle’s two brothers and they got right to work taking down walls, which was hard to watch. Then they started framing the new bathrooms.

Joel had four or five guys with him each day, rarely the same faces. He didn’t tolerate slackers and would cut them loose at the slightest dawdle.

Ralph Cummings, the electrician, and his son Matthew must have been related to George somewhere down the island line. They are two of the quietest, meekest individuals I have ever met. Unlike George, they did speak to me in full sentences when I talked to them, but they always prefaced everything with, “Yes, ma’am.” “No, ma’am.”

At lunch time the rest of the Cummings family would ride out to the lodge from their home in the middle of the island to bring lunch to Ralph and Matthew. The family, which included Miriam, the mother, and Matthew’s five siblings—an older sister and four younger brothers—would go down to the beach and eat and then pack up and let the men get back to work.

Just as the chaos was in full swing, our first official guests arrived. I felt as though I should have hired a marching band and hung up a banner that read,
Congratulations! You are the first guests of The Lake Lodge in over six decades. Welcome!!!
And then I would have had the band play them up the hill.

Instead, I made Rhubarb Strawberry Cream Cheese Muffins with Coconut Streusel Topping, yum, and left them in the cottage with a vase of Lucy’s Shasta daisies and a note,
Welcome to Rhubarb Cottage at The Lake Lodge. If you need anything, please let us know. Cammy and Race Coleman, Proprietors.

Before their stay with us, I spoke to Grace and Grant from Madison, Wisconsin, and I asked if they wanted someone to meet them at the ferry to pick up them and their luggage.

“No, we’ll just ride out there,” Grace told me.

And that they did. They rode up to the front gate on their bikes, sporting big backpacks that I couldn’t have carried if I was walking slowly, and on level ground. Granted, they were half my age, but she was a tiny thing. Stuffed inside their packs was all their food and clothes for the week and they didn’t seem to want for anything, at least they didn’t ask.

I had called the couple and told them the renovation had begun and gave them the option of cancelling. “We hadn’t started the renovation when you booked the cottage. It won’t be as quiet as I described it to you.”

I was concerned how they would feel about the situation once they arrived. My concerns were a waste as most concerns are. Not only did they not seem to mind that a major construction site was a hundred feet from their front door, they were genuinely interested in the project as were our other guests that summer.

We walked them through the lodge and told them what our plans were, and they asked lots of questions. Grant was a painter by trade and he offered us some tips that we might want to consider when we began the painting.

The night before Grace and Grant left, Race and I had the couple in for dinner. After dinner we walked over to Rhubarb Cottage and took their picture, which is now on the first page of The Lake Lodge scrapbook with the caption,
Our first guests, Grace and Grant Poole, Madison, Wisconsin.

When our first guests departed, I refocused on the property. I finished seeding the vegetable garden, put in asparagus crowns, and planted climbing roses along the fence at Shoreline Drive. Race and I planted ten new trees in the fruit orchard and two new cherry trees down by the front gate.

I spent time in the attic most days, sorting at least two crates or piles as a goal. While I did that, I took the opportunity to reassure anyone who might be listening that the workers were all on our side and that they would make the lodge more beautiful than it had ever been. With the rest of my time, I hovered, sorting trash from salvageable material, picking up, sweeping and watching over the progress.

I was on the second floor porch, shaking the dust from some rugs I had found in the attic. Down below, Nigel, one of Lisle’s brothers, came out of the lodge carrying an armload of old wooden trim. Race was out on the lawn in front of the lodge changing a tire on my mountain bike, and I heard Nigel ask him, “Mr. Coleman, Kurt told me to ask you where you wanted us to start a trash pile.”

“Oh no, son, you’re in Cammy Coleman country. That isn’t trash.”

“What would you possibly want to do with this stuff?”

“Trust me, the lady of the place will find a use for it. Just stack it over there.”

I cleared my throat, “UhHmm.”

Race looked up and saw me hanging over the railing. “Oh, hello, lady of the place.”

“Hello, man of the place.”

“I’m just looking out for you, babe.”

I shook my head at him and went back inside.

According to my timeline,
if all went well, we would be finished with stage one of the renovations by the end of August, and we would still be able to rent rooms in the lodge in the fall. All did not go well.

Wade, the roofer, arrived and discovered that not only were there layers of rotted shingles to be removed, the shingles sat on rotted slats instead of panels of sheeting, which he was expecting but hadn’t mentioned to me. All the slats would need to be removed and the whole roof re-sheeted, ditto for the cottages. Also, under the lodge roof, rafter beams had rotted and would need to be replaced.

While Wade was investigating, he also noticed two of the chimneys were cracking and then told me, “I can recommend a good mason. Good guy, lots of experience.”

Alrighty then, send him right over.

We knew the plumbing would all need to be replaced, but when Joel got into the walls he found pipes that were split and had leaked in several places, rotting the framing and subfloor, which he was also expecting but hadn’t mentioned to me. Joel took Race and me on a tour of the damage and gave us a crash course in Plumbing 101.

“Look at this Chief. With no heat on in the place for so many years, these pipes have froze and thawed. The ice swelled the pipes and they cracked. Then they stayed swelled even after the ice thawed and the water leaked out.” While making his sucking noises from the side of his mouth and shaking his head with a half grin on his face, Joel pointed to one of the expanded pipes and ran his finger along a crack. “Look at the size of that one, Chief.”

The rotting floor boards called for extra support when removing the walls, which needed to be replaced because of more rotting wood. When some of the old walls had been taken down to be reframed, a clawfoot tub almost fell through the second floor.

Lisle heard the cracking and yelled for help. We had a chain of carpenters, plumbers, and electricians who pulled it to solid ground before it broke through the floor. It would have crashed down on top of one of the dining room tables that I still had stacked with china.

The good news? The foundation was solid and the floors and walls were all amazingly level and straight. Oh, and no ghosts had objected to the progress so far.

Celebrate

I think everyone should take time out to celebrate the day they were born. Even if you’re alone and you take yourself shopping, or you get your favorite take-out and watch a stack of movies, or you read all day until your eyes are bugging out. The day you were born was the beginning of a life that was meant for something.

If your life isn’t going the way you were hoping, it’s a good day to set down some goals—maybe make a list. It’s a great day to take stock. It is called a
birth
day, isn’t it?