Summer Rental (4 page)

So when the caravan of cars had pulled into the driveway—first a stripped-down Jeep, then two pickup trucks and a lime green VW bug convertible carrying four half-drunk chicks—he’d made up his mind to ignore them. He’d watched with a sinking heart, though, as sixteen college kids piled into the house. And that was just the first night.

The ad specifically stated that the house slept a maximum of ten people—which wasn’t totally accurate, since two of those people would have to be willing to bed down on the butt-sprung living room sleeper sofa he’d picked up off a curb back in March.

With a sigh, Ty went out to the back porch and dragged in the big-wheeled garbage can. He grabbed his janitor’s bucket and mop and the battered Food Lion grocery cart some other little college pricks had left at the back door earlier in the summer, which now contained his cleaning supplies.

Not for the first time, Ty pondered the irony of his situation. Maybe his old man had been right. Maybe, if he’d stayed in law school, he’d be sitting pretty at some white-shoe law firm in Manhattan.

Maybe he’d still be with Kendra too. Nah, probably not. But maybe he’d have a fatty mutual fund, maybe he’d be driving a Jag, wintering in Cabo, or at least Key West. Maybe he shouldn’t have sunk every last dime and mortgaged himself to the hilt trying to save Ebbtide.
Told you not to buy that dump
.

Maybe, if he’d listened to his old man, he wouldn’t be living in a tiny garage apartment, staring at a computer screen all night ’til he was glassy-eyed and brain-dead. Maybe he wouldn’t be cleaning toilets by day and worrying that the next phone call or e-mail would mean the end of all of it.

The clock was ticking. He had less than six weeks left to save Ebbtide. Otherwise, come September 15, the house would be auctioned off on the steps of the Dare County courthouse. He’d be out on the streets, jobless, homeless. And his old man would stand there, shaking his head. Kendra, h
is ex, and Ryan, her new husband, aka Fuckface, would be right there with his old man, oozing phony sympathy. They might not say it, but they’d all be thinking it.
Told you so.

Ty looked out the kitchen window. If he leaned out, he could see the waves rolling in on the beach. They had some size to them this morning. His stomach growled loudly. If he got this pigsty cleaned up, in say, three hours, he’d have just enough time to make it to Abigail’s before they ran out of the Saturday lunch special: mahi-mahi tacos.

He pulled the grocery cart into the combined living/dining room at the front of the house and his eyes widened at the degree of destruction his tenants had wrought there. Armchairs, tables, and lamps were upended. The battered wooden floor wore a thick carpet of beach sand, and the sofa cushions were lined up end to end in front of the fireplace, where a trio of untwisted wire coat hangers suggested an impromptu wienie roast. Which would have been fine, if the fireplace damper had been opened, which it hadn’t. Fingers of greasy black soot marred the white mantel, which Ty had
repainted in June. His grandfather’s huge, framed navigational map of Currituck Sound, which had hung over said mantel, was askew on its hanger, its glass shattered. Tufts of stuffing poked out of one of the sofa cushions, which had a baseball-sized hole burnt into it. The unmistakable odor of stale beer and cheap weed lingered in the air.

“Christ,” he repeated. He yanked his iPhone from the pocket of his baggy board shorts and scrolled over to the last e-mail he’d gotten from his good buddy, ol’ Cooter.

He typed rapidly, his fingertips flying over the tiny keyboard.

“Hey Cooter,” he wrote. “Kiss your $500 security deposit goodbye. Asshole. Sincerely, Mr. Culpepper, manager, Ebbtide.com.”

When he got the notification that the message had been sent, he looked down at his incoming message box and sighed. Another e-mail from another pain in the ass. The PITAs were the reason he always communicated with his tenants by e-mail and never gave out his phone number. As far as they knew, Mr. Culpepper was a cranky old bastard who resided somewhere in the Internet. They didn’t need to know that their landlord was actually the
guy who lived over the garage, just a door knock away if the toilet didn’t flush or you couldn’t figure out how to use the remote control.

This particular PITA’s name was Ellis Sullivan. He’d been peppering Ty with nit-picking questions for weeks now. From the tenor of the questions—should he bring his own linens, were there beach chairs, bicycles, a grill—Ty decided Ellis was undoubtedly gay. Straight guys, like ol’ Cooter, just wanted to know the location of the nearest liquor store.

Ellis Sullivan and his friends were supposed to check in later today. The later the better, as far as Ty was concerned. God knew how long it would take to clean up the kitchen and living room. His shoulders sagged as he realized he hadn’t even taken a look upstairs yet.

He was headed for the stairs when he became aware of a faint gurgling sound. It was coming from the bathroom tucked under the stairs. Funny, the door was closed and it didn’t want to budge. He braced one leg against the doorjamb and yanked hard. The door flew open, and a torrent of foul-smelling water rushed out into the hallway.

“Shiiiit,” Ty said. And he meant that literally.

*   *   *

Ellis took her time finishing breakfast. She checked her e-mails repeatedly, finding nothing new except for sale offers from Bloomingdale’s and more e-mails from old friends at the bank, who’d also had unpleasant termination sessions with Stonehenge.

In the days following her downsizing (which was how she preferred to think of it), Ellis had been consumed with the injustice of her situation. She’d spent hours, days really, commiserating with her former colleagues. She’d joined a “I got jobbed by BancAtlantic” Facebook group and chatboard and had even attended a meet-up at a bar in the suburbs, where everybody had gotten sloppy drunk and teary-eyed about their dire situations.

No more, though, Ellis had resolved. She’d been a saver her whole life. Her father had left her a little inheritance, so her town house was paid for. Her car was paid off, and she’d wisely decided years ago against investing her pension funds in her own bank’s stock. She was by no means wealthy, but she had a little cushion, and she refused to panic. Or so she told herself.

So she scrolled down the messages in her in-box, looking in vain for a reply to her message to Mr. Culpepper.

Finding none, she got out the printout of the VRBO ad for Ebbtide. Strange, the only thing it lacked was a contact number.

She frowned and tapped out a follow-up e-mail, reminding Mr. Culpepper of her request for an early check-in, and suggesting that he call her on her cell phone, to let her know the house was ready.

Finally, there was nothing else to do but kill some time at the outlet mall. But first, she’d just take a spin past the house, to see if the previous guests had checked out.

She cruised down Virginia Dare Trail, slowing as she came to the house, but there was a line of cars directly behind her, so she pulled into the driveway at Ebbtide.

Damn! The Bronco hadn’t moved from the garage. But the broken cooler and beer bottles had been picked up since her last drive-by, and now a large wheeled garbage can overflowing with trash had been parked in the weedy area beside the mailbox. She craned her neck to try to see if there was any activity around the house.

She checked her e-mail in-box one more time. Nothing. Reluctantly, she decided to head for the outlets.

*   *   *

At one, Ty loaded the last load of damp towels into the dryer. Straightening, he looked out the window of the ground-floor laundry room just in time to see the same silver Accord slowly cruise past. This was the Accord’s third pass in the past hour. What was up with that? It couldn’t be one of the assholes from the bank, right? It was Saturday, for God’s sake. Not that he had time to worry about it too much. As bad as the first floor of the house had been, the second floor was worse. Much worse.

It was a horror show, is what it was. The bathrooms held piles of wet, mildewed towels, and somebody had barfed in the shower stall. He’d found what looked like a dog turd in the closet in one of the front bedrooms. How the hell had they snuck a dog past him? And it must have been a friggin’ Great Dane from the looks of things. The twin-bed mattresses from the bac
k bedroom had been dragged out to the sleeping porch and piled on the floor, where last night’s rain had given them a good soaking. Trash was strewn everywhere, and the wood-slat shades in two of the bedrooms looked like somebody had taken a baseball bat to them.

Ty had never worked as hard, or as feverishly. He had to replace the ruined twin-bed mattresses with a double bed he’d dragged out of the attic. The window shades were a total loss, so he rigged up some faded flowery curtains he found on a shelf at the back of the locked owner’s closet on the ground floor. He shoveled and mopped and scoured and plunged until his back and legs ached, and his hands were rubbed raw from all the bleach and disinfectant.

Check-in time was only minutes away. He knew that without looking at his watch, because he’d received three more e-mails from friggin’ Ellis Sullivan, wanting to know why he couldn’t have access to the house, like, now. He hadn’t bothered to answer. He was too busy staving off disaster.

And now he heard the tap of a car horn from the driveway. Not a blast, really, just a tap. He darted to the window and looked out. Christ! The silver Accord was parked in the driveway, blocking him in. And somebody was walking towards the door. No. It couldn’t be. But it was. Oh yeah. It was totally the dark-headed chick who’d caught him whizzing off his deck this morning. Ty Bazemore was having himself quite a day, all right.

5

On her third pass by Ebbtide, Ellis decided it was time to take action. She’d wasted half a day already. After all, it was five after two, so these people were now, officially, encroaching on her time. She pulled into the driveway and stared daggers at the Bronco, which was still parked in the garage. She gave two polite taps on the Accord’s horn. But the tap brought nobody scurrying out of Ebbtide. She glanced down again at her iPhone, but there was still no reply from Mr. Culpepper.

She parked and walked briskly towards the house and up the front steps. She hesitated a moment before stepping onto the porch—her mother hadn’t raised her to be the sort of person who just went barging up to somebody else’s house. Even fifteen years of living up north couldn’t change that.

“Hello?” she called softly. All was quiet. She took a good look around. The porch was broad, and although the clapboard frame of the house was brownish gray and unpainted, the trim was painted white. The porch railing had built-in benches that raked outwards, and a clothesline with bleached-out wooden clothespins was looped between the posts, just under the rafter
s. Four white rocking chairs were upended, two on either side of the front door. There was a galvanized tin pail half-filled with water sitting right beside the steps.
PROPERTY OF EBBTIDE
was painted on it in bright blue letters. She made her footsteps on the weathered gray porch boards loud and deliberate—sort of an early warning signal that she’d arrived.

The hinges of the rusted screen door squeaked loudly when she pulled it open. There was no doorbell, so she knocked briskly on the periwinkle blue door. And then she knocked, and banged, and knocked some more. She walked over to the window, and cupping her hands, peered into the darkened room. The place looked neat enough, but there was no sign of life.

Just then, her cell phone dinged softly, notifying her that she had an e-mail. She pulled it from the pocket of her capris and looked at the in-box.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Check-in: Sorry, it is our policy not to allow early check-ins. After 2 pm, you’ll find the key to the front door in an envelope under the front doormat. Be advised there is a $25 fee for replacement keys. Enjoy your stay.

“Prick,” Ellis muttered under her breath. She found the key, unlocked the door, and stepped inside.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkened room. She found a light switch by the door and flipped it on. A ceiling fan hummed to life overhead.

“Hmm,” she said, looking around. “Not too bad.” She was in a large combined living/dining area. The walls were varnished knotty pine that had grown dark with age. The wood floors were still damp from a recent mopping, and the familiar smell of Murphy Oil soap hung in the air. Ellis smiled. Her grandmother always mopped her wood floors with Murphy soap. She decided this was a good omen.

The place was not fancy, but then she’d seen that in the photographs on the website. There was a faded oval rag rug on the living room floor, a
large, lumpy sofa, and a couple of ’80s-era armchairs facing a soot-blackened fireplace. The walls were dotted with what somebody considered beach-appropriate art—paint-by-number scenes depicting lighthouses, fishing boats, tropical birds, and waving palm trees.

A nicely framed nautical chart hung over the mantel, but its glass was badly cracked. Ellis leaned in and examined it with interest. She loved the names of the rivers and sounds. Pasquotank, Croatan, Ocracoke, Currituck, and her favorite, Mattamuskeet. But then, Ellis adored anything with names and numbers and places: maps, graphs, charts. As a child, she’d traded a doll—an expensive Madame Alexander dressed as Princess Diana, sent to her by her godmother in Atlanta—for her older brother Baylor’s light-up globe. Baylor had turned around and given the doll to his little fourth-grade girlfriend.

Reluctantly, Ellis turned away from the chart. She had a car to unload and a house to set up.

The dining area held a long, scrubbed pine table and was surrounded by eight mismatched white-painted wooden chairs. A hideous plastic flower arrangement in a fish-shaped ceramic bowl was centered on a plastic doily in the middle of the table. It looked like somebody’s granny had just gotten up to fetch another cup of tea.

A smallish kitchen opened off the dining area. It was clean, yes, but it had definitely seen better days. Here, the board walls were enameled white. The cupboards were painted white, with green glass knobs, and the counters were yellow linoleum with aluminum trim. Instead of upper cupboards there was a pair of shelf units with scalloped trim nailed to the wall on either side of a kitchen window that looked out onto the sand dunes. A small stack of chipped plates, two plastic cereal bowls, and some plastic convenience store go-cups were lined up along the shelves. In the middle of t
he room stood a large wooden table with a chipped turquoise enamel top. The floors were of cracked and faded yellow-and-white checkerboard linoleum tiles. There was a four-burner electric stove with curious push-button controls and a white refrigerator with rust spots around the corners of the doors.