Ten Beach Road (52 page)

12. How do you think the second set of renovations will go at Bella Flora? How will the lessons learned over the summer set the team up?

Every book presents its own journey of discovery. Even when you think you know your setting and your characters, there are countless details that need to be researched and understood. A lot of people contributed their unique insights and experiences to
Ten Beach Road
, and I’m very grateful for their help.

This time thanks are owed to:

Pat Rossignol, whose own renovation of an incredibly special house both inspired and awed me. Thank you for sharing your experiences and your home; the champagne and encouragement were unexpected bonuses.

“Sister” Carol Lane, who made introductions and went with me on that first fabulous tour.

Marie Beth Cheezem for sharing her gorgeous home, and to the “Yes” Girls, Rhonda Sanderford and Marian Yon Maguire, for the tour of Snell Isle homes that led me to it. Thank you for answering the real estate questions that arose.

Frank T. Hurley, Jr., former neighbor, well-known Realtor and beach historian for answering both real estate and preservation questions and for helping me understand what could and couldn’t happen. Your books gave me a greater understanding of Pass-a-Grille and the beach I grew up on.

Catherine Hartley, AICP, for helping me get started.

Joe Frohock, All Lines Insurance Group, for answering questions up to the last minute, especially when I realized that I simply couldn’t “kill the house.”

Rob Griffin and “Tito” Vargas for talking me through the intricacies and order of construction and remodeling. And to Rebecca Ritchie, who took pity on my lack of understanding and not only re-clarified but read the final draft to make sure I’d gotten it right.

Jon and Barry Wax for boating and other feedback, Jeff Brizzi for sharing his knowledge of classic cars, and Special Agent Karen Marshall for helping me keep FBI Agent Giraldi as real as possible.

Tonja Kay, whose donation to F.A.C.E.S., Families and Children Experiencing Separation, in Morgan County, Alabama, won her the right to have a character named after her. My apologies for using your lovely name on a less than loveable character.

Reneé Athey for her friendship and for helping me envision Bella Flora and her surrounding grounds and for lending me her name—accent aigu and all.

Ingrid Jacobus for her unflagging friendship and for serving as a first reader. This book probably never would have existed if it weren’t for all those great breakfasts at The Seahorse and our walks on my favorite beach in the world.

And, of course, no list of thanks would be complete without Karen White, intrepid friend and critique partner, who is not afraid to tell me when something’s not working. And to Susan Crandall, retreat and critique partner. It’s great to have you in the mix.

I hope that my love of the real Pass-a-Grille is apparent in this story. I cartwheeled my way down its beautiful white sand beach as a child, strutted across it in a bikini as a teenager, and brought my own children to build sand castles on it as an adult. I trust those of you in the know will forgive me for altering parts of it. I’ve changed a few street and business names to suit the story and removed an entire condo building to make room for Bella Flora. This is, after all, a work of fiction. And although I have borrowed some names and a few occupations, the characters are imaginary and not based on or intended to represent real people in any way.

Well-bred girls from good southern families are not supposed to get shot.

Vivien Armstrong Gray’s mother had never come out and actually told her this, but Vivi had no doubt it belonged on the long list of unwritten, yet critically important, rules of conduct on which she’d been raised. Dictates like “Always address older women and men as ma’am and sir” and “Never ask directly for what you want if you can get it with charm, manners, or your family name.” And one of Vivien’s personal favorites, “Although it’s perfectly fine to visit New York City on occasion in order to shop, see shows and ballets, or visit a museum, there’s really no good reason to live there.”

Vivien had managed to break all of those rules and quite a few others over the last forty-one years, the last fifteen of which she’d spent as an investigative reporter in that most Yankee of cities.

The night her life fell apart Vivi wasn’t thinking about rules or decorum or anything much but getting the footage she needed to break a story on oil speculation and price manipulation that she’d been working on for months.

It was ten P.M. on a muggy September night when Vivien pressed herself into a doorway in a darkened corner of a Wall Street parking garage a few feet away from where a source had told her an FBI financial agent posing as a large institutional investor was going to pay off a debt-ridden commodities trader.

Crouched beside her cameraman, Marty Phelps, in the heat-soaked semidarkness, Vivien tried to ignore the flu symptoms she’d been battling all week. Eager to finally document the first in a string of long awaited arrests, she’d just noted the time—ten fifteen P.M.—when a bullet sailed past her cheek with the force of a pointy-tipped locomotive. The part of her brain that didn’t freeze up in shock realized that the bullet had come from the wrong direction.

Marty swore, but she couldn’t tell if it was in pain or surprise, and his video camera clattered onto the concrete floor. Loudly. Too loudly.

Two pings followed, shattering one of the overhead lights that had illuminated the area.

Heart pounding, Vivien willed her eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness, but she couldn’t see Marty, or his camera, or who was shooting at them. Before she could think what to do, more bullets buzzed by like a swarm of mosquitoes after bare flesh at a barbecue. They ricocheted off concrete, pinged off steel and metal just like they do in the movies and on TV. Except that these bullets were real, and it occurred to her then that if one of them found her, she might actually die.

Afraid to move out of the doorway in which she cowered, Vivien turned and hugged the hard metal of the door. One hand reached down to test the locked knob as she pressed her face against its pock-marked surface, sucking in everything that could be sucked, trying to become one with the door, trying to become too flat, too thin, too “not there” for a bullet to find her.

Her life did not pass before her eyes. There was no highlight reel—maybe when you were over forty a full viewing would take too long?—no snippets, no “best of Vivi,” no “worst of,” either, which would have taken more time.

What there was was a vague sense of regret that settled over her like a shroud, making Vivi wish deeply, urgently, that she’d done better, been more. Maybes and should-haves consumed her; little bursts of clarity that seized her and shook her up and down, back and forth like a pit bull with a rag doll clenched between its teeth.

Maybe she
should
have listened to her parents. Maybe she
would
have been happier, more fulfilled, if she hadn’t rebelled so completely, hadn’t done that exposé on that Democratic senator who was her father’s best friend and political ally, hadn’t always put work before everything else. If she’d stayed home in Atlanta. Gotten married. Raised children like her younger sister, Melanie. Or gone into family politics like her older brother, Hamilton.

If regret and dismay had been bulletproof, Vivien might have walked away unscathed. But as it turned out, would’ves, should’ves, and could’ves were nowhere near as potent as Kevlar. The next thing Vivien knew, her regret was pierced by the sharp slap of a bullet entering her body, sucking the air straight out of her lungs and sending her crumpling to the ground.

Facedown on the concrete, grit filling her mouth, Vivien tried to absorb what had happened and what might happen next as a final hail of bullets flew above her head. Then something metal hit the ground followed by the thud of what she was afraid might be a body.

Her eyes squinched tightly shut, she tried to marshal her thoughts, but they skittered through her brain at random and of their own accord. At first she was aware only of a general ache. Then a sharper, clearer pain drew her attention. With what clarity her befuddled brain could cling to, she realized that the bullet had struck the only body part that hadn’t fit all the way into the doorway. Modesty and good breeding should have prohibited her from naming that body part, but a decade and a half in New York City compelled her to acknowledge that the bullet was lodged in the part that she usually sat on. The part on which the sun does not shine. The part that irate cab drivers and construction workers, who can’t understand why a woman is not flattered by their attentions, are always shouting for that woman to kiss.

Despite the pain and the darkness into which her brain seemed determined to retreat, Vivi almost smiled at the thought.

There were shouts and the pounding of feet. The concrete shook beneath her, but she didn’t have the mental capacity or the energy to worry about it. The sound of approaching sirens pierced the darkness—and her own personal fog—briefly. And then there was nothing.

Which at least protected her from knowing that Marty’s camera was rolling when it fell. That it had somehow captured everything that happened to her—from the moment she tried to become one with the door to the moment she shrieked and grabbed her butt to the moment they found her and loaded her facedown onto the stretcher, her derriere pointing upward at the concrete roof above.

Vivien spent the night in the hospital apparently so that everyone in possession of a medical degree—or aspirations to one—could examine her rear end. The pain pills muted the pain in her posterior to a dull throb, but there didn’t seem to be any medication that could eliminate her embarrassment.

When she woke up the next morning, exhausted and irritated from trying to sleep on her side as well as round-the-clock butt checks, she found a bouquet of butt-shaped balloons from the network news division sitting on her nightstand. A bouquet of flowers arranged in a butt-shaped vase sat beside it. No wonder there was a trade deficit. We seemed to be importing endless versions of buttocks.

Making the mistake of flipping on the television, she was forced to watch a replay of last night’s shooting—the only footage in what they called a sting gone awry was of her—and discovered that she was one of the last human beings on the face of the earth to see it. Everyone from the morning anchors at her own network to the hosts of the other networks’ morning talk shows seemed to be having a big yuck over it.

If she’d been one for dictates and rules, she would have added, “If a well-bred girl from a good southern family slips up and
does
somehow get shot, she should make sure the wound is fatal and not just humiliating.”

If she’d died in that parking garage, they would have been hailing Vivi as a hero and replaying some of her best investigative moments. Instead she was a laughingstock.

Vivien swallowed back her indignation along with the contents of her stomach, which kept threatening to escape. She desperately wanted to take her rear end and go home where both of them could get some privacy.

The phone rang. She ignored it.

It was almost noon when Marty strolled into the room. He was tall and lanky with straight brown hair he was always pushing out of his eyes and a long pale face dominated by a beak of a nose. She always pictured him rolling AV equipment into a high school classroom or caressing computer keys with his long, surprisingly delicate fingers. He was a gifted photojournalist and over the last ten years had demonstrated that he would follow her anywhere to get a story and could shoot video under the most trying circumstances as he had, unfortunately, proven yet again last night.

Marty looked relaxed and well rested. But then, he hadn’t taken a bullet in his butt last night. Or had people prodding and laughing at him since.

“You don’t look so good,” he said by way of greeting.

“You’re kidding?” Vivien feigned chagrin. “And here I thought I was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready for my close-up.”

He dropped down onto the bedside chair, and she envied the fact that he could sit without discomfort or forethought. If he noted the jealousy that must have flared in her eyes, he didn’t comment.

“If you’ve brought anything shaped like a butt or with a picture of a butt on it, or are even remotely considering using the word ‘butt’ in this conversation, you might as well leave now,” she said.

“My, my, you certainly are touchy this morning.”

“Touchy?” She snorted. “You don’t know the half of it.”

They regarded each other for a moment while Vivien wondered if she could talk him into breaking her out of here.

“Your mother called me on my cell this morning,” Marty said. “I heard from Stone, too.”

About five years ago her mother, noting that Vivien had had a longer relationship with her cameraman than she’d ever had with anyone she dated and frustrated at the slowness of Vivien’s responses, had started using Marty as a middleman. Stone Seymour, who actually was her boyfriend, or, as he liked to call himself, Vivien’s main squeeze, used Marty to reach her, too, especially when he was on assignment in some war-smudged part of the globe from which communication was difficult and sporadic and Vivien had forgotten to clear her voice-mail box or plug in her phone.

“How in the world did he hear about this already?” Stone was CIN’s senior international correspondent and the network’s terrorist expert, which meant he spent great blocks of time in places so remote that even the latest technology was rendered useless.