The Cottage Next Door (4 page)

“Ouch. That must have been hard for your dad to hear.” With all the pain that came with a breakup, none was as sharp or deep as seeing an ex-­partner truly happy. “Did you still see him a lot after he moved?”

He sat up straight again, reaching for their garbage bag and folding the top. “About as often as his congregation—­Christmas and Easter. He wants me to move to Montana, but I’m a Californian, through and through. I can’t imagine what I’d do living back there.”

“I was so sure when I was growing up that I would get out of Kansas as soon as I could. I’ve had a case of wanderlust from the day I read my first
Ranger Rick
magazine at the dentist’s office.”

He looked at her with new interest. “Where have you lived?”

“Everywhere—­” she laughed. “In my mind, that is. In reality, this is the first time I’ve been to a state that doesn’t border Kansas.”

“That’s a start.”

“How many states have you been in?”

“Twenty-­seven. It’s not as impressive as it sounds. I have relatives on the east coast, where you can hit five states in a day. Most of the rest came from a trip I took with my brother a few years back.”

“I’m wondering whether I have it in me to stay away from everything I’ve known and everyone I love.” She realized the minute it was out that she’d made a mistake. Giving Michael the impression she had doubts about whether or not she would stay in California wasn’t the way to instill confidence in Peter’s decision to hire her.

“I don’t mean that the way it sounds. It’s just that Topeka has over a hundred thousand ­people, but block by block, church by church, neighborhood by neighborhood, it’s like living in a small town. One where everyone looks out for each other. I’m going to miss that.”

“California has absorbed too many cultures to be known for anything but diversity. There are communities out here that are like Topeka. But there are some that encourage independence and have ­people who spend an entire lifetime living next door to someone they never meet.”

“I would go nuts living in a neighborhood like that.” She put her hands on her knees and stood, taking the bag from Michael and heading toward the garbage can.

It was obvious she’d planned to come back, but Michael followed her, deciding it was a good time to leave.

They moved to the curb and waited for traffic to clear. “Is the gallery near here?”

He pointed north. “A ­couple of blocks that way.”

“Would you mind driving by on the way back? I’d love to see it.” Before she took the job, she did an Internet search for Peter Wylie’s work, and was relieved to discover she liked it. She couldn’t imagine spending five days a week surrounded by the works of a Jackson Pollock wannabe.

When he didn’t answer right away, she remembered seeing him check his watch earlier. “Sorry—­I forgot you were expecting a call. I don’t have anything to do this afternoon. I can come back later.”

Taking her to the gallery when it was possible she would never work there seemed downright mean. Of course he could be wrong about how all of this was going to end. Hell, he could be wrong about everything.

He absently touched her arm, forming a connection as they crossed the street. He was only a ­couple of days away from becoming the world’s biggest jerk, or close to it. When that happened, she was going to wish she’d never heard of California, or Santa Cruz, or Peter Wylie Galleries. The least he could do was give her a ­couple of good memories before the bubble burst.

He opened her door and moved around the car. “There’s not much to see. It won’t take long.”

Chapter Five

T
HE PICTURES OF
the gallery didn’t do it justice. The building was a block from the ocean, but easily accessible to those drawn off the beaten path by the lure of a historic home constructed to look like a lighthouse. She could see why the gallery would appeal to anyone looking for an out-­of-­the-­ordinary souvenir of their trip to Santa Cruz. Instead of the typical hats and tee shirts and seashell frames she’d seen yesterday in the shop next to the grocery store, they could have a limited edition print of a painting by the area’s premier artist.

The body of the building was painted a Carolina blue, the shutters a medium grey, the trim an off-­white. The shingles that covered the tower sported a darker weathered gray, the optic section at the very top of the tower was a circle of green-­tinted glass panes. A narrow walkway with a sturdy metal railing surrounded the lookout.

Diana tried to take it all in from where they’d parked at the back of the building, but had to move to the front to see everything.

A ten-­foot-­wide section of grass ran the length of the building, with flowerbeds tucked against the house and behind the white picket fence. A classically simple sign hung over the gate—­
Peter Wylie Gallery
.

“Nice,” Diana said, her tone carrying more appreciation than the word.

“You should have seen this place when my mother found it. She was the only one who could see its potential. Even Peter called it a money pit in the making, and he thinks my mom is the most brilliant person he knows.”

“What happened?”

“Jeremy.”

“Beach house Jeremy?”

“The same. It took him almost a year but he turned what everyone considered a teardown into a place listed in all the tours of Santa Cruz.”

“Can’t ask for better advertising.”

“They hoped the lithographs and limited edition prints would work well in this market—­ they just didn’t have any idea how well.”

“And then it all fell apart this past year?” she asked, repeating what Peter had told her.

“More like a year and a half,” he said.

“And you have no idea why?” If she weren’t days away from a job where it would be up to her to look for an answer, she never would have asked the question.

“We’re working on it.” His tone made it clear he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

At his abrupt answer, the follow-­up questions she’d wanted to ask stuck in her throat.

Michael dug out his keys, and opened the front door. Diana followed him inside and waited while he disengaged the alarm. To the right, in what had once been a bedroom in the converted house, was a small office with puzzlingly old computer equipment. Three tall file cabinets sat side by side on the back wall, pre-­cloud storage relics. Diana subscribed to copying and storing on redundant cloud systems, followed by the use of a good crosscut shredding company after the legal limit had been reached on disposable audit documents. She had a strong suspicion there were records that went back twenty years or more that were mixed in with important current information, all vulnerable to flood and fire and theft. Warning bells went off, their tolling louder than the Vatican on Easter morning.

“This will be your office,” he said. “Hester has it set up so that she works here Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and then Tuesday and Thursday in the Carmel Gallery, but that’s just her way of doing things, not anything set in stone. Feel free to do what works best for you.” Pretending everything was going as planned was a lot like lying and made him sick to his stomach. But for now he had no choice.

“How long did you say Hester has been the bookkeeper here?”

“She’s been with Peter from the beginning.”

Diana had heard the story about why Hester was leaving from her mother, who’d heard it from Cheryl, who’d most likely heard it from Andrew, who’d heard it from Peter. She liked getting her information a little closer to the source. “And why is she leaving now?”

He reached behind her and turned off the office light, then closed the door. “Her husband, David, died a ­couple of months ago after a long god-­awful battle with cancer. He went through chemo and radiation—­and everything else mainstream medicine could do for him—­and he wasn’t in remission six months before the cancer showed up again.

“Hester couldn’t deal with the suggestion by David’s doctors that he begin hospice. Which made her an easy target when a woman came into the gallery to buy prints for an alternative medicine cancer clinic she and her husband had opened in Big Sur. The woman got Hester to tell her about David and what he was going through. One thing led to another, and by the time the woman left the gallery, she’d convinced Hester they could cure David no matter how far his cancer had spread, completely contradicting what David’s oncologists had told them.”

“The same kind of thing happened to my uncle and his wife,” Diana said. “The family tried to tell them they were being scammed, but who are you going to believe when you’re being bombarded with a parade of ­people coming to your house telling you about their miracle cures?”

“Her friends did some investigating and discovered the doctor had closed his first clinic under a cloud of ongoing charges of health care fraud. Hester’s way of dealing with that kind of information was to stop seeing her friends.”

Michael led Diana into the main part of the gallery. “When David died last Christmas, she fell apart. It was like she was trying to climb a greased pole to get out of her depression. She got into the habit of staying up all night and not coming to work until one or two o’clock in the afternoon. Then, because she was falling behind on her work, she would stay until midnight. She stunned everyone when she put up her house for sale, and told Peter that as soon as she took care of some unfinished business, she was moving to Oregon to be with her sister.”

They wandered from room to room, Diana stopping to stare at prints that caught her eye, Michael telling her behind-­the-­picture stories. The majority were ocean scenes, but several of her favorites were portrayals of day-­to-­day life along the coast, the subjects surprisingly eclectic, going from sheep grazing in the shade of an old barn to monarch butterflies wintering over in a grove of pine trees. There were portraits, too, almost all of them showing the subject in contemplation. The work was sentimental but not mawkish, the kind of art that broke through a snarky critic’s opinion to grace the walls of cottages and corporate offices alike, because it spoke to the person who loved it.

In the last room on the main floor, tucked between a picture of a robin stretching to capture a red berry and one with a ­couple walking hand in hand on a moonlit beach, was a portrait that struck her with such force she couldn’t stop staring. The image was simple, a young girl sitting on a fog-­shrouded beach, her back to the artist, her chestnut hair blowing gently in a breeze, her arm draped lovingly around a dog that leaned tightly into her side.

“Recognize her?” Michael said.

Diana frowned. “The girl?”

“The dog.”

She looked closer. “Is that Coconut?”

He nodded. “In one of her few quiet moments when she was a puppy.”

“Then the girl must be Shiloh.”

“It was her first day back after three weeks in the hospital. She desperately wanted to spend it at the beach, but Jeremy had arranged for a visiting nurse to stay with her at home. He had a meeting that he either attended or lost a job that was in the bid process. Peter happened to overhear what was going on and offered to spend the afternoon with Shiloh—­if she would sit for him. She knew she was being manipulated and that sitting for Peter was more a way to keep her from overextending herself, but she also knew it was the only way she was going to get what she wanted.

“While she tried to see the humpbacks that had been reported in the area through the fog, he sketched. This was the result of that day.”

“I love that story,” Diana said. “And I love the way I feel when I look at the picture. Even though you can’t see her face, you can tell how special that moment was and how much it meant for her to be there.”

“I’ve known a lot of ­people who feel they’re coming home when they’re at the ocean, but none like Shiloh. My mom told her she must have been a mermaid in another life.”

Diana had never known a guy her own age like Michael and wasn’t sure how to respond to him. His kindness was real. And natural. As much a part of him as his lopsided smile. She could picture him turning down a date with Taylor Swift if Shiloh or his mother or Jeremy or Peter or anyone he knew needed him. What kind of twenty-­nine-­year-­old man was like that? And why? “She sounds like a special little girl.”

“Not so little anymore. She’ll be twelve in a ­couple of months.”

“I’m looking forward to meeting her.”

Michael stared at her through narrowed eyes for what seemed like a long time before saying anything. “She’ll like you.”

Diana dipped her chin to hide the flush of pleasure that swept her cheeks. She was used to guys saying nice things about her hair or her eyes or her body, but never about who she was inside.

“Is the original painting available?” she asked, suspecting a Peter Wylie original would cost what her house would cost. If she still had a house.

“If it were, I could have sold it a hundred times.” Michael reached out to tap the right-­hand corner of the frame to straighten the infinitesimally crooked print. “Peter gave it to Shiloh.”

They’d talked about Jeremy and Shiloh during lunch, too, so Diana knew the basics. Still she sensed there had been a lot left unsaid. She’d been filled with curiosity, but didn’t push for answers. It was obvious Michael felt protective of his friends.

She moved to the final wall of pictures in what logically would have been the living room before the house was converted.

“Why two galleries?” she asked, standing in front of a picture of a sea otter.

“The Carmel gallery was too small to handle originals and prints. Peter considered moving up the coast to Half Moon Bay, but it was too far away for him to spend more than a day or two a month up there. He likes to meet the ­people who buy his pictures. Personal contact is important to the way he does business.”

“I think it’s great that you wound up working with him. Having the two of you hit it off must have felt like a great gift to your mom.”

“It was hard in the beginning,” he admitted. “Especially when my dad wanted to get back together with my mom, and it seemed to me and my brother that Peter was the only thing keeping them apart. But then I saw it for what it was, and instead of getting sucked into taking sides, Paul and I got out of the way so they could work it out themselves. Julia was a big help.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Julia?” He laughed. “Not even close. Not only is she married to a best-­selling writer, she has a houseful of kids and lives three thousand miles away.”

The name connected. “She’s the owner of the beach house that Jeremy is working on.”

“She insists she’s its caretaker, that the real owners were and always will be a ­couple named Joe and Maggie.”

“That’s the way I felt about the house my great-­grandfather built. He and my great-­grandmother willed it to my grandmother and then when she died, I bought it from the estate. I considered myself the caretaker for the next generation.”

“It must be great to feel that kind of connection.”

“Yeah,” she said softly. “It did.”

Michael came to a set of stairs. “There’s a one bedroom apartment on the second floor with a great view of the boardwalk. It’s where I used to stay when I came home from college during summer breaks. Living so close made it convenient to learn the business. Of course I didn’t have a clue that it was a setup. I was being groomed to take over running the galleries when Peter and my mother toured Europe every other summer.”

Before she thought how it would sound, she blurted out, “So, working here during the summer is all you do?”

Michael laughed. “That, and getting my PhD, and traveling, and substitute teaching for a ­couple of years, and writing environmental blogs for several—­”

She held up her hands in surrender. “Any more and I’m going to feel like a slacker.”

She looked to the top of the staircase. “Is this how you get to the lighthouse part?”

“There’s another set of stairs off the kitchen that takes you up there.”

“Can I see?”

“Sure—­but it can get claustrophobic.”

“I don’t mind. I was stuck inside a paper-­mache cow for four hours and did okay.”

“You don’t expect me to let that one go.”

She pulled the elastic band from her hair and shook her head. “I was in Future Farmers of America in high school and we made an overly ambitious float for the Fourth of July parade. The cow was supposed to be animated, but the motor stopped running just as we pulled into line. Which meant we either settled for second place—­
again
—­or put someone inside to manipulate the head and tail by hand. That someone turned out to be me.”

“The parade lasted four hours?” Michael had an insane urge to touch her hair to see if it really was as soft and silky as it looked.

“Oh, there’s more.” She grinned. “The hole I crawled through wouldn’t stay closed so someone came up with the brilliant idea to use superglue. Of course all this happened before they told us that an alarm had gone off at a bank on the parade route and we wouldn’t be allowed to start until they made sure it was safe.

“So, I either stayed inside the cow or they cut a hole in its belly. Which meant we would have a mutilated nonfunctioning animated cow as the main feature on our float. This was the first time in three years that we actually had a chance at first place. You can understand why no one was anxious to cut me out.”

Michael showed her the apartment and it was everything she could do to keep from asking about the rent, knowing there was no way she could afford it. Not only was the apartment the perfect size, it was fully furnished and decorated in all her favorite colors.

They left the apartment and went down the hallway to another locked door. This room held the circular steel stairway. Every riser creaked and groaned; the sides came in closer and closer as the tower narrowed. Finally, they reached the top. Michael unlatched a window and swung it open before he moved aside so Diana could join him.