Blindsided (3 page)

Kirk loved the romance of those stories—the idea of Bowlegs’s ragtag band defending their patch of wilderness, refusing to give up or give in. But Ashley had always found them unsettling. She’d plagued him with questions.
What did they eat? How did they survive? Did they like it here?

She’d never been able to think about Billy Bowlegs without remembering that in the end, the army had built forts all around Okefenokee and sent in wave after wave of soldiers until the Seminole were beaten, cleared out, their identity as a people nearly obliterated.

She could never forget that Billy Bowlegs had died in Arkansas, driven from his home, utterly defeated.

“What do you suppose Roman’s doing?” she asked.

“Calling half the tow services in Georgia, I expect,” Mitzi replied.

“He’ll find a way to get his car unstuck by the end of the day.”

Mitzi lifted her dripping paddle from the water and placed it inside the canoe. “That’s why we’ll have to act fast.” She turned around, maneuvering carefully to avoid capsizing the boat, and took a seat so close to Ashley, their knees touched. “So. Here’s what I’m thinking. You can’t hold him off forever just by threatening to get in his way. Honestly, I don’t know why he hasn’t sent his guys in to knock the place down already.”

“Because of the hurricane?”

On TV this morning, she’d seen pictures of the Keys, but not until the last few minutes of the newscast. The storm hadn’t hit as hard as expected.

Mitzi flapped a hand. “Sure, but that’s passed now. If I were him, I’d have had the bulldozers out there this morning.”

“He promised he wouldn’t.”

“Why should he care if he breaks a promise to
you
?”

Ashley frowned, because she couldn’t answer the question.

“He’s a good person,” she tried.

“Are you kidding? He’s a stiff-necked, anal-retentive corporate drone who wants to turn the Keys into a theme park. We need to break this guy.”

“Break him?”

“Destroy him. Otherwise, he’ll never give it up. You said yourself, this place is important to him. So we have to make it completely impossible.”

“I don’t want to
break
him,” Ashley said. “I just want Sunnyvale back.”

Mitzi grabbed her hand, pressing it between her own. “Look, honey. You’ve got a big heart. The biggest heart. But now’s not the time to make decisions with your heart. Not with your twat, either, if you’re having any of those kinds of ideas—and I’m guessing you are, because man alive,
look
at the guy. But you can’t be sweet to this one. You just can’t. Not if you want Sunnyvale.”

“I do.”

She wanted it more than anything, because when she tried to imagine the shape of her future without Sunnyvale—what would that even look like?

She couldn’t go back to Bolivia. It hadn’t been working out with H2O Global. They’d promised her a job in the mountains, a villa called Huaycaba where there were nearly two
hundred people whose lives would be changed by the installation of a gravity-fed water pump. But when Ashley had arrived for duty in Cochabamba, travel-greasy and gawping at the crush of a million people gathered in the Andean valley, they’d told her,
You need to work on your Spanish
.

Her Spanish was fine. She’d traveled around Mexico for six months when she was twenty, and she’d spent another summer as a tour guide out of Baja. It was
her
they didn’t like.

They’d taken one look at her bare arms and her blond hair, her tan and freckles and impractical shoes, and they’d stuck her in the office writing press releases on an ancient computer. She’d overheard the director tell one of the field agents that they’d only taken her on in the first place because of who her father was.

Ashley didn’t know if it was true. It might have been. If it was, she couldn’t do anything about it. But she’d figured if they weren’t going to take her seriously, she wouldn’t take the job seriously. She’d started putting more energy into flirting with Chad than spreading the gospel of clean water, because they never sent out any of her press releases, and because that was what she did. The easy thing. The fun thing.

She looked wispy and frivolous, and that was how people treated her, so she went along with it. She drifted from job to job, hooked up with guys who weren’t worth the time she wasted on them, let her life slide through her fingers.

That was who she was.

But after Chad left, there had been mornings in Cochabamba when she could almost convince herself she would be able to make this work. That she could be a serious person if they just gave her a chance. If she stayed long enough, worked harder, they’d see that she really had something to contribute, and
she’d
see it, too.

Then she’d heard her father’s voice on her cell, scratchy with distance, authoritative and remote, and she’d known she was wrong.

Ashley had quit on the spot. The country director had made a face that meant,
I knew this would happen. I knew you’d never stick
.

I knew it, too
, she’d thought.
This is how I am. I’m nothing
.

Her grandmother was dead, and she was nothing.

And if she lost Sunnyvale, she’d be nothing with nowhere to go. Evicted from her homeland like the Seminole, sent off into the world to try to live without a place.

Although that probably wasn’t an acceptable comparison, since the Seminole were a whole Indian nation, and she was just one skinny white girl with an unhealthy attachment to a bunch of vacation apartments.

“I
do
want it,” she said again, more firmly this time. “I just don’t know how to change his mind.”

“You’re never going to change his mind,” Mitzi said. “You have to take him down—make it impossible for him to carry out his plans. Did you ever read that book
The Monkey Wrench Gang
? You have to be a monkey wrench. Pour sugar in his gas tanks, cut down his billboards, that kind of stuff. Corporate terrorism.”

“I’m not cut out to be a terrorist.”

“You got him here, didn’t you?”

“I don’t think that was terrorism. I think it was grief-induced psychosis.”

“Well, the important thing is, he’s here. Did you get any dirt on him on the way up? Gambling problem, alcohol, penchant for hookers?”

Ashley shook her head.

“What he’s planning, he must have been working it for years. Lining up permits. Sugar-coating deals for anybody reluctant to sell, putting the pressure on. These guys are slimy, Ash. They’ll do anything. Maybe he bribed people. Maybe he manipulated the rules. I don’t see how else he would have got the property from Susan. She always said she was leaving it to you.”

“I can’t imagine him bribing anyone,” she said. “He’s a straight shooter.”

But she flashed back to his rain-covered face. His flat eyes.

I lie
.

She didn’t know him. She didn’t know much of anything, but she knew she loved Sunnyvale, and she wished that were enough. She wished
that
were all it would take to convince Roman to back off.

“You know what would be great?” she asked. “If I could take him back in time and make him
see
it. Like, summer before last, when I was selling jewelry at the flea markets and failing spectacularly at all those online premed classes—remember when we made those drinks with the coconut shavings for happy hour, and we had that limbo contest and Arvind and Prachi kicked everybody’s asses? I wish I could make him be there for that. I wish I could show him what he’ll bring an end to if he knocks it down.”

“That would never work, doll. You can’t make him have a change of heart if he doesn’t
have
a heart.”

“Roman has a heart.”

“Have you looked in his eyes? The man’s got scary eyes. No, you need something to hold over him while we dig around and figure out what dirty trick he used to get Susan to sell. Secret perversions, clubbing baby seals, toxic waste dumping, violating zoning regulations. You suppose Little Torch is zoned for what he wants to do to it?” Mitzi frowned, then shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. He hasn’t done it yet, so we can’t zap him for that. What about the animal angle? Can we invent some manatees or sea turtles or something? Or there’s birds, maybe, or those little Key deer that are always in the paper. Or I know! Snakes. We’ll look on the Internet, there have to be some snakes you could say you’d seen, and then—”

“Wait,” Ashley interrupted. “Back up.”

“What’d I say? I’m just riffing, here, so you can’t expect me to remember every little—”

“Key deer. We have Key deer. Sunnyvale does. I’ve seen them.”

“You have?”

“Yeah. Just the other day, in fact, there was this little one in the pool, drinking water from a puddle. But—that’s not news, right? I mean, the refuge is just over on Big Pine.”

“I’ve never seen Key deer at Sunnyvale.”

Ashley considered. “I guess I hadn’t, either. I’ve seen them on the beach, and all kinds of other places. But not right there at Sunnyvale. That was the first time.”

Mitzi grinned, brilliant and a little bit menacing. “One time is all it takes.”

“But he must have gotten permission already. Environmental impact statements or whatever.”

“Probably, but that doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t?”

“So he got an impact statement. So what? You say, ‘Your experts were bogus, this development is going to threaten the fragile ecosystem of our Key deer, and I have these three other experts who agree with me. I’m going to sue your ass, and we’ll let the courts figure it out.’ ”

“I can’t sue him. I don’t have any money.”

“No, darling, that’s not the
point
. The point is the threat. The point is the
wrench
. We tie
him up in hearings and experts and money, and meanwhile the court—or the state or whoever—says, ‘No demolition on this property. Not until it gets sorted out.’ And while that’s all happening we dig around, talk to all the other people who knew your grandma, and find out what this guy
did
to her, and we can use that to force him to quit. This is perfect.”

“It is?”

“It is. It’s so perfect, it’s like it fell from the sky. It’s like Susan gave it to us.
Here’s your Key deer, darlings. Hit him where it hurts
.”

“I don’t know, Mitz. I’m not sure anymore that I know what Grandma would want.”

“Sure you do. You two were peas in a pod.” Mitzi picked up the paddle and turned around. “We’re going back, and I’m going to do some research and make a few phone calls, and then you’re going to cut his
balls
off with this.”

She twisted to smile over her shoulder, and Ashley smiled back, because that was what she was supposed to be doing. Smiling.

This was the plan she’d been looking for.

But she felt kind of dirty.

She couldn’t help but wonder why Mitzi hadn’t known about the sale. Ashley had been afraid that Mitzi
did
know, but somehow it was worse that she didn’t, because why had Grandma left Mitzi out of this plan, when they were such good friends?

Maybe Mitzi was right, and Roman had somehow taken advantage. But try as she might, Ashley couldn’t believe he would do that.

Or maybe Ashley’s worst fears were true, and her grandmother just hadn’t cared what happened to Ashley after she was gone. Maybe she’d considered her job done once Ashley was raised, and she’d been trying to cut the apron strings, to force Ashley out into the world so she’d find a real life, a real job, and stop returning to Sunnyvale every winter.

The youngest snowbird in Florida
, Grandma had called her once, and Ashley hadn’t been able to tell even then if it was a good or a bad thing.

And there was another possibility. The possibility that the answer to all these questions was in those boxes in the Airstream that Ashley couldn’t bring herself to open.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

She didn’t know what any of it meant—the way her grandma had died, how she’d distributed her estate—any more than she knew how to change Roman’s mind. But she couldn’t
help feeling that the two things were bound up together, somehow.

Mitzi paddled hard, cutting through the water with gusto. The Key deer revelation was clearly the most exciting thing to happen to her in weeks.

Ashley wasn’t excited, though. The thought of siccing a bunch of lawyers on Roman made her heart sink, and she could no longer be certain she’d picked the right ally in this fight.

It was just that if she couldn’t trust Mitzi to get her out of this, she’d have to trust herself.

CHAPTER FIVE

Cupped in his palm, Roman’s phone chirped a low-battery warning.

The alligator raised its head.

He took a step back and ran into the porch railing.

“Don’t worry about Flossie,” the man behind him said. “She just likes music.”

Roman spared him a glance. The man had wispy white hair, silky as the innards of a cracked-open milkweed pod. Khaki pants, untucked button-up shirt, glasses. He looked like a slightly nutty university professor, or the PR guy for some nature conservancy.

Roman had met him last night, but he couldn’t remember his name until he saw his feet.

Don.

Don doesn’t believe in shoes
, Kirk had said.

Shoes are part of the social fabric
, Roman replied.
How can you not believe in shoes?

Kirk shrugged.
Feel free to ask him
.

Roman had learned his lesson about asking questions, though. The commune residents looked normal enough, but throw out one innocent question about whether the coffee was decaf and you found yourself on the receiving end of a lecture about the bleach content of coffee filters—which segued, improbably, into colonic cleansing, coffee-plantation labor abuse, the “bullshit” labeling of free-trade products, and, finally, obscure and truly disgusting African parasites.

He’d been forced to conclude that the only thing these people didn’t waste energy yammering about was the enormous alligator occupying the patch of grass just off the porch, between the dining hall and the swamp.