The Barefoot Believers (16 page)

A young boy lifted his glass.

Billy J refilled it with a smile and a wink then turned to face Moxie, all thunder and grump, concluding, “…and get out.”

Moxie shook her head, laughing. “I'll believe you when you do as I've suggested over and over again. Fix up the place into a nice, quiet sit-down restaurant where patrons are not so inclined to gather and linger.”

“The days of Santa Sofia supportin' a fancy eatin' spot are long over.”

“Not fancy.” She pointed toward a booth across the room stuffed with mom, dad and two teenage boys. The table was piled high with plates and every glass among them empty. “Family.”

“Family? You mean one of them places where they tack posters and neon signs on the walls?” He gestured toward his beloved rough-hewn paneled walls covered in fishing nets and cheap, tacky souvenirs. “Fill the menu with stuff that's more trend than taste and make the whole staff line up and sing a made-up song to customers on their birthdays over some stale brownie and topping concoction?”

“Something like that.”

“Can't picture it.”

Moxie couldn't, either. Oh, she could conjure up the image, thanks in part to her father's detailed description, but as for putting her father as the owner of such a place? Nope. He'd run Billy J's pretty much as it looked today since before she was born. The Bait Shack was part of this town, just like the weary Traveler's Wayside Chapel and the historied cottages on Dream Away Bay Court.

That thought snapped her back to her earlier concerns. “What do you know about the Cromwell sisters?”

“Who?” Suddenly the man who had ignored her silent direction to tend to the distant booth couldn't make his way across the room, and away from Moxie, fast enough.

So she just followed him. “The ones who own the cottage on Dream Away Bay Court?”

“Sisters?” He put his huge back to her and began pouring tea into the glasses, even the ones that clearly should have had juice in them. “I thought there was only the one lady. Single mother. Dottie? Dorie?”

Moxie frowned. Her father never forgot names. “Dorothy.”

“Dorothy Cromwell? Sounds right. Haven't spoken to her since you took over handling the cottage upkeep.”

“Ten years? You haven't spoken to her for fifteen years?”

“That how long it's been? Hmm.”

“Time flies when you're going fishing.”

He chuckled, looked pensive then chuckled again. “But to answer your question, no, I don't know a thing about them sisters and ain't particularly interested in making a study of them.”

The front door creaked again. Moxie turned just to see where the newest customers would find to wedge themselves in. And she couldn't help but smile. “So I guess it wouldn't interest you at all that the Cromwell sisters just walked in the door?”

“That's it! I've reached my limit!” Billy J spun around, his huge arms spread wide. “If you ain't paid yet, settle up now. If you ain't ate, fill a plate and take it home with ya. This is not a drill, people. I repeat, this is not a drill.”

“Daddy? What are you doing?”

“I'm…I'm…I'm going fishing, sweetheart,” he said softly. Then he gave her cheek a pat and began moving through the dining room, directing people to pay up and skedaddle. “Everybody out!” Billy J called again. “I'm closing this place down!”

“T
hat felt like the longest day of my life.” Jo slumped into a wooden kitchen chair with leatherette padding on the back and seat.

Travis stacked the leftovers from their meal in the refrigerator, moving the newly stocked milk, eggs, lunch meat, fruit and vegetables around to accommodate the large white to-go box from the Bait Shack Seafood Buffet.

Jo let out a sigh that was more like a moan, or a moan that was almost a sigh. Anyway, she made a sound that she thought summed up her weariness and frustration then went to work trying to elevate her throbbing ankle.

Before she could maneuver her leg more than a foot off the kitchen floor, Travis had slid his hand under her knee, gently bending and raising her leg as he scooted the other chair up to provide a resting place for her foot.

“Thanks.” She nodded.

He nodded right back, saying nothing as he let his hand linger, lending support a moment longer than the situation really warranted.

“I'm okay,” she said, finally able to straighten her leg, in a crooked, tense, ready-to-yank-it-out-of-harm's-way sort of way.

He stepped back.

She missed the warmth of his touch immediately. So she asked a totally pointless question, hoping to keep him from making some excuse and heading out the door. “Coffee?”

“Don't mind if I do. I didn't get any work done today for the chapel. I'll be up late playing catch-up.”

Jo should have felt bad about that but she didn't. Whatever he had done, he had done because he wanted to. He was a grown man, after all.

After all, before all, and all in all!

A real live, grown-up, wonderful man, who was, at this moment, making coffee in the kitchen of the house she had heretofore only associated with childhood and childlike hopes, dreams and memories.

There had never been a man in this kitchen that she knew of. Oh, wait, Vince Merchant.

Jo glanced toward the front room where Kate had sacked out on the couch already. Poor Vince. They had barely gotten back from the buffet, after a side trip to the grocery, and eaten their considerably cooled-off meal when Kate couldn't endure it any longer. She'd had to have one of her pills.

Kate had fought off the pain as long as she could, but with her tummy full for the first time today, the doctor in her had taken over and she'd taken her meds. And conked out within a half hour. Not that she'd made a lot of sense during the last fifteen minutes of that half hour. So that had given her less than fifteen minutes to talk to Vince after more than fifteen years apart.

Kate was going to kick herself in the morning.

A fate that Jo determined would not befall
her.
Travis was here. They were alone at last. She was going to make the most of it. By pumping him for information, of course.

She put one elbow on the table and watched Travis move about the kitchen gathering the goods he had just helped stash away. Filter, coffee, creamer, cups. His fingers barely fit into the drawer handles as he went looking for a spoon. When he found one, the size of his hand dwarfed the slender silver utensil.

Jo could have watched him all day. Um, night, she corrected, looking out at the crescent moon framed in the tiny cottage window. The day that had seemed almost endless was winding down.

She rested her chin in her hand, with her cool fingertips along her cheek. “Is every day this long down here?”

“Same as everywhere else. Twenty-four hours.” He raised his head, not quite looking over his shoulder, then switched on the coffeemaker as he said, “Though Santa Sofia does move at a slower pace, if that's what you mean.”

“Slower pace.” Jo mulled the notion over. “Guess that's why tourists and snowbirds have sought it out for so many years.”

“Actually, I think that's probably why in recent years tourists especially have begun to avoid it.”

“Avoid it?” Jo sat up. That news did not bode well for what she hoped to do here.

The coffeemaker gurgled and the dark, rich-smelling liquid began to drip, drip, drip into the carafe.

Despite her conviction that bathrooms and kitchens sold houses, she knew that locations set market values. They determined how much people would pay, brand spanking newly renovated kitchens and baths notwithstanding. A town fallen from favor with tourists meant a town with a depressed market.

Drip.

A depressed market meant desperate sellers.

Drip.

Desperate sellers meant…

Drip.

Desperate and depressed Realtors.

Jo thought of all the things she had seen over the years. Prices reduced below real value. Unrealistic demands from buyers. Gimmicks. Giveaways. Kissing her potential windfall goodbye.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

“But the snowbirds, they still come back to Santa Sofia, don't they?” That was the real market, she told herself.

Travis gripped the handle of the carafe for a moment and paused to make sure the process had finished up before he yanked it free and began pouring. “Every winter there are fewer and fewer of them.”

One lone last drop fell from the filter bin. It hissed on the hot plate, followed by the odor of burned coffee.

“The bulk of them used to descend on the town right around Thanksgiving. Blue-haired ladies and baggy-pants men in big old cars loaded down with trunks and suitcases with just enough room to see out the back window, if a yappy little dog hadn't taken up residence there.”

He held up the creamer to offer Jo some in her cup.

She shook her head.

He sloshed a slug of it into his own cup, not bothering to measure it out, and began to stir as he went on. “They flocked to the beach, swarmed the farmers' market and relied on locals to shepherd them around. It wouldn't be uncommon for great gaggles of them to cross paths all over town.”

“You sound as if you're describing an actual migration of wild creatures instead of the yearly convergence of mostly elderly folks fleeing the cold climates of the Northern states.”

“You ever seen these wild snowbirds?” he asked, waggling his dark eyebrows at her as he set a cup before her with a clunk.

“No,” she confessed.

“Then stick around a while, why don't you? It's more fun than watching Animal Planet.”

Stick around? Not in her plans. Jo gazed down into the coffee cup to keep from letting her expression give away too much as she asked, “But you said there still are people who have winter homes here, right?”

“Sure. Some pass properties down through families, well, like your family obviously has.”

She took a sip. It was hot but that was easier to deal with that than the intensity of Travis's curious gaze when she failed to affirm his statement.

“And some come back year after year because they have made friends here. They don't see any reason to try to find a new place somewhere else.”

“Doesn't anybody ever see a reason to find a new place here in Santa Sofia?”

“Oh, sure.”

That got her to look up.

“We've seen quite a few people come back because they remember how it was here when they were kids. Again like—”

“Like me and Kate,” she supplied the rest. Only she hadn't come back here to recapture a happier time. And almost told him so.

“That's a funny thing about this town, people can't get it out of their heads. They have some good times here and they want to come back. They spend enough time here and they never want to leave.”

She pressed her lips together.

The room went quiet.

The quiet grew around them.

Then it seemed to press down on them, making them each squirm a little.

Say something,
Jo's mind screamed. But she didn't dare. The only things she could think to say were too personal.
Is that what happened to you? You came here and you never wanted to leave? Or are you talking about what you hope will happen with me? Do you really want me to stick around? What would you think of me if you knew I have no intention of doing that—and why I can't?

Jo shifted in her chair.

The floorboards squeaked.

She should say something about needing her rest and calling it a night, she thought.

She took another sip of coffee then stared into the black liquid splashing against the inside of her cup.

Finally, Travis leaned back against the kitchen counter and folded his arms, not tightly, just laid them across his chest, his cup all but swallowed in one of his hands. “You had regular winter renters here for a long time, didn't you?”

“The McGreggors.”

“The McGreggors,” he echoed as if the name had been right on the tip of his tongue. As if he had known them almost as long as her family had.

Only he couldn't have.

“Mr. McGreggor died almost a decade ago and his wife, Ora, went to a nursing home a few years ago.” Jo folded her arms to mirror him in a not-so-subtle way of letting him know she had seen right through his so-called natural charm right down to the oldest of sales tricks. “You were still in broadcasting around that time. So you couldn't possibly have known them.”

“Ora and her only daughter stopped coming to Santa Sofia four years ago. But her last winter, she was an avid supporter of the Traveler's Wayside Chapel.” He rested the heel of his empty hand next to the deep old soapstone sink. He crossed his long legs at the ankle and looked up then all around the room, leaving the impression he had stood in that very spot before, probably with Ora McGreggor. “Only knew her the one year and hadn't thought of her in a long, long while. Did you know her well?”

“No, not well.” She tried to picture the couple and their child, or had they had a dog they'd treated like a child? Jo couldn't say for sure. “The McGreggors were some kind of distant relation on my mother's side. That's how they came to rent the cottage for the winter. They called her to ask about it or she called them to offer…. Something like that. It worked out because with them here every year, neither Kate nor Mom nor I felt anxious about the condition of the cottage, even after we stopped coming to it in the summers.”

“Why did you stop coming here?”

Because Kate wanted to. And whatever Kate wanted, the whole family did.

That was the simple answer. But as is the way of most simple answers, it was, in fact, really very much more complex than that.

“We stopped coming because…” It wasn't any of his business, this business of how she felt unwanted even in her own family. Of how her wishes hadn't mattered when Kate the Great spoke. It wasn't his business and it wouldn't matter in the long run and…and the last thing she wanted to reveal to this man was how unimportant she felt to the most important people in her life.

Still, she had to say something, so she told a shorthand version of the story, one that cut her out of the mix entirely. Which struck her as painfully appropriate. “We stopped coming because Vince Merchant broke Kate's heart.”

“Really?” He set his cup aside and straightened out of his casual slouch by the sink.

“Or she broke his. Honestly, I can't tell you which. Like I said, I was practically a kid.”

“So they have a history?” He looked through the open doorway, past the dining room and into the front room where all that showed of Kate was her cast propped up on Mom's good table and one hand dangling out from a snarl of covers. “Definitely an undercurrent there this afternoon but I thought it had more to do with Vince trying to cover for his son not showing up with your groceries.”

“Gentry? I can't believe he's old enough to drive.”

“Oh, he's old enough to do a lot more than driving.” Travis chose that moment to rub his eyes, effectively concealing any further clues to what he meant by that. “Anyway, very interesting about your sister and Vince. Curious to see how that plays out.”

“Plays out?” It just now hit Jo. Vince and Kate. After all these years, they had crossed paths again. That totally changed everything. For the good or for the bad, they were not in the situation now that Jo had expected them to be in when she'd proposed this trip.

“Yeah, plays out. Who knows? They may rekindle the old flame.”

He was right. Kate might want to stay here now more than ever.

“Or Kate might want to run out of here faster than a…a Scat-Kat-Katie.”

“A what?”

“Nothing.” Jo shook her head then frowned. “Weren't we talking about something interesting before we got onto why we stopped coming to the cottage?”

“Interesting? Not much. Just the McGreggors.” He looked into his cup and chuckled. “Of course, that Ora was pretty interesting. A real pistol.”

“Do you happen to know, was she the one responsible for all those tacky souvenirs in the rock garden?”