The Men of Thorne Island

She stood and paced the length of the veranda. Old wood planks groaned under her feet, but fortunately remained intact. With renewed optimism, she turned the knob on the door and entered her Cozy Cove Inn.

She stepped into a wide hallway furnished with only a guest-registration counter, a wall clock that had stopped at eight-twenty-two and a pair of Windsor chairs scarred with what high-priced decorators might call character.

To her left was a large parlor. It was impossible to determine the style or colors of anything in the room. Every piece of furniture had been covered by a sheet except one wing chair and a small table by the fireplace. The walls were adorned with peaceful country prints and shelves of hardback books.

Feeling more like an intruder than a proprietor, Sara slowly backed out of the room. Unease raised the hair on her neck. The inn appeared empty, yet Sara had the distinct sense that she was not alone.

She’d never believed in the supernatural, yet the presence of another soul in this house was as real to her at this moment as was the newel post at the bottom of the thick banister. She curved her fingers around the post and willed herself to go up the stairs.

A center hallway veered to the left and right of the second-floor landing. Doors stretched the length of the hall. All of them were closed except one at the very end. Weak sunlight mixed with an artificial glow poured into the passage. Sara approached cautiously, ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble. Logic told her that she wouldn’t find any of course. Mr. Winkleman would have told her if there was something bizarre about the island. Surely he wouldn’t have left her alone…

The first unnatural sounds of Thorne Island floated from the room to Sara’s ears. It was a light tapping, almost like… Yes, that was it. Sara stood outside the open door listening to the harmless sound of someone pecking a computer keyboard.

She stepped over the threshold and had her first look at the other resident of the Cozy Cove Inn. It was a man and his back was to her. Dark, thick curls covered the collar of his knit shirt.

His hands halted above the keyboard. His back straightened and his voice, low and hoarse, reached her across the room. “If you’re trying to scare me to death, it’ll never work. So if you came to kill me, you’d best use a gun.”

CHAPTER TWO

WHEN THE FULL IMPACT of the man’s statement registered in Sara’s brain, she didn’t know whether to laugh or run from the room. She did neither, but instead spoke to the back of his head. “What a horrible thing to say.”

His ancient office chair squeaked as he turned slowly toward her. “Not to someone creeping around your house, it isn’t.”

Though he faced her, he was still in the shadows. She couldn’t detect any details of his features.

“Of course, I didn’t know at first that you were a woman,” he added.

Sara hated being at a disadvantage. The last amber rays of daylight speared through the louvered shutters at his back. He could see her clearly enough, but his form was nothing but an amorphous gray blob to her. “What difference does it make that I’m a woman?” she said. “I could still kill you.”

He stretched one leg, then settled his ankle on the opposite knee, a casual pose for someone who just a moment before had thought he might be taking his last breath. “Yeah, but you won’t. Women don’t like to murder people after they’ve looked into their eyes.”

“Then don’t get too confident,” Sara shot back, “because I haven’t seen your eyes yet.”

He deliberately moved his chair out of the shadow until sunlight fell across his upper body. “There, is that better?”

It was. The shapeless mass had transformed into an exceedingly acceptable-looking human. Except perhaps for his almost black hair, which was unstylishly long and untidy. It curled over his forehead to meet a slightly lighter pair of straight eyebrows. Much of the rest of an interesting face was hidden by at least two days’ growth of beard. He was fairly young, near her own age, Sara assumed, prompting her to conclude that she wasn’t looking at “Ol’ Brody.”

Once Sara had noted these details, the man’s shirt commanded her attention. She’d given her father a similar one at least fifteen years ago when he took up golf, and her sense of humor had been quite different from what it was now. A beige knit background hugged the man’s chest respectably, but it was the eighteen numbered golf flags fluttering around his torso that made Sara choke back her laughter.

Each flag had a different cartoon printed on its surface. Flag number sixteen, the one she could see most clearly, depicted a droopy-eyed fellow with an ice bag on his head and a thermometer sticking out of his mouth. The words “Feeling under par” were printed next to the caricature. Other clichéd golf references decorated the remaining flags. Sara covered her mouth with her hand, but wasn’t successful in stopping a chuckle.

The man plucked a portion of the shirt away from his chest and stared down at it. “What? You don’t like my shirt?”

“It would be all right if it were a cocktail napkin at the nineteenth hole.”

“Hey, it’s got a pocket. That’s why I like it. Try to find shirts with pockets these days.”

Sara’s limited experience with shopping for men’s clothes hadn’t included an awareness of shirt pockets, so she just said, “I know, and it’s a darned shame.”

“It is if you smoke.”

“Do you smoke?”

“Not anymore. But I like knowing I still have a pocket in case I start again. Basically I just hate it when manufacturers mess up a good thing after I get used to it.”

The hint of a smug grin lifted the corners of his mouth. This man obviously liked to have the last word. And once he knew he wasn’t about to be shot, there was no lack of confidence in his manner. “But we’re off the subject here,” he said. “What are you doing creeping around my place?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. I wasn’t creeping. What’s the point of trying to remain unnoticed after riding in that boat with the earsplitting engine? Don’t tell me you didn’t hear us arrive.”

“Of course I heard the boat. I just figured Winkie had forgotten the toilet paper or something and was dropping it off. I sure never thought that what he was leaving behind was a snooping female.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “So now I’m snooping and creeping?”

He raised his hands palms up as if his point was obvious. “Look, you came into my place without so much as a hoot or a holler and tiptoed up to my room like a typical nosy woman on your little lady cat’s feet…”

Suddenly his golf flags weren’t amusing anymore. They were just stupid. And his hair wasn’t untidy, it was unkempt. And his attitude belonged way back in an era before golf was even invented. Sara’s index finger poked out at him as if it had a mind of its own, which it must have, since she hated for anyone to do that to her. “Now look,” she said in a voice that quivered with underlying anger, “first of all, this is my place, and I’ll walk around in it any way I please!”

That seemed to get to him. He gave her a dark look. “What do you mean, your place?”

“I mean this hotel is mine, this island is mine. In fact, every single place on this island—if there are any others—belongs to me.” For emphasis, she yanked the deed out of her purse and held it up to the challenge in his eyes. “Would you care to inspect this document?”

He stood up from the chair, all lean six-feet-plus of him, and glared at the paper in her hand with eyes that she saw now were startlingly gray. “What’s happened to Millie?” he demanded.

The mention of her aunt’s name gave him some credibility. At least he wasn’t a squatter. Sara softened her tone. “Millicent Thorne died last week.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his middle finger to the bridge of his nose. “Damn it. Why didn’t somebody tell me?”

His reaction caught her off guard. “You knew my aunt personally?”

“Millicent Thorne is…was your aunt?”

“Actually great-aunt, yes.”

“Well, of course I knew her. I’ve been living on her island for the past six years.”

“And not paying any rent for a good part of it, too.”

His eyes, which had only just registered the shock of bad news, now narrowed with irritation. “Now, hold on a minute. I haven’t missed a single month paying my rent. For your information, Millie stopped collecting my checks. She said she didn’t need the money. Told me to hold on to them and send a bunch all at once when she asked for them.”

“Why would she do that?”

He turned away from her and sat back down in his desk chair. “You’d have to ask Millie about that, which might be difficult at the moment, but I would suspect it had to do with a little something called trust.”

“She trusted you?”

He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a short stack of checks held together with a paper clip. “She did, and for good reason.” He thrust the checks at Sara, holding them at the level of her chest until she took them. “Those are my rent checks, every one of them for the last year, dated by the month. They’re all there in chronological order. Go ahead, see for yourself.”

She flipped through them. They were dated consecutively, made out to Millicent Thorne and signed “N. Bass.” She looked up. “Bass? That’s your name? After the island or the fish?”

“Pick one. It’s only a name.”

Sara returned her attention to the checks. Suddenly Mr. N. Bass’s name wasn’t important. The amount of the rent he paid each month was. “One hundred dollars?” she said. “You only paid my aunt one hundred dollars a month?”

He shrugged. “That’s what she asked for.”

The accountant’s hackles on Sara’s neck prickled. “That’s ridiculous. You live here practically like a king of your own private domain, in a cozy little inn, which, by the way, you’ve allowed to fall into pitiful disrepair, for the sum of one hundred dollars a month?”

He nodded. “I’m not complaining about the deal.”

She thrust the checks and the deed into her shoulder bag. “Obviously not. Then I guess you won’t mind if I raise your rent to help cover the cost of repairs around here.”

He met her self-assurance with cool disdain. “Sorry. You can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve got a twenty-five-year lease, with a clause prohibiting rent increases, and I’ve only lived here six of them.”

Mr. N. Bass must have thought he was dealing with an idiot. “That’s absurd,” she said. “My aunt had an attorney, and even if you had tried to talk her into such a financially unsound arrangement, he would never have allowed—”

Mr. Bass leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs at the ankles. “You talking about Herb Adams?”

Herb? “You know Mr. Adams, too?”

“Sure. He was present when I signed the lease. He did, in fact, advise Millie against such generosity, but she insisted.”

N. Bass had the nerve to follow that statement with a short burst of laughter. Sara quickly changed the shocked expression on her face to one of outrage. His cocky smile faded, but his attitude did not.

“Never mind asking a bunch of questions I have no intention of answering,” he added. “I’ll just tell you that Millie and I were friends. I helped her out once, and she repaid me.” That odd little grin, which under other circumstances might have been interpreted as somewhat endearing, twisted his mouth again. “Millicent was a fair woman. But then, you know that.”

Sara spied a chair a few feet from her. She stepped over to it and sank into its plump floral cushion. She had to think rationally. Sara prided herself on her ability to get to the fundamental truth of a situation. Finally she said, “Mr. Bass, this all may be true…”

“It is true.”

“All right. I don’t question your story, but the island belongs to me now, and any agreements you had with my aunt are no longer applicable. If I see fit to raise your rent, I am well within my right to do that.”

He clasped his hands in his lap and shook his head slowly. “Nope. You’re not. Millie assigned all lessee’s rights to her tenants in the event a new landlord took over the property. I’ll let you take a look at my lease. You might be able to fight it, but it would be expensive and time-consuming.”

“And with my luck someone actually would kill you before I won the case,” Sara said. “It wouldn’t be any fun unless I had the satisfaction of seeing your expression when I beat you.”

A genuine grin split his face for the first time, and Sara found herself disliking him a little less. But if she had to accept this man’s living arrangements on Thorne Island, then she and he were still a long way from bridging the gap from dislike to tolerance.

“Cheer up, Mrs….?”

“It’s Miss. Miss Sara Crawford.”

He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “There you see, things could be a lot worse between us.”

“I don’t see how.”

“You could be married or ugly. And you’re neither one of those things. I think we’ve got a future, Miss Crawford.”

She gritted her teeth. “I think we’ve got a problem, Mr. Bass.”

“Nick! Nickie! Everything all right up there?”

A low, booming voice rolled up the staircase and down the hall to Mr. Bass’s room, and Sara nearly jumped out of her skin. “Who’s that?”

“That’s Dexter Sweet, former linebacker for the Cleveland Browns. He’s a big man with thighs the size of tires, but don’t let him scare you. The goodness in his soul could make nightingales sing. And that yelling thing he just did—that’s how you enter someone’s house.”

“Oh, please, will you—”

“Everything’s fine, Dex,” Nick Bass called. “We’ve just got company.”

An African-American male filled the doorway. Sara couldn’t tell anything about his soul, but the rest of Nick’s description was absolutely accurate, though he might have mentioned Dexter Sweet’s height. It was just shy of a California redwood.

Dexter spared her a quick, astonished glance before settling a worried gaze on his friend. “I heard Captain Winkie’s boat and thought something was wrong. He’s not due back till day after tomorrow. Then I couldn’t find Ryan, and Brody was still snoring when I looked in on him.”

Nick extended his hand to indicate Sara. “Dex, meet Miss Sara Crawford, our new landlady. Sara, this is Dexter Sweet.”

Amazingly, despite his size, there was something about the man’s round boyish face that made his last name seem appropriate. She stood up, offered her hand and looked into Mr. Sweet’s perplexed brown eyes. “Did you say ‘Captain Winkie’?”

He nodded.

She couldn’t stop herself. Exhaustion and shock had taken their toll. Laughter bubbled from her throat and she could barely get her next words out. “I’m standing here with Mr. Sweet and Mr. Bass, and we’re all talking about Captain Winkie. Somehow I feel like I’m in the middle of a Saturday-morning cartoon.”

The two men exchanged a look that was part male commiseration and part she’s-a-woman-that-explains-it. Sara wouldn’t have been surprised if they both put a finger to the side of their heads and made circles.

“Tell me something, Mr. Sweet,” she said through a continuing fit of laughter, “do you pay rent on this island?”

“Yeah.” He dragged the word out with caution. “Been here almost six years now.”

“And how much do you pay?”

“A hundred a month.”

“Terrific. And are your checks stored in a drawer somewhere?”

“Yeah, Nick’s.”

Nick Bass opened the desk drawer, withdrew a stack of checks similar to his own and brought them to her. Each one was dated and signed by Dexter Sweet.

It wasn’t even enough to cover the back taxes, but it was a start. “Thank you, gentlemen,” Sara said. “Now I think I’ll go find a room for myself. Do we have any fresh linens?”

“I’ll let you use mine,” Nick said. “The cupboard down the hall that they’re sitting in is yours. But the spare sheets belong to me. Share and share alike I always say. Pick any room you like, Miss Crawford. Make yourself at home.”

“I am at home, Mr. Bass.”

A SHARP PAIN shot up Nick’s leg. He limped back to the desk chair and sat down.

Dexter frowned at him. “Are you doing your exercises, Nick?”

“Sure, I’m doing them, just like you told me,” he said without looking Dexter in the eye. “But I figure after six years a guy’s just got to live with a little discomfort.” He gave his friend a crooked smile. “It beats the alternative, anyway.”

Dexter grunted his agreement and sat in the chair Sara had vacated. “What’s going on here, Nick? Who is this Crawford woman?”

“I told you, Dex. She’s our new landlady and Millicent Thorne’s great-niece. Millie died last week and left the island to her. She showed me the deed, and it looks like everything’s in order.”

“What does that mean for all of us?”

“Actually, Dex, now that I’ve had a few minutes to think about it, Millie did us a favor.”

“But Miss Thorne was the best landlady we could ever have had.”

“True, but we knew she wouldn’t live forever, and when you think about all the possible outcomes for Thorne Island, having Millie’s niece as the owner seems like the best one. Sara Crawford will probably hang around for a couple of days, flex her landlady muscles a bit and then take off. You saw what she was like—nice clothes, educated manners, soft hands.” His mind wandered to Sara’s other obvious attributes, but he refrained from listing them. “She won’t have any interest in staying around here.”

Dexter nodded. “Yeah, why would a woman like that want to hang around a bunch of independent cusses like us?”

“Exactly. I give Miss Crawford three days tops, then she’ll be history.” He grinned at his own private thought. “Though I imagine she’ll make us send in our rent checks on time.”

Dexter’s answering grin curled into his cheeks. “She makes a darned pretty chapter of Thorne Island history, though, doesn’t she, Nick?”

Nick nodded slowly. “Yep. She’s not hard to look at.”

Dexter stood and headed for the door, but stopped before leaving the room. “By the way, Nick, did she see what you had on the computer screen?”

“No. She wasn’t the least interested. I use the name Nicolas Bass in the top margin, so she wouldn’t have suspected anything, anyway. She doesn’t seem like the type who’d be curious about the ramblings of a grumpy, thirty-eight-year-old hermit.”

JUGGLING BED LINENS and her suitcases, Sara chose a room at the opposite end of the hallway from Nick’s. She flicked the light switch beside the door. A single bulb hanging from the ceiling crackled and spit, finally casting a sickly yellow light on more furnishings covered with sheets. Cringing at the potential cost of electrical repairs, Sara dropped her belongings onto the floor.

She snapped open one neatly folded sheet and fluttered it over a gray mattress. A fresh scent—familiar from Sara’s childhood—filled the room. She hadn’t smelled that clean aroma since the days her mother had folded the family’s laundry from the backyard clothesline. Bass must dry his laundry in the open air, she thought. Probably because the inn didn’t have a working electric dryer.

She doubted the island had many modern conveniences. In fact, considering the condition of the Cozy Cove, she’d been dumbfounded to see a computer in Nick Bass’s room. She’d tried to read the screen, and once she’d recognized standard manuscript format, she’d been doubly curious. But she hadn’t gotten close enough to actually read the words.

Strange, she thought now as she tucked a corner of the top sheet between the mattress and box spring, she wouldn’t have been a bit surprised to see a racing form or even a video game on Mr. Bass’s monitor. But a scholarly-looking bit of text—somehow that didn’t fit the picture she’d formed of the man so far.

There’s an old saying, Sara, she said to herself. You can never tell a person by his dopey-looking golf shirt. She was glad she had a full week to devote to this island project. It might take that long to understand her bizarre tenants, especially the aggravating—but oddly appealing—Mr. Bass.

CHAPTER THREE

THE ROOM Sara had selected turned out to be almost cheerful. She removed the sheet that had been thrown over a cedar wardrobe and found dainty floral stenciling on the doors. When she uncovered a pair of colonial arrow-back chairs flanking a fireplace, she discovered bright chintz cushions on the seats. She gave the shutters at the windows a thorough dusting, which gave new life to the well-polished slats.

Yes, she would be quite comfortable in this room, once she solved the immediate problem of food. Since the Cozy Cove obviously wasn’t a working hotel, it probably didn’t have a restaurant or the personnel to run it. A snack breakfast on the airplane and a nonfat yogurt cone in Put-in-Bay wasn’t nearly enough to sustain Sara. Surely the inn had a kitchen. She went downstairs to raid the refrigerator.

Behind the registration counter and opposite the parlor, she located a spacious dining room with sheets hiding what appeared to be a long table and eight chairs. In the near darkness of dusk, she felt her way through that room to a kitchen beyond. She flipped the light switch by the entrance, and another single overhead bulb glared down on a red brick floor.

Sara made a quick inspection of the appliances and decided they had once been used to prepare meals for a large number of people. But they hadn’t been operated in some time. She ran her hand across the porcelain top of a six-burner stove, and years of smeared grease stuck to her fingers. Hardened boil-over remains coated the sides of the oven. When she opened the door of an ancient refrigerator, she grimaced at the streaks of mildew.

The rest of the kitchen was in much the same condition. Pitted kettles hung from brass hooks in the ceiling or lay any which way on the rough wood of the countertop. An old oak worktable surrounded by four simple ladder-back chairs had an assortment of alien substances embedded in its scratched surface. Sara’s stomach, which just moments before had growled to be fed, nearly revolted at the conditions under which its next meal would have to be prepared.

That was until Sara saw a little corner of the kitchen that made her heart—and stomach—rejoice. Sparkling under the unforgiving light, next to a modern apartment-size refrigerator, was a scrupulously clean area of counter. A gleaming-white two-burner stovetop and a microwave oven sat side by side on the varnished pine surface. A cabinet above this miraculously neat oasis held two spotless pans, a pair of matching skillets and assorted clean tableware. If these items existed in this chaos of dirt and grease, could decent food be far away?

She began a search for cans, bottles and jars, checking cabinets in the tidy corner of the kitchen.

“Can I help you, Miss Crawford?”

Like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar, Sara slammed a lower cabinet door and stood up. “Mr. Bass, you don’t have to sneak up on me.”

Another of those smug grins tugged at his lips. “Now we’re even, eh?”

He crossed the threshold into the kitchen and came toward her. A pair of brown chinos accentuated his long, lean legs and matched the sand traps on his shirt. Sara detected a slight limp in his gait, though it might have been caused by the uneven old brick flooring. She pulled her gaze away from him and continued her search for food. “I wasn’t aware we were keeping score.”

She sensed his amusement even though she couldn’t see his face and hated the flush of embarrassment it brought to her face. “Oh, yes you were, Sara,” he said. “You’re just miffed because it’s a tie.”

“What nonsense,” she responded, acutely aware that he’d called her by her first name. A chuckle rumbled from his throat and seemed to reverberate down her spine.

“What are you doing in my kitchen—oh, pardon me, your kitchen—going through my things?” he asked.

She banged another cupboard door closed. This one contained various cleaning supplies, and she tucked the information away for later use. “I’m looking for food. And while we’re on the subject, may I say that under your supervision, my kitchen has fallen into a state that isn’t fit for pigs.”