The Treasure Man

Since there were eight bedrooms, each with its own bath, this took quite a while, during which Chloe inspected the dining room and removed the covers from the big mahogany dining-room table and chairs. The breakfront was devoid of its usual heirloom silver trays and goblets, which made the room seem bare, and Chloe recalled Gwynne’s telling her that she’d put them in storage. The elegant bone china was still there, and so was the antique crystal, all under the surveillance of numerous saturnine Timberlake ancestors glaring down from ornate gilt frames.

When she’d finishing in the dining room, Chloe retreated to the kitchen and munched gloomily on Ben’s cracker. The inn was a disappointment. True, her memories were based on idealized moments from past vacations. She hadn’t been prepared for the general disrepair of the place, but she definitely couldn’t go back to Texas. Her grandmother, with whom she’d lived for the past five years, had sold her house and moved to an assisted-living facility.

During the years with Grandma Nell, Chloe had saved her money in order to give herself a chance to do what she did best—design jewelry. Her cousin’s offer to let her live here had been a godsend. But Chloe’s work would suffer if she was forced to spend all her time cleaning and repairing the Frangipani Inn, not to mention that she didn’t have a clue how to go about it.

When Ben returned, she wordlessly handed a can of warm cola up to him. He popped the top, sat down on a chair beside hers and drank, his throat working as he swallowed. “You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked him suddenly.

He lifted a brow. “Cute. Red hair. Gwynne’s cousin.”

“Well, thanks for the cute, anyway,” she said wryly.

“It was a long time ago. You were how old? Fourteen? Fifteen?”

“Sixteen,” she told him, remembering the pain of longing for a guy who hadn’t recognized her existence. He’d called her Carrots because of her red hair, and she’d hated that nickname.

“I was twenty-one and in my first season of diving for Sea Search, Inc.”

“You seemed much older to me.”

He snorted. “Honey, that summer I was getting older by the minute.” His curt laughter didn’t convey humor.

She got up to plug in the refrigerator. “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

“Oh?” His eyebrows shot up.

“About your request to stay here. I wasn’t anticipating sharing the place with anyone else because I have work to do, but if you’d help with repairs in exchange for rent, you could live in the annex. You’d have your own entrance and everything, and—”

“Hold it,” he said. “You don’t have to talk me into it. I have nowhere else to go, and I’m a decent handyman.”

“That’s good, because I don’t know one screw from another.”

He blinked at her, and she realized what he must be thinking. She felt her neck coloring. “We could give it a trial,” she said quickly to cover her embarrassment. “Maybe a week or two?”

“That suits me, since I’m waiting for a job to come through and money is tight.”

“You don’t work with Sea Search anymore?”

“I haven’t been employed there for over a year.” Ben drained the can in one easy motion and stood up, crumpling it in his hand. “The rain has let up enough so that I can retrieve the food from your car,” he said before tossing the can into the trash bin beside the door.

Chloe, her cheeks still flushed from her gaffe, handed over her car keys and watched from the window as Ben loped through the curtain of rain. He soon returned carrying bags of groceries that she’d bought before leaving Texas, sprinkling wet droplets around the kitchen as he shook water from his eyes.

“I spotted your cat. He’s sitting under the porch steps.”

“Butch will be okay on his own. He loves it here.” She set a box of cat crunchies out on the counter for later and started to stash the rest of the food in the pantry.

“Would you like a sandwich?” she asked.

“No, I’d rather inspect my new digs.”

“You’ll have to plug in the refrigerator in there, and I’m not sure the hot-water heater works. Gwynne mentioned something about it.”

“I’ll check everything.” He rose, and she found herself staring point-blank at his bare damp torso, exposed when his shirt had come unbuttoned. His physique, even though he was older than when she saw him last, was close to spectacular. Wide shoulders tapered to a narrow waist, and his legs were muscular and nicely formed.

“I’d better call Butch one more time,” she said, mostly for something to do besides stare at the line of hair pointing toward his navel.

She stood and went to the door as Ben disappeared into the annex. Butch didn’t appear when she called. Since she wasn’t interested in flailing around beneath the porch in the hope of chasing him out, she went back inside and opened the can of tuna.

After her solitary meal, she climbed the stairs to her room and stripped off her wet clothes, noticing that the stream of water from her bathroom sink ran nonstop, a knob was missing from the vanity and the hook from the closet door lay on the floor. Thank goodness Ben Derrick had shown up. With him to help her, she might be able to make her ambitious plans for the summer work after all.

She was brushing her teeth when she heard a door open downstairs. “Chloe?”

“Uh-huh,” she said through a mouthful of toothpaste. She grabbed a glass of water, rinsed her mouth and spit; the water here had a foul sulfur taste, but the water softener would take care of that.

“You’re right. The hot-water heater isn’t working.”

She wrapped her robe tightly around her and went to the top of the stairs. Ben was standing in the foyer below.

“I’ll look at it tomorrow,” he said.

“Okay,” Chloe said, her heart sinking. She didn’t have extra money to pay for major repairs, and anyway, she wasn’t sure whose responsibility they would be, hers or Gwynne’s.

“I figured I’d better report it.”

“Thanks. I think. Hey, you’ll be needing a hot shower, won’t you?”

“That would be nice, but I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

“The bathrooms up here are all supplied by the water heater under the attic stairs,” she said, inclining her head in that direction. “It’s working fine. I have personal knowledge of this.”

“If you wouldn’t mind—” Ben began, but she shushed him by holding up a hand.

“Use the bathroom off the master suite to my right. You won’t be in my way.”

“Cool,” Ben said, and for a moment she could have sworn that he was ogling her bare legs below her short terry-cloth robe.

“No, hot,” she said, referring to the water, but as he raised his eyebrows, she realized that he thought she was making a flirtatious comment about him.

“Good night,” she mumbled in embarrassment, turning on her heel and fleeing to her own room, knowing that she hadn’t mistaken the humorous glint in his eyes.

“Good night, Chloe,” he replied, a hint of laughter in his voice.

Her room was filled with the sound of the rain on the roof and Ben taking his shower on the other side of the wall, which divided her room from the master bath. She couldn’t stop visualizing Ben standing under the shower spray, soaping himself all over. The more she tried to banish him from her mind, the more vividly her imagination embellished his image.

“Ridiculous,” she muttered as she fluffed her pillow for the fourth time. “I’m not here to get involved with a guy.”

Except that it was a strange thing about not wanting to meet men. Sometimes all you had to do was decide that you didn’t want any part of them, and suddenly, they were everywhere. Popping up in your headlights. Crawling out of the woodwork like palmetto bugs. Showering in the room next door. Reminding you of when you were sixteen years old and eager to find out what love was all about.

Too bad that you couldn’t just squirt men with something in a spray can and make them go away. Although even if that were possible, she wouldn’t get rid of Ben Derrick.

Not that anyone could ever recapture the thrill of a first crush. No, better that Ben never realize that she’d cared for him. Better to hunker down at the Frangipani Inn, get to work and forget all about that special summer.

Chapter Two

Chloe’s goal in taking up residence at the inn was twofold. The solitude would allow her to get her fledgling jewelry business off the ground, and she could stop solving other people’s problems. It was difficult, after years of accepting the roles that other people expected her to play in their lives, to disengage. Grandma Nell had understood.

“You can’t create space for new experiences and new people in your life if you’re giving all your energy to people who drag you down,” her grandmother had said. “It’s time for you to leave behind unproductive and outmoded situations, Chloe. Go to Sanluca. Stay awhile.”

The resounding message was that she needed to concentrate on herself for a change. After several rescue operations involving unsuitable men, Chloe couldn’t have agreed more.

Of course, there would always be room in her life for Butch, who woke her the morning after she arrived by jumping on her feet and nibbling at her toes. Hoping to get back to sleep, she yanked one foot away, then the other. This only caused the cat to settle on her chest, purring loudly as he kneaded sharp claws in and out of her shoulder.

“All right, I’m awake,” she told him grudgingly, treating him to a vigorous rub behind the ears before sliding out of bed and padding into the bathroom.

“How did you get in, anyway?” she asked, knowing that Ben must have opened the door for the cat. A glance at her watch told her that it was almost nine o’clock, late by her standards. Usually, when she was here, she was awake at dawn, since the rising sun’s rays easily penetrated the thin curtains of her room.

Butch meowed and pawed at her leg. “Okay, okay,” she said, lifting the toilet lid. Butch was toilet trained because she’d been relentless in her expectations. She took a dim view of scooping cat litter, and so did her grandmother, who had been skeptical about adopting a pet in the first place. Chloe had insisted that they keep Butch after he’d ventured out of the woods behind their house, skinny and scared. Now he weighed in at a hefty twenty pounds and was afraid of nothing.

Since Butch preferred privacy when he performed, Chloe wandered into the bedroom. She opened the windows to let in the breeze, marveling at the sight of the waves lapping on the shore. Though born and bred in the heart of Texas, she’d always felt a kinship with the sea.

Ben was sitting at the edge of the ocean, staring toward the horizon. She almost called to him, but something about the set of his shoulders gave her pause. She read discouragement in the way they slumped, and something else. Sadness? Sorrow? She wasn’t sure, but she sensed that he was weighed down by some indefinable burden. He seemed different from when she’d first met him. In those days, he’d been full of personality, convivial and gregarious. People had been naturally drawn to him, and he’d basked in his own popularity. The change in him tugged at her heart even as she cautioned herself that whatever Ben’s problems were, she wanted no part of them.

She returned to the bathroom, where Butch was now waiting at the edge of the sink for his morning drink of water. After turning on the tap for him, she flushed the toilet, a skill that the cat had unfortunately not mastered. After one lick at the dripping faucet, Butch gave a disdainful little brrrup!—his equivalent of “yuck”—and jumped down.

Chloe started a shopping list. Bottled water, she wrote at the top as her cell phone rang. The caller ID revealed that it was Naomi, who, until she’d married her husband, Ray, the summer of high-school graduation, had accompanied her to Sanluca during their childhood summer vacations.

Naomi wasted no time getting to the point. “Chloe, guess what Tara’s done now.”

“I couldn’t say right off,” Chloe said cautiously as possibilities sequenced through her mind. Her teenage niece had recently decided that she didn’t want to go back to high school in the fall. “Taken up skydiving? Joined a convent?” Chloe figured the only way to calm Naomi down was to make light of the situation.

“She’s run away from home, that’s what! Ray and I are frantic with worry. Tara finished her final exams and split. No one has a clue where she is.”

“Did she leave a note?”

“She propped a sweet little card on her pillow, telling us not to worry.”

“As if you wouldn’t.”

“As if,” Naomi agreed with a sigh.

“At least Tara took her exams,” Chloe pointed out.

“Why do you find this funny?” Naomi asked with remarkable forbearance. “We’re beside ourselves with worry.”

“Tara confided before I left Farish that she’d reformed. My guess is that she’s hiding at a friend’s house and they’re pigging out on hot-fudge sundaes. You used to do that when finals were over, remember?”

“We’re checking with all her friends, and in the old bunkhouses on some of their parents’ ranches, and every other possible place. The police don’t consider her disappearance a criminal matter because Tara left a note, went of her own accord and kids run away all the time. They believe she’ll be back. I’m not so sure, Chloe. Tara and I had a big argument a couple of days ago.”

Chloe’s heart sank. “I’m sorry to hear that. Care to tell me about it?” She’d hoped that Tara was sufficiently chastened after her latest transgression of hosting an unchaperoned party when her parents weren’t home. But then, Chloe knew about rebellion for rebellion’s sake. She’d been a difficult teenager herself.

“On Sunday, Tara wanted to wear this really horrible outfit to church. I mean, it was so short that it would have raised the eyebrows of every little old lady in the congregation, including Grandma. Especially Grandma. And no bra, and—”

“I don’t wear a bra sometimes.” Like maybe never, Chloe was thinking, if the weather didn’t cool off.

“You’re a grown woman, free to make your own decisions about how you dress. Tara’s still a kid. I told her that over my dead body would she leave the house in that getup, and she said that she hoped I wasn’t planning to assume room temperature any time soon, but she was going, like it or not. And I said she wasn’t, and she said I was a bitch, and—”

“She called you a bitch?”

“As well as other names I would rather not repeat. Then she stormed out of the house, wearing a dress no bigger than a sticky note. Ray and the twins and I waited for her to come home and were late for church because she never showed up. Or at least, she didn’t come home until we were gone. I didn’t figure out until late that night that she’d taken a duffel. She packed clothes, Chloe, and her teddy bear. She never goes anywhere without that bear.”

Chloe sighed. This sounded like an updated version of her own difficult adolescence, though she hadn’t had the comfort of a stuffed animal when, during Christmas vacation in her senior year of high school, she hitchhiked to visit a boyfriend who had recently moved to California.

“That’s awful, Naomi. You have my heartfelt sympathies,” Chloe told her.

“We’ve set off alarms in every direction. I’ve alerted Marilyn and her group in case she shows up in Dallas.” Marilyn, their cousin, and her husband, Donald, had five kids. Tara had been close to that branch of the family most of her life.

“You’ll call when you find her, won’t you?”

“Sure. Let’s hope it’s soon.”

“I’m sure it will be. She’s a good kid, Naomi.”

“I keep expecting her to walk through the front door—” Naomi broke off her sentence, a sob catching in her throat.

“I’m so sorry, Mimi.” Chloe was the only one allowed to call Naomi by her old childhood nickname.

“I’ll keep you posted. I wish I were in Florida with you. I worry about you being all alone there.”

“Well, don’t. Ben Derrick showed up.”

“Who?”

“You wouldn’t remember. You were already married to Ray the summer that Ben boarded at the inn and I was here.”

“He’s nice?”

“Also helpful.”

“Age?”

It took a moment for Chloe to figure this out. “Thirty-seven.”

She could picture her sister narrowing her eyes on the other end of the phone. “You haven’t taken up with him already, have you?”

Chloe let out an exasperated sigh. “I’ve been here less than twenty-four hours, Naomi. Surely you jest.”

“I am not in the mood for joking, Chloe. I’m falling apart. I can’t even pull myself together long enough to throw a load of laundry into the washing machine.”

“Do you want me to come home, Naomi? Help you out?” She waited with dread for her sister’s answer, knowing that she’d go if Naomi needed her.

“No, Chloe,” Naomi said. “We’ll get through this. But thanks.”

Chloe, all but heaving a giant sigh of relief, decided to broach a new topic. “How are Jennifer and Jodie?” she asked. Naomi and Ray’s twin daughters were ten years old and never gave them any trouble. So far, anyway.

“J and J are upset that Tara’s disappeared, like all of us.”

“Give them my love.”

“I will.”

“And Grandma Nell—is she adjusting to the assisted-living home? Or is she still trying to decide if she likes it?”

“Chloe,” Naomi said patiently. “Stop assuming responsibility for other people’s well-being. Our grandmother is doing fine. She’s made a new friend, and they watch their favorite TV program together every day. The friend’s family treats them to dinner at the country club. Grandma’s happy. Repeat after me. Grandma’s happy.”

“‘Grandma’s happy,’” Chloe recited as if by rote.

“You’ve got it. You’ve got it! Listen, Chloe, I’d better hang up in case Tara tries to call home on this line instead of our cell phones.”

“Okay. I’ll talk to you soon.”

“Love you,” said Naomi.

“Love you, too.”

She heard the sliding glass door to the annex grinding along its track. It was located under her bedroom window, and a glance outside told her that Ben was no longer sitting and staring morosely out to sea. While she dressed, she heard the Jeep’s engine roar to life as Ben left. Briefly, she wondered where he was going, but she didn’t have time to mull it over. She had work to do.

Downstairs, she threw all the windows open and hauled the wicker rockers outside to the front porch, where last night’s rain had washed everything fresh and clean. A row of red hibiscus bushes bordered the porch, their flowers as big as saucers, and overhead, in a nearby palmetto tree, a mockingbird’s white feathers flashed as it flitted to and fro. Beyond the rolling dunes, the sea was glassy and calm. This day, like every day in summer, would be scorchingly hot. The sun was already blazing down on the sand.

Unfortunately, the Frangipani Inn wasn’t air-conditioned. Tayloe had been adamant that the winds off the ocean cooled it enough; she’d insisted that if the natural breezes had been good enough for her grandparents, they were good enough for her. Chloe wasn’t so sure. Sea breeze or not, air-conditioning seemed like a really good idea in this hot and steamy climate.

Once she’d opened the house, she tackled the dirty dishes in the sink, then measured the small study off the library, where she intended to set up her workshop. The space was cluttered with an old treadle sewing machine, a box of dusty jelly jars and various other debris. She’d place a workbench at one end of the long, narrow room A telephone outlet behind Tayloe’s old desk would make it convenient to connect to the Internet. Between the workshop and the kitchen, a large closet, formerly a butler’s pantry, would house her jewelry-making supplies. The closet contained a safe, where she’d keep the precious and semiprecious gems she used in her one-of-a-kind designs.

All that decided, she was finishing off a slice of peanut butter toast when someone began hammering on the front door.

Through the sidelight, Chloe spotted a tattered white sailor hat with the brim pulled low. She threw the door open to Zephyr Wills, one of the most senior of Sanluca’s senior citizens. Known as the Turtle Lady, she felt that it was her obligation to safeguard the big loggerhead turtles that nested up and down the coast.

“Chloe!” Zephyr cried, her round wizened face crinkling into a broad smile. She was under five feet tall and as frail as a bird. “Gwynne told me you were driving all the way from Texas, gal. What’s the matter—you tired of cowboys?”

“And how,” Chloe said with feeling.

“Well, no wonder. All those sweaty horses, all that nasty dust. I knew a cowboy once, but never mind about that right now. Thought you’d never open the door. With Tayloe and Gwynne, I always walked right in. Didn’t think you’d care for that, though.”

“I, um, wouldn’t have expected it,” Chloe admitted.

The Turtle Lady wore her customary white long-sleeved shirt, which she donned every day for protection from the hot sun. Chloe could have sworn that Zephyr’s plaid shorts were twenty years old, which was almost as long as Chloe had been vacationing at the Frangipani Inn. Zephyr carried a ruffled parasol; it was her trademark.

“Come for a walk with me, Chloe. We’ll check out the latest nests.”

Zephyr had always liked company on her morning nest-hunting expeditions. Tayloe was usually willing to oblige; Gwynne, too.

“I’d love to,” Chloe told her, nudging Butch back inside with her foot.

“Get a hat. You don’t want to have a sunstroke. Is your cat coming with us?

“No, he doesn’t much like the beach.”

“That’s just as well. No telling what trouble he could get into out there.”

Chloe found a hat on the rack inside the door and skipped down the steps with a kind of heady anticipation. In her girlhood, she had listened with fascination to Zephyr’s explanation of the habits of loggerhead turtles. During their summer breeding season, female turtles lumbered onto land to lay eggs in a shallow nest in the sand. Then they returned to the ocean, never to see their own offspring, which hatched in a matter of weeks and clambered down the beach to the ocean, subject to predators and often so confused by the lights on land that they headed the wrong way. Zephyr considered it her mission in life to make sure the babies found the sea, and she sent them off with a little blessing and prayer for their safety.

Due to the nearby coral reefs being constantly ground to bits by wave action, the sand on this beach was famously pink. The ocean at this hour was still a deep cerulean blue, but as the day progressed and the sun climbed higher, its color would change to a cool, inviting turquoise. An onshore breeze, picking up now, fluttered the brim of Chloe’s hat and ruffled her hair. As they walked, Zephyr cast inquisitive glances at her from under the parasol.

“You used to be a redhead,” Zephyr stated. “What happened?”

“Uh, well, magenta and bronze and green and a color called Desert Dream, which I’ve settled on, finally. I want to look like a normal person for a change.” She wore her hair in a straight bob slightly longer than chin length, having dispensed with the spiky style she’d tried last year.

“You always were kind of different,” Zephyr ventured. “Gwynne was predictable, Naomi was sedate, but you were always turning cartwheels down the beach or ripping off all your clothes and jumping in the water.”

Chloe laughed. “I doubt if I’ll be doing any nude swimming around here now. There are lots more people on the beach these days.”

“We have the new wilderness preserve to thank for that,” Zephyr told her. “Lost Galleons Park, they call it, after the 1715 Spanish fleet that wrecked on the reefs while transporting gold and silver from the New World to Spain. Strange juxtaposition if you ask me—galleons in the New World and space launches right up the coast trying to find other new worlds. We’re going to have a space-shuttle launch later this summer. You going to be around?”

“I’m sure I will. I like the name Lost Galleons Park.”