Chapter 3
Freed from chaperoning Mitchell Colton in her father’s office, Dove got to work helping out on the docks.
While she didn’t know anything about general maintenance or fixing the boats—her father had always insisted that was men’s work—she’d been helping with tourist check-in on and off since her father had used his savings to buy his own boats and start the business.
She had also adjusted her class schedule at the studio to free up Saturday mornings when her father had been forced to let Oscar go.
The adjusted schedule was temporary. As was, Whaler hoped, the termination. He was ready to rehire Oscar as soon as the man got sober.
Holding the position open was part of what was hurting the business.
While most of the revenue came from boat rentals, Whaler used to make good money with the chartered excursions he and Oscar had run on a regular basis.
He’d had to take those outings off the St. James Boats offerings at the start of the current tourist season.
With Oscar gone, and as much as Whaler was drinking, he’d made the responsible choice, in terms of client safety.
The best choice, of course, would have been to curtail his own drinking. Something he was managing to do on a case by case basis as special requests came in for excursions. He’d blow completely sober before he went out and when he got back, too. An hour later, no way.
As she headed to her studio before lunch, needing an hour of self-provided therapy before her afternoon classes began, Dove still hadn’t heard from Mitchell Colton with any kind of plan.
She found herself thinking not about what that silence meant in terms of her hopes but about the fact that the lawyer hadn’t pointed out the most obvious solution.
Bob St. James had to sober up.
With a failing business that wasn’t going to happen.
If he was sober, the business would bounce back.
Catch-22. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg. She’d been diving headfirst into emotional pools of bad energy with her lack of solutions every time she thought about convincing her father to try and go even a day without getting drunk.
But if Mitchell could find a way to help her save the business in the interim, her father would sober up. She just had to believe that.
On a wave of hope, she climbed the stairs to her studio, key in hand to unlock the door.
And stopped just short of reaching to slide it in the slot it matched.
The doorknob was tilted at a downward angle.
And the quarter-inch gap between the jamb and the front of the door told her that it wasn’t latched. Pulled closed, but not tightly.
Curious more than anything else, she pushed a shoulder against the door. Hanging back enough that if someone was inside, she could call out and be heard by Repo customers at the bottom of the stairs.
When no sound came, she cautiously took one step and then another.
Could be there’d been a leak from her bathroom and maintenance had had to get in to fix it before it damaged goods in the store below.
The plumbing was old. She’d put in requests to have it fixed but hadn’t pushed because she couldn’t afford to have her rent raised.
She also hadn’t delivered a key to the place after she’d had the locks changed shortly after moving in. She trusted her landlords implicitly. Not so much the taxidermist who’d had the space before her.
She’d spent a month ridding her studio of bad energy before she’d moved a single thing in.
With salt in a bowl at the door, scrubbing every corner and then applying pinches of salt in each one of them, burning incense and essential oils, leaving windows open when the air outside was fresh, leaving music playing twenty-four seven at frequencies that were proven to relieve tension, she’d finished by changing the locks.
Four steps was what it took to get around the wall that faced the studio’s front door and blocked the peace of the classes from those entering.
There was also a wall filled with cubbies in which clients stored their personal belongings—suffused with energy from their everyday lives—before entering the studio itself.
Four steps and Dove froze. Gasping for air. Eyes flooding with tears, she found the strength to move her head, allowing her a glimpse from one end of the studio to the other.
The entire space had been trashed. Literally.
The expensive sprung wood floors she’d put in were covered in what looked to be an entire garbage truck’s worth of everyday items human beings threw away.
Piles of it. A crushed empty toilet paper roll.
Empty cans. Broken and stained food containers. A ripped egg carton.
And the smell…spoiled food? Used hygiene items?
Covering her nose and mouth, she stood there, tears streaming down her cheeks. Unable to comprehend what she was seeing.
Feelings always came first. They spoke the loudest within her.
And in that moment, all Dove knew was despair.
Mitchell’s plan was half-formed and weak at best. He’d found problems with the leasing agreement Whaler had signed years before, giving him lifetime access to the dock space he used. The fishing captain had been charged illegal fees over a period of years. Enough so that the money would be a boon.
St. James Boats needed employee contracts that better delineated a benefit package that would serve the two men who worked for him but also save the company money.
Mitchell could oversee contract negotiations under which Whaler could use the equity in Wicked Winnings to borrow enough money to buy two new smaller boats to be rented out for private fishing charters—currently St. James Boats largest income stream.
But without Whaler sober and at the helm of his operation, Mitchell didn’t see much hope of any of it making a big enough difference to save the business.
That particular message wasn’t first on his list as he climbed the stairs inside Repo to speak with Dove before her afternoon classes started. Assuming she was adhering to the schedule he’d just accessed on the Namaste website.
He’d also spent time that morning doing some research on Brad Fletcher. And did not like what he’d found.
Mitchell was equally displeased as he saw the studio door standing open—allowing anyone to enter as they pleased. He’d just warned Dove to be extra careful. Keeping her studio door closed and locked while she was in there alone was part of that. She could unlock it when it was time for class.
Muscles tensed beneath his shirt, he pushed on the door with one shoulder. And was hit simultaneously with an eerie silence… and dreadful smell.
In two strides he was around the wall blocking the entry from the studio and ran straight into Dove’s back. Catching her shoulders between his hands, he held her upright long enough for her to give a backward jab of her elbow straight into his rib cage.
And barely had the wherewithal to protect his area as she spun with a knee already poised to hit. Hard.
“Oh!” Her exclamation was part of a hiccup as she looked up, her gaze—wide-eyed and blank—connecting with his.
Aware of the destruction in his peripheral vision, Mitchell tuned out any specifics as he saw the tears dripping down Dove’s face.
Had he been too late? Fletcher had done something to her?
Filled with an anger that was foreign to him, he softened his hold on her arms, though not letting go as he feared she might need his support. “Are you okay?” he asked.
His gaze intent, he brushed by his own mental Of course she isn’t to get the information he needed first. Had she been physically compromised in any way?
When she just stared up at him, he rephrased the question. “Are you hurt?”
Her eyes cleared some as she frowned. Opened her mouth slowly. And said, “Not physically.”
Relief flooded through Mitchell. More than any he’d ever experienced in court when a questionable verdict came back in his favor.
With the confirmation that he wasn’t rushing her to emergency care, he took his first good glance over her shoulder and tensed all over again.
“Who did this?”
Dove shrugged. But it was the desolate look in those big green eyes that caught him.
“I just got here and found it like this,” she said.
“I think the lock on the door was broken.” Her voice was threadbare.
Sounding nothing like the woman who’d spent the past twenty-four hours challenging him to step up.
Strands of that long auburn hair, wet with tears, were sticking to the sides of her face. He pushed them back over her shoulders. Like somehow that was the first task toward making something better.
What, in her life, he could improve, he had no idea.
Only one thing was clear to him.
Pulling out his phone, Mitchell tapped the contact for his older brother. A lieutenant in the state major crimes division, Eli didn’t handle break-ins, but he’d get someone over to the studio who did. More than that, he had the means to quickly find out where Brad Fletcher had been all morning.
To look for any evidence there might be of him or someone he hired having been on Main Street.
And to have someone keep an eye on the man in the meantime.
Mitchell was there. His phone to his ear, though he hadn’t yet spoken. She had no idea who he was calling. Or why. She just stood by him, shaking, until he said, “Come on, we’ve got to get you out of here.”
Still in shock, she wasn’t even sure he was talking to her, until his grip on her elbow brought her to an awareness that he wanted her to move toward the door.
She went. At that moment, she knew of no reason not to do so.
Until she was standing out in the hallway, listening as he said, “Eli.” In a tone urgent enough to shake her up and out of the stupor she’d fallen into.
Eli. He’d called his brother, the cop.