9. Tuesday
CHAPTER 9
TUESDAY
D aniel hadn’t heard from Maggie since the ‘80s social, but then, he hadn’t expected to. After they’d made it back to the gym in time to join in on the second half of “Footloose,” she’d more or less acted as if nothing notable had happened.
Which it hadn’t.
Unless it had?
Daniel had almost texted her at least twice, but he wasn’t exactly sure how to phrase “Sorry about the erection and also sorry for bringing it up if this is making it more awkward” in a way that sounded chill and low key. So, instead, he found himself pulling uninvited into the Blue Harbor parking lot on a Tuesday evening with the vague idea of offering again to take a look at the Blue Harbor books and maybe, somehow, kind of, slipping an apology into the conversation. You know, if it naturally came up.
Daniel didn’t get quite as far as knocking on the cottage door (and, as a result, didn’t get to the moment just before knocking, when he could have paused and had a final chance to think better of the whole venture) because as soon as he set foot on the first porch step, Parton howled. The howl was followed by a series of very excited barks and the telltale scratch of nails on the far side of the front door. At least he knew where he stood with one resident of the cottage.
Maggie cracked opened the door, blocking the gap with her body to keep Parton inside.
“Hello?” Her hair was down, or, rather, out, a mass of curls extending beyond the doorframe. He’d only ever seen it in a ponytail, he realized. She looked…softer, somehow. Although the effect was somewhat mitigated by her deep scowl.
“Uh, hey,” Daniel said, articulately.
“…Hey.” She sounded notably less thrilled about his unannounced appearance than Parton, who was poking his nose between Maggie’s thigh and the door jamb and whining to be let out. “Is everything ok?”
“Oh, yeah. No, I just?—”
“Hold on,” Maggie interrupted. She closed the door, and he distinctly heard her say “Fine, have it your way,” before she reopened it, wider this time, holding onto Parton by the collar. “You’d better come in.”
When he hesitated a moment, Parton lunged for him. Or, he tried to. Maggie had a good grip, but the muscles in her arms were clearly working hard to hold him back. “Becker,” she said, less of an invitation and more of an order. He crossed the threshold and closed the door behind himself. Before he realized Parton had been released, the dog had his paws on Daniel’s chest and was licking his face in greeting. It was all Daniel could do to stay standing.
“Hey, buddy. Off.” Daniel pushed the giant mutt gently to the ground and knelt down to his level. Parton promptly presented his back half, and Daniel complied with the demand for scratches. “You seem to be feeling better.”
When he looked up, Maggie had retreated into the open kitchen, so he followed, with Parton close behind.
Daniel had been to Miss Peggy’s cottage before. A lot, actually. She used to invite him over for tea at least once a week, especially in the off season when she knew the quiet up in the mountains could start to get too loud for him. He hadn’t really thought about whether the cottage would look any different, but, of course, it made sense that it would. The kitchen looked the same, but the living room… The bookshelves on the far wall had been picked over, and the chaos of keepsakes that had covered nearly every flat surface was gone, save one of what had once been a stack of coffee table books. It looked like there’d been some sort of knickknack rapture. Although Daniel suspected he knew where the treasures had gone. There was a pile of black trash bags under the front window, another in the far corner of the living room, and he thought he could see the top of a third pile poking up from behind the couch. The effect was somehow both sparse and cluttered.
It felt…sad.
“So, you are here to…?” Maggie was leaning up against the refrigerator, arms crossed.
“Right. I wanted to see if I could help at all. With the books.” He attempted his most charming smile. It felt brittle under her skeptical gaze. “Which, I know, you didn’t ask me to do. And you don’t need help with. Because you have an MBA.” She raised an eyebrow. “But I have critical local knowledge. Hard won through years of camp directing experience. I’m here as what you might call a consultant.”
* * *
Maggie didn’t need help. She provided help to others, because it was her job and because others had a tendency to be incompetent. But Maggie was not incompetent and, therefore, didn’t need help. She’d made it through four years of college and all of business school without ever attending a professor’s office hours. In her 9 years at her current job, she’d never once gone to her supervisor with a problem unless she already had the solution and needed a sign-off. Say what you would about her, but Maggie McArthur was a woman who Had Things Under Control.
Except, possibly, just a little bit, not quite at this exact moment. Which is why it was particularly irksome that Daniel Becker had just shown up at her door, unannounced, at this exact moment .
In her defense, the slight lack of under-control-ness was mostly an issue of timing. She’d only realized there was a real problem late that afternoon. And even Maggie McArthur gave herself a full 48 hours to resolve a crisis of this magnitude.
Maggie had been peacefully digging through the leather-bound ledgers, creeping her way forward in time. Having more or less made peace with her aunt’s handwriting, she found it almost relaxing to sink into the accounting of it all. She’d expected the rough summers during The Great Recession, and she’d anticipated, of course, that as the years ticked up, so would prices for everything from cleaning supplies to food. By itself, that was hardly notable. Prices typically rise year over year, after all. So far, no big surprises. Which was good. Maggie hated surprises.
Her aunt had also increased counselor and staff salaries annually, probably more than was necessary to remain competitive, but Maggie had figured on Aunt Peg’s generosity. She had even figured that her aunt would have been loath to raise the rates for campers, and it was beginning to look like she hadn’t in over a decade. That was an easy fix, even if it was the sort of thing Maggie would have to hold her nose to do. This was a business, after all. Maybe she could look into scholarships. Or, she could suggest it to whoever bought the camp. No, the real problem hadn’t become apparent until Maggie got to the more recent tax records. There had been a steep jump in the property tax assessment in 2015 and again in 2019. That, Maggie had not anticipated.
So she had done some Googling.
Apparently, Henderson County reevaluated properties for tax purposes every four years, and there had been an unprecedented rise in the estimated land value of the Blue Harbor grounds in the 2010s. Now that she thought about it, Maggie could understand why. When Blue Harbor opened in 1952, Asheville was best known for the tragic 1948 fire at the Highland psychiatric hospital that killed Zelda Fitzgerald. Maggie’s grandmother had chosen Blue Harbor’s location for its natural beauty and proximity to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the French Broad River. But, of course, as Asheville had become increasingly trendy, the land around it would have become more expensive. People were probably clamoring for more vacation cabins a reasonable drive from the hipster capital of North Carolina. And so, the value of the land on which Blue Harbor sat had risen dramatically, and the tax bill had been correspondingly adjusted.
So either Blue Harbor became the go-to summer camp for children of the uber-wealthy, which sounded like a great premise for a Black Mirror episode but less great as her aunt’s legacy, or something had to give. Becker might have been on to something the night he’d suggested that no rational buyer would keep Blue Harbor operating the way it had been for the past seventy years. Unless she could find a way to make it profitable.
God, she hated when other people were right.
And that is exactly as far as Maggie had gotten when Daniel Becker showed up on the front porch.
She knew she was being kind of a jerk. But she was not having a great day. Or month. And, frankly, the fact that this man was constantly so aggressively nice was disconcerting. After the Social Saturday night, she was pretty sure he wanted to sleep with her. She had no problem with that. She might even be interested. But people usually didn’t put in quite this much effort when all they wanted was to get into her pants. It felt…dishonest, and that irked her. Maggie preferred it when people said what they meant.
“Why are you actually here?”
Daniel blinked at her. “I…came to see if I could help with the books,” he repeated.
“And that’s it. At 10pm.”
“Uh,” he said, and his smile faltered for a moment. “Now I think I should probably offer to help with the piles of trash bags, too.”
He was losing a little of his smarm. Good. “Look, Becker. I am having a day, and I’ve got shit to do. You can just text a classic ‘U up?’ next time.”
“I—what?”
“I’m not saying I couldn’t stand to blow off a little steam one night. But I really am in the middle of something.”
Daniel stood there for several moments with his mouth open. She could practically see the thoughts racing behind his annoyingly warm brown eyes.
“So you’re not…upset,” he said, sounding, for some reason, relieved.
“No, Becker. I am busy. ” She really thought she was being clear.
“I mean, I didn’t make you uncomfortable. At the Social.”
“At the Soc—” Oh. Ohhhh. “You mean when you broke my fall with your boner and then looked like you wanted to simply dissolve into the dirt?”
“Uh, yeah.” Daniel was beginning to look, again, like he wanted to simply dissolve. Oh god this was…was it…adorable?
“It made me uncomfortable for you . But no. My virtue was not besmirched. Which, again, I’m not necessarily opposed to.”
“Ok. Ok, good.” He was still standing a few feet inside the door.
“Is that what this is about?” Who was this guy?
“You’re busy. I, uh, I’ll go,” he said, not not answering the question. “But I would be happy to help. If you do ever want. Me. To-help-with-the-books.” He was frazzled. It was delightful.
“Just the books?” Maggie said, because she thought it would make him blush.
It did.
Watching Daniel Becker blush was turning out to be a lot of fun.
“Oh my god. I’m leaving.” He turned and reached for the door handle.
“Becker.” He paused. “Actually, I…could use a consult. With the books.” It was a concession. Which was almost an apology. If you squinted really, really hard.
The moment hung long enough for Maggie to remember why she never asked for help. It made her vulnerable. It was excruciating. She was about to tell him to never mind when he turned around.
“On second thought, I don’t know if you can afford me,” he said seriously.
“Oh?” She leaned back, raised a brow, and crossed her arms over her chest.
“Got any beer?” There was that grin again. She’d been wrong to call it smarmy. It was genuinely charming, which was infinitely worse. She felt the left side of her own face contract into the corner of an answering smile. Traitor.
She turned away to open the refrigerator she’d been leaning against, pulled out two beers left over from her last unexpected visitor, uncapped each one with the bottle opener her aunt had kept in the top right drawer, sat down at the kitchen table, and slid a drink over to the empty chair across from her.
He took the seat and then took a swig.
Daniel, it turned out, had a passion for spreadsheets rivaling Maggie’s own. He made himself a nest in the stacks of papers on the office floor and started to pull together a vendor list, now that the ledgers were more or less legible. As he went, he noted the ones that he thought she should switch away from and why, and the places he thought there was room for price negotiation. It wouldn’t solve all Blue Harbor’s problems, or even the main one, but it was a start. Maggie could have done it herself, of course, but the research would have taken days, and she wasn’t honestly that interested in doing a deep dive on Henderson County laundry services or comparison shopping for carabiners.
Maggie finally kicked Becker out sometime after midnight when they had gotten sufficiently sidetracked by a Wikipedia list of all the classic nicknames for Margaret (“Excuse me, Daisy?!” Daniel had said, sounding very aggrieved) that she’d determined no more work was going to get done. As she’d walked him to the door, she’d somehow found herself agreeing to let him join her on her planned trip to Goodwill. He could help her schlep the Donate trash bags, he’d explained, apparently very convincingly.
It was late. She was weak from lack of sleep. And, damn it, he was hard to say no to.
Which was not a problem she usually had.