Chapter Fourteen
“You should go see if Danny’s planning to leave today.”
Rob laughed, shaking his head. “Nope. All my life, you’ve been dumping the stuff you don’t want to do onto me, but I’m not going to be the one who breaks Danny’s concentration if the writing’s going well.”
“I cleaned the bathhouses this morning,” Brian pointed out.
“And I did them yesterday, and Joey did it the whole weekend. What’s your point?”
“What’s it going to take? An extra turn scrubbing toilets? Cooking for a week? I get stuck on lifeguard duty?”
Rob snorted. “Looking out the window a few times to make sure nobody’s breaking the rules is hardly lifeguard duty.”
“I’ve got it,” Brian said as he slapped a hand down on the counter, waking Stella, who wasn’t at all impressed by having her nap interrupted. “I won’t tell our two business partners that you’re violating the business agreement.”
“Seriously? First, I haven’t violated anything.”
“Yet. But you’ve been at site twenty-nine a lot, for no good reason, and I know she was in here for, like, an hour yesterday.”
“A lot of the campers come in and start talking, sometimes for an hour. Sometimes for two.”
“I guess it’s all in how you frame the story.”
“Are you blackmailing me?” When Brian shrugged, Rob threw his empty water bottle at him. Stella sighed, but didn’t get up. “You know, there’s nothing in any of the business documents we signed about me not being allowed to spend time with Hannah.”
“We all agreed not to fraternize with the campers.”
Rob grinned. “Prove it.”
Brian held up his hands. “Okay, how about I’ll keep my mouth shut about Hannah...within reason.”
“What does that even mean?”
“You’re my younger brother, so I’m going to have big-brother-type thoughts about what you’re doing. But I’ll lay off the fraternizing nonsense.”
“Done.” He was probably going to be the one who went to the cabin anyway, but at least he’d gotten a concession from his brother. And a concession that might enable him to visit Hannah in peace was a big one.
Now to deal with the other brother.
When he got close to the cabin, he was able to see Hannah’s truck was gone, and he felt a pang of disappointment that he couldn’t swing by her site after.
He hadn’t seen her leave, but he’d spent part of the morning in the back part of the campground, trying to fix a muddy spot on the trail that connected to the main ATV trail system.
Mud was fun until a bunch of machines tore it up and then it dried into ruts.
When he reached the cabin, he peeked into the windows of Danny’s car. It didn’t look like he was ready to hit the road anytime soon, so Rob walked onto the porch and knocked on the door.
“What?”
It was definitely more of a roar than an invitation to enter, but Rob opened the door and stepped inside anyway. Danny was at the small table, tapping away on his keyboard. He didn’t even look up when Rob closed the door.
Empty gallon-size water bottles were lined up by the door, and the small trash can was full of used K-Cups. At least there were also empty snack wrappers in there and they’d seen his vehicle leave a few times, so he knew Danny had been eating something and wasn’t running on caffeine alone.
His brother’s hair was sticking up in several directions, and Rob wouldn’t have bet against those being the same clothes Danny had been wearing yesterday.
“I guess you pushed through the writer’s block.”
Danny’s fingers paused, hovering over the keys. “Yeah. Kenzie helped me figure out where I’d taken a wrong turn.”
“Kenzie from the restaurant?”
“Yeah, I went in there to have some food before the coffee ate a hole through my stomach lining and I sat at the counter with my notebook. There was nobody else there and we started talking and next thing you know, I’m talking through some plot issues and she’s really good at being a sounding board. ”
“I’ll leave you to it, I guess.”
“I might not leave today.”
“I figured that out. But Friday afternoon, a nice couple from Connecticut plans to sleep in here, so things will get awkward real fast if you’re still here.”
“I’ll be out by then.”
Rob was going to say more, but Danny started typing again and he probably wouldn’t hear him anyway. He backed out of the cabin and, after noting Hannah hadn’t pulled in while he was inside, he went back to the store.
“Is he leaving today?” Brian asked when he walked in.
“Doubtful. I told him that the cabin’s already reserved for the weekend, though.”
“Is he writing or is he lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling fan to keep from throwing his laptop out the window?”
“He’s writing. Pretty intensely, too. I guess Kenzie helped him brainstorm some stuff when he went down to the restaurant to eat.”
Brian frowned. “He brainstormed story stuff with Kenzie? He usually refuses to talk about his books at all while he’s writing them. He won’t even tell us what the plot is, never mind let us help with it.”
Rob snorted. “To be fair, we don’t have a history of being all that helpful.”
“I thought his protagonist showing up for Thanksgiving and finding everybody dead would be a hell of a plot twist.”
“Uncle Joe writes the horror, not Danny.”
A vehicle turned into the campground, and when he saw that it was Hannah’s truck, only knowing Brian would never let him live it down kept him from running out the door to greet her. Instead, they exchanged a wave through the windows and she kept going.
When he turned back, he caught Brian staring at him and raised an eyebrow. His brother just held up his hands in silence before going back to the spreadsheet he was working on.
After a few days of making short trips around the area—to the grocery store and the library as well as visiting a few spots of interest—Hannah stayed close to her site on Friday. And her site was close enough to the small cabin so she overheard the heated debate about who was going to clean it.
Rob thought Danny should clean the cabin since he hadn’t paid to stay in it and they had people checking in soon.
Danny thought Rob should clean it because he had a call with his agent scheduled for the afternoon and he didn’t want to talk business while driving, which meant getting home before the call.
It sounded as if Rob actually made Danny show him the appointment in his phone before they compromised and cleaned the cabin together. It didn’t take long. They probably argued over who would clean it longer than they actually cleaned, and then she heard Danny’s car driving away.
A few minutes later Rob appeared around the end of her camper, as she’d hoped he would.
“Writers are a pain in the butt,” he said, dropping into the empty chair. “A writer who’s also your brother? I could use a drink right now. I didn’t think he was ever going to leave.”
“He was a quiet neighbor,” she said.
“All he did was type and drink coffee. I was afraid we’d need another dumpster just for his K-Cups.”
“Still, having a famous brother must be neat,” she said. “I’ve seen his books. I don’t think I’ve read any, though.”
“They’re good. Like, literary, I guess. Mainstream? A lot of themes and allegories and all that stuff we had to learn about in high school. They’re not as fun to read as Uncle Joe’s books, but I like them.”
“Your uncle Joe writes, too?”
He chuckled. “I think you knowing Danny’s books but not Uncle Joe’s might be a first for the family. Joe Kowalski? The horror writer?”
Her eyes widened. She might live in the true crime space, but she liked her fiction on the nonterrifying side. “Horror? I definitely haven’t read his books.”
“They’re both big deals, which is cool.”
“You’re all very cool. You have a great family.” She belatedly realized that might be too much and waved a hand. “I mean, from the little time I’ve spent with them, they seem cool.”
“They are. I’m pretty blessed.” He sighed. “I have to confess I wish I’d gotten some of those bestselling-author genes, though.”
Hannah laughed. “I saw Danny around the campground a couple of times this week, and it didn’t look like being a writer’s as easy as most people probably think it is.”
“Oh, nobody in my family thinks it’s easy, that’s for sure. But Danny doesn’t usually look this rough. He’s been stuck for a while and finally had a breakthrough, so he was in the zone. The zone is not pretty and can smell sketchy, but it’s well caffeinated, at least.”
“Did you run those captions and hashtags I sent by your brother?”
He shook his head. “He doesn’t care, but I tried some and we’re already getting more interaction on our social media. Especially on Instagram. Look.”
“You’re definitely hitting higher numbers,” she said, looking up from the screen a few minutes later. “Are you tracking how much traffic is clicking through to your website from Instagram?”
“I am now. You know, you’ve never really talked about what you did for work,” he said, and she could hear the effort he was putting in to try to sound casual.
“It seems like you must have a strong marketing background, and I was thinking maybe you work remotely, but then I remembered you said you were taking this time off. Plus, you know a lot about social media, but you have a history degree.”
“I am taking this time off.” She shrugged. “I’m a podcaster, though it’s not something I tell a lot of people.”
“Why would you—” He broke off and chuckled. “I guess everybody has a great idea for a podcast, right? Like, sometimes when we’re around people we don’t really know, Danny will tell people he works at a bookstore.”
“At least it’s close to the truth.”
“Yeah, for a while he was telling people he was an accountant because he thought it was boring and nobody would want to talk about it, but then people would ask him tax questions and he was afraid he’d get them sent to prison.”
Hannah laughed, shaking her head. “Never take tax advice from people who get paid to write lies.”
“What is your podcast about? History?”