Key West Homecoming (Seaside Palms #3)

Chapter 1

Emma Kendrick saved the file, pushed back from her desk, and rolled her shoulders until something in it let go. She had been sitting in that position since noon.

It was Sunday, and the thirty-second floor was dark except for her office and the lamp at her assistant, Marcy’s desk outside it. Emma had stopped asking herself years ago why she worked so many hours because she didn’t have an answer.

The presentation was forty-two pages and had taken her three weeks to perfect.

In the morning she would walk seven partners through it in the conference room at the end of the hall.

It set out how Ashcroft & Payne was going to win a consumer products account.

The firm had been chasing it for two years, without success and with increasing frustration.

One more click took her to the last slide, and she wasn’t happy with it.

“If you change that chart again, I’m taking the mouse away from you.”

Marcy stood in the doorway with her handbag over her shoulder and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair.

“I’m not changing it,” Emma said. “I’m admiring it.”

“You’re changing it. I can tell by the look on your face.”

“I might adjust the color slightly.”

“Emma!”

“What? It’s a terrible blue, Marcy. It looks like a hospital corridor.”

“It’s a perfectly nice blue, and it’s the same blue you used for Brookfield, and they gave up the account.”

Marcy came in and set a fresh cup of coffee on the desk. “I finished the appendix. Page thirty-eight was numbered wrong and I fixed it before anyone important noticed, so you can thank me properly tomorrow. It’s time to go home.”

“I will.”

“You won’t.”

“Soon, I promise.”

Marcy gave her the look that had been getting Emma out of the building since roughly 2020, then gave up gracefully and went toward the elevator. “Six o’clock,” she called back from halfway down the hall.

“Understood.”

By six o’clock the thirty-second floor had gone almost completely quiet. The ventilation was the loudest and the cleaning carts had started their slow rounds.

Emma stood and stretched then walked to the window where the Chicago River lay flat and dark beneath a gray May sky.

A water taxi nudged toward the Michigan Avenue bridge.

One by one the lights came on in the buildings across the water.

On a good day she could see all the way to the lake from here.

This was not a good day, but it wasn’t a bad one either even if she had chosen to spend it this way.

In the glass her reflection came back at her, and she studied it the way she’d have studied a slide that wasn’t working.

Her dark hair came loose from behind her ears and her gray eyes were tired at the edges.

The thin gold chain her mother had given her at graduation lay flat against her collarbone, where it had lain for thirteen years.

She had been thirty-five for six months, and tonight she looked older from exhaustion.

When had that happened?

Her mother had been gone almost three years, her grandmother, Gloria, a little over one. There had been a long stretch after her mother died when simply getting dressed in the morning felt harder than presenting to a potential client.

The thing that saved her, if save was the right word, was the work always told her what came next.

She knew her job and could handle any obstacle thrown in her path.

Grief was shapeless and enormous and impossible to hold, but a forty-two-page presentation had a beginning and an end. She could get her arms around that.

When Gloria died a year ago, Emma chose work over dealing with the pain. She had never once stopped to wonder what it meant that the second time had been so much easier than the first.

The coffee Marcy had left for her was stone cold. She took one sip and then set it down, reached for her jacket, and had genuinely intended to leave when the desk phone rang.

On the display was a Florida area code, and not one she recognized. She let it ring three more times before deciding to answer it.

“This is Emma Kendrick.”

“Ms. Kendrick, my name is Samantha Larson. I’m a real estate broker with Coastal Title and Realty, out of Naples. I’m sorry to bother you at the end of your day. I’m glad I caught you at the office, since I didn’t have a cell number for you. Do you have a few minutes?”

“Well, I was just about to leave…”

“I’ll be brief. I’m calling about a property at twenty-three Hibiscus Lane, in Key West.”

Emma dropped her bag and returned to her chair. “I’m sorry,” she said carefully. “Could you say that again?”

“Of course. We’re handling the title search on a pending sale of a cottage at twenty-three Hibiscus Lane. The recorded owner is a Mr. Arthur Kendrick. In the course of our due diligence we came across a document that references you directly, and I wanted to reach you before we go to closing.”

“What document?”

There was a small pause, and the sound of paper being shifted. “It appears to be a will, signed by a Gloria Kendrick. It’s dated roughly two years before her passing, and it names you as the beneficiary of the property.”

Emma didn’t move. She was aware of her hand resting on the receiver and the hum of the ventilation and almost nothing else.

“Ms. Kendrick? Are you still with me?”

“I’m here.”

“I want to be very clear with you, because I think you deserve clarity. This document was never filed with the probate court. The estate went into probate up in Miami-Dade under an earlier will that named Mr. Kendrick as beneficiary, and the court appointed him personal representative. That administration is still open. He’s selling as the estate’s representative under a power of sale in that will, which is ordinary enough that no one in my office looked at it twice.

So as far as the public record is concerned, he had the authority to sign.

I’m calling because your name is sitting in my file, and I’d rather be thorough than not. ”

Emma pulled the legal pad across the desk and wrote the date at the top and underlined it twice.

“You said the property is being sold.”

“It is. We have a buyer, and the closing is scheduled for a week from this Friday.”

“Twelve days.”

“That’s right.”

Emma wrote the number beneath the date and drew a single box around it.

“Tell me about the cottage,” she said.

“It’s a small one. Two bedrooms, original Conch architecture, built in the nineteen forties, and beautifully maintained.

The garden’s genuinely something of a feature.

There’s been significant landscaping investment over the last several years.

Fresh paint, a new roof, the porch was refurbished.

Honestly, it’s the kind of property that hardly ever comes on the market, which is why the offer was as strong as it was. ”

Emma closed her eyes and saw it immediately, though not the cottage Samantha described.

She saw the one from her childhood, the one her father loved.

She remembered the lilies standing in a crooked line along the fence, the bougainvillea spilling magenta over the porch railing, and the crushed-shell path that crunched underfoot.

Her memory of the screen door that slapped twice against the frame every single time no matter how you tried to catch it, could bring her back to her childhood just by closing her eyes.

She could not, for the life of her, make that cottage fit inside the words new roof.

Because her Uncle Arthur had told her that the roof was gone.

He’d called her three times in the year since Gloria died. The first time, a week after the funeral, to say the estate would be settled soon and that there was nothing whatsoever for her to do. She was grateful then, thinking it was a blessing she didn’t have to get involved.

The second, a month or so later, ostensibly to check on how she was holding up, and to mention almost casually that the Key West place was in far worse shape than anybody had realized.

The third, some months after that, another brief and friendly call in which the cottage came up again and was waved away entirely.

A small hopeless thing, sweetheart, don’t give it another thought.

Each time, Emma had thanked him sincerely.

Each time, she had hung up and gone straight back to work.

How had she never once asked him a single question?

“Ms. Larson,” she said. “How long has that property been in Mr. Kendrick’s name?”

“A little over a year. It transferred through probate after the previous owner passed.”

“And the will. Where did your office find it?”

“It was recorded in the Monroe County property records as a public document, sometime before the previous owner went into a care facility. Recorded but not filed with the probate court. Some Florida counties still allow that, and Monroe is one of them. We pulled it as part of the chain of title.” She paused briefly.

“I want you to hear this part clearly. It’s a real document. It was witnessed and notarized.”

“Notarized where?”

“Miami-Dade County, by a notary who’s still in good standing. I checked personally before I called you.”

All of it Emma wrote on her notepad. Miami-Dade. Two years before. Witnessed and notarized.

“Ms. Kendrick, I’d like to say something carefully, and I hope you’ll take it in the way it’s meant.

I’m not your attorney and I can’t give you legal advice.

But I’ve been doing this work for nineteen years, and when I find a document like this sitting in a file, I want the woman whose name is on it to know it exists.

What you do about it is entirely your business. ”

“I appreciate that more than I can tell you.”

“If you want to assert a claim, you’ll need a Florida attorney, and you’ll need one very quickly. Once we close a week from Friday that title transfers to the buyer and reaching back to undo a completed closing is a far uglier proposition than stopping one.”

“I understand.”