Chapter 2
Emma pulled her suitcase off the carousel at Miami International and headed for the rental car shuttle.
The flight had been a blur with a million thoughts running through her head.
She had no idea how best to approach her problem.
All she could think about was getting to Key West and she’d figure out the rest once there.
She stood in line at the Alamo counter, waiting for the family in front of her to sort through their paperwork. Their two children fought over who got to sit up front in the red Mustang convertible.
A young couple in matching sunglasses stood two spots back, deciding out loud which mid-week snorkeling trip to book. Two women who looked to be in their sixties laughed over something as they wheeled their bags toward the doors.
Everyone seemed to be on vacation.
Emma looked down at her linen blazer, put on at five in the morning for Chicago weather and realized she was over-dressed for the Florida heat.
More than once she questioned her decision to travel to Key West. Everyone else at the car rental appeared to be headed for a beach chair and a rum drink.
She was on her way to fight over a house she hadn’t seen since she was a child, against an uncle she hardly knew, on a clock she couldn’t stop. A convertible didn’t fit her plans.
Get in, drive down, figure it out. That’s all this is.
“Miss? I can take you down here.”
Emma stepped up to the counter. “I have a reservation. Kendrick.”
The clerk tapped at her keyboard. Her name tag read Yvette and there was a small plastic flamingo standing on top of her monitor.
“Mid-size sedan,” Yvette said. “Now, I have to tell you we’re running a special on convertibles today. I’d be doing you a disservice if I let that go by.”
“The sedan is fine, thank you.”
“Where are you headed?”
“All the way down to Key West.”
Yvette stopped typing and sat back from the keyboard.
“Ma’am, I want to be sure I heard that right.”
“The sedan is fine.”
“You’re going to drive the Overseas Highway, in May, in a Camry?”
“That’s the plan.”
“There are people who save up two years for that drive.” Yvette held up one finger and typed something with the other hand. “I’m going to put you in the sedan because you’ve told me twice, and I want it understood that I’m doing it against my professional judgment.”
“I appreciate the sacrifice.”
“It’ll sit with me all afternoon.” She slid the keys across the counter. “Space forty-one. It’s white. Everything out there’s white, so look for the one with no personality.”
Emma found her white Camry between a lime green convertible and a bright red Jeep. She loaded her suitcase into the trunk and pulled out of the lot. The GPS said the drive would take three hours and forty minutes.
Miami traffic was a mess for the first forty-five minutes, all semis and road construction.
She drove most of that time behind a landscaping truck.
Then the road opened up. Homestead came and went, and the long straight stretch through the mangroves started where the buildings disappeared and the horizon flattened into something wide and green.
Down came the window, and the air that came in carried a smell she hadn’t come across in a very long time. Damp, and a little bit floral. The last time it reached her she’d been in the back seat of her mother’s rental car with the windows rolled down.
Somewhere past Islamorada she pulled off the road because of a sign.
It stood on two posts in the gravel and it read PIE in letters a foot high.
Underneath, in letters that had clearly been added later by someone who had grown tired of the question, it read WE ONLY MAKE THE ONE.
Behind it was a shack with a window cut into the front of it and three picnic tables set out in the crushed shell sitting area.
Emma hadn’t planned to stop. She hadn’t planned anything at all since she got on the plane and it was starting to worry her. Once again, she questioned her decision to come to Florida, but now, here she was, getting ready to eat key lime pie.
The woman at the window was seventy if she was a day, in a T-shirt from a fishing tournament that had happened in 2009.
“Key lime,” she said, before Emma had opened her mouth.
“How did you know?”
“It’s the only thing I’ve got. It’s on the sign.” The woman cut a slice, put it on a paper plate and set a plastic fork on top of it. “Where are you coming from?”
“Chicago, as of about six o’clock this morning.”
“And you’ve driven yourself all the way down here since then with nothing in you?”
“Well, I didn’t drive from Chicago. I flew into Miami, so it’s not that bad.”
“It’s bad enough if you haven’t eaten.”
Emma began to question whether the pie was worth having to share the details of her life with this stranger.
“You sit down and eat that at a table like a person,” the woman said, “don’t you eat it in the car.”
So Emma sat at a picnic table by the road in a linen blazer, in the sun, and ate her pie. After only two bites, she didn’t question the cost after all.
The woman came out and wiped down the next table over.
“You’ve got the look,” she said.
“What look is that?”
“Someone who desperately needs a vacation.”
Emma laughed. “You’re not wrong about that. One of these days I’ll get around to that.”
She finished her pie and got back in the car.
The first bridge came without much warning.
One minute she was on solid ground, and the next she was crossing a stretch of open water so blue it didn’t look real.
Key Largo on the other side, dive shops and seafood restaurants and hand-painted signs advertising snorkeling trips she drove past without slowing.
Then Islamorada, where the ocean sat close to the road on both sides.
The sun came off the water so bright she was grateful for her sunglasses.
She continued through Long Key, then the causeway, and slowed coming into Marathon.
It looked like every other town on the drive down.
There were strip malls, marinas, cinder-block houses with hurricane shutters and boats parked everywhere.
But somewhere in these blocks was her uncle Arthur.
His address wasn’t something she’d ever had reason to learn, and she’d never once been to his place.
Knowing he was near most likely having his coffee, doing whatever a man did when he’d spent the last decade stealing from his mother a little at a time.
She knew more about Arthur’s dealings than she wanted to and felt there was little she could do about him. Until now, when her anger grew the longer she made her way to Key West.
At the end of Marathon, the road lifted, and there it was. The Seven Mile Bridge.
Nothing had prepared her for it. The bridge went on and on, the old one running parallel to the new.
On either side the water changed colors from blue to turquoise.
With both hands on the wheel she drove straight through the middle of nothing.
A memory of her mother driving over the bridge popped up and she remembered asking her mother if the water underneath was deep.
“Yes, it’s very deep, sweetie. It’s so deep that if you’re not careful the mermaids might come up and take you down with them.”
Emma believed it for the whole crossing.
Big Pine Key came and went with a sign warning her to watch for the Keys’ deer. Then, Sugarloaf, Cudjoe, Boca Chica. The road narrowed, the traffic thickened, and the light changed from open-sky bright to the softer green of trees closing in overhead.
Key West appeared just ahead. She drove down a smaller road at a slower speed and looked at houses painted the color of tropical fruit. She followed the GPS off the highway and onto side streets that got narrower and quieter until it told her she’d arrived.
Twenty-Three Hibiscus Lane.
The cottage sat behind a low white fence in the middle of a quiet street. Emma pulled up to the curb and turned off the engine. And for a while, she did nothing but stare at the house.
Arthur had told her the roof was gone. He'd said the porch had collapsed. And that the garden was a jungle. As if that wasn't dramatic enough. He'd added that she'd break her ankle on the front step. And that the whole place was one good storm from coming down.
What Emma saw kept her in the seat with both hands still on the wheel.
Same pink as her last summer here. The white trim fresh, the black shutters neat against it.
On the drive down, she'd told herself that even if the cottage was still standing, it wouldn't look like anything she knew.
It looked like everything she knew. Lilies bloomed along the fence in the same yellow and pink.
The bougainvillea over the porch railing was the wild magenta her grandmother had always said was the only proper color for bougainvillea.
At the corner of the yard, the tall palm bent the way it had always bent.
Someone had raked the crushed shell path and the edges were still sharp.
And by the front steps in a clay pot that was new to her, sat a young key lime tree with three small green fruits already on the branches.
Whatever this was, it wasn't the ruin Arthur had described.
She got out of the car and walked to the gate, where the latch was clean and new. Inside it, she started up the path, and that's when she saw the man on the porch.
He was crouched at the far end, working on something with a paintbrush. He hadn't heard her come in. His back was to her and she could see the long line of his shoulders under a faded gray T-shirt. He had dark hair that was a little too long and he had paint on his forearms.
Emma cleared her throat.
He looked up, saw her and stood. Tall, about her own age, with a face that hadn't decided yet whether to smile. He wiped his hands on a rag and set the brush down on the paint tray.
“Can I help you?”
His voice was careful. Not unfriendly but not welcoming either.
“I’m looking for the owner of this cottage,” Emma said.
He watched her for a beat. “There’s no owner living here. It’s a rental.”
“Do you live here?”
“For the last three years.”
“And your name?”
“Jake Kelleher. And yours?”
“Emma Kendrick.”
She watched his face. There was a small flicker at the name. Jake had signed a lease with a Kendrick, written checks to a Kendrick every month for three years, and now a Kendrick was standing in his yard.
“Related to Arthur?” he said.
“He’s my uncle.”
“Are you here about the sale?”
The question suprised her. “You know about the sale?”
“I got a letter a couple of weeks ago telling me the closing was coming up. Are you the buyer?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m not.”
“Then I’m confused.”
Emma took a breath. She’d come here without a plan for this exact moment. She hadn’t expected the cottage to be lived in or cared for.
“This was my grandmother’s house,” she said. “Gloria Kendrick.”
Jake looked at her for a long moment. She could see him running through possibilities the way she'd run through them in her office the night before, when Samantha Larson had first said the name.
“That’s a longer conversation than I can have with you today.”
“Okay.”
“Who have you been paying rent to?”
“Arthur Kendrick. He’s the one who signed the lease three years ago.” Jake picked up the rag again and turned it in his hands. “I assume he’s the one selling the place.”
Emma nodded. “Can I ask what the letter said?”
He shrugged, “Not much. Just that the property was under contract and the closing was scheduled for a couple of weeks. That the new owners intended to keep the current tenant on and that I shouldn’t worry about moving.”
“Who signed it?”
“A name I didn’t recognize. Some rep for the buyer, I guess. There was a phone number but I never called it. I figured if they wanted me out, they’d tell me. And if they wanted me to stay, there wasn’t anything to talk about.”
Emma stood in the middle of the path with her hand still on the strap of her bag. Jake had been reassured that his life wasn’t going to change. Whoever had sent that letter, and she had a suspicion it wasn’t the buyer at all, had wanted Jake calm. A calm tenant asked no questions.
“Look,” Jake said. “I don’t know what’s going on with the family or the ownership or any of this. I have a lease. I pay rent every month. I got a letter two weeks ago telling me the sale was happening and I’d be staying on. That’s everything I know.”
He set the rag down on the porch rail and stepped closer to Emma.
“So maybe you can tell me what’s actually going on here.”
Emma didn't answer. Until she understood what was going on with the house, she couldn't explain anything to him. And there was no telling what would happen if word got back to Marathon that Gloria Kendrick's granddaughter was standing in this yard asking questions.
“Can I come back tomorrow when I have more information?” she asked. “I’m sorry for being so vague, but it’s the best I can do for now.”
Jake took his time answering. She could see him weighing it. “Just tell me. Should I start packing?”
“No.”
The word came out before Emma had thought about it.
She realized she'd told a stranger something she couldn't yet promise.
She didn't know whether Jake needed to start packing.
She didn't know what a rental company did with a long-term tenant on a property it was buying as a short-term rental.
Nobody had asked her what she intended to do about any of it until this moment, and she'd given him an answer as if she already knew.
She kept her face still.
“Tomorrow’s fine,” he said. “I’ll be here.”
“Thank you.”
Emma turned and started back down the path. At the gate, she stopped and looked over her shoulder.
“Mr. Kelleher,” she said, “one more thing. Whatever’s in that letter, I’d hold on to it. And I wouldn’t call that number.”
He didn’t ask why. He just nodded once.
As she continued to walk toward her car, Emma realized she’d told Jake Kelleher more than she meant to.