TWELVE Intrusion
“ I s that the wifi guy?!” Wyatt asked eagerly.
I considered the dark grey Lexus parked before our cabin as I pulled up beside it and parked. “The wifi guy is supposed to be here between three and six. And I think he’ll be driving a work truck or a van.”
I didn’t like that Lexus. It was empty, and there didn’t appear to be anyone around, like waiting at the door, for instance. I’d made a few appointments for quotes on repairs to Cottage 12, but the first of those wasn’t due until the day after tomorrow.
I suppose the smart thing for a woman alone with her teenage child to do in that situation would have been to pull back out, go somewhere safe, and call the cops. Or at least grab a big strong friend to come back with them and make sure everything was okay. However, the smart thing didn’t occur to me in that moment. Maybe I’d been without friends or any kind of real support long enough that I no longer could imagine having anyone to turn to.
Anyway, even if I had thought of it, who would I have asked? Jessie was out of town. Catherine was elderly. Neither was big or strong. Roman was pretty big and strong, but even if I had thought of that, I think I’d have been too embarrassed to seriously consider running to him for help because there was a scary luxury sedan parked in my lot.
Ergo, I did not pull out of the parking lot and go looking for help. I turned to my son and said, “Wait here and lock the doors. I’m going to go around and check. I’ll leave the keys, in case you need them.”
He was only fifteen and didn’t have his permit yet, but I will confess to some possible minor law-breaking in letting him practice driving the Golf around a few parking lots while we headed west. The Golf was a manual transmission, and that was a dying skill I wanted him to have, so when he asked if he could practice, I’d said yes.
He hadn’t been on the road yet, but if he needed to make a quick getaway, I was confident he could manage it.
“Mom, no,” he said, looking at me with wide eyes.
“I have to, bud. I’m going to get the bat out of the hatch. Then lock the doors.”
Before he could say more, I got out and went to the back. I’d put Micah’s steel alloy softball bat in the hatch as protection during our trip, and I’d left it in there when we unpacked because it seemed like a safe thing to keep around.
And before you say something about how it should have been a gun, let me cut that off at the knees. I am not okay with guns. I do not feel safer with a gun. I am a teacher in the twenty-first century. I’ve been through routine active-shooter drills with my students. I know teachers who have been in real active-shooter situations. I know this for a fact: no one is safe when a gun is close.
When I had the bat in my hands and closed the hatch, Wyatt was standing beside the car.
I gave him my I-meant-what-I-said look. “I told you—”
“I’m not waiting in the car,” he said, crossing his arms stubbornly. “I’m not letting you go looking by yourself.”
My little boy who thought he had to be my grown-up protector. “Wy—”
“I’m not , Mom. If it’s a bad guy, we run and come back together.”
I could tell by his expression that if I made him get back in the car, he’d just come after me as soon as I walked away, and that could make more trouble. Besides, nothing about my parenting style has ever been about forcing my will on him. I opened the hatch, lifted the bit of floor that covered the spare, and got the tire iron out.
“Just in case,” I said, handing it to him. “If there’s trouble, I want you to fucking run, you understand?”
He nodded. I closed the hatch, and we headed up to the cabin together. “Stay behind me,” I instructed, pushing him back. That, at least, he didn’t fight me on.
The front door was locked and showed no signs of anybody trying to force it open. I went around the porch to the side, checking all the windows. The Lexus driver wasn’t in our house.
Next we searched the guest cottages and the rest of the property, skulking around with our weapons raised. I was starting to feel woozy from the adrenaline.
But there was nothing. Each cottage we checked was closed and as we’d left it. Our shared glances got increasingly confused as we went.
We found him standing in Cottage 12, one foot propped on a branch of the tree that had fallen in. His attention was homed in on his phone (it was either a satellite phone or just had one of those super-tough, make-believe-military cases), and he was texting—or maybe taking notes.
He was an older guy, probably in his fifties, wearing a navy golf shirt tucked into pressed khakis, and polished loafers over tan socks. He had the kind of round belly some men got at that age, from a few too many beers on the course followed by a few too many cocktails and steaks on the ‘nineteenth hole.’ Micah had worked with a lot of those guys. This one was a little rougher around the edges than the typical executive, though. His grey hair was cut in a severe brush cut, and the back of his neck had the cracked, baked red sheen that indicated a lot more time spent outside than a round of golf every weekend.
This guy was a general contractor, or something like that. Was he one of the people I’d scheduled quotes with, and had simply gotten the date of the appointment wrong?
“Can I help you?” I asked, trying to put just the right spin on the question so he knew I was not pleased but also so if he was here to do a quote—that had to be it, right?—we could still get that work done. Showing up and wandering around on his own would certainly be a strike against him in the decision process, but it didn’t necessarily disqualify him if his quote was reasonable.
Whatever he was doing, it truly had his entire focus. Wyatt and I had come up aging wooden steps onto an aging wooden porch; though we were both wearing sneakers and trying to be quiet, our super-sleuth skills were not so good we’d been silent on creaking wood. Yet my voice startled the guy. He stood straight in a rush and looked over at us with eyes momentarily round.
Then he remembered himself and speedily transformed into the kind of rural, good-ol’-boy businessman I encountered hundreds of times in my years in Arkansas. We lived in Little Rock, but in Arkansas, even the cities have a kind of rural sensibility.
“Well, hello there, little lady,” he said, putting on a Big Daddy grin. He held out a beefy right hand. “I’m Darryl Manfred. I see you had some trouble here.”
I made sure he saw me look at his hand, but I didn’t take it. That ‘little lady’ had sealed the deal on me not doing business with this guy no matter what.
Rather than shake with him, I asked, “What are you doing here? The Sea-Mist is closed. Also, it’s my private property.”
My refusal of his handshake put a serious dent in that Big Daddy smirk, but my last words recovered it a little. I didn’t understand why—at least not until he spoke again.
“See, that’s the thing. I was just about to ink a deal with the lady who owned this place before—your mother, I think that was.” He paused, expecting me to confirm his assumption. When I didn’t speak or otherwise indicate he was right, he went on, unperturbed. “Then she passed, and Mayor Holt started looking for you. But you let it sit and rot. Past coupl’a months, I’ve been in talks to buy this derelict property from the town. But here you are, right before we’re ready to put our deal in ink. Ain’t that convenient.”
Not even a nominal attempt to open with an offer to buy the place. He went straight to implying—almost outright saying—that he had a right to this place. He’d taken one look at me and decided I wasn’t worth any effort of persuasion. Straight to antagonism.
This guy wasn’t armed, but he was threatening. Not a physical threat, though; I didn’t see him trying to beat us up. Honestly, despite my suspicions that he would try to bully me, despite my wary sense of threat, I couldn’t see how he could really be any kind of a danger. I had legally inherited the property. Also, the mayor had never made any suggestion to me about wanting to take it over if I wasn’t coming back, so this was the first I was hearing of a deal in the works to buy it—if he was even telling the truth. I didn’t see how he could hurt us.
Even so, menace came off the guy in waves. A whole bunch of gasbag posturing.
My kid was standing just behind me, and we were both holding metal sticks like weapons. All I wanted was for this intruder to get the fuck off our property; I wasn’t about to get into a debate with him about whether he was ... what? Entitled to buy a property that I didn’t want (was pretty sure I didn’t want) to sell? Uh, no. I’d have wanted him gone even if I’d had a For Sale sticker plastered across the sign on the highway.
“You need to get off my property right now, or I will call the sheriff.”
That nasty grin broke wide. “Cam Durbin? You go right ahead and give him a call. While you’re on the phone, you mind lettin’ him know I might be late for our tee time Saturday?”
“Get the fuck out of here, mister,” Wyatt growled at my shoulder.
Darryl Fuckface Manfred tilted his head with malignant curiosity. “Got your little boy thinkin’ he can protect you, hmm?” Shifting his eyes to Wyatt, he said, “You got a few more years, son, before you’ll scare more than a bunny in the yard.”
I pulled out my phone and saw I had three bars, so I keyed in 911 and put my finger on the green button. “You can tell the sheriff about your tee time when he gets here.”
Manfred put his hands up in an okay, okay, chill out gesture. “I guess I came on a little strong. I’m prepared to make you a real reasonable offer—same offer I made your mama, and now, with all this damage here, that offer is even better for you than it was for her. But I see you’re busy now, so I tell you what. I’ll get outta your hair, and we’ll talk again real soon.” He slid two fingers into the chest pocket of his shirt and pulled out a business card. It was grey and had a sheen to it, as if it were made of metal. Then he came toward us. “Here’s my contact info. You give me a call and we’ll talk about that offer.”
He held the card out to me, but I didn’t take it. I stood where I was, still wielding the softball bat, and stared at him. “Get. Out. Now.”
With a long, deep breath that was clearly meant to show me how close I was to making him erupt, he dropped the card at my feet. It hit the floor with a faint clang —it was, in fact, made of metal.
Wyatt and I stepped clear of the door, and Darryl Manfred strolled out of Cottage 12. We followed his ambling progress all the way through the property, to the parking lot. We stood before our cabin and watched him get into his Lexus, back out of the space, and finally drive away.
His business card was still on the floor of 12.
WYATT AND I WERE BOTH a little subdued after that strange and upsetting scene. We went into our cabin, and Wyatt wandered off to his bedroom.
I was far too amped after that confrontation to be still, so I took up a project in the living room—to clean and polish the walls. It’s a real log cabin, so the walls of most of the rooms look like the other side of the logs. They actually aren’t, there’s insulation and plaster lath between the actual logs and the inside of the cabin, so it’s just paneling, but that paneling is made out of actual half logs. We don’t paint them, we clean and polish like you would any good wood furniture. Anything we hang on the walls, we use wires and only screw into the joins between the logs.
Anyway, among the many things that needed work in that cabin, all the walls had so much dust it had adhered to the wood, so I meant to go room by room and get them gleaming again, and on that afternoon, I had a bolus of nervous energy to work off.
I was standing on the ladder, one foot on the wall so I could stretch to reach the top log, when Wyatt came into the room. He came over right away and grabbed the ladder as if it had been shaking beneath me. Maybe it had been, a little.
“You should’ve asked for help,” he said, “I was just organizing my comics.”
“I don’t need help. I’m fine.” Putting both feet on the ladder again, I looked down at him. “Did you come in because you need something, or just to check on me?”
He looked up at me without answering; I could tell something was bothering him. “Scoot,” I said, “I’m coming down.” Wyatt stepped warily back, and I set my cleaning supplies on the ladder’s shelf and worked my way back to the floor.
“What’s up?” I asked.
It took him a second or two, but he finally asked, “Are you thinking about selling?”
Ah. Despite the hostility of our encounter with Darryl Manfred, Wyatt hadn’t discounted the idea that there was an offer already on the table.
I hadn’t, either. Obviously I had no intention of selling to that jerk, but I sure was thinking about all the things I’d learned in that brief exchange with him. That my mother had been working on selling when she’d died. That the mayor had taken the time and expense to hire an investigator to find me, even though there was somebody interested in buying the place and I’d been gone so long. Maybe they couldn’t have sold without making an effort to find me—I was fairly well versed in the probate laws of Arkansas, but I had no idea about California.
Still, Manfred was perched in my brain like a vulture in a tree, waiting to swoop down and feed.
I tugged on Wyatt’s sleeve. “Come sit with me.”
We sat on the sofa. I turned to sit sideways and faced him. “There is nothing I can imagine that would induce me to sell even a used piece of toilet paper to that man.”
“No, I know. He’s terrible. And rude doesn’t cut it—he was ... it was like he thought we were trespassing on his property.”
I nodded. “I think that’s pretty much what he thought—because we got in the way of his done deal. He’d have to offer a billion dollars for me to even stop to think about selling to him.”
“But are you thinking about selling to anyone?”
I chose my words carefully. “The other night, when we were at Hidden Beach, you told me you didn’t ever want to leave here. I told you we won’t, and I meant that. As long as you want to stay here, we will stay.”
He relaxed a little and nodded, but he said, “I’m glad. But it sounds like a hedge. I don’t know why. Just a feeling, I guess.”
“It’s not a hedge, bud. I think you’re sensing that to me, it’s not a perfectly iron-clad decision for either of us.”
“But I said—”
“I know what you said. And I know you mean it. But we’ve only been here about a week. You haven’t started school yet, we don’t have this place ready for business yet, we haven’t settled in yet. I’m just leaving room for the chance that when we are settled, we might not like it as much as we think right now. We might change our minds.”
“Do you like being here now?”
I don’t know if Wyatt had any idea how complicated that question was. I took the time to devise an honest answer, though, complicated as it was. “I think ... I think I like it better than I thought I would. I think I was expecting to be greeted by an angry mob, and I’ve been surprised so far that people have been either kind or uninterested in me.”
“Mr. Mendoza is interested in you,” Wyatt asserted.
While my heart did a little tap dance on the inside, on the outside I rolled my eyes. “Maybe. But it’s not a factor.”
Wyatt’s smile told me this talk was easing his mind. “You’ve got a date with him tomorrow night. I think that means he’s interested, Mom.”
“Okay, buddy. Let’s just not make more of that than it is. It’s just dinner.”
“Uh-huh.”
“ Anyway , we are here as long as you want to be here. I mean that. If Bluster is where you want to put down roots, we will get to digging. But I’m not sure if that means we’ll keep the Sea-Mist. I have to be able to get it going again and make it earn enough to keep us secure and pay for your college. There’s a lot of rebuilding we have to do, and I don’t know yet if running this place is the best way to rebuild, or if selling it, getting a little place in town, and going back to teaching is better.”
“You said you never wanted to teach again.”
“That would have been true if we’d stayed in Little Rock. I think I wouldn’t be a teacher in a red state right now even if the alternative was homelessness. California is different. I wouldn’t have been fired for teaching James Baldwin in California. So it’s an option if we can’t afford to get this place going again—if I could find a position in a school close enough, anyway.” That was too far off for me to worry about while I had so many much closer worries.
“Okay. I hope we can make the Sea-Mist work. I like this place. It’s cool. And the woods are so pretty.”
“I like it, too. It’s still a little bit haunted to me, with all the stuff from when I was a kid, but I like the idea of making it ours.” I put my arm around him. “Feel better?”
He rested his head on my shoulder. “Yeah. That guy made me mad. And scared, too. He acted like he hated us.”
“He probably did. He acted like a man who doesn’t respect women, so when I wasn’t cowed by him, yeah. That’s hate in a guy like that.”
“You don’t think he’d try to hurt us, do you?”
“Physically, no. But I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him trying to get this place. I need to talk to the mayor and try to understand the situation better.”
“Do you think he could take it from us?”
“No,” I told my son, and I spoke with the confidence of truth. “My mother died without a will. I’m the only Braddock left, and her next of kin. Darryl Whathisname might not like it, but we own this place now. And he knows that—remember, he wants to make an offer. He wouldn’t do that if he thought he had a rightful claim somehow, or that I did not.”
“Okay. Good.” The sound of tires on gravel wafted in from the open windows, and Wyatt jumped up to see. “Wifi guy! It’s the wifi guy! Yes!” He did a little fist pump and ran to the door.
Smiling, I got up to follow. I cannot tell you how relieved I felt every time he downshifted from far too old for his years back to goofy teenager.