Chapter 10 Time Out
Time Out
When Dawn was a kid, she could imagine no greater horror than living in a small town in cottage country.
Every summer, her parents dragged her to a mouse-infested cabin that belonged to an old college friend of Dad’s.
He’d let them stay rent-free, and even at Dawn’s age, she smelled the smug charity in that.
No, really, Charlie, take it. You guys deserve to get away, and I know how hard it’s been since the accident. A week, two weeks, whatever you want. My treat.
Of course, the friend—Dawn forgets his name—hadn’t cared how long they stayed.
He didn’t use the cabin himself. He had a million-dollar place a half-hour away.
This was the inherited family cabin that he couldn’t bear to part with, especially not when Dawn’s dad would spend his “vacation” fixing up the place.
Dawn hated every minute of those trips, especially when she’d look at the new cottages on the other lakes and imagine her dad’s friend in one of them.
Couldn’t even invite them over for the weekend, could he?
Nope, he might call Dad an old friend, but her father was really just the handyman, getting two weeks in a dump in return for keeping that dump standing until the friend could sell the land, which he eventually did.
Whenever they made the drive up, they’d pass through endless tiny towns with an old-fashioned main street and cottagers eating overpriced ice cream and buying ugly hats they’d never wear. As they drove through, her dad always said the same thing.
Can you imagine living here?
Dawn thought the same thing, but for her the words had a very different inflection. Her dad said them with wonder, like this was some kind of middle-aged guy Disneyland. In Dawn’s mind, those words came with undercurrents of horror and disgust.
Can you imagine living here?
Stuck in a nowhere town, infested with tourists in the summer and then all but shut down in the winter. A three-hour drive to the nearest restaurant that didn’t have Kids Eat Free Thursdays.
Could she imagine it?
Yes, she could, because at thirty-four, she lives in one of those towns.
Well, not full-time. She would cut a hole in the lake ice and dive under before she subjected herself to that.
But she lives there enough that she’s earned the badge of resident, and that’s important.
People trust residents, especially single female ones.
Well, the men do at least, and that’s what counts in these backwaters.
Dawn’s father always hoped she’d learn a few things from those summer trips. A love of the outdoors, a strong work ethic and a sense of fairness, where you didn’t take anything without giving back.
Yeah, no. Dawn’s teacher was a man she’d never met—the asshole who’d owned the cabin. He taught her that people will use you the moment you give them an opening, and if you want that million-dollar summer house, you need to be the one doing the using.
He also showed her the value of property up here. That scrap of land where his family cabin stood sold for a half million bucks, and now held a massive summer home owned by Americans who’d considered the land a bargain.
Dawn is a real estate broker. Oh, that’s not what her business card says.
According to it, she’s a fairy godmother, making dreams come true.
The dream of a place where you could escape the concrete of Toronto—or Buffalo or Detroit—and flee north to lake breezes and sunsets on the deck, beer in hand, children splashing in the water below.
Dawn specializes in exactly what her dad’s college friend did. She “repurposes” vacation property. In other words, she buys rundown cabins that’d been built early in the last century, tears them down, tidies up the land and sells it as pristine property for dream-home development.
That day, Dawn drives through Miller’s Point in the pickup truck she hates almost as much as she hates the town itself. It’s equally rundown, equally ugly and equally lacking in every convenience and luxury known to humankind. The damn thing doesn’t even have air conditioning.
The truck is camouflage, like everything about Dawn when she comes to Miller’s Point. In Toronto, she’s a different person, with a little convertible BMW and a condo on Lakeshore. She even keeps different social media accounts to separate “work Dawn” from “real Dawn.”
Work Dawn is barely scraping by, far too invested in other people’s dreams to cultivate her own. Real Dawn… Well, real Dawn finally broke the top tax bracket last year. Not that she paid the top bracket taxes—she’s far too savvy for that.
Dawn pulls in at the diner, climbs out, adjusts her ponytail and rolls up the sleeves on her plaid flannel shirt. Then she heads inside.
“Dawn Mulligan, as I live and breathe,” Stu wheezes from behind the grill. “You back in town, girl?”
“Thank God. I thought I’d be trapped in that city forever.”
“How’s your mama?”
Dawn’s mother died from breast cancer two years ago, but as far as the town knows, she’s still fighting the good fight, and Dawn needs to spend months in the big city caring for her.
“Still dreaming of getting back up here once she’s able.” Dawn perches on a counter stool in the nearly empty diner.
“The usual?”
“I’ve been dreaming of it the whole drive up.”
He grins and slaps a patty onto the grill. The smell of grease makes Dawn’s stomach churn, but she covers the rising nausea with the appropriate mmm-mmm noises.
“So what did I miss in the last month?” she says.
“Well, the Coopers are finally thinking of selling.”
Dawn waves a finger at him. “None of that. Gossip first, business later.”
“But that is gossip.” His smile grows. “The best kind. Profitable.”
She tut-tuts and rolls her eyes but doesn’t stop him from going into detail. Like many locals, Stu hates the summer people. Hates their ostentatious wealth and their condescending bullshit and hates that he relies on it to make a living.
Dawn and Stu have an arrangement. When one of the aging summer folk dies and leaves their cottage to their kids, he tells Dawn, and she dives in for the kill before other brokers catch wind of fresh meat.
It helps that she’s a pro at the soft sell.
Dawn has her routine down to a science—offer condolences and back off.
Show up at the funeral, use Stu’s intel to act as if she knew the deceased, and then back off again.
Give it just enough time, and then sheepishly send them her contact information—I know this is the last thing on your mind, but someone asked about the cottage and I’m obligated to let you know.
Before long, she’d have made the purchase and by next summer, a new cottage would be going up on the property and Stu would have a ten percent commission in his pocket.
He gives her leads on two new property. Damn but these boomers are dropping like flies, all of them convinced their kids wanted the old family cottage with an outhouse and zero winterization.
When he finishes, he leans out and looks around the diner. The only patrons left are a couple of hunters in the corner, grabbing a burger on their way north for moose season.
“You heard of old Millie?” Stu asks in a whisper.
Dawn pauses. The name twinges a memory, but she can’t pull up details.
Stu rubs a grease-streaked hand across his mouth and glances nervously at the hunters. “Folks up here don’t like to talk about her. They respect her privacy, you know?”
Dawn nods. “She lives backwoods?”
“She does. Over on Little Thorn Lake.”
When Dawn frowns, he says, “It’s about an hour north. Near Blind Bay.”
That gets her attention. When she’d been a kid, Blind Bay had been one of those places considered too remote for anything but the hardiest hikers. Fast forward twenty years, and it was the latest hot development spot…now that all the truly hot ones were fully developed.
“Old Millie’s lived out there since her husband died, nearly twenty years back. They never had kids.”
“How old is she?” Dawn asks, trying for idle curiosity.
He shrugs. “Gotta be close to ninety by now.”
She whistles. “Must be a tough old bird.”
“She used to be, but it’s been years since she could even row out. I take her supplies, and the last time I was up there…”
He shifts, looking uncomfortable as he lowers his voice more.
“She’s not going to make it through the winter.
I feel like a ghoul mentioning this, but I’d hate to see the place go to a great-nephew who hasn’t even bothered to come see her in a decade.
I was thinking, maybe if I had you run some supplies over, and you could get to know her… ”
“Get to know her and convince her to sell me the property now, in return for a lifelong lease and enough money to make her final days very comfortable?”
He exhales. “Exactly. I trust you to treat her right.”
“If her nephew is expecting a windfall, he should have looked after her.”
“He should have.”
“Instead, you’ve been doing it, and I’m sure he’s not going to repay you for that.”
“He won’t.”
“So let’s make sure she gets a square deal, you get properly compensated for your work and the nephew gets as little as possible.”
Stu smiles. “I like the sound of that.”
Dawn paddles along the edge of “Old Millie’s” property and tries to reason with the disappointment leaching into her bones.
Yes, it’s not as close to Blind Bay as she’d hoped.
Yes, it’s only accessible by water—hence the canoe.
Yes, it’s completely off grid, with no electricity lines for two kilometers.
But if you want rustic, it’s perfect. Better than perfect, in fact.
According to Stu, this isn’t just a half-acre of lakefront property.
Millie owns fifty acres, with a thousand feet along the lake.
Hell, she pretty much owns the tiny lake with the way her property wraps around it.