Return to Magnolia Harbor - Hope Ramsay Page 0,101
trust fund, to sell the place. But, of course, her grandfather’s will restricted such a sale, just as it had restricted her ability to sell her grandfather’s stock in iWear, Inc., the company he had founded and which now was the largest manufacturer and retailer of optics in the world, including sunglasses that regularly retailed for two hundred dollars or more a pair.
The Wall Street Journal may have dubbed Jenna the Sunglass Heiress once the details of Robert Bauman’s will had become public, but that was so not who she was.
She’d been raised in Dorchester, a neighborhood in Boston, the daughter of a single mother who’d worked two jobs to keep her in shoes and school uniforms. She’d been a good student, but even with scholarships, Jenna had taken out huge loans for college and graduate school. But she’d earned her MBA from Harvard, and landed a job in business development with Aviation Engineering, a Fortune 500 company.
But her inheritance had cost her the job she loved, because iWear was a direct competitor in the advanced heads-up optics market that was so important to Aviation Engineering’s bottom line.
The company she’d devoted eight years of her life to had made her sign a nondisclosure agreement and had booted her out within a day of learning of her good fortune. It was as if the universe were sending her a message that just ignoring the money or refusing to accept it was not sufficient.
So she did what she’d been thinking about doing for years—she took a year-long trip to the Near and Far East, intent on deepening her understanding of meditation and Buddhism. Her goal had been to learn how to handle the karmic consequence of the inheritance her stranger of a grandfather had given her.
She needed something meaningful to do. But what? She needed a cause. Or a reason. Or something.
After a year spent mostly in India, she’d come to the conclusion that she could never build a new life for herself without confronting the secrets of the old one.
Which was why she’d come to Magnolia Harbor, South Carolina, with a million questions about her father, seeking the one person who might be able to answer them—her uncle Harry, Robert Bauman’s younger brother.
She crossed the street and leaned on the picket fence. It would be so easy to ascend the porch steps, knock on the door, and explain herself to the uncle she had never known. But it wasn’t that simple. The rift between Robert and Harry had been decades wide and deep, and she didn’t understand the pitfalls. She couldn’t afford to screw this up. She’d have to gain Harry’s trust before she told him who she was.
She walked away from the house and continued down Harbor Drive until she reached downtown Magnolia Harbor. The business district comprised a four-block area with upscale gift shops, restaurants, and a half-mile boardwalk lined with floating docks.
On the south side of town, an open-air fish market bustled with customers lining up to buy shrimp right off the trawlers that had gone out that morning. On the north side stood a marina catering to a fleet of deep-sea fishing boats and yachts. In between was a public fishing pier and a boat launch accessed from a dry dock filled with small boat trailers.
Presiding over this central activity stood Rafferty’s Raw Bar, a building with weathered siding and a shed roof clad in galvanized metal. Jenna found a seat on the restaurant’s terrace, where the scent of fried shrimp hung heavy on the air. She ordered a glass of chardonnay and some spinach dip and settled in to watch the sailboats out on the bay.
“The Buccaneers are always fun to watch,” the waitress said as she placed Jenna’s chardonnay in front of her.
“Buccaneers? You mean like pirates?”
“Well, they’re obviously not pirates, but they do pretend sometimes. Some of them love to say arrrgh at appropriate moments. They also regard Talk Like a Pirate Day as a holy day of obligation.”
Jenna must have let her confusion show because the waitress winked and rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t mind me. I’m a sailing nerd. Those sailboats are all Buccaneer Eighteens, a kind of racing dinghy. The Bucc fleet always goes out on Tuesday afternoons for practice races.”
“So, sailing is a big thing here, huh?”
“It always has been. Jonquil Island used to be a hangout for pirates back in the day. And the yacht club is, like, a hundred and fifty years old.”