his real estate,” the friend said. “He helped her find a new agent, who got her some acting gigs. Eventually they started dating, in a casual kind of way. Letty then invited her younger sister, who’d been living and working in Atlanta, to visit her in New York.”
But as soon as Tanya Carnahan arrived in the city, the friend said, everything changed.
“Evan fell hard for that girl. Letty, obviously, was furious. It caused a serious rift between the two sisters. They didn’t speak for years.”
Maya patted her knee and held up her juice box. “All done.”
“Okay,” Letty said, taking the empty box. “Would you like some Goldfish?”
“Pees,” Maya said, holding out a rather grubby hand. Letty took the bag of cheddar crackers from her backpack and poured some into the child’s hand.
“What do you say?” Letty prompted.
Maya shoved all the crackers into her mouth and chewed happily. “Fank you,” she said, sending showers of orange crumbs down the front of her swimsuit.
Letty resumed reading the Daily News story, fuming. She knew exactly which of Evan’s bitchy pals the reporter had quoted.
Sascha Hallowell was married to Evan’s Princeton classmate Skipper. She’d pretended to like Letty, but as Tanya later confided, “She thinks we’re both a couple of hillbilly hayseeds. What Sascha doesn’t know is that good ol’ Skippy tried to put his hand up my skirt the last time we had dinner at their place.”
7
After the ferry docked, Nate Milas steered his golf cart back toward Duck Inn, the cabin he’d bought at Sandy Point.
Some cabin, Nate thought, as he pushed through the unlocked door. The place had been a hunting shack, thrown together by members of his father’s hunting club in the late sixties with odds and ends of leftover lumber and building supplies pilfered from construction sites around the island. The shack’s title was murky, because so many of the original hunting club members had died or moved away over the ensuing years, but he’d finally tracked down the last surviving self-styled Dirty Dozen club member at his home in Pittsboro, and paid eighty thousand dollars for the property. Which was probably a hundred times what his father’s pals had paid.
“All mine,” Nate said, surveying the cottage. The floors were scarred oak and the walls were whitewashed planks of rough pine. The original floor plan had been simple: one big main room contained a combination living room and dining room, originally heated only by a potbellied stove installed in a huge rock-faced fireplace at the rear of the room. On either side of the living area were two high-ceilinged bunk rooms. And that was it. For the first ten years of its existence, the shack had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. A cookhouse had been built a few yards to the east of the shack, connected to the main house by a covered walkway, and a bathhouse, with a communal shower and a two-holer outhouse had been built to the west.
Over the years, the club members had gradually (and grudgingly) upgraded the shack. Electricity and plumbing were added in the early seventies, and the cookhouse had been picked up and tacked onto the back of the original cabin in the early eighties. Bathrooms had been added to each of the bunk rooms.
But there was still no central heat or air-conditioning. And no insulation. Only one burner on the propane-fueled oven worked, and the roof leaked. The furnishings consisted of whatever castoffs the club members’ wives had donated over the years. Still, it was home. For now.
Nate sat down at the dining room table, a rickety maple faux Early American number, and powered up his laptop computer. The first improvement he’d made to the cabin was having Wi-Fi installed. Now he clicked over to the Baldwin County legal advertising site and scrolled down the listings until he found the one he wanted and read it for the third time that day.
He still couldn’t believe this was really going to happen. His mother had heard gossip in the past couple of years, of problems at Belle Isle Enterprises, but he’d never given them much credence. Wendell Griggs was a sharp operator. He had an MBA, and he’d learned the real estate business from this father-in-law, who also happened to be the shrewdest man on the coast, W. R. Nolan himself.
To beat back the monotony of waiting in hospital rooms during his own father’s illness, Nate had started poking around at the courthouse and in online records, and he’d been dumbfounded by