left the cottage. I was busy doing back-to-school shopping with Jackie.”
“Well, apparently he did. He sailed to Lookout Island with Jessica Blackwood. I called Donna, and she confirmed that he’s hired her niece to do a site visit for a house out there.”
Ashley brushed an imaginary crumb from her marble countertop. “Well, I guess that’s not a surprise. He’s been talking about building a house out there since he returned to Magnolia Harbor.”
“Yes, but I thought he’d give it up once he was back home with family. We can’t let him run away from his problems. And besides, it’s not safe for him to live alone out there,” Karen said.
Ashley studied the veins in the marble but said nothing.
“Tell me you don’t disagree,” Sandra said.
“I guess I do agree. But I don’t feel right intervening.”
“But we must,” Sandra said. “Can you imagine him living out there alone during a storm?”
No, Ashley couldn’t. But storms had nothing to do with it. She couldn’t imagine how anyone would choose isolation over family.
Loneliness was one of Ashley’s constant companions. It had been that way even before Adam had died, when he’d been deployed to some godforsaken place and managed to call only every once in a while.
She’d hated the loneliness then. But when Adam had been killed, she hadn’t taken a deep dive into self-pity.
No. She’d moved here, where people poked their noses into her business. And then she’d become an innkeeper, with a constant crowd of guests coming and going. She was still lonely, but she wasn’t alone.
She understood Topher’s grief, but she had no clue how to make him return to the world of the living. She had hoped he would take his meals with the rest of her boarders. But he hadn’t. He wouldn’t even let the cleaning lady in to tidy up.
“No,” she said aloud, looking up. “I wouldn’t want him out there in the middle of the bay living alone. Not in a storm or on the calmest summer day.”
“Okay, then,” Karen said. “We need to put our heads together and figure out a way to stop him.”
Chapter Five
Jessica threw herself into the City Hall project, working late into the night on Tuesday and Wednesday. By Thursday afternoon, the proposal was as good as it was going to get. Messing around with it for another twelve hours would only make her crazy. If she filed it today, she’d have time on Friday and over the weekend to generate a few ideas for Topher’s castle.
So at half past noon on Thursday, she sent the electronic version of her City Hall design via email to the selection committee’s administrator. But she also needed to provide one set of paper drawings, and since she was within walking distance of the old City Hall and in desperate need of stretching her legs, she left the office and walked down to hand deliver the package.
Big mistake.
No sooner had she set foot in the old building on the corner of Tulip and Mimosa than she ran headlong into State Representative Caleb Tate, who was coming down the hall with Councilmember Harry Bauman in tow.
She overheard their conversation—all about sailing—and suspected they were headed off to the yacht club.
PopPop had been a lifelong member of the club, and his connections had helped her land the job as a lifeguard up there the summer of her junior year in high school. But she’d never really belonged to the yacht club set. The kids who hung around the pool were rich and spoiled. Caleb had been one of them.
She’d gotten a bird’s eye view of Caleb that summer—enough to know that the Rutledge Raiders’ star running back considered himself a gift to all females, whether the females in question were interested or not.
She never had been. But that hadn’t stopped him from following her into the deserted women’s locker room one afternoon and pressing his unwanted attentions on her.
Thank goodness Mrs. Bauman had arrived unexpectedly. Of course the old biddy had misread the situation and scolded both of them for making out in the locker room. The woman had actually threatened to tell Jessica’s parents.
But she’d never made good on that threat. Heck, the way Daddy would sometimes go on and on about the boys on that championship team, he might not have even cared that she was caught red-handed with one of them. And he certainly wouldn’t have believed or listened if she’d told him the truth.
Daddy had once been a Rutledge Raider himself. And he