The House on Mermaid Point (2 page)

There had been a time, many times, actually, when William Hightower would have left rehab in a limo. That limo, sent by his record label, would have had tinted windows, a fully stocked bar, and an eager woman with long legs, big breasts, and a talented mouth perched on the backseat.

His release would have been celebratory and newsworthy, with photographers and fans jostling each other outside the gates so that they could snap photos and scream his name as the limo sped by.

The articles and news stories would run for weeks after his release. Each would begin with pictures of him on a stage surrounded by a vast, undulating sea of enraptured fans. Back when the braid that hung down his back was darker than the night sky over a Florida swamp. When he’d swaggered across a stage as if he owned it. As if he were a real Seminole warrior and not a scared kid from a dusty, no-name town who had two drops of Native American to every gallon of Florida Cracker blood in his veins.

Back then the alcohol and drugs were just part of the gig. They hadn’t yet slowed his fingers or marred his voice or eaten away the muscle and sinew that held him together, like termites gnawing on a wood shanty. The pain of watching his little brother leave their band, the aptly if offensively named Wasted Indian, in a hearse hadn’t yet been carved into his face like a name slashed into a tree trunk. Back then the roar of the crowds had convinced him that he was alive. And destined to be young forever.

Today the car that whisked him away from rehab had not been sent by a record company and did not contain drugs, alcohol, or a woman, eager or otherwise. It was a muddy brown BMW driven by his angry, tight-jawed son, whom he barely knew. The only one left from that once-vast sea, the only one bound by the obligation of blood.

“Thanks for picking me up,” Will said.

A grunt was his only answer. Which was perhaps more than he deserved.

“And for arranging my . . . stay.” It was as close as he could come to admitting that he, William Hightower, who had made and blown millions, couldn’t have afforded the month spent at Three Palms Whole Health Center, which practiced a holistic and adventure-based approach to beating one’s demons. Not even if he’d wanted to go there.

There were no gates to drive through. No waiting press. No screaming fans. Just a clean, modern building sandwiched between a lake where he’d paddled a kayak until his muscles burned and a pool where he’d numbed his mind and his body with lap after lap. He was leaving far fitter than he had arrived. Fitter than he’d been since he’d played his first gig at seventeen. He’d give the Three Palms folks one thing: they’d forced him to clean up his outside while they’d hammered away at his interior. As if there were anything left in there.

The hair that had once hung down his back barely brushed his shoulders; the glossy black was streaked with gray. His face, bruised and battered by sixty-one years of hard living, was still dominated by a hatchet of a nose and high, harsh cheekbones that the camera had once loved. His dark eyes were framed by a spider’s web of lines, but they were clearer than they’d ever been, allowing him to see the world around him as it really was: stark and unrelenting.

They drove south from the hermetically sealed town of Weston, Florida, in silence, palm trees sliding by, bold blasts of tropical color climbing walls and snaking up tree trunks. The flat morning light was unforgiving, leaving only the stingiest triangles of shade.

In Florida City the turnpike emptied onto U.S. 1 then onto the two-lane, eighteen-mile ribbon of asphalt that locals called “the stretch.” It was here that the real world began to dissolve while paradise crooked its finger just ahead. Even on the crappiest day the stretch could cause heart rates to slow, stress levels to drop, and brain synapses to fire less frantically. But today Will’s mind flitted at random as Tommy drove sedately, his eyes fixed straight ahead. Despite the open windows the silence between them hung hot and heavy, stuffed with things that had never been forgiven and that Will sincerely hoped would never be discussed.

A chain-link fence was all that held back the scrub and brush as they skirted the Everglades and crossed over the Monroe County line. Will stole the occasional surreptitious glance at his son, who had inherited his size and coloring and who looked so much like the younger brother he’d been named for that it hurt to look at him. He thought about the boy’s mother, who’d been a casualty of the life they’d lived, too. So many people gone for no good reason.

From the top of the Jewfish Creek Bridge sun glinted off the impossibly turquoise water that flanked them, and a warm salt breeze tinged the air and riffled Will’s hair. In Key Largo scuba and bait-and-tackle shops began to fly by. A strip mall sign promising Pilates in Paradise caught his eye.

The silence spooled out. Will’s eyelids grew heavy. He was close to nodding off when Tommy said, “I talked to the bank. Then I brought in a Realtor to look at Mermaid Point.”

Will’s eyes blinked open. This was what happened when you gave your only blood relative power of attorney. In case of emergency. Never thinking that you might be thrashing it out in rehab when they decided to declare one.

He’d bought the tea-table-shaped key on a whim back in the early eighties when Key West had ceased being a place to hide out, kick back, and chill. When cruise ships began to arrive and depart daily and crowds longing to be wild and eccentric planted a flag and declared Key West their capital of crazy. Everyone he cared about had fled. Will had only made it seventy-nine mile markers up U.S. 1.

“I’m not interested in selling Mermaid Point.” Not his island. Not ever.

They were passing through Tavernier. Mariners Hospital and McDonald’s flashed by and then they were crossing Tavernier Creek. Soon they’d be on Upper Matecumbe, the third of Islamorada’s four keys.

Almost home
.

“Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t sell the island without doing something about the house and the outbuildings,” his son said. “Not in the condition they’re in.”

It was Will’s turn to grunt. When he’d bought Mermaid Point it had been one of many homes Will owned. Now it was all he had left. All he wanted to do when he got there was stretch out in a chaise by the pool and zone the hell out. Which wouldn’t be anywhere near as easy without a drink or a joint in his hand.

At the moment he was trying not to think about how he was going to live the next week, let alone the rest of his life, without numbing up. He wasn’t sure his pool—or even the Atlantic Ocean, which his pool overlooked—was big enough to swim the number of laps it would take. He didn’t know if there were enough laps in this world to make the need to detach go away.

“The thing is, if the house and grounds could be renovated it would make a great place for an island vacation or a corporate retreat. And you could keep the rooms rented out all the time—I mean, you’re still a name. People would pay a fortune to come stay in a property owned and operated by William the Wild.” The tone was derisive. As if he were relating something that he didn’t understand but he knew to be true. “You could make a living as the ‘genial host’ of the Rock ’n’ Roll Bed-and-Breakfast. Or, I don’t know, maybe we should just call it the Wild House.”

“You’re joking.” Will kept his voice even. He wasn’t even home yet. He was not going to get worked up. Hadn’t he just spent a month trying to learn how to stay calm and in control? “And it’s not like you’d ever get approval for a bed-and-breakfast. There’s an ordinance against them. And a moratorium on building.”

Tommy shook his head dismissively. “That’s just semantics and small-town politics. And I never joke about money.” Of course he didn’t. The kid was a damned investment banker with a calculator for a brain. If he didn’t look so much like a Hightower Will might have doubted the paternity test. “Unless you want to end up on the sleeper sofa in my living room? Or an old-age home for former rock stars?”

Will crossed his arms over his chest and turned an eye on Tommy. He’d used this look to good effect with record people who’d wanted to turn him into some fancy-boy crooner when he was a rocker through and through. And with fans who didn’t understand boundaries or personal space. “That won’t be happening.” If he’d earned anything in all the decades played out onstage, it was privacy. “There’s no way in hell I’m sharing my island or my home with strangers.” He shuddered when he thought of wide-eyed honeymoon couples or, worse, sad-eyed retirees in the bedroom down the hall.

You didn’t own a slab of coral rock barely tied to land if you wanted strangers anywhere near you.

His son turned and looked at him. “Well, I’m afraid you don’t really have a choice. You don’t have enough money to live on without using your sole remaining asset one way or another. You can sell Mermaid Point and the structures on it and live frugally for the rest of your life”—his tone indicated he didn’t believe William had the ability to do any such thing, as if he’d been born to wealth and hadn’t earned his fortune one damned song at a time—“or you can renovate, play the host to anyone willing to spend the money, and at least keep a roof over your head.”

William’s throat was so parched he could barely swallow. He didn’t know how he’d made such an obscene amount of money and ended up with so little. Or how the son who despised him had come up with such a horrifying plan.

A drink would have smoothed things out. Would at least allow him to pretend he wasn’t a broke, recovering alcoholic. Slowly, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a Tootsie Pop. He unwrapped it carefully and placed it in his mouth as they passed Whale Harbor Marina.

The Lorelei whizzed by on his right. Pretty soon they’d see Bud N’ Mary’s Marina, which would make him as good as home. He sucked on the thing in silence, refusing—in a ridiculous test of will—to give in and bite into its chewy center like he wanted to.

Danielle, his favorite group leader at the facility, had given him a large bag of the pops as a going-away present. Idly, he wondered why no one had ever invented a whiskey-flavored version with a shot of Jack Daniel’s in the center. Maybe that was what he should do to get back on his feet. Invent an alcoholic version of the Tootsie Pop.

He turned his head to hide his smile, concentrating on the hard, sweet candy in his mouth. Maybe an alcoholic but sugar-free version so all the poor alcoholics wouldn’t become diabetic on top of everything else. He crossed his arms on his chest and let his eyes skim over the familiar surroundings as he sucked on that candy shell.

He could tell by the position of the sun that sunset was only a few hours away. From Mermaid Point he could watch the sun rise over the Atlantic in the morning and see it set over the Gulf every night; both were sights he hadn’t gotten tired of seeing yet.

Back in the day he could have scribbled down a hit song on a napkin between sets in a bar. But that was then. Before he’d turned as old as the fucking hills and lost most everyone he’d ever cared about. This was now. And he was pretty certain that he didn’t have so much as half a melody hidden anywhere inside him.

Although she hadn’t exactly planned it, Madeline Singer had recently achieved two things that surprised her: a senior citizen discount; and the legal right to date.

Over the course of her twenty-seven-year marriage, Madeline had fulfilled many roles and been described in a variety of ways. She’d begun as a young bride, morphed quite happily into a suburban housewife, and genuinely enjoyed the years spent taking care of her husband and two children who followed. Two years ago, for a time so brief she wasn’t sure it should count, she’d become an “empty nester,” eagerly anticipating what she was sure would be a new and exciting phase of her life. That anticipation had been blotted out by the discovery that she was, in fact, a Ponzi victim; a dark thundercloud of reality that had forever changed her, her family, and her life but that had been rimmed with a silver lining of unsuspected inner strength and sense of purpose. She could now be described by two words that she’d never imagined joined together. Those words were “fifty-one” and “single.”

As oxymorons went, hers was nowhere near as clever as “jumbo shrimp,” “virtual reality,” or even “a little bit pregnant.” But it did qualify her to join AARP. And, apparently, to go out with new men.

Most of all it made Madeline more determined than ever to prove that being old enough to get a senior citizen discount didn’t mean you couldn’t start over.

It was May in the Atlanta suburbs. The azalea bushes bulged with white and fuchsia blooms as Madeline contemplated the For Sale sign now planted in the sprawling yard her children had once played in. A row of deep orange daylilies marched down a gentle slope to meet the mass of purple and red tulips that had shot up through the red clay. The deep green leaves of the magnolia trees she’d planted to celebrate Kyra’s and Andrew’s births cupped large, white, saucer-shaped blooms.

Madeline’s pollen-dappled minivan sat in the driveway, crammed to capacity for the drive down to Tampa, where she, Kyra, and her grandson, Dustin, would spend the night. The next morning they’d caravan with their partners, Avery Lawford and Deirdre Morgan, to meet Nicole Grant in the Florida Keys, where they’d spend yet another sweat-soaked summer transforming a mystery house for an unknown individual for their renovation-turned-reality-TV show,
Do Over
.

“Geema!” Her grandson emerged from the open garage, his mother behind him. The one-and-a-half-year-old ran to her, his chubby arms outstretched. Madeline lifted him into her arms and rubbed her nose against his. His golden skin was soft and warm. His dark lashes were long enough to brush against her cheek in a butterfly kiss.

“Dustin!” She planted a kiss on his forehead and hugged him to her chest. When her daughter had been fired from her first feature film for sleeping with its star, Malcolm Dyer and his Ponzi scheme had already plunged their family into dire financial straits. Kyra’s pregnancy had seemed just one more crisis to overcome. Until the first time she’d held Dustin in her arms.

“I can’t believe you’re selling the house,” Kyra said, looking at the sign. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her arms were filled with camera gear. A diaper backpack dangled from one slim shoulder.

Madeline braced herself for one of Kyra’s pointed observations about just how few women Madeline’s age would have had the guts to ask for a divorce. Or toss out some new and troubling statistic about the shocking percentage of divorced women and their children who ended up living below the poverty line. As if their entire family hadn’t already hovered uncomfortably above that line for the past two years. But to Madeline’s relief, Kyra kept her thoughts to herself.

The previous day, which would have been her twenty-seventh wedding anniversary, had been spent packing and de-cluttering the house so that Kelly Wittes, her ex-husband’s girlfriend, could stage it and the Realtor could start showing it. Their history as a family in it had been either stuffed into boxes or discarded. “I know. It’s hard to imagine someone else living here,” Madeline agreed. And yet, if the real estate gods were bountiful, the next time she saw their house it could belong to someone else. “But maybe a new family with young children will move into it like we did.”

Like mourners not yet ready to lay a beloved family member to rest, they observed a moment of silence. “I don’t want to picture anyone else in our house. I’m having a hard enough time trying not to think about the people who’ll be living in Bella Flora.” Kyra’s hands tightened on the camera bags as she mentioned the neglected mansion on the tip of St. Petersburg, Florida, that Madeline, Nicole, and Avery had desperately nursed back to life not once but twice. “Are you ready?”

The answer was no, not really. Even though she knew in her gut that divorce had been the best, most positive option for both her and Steve, her excitement was tinged with regret. Madeline was looking forward to going to the Keys for the first time; she couldn’t quite believe she was going as a single woman.

She followed Kyra to the van.

“I wish they’d tell us a little more about the owner of the house we’re going to renovate. I mean, ‘high-profile individual’ covers a lot of ground,” Kyra said as she loaded the camera bags into the backseat. Their first full season of
Do Over
, which would begin airing in just a few weeks, had been shot in South Beach, where they’d renovated a home for a former vaudevillian they’d all fallen in love with.

“Well, from what I hear, Key West is party central. If we end up down there you can hit the bars, Mom. We could go drinking together, troll for dudes.” Kyra took Dustin and began to buckle him into his car seat. “The tabloids would eat it up. And I bet our ratings would go through the roof. I’m surprised Lisa Hogan hasn’t already set it up.” Neither of them were fans of the network production head, who cared only about ratings. “Who knows, you could get your own reality TV spin-off called
Cougar Crawl
or something.”

Madeline looked at her daughter, who seemed unable, or unwilling, to grasp the fact that the divorce had left both of her parents happier, or at least less unhappy, people.

“Well, if I get that spin-off I’ll be sure to invite you on for a cameo appearance as the cougar’s disapproving daughter.” Madeline bit back a smile at the horror in Kyra’s wide-set gray eyes. “We’d better get on the road. I told Avery we’d be there in time for dinner.” Madeline climbed into the driver’s seat of the minivan. She averted her gaze from the For Sale sign as she backed down the drive for what might be the last time and reminded herself that the time had come to stop apologizing. Still, the last thing she wanted to think about was partying or, God help her, dating. Ending her marriage had been all about making the most of the life she had left, not the right to sashay through bars or pick up men.

Fifty-one-year-old grandmothers did not belong in the dating pool when they weren’t even sure they remembered how to swim.

•   •   •

Avery Lawford had what some might consider an unhealthy relationship with power tools. She’d come by it naturally, the result of a childhood spent trailing behind her father on his construction sites, a bright pink hard hat smashed down on top of unruly blond curls, a training wheels of a tool belt buckled tightly around her little-girl hips.

Before her mother ran off to Hollywood to become an interior designer to the stars, Avery went with other little girls to ballet and tap lessons, where she discovered she had no discernible natural rhythm or the slightest chance of learning to leap like a gazelle. By the time her mother left them, Avery knew how to handle the business end of a hammer and when to use a fine blade in a circular saw versus a rough cut. The whine of a band saw, not Tchaikovsky’s
Swan Lake
, was the music that moved her.

She spent most of puberty telling herself that her mother had been nothing more than a vessel who’d carried her father’s DNA. On the morning of her sixteenth birthday she’d finally conceded that her height, which was nowhere near tall enough for the size of her chest, and the blond hair, blue eyes, and Kewpie doll features that resulted in an immediate deduction of perceived IQ points and caused strangers to talk to her slowly, using really small words, were, in fact, unwelcome “parting gifts” bequeathed by the absent Deirdre Morgan.

In architectural terms Avery was a Fun House façade wrapped around Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. It was that façade that nullified her architectural degree and the years spent on her father’s construction sites and that had encouraged two television networks to try to turn her into the Vanna White of the do-it-yourself set.

Avery drew a deep breath of freshly sawn wood, shook a ton of sawdust out of her hair, and smiled. It was a heady scent, filled with new beginnings, borderline heavenly, one that conjured her father and everything she’d learned from him in a way nothing else could.

She took in the room that had been designed for Chase’s father, who’d fallen and fractured both his hip and his femur just before she and Deirdre had moved into the Hardins’ garage apartment. The newly framed walls, just-laid hardwood floor, windows stacked against one wall waiting to be shimmied into their openings. She ran a hand over the shelf of a bookcase that she’d built around the front window. The large bedroom/bath/sitting room would be warm and cozy. Most important, it would be barrier free.

“It’s looking good.” Chase Hardin, who had once been a contender for the title of most annoying man in the world, stepped up behind her, hooked a finger in the tool belt slung low on her hips, and pulled her closer.

“Yeah. The space will be perfect for your dad. He’ll be right here with you and the boys, but he’ll have his independence, too.” She turned in his arms and looked up at him. “I hate to leave before the addition’s finished.”

“I know. But it means a lot to Dad that you and I have been working on his new space together.” Chase’s father, Jeff Hardin, had been her own father’s longtime partner in the construction business they’d founded and that Chase now ran.

Chase buried his face in her hair. “Mm-mm. What’s that perfume you’re wearing?”

Avery snorted. “I believe that would be Trésor de Two-by-Four. Or perhaps zee Poison de Pine.” She tried for a French accent and failed miserably.

He nuzzled her ear. “I like it. Maybe we should bottle it.”

“Great idea. I’m sure we could sell a ton of it at Home Depot.” She laughed. “Right next to the Drano and commercial cleaning products.”

“Hey, there are a lot of men who like the smell of a woman who knows her way around a construction site.” He nuzzled her other ear. “Of course, they like her to be wearing less clothes than you have on right now.” His hands dropped down to cup her bottom. Which vibrated on contact.

“Wow,” Chase said. “That’s incredibly . . . responsive. I’m flattered.”

“Very funny,” she said, already reaching a hand toward her shorts’ pocket, which was, in fact, buzzing. “I asked Kyra to let me know when they were close.”

Pulling out her cell phone, she held it up so she could read the screen. The text read,
Amset air in HaRrin funjom.

They looked at each other. “I don’t understand it. But I know who sent it.” Maddie Singer’s thumbs and her iPhone were often incompatible. She claimed she’d been a lot more comfortable with her smartphone before it got so smart.

Avery peered down at the screen again to check the time. “I was so into the bookcase, I forgot to order the pizza.” She swiped at her T-shirt. Fresh shavings sprinkled to the floor. “I know I’ve got the delivery number in here somewhere.”

Many of the meals she and Deirdre had shared with Chase, his two teenage sons, and his increasingly frail father had been delivered. Few of them had required silverware. She began to scroll through her contacts.

“I have it on speed dial,” Chase said. “But Deirdre took care of dinner.”

“Deirdre?” she asked. “Deirdre ordered pizza?” Deirdre had returned almost two years before and continued to claim that all she wanted was to be Avery’s mother. But none of her efforts to build a mother/daughter bond had included a willingness to lower her epicurean standards.

“Not exactly. I think the appetizer is a liver pâté of some kind. The main course is pompano en papillote.”

Avery groaned. “I don’t know why your dad gave her that apron and those cooking lessons for Christmas.”

“Hey, there’ve been four males living in this house for way too long for me to see a downside to a home-cooked meal of any kind. And he was smart enough not to give them to you,” Chase said.

“Ha. Deirdre always has an angle. She took mothering lessons from Maddie in Miami. Now she’s trying to become Betty Crocker. If she thinks she can turn her reappearance in my life into some kind of
Brady Bunch
reunion show, she’s crazy.”

“I agree that she has a lot to make up for. No one’s ready to pin the Mother of the Year medal on her chest. But she did throw herself in front of a bullet for you,” Chase pointed out.

This was still almost as hard to believe as it was to dismiss. “Well, all I know is Maddie and Kyra have been on the road for eight hours with a toddler. Greeting them with ground-up goose livers and fish cooked in a paper bag is ridiculous.” Avery hurried through the newly widened doorway and into the family room.