To Bimini with baboons. To Cairo with coconuts. To Denmark with dental floss, he thought as the speck vanished.
He stood a moment longer before stepping back inside, back into the warm.
He needed to do something. He should go out, get his stuff. Unpack, settle in.
Maybe later.
He walked out again, wandered again, all the way to the third floor that had once served—before his time—as the servants’ domain.
Storage now, ghost-draped furniture, chests, boxes, most in the wide space while the warren of rooms where maids and cooks had slept stood empty. Still, with no purpose in mind, he walked through them to the sea side, and the gable room with its wide, curved windows facing the sea.
The head housekeeper’s room, he thought. Or had it been the head butler’s? He couldn’t remember which, but whoever had slept there claimed prime territory, down to the private entrance and terrace.
No need for all that staff now, or to keep the third floor furnished, maintained, even heated. His practical Gran had closed that off years ago.
Maybe one day whoever was in charge would repurpose it, bring it back, shake off all those ghost cloths and strike up the warmth and light.
But right now it felt as empty and cold as he did.
He went down again, continued to wander.
And found more changes.
In what had been one of the second-floor bedrooms, his grandmother had reimagined, redesigned it into an office/sitting room. A study, he supposed. Complete with a computer station on a gorgeous old desk, a reading chair and what he thought of as an afternoon nap sofa. More of her art—petal pink peonies spilling out of a cobalt vase, mists rising over windswept dunes.
And the view, of course, spread out like a banquet for a hungry soul.
He moved into the room, to the desk, and pulled the sticky note off the monitor.
Hester says:
Write here, and why aren’t you already?
Relayed by Abra.
He frowned at the note a moment, not sure he appreciated his grandmother’s using her neighbor to relay her orders. Then, the note still in his hand, he looked around the room, the windows, even into the little bathroom, the closet that now held office supplies as well as linens, blankets and pillows. Which meant, he concluded, the sofa was a pullout.
Practical again. The house held a dozen bedrooms or more—he couldn’t remember—but why waste space when you could multipurpose?
He shook his head at the glass-fronted mini-fridge stocked with bottled water and his own guilty favorite since college, Mountain Dew.
Write here.
It was a good space, he thought, and the idea of writing held a lot more appeal than unpacking.
“Okay,” he said. “All right.”
He went to his room, retrieved his laptop case. He slid the keyboard and monitor to the far left, gave himself room for his own tool. And since it was there, what the hell, got a cold bottle of the Dew. He booted up, plugged in his thumb drive.
“Okay,” he said again. “Where were we?”
He opened the bottle, chugged as he brought up his work, did a quick review. And with one last glance at the view, dived in.
He escaped.
Since college, he’d written as a hobby—an interest he’d enjoyed indulging. And it had given him some pride when he’d sold a handful of short stories.
In the past year and a half—when his life began to shake into the dumpster—he’d found writing offered him better therapy, a calmer mind than a fifty-minute hour with a shrink.
He could go away into a world he created, he—to some extent, anyway—controlled. And oddly felt more himself than he did outside that world.
He wrote—again, to some extent—what he knew. Crafting legal thrillers—first in short stories, and now this terrifying and seductive attempt at a novel—gave him an opportunity to play with the law, to use it, misuse it, depending on the character. He could create dilemmas, solutions, tightrope along the thin and slippery line, always shifting between the law and justice.
He’d become a lawyer because the law, with all of its flaws, all of its intricacies and interpretations, fascinated him. And because the family business, the industry of Landon Whiskey, just wasn’t a fit for him as it was for his father, his sister, even his brother-in-law.
He’d wanted criminal law, and had pursued that goal single-mindedly through law school, while clerking for Judge Reingold, a man he admired and respected, and into Brown, Kinsale, Schubert and Associates.
Now that the law had failed him in a very real sense, he wrote to feel alive, to remind himself there were times truth held out against lies, and justice found a way.
By the time he surfaced, the light had changed, gone gloomy, softening the tones in the water. With some surprise he noted it was after three; he’d written solidly for nearly four hours.