Redemption Bay. RaeAnne Thayne

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СКАЧАТЬ only some landscaping between the houses that ended several yards from the high water mark. Sometimes she found the lack of privacy a little disconcerting, with strangers temporarily living next door, but Carole assured her she planned to put the house on the market at the end of the summer. With everything else McKenzie had to worry about, she had relegated the vacation rental situation next door to a distant corner of her brain.

      New neighbors or not, though, she still adored her own house. She had purchased it two years earlier and still felt a little rush of excitement when she unlocked the front door and walked over the threshold.

      Over those two years, she had worked hard to make it her own, sprucing it up with new paint, taking down a few walls and adding one in a better spot. The biggest expense had been for the renovated master bath, which now contained a huge claw-foot tub, and the new kitchen with warm travertine countertops and the intricately tiled backsplash she had done herself.

      This was hers and she loved every inch of it, almost more than she loved her little store downtown.

      She walked through to the back door and let Rika off her leash. Though the yard was only fenced on one side, just as the Sloane house was fenced on the corresponding outer property edge, Rika was well trained and never left the yard.

      Her cell phone rang as she was throwing together a quick lemon-tarragon marinade for the chicken.

      Some days, she wanted to grab her kayak, paddle out to the middle of Lake Haven—where it was rumored to be so deep, the bottom had never been truly charted—and toss the stupid thing overboard.

      This time when she saw the caller ID, she smiled, wiped her hands on a dish towel and quickly answered. “Hey, Devin.”

      “Hey, sis. I can’t believe you’re holding out on me! Come on. Doesn’t your favorite sister get to be among the first to hear?”

      She tucked the phone in her shoulder and returned to cutting the lemon for the marinade as she mentally reviewed her day for anything spill-worthy to her sister.

      The store had been busy enough. She had busted the doddering and not-quite-right Mrs. Anglesey for trying to walk out of the store without paying for the pretty hand-beaded bracelet she tried on when she came into the store with her daughter.

      But that sort of thing was a fairly regular occurrence whenever Beth and her mother came into the store and was handled easily enough, with flustered apologies from Beth and that baffled what-did-I-do-wrong? look from poor Mrs. Anglesey.

      She didn’t think Devin would be particularly interested in that or the great commission she earned by selling one of the beautiful carved horses an artist friend made in the wood shop behind his house to a tourist from Maine.

      And then there was the pleasant encounter with Mr. Twitchell, but she doubted that was what her sister meant.

      “Sorry. You lost me somewhere. I can’t think of any news I have worth sharing.”

      “Seriously? You didn’t think I would want to know that Ben Kilpatrick is back in town?”

      The knife slipped from her hands and she narrowly avoided chopping the tip of her finger off. A greasy, angry ball formed in her stomach.

      Ben Kilpatrick. The only person on earth she could honestly say she despised. She picked up the knife and stabbed it through the lemon, wishing it was his cold, black heart.

      “You’re joking,” she said, though she couldn’t imagine what her sister would find remotely funny about making up something so outlandish and horrible.

      “True story,” Devin assured her. “I heard it from Betty Orton while I was getting gas. Apparently he strolled into the grocery store a few hours ago, casual as a Sunday morning, and bought what looked to be at least a week’s worth of groceries. She said he didn’t look very happy to be back. He just frowned when she welcomed him back.”

      “It’s a mistake. That’s all. She mistook him for someone else.”

      “That’s what I said, but Betty assured me she’s known him all his life and taught him in Sunday school three years in a row and she’s not likely to mistake him for someone else.”

      “I won’t believe it until I see him,” she said. “He hates Haven Point. That’s fairly obvious, since he’s done his best to drive our town into the ground.”

      “Not actively,” Devin, who tended to see the good in just about everyone, was quick to point out.

      “What’s the difference? By completely ignoring the property he inherited after his father died, he accomplished the same thing as if he’d walked up and down Lake Street, setting a torch to the whole downtown.”

      She picked up the knife and started chopping the fresh tarragon with quick, angry movements. “You know how hard it’s been the last five years since he inherited to keep tenants in the downtown businesses. Haven Point is dying because of one person. Ben Kilpatrick.”

      If she had only one goal for her next four years as mayor, she dreamed of revitalizing a town whose lifeblood was seeping away, business by business.

      When she was a girl, downtown Haven Point had been bustling with activity, a magnet for everyone in town, with several gift and clothing boutiques for both men and women, restaurants and cafés, even a downtown movie theater.

      She still ached when she thought of it, when she looked around at all the empty storefronts and the ramshackle buildings with peeling paint and broken shutters.

      “It’s his fault we’ve lost so many businesses and nothing has moved in to replace them. I mean, why go to all the trouble to open a business,” she demanded, “if the landlord is going to be completely unresponsive and won’t fix even the most basic problems?”

      “You don’t have to sell it to me, Kenz. I know. I went to your campaign rallies, remember?”

      “Right. Sorry.” It was definitely one of her hot buttons. She loved Haven Point and hated seeing its decline—much like old Mrs. Anglesey, who had once been an elegant, respected, contributing member of the community and now could barely get around even with her daughter’s help and didn’t remember whether she had paid for items in the store.

      “It wasn’t really his fault, anyway. He hired an incompetent crook of a property manager who was supposed to take care of things. It wasn’t Ben’s fault the man embezzled from him and didn’t do the necessary upkeep to maintain the buildings.”

      “Oh, come on. Ben Kilpatrick is the chief operating officer for one of the most successful, fastest-growing companies in the world. You think he didn’t know what was going on? If he had bothered to care, he would have paid more attention.”

      This was an argument she and Devin had had before. “At some point, you’re going to have to let go,” her sister said calmly. “Ben doesn’t own any part of Haven Point now. He sold everything to Aidan Caine last year—which makes his presence in town even more puzzling. Why would he come back now, after all these years? It would seem to me, he has even less reason to show his face in town now.”

      McKenzie still wasn’t buying the rumor that Ben had actually returned. He had been gone since he was seventeen years old. He didn’t even come back for Joe Kilpatrick’s funeral five years earlier—though she, for one, wasn’t super surprised about that, СКАЧАТЬ