Page 36 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
All those words were good words. But the one I heard most clearly was my name. Not Leonora, the struggling girl he’d known, but Leo, the woman I was now. He had not called me Leonora since the day he’d learned I was no longer her.
I set my hand in his.
THE REST OF THE DINNERwas much more like a real date. The food and wine were delicious, and our conversation turned to more normal, first-date things. Roman talked a lot, filling in the wide gap of my knowledge of present-day Bluster . He didn’t gossip overmuch, backing away from an explanation or description when he thought he was getting too close to personal details. But he helped me make sense of the changes I’d noticed in town.
Among those changes was a significantly greater number of strangers to me. More people had moved to town than I’d ever imagined. Roman described a years-long push by the city council and the chamber of commerce to make the town more appealing for tourists. New restaurants, a bed and breakfast (oh yay, competition), a gaming arcade, boat tours, and two small museums had opened while I’d been away. All that development had brought about a hundred or so new residents to own and work those businesses.
In my first eighteen years of life in Bluster, I don’t think many people at all moved into town or around it. I’d say less than ten new residents altogether in all those years. Virtually everyone I’d known was from a family who’d lived here for at least a couple generations. The Bluster of the past had been an insular place, too close to Eureka to the south and Oregon to the north to be a major draw for tourists or road-trippers.
The Sea-Mist had been the only guest accommodations in town, and it had been difficult to keep the doors open most of the time. We’d rarely been entirely empty, but despite having only twelve cottages, there’d been maybe six weeks of any given year we were booked full.
The people of Bluster, my mother included, hadlikedit that way. My mother, proprietor of a motel, had always resented our guests. She hadn’t liked cleaning up after them, or being nice to them, or having them come into the front room of the cabin for morning coffee and maybe to pick up some brochures. The ones who liked to chat were the worst, in my mother’s opinion. But for them, she’d always managed to shape her mouth into a smile and her voice into a friendly tone. Even if she scowled at their backs the second they turned away.
For my part, I was fascinated by most of our guests. Until I’d run away, I’d never been farther from home than Eureka, so all those people who were traveling far enough distances to need suitcases were like foreigners to me. The people who weren’t staying only a night or two on their way somewhere better, those outdoorsy types who used the Sea-Mist as a base for a week or more while they spent their days in the redwood forest, or on the ocean, they were my favorite. I’d loved to poke around gently at their things while I cleaned their cabins. All their expensive gear, their packs and boots and jackets and such from REI or Patagonia or L.L. Bean.
The ones who settled in for a bit were the nicest guests, too. They’d learn my name and use it, and they’d ask me for recommendations or simply chat me up a little. They always told me how lucky I was to live somewhere so beautiful, and I always believed it when these exotic creatures from far away said it.
Over the course of our dinner and our conversation about the Bluster that had been, I told Roman about my enthrallment with our guests. He listened with perfect attention, his eyes fixed on my face, a soft smile playing at the corner of his mouth.
“Is that why you want to reopen it?” he asked when I was finished. “To reclaim those good feelings about the place?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly, playing my fork through the remnants of my cheesecake. “The good memories are onlywaking up since I’ve been back. We came back because it’s the only asset we have left, not because I wanted to run a business. But Wyatt loves it here already and wants to stay, so I guess we’re going to give it a go. If we can, that is—there’s bad damage to Cottage 12, and I don’t think we can afford to do anything about it for a while. I don’t know if I can open while that cottage isn’t usable.”
“What kind of bad damage?” Roman asked with a frown.
“A tree came down at some point and took most of the back of the cottage with it.”
“Jesus!”
“Yeah. It’s a fir, and the top part of the tree is just lying in the middle of the cottage. I don’t know how long it’s been like that, but damage has some layers. It’s been through a few storms that way, so I guess it’s been a couple years.”
“I bet it’s not that long. This past winter and spring were really rough,” Roman said. “Lots of damage all around. We had several atmospheric rivers roll through in a row, dumping rain and bad storms for weeks at a time. We had an earthquake in January, too. 6.5.”
Now it was my turn to say “Jesus! 6.5?”
Roman nodded. 6.5 is not a city-destroyer, but it’s a serious quake. The kind that might uproot a forty-foot tree and drop it on a cottage. I was surprised how well the main cabin had held up under all that stress, but the scattered mess we’d found on our arrival made more sense now.
“Yeah, it probably fell then,” I agreed. “For now, I’ll find somebody to cut the tree up, and we’ll have to tarp the cottage and hope we get open and start earning some money.” Then, because the direction of our conversation had brought our most unwelcome visitor to mind, I asked, “Do you know somebody named Darryl Manfred?”
The impact that name had on Roman’s expression was impossible to miss, or to mistake. Not only did he know Manfred, he quite clearly did not like him. Well, same.
“Why? Do you know him?”
“I’m sorry to say we’ve met, yes. Wyatt and I came home the other day and found him making himself at home in Cottage 12.”
Obviously finding that information alarming, Roman leaned in. He reached for my hand again and asked, “Are you okay? And Wyatt?”
Now I was alarmed. Manfred had been threatening, but not in a physical sense. I hadn’t felt actually unsafe. “Yeah. He made a lot of big talk, and he wasn’t nice, but he didn’t try to hurt us. Is he capable of that?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him. What did he do to you that wasn’t nice?”
“He was insulting, really. Just that. He tried to make me an offer on the place, but he acted like he was already the owner. I guess he had a deal going with my mother, but she died before it went through, and then when I didn’t come back right away, he said he was in the middle of a deal with the city for them to take it over, I guess, so he could buy it?”
“He was working a deal with Marilyn, yeah,” Roman confirmed. “The last few years before she died, the motel was pretty much closed. She couldn’t do all the work herself anymore, and she had trouble keeping employees once the casino opened.”
The subtext was that my mother had drawn her employees (who never numbered more than two, not counting me) almost exclusively from the Yurok reservation because there she found people who would work for below minimum wage and for cash, so she didn’t have to claim any employees on her taxes. She was almost as crappy a boss as she was a mother, but back in theday there hadn’t been a lot of employment options for anyone, particularly people who lived on the reservation.
But the tribe had opened a casino while I was away ... and right there I realized why Bluster had changed. The casino brought in the tourism, and Bluster, adjacent to the reservation, had capitalized on it.
