Mermaid inn, p.1
Mermaid Inn, page 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Jenny Holiday
Cover design by Elizabeth Turner Stokes
Cover illustration by Allan Davey
Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
“Meant to Be” copyright © 2019 by Alison Bliss
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ISBN: 978-1-5387-1651-9 (mass market), 978-1-5387-1652-6 (ebook)
E3-20191217-ORN-DA
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Praise for Jenny Holiday’s Novels
Also by Jenny Holiday
Don’t miss the next book in the Matchmaker Bay series!
Meant to Be
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
About the Author
For Lexi, who will be so very missed. (Don’t worry; she’s not dead. She’s just in Pittsburgh.) I’ll see you at the falls.
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.
Tap here to learn more.
Chapter One
Great-Aunt Lucille always used to say that life is twistier than the Miskwimin River, and Eve Abbott had always filed that adage away as cute but ultimately meaningless. No one’s life was twistier than the Miskwimin River. It made so many zigs and zags on its way to its outlet in Moonflower Bay that tourists were always getting lost. Locals, too, if they’d had one too many at Lawson’s Lager House. One second the river was behind you, then bam, there it would be in front of you, and you’d be scratching your head and thinking, “Didn’t I just cross that sucker?”
So basically, you’d have to be living in a soap opera for your life to be twistier than the Miskwimin River. And Eve’s life was most decidedly not a soap opera. If a water metaphor had to be made, it was a nice, linear canal. A man-made canal—a woman-made canal, thank you very much—that stretched out in a gloriously straight line as far as the eye could see. Eve’s life was hard won. Predictable. Not twisty. Not even gently curved.
Lucille’s life, though, had been twisty, and she had usually been the cause of the twists. For example, there was that time Eve’s father—Lucille’s nephew—idly suggested she start thinking about retiring, about selling the inn and moving to an old-folks home, because he thought she was “slowing down,” and she’d responded by going out and getting her first-ever driver’s license at age seventy-two.
Lucille must have thought Eve’s life needed more twists. Because a few days ago, Eve had been contentedly living her life in Toronto, a plant-lady librarian living the dream, and today she was standing on the roof of the Mermaid Inn in Moonflower Bay because she owned it.
Eve could still see the eight little words that had upended her life so utterly: “Last Will and Testament of Lucille Frances Abbott.”
Eve sighed. Well, at least she had found the source of her immediate problem—her immediate problem being that it had been raining inside when she arrived yesterday. There was a big bare spot on the tarred roof.
When Eve had gotten to town last night, she’d been glad about the rain—the outdoor kind—because it meant she hadn’t had to interact with anyone besides Jason Sims, the lawyer who’d handled Lucille’s estate. Eve didn’t know Jason. He must have moved to town sometime in the past ten years. As he’d handed her the keys, he’d warned her that the Mermaid was a little the worse for wear. “Lucille couldn’t keep up with it toward the end,” he’d said, his words a dagger to Eve’s guilty heart. Eve’s determination never to set foot in Moonflower Bay again after that summer ten years ago had been matched by Lucille’s devotion to the place. That meant Eve had only seen her beloved great-aunt a couple of times a year over the last decade, usually on holidays when Eve’s father had driven to pick up Lucille and bring her to Toronto for the day.
Eve had spent the last decade telling herself that she could be a devoted great-niece from afar. She sent presents, and she and Lucille talked on the phone a lot. She knew things—she’d thought.
But Lucille hadn’t said anything about having trouble maintaining the inn.
She hadn’t said anything about her heart condition, either.
Or about leaving the Mermaid to Eve in her freaking will.
Okay, Eve knew nothing.
Except that she needed a plumber, stat. Or a roofer. Or…whatever kind of person you called when it was raining inside.
She started making a mental list. She was a librarian, and categorizing things came naturally.
Either that or her fondness for list making was about making her feel more in control of what remained, essentially, uncontrollable. Potato-potahto.
People to Call
1. Plumber.
2. Roofer.
Also, the most important one:
3. Real estate agent.
Preferably one from Grand View, the next town over, because she didn’t need her business spread all over town. Everyone was always up in each other’s business here. She wasn’t getting mixed up in any of that. She was going to be in and out as quickly and efficiently as possible. Like a spy.
Or, you know, a scaredy-cat.
She pushed down a niggle of guilt at the idea of selling the place that had been Lucille’s pride and joy, the place that had been Eve’s own beloved summer home for so many years.
She told herself she wasn’t feeling guilty so much as overwhelmed. Lucille was dead, and Eve was back in Moonflower Bay.
And it was grossly humid. Way too hot for this early in the morning. Way too hot for any time of day for a town on the shores of a massive lake. Time to get back inside to the air-conditioning.
Okay, well, one step at a time. Literally, because the first thing she needed to do was get off the roof. She made her way to the rear edge, intending to climb down the ladder she’d left propped against the back of the building, and…what the hell?
She squinted down at the parking lot, which was empty except for her rental car. The ladder was gone. Not fallen over. Gone. Like, not in sight.
She reached into her pocket. It was empty.
She peered over the edge of the roof again. Not that she had expected it to magically materialize, but there was still no ladder in sight.
What was in sight was her phone—which she’d left on the hood of the car. “Crap.” She’d pulled it out to take some photos of a section of the inn’s exterior brick. It looked bad enough that she should probably get it repointed before listing the place.
4. Bricklayer. Mason? Whatever: brick person.
But the to-do list aside, this was extremely not good. She was stuck on the roof with no way to call for help.
Except, was that…?
“Mr. Andersen?” she called.
So much for lying low. Once Karl Andersen, the owner of Lakeside Hardware, realized she was here, so would the rest of the town. Back in the day, his store had pedaled more hearsay than hardware, functioning as a sort of unofficial town hall and as ground zero for a pack of meddling town elders. Some towns had beauty parlor–based gossip networks; Moonflower Bay had the hardware stor
e.
Karl hadn’t heard her. He had to be in his eighties by now. She upped the volume. “Mr. Andersen!”
He looked around exaggeratedly.
“Up here, Mr. Andersen! On the roof of the Mermaid!”
Tilting his head back, he regarded her silently. She was expecting surprise, incredulity, but he just smiled. “Eve Abbott. I heard you were back in town.”
You did?
How was that possible? She’d told no one she was coming—she didn’t have any friends here anymore. But perhaps she had overestimated Jason Sims’s commitment to client confidentiality. And she’d just been thinking about how robust the town gossip network was.
She braced herself for questions. What was she doing here? Where had she been all these years? Why had she stopped visiting Lucille? What kind of monster great-niece was she?
But he only said, “What do you think of the new square? You should be able to get a good bird’s-eye view from up there.”
She glanced down. Moonflower Bay’s historic main street ran perpendicular from the bay for about four blocks before it widened into an open green space the town used for a weekly farmers’ market and for its two big annual festivals.
“It, ah, looks great.” It looked the same as it ever had. And she knew this view. Every time one of the top-floor front rooms was vacant, she used to sit on its balcony and read.
Or sit on the balcony and talk for hours on end with He Who Shall Not Be Named.
Or sit and watch the Mermaid Parade from up high, which they also used to do.
Except that the last year she’d watched alone from the sidelines, and he’d turned out to be in it.
But no thinking about the Mermaid Parade. Time to lock the marching, waving mer-people back in the mental vault. Which probably wasn’t healthy, but whatever. It had worked pretty well for her for the past decade.
“That’s a new gazebo,” Karl called. “The old one had been painted over so many times, it would no longer hold on to a coat of paint for more than a season.”
He was right. The old gazebo used to be a magnet for love graffiti. “Jake + Kerrie 4EVR,” that kind of thing. It’s possible there was once a “He Who Shall Not Be Named loves Evie” on that gazebo, too, and it had been carved, not painted. That way, the carver had proclaimed, it would be “more permanent.” Eve, embarrassed by how thrilled she’d been, had teasingly pointed out that permanent wasn’t a concept you could have more or less of. It just was.
Or wasn’t, as it turned out.
“Town council was deadlocked over what color to paint it.” Mr. Andersen was still going on about the gazebo. “There was a pink faction, if you can imagine it. They said it was ‘raspberry.’” She could hear the air quotes. “It was supposed to be an homage to the festival. But it was pink. Bubble gum pink. Raspberries are red, I kept telling them.”
Right. “Mr. Andersen, do you think you could—”
“You see Jake Ramsey’s boat on its way in?”
That gave her pause. The concept of Jake Ramsey—he of “Jake + Kerrie 4EVR”—on a fishing boat was not unusual, but ten years ago he would have been on a fishing boat with his dad. The boat would have been referred to as Arthur Ramsey’s boat.
But time marched on, didn’t it? She’d left everything and everyone in this town behind when she’d fled on that horrible Labor Day weekend ten years ago. Arthur had probably retired. For all she knew, Jake and Kerrie had broken up, too, though that seemed impossible. If there was any couple in the world that was permanent, it was them.
Jake’s fate would have to remain a mystery. If she asked a follow-up question, Karl would answer it. He seemed to find nothing unusual about carrying on a mundane conversation with her, a person he hadn’t seen in a decade, while he was on the ground and she was on a roof three stories up.
“I don’t see Jake. Mr. Andersen, I need some help. I’m stuck up here. My ladder seems to have gone missing.”
“Missing?” He looked around, again in a comically exaggerated fashion. “How can a ladder go missing?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe it blew over, but I don’t see it at all. I guess someone took it?”
“Not in Moonflower Bay.”
That was the problem with this town. Everyone acted like it was the magical land of Oz, except with mermaids instead of Munchkins. Eve didn’t bother to rein in her eye rolling since Karl couldn’t see her eyes from down there. “Regardless, I had a ladder, and now I don’t. I’m stuck. Any chance I could borrow one from the store?”
“You’re awfully high up there, Eve Abbott. You’re going to need a serious extension ladder to get down.”
She nodded enthusiastically. “I would be in your debt.”
“I’d better call the fire department.”
“Oh, don’t do that!” She had visions of Moonflower Bay’s single engine pulling up to the Mermaid, sirens blaring. That would be the end of her get-in-and-get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge plan. As it was, she’d been spotted, and Karl’s gossip network would work fast. “They’re volunteers! They don’t need to be pulled from whatever they’re doing when a ladder will—”
“I’ll call the police chief,” he said, more to himself than to her, as he turned away. “Chief Collins will know what to do.”
Chief Collins?
Yes. She could totally see that being a thing.
But also: no. A thousand times no. Eight hundred million times no. In addition to the fact that she was wearing yoga pants so old and ratty that they were almost transparent and a T-shirt that said, “Keep Calm and Ask A Librarian,” there was also the part where she hadn’t seen He Who Shall Not Be Named for ten years.
Also, you know, the part where the last time she had seen He Who Shall Not Be Named, he’d had his tongue down Jeannie Wilkerson’s throat on the Mermaid Christmas float in the parade.
Her hands started shaking enough that she probably should be concerned about her ability to climb down a ladder, but no way was she letting Karl call the police. She would rather have the actual Voldemort rescue her.
“Don’t call…him!” She couldn’t say his name, even in an emergency like this. “Maybe we do need the fire engine!” She ran to the front of the building, tracking Karl’s progress down the sidewalk toward his store, which was on the other side of Main Street. “Mr. Andersen! You really don’t need to bother the police. I’ll figure something out!” She would rappel down this building with a rope fashioned from her own clothing if she had to.
“Back in a jiff!” Karl called as he disappeared into his store.
Alone again, she surveyed the town she used to love. The inn was four blocks up from the water, but she was high enough that she could see both town beaches, the closer of the two with its pier and red-and-white lighthouse.
She and He Who Shall Not Be Named used to sneak into the decommissioned lighthouse and climb to the top at sunset. They would watch the sun set from the pier first, then make a game of scrambling up the old, rickety stairs. If they were fast enough, they could see a slice of a “second” sunset. They usually didn’t make it when they had his sister, Clara, with them—which they often did. Clara’s little legs had been too short. But it was always fun to try, and the three of them would arrive at the top laughing and panting.
She had forgotten about that.
It should have been a good memory, but thanks to him it was tainted. She’d lost the lighthouse when she lost him. She’d had to lock it in the vault with the mermaids.
A frisson of anger made her shiver, even in the oppressive heat.
Interesting. Her usual method for dealing with thoughts of He Who Shall Not Be Named was to…not think them. Shove them away. She didn’t even allow herself to think his name, for God’s sake.
But where had that gotten her? Standing on a roof, literally shaking she was so afraid to see him.
But why? He was the villain in this story.
And to her great surprise, now that she was here, she was spectacularly angry at him.
She smiled. Anger was unfamiliar, but she could work with it. If she was stuck in this town for a little bit, anger was better than fear. Anger was armor.
So she looked down again at the town she used to love and waited for the boy she used to love to come and rescue her. And when he did, she would call him by his name.
Sawyer Collins.
