Buck's Landing (A New England Seacoast Romance) Read online

  Buck’s

  Landing

  A New England Seacoast Romance

  Cameron D. Garriepy

  Buck’s Landing

  Copyright © 2012 Cameron D. Garriepy

  Bannerwing Books

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design and photography

  Copyright © 2012 Cameron D. Garriepy

  Additional images used with permission.

  All rights reserved.

  Print Edition:

  ISBN: 0615689777

  ISBN-13: 978-0615689777

  All persons represented in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Bannerwing Books

  http://bannerwingbooks.com

  DEDICATION

  This book is respectfully dedicated to the residents of Hampton Beach, NH.

  Please forgive me any liberties I have taken, and know that this story is written with the greatest affection for the beach, the boardwalk, and the community which makes Hampton so very special to my family.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book was made possible through the incredible generosity of a very special group of investors:

  Judith G. Zamore

  Elizabeth & Gary Brown ~ Rebecca DiJulia

  Amy Lipke ~ Heather Sanborn

  Nichole Beaudry ~ Roxane Bock

  Kirsten Piccini

  Veronique Corddin

  John Batzer ~ Nancy Campbell

  Elizabeth Goeke ~ Ari Gottlieb

  Lex Marburger ~ Erin Margolin

  Renee McKinley ~ Katherine O’Grady

  Lori O’Hara ~ Frank Wildermann

  Angela Amman ~ Phoebe Chase

  Alta Dantzler ~ Marian Kent

  Victoria Kirichok ~ Tara L. Lagana

  Kelly Sajonia ~ Heather Young

  Kath Galasso ~ Kate Sluiter

  It takes a village to write a novel, and I am privileged to practice my craft in a particularly wonderful one. Heartfelt thanks to everyone in my writing community, including but not limited to:

  My family, especially my wonderful husband and son, for putting up with my devotion to writing—especially when inspiration struck on our summer vacation!

  The friends and readers, near and far, who’ve supported me over the last few years. I write for myself. I publish for you.

  The enigmatic K, who is always right.

  Mandy and Angela, for hours of critique. I hope I’ve done you proud.

  Roxanne, my editrix extraordinaire, thank you for whipping the manuscript into shape with a professional eye.

  My dear Write on Edge colleagues, I love you like sisters (yeah, you, too, John!).

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Buck’s

  Landing

  ONE

  Whoever was pounding on the door had better have their affairs in order, Sofia thought as she pushed herself up off the sofa, because she was going to murder them with her bare hands. With a grimace at the empty bottle of pinot noir on the coffee table, she cursed herself for drinking too much the night before, pressing her knuckles against her sleep-crusted eyes. Hadn’t she fled this coastal New England beach town to escape her father’s drinking? She scraped her mane of dark brown curls into a hasty knot, wondering what the hell else a lone woman was expected to do in Hampton Beach when she wasn’t one of the vacationing hordes.

  A glance at the clock told her she’d overslept. The mini-golf course at Buck’s Landing would be open by now, and she should be getting the Snack Bar ready.

  She opened the door to Amy, her assistant manager. The co-ed’s perky ponytail and crisp uniform polo shirt practically sparkled in the July sun.

  “I’m sorry, Sofia.” Amy glanced down from Sofia’s third story landing at the Astroturf greens, where a small crowd had gathered around the cement “tree” on the twelfth hole. “There’s a kitten stuck up the tree, and I can’t get him down.”

  “Of course.” With a sigh, Sofia slid her feet into the sensible sport sandals she wore to work, and followed Amy down the stairs to the waiting cat. She praised herself for falling asleep in a tank top and soft cotton pants. At least she was decent enough to rescue stray kittens from fake cement trees.

  The sun glittered off the crushed stone paths that wound through the course, sparkled on the blue-gray sea washing ashore across the street at the state beach. Heat was already pooling on the sidewalk, the boardwalk, and the road between. Sofia squinted, wishing for sunglasses, and did her best to ignore the faint throbbing at her temple.

  A six-foot ladder proved enough to get her into the tree, and the little scrap of fur came to her easily. Sofia had never had a cat, but as this kitten’s body went soft in her hands, she wondered briefly why not.

  “Aren’t you a pretty…well, now what are you?” She raised the tiny cat up and inspected its underside. “A pretty boy.” He cocked his head to one side, and Sofia chuckled. She tucked the purring feline under her arm and backed down the ladder. “Amy, can you stash the ladder on your way back to the window? I’m going to find a place for this guy to stay until I find his owner.”

  “Sure.”

  Sofia envied the college girl’s boundless energy. She hadn’t remembered having that much buoyant charm at twenty-two. All she remembered about being a college kid was planning her summers off from UNH so that she could be home as little as possible. The summer she was twenty-two, she’d worked her third consecutive summer at a girls’ camp in the White Mountains, blessing them for providing room and board. She’d stashed her paychecks away, saving for the precious future, intent on escaping her father’s grief and its companion, Canadian whiskey. She had planned to get out of New England, alone.

  She carried the kitten up to the landing outside her apartment. Below her, Hampton’s Ocean Boulevard was already awake and bustling. Salt and sand seasoned the breeze blowing in off the water. Motels, restaurants, food counters, and seaside souvenir shops lined the sidewalk of the boulevard as far as she could see before the coastline curved eastward at Rocky Bend. She smoothed out the cat’s long tail while her eye traced the farthest point where the year-round colony sat on the bluff.

  Buck’s Landing sat amongst all the tourist traps, three stories high and half a block wide in every direction. Her grandfather had designed the mini-golf course on a parcel of land acquired after a fire, turning the charred remains of a boarding house into his personal dream of summer vacation family fun. Her father had run the course as a young man, bringing his new wife to live in the apartment on the third floor, turning the ground floor into an ice-cream and soda counter. It had been her mother who suggested, after Grampa Buck passed away, that they convert his second floor dwelling to apartments: weekly rentals for summer vacationers, monthly rentals for UNH students in the off-season.

  While Sofia watched, the beach filled in with umbrellas and tents. Half a dozen kites flew over the boardwalk. Vacationing families were using the new bathhouse at the State Park—far better than the old one, she thought with a shudder. Kids and gulls shrieked from the high tide line, and the scent of Coppertone drifted over the piped-in music on the course. The kitten rested contentedly in the crook of her arm.

  “You like it here, don’t you?” She stroked one silky, steel gray ear. “You don’t know that there’s a whole world beyond this tacky town, a whole universe outside of New England.”
<
br />   The kitten’s pleasant rumble was disturbed by the buzzing in her pocket. With her free hand, she fished out her phone. “Sofia Buck.”

  The tenants in 2B had clogged the toilet again. “I’ll be right down.”

  Pocketing her phone, she shifted the small bundle on her arm. He blinked sleepily, stretching his skinny legs and flexing his fuzzy, half-dollar coin-sized paws.

  “You’re going to have to stay here alone for a few minutes. Can you do that?” Her companion yawned.

  Sofia took him inside and carried him down the short hall, past the tiny bathroom and her parents’ bedroom, to her childhood sanctuary. She focused on finding a pair of khaki shorts and a Buck’s Landing polo, her glance coasting over the photos her father had set on the dresser sometime in the years between her departure and his death. There was a kind of madness in nostalgia, and Hampton Beach was not going to be her asylum.

  Her guest began to knead the bedspread, and Sofia scooped him up. The kitten squeaked in protest. “No way, little man. This is the people bed, not the cat bed.” She shut the bedroom door firmly behind her.

  Plopping him down on the sofa, she headed for the utility closet. She grabbed a pair of long rubber gloves, a bucket, mop, and plunger. Giving the kitten a stern look, she said, “Be good.”

  She jogged down the stairs to the second of the two rental apartments that made up the second floor. This week, a family from upstate New York had 2B. During their brief exchange on Saturday afternoon, the mother had fretted over her.

  “I’m so sorry to hear about your Dad, honey. He was such a nice man. Nick and I have been renting this place since before we got married. He was part of our vacation tradition.”

  Sofia had murmured the correct responses before showing them a few of the updates she’d arranged for over the past few weeks, including wireless internet. If she was going to be trapped in this place, she was at least going to be able to access the rest of the world from her laptop.

  Pinning on her brightest smile, she knocked on the door. The mother opened the door. Her small child, a kindergartener named after a character from a movie—Trinity?—peered out from behind her legs.

  “Hey, Sophie.” The mother pushed a mop of sweaty curls from her forehead. “We’re just heading across to the beach. Thanks for taking care of this.”

  Sofia swallowed the name correction that surfaced on her tongue. “Have fun. The waves are up this morning.”

  Thankfully, the toilet was only clogged with an abundance of quilted toilet paper. As she worked the plunger, she wondered what the fascination was with little kids and toilet paper rolls. Sofia cleaned up behind herself and locked the unit. She stowed the supplies back in her apartment, washed her hands, and poured herself a cup of coffee. Leaning on the counter to write up a to-do list, she ticked off her duties for the day.

  The water in the fountain shared by the fourth and fifteenth holes was looking brackish, and she was running low on paper goods. Buck’s Landing wasn’t enough in the black to warrant a delivery service, which meant she’d be trucking over to Manchester for provisions and to stop at the pool supply place. And, at some point, she was going to have to call someone about the kitten.

  She stood upright so quickly she nearly rapped her head on the upper cabinets. The kitten!

  Her gaze flicked to the sofa, where a slight depression in her mother’s once-favorite throw pillow was the only evidence of the feline adventurer’s existence. She clicked her tongue and kissed the air in her apartment, willing the gray ball of fluff to appear from beneath some piece of furniture.

  For twenty minutes she scoured her apartment for him, but the kitten was nowhere to be found. She was impressed. It was essentially a four room home. Her bedroom, the cramped-but-functional bathroom, her parents’ bedroom, and the living space, with a single line of countertops and cabinets along one wall to hold the kitchen appliances. The dining table served as a visual separator for the room. When her efforts proved fruitless, she upped the ante. But a saucer of half-and-half and a bowl of chunk light tuna didn’t coax the little monster out either. It wasn’t until she went to the outside landing that she realized where he was.

  The ghost of a smile played over her lips at the sight. Her furry friend had scaled another miniature landmark on the course. Not just any landmark, but the twelve-foot replica Easter Island head at the seventeenth hole.

  Down again, out onto the course she went, grabbing the ladder from the utility room.

  Amy spotted her coming. “He’s awfully cute. Will you keep him?”

  “I’m sure the little beast belongs to someone.” Sofia propped the ladder against the statue and spoke to the three parties queued up at the tee. “Play through, folks. Amy will comp you all a soft-serve in the snack bar for your trouble.” Amy herded everyone through while Sofia surveyed the head, looking for the best path to get to her little pal, who batted a passing white butterfly and mewed at her from his perch.

  ~~~

  “Well, I know what I’m going to call you when I find you.” Silas Wilde pushed up to standing, brushing a fine dusting of beach sand from his knees. He gave up hope that the little thing had only gone to ground under the sofa; he was fairly certain he was talking to an empty room. So far, the kitten his sister had given him at the beginning of the summer—a housewarming gift, or so Mallory claimed—had escaped his apartment no less than ten times, this last time managing, Silas feared, to get out of the building altogether.

  He made a cursory examination of the bathroom and efficiency kitchen before taking the back stairway down to the Atlantis Market, the convenience store and gift shop that was his new livelihood, half-hoping the kitten was playing with the mops and brooms in the hallway. When his search disappointed him, he headed into the Market. His older sister’s oldest son, Theo, looked up from the register. He was ringing up a big sale: two beach chairs, a soft-sided cooler, and a picnic’s worth of bottled water, soda, and junk food.

  Silas had developed a great affection for impulse beachgoers.

  “Cat got out again,” he said.

  Theo laughed. “I’ve got everything taken care of.”

  Silas let himself out through the store’s front door, leaving Theo to handle the morning beachcombers in search of a snow globe of the Casino Ballroom, a new pair of flip-flops, or aloe gel. “Hopefully, I won’t be gone more than a half hour. I’ve got my phone.”

  Silas had traced the New England coast north from New York City six months earlier, abandoning Interstate 95 in Boston to weave a northbound route along route 1 and 1A, in a Jeep Wrangler he’d bought from the Want Ads. A thousand times, his breath was stolen by the pewter sea and the rocky shoreline, peppered with stretches of coarse sand beaches and faded boardwalks, but something about Hampton Beach called to him. Following the tug, he’d checked into a motel a block inland, one of the few open in the frigid winter months, and fallen asleep to the north wind wailing over the snowy beach.

  He’d thought Ocean Boulevard had stolen his heart in January, abandoned and near silent, save for some hardy year-round dwellers and a handful of businesses that defied the off-season. As he looked out over the summer expanse of state beach, pristine and already baking under a ninety-degree sun, the music of tourism and the magic of vacation coursed through him like the first swallow of a cold beer.

  Had he still been in New York, sweltering in his Brooklyn walk-up or hunched over his desk in the maze of cubicles on the litigation floor at Stern & Lowe, he might never have known the heady mix of kitsch and tradition that was Hampton. Owning a convenience store in a summer town was a good, long way from the document review sweatshop of corporate law.

  Not even ten in the morning, and his worn R.E.M. tour tee-shirt was stuck to the small of his back. A bead of sweat rolled down his face, and he wiped it with the hem of the shirt. A gaggle of teenage girls wandered by in bikinis, and one of them turned to give him a sassy grin, her eyes lingering over the flat expanse of his stomach. Silas watched them pass, doin
g his best not to appreciate the view too much.

  He walked the perimeter of his building, examining a patch of newer cedar shingles, not yet weathered silver, while he looked for the cat. The previous owner had taken care of the Atlantis, even if his taste in interior decorating was a blend of seventies aesthetic and thrift store pragmatism. Silas called to the kitten with the whistle and click combination he’d found seemed to attract the small adventurer.

  It wasn’t long before he heard the meow from over the fence. The kitten was small, but he had lungs and feet worth watching. Following the cries, he arrived at the gate of Buck’s Landing. His next door neighbor’s building was taller, casting his apartment into welcome shade for most of the day. The owner, Jimmy Buck, had passed away about a month ago, leaving the whole property to his estranged daughter.

  The jury was still out on the new Buck at the Landing, as far as Silas was concerned. She’d breezed into town in a slick BMW sedan, holed up in her late father’s apartment, and kept mostly to herself. He’d only seen her once in the three weeks she’d been in residence; she’d been hauling a huge suitcase out of the trunk of that Beamer. She had refused his friendly offer of help, called down over the railing from the porch roof that served as his deck. He’d watched Jimmy’s daughter drag that luggage up the two flights of narrow exterior stairs to the apartment with equal parts amusement and distaste.

  Silas recognized the young woman working the register at Buck’s. Amy had pounded pavement before the last frost looking for a summer job, even coming into the Atlantis Market to see if he was hiring. Turning her down had been tough, so he’d been glad to hear Jimmy had hired her on for the summer. Later in the spring when he’d run the numbers and knew he could afford a part-timer, he’d hired his nephew Theo at his sister’s insistence. Mallory was a persistent woman.