I crossed my fingers and turned the hot-water faucet in the bathtub. Tea-colored water trickled out at first, but cleared up after a moment, and after another moment or two, scalding-hot water gushed from the tap.
I’d taken a stack of clean bath towels and soap from the laundry room in the manager’s unit, and had even found a miniature bottle of bubble bath, so old that the paper label was yellowed with age. I dumped in the whole bottle, and sank deep into the hot froth, willing my aching muscles to relax.
Tomorrow, I thought sleepily, I would have to start all over again on the other thirteen units. More scraping, scrubbing, stripping, and sanding. But, I vowed, I would not be working alone. Harry Sorrentino, by God, worked for me, and by God, he would work with me too.
Finally, when the water had gone tepid and my knees weak with exhaustion, I toweled off and stumbled to bed, where I fell instantly to sleep.
Dazzling sunlight flooded into the room, nearly blinding me with its intensity. I yawned, stretched, and glanced at my watch. Six-thirty! Somehow, I would have to rig up some kind of curtains at the windows facing my bed.
Before my feet could even hit the floor, there was a soft knocking, and a more insistent scratching, then barking.
“Yeah?” I said groggily.
Harry opened the door and poked his head inside. “You didn’t lock up last night,” he said accusingly. “I came home and the place was wide open.”
I blinked. “Is anything missing?”
“No. But that’s not the point, damnit. You left the office open too. What the hell is wrong with you?”
Aware that I’d gone to bed wearing nothing more than panties and an oversize T-shirt, I wrapped the comforter around me and stood up, trying to summon my dignity.
“We didn’t finish working here until after midnight. I was tired. I haven’t had any sleep. So yes, I did forget to lock up. For which I apologize. But maybe if you’d come back at a reasonable hour, you could have given me a hand and I wouldn’t have been so absolutely sick with exhaustion.”
“I put in an eight-hour day of work here, yesterday, in case you didn’t notice,” Harry began.
“Yippee for you,” I snapped. “I put in sixteen hours. I’m likely to put in at least that today too. Not that you care.”
Jeeves let out a low, guttural growl. Harry gave me the human, visual equivalent of a growl.
“Just lock up, okay? I can’t get anything done if my power tools go missing.”
“Fine,” I said, hurrying toward the bathroom, and slamming the door hard behind me.
He apparently didn’t realize he’d been dismissed. I could hear Jeeves’s nails clipping as he trotted around my living quarters, followed by Harry’s heavy footsteps.
“Place looks pretty good,” Harry called to me.
“No thanks to you,” I mumbled to myself, assessing my looks in the wavy glass of the mirror. I still had flecks of white paint in my hair, which badly needed washing. I looked down at my hands. My knuckles were scraped raw, and the nail on my right forefinger was black and swollen from where Weezie had hit it with the tack hammer.
“I like the white floors,” he said. “You gonna do that in all the units? It’ll cut down on maintenance. We won’t have to vacuum, or worry about carpet stains, and sand won’t show on these white floors.”
“Yeah,” I called back. “I thought about that already.” What I didn’t tell him was that I had plenty of cheap paint, but no money for carpets anyway, or a vacuum cleaner, or somebody to run said vacuum.
“Where’d you get all the furniture?” he asked. “There’s some beds and dressers out in the storage shed, but nothing this nice.”
“It’s on loan from a friend.”
Why didn’t he leave already? I needed to pee, but I didn’t want him out there, listening to me.
“See you in a little bit,” I called, hoping he’d get the hint.
“You got any coffee?” he called back, still oblivious.
“No. No coffee, no coffeemaker, no mugs, no spoons,” I said.
“Oh. Well, I guess I could make us some.”
“You do that,” I said, turning on the bathtub faucets to drown out any embarrassing sounds.
“Okay.”
When I’d dressed in my work clothes, with my hair covered with the stocking cap again, I marched myself over to the office, where Harry was sitting at the table, sipping coffee and regarding a heap of metal parts in front of him.
“What’s that?” I asked, pouring myself a mug.
“The motor for the clothes dryer,” he said, poking at it with a screwdriver.
“Shit,” I said, sitting opposite him. “Can it be fixed?”
“Maybe. No promises.”
“We’ve only got the one dryer, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it’s got to be fixed. I can’t afford to replace it.”
He took a pair of glasses from his breast pocket and perched them on the end of his nose, leaning in closer to examine the motor. “I know,” he said. “I know all about your little problem.”
I felt my scalp prickle, and my hands started shaking so badly I had to set the mug of coffee down on the table to keep from spilling it all over myself.
“Which little problem is that?”
He sighed. “Tybee’s not Siberia, you know. People talk. They even talk about you. You’re a pretty hot topic over at Doc’s Bar.”
I grimaced. “Swell. So what’s the Doc’s Bar version of my little problem?”
Harry reached for a tin pie pan that contained a heap of nuts and bolts. He found the one he wanted, and carefully inserted it in a minuscule hole in the motor.
“Let’s see if I got it straight. You had yourself a little boy toy, some rich guy from Charleston with a yacht and a fancy car. Only he wasn’t really rich, or from Charleston, and the yacht wasn’t his either. And when the smoke cleared, the boyfriend was gone, and so was all your money. He sold your house, and everything in it, cleaned out your bank accounts, and blew town.”
He reached for his coffee mug and took a sip. “That about the size of it?”
There was no use in lying to him. Maybe it was time to put my cards on the table. “That’s about right. I wouldn’t exactly call Reddy a boy toy, but when you get right down to the nitty-gritty, yeah, he cleaned me out.”
“And now you’ve had to close your restaurant. And you’re broke.”
“Dead broke,” I said glumly.
“And basically homeless,” Harry said, ever helpful.
“Not anymore. I own this place. It’s oceanfront property. Extremely valuable oceanfront property that I own outright. I’m back in the game.”
“Nuh-uh,” Harry said. “Sandcastle Realty Associates has an option on the Breeze. Your lawyer’s fighting it, but in the meantime, you can’t do squat. You’re screwed, sweetheart.”
“Don’t call me sweetheart,” I said sharply. “I don’t know what all you’ve heard from the sages over there at Doc’s. But they don’t know me. And you don’t know me.”
“Don’t I?” He picked up the motor and went into the utility room, where he dropped down onto the floor in front of the disemboweled dryer.
I followed right behind him. “You think I’m just some bubbleheaded downtown ditz playing Motel Barbie, right?”
He had his back to me, so all I heard was a grunt.
“It doesn’t bother me what you think,” I said. “And I don’t care what a bunch of winos and losers think of me either. But here’s the deal, Harry. St. Patrick’s Day falls on a Monday, which means we’ll get a four-day weekend of guests who will basically pay anything to stay anywhere within a twenty-mile radius of Savannah. I’ve checked the rates at the B and Bs in town. The Gastonian, the Ballastone, the Planter’s Inn? They’re all booked. Have been since before Christmas. They all charge at least $350 a night at St. Patrick’s Day. For three nights minimum. We can make around a thousand bucks apiece, for fourteen units. That’s $14,000 for our opening weekend. So, you see, Harry, the Breeze is going to be open and fully booked by then.”
He laughed. “Lady, this ain’t the Gastonian. It ain’t even the Motel Six. Nobody will pay those prices to stay on Tybee Island. And especially at the Breeze Inn. I’m telling you, it can’t be done.” He rolled over onto his back to look up at me. “You saw what your unit looked like. And that was the nicest one. The rest of ’em are ten times worse. It’s not just a matter of time, either. I need materials. Roofing shingles, commodes, Sheetrock, lumber. Three of the units have rotted-out doors. None of that stuff comes cheap.”
“Let me worry about the money part. I’ve still got credit cards. You just make a list,” I told him. “I’ll borrow a truck, and meet you over at Home Depot in an hour.”
“Sure,” he said, going back to work.
“And there’s one more thing,” I added.
“I can’t wait to hear it.”
“No more taking off at three o’clock to go drown your sorrows at Doc’s Bar. I know you’ve got your troubles, but drinking isn’t going to solve them. And anyway, I need you here. All day. Every day.”
“Fuuuckkk.” He said it long and low.
He sat up. “You were checking up on me at Doc’s? Is that what this is all about? Well, fuck you, lady. What I do when I’m off the clock is my own damn business. And as soon as you pay me what you owe me, you can find somebody else to order around.”
“I’m aware of how much money I owe you,” I said calmly. “And you’ll get it back. Every dime. I swear. The police have a lead on my uh, Reddy’s, whereabouts. When they find him, I’m going to get my money back. And my house and my rental properties. My lawyer is very optimistic about that. And we’re working on resolving this Sandcastle Realty issue too. But in the meantime I can’t pay you anything until this place is up and running.”
“You’re living in a dream world,” he said. He put the front panel back on the dryer, stood up, wiped his hands on the seat of his jeans, and mashed the button on the dryer’s control panel. We both bent down at the same time to look inside the glass door. Whompa-whompa-whompa. The big steel drum started its slow rotation. It worked. At least one dream had come true for the day.
“My hero,” I said, patting him on the back.