Alice’s To-do List
Put gas in Stella so you’re prepared for a quick getaway.
As Knox and Pickle shut the door behind them, Alice realized she was staring out the window at them, right along with Lauren.
Who sneezed again.
“They’re gone,” Alice said dryly. “You can stop with the fake sneezes.”
Lauren sniffed. “Maybe I’m getting a cold.”
Shaking her head, Alice forced herself to turn from the window and look around. Memories bombarded her, along with the heavy weight of all the emotions that came with them.
The inn had been made infamous by two TV shows. First was the early 1960s Wild West TV show Last Chance Inn, a depiction of life on the range in the 1800s, hence the old sets leaning against the barn. The second show, Last Chance Racing, had been a late-1970s reality show before that was even a thing. The long, private road up to the inn had been used for filming what had been—and still was in most states—illegal street racing. They’d used the barn to store the cars.
Back in the day, the property had been a hugely popular tourist stop until the inn had closed a few decades ago. Now it had a run-down, neglected look to it that hurt Alice’s heart.
Six months ago, Netflix had started streaming the original Last Chance Inn, bringing in a whole new generation of fans.
As a direct result, a restoration of the inn had been in the making, planned by Eleanor Graham, star of the original Last Chance Inn and owner of the property. She’d had a general contractor ready to sign on the dotted line and, with high hopes, had advertised a grand opening a month from now.
But then the grand dame had died, and all plans of renovations had been abandoned. The general contractor had moved on to another job, leaving everything in flux until Eleanor’s inheritors decided what to do.
A genuine descendant from an infamous Wild West outlaw, Eleanor had grown up on this property too. Self-assured, never wanting to rely on a man in an era when that hadn’t been a thing, she’d never married or had children of her own. The inn had been her baby.
As a result, her stamp was everywhere. She’d believed in history and had picked decor that made you believe you were walking into the wild, Wild West. It hadn’t been hard; the property had been in her family for generations. The front room was centered around a huge stone fireplace. The walls were beadboard—wood fiber and resin melded together, a common wood wall paneling in the late 1800s—with old lanterns hung for lighting. The ceiling was wood with rustic beams, the furnishings reupholstered antiques. Taken together with the old leather-bound books packed in the bookshelves and the hand-painted china replicas, the throw blankets on the couches in front of the fireplace, it all made quite the picture.
But unlike in the glory days, everything was covered in dust and stacks of unread mail and newspapers. Nothing to suggest any renovation work had actually begun. Only, Eleanor had hated dust and junk, so Alice took it all in with a heavy heart. What had Eleanor’s last few years been like that she’d let go of her obsessive need for perfection?
Knox had built a fire in the huge stone fireplace, but the room was still frigid, telling her he hadn’t been here long. She actually had no idea where he’d even come here from. Lauren had never left Sunrise Cove, a fact Alice knew only because she’d somehow gotten on the subscriber list for Sunrise Cove’s newsletter. She’d tried to send it to spam a bunch of times, but it kept faithfully showing up in her email box on the first of every month.
Written by Lauren Scott, town historian and librarian.
Knox returned sans Pickle, and the three of them stood there, looking at each other. Lauren was outwardly distraught, Alice doing her best to hide her feelings, even though she’d never been any good at it, and then there was Knox, blank faced, emotions locked up tighter than . . . well, Fort Knox.
“We should talk,” Lauren said softly. “About what we should do.” She pushed off her hood and unzipped her jacket, still wearing more pink than Alice had ever seen in one place.
“What’s to talk about?” Alice asked. “Obviously we sell, ASAP.” She’d let her boss know she might need a month off, but the thought of staying with Lauren and Knox for that long had her sweating in some uncomfortable places.
When neither of her coinheritors said anything, an uneasiness settled in her gut to go along with the rising panic. “Selling is the only logical choice.”
Lauren shook her head. “You can see that the renovations never got started. We’ve got the big opening coming up, we can’t just sell.”
“I agree with Pink,” Knox said.
Pink, aka Lauren, beamed at him.
“If this is all about Eleanor,” Alice said with what she hoped was a reasonable, agree-with-me tone, “she made her mark a long time ago. She has nothing left to prove, and neither do we. There’s no reason for us to reopen, when the only person it meant something to is gone.”
“Not true,” Lauren said. “There’s been a lot of press, and the fans of the shows are super excited. And if this is, as you’ve said, all about Eleanor . . .” She actually used air quotes for the all about Eleanor part. “Well, then we should do this in her honor. Carry on with her wishes and reopen the inn.”
“Again, I agree.”
At Knox’s low, quiet voice, Alice turned her head to stare at him.
“Eleanor gave me my first job,” he said.
She held his steely gaze with difficulty, because same, and at the reminder of all Eleanor had done for her, her heart ached.
“She took care of a lot of people,” he continued. “And the town, providing revenue and employment to hundreds over the years.”
Alice turned her head and looked out the window, pretending that she was anywhere but here. Maybe on a deserted South Pacific island . . .
Then she realized the room was silent and both Knox and Lauren were staring at her. She cleared her throat. “I didn’t hear the question, but the answer is chocolate.”
Knox shook his head, clearly annoyed.
“I don’t know if either of you know,” Alice said, “but the place is a hot mess. Which means it’s our hot mess. To open in a month, it would take the three of us working day and night to pull off, and even then, it might not be possible. Do you really want to put your own lives on hold for the next four weeks and be on top of each other?” She looked at Lauren, who had zero emotional ties to Eleanor for a bunch of very complicated reasons.
Lauren was looking around her, taking in the sights, making Alice remember she’d never been inside the inn. “There’s a lot of history here,” she murmured.
And as Alice well knew, Lauren loved history. The irony didn’t escape her, that Lauren, Eleanor’s grandniece, loved history as much as Eleanor had.
“Nearly one hundred and fifty years of history,” Knox said. “And as for leaving or staying, I’d do anything for Eleanor, dead or alive.” He said this in the same quiet, husky tone he might have said it’s still snowing, which perversely made Alice want to see him lose his temper. But if he was anything like the younger Knox, he wouldn’t. He didn’t shy away from a problem, instead always facing it head-on. He’d certainly weathered enough of them in his life, same as she had.
But where she was a storm in her own right, always a swirling mass of tangled, wild emotions, he was the calm eye of any storm that came his way. “And our personal lives?” she asked, hoping she was the only one who could hear her desperation. “Are we supposed to give those up?”
Knox shrugged. “I run a general contracting company. I’ve got business partners who can hold down the fort while I work from here, handling both my business and finishing Eleanor’s dream for her.”
Okay, so Alice was reluctantly impressed in spite of herself. The summer after he’d graduated high school, his mom had died, and he’d left town. She’d never seen him again. Clearly, he’d come a long way. But . . . “I don’t have the luxury of staying for emotional closure.”
“Okay,” Knox said. “If there’s no emotional appeal for you, then how about monetary. The architecture of this structure is amazing. The moldings and baseboards alone are worth a fortune. The inn is shored up with redwood beams, also original. They don’t make ’em like this anymore. With a little TLC, this place would be worth a lot of money, not to mention the barn full of muscle and antique cars, and the nostalgia of the show sets. A renovation is in our best interests.”
Alice hadn’t heard much past “if there’s no emotional appeal for you . . .” Because was he kidding? There was nothing but emotional appeal here for her. In fact, her chest was so tight at the ball of emotions sitting on it that she could scarcely breathe. She’d taught herself how to stay calm, but to do that, she needed to get into her backpack and pull out the scarf she was knitting. She sucked at knitting, sucked bad, but the craft was the only thing that seemed to quiet her brain. Well, okay, so that wasn’t strictly true. Food also calmed her brain, but she didn’t have any at the moment.
So . . . the three of them staying for the next month? The thought nearly caused a full-blown panic attack, and she’d finally given those up. “And how about you?” she asked Lauren. “You can just walk away from your career at the library? Because I sure can’t.”
“I’m sorry, your career is what again? Last I heard, you were a nanny in Santa Fe.”
“That didn’t work out.” Nor had waitressing, bartending, or landscaping, but that wasn’t important now. “I work in a lumberyard in Flagstaff.”
“Ah.” Lauren nodded. “So much upward mobility there.”
Ignore the ’tude. You deserve the ’tude. “I like it,” Alice said. Wood didn’t need looking after, it didn’t have feelings or expectations. It just needed to be moved from point A to point B. The end.
“What are you doing wasting your talents in a lumberyard anyway?” Lauren asked. “Why aren’t you restoring cars, which you were born to do. Literally.”
Alice was actually almost content at the lumberyard. The guys had all become her friends; Miguel and Steven, and especially Eddie, who often worked construction on the side and had taught her enough that she sometimes worked with him on those extra jobs when she needed money. They were all so good to her. It was the closest she’d come to belonging anywhere since she’d left Sunrise Cove.
They hadn’t wanted her to leave but had understood. They’d extracted the promise that she’d be back when she finished here, which had warmed a teeny tiny corner of her cold dead heart. Because of that alone, she intended to fulfill her promise and get out of here ASAP. She met Lauren’s gaze. “I find it ironic you want to commit to helping fix this place up, since you recently hired someone to plant flowers for your patio so you wouldn’t get dirty.”
Lauren pointed at Alice with a pleased gleam in her eyes. “You stalk my IG.”
Alice grimaced. Stupid, rookie move.
Lauren grinned but it faded quickly. “And no,” she said. “I can’t give up my job at the library, but I’ll have plenty of time to help. I can handle the accounting for the renovations, keep track of the expenses, and create an inventory of what we have, figuring out ways to use that inventory to increase our guests’ enjoyment of the place. For instance, people are going to love coming out to see those old TV sets. We just have to set them up in a safe and manageable way.”
Okay, all of that would be valuable, Alice could admit. “Great for you two. You can fix up the inn and keep your jobs. But I can’t. You guys can buy me out.”
“Yeah, what part of small-town librarian are you missing?” Lauren asked with a rough laugh. “I’m a dollar over the poverty line at all times. Besides, one of us leaving isn’t what Eleanor wanted. I assume that’s why she set things up so that the money in the inn’s accounts is dedicated to the inn only, not to be distributed as cash to any of us. According to the will, only once the inn’s up and running and in the black can profits be split among whoever stuck. If you leave, you get nothing.”
Not if Knox would buy her out. She looked at him.
He gave a slow shake of his head. Apparently the man didn’t do anything fast. “No can do, Tumbleweed.”
She stiffened, and not because he’d just used the nickname her dad and brother had always used for her—well earned, by the way—but because he so did remember her!
Focus.
She’d been counting on getting out of this. Not for the money. Hell, she’d been poor most of her life. She had no real expectations for that to change, though a fresh start would have been . . . everything. As would the means to fuel a very specific dream that had been living deep inside her for years, way back to when she’d been her dad’s little monkey wench, working at his side, renovating the antique cars. She’d always wanted to start up a women-run mechanic shop. Alice herself could never get under a hood again, ever, but she’d also never get cars out of her system entirely. She’d be more than happy running the show and hiring female mechanics to get the jobs done.
“Okay, how about this,” Knox said at the standoff. “Let’s do a walk-through and see what exactly needs to be done. We’ll go from there.”
Hating that it was actually a good idea, Alice gestured around them. “The Eleanor I knew was meticulous. She hand-mopped the floors, she hated dust, and never tolerated clutter. This cluttered mess wasn’t at all like her. Something was wrong, very wrong.”
“She was sick,” Knox said. “She moved all her favorite stuff down here from the second floor because she couldn’t get around much.”
Alice walked through the front open room to the wide-open hallway that led to a den, dining room, and a huge kitchen that she remembered so well it almost hurt just to peek her head in. Off the kitchen was what used to be the office. The second floor held seven guest rooms, each decorated and made to look like a character’s bedroom from the 1960s TV show.
All of it . . . messy, with that same sense of neglect. Eleanor had tried to turn the den into her bedroom. A hospital bed, a recliner, and some other bedroom furniture had been squeezed into it, every last surface covered with pill bottles, cups, books . . .
“This huge property,” she murmured, “and her entire life shrunk down to one tiny room.” It had been bad, and she hadn’t even known. A sense of sadness weighed her down for the infamous old broad who’d once been the center of her universe.
“There was no pain in the end,” Knox said from right behind her, making her realize she was standing still with a hand to her chest, aching, worrying that Eleanor had suffered.
She turned to face him, forgetting until she met his dark green gaze that there’d been a time she couldn’t look right at him without making a fool of herself. “You were here with her?”
His eyes were impassive pools as he looked at her, but something flickered in them. “No. But we were in touch.”
And she hadn’t been. He didn’t need to say the words for her to hear the reproach. She felt guilty enough all on her own.
“We need to talk about what we’re going to do,” Lauren said.
“Yeah.” Knox turned to a cabinet on the wall that Alice hadn’t known existed. He pulled out a bottle of whiskey.
Lauren nodded in approval. “Definitely.”
He handed over the bottle, and Lauren tilted it to her lips. Town Librarian Takes a Walk on the Wild Side. She passed it back to Knox, who then offered it to Alice. She took two long swallows, figuring she was entitled. The first shot was pure fire. The second pleasantly numbing.
Knox drank after her, then sprawled in a chair, long legs stretched out in front of him, his stubble two days old, maybe three, his pose suggesting a bone-deep exhaustion.
Understanding that all too well, she reluctantly took a seat on the couch across from him. Lauren sat on the couch with her, but as far away as possible.
For a long moment, they all just stared into the crackling fire. “I can’t stay,” she said.
Lauren looked over. “Because of me?”
Alice closed her eyes for a beat, and when she opened them, Lauren’s were shimmering with tears again. And damn if Alice’s didn’t do the same. Throat too tight to answer, she just shook her head.
“I told you that I can’t buy you out,” Lauren said quietly, her voice thick with tears. “But you should know that even if I could, I wouldn’t.”
Alice’s heart took the hit.
“Not for the reason you think,” Lauren said. “I want you to stay.”
If Alice had been standing, she’d have fallen over in surprise. She stared at Lauren, who stared right back.
Stunned, Alice looked at Knox.
“Three is better than two,” he said with a shrug.
Lauren was sniffling and patting her pockets. She came up with a tissue. She’d been like that as a kid too. Always prepared for anything. Beneath that buttoned-up look beat the heart of a Girl Scout, one who’d loved Will “Speed Racer” Moore as much as Alice had, and would’ve done anything for either of them.
“If you stop crying, I’ll stay,” Alice heard herself say. “Just until we open one month from now. After that, we hire someone to run the place for us, and I’m out.”
Knox rose to his feet without a word and began rummaging around in the desk against the one wall that wasn’t beadboard but wallpapered. Most of the paper had peeled away so that the wall was basically down to drywall. He came up with a Sharpie.
“What are you doing?” Lauren asked as he turned to the drywall.
“That’s permanent marker,” Alice said.
Ignoring them both, he began to write.
“What does that say?” Alice asked, squinting at the messy scrawl.
He looked at the words, as if surprised they weren’t legible. “You can’t read it?”
“Not even a little bit.”
He looked at Lauren. She bit her lower lip. “I can make out some of it,” she said.
“She’s lying,” Alice said. “She’s just incapable of hurting someone’s feelings. Trust me, she can’t read your chicken scratch either.”
“I can so,” Lauren said. “It says . . . ‘down range’?”
Looking to be grinding his back molars, Knox crossed it off and wrote slower this time:
THE GROUND RULES
Then he underlined it, twice.
“Seriously?” Alice asked dryly. “We need ground rules?”
Not answering, he wrote beneath Ground Rules:
1. No tears.
Or at least she was pretty sure that’s what it said. “What the hell.”
He ignored this too, and moved over to start a new list, writing even slower this time, clearly wanting them to be able to read it. This one was labeled TO-DO. He then wrote for a full three minutes.
“That looks costly,” Lauren said.
“Yeah,” Knox said. “But it has to be done. The inn’s account should cover it.”
Alice snatched the pen from his hand, and turned to the Ground Rules list. Beneath the No tears, she wrote:
2. This is about Eleanor.
She then underlined Eleanor—twice—and turned to glare at him.
He held her gaze, his looking as if he was holding back a smile. Before she could translate what that meant, Lauren grabbed the pen from Alice and wrote:
3. Open, honest conversations with actual words.
Then she paused and added:
DAILY.
Knox held out his hand and Lauren pointed to the with actual words.
He sighed. “Fine. Can I have the pen back?”
Lauren tilted her head and cupped a hand around her ear.
Knox gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head but said “please.”
With a smile, Lauren dropped the pen into his hand, and Alice had to hold herself back from offering Lauren a high five for standing her ground with him.
Knox circled the open, honest conversations and drew an arrow to the No tears. “As long as it doesn’t violate rule number one.”
Alice tried to take the pen from him, but he simply held it above his head. At five foot seven, she was fairly tall for a woman, but not tall enough, which turned her right back into the sullen teenager she’d once been. “What are you, the keeper of the pen?”
“You were going to write down something argumentative and not wall worthy,” he said.
That it was true didn’t help. “Give me the pen.” She smirked. “Please.”
When he did, she added:
4. Do not kill your partners.
“That one’s a reminder for me,” she said.
Knox promptly put a line through it. “That’s in the Commandments, which makes it redundant here.”
Alice rolled her eyes. One of these days she was going to roll them so hard she’d go blind. She began a new list called Need. On it, she wrote:
Alice—A new life
“Good luck with that one,” Lauren murmured.
“You know what?” Alice asked, tossing up her hands. “I need food to deal with this.”
Lauren nodded and turned to the door.
“Hey, if anyone gets to walk, let’s make it me,” Alice said.
“I’m not walking away. I’m going to get my new and cranky partners some food.” And with that, Lauren slammed the front door behind her.
A shelf above the desk fell from the wall. It hit the wood surface and then the floor at Alice’s feet.
Look at that. Yet another metaphor for her life.
But she’d upset Lauren, which felt a whole lot like kicking a puppy. Suddenly chilled, she hugged herself. Looking up, she found Knox eyeing her with an unfathomable expression on his darkly handsome face. “What?”
He shook his head. “Nothing you don’t already know.”
That didn’t sound like it was a compliment, so she moved on. “Why did you pretend not to know me?”
He strode to the fireplace, crouched before it, and with a few economical movements that had the muscles in his broad shoulders and back flexing in a way that shouldn’t steal her breath but did, he had the fire blazing. She nearly jumped in surprise when he finally answered her. “Because I don’t know you. I suspect no one does.”
A sentence that almost had her violating Ground Rule number one.