“Not unless she—” R.J. was grinning, but at one look at Sara’s face, he stopped smiling. “Of course I wouldn’t. Code of honor, that sort of thing. Anyway, Charley told me that Kat wanted him to buy an island and open a resort on it. A rich resort. He said …”
R.J. sat up a bit straighter and deepened his voice. When he spoke, he sounded very much like Mr. Dunkirk, but Sara as Ariel wasn’t supposed to know that,
so she had to work to keep from laughing.
“‘No twenty-grand-a-year, Mom-and-Pop-with-the-kids place,’” R.J. said in Charley Dunkirk’s voice. “‘I want celebrities. Multimillionaires who crave privacy. This King’s Isle is the only island left that hasn’t already been exploited. It’s like the place has been left for me. It has flat land on one end that could be used for an airstrip. There’s no beach, but what’s a beach? Sand, right? So we bring in some sand.’ “
Sara had to look away again to keep from laughing, but R.J. saw the muscle in her jaw twitching so he went on.
“‘I was thinking of an island in the Caribbean, but Kat wants North Carolina, so that’s what I’m gonna give her. Maybe she wants a business to run after I’m gone. Maybe that’s it. I don’t know why, but she wants you to go look at the place for me. You’ll do it?’”
R.J. returned to his normal voice. “I told him I’d look at the island and that I’d even take my camera.”
“‘Vacation,’” R.J.-as-Charley said. “‘This could be a vacation for you. I’m gonna take one of those one of these days.’ Sure you are, I told him. We all are. One of these days.”
Sara kept looking out the side window. She remembered the day she’d seen Mr. Dunkirk half carried out of R.J.’s office. She’d thought then that R.J. had made the old man drunk on purpose, but maybe Charley Dunkirk was just a drinker.
“So you agreed to help an old friend,” she said.
“Not without doing a lot of research first. It took a lot of work.”
Sara had a vivid vision of R.J. stretched out on the big leather couch in his office, his laptop on his chest. Lot of work, indeed! “Didn’t Sara write me about helping you find out about the island?”
R.J. looked in the rearview mirror at David and Ariel, then lowered his voice. “Naw, she was too busy helping me tie up loose ends so I could go. I did the research by myself.”
“And who said Hercules had a lot of tasks?”
He laughed. “Yeah, okay, so I dump a lot into her capable hands, but I did find out about King’s Isle myself.”
“And what did you discover?”
“Nothing that you, as a resident of Arundel, don’t know.”
“It’s always nice to hear an outsider’s point of view,” she said, smiling. “So enlighten me.”
“It’s a weird place.”
“Everyone in Arundel knows that. But what makes it strange to you?” She was trying to sound as though she knew everything but wanted to hear more.
“Nothing important, but I think it might have great money-making potential.”
“The most important thing.”
“Have to feed the bottom line, but, touristwise, that island does have an interesting history. Apparently, the inhabitants refused to take part in either the Revolutionary or the Civil War. When the patriots won, they refused to change the name of their island to what the new government suggested, Freedom Island. And when soldiers in the War Between the States landed, no matter what side they were on, the King’s Isle people burned their war boats, then put the soldiers in rowboats and sent them back to the mainland. When President Lincoln heard of it, he said that if all the states did that there wouldn’t be a war. He didn’t allow his troops to waste ammunition blowing up the island, as many people wanted to do.”
“Too bad everybody didn’t do that,” Sara said.
“Yeah, too bad. By the early 1890s King’s Isle was poverty-stricken, with just a few hundred people living there. Then natural hot springs were discovered bubbling up from the rocky center of the island and a year later, King’s Isle was the place to be. The rich went there to play and to lounge in the waters. They built big summer houses, put in roads, and almost overnight, King’s Isle became rich.”
“It isn’t rich now, so what happened? The spring dry up?”
“Sort of. Around the turn of the century there was an explosion—nobody knows what caused it—and in an instant, the springs were gone. Since then, the island has declined and now there are only about two hundred and fifty inhabitants on its five square miles. The big old houses are still there, but the Internet sites said they’re rotting into the ground, and the current residents have become squatters. The kid who delivers groceries might be living in two rooms of a ten-thousand-square-foot house that has crumbling marble floors. A lot of the residents pay no rent.”
Sara could see the possibilities. If there was anything that newly rich people liked, it was making people think they’d been rich for a long time. Old mansions would do that. “Why hasn’t someone fixed up the old buildings and made the island into a resort before now?”
“From what I could find out, quite a few people have tried, but every businessman has been sent away. It seems that the current residents are just as inhospitable as their ancestors.”
“You’ll do it,” Sara said before she thought.