“I want you to get the county to reverse its decision and get me back into the Roost. I wasn’t hurting it. A pizza box? An uncovered trash can?”
“There’s a porta-potty in the back,” she said with a wrinkle on her nose.
“Would you rather we used the bushes? Hey . . . I get it. You think anything historic should be preserved behind glass and on display in a museum. That house has been through three hundred years of bad weather, wars, and a couple of hurricanes. A pizza box won’t hurt it.”
“The Roost needs to be studied. It’s one of the oldest buildings in this area. There’s a lot more to that place than historians have ever learned, and I want to know what it is. You can’t tear it down! It would destroy a part of history forever.”
His cell phone vibrated. He yanked it out as an excuse to slow the conversation down and jockey for position.
It was Sophie.Again.
He smothered the anguish that threatened to clobber him and sent the call to voicemail. Sophie had been trying to reach him for months, and so far she hadn’t left a message, so whatever she wanted must not be that important.
He pocketed the phone and looked at Alice. Why was this so important to her? There wasn’t any money to be made off whatever trivia she learned there.
And yet . . . he admired people who were passionate about unusual things. He once knew a guy who made models of real cathedrals out of toothpicks. They were built to scale and took years to complete, and then he donated them to local museums. There wasn’t any money in it, but people loved those toothpick models. Alice apparently had the same sort of nonsensical commitment to the Roost.
“Get me back into the Roost by Monday. In return, I’ll let you poke around and take pictures or samples or whatever you need to do, until I carry out the demolition later in the summer.”
“Will you promise not to tear it down?”
“Of course not. I’ll give you a month or two. That’s all I can afford, since I’ll need to break ground on the amphitheater as soon as the permits are ready.”
“But what if I find something really important?”
Historians thought an old horseshoe or a bullet from the Civil War were worth grinding a million-dollar construction project to a halt. They lived in ivory towers where they didn’t have tomake payroll or float loans or build things that actually paid for themselves.
“If you discover something really important, I’ll help you find a qualified contractor to relocate the Roost to a new location. Onyourdime.”
She probably wasn’t used to paying for anything. College professors lived in ivory towers where the university or the government wrote fat checks so she could sit around reading Jane Austen or whatever it was someone with a PhD did all day.
“It’s a deal,” she said and reached out to shake his hand.
An electric zing raced up his arm from where she touched him. Alice turned and walked toward the house, the fall of her skirt gently swaying with each step, and to the bottom of his soul he wished she wasn’t the most intriguing thing he’d ever seen.
How was she going to reverse the eviction so Jack could get back into the Roost by Monday? Nervous energy coiled in her gut as Alice headed toward the Cherrywood mansion, avoiding everyone’s gaze. She had to find Arlo Whitworth. He was her best bet among members of the Historic Preservation Board to ask for advice.
As for how to explain her about-face? The truth would work. Maybe she’d exaggerated the dangers of living in the Roost, but she hadn’t exaggerated its historic importance. It was among the oldest surviving buildings in Virginia, and if her theory proved correct, it was far older than anyone realized. The Roost had a story to tell, and she needed to save it from being torn down on Monday.
Arlo stood with Daisy and a cluster of others inside the gazebo overlooking the terraced backyard. Towering oaks that hadstood for decades shaded the lawn, and she trudged up the steps, wondering how to extricate Arlo from the women because this conversation should be handled privately.
Unfortunately, Daisy spotted her and sent an eager wave. “Alice! Just the person we’ve been looking for. Come and tell us about Sebastian Bell.”
Alice forced the pleasant expression to remain in place. Her association with Sebastian and the Jane Austen movie was bound to come up again and again, and she couldn’t avoid it forever. Sebastian was now in a pricey drug rehabilitation program, but his agent, an oily man named Graham Garfield, was still sending her threatening letters. Graham repeatedly warned that if she breathed a word about Sebastian that deviated from her confidentiality agreement, he would destroy her.
“I’m not authorized to talk about anything related to theEmmaproduction,” she began, which was true enough. Cast and crew on all major movie productions were required to keep mum about details of the filming.
“Not that,” Daisy said. “Arlo was just telling us about the new Charles II miniseries. The one airing on Netflix? Have you been watching it?”
Sebastianhad filmedThe King’s Redemptionthe year before she met him, and it was another of his historical smash hits. He played the dashing young King Charles II of England. The miniseries focused on the years of Charles’s exile after his father lost his head on the chopping block during the Puritan Revolution. The young king lived on the run for two years, moving from one safe house to another, trying to rally enough support among the royalists that would allow him to retake the throne from Oliver Cromwell. He eventually fled to France, where he remained in exile for almost a decade.
It was the perfect role for Sebastian. With his smoldering good looks, he could play the warrior king with a perfect dash of wounded vulnerability. Sebastian privately told her that he hoped the role would bring him the longed-for respectability instead of his current heartthrob status. Alice had foolishly daydreamed of someday curling up with Sebastian before the fireplace, watching the miniseries together.
Now she would rather rinse her eyes with bleach than watchThe King’s Redemption.
“No, I’m afraid I haven’t been watching,” she said.
“You need to,” Arlo replied. His bow tie today featured tiny embroidered roses in honor of the Kentucky Derby, but his expression was serious. “We’re only three episodes in, but what strikes me is the similarity between the English Civil War and the American Civil War. The causes were completely different, but the parallels between Abraham Lincoln and Charles II are remarkable.”
