Page 105 of Wayward

“No,” I said quickly, thinking that Mr. Kramer’s training had included Thor not being the type to chase anything but bad guys. “Just Bedelia.”

Lauren crossed her heart that her baby would be good.

Dr. Coleman came by, with his husband, Troy, and introduced me. He was sorry he hadn’t called.

“I would have,” he said, glancing at Gale, “but I was informed that you were quite busy being Ada’s caretaker.”

“That’s true,” I agreed, as Gale took gentle hold of the back of my neck. “But I would love the four of us to get dinner sometime.”

“I would love that,” Troy said, beaming at me.

Gale only grunted.

Ada did a thriving business, selling every last piece of pottery, much to her surprise and delight. Her banker, Mr. Raleigh—Allen—was thrilled for her, even more so when she hugged him. Clearly, the man was a bit smitten. I invited him for dinner, and he quickly accepted. Ada, Gale, and I had dinner together every night at our house, and one more was always welcome.

I had so many people coming and going from the property that I had to buy one of those stupid organizers with all the tabs. Keeping it all straight on my phone, where I had to open the calendar to see everything, didn’t work for me. Just like I kept my records that I turned over to the Feds, journals worked best for me, but to be on the safe side, I hired a CPA from a big firm in Portland and a lawyer from a small outfit in Seaside.

A week later, when Gale got home from work, he was stunned to see that the jungle that used to be Ada’s front yard had been taken down to dirt, and new sod and plants were being put in. The fact that the porch needed to be rebuilt was bad news, but the wrought-iron railings had held up. I was pleased that at least some pieces of the original house were intact. It was part of Ada’s history with her home and I wanted that for her. Libby had lived there after all, and so to see the restoration process had to be part of the healing. I was guessing that had Libby been around, Ada would have been so much more vigilant about the upkeep of their home.

So many positive changes, it was hard to keep track of them all.

Genie came a month later, in July, invited by her aunt to move into the second bedroom in the bungalow until the house was finished. Then, of course, she’d have her own suite.

“I’m very excited about having so many rooms,” Genie told me.

She immediately took over the care of the barn cats and accepted the two alpacas Peter Kay gifted to Ada. He said that when he was watching the girls for the couple of days he had them, that those two particular alpacas enjoyed being with the sheep. So Betty and Denise joined the others in grazing on the grass in the now fenced paddock. It was nice to see things coming together.

Genie became the first employee of Libby’s House, which was the official name of the sanctuary, and she hired a designer to begin building the website. She got to sit in when Dillon Harrison, an architect and builder out of Cheyenne, Wyoming, got on Skype with us and showed us his plans for the house. It was fun to watch the house transform in the video he narrated. He then suggested we contact Chun & Patel out of Butte, Montana, to do all the interior design of the house. They had just appeared in Architectural Digest and had done a fabulous job updating a Victorian in San Francisco and a ranch in Wyoming. I called them the following day, thinking there was no way they would be interested in coming to a small town on the Oregon coast. They arrived two days later, both women thrilled to be meeting the heiress Ada Farley, and excited to hear all her stories about Studio 54.

In September, the foundation of the house was finally cleared by the building inspector. I was about to call the interior designers as I was crossing from Ada’s home to mine and Gale’s, when I noticed him standing by the front gate.

“Hey,” I called over to him.

It had rained that morning, and the ground was still wet and the air held the first hint of fall. I smiled at him, but as I got closer, I noticed he looked strange. His now blond mane—he grew it out for fall and winter—was whipping around in the breeze and kept falling into his beautiful eyes.

“What’s wrong?”

He straightened up, staring at me. “I just watched a report on the national news about Grigory Lenkov, a former head of one of the Russian crime families in Chicago, who was brought down when his own son turned informant.”

I nodded.

“That’s you.”

“That’s me. Don’t tell Alvarez I told you.”

“Jesus, Maks,” he moaned. “Everything they said you went through… Your father’s a fuckin’ sadist!”

“He is. Yes,” I agreed.

“You’re so calm about it.”

“No other way to be,” I assured him.

“The reporter said there were no current pictures of you, so people can guess what you look like, but it’s not like with your brother, Pasha, or your stepsister, Galina, whom anyone can find on the internet.”

“I took care of the side of the business that you don’t take pictures of at all.”

“You don’t look like your father or your brother, but your mother’s father—they showed lots of family pictures—you resemble him a bit. Your mother too. She had the same black eyes and hair as you.”