Sunbaked Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2015, 2017 by Junie Coffey All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477823934

  ISBN-10: 147782393X

  Cover design by Danielle Christopher

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  Nina bought the house off the Internet. Just like that. It was two o’clock on a cold New York morning, and she held a glass of red wine in one hand while sirens wailed in the distance and Bob Marley played on the stereo. It was exactly three months and fourteen hours since she had arrived home from teaching a class (The Mating Rituals of Canadian Snowbirds in a Florida Retirement Community) at the college and opened the door to find her soon-to-be ex-husband in flagrante delicto with his paralegal on the sofa. After a brief, undignified scene, husband and paralegal—wearing a ridiculously tight skirt―scurried out together. Nina called a locksmith to change the locks, a cleaning company to scrub every surface in her violated apartment, and a fumigator for good measure. Then she sat on the sofa looking out at the city lights.

  Three months went by. Three months of long coffee breaks with her best friend, Louise, sitting across from her, nodding her head sympathetically. Nina taught her classes, walked home in the rain, and sat on her sofa, staring out the window while cups of tea went cold in her hands.

  Then the Christmas lights went up around town, and things began to look more festive. Nina joined a gym. And a book club. Then the group chose Ethan Frome as its February selection, and she quit. Seriously? she thought. But it was starting to stay light a little longer every day, she noticed.

  One slushy March day, Nina arrived home from work after dark, shucked off her damp winter coat and heavy boots in the hall, and took her dinner of leftovers into the living room. When the news ended, she clicked off the television and surveyed her apartment from the sofa. She’d spent a lot of time choosing the curtains and arranging everything just so when they’d moved in, but now it felt more like a slightly tatty hotel room in limboland than home. She sighed and stretched. She decided to clean out the hall closet. It was getting hard to open the door without something falling on her head. Over the last few weeks, she had been methodically, drawer by drawer, ridding the apartment of any lingering remnants of Darren.

  Standing on her tiptoes, she pulled wool hats, cloth shopping bags, rinds of ski wax, and other junk from the top shelf. Darren’s never-used cycling gloves. Right into the garbage can. Two points. Then reaching as far back as she could, she pulled out her old green canvas duffel bag. It was pre-Darren vintage. She held it in her hands and looked at it, trying out the bestselling Japanese clutter expert’s technique of deciding what should stay and what should go. The handles still bore the old, curled airline tags from her pre–married life adventures: NBO—Nairobi; NAS—Nassau; MBJ—Montego Bay. She’d hold on to it.

  She started to fold it. There was something inside. She sat on the sofa and unzipped the bag. Tucked away in the bottom, she found a pair of pink flip-flops wrapped in an old red-, green-, and yellow-striped T-shirt and a faded paperback novel. She remembered reading it on the beach in Port Antonio, Jamaica, while Louise napped on the chair beside her after sampling every fruity rum cocktail on the beach-bar menu.

  She walked over to the bookcase and pulled down her photo album. She turned the pages slowly, her eyes drifting over the pictures of her younger self and Louise in Lamu the summer after they graduated from college, laughing and holding up wooden carvings they’d just bought in the covered market. The two of them waving to the camera in front of the Eiffel Tower. Playing darts with some motorbike-touring accountants they’d met at a tiki bar in the Florida Keys on a weekend girls’ getaway—her first freelance travel-writing gig. Then a little bit older, with different hairstyles, smiling at the camera from beach lounges in Jamaica. That was a fun trip. She was in grad school then. Still doing some travel writing on the side, when she could get the assignments and the time off school to travel to Bequia, a bed-and-breakfast in Vermont, or wherever. She was up for any adventure an editor might dangle in front of her in those days. An article on what you can do in forty-eight hours with forty-eight dollars in Little Rock? No problem.

  Then the Darren era. Not so many smiles.

  They’d met at a charity fund-raiser at a fancy uptown hotel, where his firm had bought a table. Nina was wearing a dress she’d bought at the Salvation Army shop and had volunteered to run the silent auction. He’d bought a pizza party for $500 and donated it back to the Boys & Girls Club, which struck her as generous and heartwarming. He was a few years older than she was. He had an aloofness she’d perceived as mysterious, combined with a high-powered career, good looks, and a grown-up lifestyle that her twenty-five-year-old self had found exotic and intriguing. It was like visiting another country.

  She peered at their wedding photo, taken on the back lawn of her parents’ house in Maine about a year later. Funny she’d never noticed before, but Louise’s smile did not make it all the way up to her eyes in that shot. Nina turned the page. By the ocean in Big Sur, California, on their honeymoon. That had been nice. A corporate golf tournament sponsored by Darren’s law firm. Weekends in the Hamptons with his friends. By that point, she had retired the duffel bag, and they were using the set of hard-sided luggage they’d received as a wedding gift. She graduated and got a “real” job teaching at the college.

  She turned the page. Darren and Nina on the Caribbean cruise they’d taken as a compromise between her yen to rent a beach cottage on Eleuthera and his preference for a five-star hotel in Miami. The ship had been seven stories high. She turned the page again. There they were with a large group at the ski chalet owned by the senior partner of Darren’s law firm, the year she’d reluctantly agreed to trade Christmas in Maine with her family for the invitation to Aspen that Darren had so coveted.

  There they were a couple of years later, standing in front of a Mayan pyramid, wearing business casual. That was at a convention at a Las Vegas hotel, not in the Mexican jungle. She’d given up the opportunity to write a piece for a well-known magazine about cruising the Arctic on an icebreaker to go with him, making an effort to save their relationship. She hardly recognized herself.

  Nina closed the album. Maybe that’s just life, she thought. She wandered into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of red wine, then wandered back into the living room, stepping over the pile of hats, shopping bags, and half-used sticks of ski wax littering the hall floor. She plopped down on the sofa, put her feet up on the ottoman, and flipped open her laptop. She took a sip of wine and idly surfed the Internet. It was her favorite waste of time—scanning the real estate listings in the Caribbean, pretending she was in the market for a cozy little beach house on a sunny tropical island.

  As she clicked through the pages, she considered the drastic change of course her life had recently taken. If she was honest wi
th herself, she had to admit she was relieved that Darren had finally taken his numerous pairs of tasseled loafers and cleared out. Things hadn’t been good between them for a long time. People do change over the course of a decade, and not always for the better.

  Outside, snow began to fall in big, wet clumps, and the wind picked up, whistling in the vents. Bob Marley was singing “Stir It Up” as Nina scrolled through real estate. Pink and blue and yellow villas. Rooms full of rattan furniture, potted palms, and tropical fabrics. The bright-blue rectangles of swimming pools and blue streaks of ocean viewed from various condominium balconies. Not really her style, and she couldn’t actually afford any of them, but it was soothing to browse through the photos and daydream. She could feel the wine beginning to hit her, warming her chest and making her feel a bit light-headed.

  Then she saw it: Sundrift Cottage. A little clapboard house with an expanse of brilliant turquoise sea behind it, framed by several tall, graceful coconut palms. She could almost feel the warm, gentle breeze on her neck and the soft, sun-warmed sand beneath her bare feet. The house looked a bit rough around the edges—its once-yellow paint was faded and peeling, and on the windows flanking the front door, the wooden shutters hung at odd angles. The flowering shrubs and grass on either side of the path that led to the door were shaggy and overgrown, and the white picket fence was missing a few teeth. But it was adorable!

  Nina clicked through the three or four other pictures attached to the listing. It looked to be just three rooms: a small bedroom, a bathroom with aged fixtures, and a large, open kitchen/living/dining room running the length of the cottage facing the water. Big back windows filled with a vista of palm trees, vine-covered dunes, white sand, and turquoise water. A screen door swung open onto a deep veranda with a couple of steps down to the sand.

  It’s perfect! thought Nina. A blank canvas for a new chapter in life. She jumped up, did a few dancing steps around the room in time with the reggae beat, and took another swig of her wine. She braced herself and looked at the asking price.

  “Things are looking up!” she said to the photo of her late cat, Puff, peering down at her from a bookshelf.

  According to the listing, the cottage was located in the village of Coconut Cove on Pineapple Cay. “The prettiest little town in the islands, and a great place to call home,” claimed the real estate website. Despite her travel-writing experience, Nina had never heard of it. Satellite images revealed a bright emerald-green dollop in the vibrant blue Caribbean Sea. Coconut Cove looked to be the only settlement of any size on the island, a tidy grid of lanes alongside a wide, sand-rimmed cove on the west side.

  The Pineapple Cay Chamber of Commerce website banner read PINEAPPLE CAY: THE GOOD LIFE IS OUR BUSINESS. The website had photos of candy-colored cottages with window boxes overflowing with tropical flowers, a group of smiling schoolchildren in their classroom, smiling fishermen hauling their catch out of the turquoise sea, a smiling woman in a bright print dress weighing produce at a busy open-air fruit-and-vegetable market, and a reggae band playing to a crowd of happy people at a beach bar with a red-and-gold sunset for a backdrop.

  “Just what the doctor ordered, I’d say,” Nina said to herself. Without giving herself the chance to talk herself out of it, she tapped out an e-mail to the real estate office, making an offer on Sundrift Cottage slightly below the asking price but at the top of her comfort range. She didn’t want to do anything rash, after all. She paused for a moment, her fingers hovering over the keyboard, then added a postscript.

  P. S. I know it’s a bit strange to make an offer on a house sight unseen, but I just called it quits with my husband of ten years, and I think Pineapple Cay is just the change I need. What I have been looking for.

  It wasn’t like Nina to bare her soul to an anonymous e-mail account, but it also wasn’t like Nina to get drunk and try to buy a ramshackle house in the Caribbean off the Internet, like she was ordering a new blender. Then she drained the last of her wine in one gulp. What. The. Hell. She put her finger on the button and clicked “Send.” Nervous energy propelled her out of her chair and sent her pacing the room, her mind racing.

  She had done a couple of laps of the living room, kitchen, and dining room when she heard the ping of an incoming e-mail.

  She wondered who could be writing to her at two o’clock in the morning, and then she braced herself. Maybe it was Darren with some late-night spite. Worse yet, maybe he’d had a change of heart and was pleading with her to take him back. That would be a buzzkill.

  Not a chance, buddy, thought Nina. She went into the bedroom she’d shared with Darren until a few months ago and lay like a starfish diagonally across the bed, stretching her arms and legs out wide, making a snow angel on the feather duvet. She went into the kitchen and made herself a heaping pile of cheese- and salsa-smothered nachos in the microwave, spilling grated cheese all over the counter and not cleaning it up. She set the nachos on the table in the living room, poured herself another glass of wine, and took a few more steps around the room, doing some interpretive dance to the music with her wineglass in one hand. Then curiosity got the better of her. It was probably just junk mail. With some low-grade anxiety, she slid back into the chair and focused on the computer screen.

  To her great surprise, she saw that the message was from Pineapple Cay Real Estate Re: Sundrift Cottage.

  Hi Nina!

  Great to get your message! YES the cottage is still available!!! Your offer is in the ballpark. I am sure we can work something out. As the listing states, the property is to be sold as is, but not to worry—with a little TLC it will be a cozy little nest again! It really is a bargain for beachfront in Coconut Cove. Attached is the offer document. Sign it, scan it, and send it back to me ASAP, OK? You are going to LOVE Pineapple Cay!!

  All the best,

  Pansy Gallagher

  Pineapple Cay Real Estate Ltd.

  “If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.” —David Carradine

  Huh. A split-second reply to her query about the property in the middle of the night. Apparent acceptance of her below-asking-price offer. Eight exclamation points. An e-mail signature with an inspirational quotation from the famous American actor and martial artist David Carradine. Pansy? Maybe it all added up to a deal that was too good to be true. Nina felt her heart sink a little. Wistfully, she clicked through the photographs of Sundrift Cottage again. Maybe bouncing the idea off Louise would help. The phone went to voice mail twice before Louise finally picked up.

  “Hello?” She sounded like she was still half-asleep. Nina was totally wired. She paced the room, holding the phone to her ear.

  “Louise, I need your advice. I think I just did something really crazy. I’m thinking of buying a house on Pineapple Cay. What do you think?”

  “What? Nina? It’s . . . two o’clock in the morning. Are you OK? You don’t sound OK.”

  “I’m feeling pretty good, actually. Free as a bird. If you can’t be a poet, be the poem, right? You only live once, so better make it good. Really, why should I stay here? I mean, New York is great, but it’s a big world with lots of other places in it. It’s not like I’d be leaving home. I’m from Maine, after all. Already left home. You can’t swim in the ocean in Maine in January. Point to Pineapple Cay. And I can work from anywhere with an Internet connection.”

  “Nina, have you been drinking? Do you want me to come over? I mean, I’m happy you’re finally getting back on the horse, or boat, or whatever, but this feels a little sudden.”

  “It’s late. You should get some sleep. Let’s have coffee tomorrow. About eleven at the Cuppa Joe? Thanks, Louise. You’ve really helped me see clearly to my next move. See you tomorrow.”

  Nina printed, signed, scanned, and e-mailed the offer document back to Pansy Gallagher, fell on her bed, and slept like a baby. By nine o’clock the next morning she’d been to her bank and signed a few more papers. By eleven o’clock, when she met an astounded, but enthusiastic, Louise for coffee, she was the owner of Sundr
ift Cottage. A week later, she’d arranged a leave of absence from her teaching job on campus, lined up a few online courses to teach next term from her new home on Pineapple Cay (just to keep some money coming in), and made some calls to resuscitate her travel-writing career. She rented out the apartment, which would generate some income, too; eventually she could sell it for a sum that would buy her a lot of coconuts and sunscreen. She promised to e-mail Louise regularly so that her friend would know she hadn’t been kidnapped by rum-running pirates, and then she boarded a plane to Pineapple Cay with only her green canvas duffel bag as a carry-on. New chapter in life, no excess baggage.

  Four hours after boarding a plane in New York, Nina was winding her way through the beige-carpeted tunnel that attached the belly of the airplane to the cavernous arrivals hall at the airport on the main island. There, she joined a long, snaking queue of several hundred holidaymakers just arrived from another frozen northern city waiting to clear customs. They were all dressed for fun times in sloppy T-shirts, shorts, and new sundresses—dragging large suitcases, golf clubs, and baby strollers. The line moved briskly, and before she knew it she’d received a friendly “Welcome to the Islands” from the agent and a stamp in her passport.

  Most of the passengers turned right through the doors leading to a row of waiting buses that would whisk them off to their all-inclusive resorts. Nina, however, turned left through the double swinging doors—as Pansy had told her to do—into the interisland departures terminal. It was smaller than the other side of the airport, with an airy, relaxed atmosphere and a well-used feel. The low-key crowd seemed to be made up mainly of islanders. Businesspeople with briefcases at their feet sat reading newspapers, families hugged one another hello or good-bye, and small clumps of vacationers were scattered here and there.

  A counter ran along the back wall of the terminal. It was divided into kiosks for a dozen or more interisland airline companies servicing the fifteen-odd inhabited islands in the archipelago. Nina picked out the cheery yellow sign that read PINEAPPLE CAY AIR and headed over to collect her boarding pass. A few minutes later her flight was called, and she joined about twenty other passengers in following the ticket agent across the tarmac toward a small white aircraft. She felt the heat of the tropical sun on her shoulders.