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Then she’d heard her father’s voice on her cell, scratchy with distance, authoritative and remote, and she’d known she was wrong.
Ashley had quit on the spot. The country director had made a face that meant, I knew this would happen. I knew you’d never stick.
I knew it, too, she’d thought. This is how I am. I’m nothing.
Her grandmother was dead, and she was nothing.
And if she lost Sunnyvale, she’d be nothing with nowhere to go. Evicted from her homeland like the Seminole, sent off into the world to try to live without a place.
Although that probably wasn’t an acceptable comparison, since the Seminole were a whole Indian nation, and she was just one skinny white girl with an unhealthy attachment to a bunch of vacation apartments.
“I do want it,” she said again, more firmly this time. “I just don’t know how to change his mind.”
“You’re never going to change his mind,” Mitzi said. “You have to take him down—make it impossible for him to carry out his plans. Did you ever read that book The Monkey Wrench Gang? You have to be a monkey wrench. Pour sugar in his gas tanks, cut down his billboards, that kind of stuff. Corporate terrorism.”
“I’m not cut out to be a terrorist.”
“You got him here, didn’t you?”
“I don’t think that was terrorism. I think it was grief-induced psychosis.”
“Well, the important thing is, he’s here. Did you get any dirt on him on the way up? Gambling problem, alcohol, penchant for hookers?”
Ashley shook her head.
“What he’s planning, he must have been working it for years. Lining up permits. Sugar-coating deals for anybody reluctant to sell, putting the pressure on. These guys are slimy, Ash. They’ll do anything. Maybe he bribed people. Maybe he manipulated the rules. I don’t see how else he would have got the property from Susan. She always said she was leaving it to you.”
“I can’t imagine him bribing anyone,” she said. “He’s a straight shooter.”
But she flashed back to his rain-covered face. His flat eyes.
I lie.
She didn’t know him. She didn’t know much of anything, but she knew she loved Sunnyvale, and she wished that were enough. She wished that were all it would take to convince Roman to back off.
“You kn
ow what would be great?” she asked. “If I could take him back in time and make him see it. Like, summer before last, when I was selling jewelry at the flea markets and failing spectacularly at all those online premed classes—remember when we made those drinks with the coconut shavings for happy hour, and we had that limbo contest and Arvind and Prachi kicked everybody’s asses? I wish I could make him be there for that. I wish I could show him what he’ll bring an end to if he knocks it down.”
“That would never work, doll. You can’t make him have a change of heart if he doesn’t have a heart.”
“Roman has a heart.”
“Have you looked in his eyes? The man’s got scary eyes. No, you need something to hold over him while we dig around and figure out what dirty trick he used to get Susan to sell. Secret perversions, clubbing baby seals, toxic waste dumping, violating zoning regulations. You suppose Little Torch is zoned for what he wants to do to it?” Mitzi frowned, then shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. He hasn’t done it yet, so we can’t zap him for that. What about the animal angle? Can we invent some manatees or sea turtles or something? Or there’s birds, maybe, or those little Key deer that are always in the paper. Or I know! Snakes. We’ll look on the Internet, there have to be some snakes you could say you’d seen, and then—”
“Wait,” Ashley interrupted. “Back up.”
“What’d I say? I’m just riffing, here, so you can’t expect me to remember every little—”
“Key deer. We have Key deer. Sunnyvale does. I’ve seen them.”
“You have?”
“Yeah. Just the other day, in fact, there was this little one in the pool, drinking water from a puddle. But—that’s not news, right? I mean, the refuge is just over on Big Pine.”
“I’ve never seen Key deer at Sunnyvale.”
Ashley considered. “I guess I hadn’t, either. I’ve seen them on the beach, and all kinds of other places. But not right there at Sunnyvale. That was the first time.”
