The Men of Thorne Island. Cynthia Thomason

Sara, this is Dexter Sweet.”

      Amazingly, despite his size, there was something about the man’s round boyish face that made his last name seem appropriate. She stood up, offered her hand and looked into Mr. Sweet’s perplexed brown eyes. “Did you say ‘Captain Winkie’?”

      He nodded.

      She couldn’t stop herself. Exhaustion and shock had taken their toll. Laughter bubbled from her throat and she could barely get her next words out. “I’m standing here with Mr. Sweet and Mr. Bass, and we’re all talking about Captain Winkie. Somehow I feel like I’m in the middle of a Saturday-morning cartoon.”

      The two men exchanged a look that was part male commiseration and part she’s-a-woman-that-explains-it. Sara wouldn’t have been surprised if they both put a finger to the side of their heads and made circles.

      “Tell me something, Mr. Sweet,” she said through a continuing fit of laughter, “do you pay rent on this island?”

      “Yeah.” He dragged the word out with caution. “Been here almost six years now.”

      “And how much do you pay?”

      “A hundred a month.”

      “Terrific. And are your checks stored in a drawer somewhere?”

      “Yeah, Nick’s.”

      Nick Bass opened the desk drawer, withdrew a stack of checks similar to his own and brought them to her. Each one was dated and signed by Dexter Sweet.

      It wasn’t even enough to cover the back taxes, but it was a start. “Thank you, gentlemen,” Sara said. “Now I think I’ll go find a room for myself. Do we have any fresh linens?”

      “I’ll let you use mine,” Nick said. “The cupboard down the hall that they’re sitting in is yours. But the spare sheets belong to me. Share and share alike I always say. Pick any room you like, Miss Crawford. Make yourself at home.”

      “I am at home, Mr. Bass.”

      A SHARP PAIN shot up Nick’s leg. He limped back to the desk chair and sat down.

      Dexter frowned at him. “Are you doing your exercises, Nick?”

      “Sure, I’m doing them, just like you told me,” he said without looking Dexter in the eye. “But I figure after six years a guy’s just got to live with a little discomfort.” He gave his friend a crooked smile. “It beats the alternative, anyway.”

      Dexter grunted his agreement and sat in the chair Sara had vacated. “What’s going on here, Nick? Who is this Crawford woman?”

      “I told you, Dex. She’s our new landlady and Millicent Thorne’s great-niece. Millie died last week and left the island to her. She showed me the deed, and it looks like everything’s in order.”

      “What does that mean for all of us?”

      “Actually, Dex, now that I’ve had a few minutes to think about it, Millie did us a favor.”

      “But Miss Thorne was the best landlady we could ever have had.”

      “True, but we knew she wouldn’t live forever, and when you think about all the possible outcomes for Thorne Island, having Millie’s niece as the owner seems like the best one. Sara Crawford will probably hang around for a couple of days, flex her landlady muscles a bit and then take off. You saw what she was like—nice clothes, educated manners, soft hands.” His mind wandered to Sara’s other obvious attributes, but he refrained from listing them. “She won’t have any interest in staying around here.”

      Dexter nodded. “Yeah, why would a woman like that want to hang around a bunch of independent cusses like us?”

      “Exactly. I give Miss Crawford three days tops, then she’ll be history.” He grinned at his own private thought. “Though I imagine she’ll make us send in our rent checks on time.”

      Dexter’s answering grin curled into his cheeks. “She makes a darned pretty chapter of Thorne Island history, though, doesn’t she, Nick?”

      Nick nodded slowly. “Yep. She’s not hard to look at.”

      Dexter stood and headed for the door, but stopped before leaving the room. “By the way, Nick, did she see what you had on the computer screen?”

      “No. She wasn’t the least interested. I use the name Nicolas Bass in the top margin, so she wouldn’t have suspected anything, anyway. She doesn’t seem like the type who’d be curious about the ramblings of a grumpy, thirty-eight-year-old hermit.”

      JUGGLING BED LINENS and her suitcases, Sara chose a room at the opposite end of the hallway from Nick’s. She flicked the light switch beside the door. A single bulb hanging from the ceiling crackled and spit, finally casting a sickly yellow light on more furnishings covered with sheets. Cringing at the potential cost of electrical repairs, Sara dropped her belongings onto the floor.

      She snapped open one neatly folded sheet and fluttered it over a gray mattress. A fresh scent—familiar from Sara’s childhood—filled the room. She hadn’t smelled that clean aroma since the days her mother had folded the family’s laundry from the backyard clothesline. Bass must dry his laundry in the open air, she thought. Probably because the inn didn’t have a working electric dryer.

      She doubted the island had many modern conveniences. In fact, considering the condition of the Cozy Cove, she’d been dumbfounded to see a computer in Nick Bass’s room. She’d tried to read the screen, and once she’d recognized standard manuscript format, she’d been doubly curious. But she hadn’t gotten close enough to actually read the words.

      Strange, she thought now as she tucked a corner of the top sheet between the mattress and box spring, she wouldn’t have been a bit surprised to see a racing form or even a video game on Mr. Bass’s monitor. But a scholarly-looking bit of text—somehow that didn’t fit the picture she’d formed of the man so far.

      There’s an old saying, Sara, she said to herself. You can never tell a person by his dopey-looking golf shirt. She was glad she had a full week to devote to this island project. It might take that long to understand her bizarre tenants, especially the aggravating—but oddly appealing—Mr. Bass.

      CHAPTER THREE

      THE ROOM Sara had selected turned out to be almost cheerful. She removed the sheet that had been thrown over a cedar wardrobe and found dainty floral stenciling on the doors. When she uncovered a pair of colonial arrow-back chairs flanking a fireplace, she discovered bright chintz cushions on the seats. She gave the shutters at the windows a thorough dusting, which gave new life to the well-polished slats.

      Yes, she would be quite comfortable in this room, once she solved the immediate problem of food. Since the Cozy Cove obviously wasn’t a working hotel, it probably didn’t have a restaurant or the personnel to run it. A snack breakfast on the airplane and a nonfat yogurt cone in Put-in-Bay wasn’t nearly enough to sustain Sara. Surely the inn had a kitchen. She went downstairs to raid the refrigerator.

      Behind the registration counter and opposite the parlor, she located a spacious dining room with sheets hiding what appeared to be a long table and eight chairs. In the near darkness of dusk, she felt her way through that room to a kitchen beyond. She flipped the light switch by the entrance, and another single overhead bulb glared down on a red brick floor.

      Sara made a quick inspection of the appliances and decided they had once been used to prepare meals for a large number of people. But they hadn’t been operated in some time. She ran her hand across the porcelain top of a six-burner stove, and years of smeared grease stuck to her fingers. Hardened boil-over remains coated the sides of the oven. When she opened the door of an ancient refrigerator, she grimaced at the streaks of mildew.

      The rest of the kitchen was in much the same condition. Pitted kettles hung from brass hooks in the ceiling or lay any which way on the rough wood of the countertop. An old oak worktable surrounded by four simple ladder-back