The Homewreckers(24)

“I’ve been making improvements,” her father said. “Keeps me busy.” He leaned down and scratched Ribsy’s head. “You got a dog.”

“Yeah,” she said. “After Hank died, it got kind of lonely. Ribsy’s good company.”

“Dogs are the best company there is,” Woody said. “Come on inside. I got lunch ready.”



* * *



They ate in front of a window looking out at the river. The place was a bachelor’s paradise. There was no sign of a woman’s touch.

She wondered about that. She and her father had an unspoken pact. He never mentioned Amber—the other woman who’d been the recipient of all Woody’s ill-gotten gains—and Hattie never asked about her.

He’d made ham salad sandwiches on rye bread. There were bread-and-butter pickles, and potato chips, and iced tea.

Hattie took a bite of the sandwich, chewed, and pointed at the bread, which didn’t look store-bought. “Did you take up baking, too?”

He shrugged. “It’s not that hard. You just read the recipe and do what it says to do. The kneading is my favorite part. You get to pound the hell out of it, and it doesn’t talk back.” He tapped the jar of pickles on the table. “Made these, too.”

“Never thought you’d turn into a baker, gardener, and pickle-maker, Dad. After all those years working at the bank. Mom used to say you’d burn Kool-Aid.”

He cracked a smile. His face had gotten leathery, lined with wrinkles. His hair was streaked with silver and he wore it longer these days. Woodrow Bowers had always been a handsome man, but now, in his sixties, he looked like he could model hiking gear, or be a host for one of those outdoor shows where everyone wore plaid shirts and fly-fishing vests.

“How is your mom?”

“Okay, I guess. We don’t talk a lot.”

“Does she know about this television show you’re fixing to do?”

Hattie had explained about Homewreckers in her call to him the night before.

“Not yet. I wanted to wait until I get the house under contract.”

“Tell me about the house,” her father prompted. “It sounds like you’re going to have to pump a hell of a lot of money in it. And right after you lost your shirt on that place on Tattnall Street. You sure you’ll make back your investment?”

She bristled at his blunt reminder of her most recent failure, and realized that in Woody’s eyes, she was still the same age she’d been when he’d been sent to prison.

“You know, Dad, I’ve been doing this for a living since I was eighteen. I’ve run all the comps on Tybee waterfront houses sold in the past eighteen months. The lot alone, without the house, is worth half a million dollars, easy.”

“Come on. Tybee Island, half a million?”

“It’s not like it used to be, Dad.”

“Okay, let’s talk numbers.”

She’d brought along a yellow legal pad with her rough estimate of what she’d have to spend to buy the house, and an even rougher number for the renovation. “This is all just based on eyeballing it,” she explained, tapping the paper with her pen. “The Creedmores have basically let the house rot since the last hurricane.”

“Hard to believe Holland Creedmore is just going to sit back and let that house get bought out from under him. You want to watch out for that character. Back in the day he always had some kind of shady back-room deal cooking.”

Hattie stared at her father.

“What? You think your old man is the only one who ever committed a crime? Listen here, Hattie. The only difference between me and Holland Creedmore and at least half the movers and shakers in Savannah is that I got caught and went to prison for what I did.”

She doodled on the legal pad. Sketches of houses and trees and birds and bunnies. Anything to avoid meeting her father’s eyes.

“Look at me, young lady,” her father said sternly, in the same tone of voice he’d used when she was a child, berating her for a less than perfect grade in school.

She lifted her chin and coolly met his gaze. Once his eyes had been a deep, piercing brown. Now they were lighter, almost greenish-hazel.

“I made mistakes a long time ago. But I paid back that money. I’ve been a model citizen since I got out, and I don’t appreciate being judged all over again by my own daughter.”

He hadn’t really changed, Hattie realized. Woody Bowers, at his core, would always be Woody Bowers. He’d survived prison and he would survive everything life threw at him because the only person he really cared about was himself.

“Go ahead and say what’s on your mind,” he challenged.

“You paid back the money you stole from orphans and widows and kids with cancer. You think going to prison erases all that. But what about what you stole from me, and Mom? You destroyed our family, and you have never once acknowledged, let alone apologized, for that. The stink from what you did settled on me, and on her.”

“You haven’t done so badly,” Woody protested. “You got to stay in that expensive private school. I saw to it that you had money for what you needed. And now, when you come to me because you need money, do I turn you away?”

She got up and looked out the window, toward the river, and changed the subject. “What are you afraid of, Dad? Why all the security cameras and locked gates? Why all the secrecy?”