“Well, I guess you could call it a fixer-upper,” he mused dryly.
Aidan turned to stare at him. Zachary stood a half inch over six-two, just like Jeremy. It was as if the three brothers had been cast in the same mold, then painted in different shades. Aidan’s own eyes were a blue that varied from icy to almost as black as his hair. Jeremy’s eyes were cloud-gray, his hair a dark brown with a touch of auburn. As a kid, Zachary had fought to toughen up, because he’d been born with strawberry-blond curls. The color had deepened as he aged, but that red tint remained. His eyes were almost aqua. Aidan and Jeremy had teased him mercilessly when they were young, but the truth was, he was as striking as a Greek god. He had grown up fighting—but then, as their mother had mourned frequently, there was a reason for the expression “fighting Irish.” Regardless, the years had been good for Zach. He could hold his own in any fight, but his first love had always been music, and, like Jeremy, he turned to it often. The soul’s solace, he called it.
He had been equally ready to opt into the family business. After years in the Miami forensics unit, he had hit his limit when he was called in after a crack addict dad had micro-waved his infant son. He had already acquired a part ownership of a number of small recording studios around the country, but when he had heard the plan to open an investigations office, the idea had intrigued him, and he immediately quit the force.
Aidan was thirty-six now, Jeremy thirty-five, and Zachary thirty-three. They’d done a hell of a lot of fighting as kids, but as adults, they had grown into being friends.
“We should just sell it,” Aidan said.
“I’m not real sure what we’d get for it, in its present condition,” Zach pointed out.
“Sell it?” Jeremy protested. “It’s our…well, it’s our heritage.”
The other brothers turned to stare at him, frowning. “Our heritage? We didn’t even know the placed existed until that lawyer called,” Aidan reminded him.
Jeremy shrugged. “Maybe so, but hey, a whole lot of Flynns lived in that house, and now it’s come to us. I think that’s cool. How many people wake up one morning and discover that they’ve inherited an antebellum plantation?”
Aidan and Zach stared at the house, then back at their brother.
“Come on,” Jeremy protested. “The land alone has to be worth something.”
“Right,” Aidan said. “So I say we should sell it for its land value.”
“No, we should do something with it,” Jeremy said, shaking his head. He stared intently at the house, rather than at his brothers. Then he turned to them at last. “What’s to keep us from moving to the area, huh?”
Aidan started to object, but he crossed his arms over his chest, instead.
It was true.
He’d come to New Orleans to hunt down a runaway teen. Now that he’d done that, he’d been intending to return to the place he’d called home for some time now, Orlando, Florida. But why? They could relocate the business anywhere they wanted, and without Serena, there was really nothing to tie him to Orlando.
And all three of them liked New Orleans and could find plenty to do on the side here. Jeremy could keep working with Children’s House, and Zach often came here anyway, to play in a band with some old friends. And now, after the recent death of Amelia Flynn, they were the only family left to inherit her falling-down plantation.
Maybe it shouldn’t have been as much of a shock as it was. They knew their father’s family went way back in the South, but he’d been an only child, and his father had been an only child, and before him…well, people lost track of people, and that’s the way it was.
Not that their branch of the Flynn family had gotten far, Aidan thought wryly.
“We can all chip in to fix it up, then sell it,” Jeremy said. “If we get it into decent shape, we’ll probably make a pretty good profit. Once it stops looking like a haunted house, people will be all over us to buy it.”
“Haunted house?” Zach said.
“It really is supposed to be haunted, isn’t it?” Jeremy asked.
“Yeah,” Zach said. “Something about cousins who fought on opposite sides during the Civil War and ended up killing each other on the front lawn. Creepy.”
“That’s tragic, not creepy,” Aidan said impatiently.
“It is sad, but it’s a little creepy, too. I mean, they were our ancestors. Our family,” Zach said.
The wind whistled softly, as if in agreement.
“I’m with Jeremy. I say we restore the place,” Zach announced firmly.
“Absolutely. Turn her back into a grande dame,” Jeremy agreed.
Aidan stared at the two of them. “Are you two nuts?” he demanded.