“There’s some strange folks around here. You never know.” He leaned past me, then executed a Clint Eastwood coast-clearing-type maneuver to make sure my team of ninjas wasn’t hiding behind the rusted porch glider or Christmas tree.
“That your truck?” he asked, looking past me.
“My boyfriend’s. I dropped him back in town. He’s waiting for me.”
“Uh-huh.” He didn’t look like he believed me but motioned at me with the gun. “Come on in. We can talk about . . . what you said . . . inside.”
I didn’t move.
“Come on. I swear, I’ll put the gun away.”
He crossed the room and put the gun on top of a boxy TV. I assessed him. Somewhere in his late seventies. Rangy and blond—like Doro—or, rather, he had been blond at one time. Now his hair was a thin, sandy white. Blue eyes sparked out of a sun-leathered face. Deep grooves etched either side of his mouth. A faded plaid shirt flapped around his wiry torso. I could take him if I had to. Provided a hefty dose of adrenaline kicked in.
I crossed the threshold and glanced around the room. It was shabby but tidy and smelled of some kind of bleachy cleaner. A sofa, recliner, and coffee table—a slab of particle board and two cinder blocks—made up the decor. On the surface, a neat stack of magazines sat next to a row of three remotes, which looked like they’d been lined up with a ruler.
I could feel him studying my skin, my hair, my eyes. Cataloguing me. My scalp prickled in alarm. Was he assuming I was black? Or some other unknown but offensive-to-him combination of ethnicity? Forty years ago, he’d been a freedom fighter for the Natives. Had he come full circle in his old age and turned into a raging bigot? Was he a regular over at the KKK hangout downtown, the War Room? Or did that strange light in his eyes mean something altogether different?
He held out one freckled, chapped hand. I hesitated, then took it.
“Billy Kitchens,” he said.
“Meg Ashley.”
He was squeezing my hand tightly, still staring.
“Sorry about the gun. Side effect of living alone too long, I guess.”
I withdrew my hand from his grasp.
“It’s fine.”
“Something to drink?” he asked.
“No, thanks.” I wasn’t thrilled about letting the guy out of my sight. Not yet. He’d just pointed a gun at my head. “Look, Mr. Kitchens, I know this is unexpected—me showing up at your house like this. But I really need to talk to you. Would it be possible to do that? Talk?”
“I guess we could give it a whirl.” He gestured to a scarred Formica table set with matching vinyl chairs on the far side of the room, and we sat. He leaned back, laced his hands over his stomach. “We could start with your mother. How is our dear Frances Ashley?”
“Going strong. Gearing up for Kitten’s fortieth anniversary. The publisher’s planning quite a celebration.”
“Good for her.”
“I imagine it might be a difficult time for you, the anniversary. I know she’s been the cause of a lot of heartache in your lives.”
He shrugged. “The cause of good things too. Everything balances out in the end, I think, don’t you? Speaking of. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about your book?”
It took me a minute to recalibrate. He was obviously reluctant to talk about Kitten, but maybe if I got this line of conversation going, he’d warm up. I cleared my throat.
“The book’s about Frances and me. Our relationship. What it was like growing up the daughter of a world-famous bestselling author and a pop-culture icon.”
“Hm,” he said.
“It’s also about what Frances did to Doro and you. How, even though it might appear that you’ve benefited from her book, she actually ruined your lives.”
“I wouldn’t say ruined. More like, complicated. Personally, I always liked Frances. All my employees did. The cook used to bake those Italian wedding cookies for her. You know the ones, with sugar all over them.”
I nodded like I knew.
“None of us had a clue she was writing a book, not until it showed up in the stores. Next thing we know, we’re famous. Phone’s ringing off the hook. Hotel’s booked a year or more in advance. People come from all over the country. Washington state. New Mexico. People even come from Europe. You believe that? We had Canadians, German, French, and Swiss, all of them nuts over Kitten.”
“So you didn’t consider suing her?”
He squinted at me like I had said something outlandish. “Why, no.”
“What about later? Did you want to sue her later on, when the Kitty Cultists started showing up?”
He gave me a rueful smile. “Listen. I was no dummy. With all that business, I could finally afford to hire a big staff—every one of them Native. I could finally do what mattered most to me—help those folks claim what was rightly theirs. I gave everyone who worked for me ownership in the island and a share of the hotel profits. If I’d have sued her, back in the beginning, I’d have lost all of that.” When he looked up, his eyes sparkled. If he was lying, he did it as well as Doro.
“But then you left Bonny,” I said. “You handed it over to Doro. What happened?”
He glanced around the room. At the door, the window. The red digital clock on the cable box. My stomach twisted the slightest bit. Nerves. I took a deep breath.
“Well, she did what kids do. Grew up. I’d always coddled her a bit, maybe filled her head with some grandiose ideas, but she was an only child without a mother. I felt like she could use all the building-up she could get. But I admit it. Some of it came back to bite me.”
“What do you mean?”
He smiled to himself like there was some private joke only he could understand. Shook his head.
“You can trust me, Mr. Kitchens.”
He leveled a look at me. “Doro loves Bonny Island. I mean really loves it, in a kind of obsessive-type way, you might say. She believes that she has a unique connection to it. Which may be true, I don’t know. Doro’s always been an odd one. Anyway, by the time she was grown, she’d developed some pretty particular ideas about her role there and how things should be run.”
I raised my eyebrows, but he waved his hand.
“I’m not going to go into it. Suffice it to say I got tired of fighting with her, day in and day out. So I handed the reins over to her and left.”
“And came here. In 1991,” I said.
Around the same time he brought a lawsuit against my mother. An interesting coincidence.
“Why here?” I asked.
“Couldn’t stay in St. Marys where we’d be running into each other at the Winn-Dixie. This place is close enough so I could keep an eye on her and stay out of her way at the same time.”
“Keep an eye on her?”
He cleared his throat. “I might visit the island every now and then. To check up on things.”