Secrets in the Sand by Carolyn Brown

            He scraped grout until his knees ached from inching along on the hard floor. Then he applied new grout, using a float to smash the gritty goop into the lines and smooth it level.

            Why would Delia sell him this place without full disclosure of a deal-breaking drawback? Had she deliberately shown the property on a weekend knowing that weekdays sounded like schoolyard-playground mayhem all day long?

            He pulled out one earbud to check if the mayhem was still ongoing.

            Yes. The screaming went on all fucking day long.

            “Time for a break.” He would have to let the grout set for exactly thirty minutes before wiping off the hazy residue. His knees creaked when he stood with all the grace of an elderly monk rising from another round of useless prayers. When he reached out to steady himself on the doorframe, his fingers felt like sandpaper on the smooth painted surface. The grout had sucked all the moisture out of his skin. His hands felt—and looked—like the Sahara in dry season.

            He had earned a beer by the nasty green pool. Yes indeed, his crepe-dry fingers assured him, he had.

            But the beer he opened by the pool lacked the promise of respite, because any hope of relaxation was swamped by the happy shrieks of children running and playing next door. And, good God, was one of the little heathens climbing the hedge-covered chain-link fence between the two properties?

            Quinn stood and stalked to the hedge, which some grimy-faced young boy had just managed to conquer. The kid’s triumphant gap-toothed grin faltered a fraction when his eyes locked with Quinn’s hostile gaze. “Hello, misther,” the kid lisped as his spindly body draped over the hedge’s bowing branches. “Don’t be mad. I’m just playin’ around.”

            “How ’bout you just play around on the other side of the fence where you’re supposed to be? I’d hate to have to tattle to your teacher.”

            The kid looked over his shoulder and back again. “You don’t know my teacher.”

            “Wanna bet?” Quinn pulled his cell phone from his back pocket and started punching in random numbers. “I know her well enough to know that she’ll make you sit by yourself in the bus for the rest of the day while everyone else gets to have fun at the farm.”

            The boy’s eyes opened wide. “Please, misther. Don’t tell her. Don’t…” He backpedaled and fell off the hedge with an “Oomph.”

            Quinn stepped onto a sturdy low-hanging branch and looked over the hedge to make sure the kid hadn’t been hurt when he fell. Apparently not; all churning elbows and trailing shoelaces, he was sprinting back to the safety of the group.

            Quinn hopped off the hedge, then chuckled and took a sip of his beer.

            But his mirth was short-lived. If the current commotion next door was any indication, no matter how much money, time, and effort he sank into this place, the perfect buyer he had imagined would never materialize. He had thought that it would be a recently retired couple. His mind’s eye had conjured the visual of a stout man who enjoyed fishing and a plump woman who enjoyed gardening.

            The man would launch his aluminum fishing boat from the adjacent dead-end street that ended in a cracked concrete boat ramp—or from their own private boat dock if Quinn managed to acquire the waterfront land. The woman would sit by the pool and read romance novels. She’d use a monogrammed shovel from Restoration Hardware to plant daylilies in the estate’s rich, well-drained soil, an ideal mix of sand and silt washed up from the bay for the last hundred years.

            Quinn was pretty sure that neither of those imagined retirees would be enthused about the idea of baby hoodlums climbing the hedge, falling into the pool, and drowning so the kids’ parents could sue them for everything they’d worked for all their lives.

            He sat in the folding stadium chair and kept an eye on the empty hedge. Feeling antsy and unfulfilled, haunted by the image of the perfect retired couple and the futility of renovating a property they’d never decide to purchase, he made a quick decision. No time for making a list of pros and cons; something had to be done. It had to be done now, and it might require drastic measures.





Chapter 3


            Quinn had invested everything in this plan to move here and rebuild his reputation, his life, and his relationship with his son. He could have turned his back on the past, bought a condo in the Keys, and left all his regrets behind. But one thing—one person, his son, to be exact—held him back. If there was any small sliver of a chance that he could be a part of Sean’s life, he had to take it.