Hopefully the rain would stop soon. Tomorrow she’d have one of the Pineapple Port handymen come out and assess the situation.
Pain in the neck.
Abby jumped to her feet as Charlotte landed in the hall and stood sentry as she folded up the ladder and headed into the kitchen to get a better look in the shoebox.
Charlotte put away the flashlight and opened the box. It smelled like dust, if dust was a smell. She didn’t imagine anyone would be making Attic Dust a candle scent any time soon.
Probably somebody’s old tax documents.
Flipping through the papers inside, the first to catch her eye was a newspaper clipping about a new resort opening somewhere in Jupiter Beach, Florida. The story featured a small group of employees standing in front of a charming, multilevel gray building with white columns and trim.
Maybe a box of vacation ideas?
The rest of the container contained drawings, filled math and spelling worksheets and a few torn pages from yearbooks with row after row of smiling teenagers. At the bottom she found a yellowing photo of a baby wrapped in pink swaddling clothes.
A folded sheet of paper pressing against the side of the box turned out to be the birth certificate of Siofra McQueen, whoever that was.
Probably the baby in the photo.
What kind of name is Siofra? Charlotte wasn’t even sure how to pronounce it, but knew whatever she guessed would be wrong.
Charlotte did the math—if the certificate belonged to the child in the photo, baby Siofra would be forty-six now. She couldn’t think of anyone her grandmother might know named McQueen.
The box probably belonged to someone from the family who owned the house before Nanny.
She was about to fold up the certificate when the name of the birth mother caught her eye.
Estelle Byrne.
Hm.
The woman had the same first name as her grandmother, the woman who raised her after her mother died. Soon after, Nanny also died, and Charlotte was unofficially adopted by the Pineapple Port fifty-five-plus community, and raised as their unofficial mascot. Overnight she’d gone from no family to hundreds of doting, if older, mothers and fathers.
The father’s name didn’t ring a bell: Shea McQueen.
Something nagged in Charlotte’s brain and she stared at the certificate in an attempt to give the thought ample time to bubble to the forefront of her cerebral cortex.
Byrne. Byrne. Something about that last name…
Wasn’t that her grandmother’s maiden name?
She lowered the paper and looked at Abby.
“Do I have an aunt?” Once again, maybe she had more family than she ever imagined.
Abby glanced up and then settled her head back between her paws, chin on the kitchen floor, her burst of midnight energy seemingly drained. She rolled on her side and stretched her legs out straight as Charlotte flipped back to the top of the pile and reopened the newspaper article.
The grinning faces of the Loggerhead Inn.
A few of the girls in the photo were the right age then to be around forty-six now…
If her grandmother had had another baby, and this box was full of snippets from that baby’s life, then her mystery aunt had to be one of the people in that staff photo, right?
Why else would the clipping be in the box?
Abby grunted to show her annoyance and Charlotte looked down at her.
“I think you’re going to have to stay with Mariska for a bit.”
Abby sighed and Charlotte leaned down to ruffle the crop of hair sprouting from the top of her sleepy pet’s head.
“Mommy’s going to Jupiter Beach.”
Chapter Three
At exactly six o’clock, in Targetsville, Florida, the Loyal Order of Gophers released a series of staccato belches to the recognizable tune of Shave and a Haircut. They flipped over their glasses with a deft hand maneuver rumored to previously only have been accomplished by the ancient Double-Jointed Pygmies of South Wallento, and furiously thumbed their noses at the sky.
“To T.K.!”
The four men practiced for the Inter-Lodge Synchronized Drinking Olympics every third Wednesday night, and if another lodge ever started in the area, they were sure to bring home the gold.
Tommy Garth pulled his too-short Dr. Who t-shirt over his soft, hairy belly. Tommy’s dark hair swept back from his forehead in a greasy pompadour. His ragged mustache resembled any one of several varieties of fungus, and in a pinch, could be used as a makeshift Rorschach test. Though he earned his living as a handyman, his true love was filming little stories he wrote while on the toilet. He kept a tablet and pen on the floor beside his commode and penned stories about men and women walking across their living rooms to poke a fire or answer the door and get the mail. The films contained no love, drama, mystery or fantasy; people walked across rooms and cooked eggs or performed other mundane tasks. High art, he argued, never allowed anything of obvious consequence to happen. Not only were his movies devoid of intrigue, he also buoyed the art factor by requiring his performers to complete highbrow tasks, like using a bowl and a whisk to beat scrambled eggs instead of mixing them in the pan with a fork like a commoner.
Tommy couldn’t find anyone to buy his films until he had an epiphany one morning during a particularly long commode constitutional.
That’s when he started filming the actors in the nude.
Naked women accepted mail from naked postal carriers, naked men drank coffee and went to work for naked middle-management, naked grandfathers frolicked with naked dogs on naked hillsides.
Tommy sold an entire series of his naked films to a website entrepreneur who assured him they were ‘great pop art.’ The web guy even commissioned a dozen more custom films, though Tommy was at a lost as
