Before she’d left Melbourne Beach for Manhattan, Liz had considered the hotel too old-school and boringly quaint. Now, after six weeks of being home, she felt cocooned, cozy, and safe when she stepped inside. It was a far different feeling than she’d had in the city, turning the three dead bolts on her SoHo loft’s door. Life was simple on the island, and Liz embraced the laid-back beach-town vibe, something she hadn’t been able to do at eighteen when she was young and beyond restless.
The upper level of the Indialantic had large guest suites that had become a refuge for Aunt Amelia’s occasional “strays,” usually senior citizens with small Social Security checks and small pets, “no bigger than a bread basket.” Although Liz knew Aunt Amelia made exceptions to her own rule, as evidenced by Killer, the Great Dane who looked longingly at Liz’s lap.
“Sorry, pup, don’t even think about it. I’ll have to spend the next few weeks at the chiropractor.” Her father called the upper floor of the hotel Aunt Amelia’s Animalia, and chose to live in an apartment next to his law office on the first floor. Liz lived in the Indialantic’s former beach pavilion, now turned beach house. It was a nice distance away from the Indialantic and a quiet place to work on her writing career, or more accurately, her non-writing career.
Liz glanced around the music room and reminisced about past years with her father at the piano and Aunt Amelia singing, dancing, or replaying one of her scenes from Dark Shadows or a myriad of other midcentury television shows in which she’d had small roles. Aunt Amelia had been considered a character actress—and she was quite a character. While some children had Dr. Seuss and Goodnight Moon read to them before falling asleep, Aunt Amelia would tell Liz about the evil witch Angelique and the beautiful Josette who fought each other for the handsome vampire Barnabas’s love. “Barnabas didn’t want to be a vampire, Lizzy dear, but he had no choice. Sometimes you just have to face who you are and make the best of it…” Liz smiled at the memory and patted Killer’s large noggin. She’d been loafing too long. She thought about all the things she had to do to get ready for the Indialantic Spring Fling by the Sea. It had been Liz’s idea to have the event on Saturday in the hopes of drumming up more business for the emporium shops. Although Melbourne Beach was, as advertised, a casual, beachy surfer’s paradise, Liz knew there were celebrities hiding in nearby ocean-front homes with tons of disposable income who might enjoy an off-the-grid dining and shopping experience.
If Liz was honest with herself, she’d been using her role as her father’s and great-aunt’s assistant as an excuse not to write. It was amazing that her agent hadn’t given up on her, especially after the scandal that had rocked the literati and her life as she knew it.
She got up, walked to the window, and looked out at the Atlantic. The hotel was perched on a sandy cliff, east of State Road A1A. The hotel’s property also encompassed the west side of the highway, with its own dock on the Indian River Lagoon. Lost in thoughts of the past, Liz startled when she heard Barnacle Bob squawk, “Places to go. People to see.”
Liz moved over to the parrot’s cage. “The only place you’re going is dreamland. Catch ya later, BB. Time for my dinner. Try to behave yourself.”
“Okay, Scarface! Keep it real.”
She gave it back to him. “Whatever you say, bald-as-a-billiard-ball Barnacle Bob.”
The parrot was missing all the feathers on the top of his head. What remained were little pinholes, like a child’s connect-the-dots puzzle.
Liz traced the scar on her right cheek. She’d had two operations with a plastic surgeon in Manhattan, and a week ago, the third procedure with a surgeon in Vero Beach. Each skin graft was an improvement, but she was told that a scar would always remain and that a fourth operation would have to wait for at least another year. She now thought of her life in terms of before-the-scar and after-the-scar. Surprisingly enough, life after-the-scar was the better of the two. Her before-the-scar life had included a tempestuous relationship with Travis Osterman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The McAvoy Brothers, a five-hundred-page novel following three generations of brothers and their triumphs and sorrows through countless women and wars.
She’d left Melbourne Beach when she was eighteen and spent six years at Columbia University and then two years writing her novel, Let the Wind Roar, while modeling and bartending. After her novel won the PEN/Faulkner award, it flew to the top of the New York Times best sellers list. Liz spent the following year living every author’s dream. Then she met Travis and her dream turned into a nightmare, due to a scandal and a defamation-of-character lawsuit, not to mention a night of terror she would never forget. Liz had been acquitted of any wrongdoing in the lawsuit, but it was too late. She was branded a pariah and ostracized from every Manhattan literary salon. Liz had returned home to Melbourne Beach, her wings clipped by her father, and rightly so. It was a little embarrassing for a twenty-eight-year-old, but she’d welcomed his broad shoulders to cry on and she loved that her father never questioned her choices, saying instead, “If it wasn’t for the contrast in your life, you’d never have known what you truly wanted.”
Since Liz had returned to Florida, though, everyone at the Indialantic had been walking on eggshells around her, including Aunt Amelia. Of course, the whole sordid affair had been plastered all over the tabloids, but not even the tabloids knew what had really
