The sixteen-year-old’s mouth dropped open, and she was halfway through an indignant, “Excuse you?” when Landon brushed past her. There was no point in getting a table. He wasn’t going to eat in this rathole. He just needed a drink.
“Hendricks,” he ordered through gritted teeth to a bartender he didn’t recognize. “A double.”
“Our top-shelf gin is Empress 1908,” the young man said. “Does that work?”
Landon supposed it would have to, but what the hell had happened to the Hendricks? Finally, he saw someone he recognized. Tom, the bar manager, had worked his way up from busboy, and Landon liked him better than he liked most people anymore.
Coming out of the back office, Tom sized up the situation immediately and snapped, “Put that rat poison away, Jason.”
Jason, halfway through pouring, stopped in confusion as Tom pulled a bottle of Hendricks from the back of a lower cabinet and placed it along with a highball glass in front of Landon.
“Thank God for you, Tom,” Landon said, meaning it. He poured four fingers and drank two of them in one gulp.
Jason had moved to the register and was whispering with another bartender, trying to figure out how to ring up an entire bottle of liquor they didn’t serve.
Tom shook his head. “I keep meaning to fire him.”
“Fire Barbie’s little sister at the front, too,” Landon advised. “Is she even old enough to work at a restaurant?”
“Barely,” Tom admitted. “But you don’t know how hard it is to keep a decent hostess. Kids in this town don’t have much of a work ethic.”
“Why are you hiring kids then?” Landon asked. “Where’s Gilles?”
He expected to hear that Gilles had died or retired. What he didn’t expect was for Tom to look at him strangely and say, “You fired him.”
From the register, Jason hissed, “He’s the owner?”
If Kaitlyn had thought the luxury condo that neither she nor Grayson could afford was confusing, it was nothing compared to how she felt as Grayson drove them down the familiar roads that lead to LeClarks.
“Listen,” she said when they were a mile away, “I’m all about nostalgia, and I can’t wait to see the place, but I’m hungry. Can’t we eat first?”
“We are going to eat first,” Grayson said.
“Did another restaurant build up next to LeClarks?” Kaitlyn asked, disappointed. Part of what she loved about LeClarks was the way it stood alone on the hill. The outdoor seating in the front had a view of the ocean in the distance, and from the seating on the back patio, you could look over the twinkling lights of the town.
“Gray?” She prompted when he didn’t answer.
“Kait,” he sighed. “Just...you’ll see, okay?”
But even when she saw, she didn’t understand. There was her beloved LeClarks, but it wasn’t. The wooden sign out front that had been handcrafted by some great uncle or other was gone, and someone had defaced the weathered brick exterior with neon letters that spelled out Rathskeller.
“Someone bought LeClarks,” Kaitlyn said, and her voice seemed to come from somewhere very far away, and belong to someone else. Surely it was too high and thin to be her own. “And turned it into a Rathskeller?” Rathskellers had swarmed across the East Coast like, well, rats. They took their place in the TGIFridays, Chilis, Applebees pantheon. Kaitlyn had seen their commercials a hundred times on TV and passed billboards for it in Times Square, but she’d never once eaten there.
In her periphery, Grayson nodded grimly, but Kaitlyn was too busy cataloging the rest of the alterations to look at him. She got out of the car and approached it slowly as though it were a crime scene. It was a crime scene, she corrected herself. Someone had stolen the building their family had built with their own hands. They’d neglected the fountain her great, great grandfather had paid a fortune to bring over from Bordeaux.
“What the hell, Grayson?” Kait asked, coming to a stop beside it. “Did you know about this?”
Her brother spread his hands out helplessly. “What did you expect, Kait? The bank owned it. We’re lucky someone bought it and kept it up instead of tearing it down.
“Are we buying it?” Kait asked, trying to make sense of it.
“No, we’re starting a new LeClarks.”
Kaitlyn sat down on the wide lip of the stone fountain, trying to take it all in. Was that possible? Could they just start a new LeClarks? Could all that history, tradition, and magic be grafted onto a new kitchen, into different walls? “No,” she shook her head slowly. “This building is LeClarks, Gray.”
“No,” he said with uncharacteristic force. “We are LeClarks, Kait. And anywhere we start a restaurant is LeClarks. Mom and Dad should have known that. After we left New Canton, they should have started a new restaurant instead of wasting away over a stupid building and dying in a car accident without ever getting back on their feet.”
Grayson’s face was fierce, his blue-gray eyes blazing, and somehow, it cut through the haze in Kaitlyn’s head. She couldn’t untangle LeClarks from this building, it wasn’t possible. But he was right. Their parents should have tried harder. And maybe he was right about a new LeClarks, too.
Kaitlyn mustered up a half-hearted smile for Gray, who was still scanning her face, clearly wondering if she was about to take the next bus back to New York. “Don’t worry, big brother. I’m still in.”
“You won’t regret it,” he pulled her to her feet and started toward the entrance. “Come on, we’re late.”
“Late? Did we have a reservation?”
“No, we have a meeting with the owner.”
Landon felt them come in. His back was to the door, but suddenly the energy of the building shifted. It was as though it had been holding its breath and now released it in an exhale of relief. A chill skated up his spine. He wasn’t a fanciful man. He didn’t believe in ghosts, goblins, or energy. But when he swiveled around, there they were.
They looked out of
