But when I walked into Adventura, all my certainty faded.
An explosion seemed to have detonated since my visit, because Mark’s desk was absolutely piled with papers. His computer screen—an ancient PC that wheezed every few minutes—had practically disappeared amid the stacks.
“Glad you’re here!” Mark cried as he shook the snow off his coat. He’d helped Mav take all my stuff to my new cabin. “Have a seat.”
He waved across the desk to a folding chair that spewed stuffing from a rip across the top. Thankfully, JJ was nowhere in sight, but the vague scent of outdoors lingered in the air. He must be somewhere close.
Mark wore a pair of workout pants, an old T-shirt, and ratty tennis shoes. But his eyes were bright, and he seemed eager. I let out a long breath.
I could do this.
First, I just had to get out my spreadsheet. I’d created a matrix where I could note all his expectations, the final list of desired projects, and a timeline for each. Then I’d easily be able to map out some sort of schedule and figure out what kind of time it would take.
“Ready to get started?” he asked.
“Yes, of course. Do you mind if I ask a few questions first?”
He shrugged. “Sure.” He tipped his head to the buried computer. “Need access to it?”
“Ah, no.”
I lifted my backpack, where I’d stuffed Bethany’s laptop and headphones. “Where do you want me to work? Then I’ll start asking.”
His neck straightened. “Ah. Workspace. Right. Comes at a premium here.” He hummed to himself for a second as he scanned the area. “Good question.”
Although I’d been here before, it seemed so different without JJ in the room. The haphazard elements—clothes hanging off a nail on the wall, a spare roll of toilet paper—were out in bulk this morning. A single, dangling lightbulb had burned out over his desk, casting this side of the room in shadows. The whole place smelled like dust.
It needed a good offensive attack.
Pinnable board, here I come.
Mark tsked under his breath. “I’ll need access to my desk, so I can’t put you here for now. How about the table?”
The table was a foldout that stood on three rickety legs, with books jammed under two of them. It was half behind his desk, half in the hallway that led to the bathroom. But it was that or the floor.
I shuddered thinking of what had crawled across those wooden planks.
By some miracle, I could potentially move this work to my own cabin where I could control the environment a bit more. I hadn’t seen said cabin yet, for obvious reasons. Because I was secretly terrified of what I’d find.
“This table is good for now,” I said. While I set up my laptop, plugged it in, and booted it, Mark stood behind his desk and stared at the mess with a furrowed brow. He nudged a towering pile of papers with his toe and a hearty dose of what appeared to be fear.
“Ah, my questions shouldn’t take long,” I said. “I’d love to nail down your expectations for my work.”
“Right. Sure.” He gestured to the mess. “This is a good chunk of the paperwork that we need organized and put in the cloud, or whatever.”
I eyed it warily. “A good chunk?”
“The rest of it is boxed in the spare bedroom. Probably under the cot you slept on.”
“And how many boxes are there to go through?”
“Dunno.”
“How will I know which ones?”
“Just look through them. If there’s paperwork, go through it.”
“Okay.”
My brain almost malfunctioned. Knowing the Bailey boys as I did now, anything could be in those boxes. I’d have to deal with that later. What if it was personal in nature? What if it was alive—or had been once? I shook my head to clear my thoughts.
“Is this your first priority?” I asked.
“I mean . . . you could start the website whenever you want.” He shrugged. “We’ll probably need that completed before we can build the investor dashboard. However, we could really use some space around here.”
“Website. Right. I almost forgot. What’s the URL again?”
“For which one?”
Which one? He hadn’t mentioned multiple existing ones.
“Adventura?”
“Oh, that’s just a page on a social media site. We’ll need to amp that up. Actually, we may have a Wordpass domain.”
“Self-hosted?”
He blinked. “Uh . . .”
I waved a hand. “Never mind that. What’s the URL?”
“I can’t remember off the top of my head. Should be in the paperwork.”
He couldn’t remember his own website?
“What paperwork?” I asked.
He gestured at the desk with two hands. “That paperwork.”
My fingers stiffened on the keyboard. He wanted websites created, I had no idea if he even had a domain, and I was facing years’ worth of paperwork shoved into haphazard piles. Somewhere in said paperwork lurked the most basic answers. Answers that he didn’t keep in his supposedly brilliant mind.
“Oh.”
His phone rang, startling me. “Oh, gotta take this.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Good luck, Lizbeth. Wi-Fi is pretty solid unless there’s a storm. Not sure where the password is, but it’s on the desk.”
“Wait!” I called after him. “What’s your priority? Where do you want me to start?”
“Don’t care!” he called. Then he answered the phone with a quick, “This is Mark,” and disappeared up the attic ladder with the light pounce of a cat. I swallowed hard and stared at the explosion of papers on the table.
Sweet baby pineapple, but what had I gotten myself into?
An hour later, I stood knee-deep in a mess of paperwork that didn’t make any sense, attempting for the tenth time to connect to the internet with a different password because Mark couldn’t remember which one was current, all while trying to note on a new spreadsheet just how many categories of paperwork I’d unearthed from one stack.
One of which included a midterm exam from eighth grade.
The list stopped at ninety-seven categories so far, only five
