“Boone, you went by the house,” Cora Jane said. “Anything we need to watch out for there?”
“There are a lot of branches in the yard, but the driveway’s clear. Just watch your step going inside. I flipped on the outside light, just in case the power came back on. I called your neighbors earlier and they say the power did come on over there. You should be okay. I didn’t spot any leaks in the house, but you might want to take a closer look.”
Cora Jane gave him a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you.”
“Not a problem. Are you still planning to open here tomorrow?”
“Just with deck seating,” Emily told him. She gave a pointed look at Cora Jane. “We compromised.”
“Then I’ll be back here early in case you need help,” he promised. “What time?”
“Grandmother scheduled the bakery delivery for five-thirty,” Emily said dryly.
Boone laughed. “Of course she did. And that is why I run a restaurant that serves only dinner. I also postponed our reopening till the weekend. I wanted my employees to have time to get their own situations under control, deal with insurance issues or whatever they needed to do.”
“Can we come help you out, instead?” Samantha pleaded.
“Traitors,” Cora Jane said. “Family comes first, and don’t you forget it. We’ll all be here at five-fifteen with smiles on our faces.”
Jerry chuckled at their groans. “Well, at least you and I will be, Cora Jane.”
“Oh, we’ll be here,” Emily said. “But the smiles might be expecting too much.”
Fully clothed might be the best they could promise.
5
“Bad news, boss,” Pete Sanchez announced when Boone called him to check in after finally getting home from Castle’s and getting an exhausted B.J. into a bath and then to bed.
Pete was Boone’s manager of restaurant operations. Though Pete was a year younger than Boone, he’d come to him with ten years of solid experience. Single and eager to be on the go, he spent most of his time overseeing the restaurants in Norfolk and Charlotte, taking the burden of travel off of Boone. Even so, he’d come straight back to North Carolina the minute residents and business owners had been allowed back on the barrier islands.
“Tell me,” Boone said. If the usually low-key Pete thought the news was bad, it probably rose to the level of disaster.
“Looks like the restaurant’s been flooded one too many times, and the last repairs must have been made with poor quality materials. When we pulled up the carpets, we found sections of rotting floorboards all over the place.”
“Blast it!” Boone muttered.
“It gets worse,” Pete disclosed direly. “We discovered mold behind some of the drywall on the side closest to the bay, where the water stayed high the longest. A lot of mold. It’s pretty pervasive.”
“You have to be kidding me,” Boone said, thoroughly frustrated. If there was extensive mold now, even as quickly as it could appear after a flooding incident, this definitely hadn’t happened overnight. Nor had those sections of floor rotted since this last hurricane blew through. These were most likely things his inspectors should have caught before he bought the property.
Exhaling a sigh, he concluded he’d just have to consider this a lesson well-learned. Next time, he’d hire an actual contractor to go over any potential real estate purchase to assure that the inspection wasn’t superficial or in the seller’s favor.
“Why didn’t you call me on my cell?” he asked Pete when he had his temper under control. “I could have gotten Tommy over there today to take a look.”
“I tried, but I guess the service is still spotty,” Pete responded. “One of the cell towers blew down or something. I did get through once and tried to leave a message, but it cut me off before I could explain what was going on.”
Boone pulled his cell phone from his pocket and noted the call logged in early in the afternoon. It must have come in while he’d had the noisy chain saw going. “Sorry. I was tied up over at Castle’s.”
“I knew that, so I didn’t want to make a big deal out of something that could just as easily be handled tomorrow. I thought about calling Tommy myself, but I figured he was there with you. You’d told me you wanted him to get Cora Jane’s roof fixed. I know how you feel about making that a priority.”
“It’s okay, Pete. None of this is your fault. I’ll call Tommy now. We’ll both come by first thing in the morning so he can assess the damage and give me a timetable for the repairs.”
“You talking daylight?”
“Or thereabouts,” Boone confirmed.
“You want me there?”
“No, give yourself a break,” he told the night owl. “I’ll handle this one. How about meeting me there around nine and we’ll come up with an action plan. Looks like I’ll need you to stick around here longer than we originally talked about. Is there anything you need to get back to right away in Norfolk or Charlotte?”
“No, both restaurants are good,” Pete assured him. “You have excellent management teams in place.”
Boone chuckled. “You pretty much have to say that. You hired most of them.”
“Doesn’t make me biased, though. If they screw up, that’s on me, too.” He hesitated, then said, “I’ve been thinking we could probably start looking for that fourth location you talked about once things around here settle down.”
“You getting bored, Pete?”
“Maybe just a little,” he acknowledged. “You know I love doing the start-ups.”
“Well, we’ll get serious about the next one soon,” Boone assured him. “Start compiling the market research for me, okay?”
“Will do,” Pete said eagerly. “In the meantime, should I cancel the ads announcing the reopening for this weekend?”
“We’ll decide that after I’ve been through the place with Tommy. Maybe it’s not as bad as you thought at
