Page 4 of Midnight Enemy

She keeps her eyes on mine. Oh… her lips have curved up, just a fraction. Or did I imagine it? Too late—she tears her gaze away as Jack comes over and sits in one of the armchairs, and the moment’s gone.

He puts a folder on the table. On the front is a label that reads ‘Blake Stone / Kahukura.’

“I’m going to take some notes, if that’s okay,” she says to him. When he nods, she opens the bag she was carrying on her bike and extracts a notebook. Not a laptop, but a proper old-fashioned spiral-bound notepad.

“Want a quill pen with that?” I ask, amused. “Why don’t you just take notes on your phone?”

“I don’t have one.” She flips the pad open and clicks the button on the end of her ballpoint pen.

“You don’t have a phone?” I’m completely baffled. My friends and everyone I work with are glued to their phones twenty-four-seven. “My whole life is on my iPhone. I’d be lost without it. How do you cope?!”

“We weren’t allowed individual phones when we were kids,” she says, “and you don’t miss what you’ve never had.”

“What if you want to look anything up on the internet?”

“I can use the computers in the commune library.”

I’m stunned. I’m constantly checking financial data, reading the news on Reddit, writing business emails, looking at my calendar, or talking to friends on Snapchat. “Aren’t you on Instagram or TikTok or anything?”

“I’m not interested in social media,” she says. “I don’t share my generation’s interest in taking photos of every aspect of their mundane lives and sharing them with the world.”

My lips curve up. “What if you need to text or call your friends?”

“They all live in the commune.”

“And how is life in Brigadoon?”

She blinks, confused. I guess she hasn’t seen the movie about the mysterious Scottish village that appears for only one day every hundred years. Do they even have TV over there?

Jack clears his throat. “Let’s move on. Okay, Scarlett, first of all, I’d like to say I’m very sorry to hear about your father’s passing. Our sympathies here at the law firm go to you and your family, and everyone else Blake was close to at the commune.”

“I second that,” I say.

She looks at me. “Oh, really?” Her voice is flinty. “You’re so sympathetic toward us that you want to exploit us in our moment of grief?”

Ouch. “I apologize if that’s how it comes across. But we’d heard that localiwihad expressed an interest in the land, and we wanted to put in an offer before you made a decision.”

It’s a complicated story. The land on which the commune sits originally belonged to Blake’s Maori wife, Amiria. A river serves as the border between their land and the land my father inherited, which heoffered as the site for the Midnight Club. The river culminates in a waterfall that tumbles into a large pool known as the Waiora, which is Maori for ‘healing waters’. On a sunny day, rainbows can occasionally form in the falling water, which is why Blake called the nearby commune Kahukura, which means rainbow in Maori.

Maori consider the sitewahi tapu, which means they think of it as a sacred, almost supernatural place where theirtupunaor ancestors would bathe, believing that the waters cleansed and healed their bodies and sustained their spirits at the same time. The retreat that the commune runs uses the pool’s supposed healing properties in their treatments.

Technically, Blake’s land extends in a loop around the pool. But because our land runs right up to the edge of the rest of the river, we’ve always maintained our side of the pool, and he never contested that—why would he, when we spent decent money to make his land look good? We created a neat gravel path to lead from the resort down to the pool, and because our guests often go on walks and like to explore the grounds, we’ve erected some seating there so people can sit and admire the waterfall.

“That’s right,” Scarlett says. “Localiwihave raised the issue of who owns the Waiora now my father has passed. We discovered that because my father never transferred ownership to the commune, the land is technically mine. But we all make decisions together at the commune, and I’ll be reporting back to the Elders later.”

“I understand the cultural significance of the site,” I say. “We’d like to offer to buy the Waiora so we can develop the land in a respectful way.”

“Respectful?” Her eyes blaze. “You want to exploit and commercialize something natural and pure.”

I frown. “It’s an underdeveloped site that’s going to waste. I want to make it beautiful and functional. I promise I’ll honor the space and make sure it’s safe and secure.”

If her spine gets any more rigid, it’s going to snap. “I don’t want it to be safe and secure,” she says, her voice hard. “It should remain untouched and wild. It’s a tranquil place where vulnerable people can find clarity and peace. It’s not underdeveloped, and it’s not going to waste. It’s a sacred place of healing. You can’t disturb the god of the waters.”

That pushes me over the edge, and my patience—which hasn’t been great lately anyway—snaps. “Oh, come on. I accept it’s a peaceful placeand that people enjoy meditating and other crazy stuff there, but let’s keep your batshit religion out of it.” Out of the blue, a stab of pain runs from my shoulder down to my elbow like lightning, and I twitch irritably. “I don’t want my chakras located, and I don’t need to know if the moon’s in Uranus. I just want to talk business.”

Silence falls in the room.

Jack rests his head on a hand and massages his brow.

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