Page 95 of Ten Beach Road

Avery ate as rapidly as the rest of them, but she was eyeing Chase with suspicion. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch, ladies. Especially not where Chase is concerned.”

He smiled amiably but didn’t deny the accusation. “I can’t have you fainting from hunger,” he said. “And we don’t have time for hunting and gathering.” He reached over to pluck a stray pepperoni from the box. “We’re on a tight schedule.” He walked over to the counter and carried the napkin holder to the table. “Even monkeys need a banana now and then.”

Nicole gritted her teeth as she sat on the couch in the pool house and viewed that night’s YouTube posting. It began with shots of the last two days’ hand sanding and was cut to the theme song from the Monkees. Every other shot was a close-up of a female hand clutching a wood sanding block. The skin on those very different hands was scraped and bloody; the fingernails jagged and dirty.

In between the shots of sandpaper in motion were unforgiving close-ups of sweat-soaked faces, the set of hunched backs and shoulders. She cringed at the first glimpse of her own face furrowed in concentration, her age and discomfort clearly etched in the lines that bracketed her mouth and radiated outward from her eyes. Once again Kyra had demonstrated their monkey-like servitude, but had also managed to capture their grim determination now that the end of their labors was within sight.

Chase Hardin would undoubtedly get a good chuckle out of the video and its music track. Giraldi would probably enjoy it, too. The agent had been absent for the last four or five days, which both relieved and worried her as she continued to wrestle with whether to tell him about her conversation with Malcolm or assume that he already knew. She had no idea what her brother would think if he could see what he’d reduced them to. If he checked out Kyra’s YouTube postings, would he feel guilty or care in the least? All she knew for sure was that barely three weeks remained until August 25; she was running out of time to figure out her next move.

The music changed and drew her back to the video. She heard the plaintive “we-de-de-de” and then the “a-wimawehs” of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” covered by shots of them sleeping on their mattresses in the sardine can of the pool house, their exhaustion apparent in the sprawl of their bodies beneath the sheets. The bright yellow ball of moon hung over the pass, clearly defined in the pool house window just as it was now.

In another five or six days when the floors were done and dry, the designers would take over the interior of Bella Flora and the monkey squad would move outside to help paint the exterior of the house. Avery said they’d be done sometime the week before Labor Day. Which meant she could go meet Malcolm on the twenty-fifth without arousing suspicion if she chose to.

The video ended, and she scrolled down to read some of the comments. They now had eighty-five thousand views and a surprisingly large number of viewers who posted regularly. The odds that her clients and friends in New York and L.A. didn’t know she was slaving away on this house out of desperation were small to no-way-in-hell. If she ever saw Malcolm again, she’d have to be sure to thank him for it.

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