Point Fury: A Novel - Hardcover

Chapter 1

"Well, hello there, and I guess you must be Chris," Ted Harper said at the door in a booming, deep voice, and speaking with the same jovial, disarming Southern twang that Chris had first noticed at a gas and coffee pit stop somewhere in or near the state of Delaware.

"Hi, Mr. Harper, it's nice to meet you," Chris managed to answer, while returning an almost painfully strong handshake from his new landlord -- or employer.

Standing face-to-face, Chris thought that Ted Harper looked almost exactly the way he'd imagined: a big, heavyset man with sturdy features, pink skin, and white hair, dressed for a late-fall weekend at the beach in a stiff, yellow, button-down shirt, gray cardigan, and khaki pants with a bright green belt. Chris even thought he had pictured the gold Rolex and class ring; the man looked like all of Chris's father's old friends from college: successful, conservative, Ivy League businessmen. Ted Harper was merely the Dixie version.

"Well, come in, come in. How was the drive, okay?" At last he released Chris's hand, and then he opened the door to his stunning summer place.

Chris hadn't thought about the house very much, but even if he had, he wouldn't have come up with anything like the modern, austere, beachfront mansion he'd driven up to. It was the kind of thing you would see flipping through the pages of Modern Architecture or the real estate section of the Sunday Times, never quite believing anyone actually lived there. Ted Harper had apparently started out in business as an investment banker, but had then gone on to create his own shipping company, underwriting other companies' importing and exporting ventures...or something like that. Chris's father had explained it to him, presenting it as something he should be impressed with. Now Chris could understand why.

The house was on an island sandbar that jutted off the mainland with the ocean on one side and a small bay on the other. To get there, he'd had to drive over a little one-lane bridge after turning onto an unnamed road -- following directions he'd taken by phone and scrawled onto the back of an envelope and then only just barely remembered to bring when he left. It was a good thing he had, since neither the road nor the place itself seemed to exist on the road map he'd bought. Beyond the bridge there was nothing except for three other houses he could see off in the distance; aside from that, only bulrushes, beach grass, some stunted-looking pines, maybe two or three other types of plants and bushes he couldn't identify; and, of course, beach: lots and lots of it, pristine, unblemished, white, and sandy. The whole setup gave him a twinge of something that was either disgust or jealousy.

Inside, the house was all open spaces, dark woods, and bright white surfaces. The enormous main room, a combined living room and kitchen and dining room, had a wall of almost continuous glass looking out over green dunes to the ocean, and ceilings that Chris estimated to be fourteen feet easily at their highest point. Crossing over it upstairs, also facing the view, was a balcony with a silver metal railing, lending the whole place the feel of something between a fine yacht and a space station.

Mr. Harper led him to a carpeted, sunken living room area next to the great expanse of windows, where he held out his hand to a white canvas and chrome couch.

"Have a seat, Chris," he said.

But Chris came to a stop well before he reached the sleek, expensive-looking piece of furniture; even though his only communication with Mr. Harper had been two brief phone conversations, he'd never stopped to think that his arrival here would also be his job interview.

And now he was in no shape for it. After he'd stayed up all last night packing, stuffing every single item he owned in the world into the five-by-eight U-Haul trailer he'd rented, the drive had been a grueling ten hours: taking I-95 down to New York; crossing over the top of Manhattan and the George Washington Bridge; then all the way down the New Jersey Turnpike to the Delaware Memorial Bridge; then finding Route 13 and continuing south on that -- by which point he was already so wasted he felt as if he might be hallucinating, and when once he'd looked around and noticed the transformed scenery, of quaint old farmhouses and open farmland and churches, the sensation wasn't so much like having traveled but of having gone back in time. (It was right around here where he'd noticed the accent, too, which at the time had actually shocked him because it was the first thing to cut through his delirium and really seem real. It wasn't particularly surprising that he didn't remember it from his calls with Ted.) And still he'd had farther to go, hours farther down his new, already badly tangled road map; deep into a territory that, although he'd maybe flown over it once or twice as a child on his family's Caribbean vacations, he had never before actually been to. It wasn't until the sun was dipping below the tree line, well into Maryland and close to the shoreline, with billboards for all-you-can-eat crab houses and amusement-park water slides, that he'd exited off the main highway and followed the twisting back road to the small bridge and the exclusive island. By the time he finally discovered Ted Harper's wooden castle by the beach, he was almost, not quite but almost, too utterly gone to care what it looked like.

Of course, added to all that was everything from before: his approximately two months of some very unhealthy living, a period during which he'd probably not once gone to bed either sober or without still coming down off something, and usually neither of the two, and that was when he'd gone to bed at all. In a way it was pretty ironic: an all-day drive after an all-nighter should have been nothing to an experienced pill fiend such as himself. But in what he later considered a very foolish, very rash move, he'd flushed the last of his supplies down the toilet before he left, not even saving himself one little tab of amp for the road. The gallons of coffee he'd consumed along the way were a poor substitute, which had seemed to run right through him but other than that have no effect at all.

There hadn't been a set time for him to arrive, so at least he hadn't been late. Only now he remembered that he hadn't thought to turn his music down when he'd driven up, either; he'd had an old Helmet tape cranked on the stereo to help keep him awake, which must have been heard in the perfect silence here. Nor did he exactly look the part he was supposed to be playing. The flannel shirt and jeans he was wearing had been ready for the laundry even before he'd left, and his hair...But that was a somewhat longer story. He'd been shaving his head and dyeing the stubble blond while playing with X Bomb, the band he'd parted ways with, also some two months ago. Since that time it had been left untended, and currently the dark roots against the lighter tips looked nasty, like something out of the early days of British punk. It hadn't even occurred to Chris to do something about it, and only now did he stop to realize what Businessman Ted must think of him.

But now was obviously too late. Ted Harper had already settled himself into a matching chair on the other side of a glass coffee table, leaning back and steepling his fingers in front of him, the hotshot negotiator about to enter battle. Still cursing himself, feeling resentful as hell, Chris took his appointed place, too.

"You know, I think the last time I saw you, you were wearing diapers, Chris," Ted commented, chuckling heartily, as soon as they were facing each other.

Chris tried not to think about that and wondered instead if he should say something about his hair. He decided not to and just smiled weakly.

"Well, so, anyway, what do you think of it?" Ted said, leaning forward, opening his hands in a deceptively friendly gesture; an invitation to hang himself, Chris thought.

He took a deep breath before answering. "Oh, the house is fantastic. It's incredible," he said as enthusiastically as he could manage.

"Yep, I think so, too. And my aim, Chris, is to keep it that way. Which, as you already know, is why you're here. Now, I don't know how much your father already told you about this, but last winter this place really took some damage. People came -- locals is how I figure it, but of course no one knows for sure -- and they didn't just rob the place -- we've had that kind of thing for years here; all these houses on the shore are sitting ducks for burglars in the winter. But I mean these people came, and it looked like they stayed and had themselves a three-day party. I'm telling you, you wouldn't have believed what they did. They turned all the furniture upside down. They wrote on the walls, they used the bathrooms even though the water was turned off. Now, only two summers ago I'd gone and installed what I was told was a very good security system, but do you know what they did about that? They just went and snipped the darned phone line. So the thing went off, sure enough, but all that stupid, asinine box really did was make a phone call to the police or whoever, and in the end it did no good at all."

Ted Harper shook his head and smiled, like a man admitting he'd been taken by an easy swindle. Chris nodded respectfully.

"Anyhow," Ted went on, "clearly something had to be done, because there's no way I'm going through that one again, not if I can help it. This house has given me and my family great pleasure and great memories through the years, and that kind of desecration, well, it hurts more than you'd think. Now at first, you know, I came up with all kinds of crazy schemes. I wanted to get a full-time guard for the entire island, build him his own house with a tower, maybe put up a gate on the other side of the bridge so he can keep track of who's coming and going. But this summer, I go up and down talking to my neighbors, trying to get something worked out, and, guess what? Their houses weren't bothered, and nobody wants to pay for it. Big surprise. So, finally, I settle for plan B: get my own place winterized and have someone stay here, let everyone else find out for themselves what can happen. At that point I was actually thinking of trying to find someone to rent it from me, until I stopped to think what kind of a hassle that would be. But also, if I rented, who's to say whoever-it-is would be here all the time. They might take off for a week or two and the same thing could happen again. So, now I realize I'm going to have to hire someone, just for the months when the place is really deserted, you know, from now, late October, through the beginning of March. I don't quite know why that is, by the way, that more people don't stay put or visit in the fall and winter; it's a beautiful time to be here. But everyone just treats this like a summer place, and so out of season it pretty much sits here like a ghost town."

As he sat on the luxurious couch, a fresh wave of exhaustion had washed over Chris. In order to hide and stifle a yawn, he leaned over and rubbed his burning eyes.

"But now, I have to tell you right here, Chris," Ted droned on, "when I made that decision, you were not at all what I had in mind. What I was thinking of was maybe some older couple, or, I have a woman who cooks for us over in Charlotte, and I thought she might have an aunt or an uncle or something. Around that time, though, I just happened to speak to your father, who I haven't seen in years. And, as you already know, he suggested you. He said you were taking some time off from...you're a musician, is that right?"

Chris had to clear his throat. "Yes. Sometimes. Most of the time."

Ted looked mildly confused by the answer. "But you're getting out of that now, is that correct?"

"Well, no, not really. But the band I was playing in sort of dissolved, and so I'm kind of between jobs that way."

"Well now, Chris, you know I really need someone who's going to stick it through for the entire winter. So if you're planning on taking off the moment you hear of something better..."

"No, no, I'm not. Not at all."

"And what are you planning on doing all the time that you'd be here alone?"

"Well, I won't really be all alone. I've got Charlie, my dog I told you about, who's still out in the car. And I'll get a job somewhere. I've worked at a lot of restaurants, and if I can get even two or three shifts a week, that should keep me from going too stir-crazy."

"Well, that all sounds okay, Chris, but I don't know how much luck you're going to have with the job part. Both in the town here and in Ocean City, across the water there, they pretty much shut their doors and close down for winter, as I already said. So I doubt there'll be an opening for you."

"I'm sure I can find something, and if I can't, then I can't."

"And don't forget, Chris, I'm already paying out good money. I realize it's not a fortune you'd be making, but I do expect something in return for that wage. I don't want someone who's going to take an all-night bartender gig somewhere. I want someone living in this house, coming in at night, every night, and turning the lights on."

"Oh no, yeah, of course I wouldn't -- "

"I mean a day or two here and there, I obviously can't object to that. But the whole point of this thing is that I don't want those hoodlums coming back. This isn't just some windfall position you've happened onto."

"No, no, I understand that completely, Mr. -- "

"And I mean there are still other options that I have. There are apparently security services -- "

"Mr. Harper," Chris interrupted, speaking as assertively as he dared, putting up both hands palms out in a gesture of appeal and capitulation. Ted Harper seemed right on the verge of sending him packing, and Chris couldn't let that happen, couldn't even imagine what he'd do if that happened. Through his fatigue and humiliation, he tried to think clearly.

"Mr. Harper," he started again, "let me just assure you that I wouldn't take any job that would interfere with my being here and taking care of this place. What my father told you was true: I am taking some time off from music, and I'm not looking for anything else right now. I'm sorry if I seem a little laid-back or indifferent, it's just that I was up all last night packing, and I'm very tired. But I do, I would take this very seriously. I would fully plan to be here, and to take care of the place for you all winter."

Chris looked up to a spot somewhere between Mr. Harper's shaven pink chin and his sagging but penetrating blue eyes, hoping, praying that this rambling pledge would be good enough.

The older man seemed to ponder over the words for a long time. At last, though, he nodded and stood up.

"Well, okay then," he said, switching back to the jovial tone he'd first greeted Chris with. "If you're going to be living here, I guess I better show you the rest of my house."

Chris felt little jubilation as he forced himself back to his feet, however. Mostly he felt humiliated -- that and the exhaustion.

Copyright © 2002 by John Maxwell