What’s Vi so upset about?”
“Who knows?” Pansy shrugged as Vi pushed through the screen door, lifting a shoulder bag stuffed with mail onto the kitchen table. “You’re a mess,” gasped Pansy, taking in Vi’s mail carrier uniform—a striped shirt and gray shorts—splashed with syrupy pink liquid. Pansy’s eyes dropped to the soda can in Vi’s hand just as Vi crushed her stubby-nailed fingers around it.
“Don’t tell me,” quipped Pansy. “We’re fresh out of boards you can crack with your head.”
Ignoring the good-humored gibe, Vi set aside the crushed can and lifted the remaining sandwich. Between healthy, gulping bites, she said, “Thanks for lunch. I’ve got to change uniforms, so I’ve only got a minute.”
It was hard to say how the same gene pool turned out three such different females. All the Hanleys had light brown hair, just a shade down from honey blond, but Pansy’s flowed in sumptuous layers past her shoulders. The curviest of the three, she liked wearing a trace of makeup and comfortable skirts, practical but feminine, nothing she’d have to iron. Today’s white suit was an anomaly, chosen because the client she was to meet, Ned Nelson, had sparked her imagination during their phone conversations, though she wasn’t quite sure why.
By contrast to Pansy, the middle sister, Lily, owner of Lily’s Pad, a stationery shop, had cut the same almost-honey hair in a sharply wedged bob, and it had been years since anyone had seen her wearing anything besides a bikini or a linen shift. Vi, the youngest, was deeply tanned from surfing. She kept her hair short—less wind resistance, she claimed—trimming it above ears studded with tiny silver earrings.
Having quickly dispensed with her sandwich, Vi pushed aside the plate she hadn’t bothered to use and said, “Okay. Now for the news. You two aren’t going to believe this!”
“By the looks of the mailbag, you’re about to get fired,” Lily guessed in an awed voice, still gaping at the soda drips.
“Or get more demerits,” agreed Pansy worriedly. “Did any of that soda actually make it to your mouth, Vi?”
“Not much,” admitted Vi. “The second I opened the can, Garth Garrison’s dog—you know, that chocolate Lab he named Gargantua?—well, he came after me like a hound from hell. I ran, of course.”
“Very logical response,” said Lily.
“I didn’t want to use the Mace,” Vi defended. “Not even Gargantua deserves that. Anyway, I accidently dumped the soda in the bag. But all is not lost.” Grinning excitedly, Vi held up a cherry-stained envelope as her sisters looked on with dismayed expressions. The flap had come unglued, and in her effort to save the letter, Vi had slipped it from the envelope.
Pansy groaned. “You didn’t read somebody’s else’s mail, did you?”
“I had to!” Vi protested. “I had no choice!”
“Violet Hanley!” Lily exclaimed in censure.
“Somebody on this island won the lottery,” Vi blurted, untucking her uniform shirt and using it to dry the letter.
“The lottery?” echoed Pansy, thinking Seduction Island didn’t have a lottery. “What lottery?”
“The New York lottery,” Violet explained, her voice hitching. “Whoever it is won fifteen million dollars.”
Pansy stared in shock. “Fifteen million dollars?” she echoed as if replacing the emphasis might make the words make better sense.
Violet nodded, stunned. “Yeah. Somebody on Seduction Island!”
Lily whistled. “And I thought we’d already had enough excitement for one week.”
“You’d think,” said Pansy, glancing through the screen door toward where a sliver of ocean was visible through the dunes. New York and local police were diving from an outboard motorboat, searching through the wreckage of a yacht that had exploded. Pansy had been thoroughly questioned, since she’d witnessed the fireworks, and then, less than an hour ago, she’d gotten another shock. A wooden plank had been salvaged from the wreck, and on it was the vessel’s name, Destiny. It was the same name as the boat on which Jacques O’Lannaise had met Iris Hanley years ago. Pansy’s heart clutched as she worried over the strange coincidence.
“Who won?” Lily asked impatiently.
“That’s the thing,” returned Violet. “I don’t know. When I spilled the soda, the ink ran.”
For a second, even fifteen million dollars didn’t have the power to pull Pansy’s attention to her sisters. Her gaze had shifted from the police and the Destiny to Castle O’Lannaise, the romantic white adobe estate perched on a bluff of the north shore, which could be seen from most points of the island. The property had changed hands countless times and had even been owned by a past president, but it was never inhabited long, which, for Pansy, only served to substantiate rumors that it was haunted by the dark, swarthy ghost of Jacques, whose star-crossed lover’s past was so intimately tied to the Hanleys’.
Despite what finding a buyer for Castle O’Lannaise would mean for the realty business, Pansy loved the palatial estate, and for years she’d dreamed of finding a buyer who’d open it as a summer resort, just as Jacques O’Lannaise had planned. She’d felt that putting history to rest would restore Seduction Island’s flagging economy, and she hoped the lottery winner would be interested in the estate.
“Garth Garrison was my next stop,” Vi was saying. “Since the sorters put the letters in order, he’s probably the winner.” She groaned, thinking of the cranky horror novelist who lived in a tumbledown shack near the water. “I hate to think of him winning so much money,” confessed Vi. “He’s such a jerk.”
“A good-looking jerk,” reminded Lily.
“If you like the artistic type.” Vi rolled her eyes as if to say she’d never registered that Garth was male. “Anyway, you all have to look at the address. See if you can read it. If it gets out that I ruined the mail again, I’ll get fired.”
Pansy sidled next to Lily. All three women stared at the business envelope. “That’s definitely the lottery board’s return address,” Pansy murmured, shifting her gaze to forms the winner was supposed to fill out and sign. “And you can make out the word, ‘Mr.”’
Lily grinned. “The winner’s definitely male.”
“Then he’s married,” said Vi. “He couldn’t be single. We’re not that lucky.”
Summer storms aside, meeting so few eligible men was the one drawback to living on this otherwise idyllic island. Most men were salty retired sailors, and by the ripe old age of ten, the Hanleys had tired of having their hearts broken by seasonal tourists, whom they frequently vowed never to date, although they always did.
“Fifteen million,” Pansy whispered, wondering if a buyer for Castle O’Lannaise was about to materialize.
“This is our zip code,” offered Lily.
“What if Garth Garrison is the winner?” Vi said. “You know, Lily, you’re right. He is kind of cute.” Vi paused. “I mean, in a surly, self-absorbed, narcissistic sort of way.”
Pansy frowned. “Did you ask
