Free The Weekenders by Mary Kay Andrews

problems at Belle Isle Enterprises, but he’d never given them much credence. Wendell Griggs was a sharp operator. He had an MBA, and he’d learned the real estate business from this father-in-law, who also happened to be the shrewdest man on the coast, W. R. Nolan himself.
    To beat back the monotony of waiting in hospital rooms during his own father’s illness, Nate had started poking around at the courthouse and in online records, and he’d been dumbfounded by what he’d discovered. It was all true. Actually, things were much worse than anybody could have guessed.
    Then he clicked over to his bank’s Web site. Good. The funds had been transferred from his California bank to his new bank in North Carolina.
    He tapped a button and the computer screen darkened. He sat back in the chair and wondered at the state of his emotions. Dread. A heavy, sick feeling of dread bored up from his belly, accompanied by an uneasy sense of guilt.
    None of this was new to Nate Milas. He’d tried to quash these emotions. None of this was his doing. This was all on Wendell Griggs, who’d managed to take a thriving family business, and in the space of only two short years, driven it to bankruptcy and beyond. The stalled hotel project, the cleared but unsold new subdivision lots, and the empty and padlocked retail spaces just a block from his family’s own modest Island Mercantile? Not to mention that pretentious and weird spaceship-looking home he’d had built on Sand Dollar Lane? That was all Wendell.
    Not Nate’s problem. Not Nate’s fault. Then why, he wondered, did this whole business feel like such a betrayal?
    He couldn’t forget the hurt, stunned look on Riley’s face when she’d been served on the ferry. Had she really been blindsided by all of this?

 
    8
    It was a closely held family secret. Although Riley’s mother, Evelyn, fancied herself a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, the truth of the matter was that her grandfather, James Thomas Riley, was an Ohio-born carpetbagger—a successful storekeeper who moved to the South in the years following the Civil War to make his fortune.
    James Thomas Riley and his older brother and business partner, Charles, had made their money in timber, cutting down the longleaf pine forests of North and South Carolina and shipping the milled lumber to New York City to help supply the inexhaustible need for materials to build new factories, bridges, and apartment buildings.
    In 1919, James T. and Charles made an uncharacteristically questionable decision—they bought Puquitta Island, named such by the indigenous Lumbee Indians, sight unseen, for the timber. Family lore had it that the brothers quarreled bitterly, nearly coming to blows over who was to blame upon the discovery that Puquitta’s maritime forests consisted not of the highly desirable longleaf Southern pine, but mostly of thick stands of live oak, scrub pine, and red laurel.
    After only one visit to Puquitta Island, the brothers forgot about their investment and turned their attention to enjoying their newfound fortunes. At the age of thirty, James married a beautiful nineteen-year-old Charleston debutante named Muriel Beacham, and a year later Earline, the first of their four daughters, was born. Charles, a confirmed bachelor, devoted himself to philanthropy and butterfly collecting.
    Never one to miss an opportunity to make money, it was Charles who, in 1926, came up with the idea to build a golf course, a small hotel, and fine vacation houses on Puquitta. He’d read about Sea Island, formerly called Long Island, a resort that automobile magnate Howard Coffin was building on a barrier island down in Georgia, and didn’t see any reason why such a plan wouldn’t work for their homely little patch of land.
    The brothers promptly dumped the ungainly Lumbee Indian name, and rebranded the property Belle Isle.
    Charles hadn’t actually seen the Georgia resort, so