Read Chapter 8: A Pouring Rain of Guests

The advertisement had been live for precisely nine hours when the first call came in. Then the second. Then the seventh.

Imogen stood at the front desk of Gull's Rest with the phone pressed to her ear, a pencil jammed behind her own, scribbling names and dates onto a scrap of paper that was rapidly becoming a catastrophe.

"Three nights, yes. Family of five. Two rooms? We have—" She glanced at the ceiling as if counting rooms she hadn't yet made habitable. "Yes, two rooms. Absolutely."

She hung up and stared at the paper. Twelve bookings. Twelve. The St. Ives Arts Festival had been cancelled by a burst water main, and a travel website had helpfully redirected every stranded tourist thirty miles up the coast to Portmaw, population four hundred and twelve.

Miraculously, her advertisement had been the first thing they found.

By four o'clock, the driveway was a chaotic tangle of hatchbacks and hired campervans. Imogen stood on the front step in her late grandmother's apron—the one with the faded embroidered gull—and directed a family from Bristol toward the garden room while a couple from Manchester argued about whose fault it was that they'd forgotten the nappies.

The inn was full. Completely, impossibly full. And she had no chef, no housekeeper, and a kitchen that had last been used for storage of approximately forty years' worth of jam jars.

At seven o'clock, Imogen burned the third batch of toast.

"You've got a face like a slapped oyster," observed Mrs. Denning from Room 4, who had come down to complain about the noise and now stood watching Imogen flap between the ancient Aga and the industrial hob. "I'd give up on breakfast if I were you."

"I'm not giving up," Imogen said through gritted teeth. "I'm adapting."

The toast caught fire again. She swore, dropped it in the sink, and turned to find the entire contents of the dining room staring at her through the serving hatch.

The Bristol father cleared his throat. "Is there a, um, a backup plan? The kids are getting cranky."

Imogen's vision swam. The edges of the room blurred. She gripped the counter, suddenly aware that she hadn't eaten since Tuesday, had slept four hours, and had just given fourteen people a room for the night based exclusively on a prayer and whatever the hell a "refurbished communal bathroom" meant in the listing she'd hallucinated onto the web page.

She didn't realise she was swaying until a hand caught her elbow.

"Whoa." The voice was low, familiar, and unbearably smug. "You look like you're about to be the first ghost this place has ever had."

Toby Penrose set down the colossal casserole dish he'd been carrying—the same one from last week, or possibly a bigger one—and surveyed the chaos with the assessing calm of a man who had walked into worse kitchens in his life.

"What are you doing here?" Imogen heard herself say. Her voice sounded far away.

"Saving your arse, by the look of it." He nudged her aside with his shoulder and began rolling up his sleeves. "I heard the whole coast got dumped on you. The Old Coastguard has a staff curry night, so I've got a few hours."

"I didn't ask you to—"

"You didn't have to. That's the point of neighbours, Im. Although judging by the smoke, you might prefer an arsonist."

She wanted to argue. She wanted to tell him exactly where he could put his charity and his casserole and his infuriating dimpled chin. But the toast was still smouldering, a child was crying somewhere upstairs, and the Bristol father had begun to look at the fire exit with a certain longing.

"Fine," she said. "But you follow my rules."

"Which are?"

"I don't know yet. I'll make them up as I go."

It turned out Toby Penrose in a kitchen was a different creature entirely. He moved with a practiced economy, assessing what was available in the pantry—tinned tomatoes, jarred olives, a frankly alarming amount of clotted cream—and transforming it into something resembling food. She found herself stationed at the hob, stirring risotto under his instruction while he flambéed something in a pan that she hadn't even known was in the cupboard.

"You're holding the spoon too tightly," he said.

"I'm holding the spoon exactly."

"You're holding it like you're stabbing your ex in the chest."

"I don't have an ex in a chest—wait." She looked down at the spoon. "That's oddly specific."

Toby grinned. "What? I read a lot."

"I don't believe you read anything."

"I read menus. They're literature."

For the next three hours, they worked in a rhythm that surprised her. He'd reach for salt, and she'd already be handing it over. She'd turn to grab a pan, and he'd have it waiting. They bickered through every dish—her insistence on plating, his dismissal of her "London fussiness"; his preference for rustic presentation, her accusation that he was just lazy. But the food went out. Plates returned clean. The Bristol children asked for seconds of what Toby called "Penrose Special" and what Imogen privately thought of as "whatever the hell was in that tin."

Around half past ten, the last guest retreated upstairs, clutching a cup of tea and a promise of full English breakfast in the morning.

Imogen collapsed onto a stool in the corridor. Her feet were screaming. Her apron was stained with something that might have been tomato or might have been blood. She didn't care to investigate.

"You're not bad at this," she said, when Toby emerged from the kitchen wiping his hands on a tea towel.

"High praise from the woman who threatened to beat me with a whisk."

"I did not threaten—"

"You absolutely did. I have witnesses."

She laughed. It surprised her, a raw bark of sound that echoed in the empty corridor. Toby's expression shifted—something softer flickering beneath his usual sardonic ease—and he looked away quickly, as if embarrassed by what he'd seen.

The night air was cold and salted when Imogen stepped outside later, nursing a glass of wine she'd poured herself without asking permission from anyone. She'd expected to be alone.

Toby sat on the end of the pier, legs dangling over the water, a can of something in his hand. He didn't turn as she approached; just held up the can in greeting.

"You know," Imogen said, settling beside him with enough distance to be respectable but close enough that the warmth of his shoulder almost reached hers, "I never thanked you. For showing up."

"You don't need to thank me. I already told you—small town. When something goes wrong, everyone rallies. It's practically the civic charter."

"Portmaw has a civic charter?"

"It's unwritten." He glanced at her. "You're squinting."

"I'm not squinting."

"You're doing that thing where you try to make sense of everything in your head." He waved his can vaguely at the inn, silhouetted against the dark sky. "This place, your grandmother, the whole mess. You're trying to file it away under something you already know."

She bristled. "I'm an architect. I like things to make sense."

"Right. Because buildings always do what you want them to."

"They do if you design them properly."

"And people?"

Imogen was quiet for a moment. The tide was coming in, licking at the pier's legs with a patient, hungry sound.

"People are less reliable," she admitted.

Toby laughed softly. "You can say that again." He took a long drink, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost its playful edge. "You should know something. About my family, I mean."

Imogen went still.

"The Penroses and the Renfrews—there's history there. More than you think." He stared at the dark water. "My mother told me some of it, just before she passed. About your grandmother and mine. About why we stopped talking to each other."

"Why did you stop?"

"Because of something that happened. Something that was buried." He turned to look at her, and in the dim light of the harbour lamppost, his eyes were unreadable. "Figuratively speaking, at least. I'm not sure what's true. But I know the Penroses have been avoiding the Renfrews for thirty years, and everything I thought I knew about why is starting to look wrong."

The silence stretched between them, filled only by the water below.

The postcard in her pocket suddenly felt heavier. Jasper. Her great-uncle. The words "I'll be home soon" and the mysterious X at Pencarrick Cove.

She opened her mouth to ask Toby what he meant, what he'd heard, what his mother had told him—

The inn's front door slammed open.

"Miss Renfrew!" The Bristol father stood silhouetted against the light, frantic. "I'm sorry to interrupt, but one of the kids has locked himself in the bathroom and we think he's using a hair dryer in the bath."

Imogen stared at him.

"As a flotation device," he added, inexplicably.

She was on her feet before she'd consciously decided to move, already running toward the inn, Toby's warning rattling in her head like a stone in a jar.

Something had been buried. And she was starting to suspect it wasn't just treasure.