The Billionaire Bid

Apparently his guess had been wrong, however. I’m with the Kerrigan County Historical Society, she’d told Ross. And she wanted the building. I think it would make a wonderful museum.

Dez snorted. The trouble with the history-loving types was that they were completely impractical. The woman was totally out of touch with reality or she wouldn’t have suggested anything so patently ridiculous as turning the Tyler-Royale store into a museum.

His aunt Essie would have done the same sort of thing, of course. Dez remembered visiting Essie when he was a kid, and being creeped out and fascinated all at the same time. In Essie’s house, there was no telling what you might run into at the next turn. He’d found a full human skeleton in a bedroom closet once; Essie had calmly told him it was left over from the personal effects of the first doctor who’d set up practice in Kerrigan County.

And that had been well before Essie’s house had formally become a museum. Though he hadn’t been inside the place in at least a decade, he had no trouble imagining how much more stuff she’d collected over the years. He’d been frankly amazed, when Essie died, that they hadn’t had to tear the house down in order to extricate her body from all the junk she’d collected.

At least this young woman appeared to have a little more sense than Essie had—she didn’t seem to want to live in her museum. Other than that, she might as well be Essie’s clone.

Apart from looks, of course. Essie had been tall and thin, seemingly all angular bone and flyaway gray hair, while this young woman was small and delicately built and rounded in all the right places. She had the big, wide-set, dark brown eyes of a street urchin—an unusual color for a redhead. Odd, how her hair had seemed sprinkled with gold under the myriad lights in the ballroom…

“Dez?” the CEO said. “I’ll let you address that question.”

Dez pulled himself back to the press conference, to a sea of expectant faces. What the hell was the question?

“The Chronicle reporter asked about your plans for the building,” Ross Clayton pointed out.

I owe you one, buddy, Dez thought gratefully. At least it was an easy question—a slow pitch low and outside, easy to hit out of the park. He stepped up to the microphone. “That won’t take long to explain,” he said, “because I don’t have any yet.”

A ripple of disbelief passed over the crowd. The reporter from the newspaper waved a hand again. “You expect us to believe you bought that building without any idea what you’re going to do with it?”

“I haven’t bought the building,” Dez pointed out. “I’ve bought an option to buy the building.”

“What’s the difference?” the reporter scoffed. “You wouldn’t put out money for the fun of it. So what are you planning to do with the building?”

Another reporter, the one from the television station, waved a hand but didn’t wait for a cue before she said, “Are you going to tear it down?”

“I don’t know yet, Carla. I told you, I haven’t made any plans at all.”

“You don’t know, or you just won’t say?” she challenged. “Maybe the truth is you simply don’t want to talk about what will happen to the building until it’s too late for anyone to do anything to save it.”

“Give me a break here,” he said. “The announcement that the store was closing came as a surprise to me, too.”

“But you leaped right in with cash in hand.” It was the Chronicle man again.

“It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve bought something without knowing what I’d end up doing with it.”

The television reporter bored in. “Isn’t it true in those cases that you’ve always torn the buildings down?”

“I suppose so.” Dez ran over the last few years, the last dozen projects. “Yes, I think that’s true. But that doesn’t mean…” What had happened to the easy question, he thought irritably, the slow, low, outside pitch that should have been so simple? He felt like someone had tossed a cherry bomb at him instead. “Look, folks, I’ll tell you the same thing I told the young lady from the historical society. Just because there’s already been one deal doesn’t mean there couldn’t be another one.”

“Then you’d resell the property?”

“I’d consider it. I’m a businessman—I’ll consider any reasonable option that’s presented to me.”

“Including preserving the building?” It was the television reporter again.

“Including that.” Irritation bubbled through Dez. Damn reporters; they were making it sound like he carried a sledgehammer around with him just in case he got a chance to knock something down. “As long as we’re talking about preservation, though, let me give the do-gooders just one word of warning. Don’t go telling me what I should do with the building unless you have the money to back up your ideas. I’m not going to take kindly to anyone nosing into my business and telling me what I should do with my property if it’s my money you plan to spend on the project. I think that’s all.”

The reporters obviously realized that they’d pushed as far as was safe, and they began to trickle out of the room. A crew moved in to tear down lights and roll up cables.

In the anteroom behind the stage, Ross Clayton paused and eyed Dez with a grin. “Thanks for snatching the headlines away from the question of what’s going to happen to all my employees,” he said. “After the challenge you issued, that pack of wolves will be too busy ripping into you to check out anything I said.”

That afternoon Gina dug out the blueprints of Essie Kerrigan’s house from the attic closet where they’d been stored, and when she finished work for the day she took them home with her. Not that she was any kind of expert; expanding the museum would take not only a good architect but an engineer. Still, she might get some ideas. She might even have missed something obvious.

But when she unrolled the papers on her tiny kitchen table, she had to smother a dispirited sigh. For a little while today, it looked as if she’d found the perfect solution. It was so ideal. So sensible.

But then Dez Kerrigan had gotten in the way, and she was back at square one. Only now, as she looked at the floor plans, she was finding it difficult to focus on the possibilities. All she could see at the moment were the obstacles—the challenges which stood in the way of turning an old house into a proper museum. She had done too good a job of convincing herself that the Tyler-Royale building was the answer.

She unfolded the age-yellowed site map. Originally the house had stood alone on a full city block. Desmond Kerrigan had centered his house along one edge of his property, to leave the maximum space behind it for an elaborate garden, and he had built it facing east so it could look proudly out over the business district to the lakefront. But through the years his descendants had sold off bits and pieces of the land. The garden had been plowed up and broken into lots long ago. Later the area to each side of the house had been split off and smaller homes built there, and the street in front had been widened. The result was that the Kerrigan mansion was surrounded, hemmed in, with just a handkerchief-size lawn left in front and only a remnant of the once-grand garden behind.

It wasn’t enough, Gina thought. Still, it was all they had to work with.

She weighed down the corners of the blueprints with the day’s mail so she could keep looking at the drawings while she fixed herself a chicken stir-fry. Perhaps some radically new idea would leap out at her and solve the problem…For instance, what if instead of simply building over the garden, they were to excavate and add a lower level as well?

Nice idea, she concluded, but one to run past an engineer. Would it even be possible to get heavy equipment into that small space? And how risky would it be to dig directly next to a foundation that was well over a century old?

Finally, Gina rolled up the plans and turned on the minuscule television set beside the stove. Even the news would be less depressing than her reflections at the moment.

But when the picture blinked on, the screen was filled with a shot of the Tyler-Royale store.

On the other hand, maybe it won’t be less depressing.

“…and a final-close-out sale will begin next week,” the female reporter—the one who had been standing next to Gina at the press conference—announced.

The anchorman shook his head sadly. “What a shame. Is there any word of what will happen to the building, Carla?”

“That question was asked at the press conference, Jason, but Mr. Kerrigan would only say that he had made no plans.” She smiled coyly. “However, we did get a hint that he’s negotiating a deal of some sort with the Kerrigan County Historical Society museum.”

Gina’s wooden spoon slipped and hot oil and vegetables surged over the edge of the pan onto her index finger. Automatically she stuck the burned tip in her mouth.

The reporter went on, “The museum’s curator, Gina Haskell, was at the press conference but refused to comment—”

Gina stared unbelieving at the reporter. “I didn’t refuse to comment,” she protested. “I told you there was nothing going on!”

“—and when I talked to the president of the historical society just now, he would only say that it would be a crime for such a landmark building to be destroyed.”

Gina put her elbows on the edge of the counter and dropped her head into her hands. They’d actually called her boss for a comment. The boss she hadn’t bothered to tell about the events of the day, because her harebrained notion had come to nothing.

“Indeed it would be a crime,” the anchor broke in.

The reported nodded. “However, an arrangement like that would be a first for Dez Kerrigan. He admitted today that in his entire career in property development he’s never preserved a building.”

“Hard to believe,” the anchor said. “Keep us posted on the historical society’s preservation efforts, Carla.”

“What preservation efforts?” Gina groaned.

The phone rang. She stared at it warily, but she knew that putting off answering wasn’t going to make the president of the historical society any easier to deal with. The trouble was that she didn’t blame him for being furious with her. At least he hadn’t told the reporter that the whole thing was news to him.