Last Chance Beauty Queen (Last Chance #3)(12)
Author: Hope Ramsay

Then they could attack the other problems one by one.

Caroline smoothed her windblown hair back into its ponytail, turned in her seat, and gave his Lordship a long stare. “You were good with the ladies at lunch, I’ll give you that. They can be rough on outsiders, you know. But, um, Daddy is a whole different animal. So please, don’t confront him or anything, okay?”

“I wasn’t planning on any confrontations. I rather thought I’d talk with him.” He gave her a stiff smile and opened his door.

She did likewise, and followed him to the remains of a twenty-foot fiberglass statue of Jesus that lay on its side. Jesus had been pretty much totaled by a Country Pride Chicken truck. But at one time, he had presided over the parking lot with a sign in his holy hands saying, “Golfing for God.” His halo had included an additional sign telling the world that this particular mini-golf place featured a life-sized Noah’s Ark.

Hugh stared at the wreckage with the oddest expression on his face. By the way the corners of his mouth curled up, he seemed amused. That wasn’t the reaction Caroline had been looking for.

Shocked, awed, appalled—any of those she could have worked with. But amused was a big problem.

“You think it’s funny?” she asked, her words coming out just a tad sharp.

The words missed their mark. “It’s rather charming, actually.”

“Charming?” Boy, she hadn’t seen that one coming. “No one has ever called Golfing for God charming.”

“Well, it is, quite.” He turned on his heel and strode off toward the pathway that led to Noah’s Ark and the golf course. The truck accident was only one of the calamities that had befallen Golfing for God last October. A freak lightning storm had triggered an explosion that had taken out the propane tank that fed the tiki torches. The tikis had been blown to smithereens and ignited the woods that surrounded the golf course. The charred remnants of pine trees still lined the path, and it looked as if Daddy and members of the Committee to Resurrect Golfing for God had been out here trimming back the kudzu that had taken over the last few months.

Caroline traipsed after Baron Woolham as he strode down the ruined path toward Noah’s Ark. The Ark wasn’t actually life-sized, no matter what the sign out front said. Caroline had realized this truth when she was about nine or ten and had figured out that the real Noah’s Ark would have had to be ginormous in order to carry all the species of life on earth. The Ark at the golf course was about the size of a modest horse barn. Two elephants would have been a tight squeeze, which made it kind of puny by Ark standards.

Of course, Daddy always argued that since the Ark at Golfing for God was big enough to house a petting zoo comprised of a longhorn steer, a llama, a goat, a sheep, and a bunny, it was, therefore, life-sized. Caroline had eventually conceded that point, but continued to feel a certain level of disappointment that the Ark was so small. To make matters worse, the older she got, the smaller the Ark seemed.

The Ark also housed Daddy’s office and the check-in where customers paid their greens fees and got their little colored balls and putters. The check-in counter was buttoned up with a shutter that needed painting, as did the Ark itself. Hugh stopped, put his hands on his hips, and looked up at the building, which towered about fifty feet above them. Caroline stood behind him and searched the grounds for Daddy.

She found her father over in the back nine pruning azaleas. Daddy turned toward them, as if sensing their arrival. “Hey darlin’,” he said, then leaned his lopping shears against the rock that sealed Jesus’s tomb. He headed in their direction—a path that took him through the hole representing the resurrection.

Caroline wondered what his Lordship was thinking about Daddy’s black T-shirt, which boasted the slogan “God is. Any questions?” across the chest in huge white letters. Daddy’s salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back into a long braid that reached halfway down his back. His goatee, beer belly, biker boots, and earring gave him the appearance of a motorcycle gang member, but not exactly a member of Hell’s Angels. Daddy’s angels were probably serious hallucinations, born of the time he’d spent in Vietnam.

Daddy walked up to her and pulled her into one of his big bear hugs. “Mmmm, how’s my littlest angel?”

It always felt safe inside his big arms. Try as she might to run away from Daddy and his eccentricities, every time he gave her a big hug and called her his “littlest angel,” she wanted to burrow down into his shoulder and never come up for air. When she was a little girl, before she realized that the Ark was not life-sized, she had believed that her daddy hung the moon.

The truth had hurt. A lot.

“Uh, Daddy,” Caroline said, “I want to introduce you to Hugh deBracy, Baron Woolham. Baron Woolham, this is my father, Elbert Rhodes.”

The two men stared at each other. Daddy looked at his Lordship as if he had just flown in from some alien land, which was not really too far from the truth. Hugh studied Daddy as if he really wanted to get to know the man, which made no sense at all.

Daddy narrowed his gaze in a way that made him look semicrazy. Daddy’s eyes were really pale, and they could be pretty scary when he wanted them to be. Hugh seemed impervious to Daddy’s put-on eccentric routine.

“So,” Daddy drawled, “you figure you’re going to make me an offer I can’t refuse?”

“Well, Mr. Rhodes, the truth is I’ve already offered as much money as I can afford. So I don’t think money is going to get you to give up your land.”

“I reckon that’s why you got my daughter involved.”

“Now Daddy, don’t—” Caroline started, but was unable to finish.

“Well,” Hugh interrupted, “it did occur to me when I learned of the connection between Senator Warren’s aide and this property that getting your daughter involved might be helpful.”

Indignation stiffened Caroline’s spine. “Daddy, I never said that I was going to help him—”

Elbert waved her words away. “Daughter, you should know better than to try to walk a line as fine as this one. But I’m going to forgive you for it because I know your boss is a hard man. And besides, just this morning your momma reminded me that the Lord has a plan, and this embarrassing and difficult situation might be something He thinks is necessary.”

“Daddy, I…” Her throat closed up, and she couldn’t go on. This was so typical of Daddy. Just when she was about at her limit, he would say something like this, and she’d be reduced to a puddle of butter. Daddy’s ability to forgive almost anything was something Caroline loved about him. Lots of people talked about forgiveness, but Daddy lived it every day of his life.

Daddy turned toward his Lordship with one of his patented good-ol’-boy grins. “Would you like a tour, so you’ll know exactly what you’re trying to destroy?”

Once again, the corners of Hugh’s mouth quirked. Was he laughing at Daddy? Caroline felt her hackles rise. Daddy was eccentric, but she hated people who laughed at him. Up to now, Hugh had been pretty polite and really nice to everyone in Last Chance. With the possible exception of Bubba Lockheart. And that had been a big misunderstanding.

“A tour would be lovely, thank you,” Hugh said.

Elbert headed toward Adam and Eve, the first hole on the course, talking over his shoulder as he walked. “We have eighteen holes here, the front nine are dedicated to the Old Testament and the back nine are all New Testament…” Daddy droned on about the fiberglass and the water circulation system and half a dozen other issues.

Hugh surprised Caroline by clucking in admiration in all the right places. The man even asked a number of intelligent questions about the damage the lightning storm had done.

When they got to the plague of frogs, which at one time had frolicked on fiberglass lily pads while spitting water in synchronized bursts over the fairway, the two men stopped for a long moment. The lightning storm and subsequent problems with the water circulation system had shattered the frogs’ fiberglass bodies. Now only a few shredded frog’s legs and the guts of their spitting mechanisms remained.

Daddy and Hugh hunkered down to inspect the damage and began to talk to each other in a language so filled with engineering terms that Caroline couldn’t follow. The eccentric and the Englishman seemed to be completely copacetic despite the differences in their ages and backgrounds. She was suddenly tempted to ask his Lordship what he wanted more—to fix the frogs or buy the land. At the moment, she would have bet he was all for fixing the frogs.

That thought arrowed right through her. She liked Lord Woolham when he behaved like this. He wasn’t being bombastic or arrogant. He wasn’t appalled by Golfing for God. He was interested. And he was treating her father with respect.

Outsiders rarely did that on a first meeting.

Maybe this was a good thing, given what she’d learned that morning at the courthouse. She didn’t want to scare him. She needed to reason with him.

Eventually Hugh stood up and leaned back against the sign that bore the verse from Exodus 8:6 about Aaron calling the frogs out of the Nile. “Elbert, I’d be most interested in learning more about your business plan. I have just the spot for a small putting-only golf course like this at the nature center on my family’s land near Woolham House. I’m thinking maybe a course dedicated to garden gnomes.”

“Because everyone knows that gnomes are really a part of nature—as opposed to say snakes or frogs,” Caroline snarked out loud and then immediately regretted it. She should know better than to open her mouth and say something like that.

Hugh turned and arched his eyebrow. He might have looked snotty and arrogant were it not for the fact that the corner of his lips were quivering. Like maybe he thought her joke was funny.

“Well,” he said, his voice rich and warm, “my aunt has amassed a very large collection of garden gnome statues, and I’m thinking a golf course like this might be a good way to get them out of the vegetable garden.”

Daddy laughed right out loud.

Hugh gave him an imperious stare, but now his eyes were smiling, too.

“So tell me,” his Lordship continued in that stuffy accent of his, “where did you acquire all these statues?”

“We didn’t purchase them, if that’s what you’re asking,” Daddy said. “Rocky’s grandfather was a fiberglass artist. He made most of them, and I don’t think I could rival his talents.”

Hugh turned away and made a great show of inspecting the statues. “Well,” he said at last, “the fiberglass art is really quite amazing.”

“Which is one of the reasons I don’t want to sell the land,” Daddy said.

“Oh, but the statues could be saved, couldn’t they? I mean wouldn’t it make more sense to have the golf course someplace where there are more people? Like”—his Lordship shrugged—“I don’t know, the guidebook I have indicates that Hilton Head and Myrtle Beach are very big on golf.”

“I don’t live in Hilton Head or Myrtle Beach.”