A Month at the Shore (29 page)

Laura watched him, delighted by the sight. His khakis were soaked to the knees, his yellow tie was blowing sideways like a kite-tail in the wind. He had a grin on his face that would have melted the most hardened of hearts. For all of his education and breeding, Kendall Barclay was a townie to the core: it was obvious that he was perfectly content-being on that particular patch of the planet. The captain's genes ran true.

Corinne herself looked wonderfully carefree and relaxed. She and Ken were in animated conversation, which just went to show that Corinne
could
fly a kite and talk at the same time, despite her fears. As Laura approached them, she could see that Ken was having a lot to do with her sister's mood; there was just something about him that put people at ease. The dog's owner had joined them, and a couple of passers-by. Everyone was having a laugh over the purloined shoe.

This was a whole new Chepaquit—and it was definitely where Laura wanted to be. The realization came like a bolt of lightning and an immediate crack of thunder; she felt it race through her body and leave her in a state of electrified shock and with her ears ringing.

But was it Ken or was it home that was claiming her?

It couldn't be home, not with someone's bones in their compost.

It had to be Ken, she decided, dumbfounded.

****

"Hey, here's an idea," Corinne suggested
after their return from the beach
. "Since they won't let us work in the nursery, why don't we work on the house?
We have a lot of daylight left. We can do
... windows!"

Snack, alas, did not do windows. But he did do painting, so he dragged out an old gallon of gray paint from the basement and went to work on the floor of the wide front porch, while the women tackled the windows on the side of the house that faced the sea.

Laura suspected that they were all somehow whistling past the graveyard, but it felt good to be doing something constructive again. The first window she tackled was the filthy one on the second-floor landing. She was sitting on its ledge, cleaning the painted-shut upper pane, when the phone rang. Slithering back out into the hall, she answered before the machine kicked in. It was Ken.

"Hi," she said, unable to keep from smiling. She was picturing him on the beach, in his soggy pants, returning Corinne's hijacked shoe.

"I'm at Creasey's Marina," he told her. "They're launching my boat in the next hour: we have to wait for high tide. Come down and help me eat all the fortune cookies in my pocket."

"Is that all you do? Play? Come here and wash windows," she countered, not entirely kidding.

"Ah
... sorry, sorry, can't," he said. He sounded sincere, as if there were nothing he'd like to do more. "You know the old saying: time and tide wait for no man."

"I know another saying: something, something, men and their toys."

"Hey, unfair. Except for the car, the boat is really my only toy. And it's a hand-me-down boat at that."

"Such things are called 'antiques,'" she said dryly. "In this case, the correct term would be 'antique yacht.' "

He sighed. "It's just a small old boat, Laura. Still carrying that chip on your shoulder? I thought we'd been through all that."

"Are you kidding? I have enough material for years of therapy."

"Baloney. You just want to think you do."

"Excuse me?"

"Come over to the marina," he coaxed. "And I'll elaborate."

"Ken
... really, I can't. Everyone here is too on edge. We need to hang together now. To do something together.
 
But
... open a cookie for me," she said impulsively. "Tell me my fortune."

"Can do," he said, and she heard the rustle of cellophane. "Okay, it says, 'Come down and help me eat all the fortune cookies in my pocket.' "

Her laugh was beguiled as she asked, "What does it really say?"

There was the slightest hesitancy in
his voice before he answered, "
'Be careful what you wish for.' "

"Oh, that one. That's so overused," she said, actually resenting the slip of paper. "Open another one."

"Okey-dokey." Again the crackle, again the slight hesitancy before he said, " 'Be careful what you wish for.' "

She humphed and said, "There is
no
quality control in fortune-cookie factories anymore. Do another one."

Sheepishly, he said, "That's all I got. I had three with me. I may have exaggerated my holdings."

"What did yours say?" she asked, almost afraid to ask.

His soft laugh was more bemused than cheerful. "Actually, mine had the complementary sentiment to yours: 'Things are not what they seem.' "

"Good grief," Laura said, more affected than she would have liked to be by the ominous proverbs. "Whoever the fortune-writer was, he could use some prescription medication. What a downhead. Whatever happened to cute little sayings like 'You will gain wealth and live long'?"

"Ah, the guy probably just had a bad day at the office," Ken said, dismissing him. "When will I see you again?"

"We have lots of Windex. When can you be here?"

"An hour, an hour and a half."

"Too late. The sun will be down and the streaks wouldn't show."

"Can I come over anyway?" His voice was a low, irresistible plea. "We could play Scrabble."

"How persistent you are," she said, smiling.

"I'm a good speller, that's all; I like to show off."

She was charmed into capitulation. "All right. You win. Scrabble it is."

"An hour and a half, tops," he promised.

Whatever game they were playing, it wasn't Scrabble. With a smile that wouldn't go away, Laura returned to her Windex and was surprised to see that her sister had abandoned her post. Wandering through the farmhouse, she tracked Corinne to the front porch.

She was standing alongside Snack, facing down the law.

No question, Laura felt as if she were watching a scene out of a Western. There they were: homesteader Corinne, in bib overalls and clutching a window-cleaning rag; prodigal son Snack, looking lean and rough and dangerous with his stubbled chin and a red bandanna tied around his head; and the posse, in the form of two investigators who weren't looking too terribly thrilled with Snack at the moment.

"You got a warrant?" Snack was asking with barely concealed contempt.

Laura couldn't believe he was actually saying that. "Snack, don't," she commanded.

The men, dressed casually but looking official all the same, sounded equally contemptuous. "All we're
saying
is, it's not the best thing to be painting the porch right now, before the death investigation is complete."

"And all
I'm
saying is, if you don't have a homicide investigation, then you don't have cause. Go away and let me paint."

Jumping in to save Snack from being dragged off in handcuffs behind their horses, Laura smiled sweetly and said to them, "My brother is only home for a very limited time, and naturally he wants to get as much accomplished as possible. Since we can't conduct our Founders Week sale as we'd planned, you can see how frustrated we all naturally feel."

"It can't be helped, ma'am."

"Yes. We understand. I'll speak with Chief Mellon about whether we can paint or not, and in the meantime, we will leave all the bird poop DNA right where it is on the porch so that it's available to you in your ongoing investigation."

She picked up the brush lying across the gallon container, then picked up the paint. "Snack? The sooner they get done, the sooner we can get back to the business of saving the ranch. Shall we leave them to it?"

Put that way, Snack couldn't say no. He turned to go back into the house and then, maybe to have the last word, he turned back around. An expert spitter from way back, he let loose a missile of phlegm that went flying over the banister and within a foot of the investigator who both looked and talked like Joe Friday.

It could have been worse,
Laura told herself, sighing. At least Snack was still a good shot. Without daring to look at the investigators' reactions, she followed her brother and sister inside.

Ken stood on the sidelines at the marina, watching Jay Creasey slide his
trailer
under the bow of sweet
Eliza
in preparation for her launch.

He shouldn't be feeling so good, he knew. With Shore Gardens shut down and a forensic exam in the works, there was more than enough gloom to cast a pall over the moment. But the moment was traditionally one of the sweetest of the year, and savoring it was almost automatic.

And besides, there were reasons to feel optimistic about the ongoing investigation. He had learned from Chief Andy Mellon that the woman's bones had been in the compost pile for a long time, perhaps generations. That was the initial word from the ME, and Ken had taken heart from it. He wanted no one—no one—in Laura's own generation to be under a cloud of suspicion.

Still, assuming that it was a murder, which seemed likely, it was disheartening to realize that an obvious suspect was Laura's uncle, and that another might be Laura's father. Ken did not want it to be Laura's anything.

He had never known Norbert Shore, who'd been in prison with cancer by the time Ken became old enough to learn the story of how the man had strangled his wife. But Ken certainly had known Norbert's brother, and as far as he was concerned, Oliver Shore had been nothing less than a foul-tempered menace. No wonder Laura and Snack had run as fast and as far as they could to escape him.

Ken's newly avowed goal was clear: somehow he had to make Chepaquit accept Laura and Snack and Corinne for who they were and not hold the sins of their uncle—or of their father—against them. He was ready and willing to throw his name, his money, and his time into the effort.

If
Laura would let him. She had this thing about fighting her own battles, and Ken wasn't altogether sure that she was currently signing up enlistees in her cause.

His reverie was broken when Jay Creasey leaned out the window of his cab and yelled, "Hey, Cap! You got all your dock lines set up?"

"Yessir," he told the marina manager. "And fenders at the ready."

"You're gonna need 'em. Wind's pickin' up. Want some help takin' her around?"

"Nah. But if someone's on the dock to take a line, I wouldn't mind."

Creasey nodded. "Last thing you need is a big fat gouge in that paint job," he agreed. "Nice work, by the way."

High praise, coming from Jay Creasey. Ken said to the older man, "Thankee, sir. I try my best."

"You ever quit your day job," Creasey added with a gruff nod, "you come round to the office, and I'll put you right to work."

It would be dream work, as far as Ken was concerned. Messing around in boats all day? Dream work. He grinned and said, "I might take you up on that offer—but only if you let me pay
you."

Creasey snorted and then began barking instructions to the help, a muscular kid with a ponytail who looked as if he would run screaming from anything so terrifying as a desk.

He'll probably end up skipper of a windjammer in the Caribbean, whereas I—I'll still be running Chepaquit Savings.

Ken had to smile. It happened every year around launching time: the restless wanderlust, the second-guessing about might-have-beens. So it was coming as a bit of a pleasant shock that this year, he was feeling happy to be sticking around Chepaquit. He envisioned taking Laura sailing, taking Laura dining, taking Laura dancing, taking Laura to bed. Stick a bottle of Windex in his hand, and he could even envision himself
...
.

Okay, something was going on here. The day that Ken Barclay could picture himself with a bottle of Windex in his hand was the day that he was in trouble. What the hell
was
going on here? The biggest commitment he'd ever made in his life was to something called
Eliza.
Someone called Laura—that was a whole new level of commitment. Man, a whole new level.

His musings were so intense, so real, that he had to be chided back to the present.

"Yo! Move it!" Creasey roared.

Ken was standing right in the path of the
truck
that was guiding the
Eliza
down the ways and into the sea.

Embarrassed to be yelled at like some landlubber, he jumped clear and watched with his usual fascination as the small, graceful sloop made her annual slide into the warming waters of Nantucket Sound. The
Eliza
slipped off the padded arms of the hydraulic cradle and dipped and bobbed becomingly; she was afloat again.

Ken climbed aboard the sloop from the wobbly floating dock that was casually moored alongside the deep end of the ways. The little ship yielded gently to the pressure of his boarding and then righted herself, ready to go.

It felt good—it felt great—to be waterborne again after months of being on land. Ken thought of his ancestor Captain Barclay, as he always did, with a mixture of awe and sympathy. To captain a whaling ship successfully around the world with nothing but the stars to steer her by, only to lose her so close to home—that was enough to break any man's spirit. Never mind that at least half a dozen other vessels in New England foundered during the same storm, and with far greater loss of life. By all accounts, Captain Barclay after the storm was not the same man as before it.