Necessary Detour (2 page)

A teenage boy in a Shop and Go green T-shirt jumped in to clear the aisle and re-stack the cans. “Don’t worry about it, ma’am. People do this all the time.”

She was careful to avoid his eyes. “Really?”

“Yup. I’ll clean it up.” He gathered soup like he was next in line for a promotion and Nikki smiled at his eagerness. The cowboy had disappeared. She needed to leave the store before anyone else saw her.

Rounding the aisle, she hurried to the checkout with her bags of marshmallows.

“Find everything you need today?” The super-pierced checkout girl didn’t look up.

“Yes, thanks.” From the corner of her eye, Nikki noticed someone move in to line behind her. The cowboy was unloading his groceries onto the conveyer belt—bread, milk, hamburger and buns, bacon, cereal, a pile of frozen dinners, and several cans of chicken noodle soup.

Nikki slid the divider back to him, their hands almost touching.

“Thanks.” The husky voice again. “For some reason I’m craving chicken noodle soup.” His voice held a smirk. Damn. She nodded almost imperceptibly. He wouldn’t be paparazzi. They mostly stayed in L.A. and had an aura of desperation and a predatory look in their eyes. Not that she’d looked into his eyes, but he didn’t fit the bill in any way, shape or form. Whoever he was, his groceries indicated he was staying in the area for at least a few meals and not eating fast food out of a rental car in a celebrity stakeout.

“Two dollars and thirty-two cents.” The checkout girl put the marshmallows in a small plastic bag.

Nikki’s fingers went for her Amex card until she remembered how easy it would be to trace. The cowboy cleared his throat, and Nikki glanced back before thinking. A grin teased the sides of his mouth as he pretended to be interested in the rack of magazines.

He knew who she was. Shit. Did he?

She had to get out of there. She shoved some cash to the checker. “Thanks.” Not waiting for the receipt, Nikki grabbed the bag and rushed through the doors. She’d outrun him to the car. If he chased her, he was bad news. Photographers had ditched groceries before to get a shot of Goldy. It was still possible he was simply someone who recognized her. Or that he was only a man flirting in the grocery store.

Was it only a matter of time until they discovered Goldy was hiding in northeastern Washington State? She hoped not. And she hoped to hell she was wrong about this guy. The last thing she wanted was to return to L.A., and to the fallout of what she’d created in the last few days.

Hurrying to her black, nondescript SUV, Nikki switched the grocery bag to her other hand and was reminded of her diagnosis four nights earlier. “Use the hand, but carefully,” the doctor said. “And hope the nerves weren’t damaged.” The blisters were healing nicely after two days in the Los Angeles hospital but the FBI still hadn’t solved the mystery of her stalker. Los Angeles didn’t feel safe anymore, and Louisa Lake was as close to a home as anything, especially now that she’d given Burn the Beverly Hills house in the settlement.

She closed the car door and waited for Quinn to exit the hardware store. Why had she risked stopping in town? Quinn wanted a can of paint to redo her bedroom at the lakehouse and needed a fishing license, and Nikki relented.

While waiting, she realized they’d forgotten marshmallows in their frenzied grocery run that morning. Toasting marshmallows to golden brown, squishy perfection over the fire pit was tradition at Louisa Lake, and Nikki was determined to proceed as normal this week for her daughter’s sake. Just because the previous twenty-four hours had been a whirlwind of subterfuge, didn’t mean they couldn’t assume a low level of normalcy now that they were almost in the clear. Before the soup fiasco. Ugh. The only better way to call attention to the fact that Goldy was in the Shop and Go would have been an announcement over the intercom and a spotlight.

Jamming the key into the ignition, she watched Quinn stroll across the parking lot swinging the can of paint, oblivious to the emergency at hand. She’d probably chosen shocking pink or lime green, given Quinn’s excitement about an entire week with her mother before starting university. Her mood had sunflowers and popsicles written all over it. She’d been singing along to the radio all the way from Seattle, harboring most of the excitement for the twosome, even though Nikki was making a valiant show of enthusiasm.

“Get in, sweetie.” Nikki threw open the passenger door. “We might have one behind us.”

“Fuck.” Quinn slammed the door.

“No F-word or we’ll have to start the swear jar.” Nikki’s voice was light and singsongy in spite of her worry about the cowboy.

Luckily Quinn was used to avoiding the press. She’d grown up comparing it to a game of dodge ball, the Burnside Family always “it.” Today, the game had higher stakes.

If Nikki’s cover was blown this early, she didn’t know what she’d do. There was no plan B. Besides, she wasn’t just avoiding the media. Shakespeare was still out there, and Quinn had no knowledge of a stalker. She only thought there was the usual advantage to avoiding the media bloodsuckers, both geographically and strategically.

Louisa Lake was twenty-three miles long with a two-mile expanse at its widest. From the air, it looked like a scraggly feather with numerous small bays and inlets on one side.

In the past, the Burnsides had often arrived by float plane to avoid the town. The property’s appeal had been the lake’s remote location and ultimately the inaccessibility of the land where they built the house. One side of the lake was not reachable by road and half of the remainder was barely accessible on old logging roads. That left a small patch dotted with cabins and houses at the feather’s base. The town.

Navigating along the road that hugged the twinkling shoreline, Nikki thought about how she’d run out of the Shop and Go. “I might’ve been too paranoid, honey, but Gateman asked that we lay low.”

“Shhh, Mom. This is my favorite part.” Quinn sang to a Beyoncé song, her voice slightly off-key—a fact that made Nikki both relieved and wistful.

Louisa Lake was surprisingly quiet on that late August morning as Nikki closed the distance between herself and the lake house. Her small dog, Elvis Pugley, hung his mug out the back window, ears flapping in the wind.

“The smells flying past his nose have to be promising good times,” Nikki laughed.

Quinn looked back and giggled. “Good times that involve chipmunks and lots of barking.”

Turning onto an old logging road that followed the shore, they sang along to the radio.

The bumpy surface narrowed at the two-mile mark and branched off in several directions, the farthest road leading to both her place and one other property that shared the small bay. Now that the owner of that house was elderly and incapacitated, the road was rarely used.

Once inside the locked gate, they navigated another quarter mile of bumpy terrain until the dark green metal roof of Birch House was visible through the trees. Birch House. When she and Burn built it seven years ago, he’d named it for the trees that surrounded the property. Nikki simply called it home.

“Here’s your castle, Goldy,” Quinn teased.

“Indeed it is.” As the car slid to a halt, Nikki mentally shed what still remained of the Goldy persona like last year’s snakeskin. She wasn’t a rock star here. She was simply Nikki Crossland. Back to where she started. The thought of her divorce brought the feelings of triumph and loss. She’d have to get used to this, as well as all the other changes meteoring toward her.

Exiting the car, Nikki reacquainted herself with one of her most cherished scents—the northern Cascade forest. The fresh, tangy scent of the Douglas firs that towered above them made her almost dizzy with euphoria. The sight of hemlocks with their curled tops was heaven, as was all the fauna that struggled to thrive beneath the dense canopy of green.

In the last eighteen months Nikki had endured the exhaust of Tokyo, Paris, London, and every major city between Auckland and Madrid on her world tour. Now she was home. This time of year at the end of summer, the birch trees had a sticky-sweet smell, bringing to mind memories of campfires and fishing on another lake in Oregon thirty years before, with her grandparents. The forest was in her blood.

“Smells like home, Mom.” Quinn spun around, her arms flung out.

Nikki closed her eyes. “God, I love this place.”

“Don’t swear.”

Fishing the house keys from her purse, Nikki grabbed a loosely packed duffle bag from the back seat. Having traveled with several thousand tons of equipment for the past twenty years, she’d gone easy this trip. One bag for toiletries, favorite jeans, a few novels.

“They won’t find you here.” Quinn scanned the forest, and then followed her mother up the back stairs.

“They never have.”

The door stuck, swollen from humidity and a year of disuse. Having to shoulder it open was nothing new. Nikki punched a sequence of numbers into their alarm system, while Elvis shot inside from his quick sweep of the driveway. Rescued from an animal shelter only ten months earlier, Elvis had never been to Louisa Lake. “Looks like he approves.” Nikki laughed as he raced down the hall.

She dropped her keys on the hall table and followed Quinn into the front room—which was more than just timber beams and down-filled couches. Burn had designed the house with an award-winning architect, insisting on alcoves, window seats, interesting angles. Disproving that he was merely a pretty face who played guitar like Jimi Hendrix, Burn had discovered a talent for design. Now it belonged only to Nikki—just one of the things Burn gave up for his freedom.

“Don’t ever sell this house.” Quinn threw open the front doors leading outside to the deck that overlooked Half Moon Bay.

The water sparkled in the noontime sun, like diamonds jiggling on the surface of a mirror. After their wild escape from Los Angeles, and, with only three hours sleep, Nikki’s body began to relax enough to allow the exhaustion to set in. Both she and Quinn stood mesmerized by the stillness of the lake. It was so quiet she could hear the tiny birds rustling in the bushes at the beach. She envied their simple task.

Encircling Quinn with motherly arms, she kissed her daughter’s floral-scented hair and pulled her in close. Ah, Louisa Lake. The world stopped here. The two stayed this way until the sound of a car broke through the silence. Nikki froze. If they could hear a vehicle this clearly, it was beyond the locked gate.

“Goddammit.” Nikki turned and ran into the house with Quinn. “Elvis, come.” She shut the doors, fastened the locks, and hurried to the back bedroom, cursing the fact that their Escalade was not in the garage.

Quinn peeked through the print curtains of the guest room. Seeing her opportunity, Nikki took a moment to check for her handgun in a zippered pocket of her purse. The car had to be Harold or one of the Dickersons but still. The blot of blue got bigger as it advanced.

“Pickup truck. Chevy,” Nikki said.

“Not a rental.” Quinn sounded hopeful.

Tinted windows made it impossible to see how many people were inside the truck or if the driver looked like he might quote Shakespeare.

“Keep going, keep going,” Nikki muttered. The truck drove on to the Dickerson place.

“That’s good.” Quinn let the curtain fall back into place.

“They could be turning around.” Nikki held her breath and remembered what the FBI had said about Shakespeare…

“When we find this guy, he’ll probably be someone who hasn’t got enough money for a plane ticket to follow you anywhere. They usually are.” The agent’s words had been reassuring enough for Nikki to insist on leaving Los Angeles without security people. She’d always considered herself highly intuitive and had a good feeling about being at the lake. If that ever changed, she told herself she would leave. But for the first time since they’d left L.A., Nikki questioned the practicality of that decision.

“Quinn, get the binoculars, will you? He might be parked.”
And walking through the woods
. They moved to the kitchen for the best view of the Dickerson’s house.

With binoculars pressed against her face, Quinn looked out the kitchen window to scan the road then the log house across the bay. “Nothing.”

Elvis listened and growled, his two bottom teeth sticking out from his under bite. “Elvis, I wish your size matched your attitude.” Nikki patted his head.

“The truck is in the driveway, and I think Dickerson’s back door is open.” Quinn was an expert with binoculars, having been raised with suspicion.

“Someone must have the key to the gate and house.”
Either that or they had just picked two locks
. The Dickerson’s back door slammed shut. Someone was inside that log house. “Must be a fix-it guy.” She squeezed her daughter’s hand. “All clear. Nothing we can do.”

Soon the fridge was plugged in, taps run, windows thrown open, and food put away. While taking stock of supplies in the pantry, a truck’s noise startled Nikki. She bounded into the guest room to watch the blue Chevy pass Birch House without slowing, the open window showing the silhouette of a man at the wheel. It drove out of sight. Gone.

Taking the stairs two at a time, Nikki headed for her bedroom. “I’m putting on my bathing suit,” she called to Quinn. A silver-framed photo of Nikki and Burn smiled from her bedside table. Taking it in her hands, she remembered they’d been casually hugging, like the friends they’d become, when Quinn yelled, “Say cheese!” In some ways, Burn had never fit in here, more suited to the Los Angeles rock scene with his need for attention.

She slid the photo in the drawer, face down. This was her bedroom now, and her ex-husband had no reason to be here.

Quinn opened and closed drawers in her room across the hall.

“Whatcha doin’, girly?” Nikki asked. God she loved this kid. Quinn was the one person in her world who truly loved her, flaws and all. And no one knew better how flawed Nikki was, especially in the mother department.