Shadows on the Sand (18 page)

“I grabbed one of the little girls and climbed into the van. I made sure I had the seat in the far back corner. Everyone was so intent on saving the kids that no one thought about me being along. It was so confusing with parents and kids and crying and vomiting. I just walked out of the ER when everyone was distracted.”

“But motorcycles?”

“Two bikers were in the ER because Stu had fallen and gotten brush burns and scrapes all up his side, and he thought he might have broken his wrist. When they left, I followed them out and asked for a ride. They took one look at me and my clothes and my desperation and told me to climb behind James. They were on their way to Yellowstone, and they took me along. We stopped at the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley and the Tetons and other neat places on the way. They were great, so normal, just regular guys looking for a fun vacation. They treated me like their little sister and bought me real clothes and fed me. After we visited Yellowstone, they even bankrolled my flight east. I’m living with my great-uncle.”

“So you’re vacationing around the country while I’m sneaking home by
a roundabout route in case they didn’t believe I was dead. I bet you had more fun than me.”

Jase smiled, something she’d never have seen back at the compound. There he was so intense, so committed to doing Michael’s will that he was like a robot. She’d always thought it a wonder his voice wasn’t a tinny monotone.

Not that she’d ever said that aloud. Too many people were already too happy to report her failings to Michael, even stupid ones like saying someone had a robot voice.

In Carrie’s kitchen that first day, Andi found herself smiling back at Jase in spite of the unwanted memories he represented. She noticed how sad his eyes were, and her heart ached. She understood the sadness.

Could she trust him? She’d love to have someone she could talk to and know that he understood. But she had to go slow and be sure. What if he had been sent to find her?

Improbable but not impossible.

But now Jase was dead.

And people were talking about The Pathway.

She shivered. She no longer felt safe in Seaside.

I
ran upstairs to change, telling myself not to read more into Greg’s invitation to go fishing than was there. He’d asked me because the day had turned unexpectedly warm. He wanted to fish, but he didn’t want to go alone. His brothers and his friends were all at work—or in Mexico in the case of the missionary. I was available, and in a moment of desperation, he turned to me.

But I was grinning like an idiot, and my heart was hammering, and it wasn’t from the exertion of climbing the steps.

“Well, don’t you look like the cat who swallowed the canary,” Linds said when she saw me.

“Can’t stop to talk.” I rushed past her to my room. I didn’t want to share my happy buzz even with her.

I heard a disgruntled
huh
as I closed the door. I got rid of the khaki slacks I wore as part of the café uniform and pulled on jeans. My Carrie’s Café shirt went in the hamper, and I yanked on a long-sleeved blue knit shirt that made my eyes seem bluer than they were. I grabbed the navy fleece jacket Greg had suggested I bring and was out of there.

“Where are you going?” Lindsay called after me.

“Fishing.”

“Fishing? You don’t know how to fish!”

I stopped at the door and grinned at her. “And your point is?”

Greg drove us to the creatively named Twelfth Street Marina at Twelfth and Bay. In all the years I’d lived in Seaside, I’d never been to a marina. I don’t
know what I expected, maybe yachts and superposh vessels, but most of the boats moored in the slips were practical bay boats like Greg’s proved to be. I did see a couple of white, sleek yachts, and though I knew they were by no means the largest there were, I was still impressed. On one, an extremely handsome man with short dark hair sunned himself as he talked to a shorter, stockier man standing almost at attention. Who, I wondered as I followed Greg through the maze of floating docks, had decided yachts should be white?

Greg’s boat was blue and white and obviously well enjoyed. It was neat and tidy in spite of its dings and scratches, and somehow the yachts now looked effete and phony. Here was a real boat owned by a real person, not a boy toy owned by some rich guy with a fake tan.

The real boat rocked when I stepped on. Why that surprised me, I don’t know. I’d seen enough movies with rocking boats. I gave a little bleat and grabbed a seat back.

Greg swallowed a laugh, not disguising it very well as a cough. I fake glared as he handed me a couple of poles and some other equipment. When the boat rolled under him as he stepped on, I made sure I didn’t even flinch.

“Sit here.” He indicated the seat next to the driver’s seat. I sat. He turned the key, the engine roared, and off we went.

“How big?” I yelled over the motor’s noise.

“Eighteen foot I/O.” I nodded like I understood.

He grinned. “Inboard/outboard.”

He stopped at a spot in the bay that looked just like every other spot to me. The sun beat down, and I thought my jacket superfluous. I squinted even with my sunglasses.

“Let’s get you set.” Greg handed me a pole that felt big in my hands.
Then he opened the small cooler he had brought and pulled out a chunk of flesh. I must have looked as
ick-ick
as I felt because he reached for my hook without a word.

I swallowed. “I’ll do it. Just tell me how.”

“You sure?”

His doubts about my heartiness straightened my somewhat spaghetti spine. “I can do it.”

“Sure you can. It’s just squid. People eat squid all the time.”

“I don’t.” I took the strip of bait he handed me. “Calling it calamari doesn’t fool me one bit.” I looked at the wicked barbs on the hook and thought about impaled fingers.

“Fold the bait in half and push it on.”

I did as I was told and felt a surge of satisfaction as the squid got pierced and my digits didn’t.

“Just drop it over the side,” he said. “When you feel something take it, wait a second, then give a tug to set the hook.”

I stuck the end of the pole over the side and the line dropped into the water, dragged down by the weight of the bait and sinker. I tried to follow my squid visually, but it was swallowed by the opaque depths. I thought for a moment about all the water beneath me and all the strange and unknown creatures swimming in it, and gulped. Then I pushed that thought aside for a more appropriate time to think on it, like in a nightmare or something.

Greg fixed his own line and threw it in. He sat on the back of one of the seats and began whistling softly. If it was a specific tune, I’d never heard it.

I tried not to squirm, but being with him in this boat felt almost as claustrophobic as had the cab of his truck. I was nervous, excited, a breath away from hyperventilating. Alone with him twice in two days. Yikes!

“Are you allowed to talk while you fish?” I needed to know if I was going to break some unwritten fishing rule and make him mad when my
nerves got the best of me and I gushed with all the discipline of a volcano spitting lava. “I mean, can they hear you and then they stay away?”

“You can talk quietly.”

I took a deep breath because I was going to tell him something I hadn’t even mentioned to Lindsay. “I think Andi has something to do with The Pathway.”

He looked at me sharply. “Why do you say that?”

“When you were talking about Jase and The Pathway at the café, I was watching her. She turned pale.”

“Maybe that was her reaction to learning a guy she knew was dead.”

A reasonable possibility. “Somehow I don’t see her as that sensitive to something that doesn’t involve her, if you know what I mean.”

“Sixteen-year-old self-involvement.”

“Right. And then she went to that back booth and just stared into space.”

“Again it could be a reaction to Jase’s death.”

I made a “maybe” face.

“How would she know about The Pathway in any personal way?” he asked.

“I don’t know, but she appeared in Seaside out of nowhere, and she never mentions any family except Clooney.”

He raised an eyebrow at me.

“Yeah, I know. Sounds like me at that age. I got creative and made up a mother in the military.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. At the time I thought I was quite clever.”

“And Mary Prudence bought it?”

“I don’t think so. But she never made an issue of it. I mean, there have
to be lots of kids left when their mothers are deployed. It could have been true.”

“Sure, but a left-behind kid isn’t usually alone in a new town with a little sister in tow.”

I watched a pair of sea gulls wheeling and diving, squabbling over something one of them had in its beak. The gull with the food opened his mouth to tell the marauder off, and whatever he was holding tumbled toward the water. A third gull that had been floating beside us took off, caught the falling food just before it hit the water, and flew away before the other two even realized what was happening. With outraged screams, they followed.

Greg stood suddenly, completely focused on his pole. Its tip was bending.

I jumped to my feet. “You’ve got something!”

He didn’t respond, too intent on reeling in his catch. Up came a weird-looking fish, all horizontal instead of vertical like the pictures of fish I’d seen.

“What in the world?”

“Flounder.”

“Really? They’re sideways, sort of like a pancake.” All I ever saw when Warren went fishing were the filets. I stared at the sideways flounder. “Amazing.”

Greg pulled him in and measured him. With a look of disgust he said, “Too small. We’ve got to throw him back.”

My rod moved in my hand. “I’ve got something!”

“Start reeling.” Greg struggled to remove the hook from the flounder’s jaw.

I reeled. Greg had just dropped his flounder back in the water when mine broke the surface. I pulled it into the boat.

“He’s bigger than yours!” I couldn’t stop grinning. My first fishing trip and I caught something. I was a natural at this. “He’s bigger than yours!”

I knew bragging wasn’t the best way to impress a guy, but I couldn’t help it.

“He sure is. Congratulations!” Without even asking, he pulled the hook from my flounder’s mouth with a pair of needle-nose pliers. He measured and weighed my catch and put it in a cooler of ice. “That’ll make a nice supper.”

I saw Warren laying his fillets on the sink for us to admire, which we did, following Mary P’s example. Who’d have ever imagined I’d bring home a catch for others to admire?

Greg and I impaled fresh bait and dropped our lines back overboard. Almost at once he caught another flounder, a keeper. Then we sat for almost an hour before there was any more action. He told me funny stories about growing up in a house full of boys. I told him unfunny stories about life with Mom. I laughed at his stories and he sympathized with mine. I wasn’t surprised when his stories turned to his kids.

“I used to love taking the kids fishing. Not that I had time to do much more than bait hooks and untangle line. But they loved being on the water almost as much as I do.”

“Why do you love it so?”

He shrugged. “When I was a kid, it was just what we Barneses did. You fished and you loved it because everyone else did. As an adult it was wonderful because it was so far from the tension and chaos of being a cop. And now it’s totally removed from how barren my life’s become. It’s like visiting the good parts of my life, the great memories.”

He grinned. “Like the one time I was out here with just Greggie. He leaned over the side too far and in he went. He must have been about four. I watched him sink and waited. Sure enough, he popped to the surface right
where he’d gone in. I grabbed his life jacket and pulled him out. We had to stay out long enough for him to dry or his mother would have had a heart attack.”

I had an image of a little boy popping up and looking to his father for rescue. I could imagine them laughing as they waited for the boy to dry off, maybe draping his shirt over a seat back and his shorts over the windshield. I could see them conspiring against Ginny with great glee, not in a nasty way but a loving one. A father-son secret and a story they’d have undoubtedly told her when Greggie was older.

I smiled in spite of the hollow feeling in my middle. Just because I didn’t have good memories shouldn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy those of others.

“Did it bother you that Ginny didn’t fish?” I thought of Mary P and Warren, the only example of a strong marriage I’d seen up close and personal. They did everything together from running a business to holding hands in church—everything except fishing.

“No more than it bothered her that I didn’t like stamping or scrapbooking. In many ways we were what Billy and Ruth Graham called ‘happily incompatible.’ Ginny was a stay-at-home mom who was very involved at church. I was a cop who met all kinds of unsavory characters every day. She was sunshine and laughter, and I was often withdrawn. She lived easily with disorder, and I liked everything in its place. Opposites.”

I’d never heard the phrase
happily incompatible
before, and I found it fascinating. “Then why did it work?” Because it had, and very well, to hear him talk.