Homeplace (8 page)

Oh, sure, he thought, as he pulled a bottle of Rainier beer from the refrigerator and twisted the cap off with more force than necessary, he’d learned a lot in the past two years. But it wasn’t the same as Amy having a mother, dammit.

Peg should have stayed here where she belonged. With her daughter. With him.

And that, he thought as he threw his body onto the family room sofa, was the crux of the problem. He took a long pull from the dark brown bottle, momentarily wishing the beer was something stronger. A lot stronger.

“You’re not thinking about Amy.”

His words seemed to echo in the empty house. The falling-down house he’d tried to tell Peg was larger than they’d ever need. But she’d proven surprisingly assertive those last months of her life, insisting that after all those years living in a Seattle townhouse, they needed a “real home.” When he’d realized that she wasn’t about to give in, he’d reluctantly acquiesced, even though they both knew that she’d never live to see it properly renovated.

“It’s yourself you’re feeling so fucking sorry for.” The gloom he’d thought he’d put behind him settled over his shoulders. The roof had found a new place to leak; rain was tapping an annoying rhythm on the hand-pegged wooden floor. “Shit, nothing like a goddamn pity party to cap off a less than spectacular day.”

He pushed himself to his feet, unlocked the small cedar chest and chose a videotape at random from the stacks Peg had created. He shoved the tape into the VCR, moved the wastepaper basket he kept for such purposes beneath this new leak, then flopped back onto the couch.

It was one of the tapes Peg had made outdoors, on the rugged coastline strewn with piles of driftwood she’d claimed always made her think of Sasquatch playing a game of pick-up-sticks. She was laughing, with her gentle eyes and her generous mouth, as she related the legend of Big Foot, that huge, hairy Pacific Northwest version of the Abominable Snowman, to her daughter, who’d someday be watching this tape.

Groaning, Jack shut his eyes against the pain. Then, unable to resist, reluctantly opened them again and watched his wife as she strolled down the beach, pausing to point out the wonders found in tide pools. She could have been any mother taking a lazy summer day to share her world with her child. She could have had all the time in the world. But sometimes pictures lied, Jack thought. And appearances could definitely be deceiving.

In the background the rising tide roared, gulls and cormorants wheeled over the towering offshore sea stacks and although he couldn’t hear it on the tape, Jack remembered the sough of the wind in the fir trees atop the cliff. That same wind that was ruffling the fiery auburn bob beneath Peg’s Seattle Mariners baseball cap.

The hair was a dazzling flourescent red color never seen in nature, too bright to be real, which it wasn’t. Claiming wigs were too hot, but unwilling to go out in public looking like, as she’d put it, “a transvestite Yul Brynner,” she’d sewn strands from a cheap vinyl wig into the cap. And somehow, on her, it had looked just right.

Jack found himself reluctantly smiling back at his wife. Just as he knew she’d intended when she’d begun the ambitious legacy in the first place. As if Mother Nature couldn’t remain immune to such a warm heart, the sun swept from behind a low-hanging pewter cloud and lit the gunmetal sea to shimmering sapphire.

A dizzying tumble of images appeared on the screen, disjointed scenes of sky and surf that had Jack remembering dropping the camera. For a long time the unblinking camcorder eye stared at the gray sand. A crab scuttled sideways into view, then disappeared again. Iridescent bubbles sparkled, then winked out like fallen stars. The frothy white foam seemed to be growing closer with each succeeding wave that washed onto shore.

“Jack!” Her voice was breathless. With laughter, and, he remembered, lingering passion from the kiss they shared after he dropped the camera. “It’s going to get wet!”

There was a disorienting image of Peg’s slender hands scooping it from the sand. Her gold wedding band gleamed, reminding Jack of the until-death-do-us-part promise that had seemed so far away on that sun-blessed Saturday afternoon they’d exchanged vows.

“We should get that on tape,” she was saying.

He grumbled in the background.

“No, it’ll be perfect,” she coaxed prettily, turning the camera on him, catching him in midscowl. “Let’s show our daughter what a blissfully perfect kiss looks like.”

In the end, of course, she’d won. After steadying the camera atop a stack of bleached logs, she held out her arms to him. And, as always, he found it impossible to resist.

The staged kiss wasn’t all that long. Neither was it as hot as the earlier, unplanned one had been. But it was sweet enough to make his eyes burn as he relived it in heart-wrenching detail.

Then, without warning, memories of kissing Peg battled with unbidden images of taking Raine Cantrell on the rough wet sand, like Burt Lancaster rolling around in the surf with Deborah Kerr in
From Here to Eternity
that had been broadcast on The Movie Channel the other night.

It didn’t matter that he didn’t particularly even like the New York lawyer who’d riled up hormones he’d almost forgotten were lurking inside him. The fantasy had caused a painful stirring in his loins and Jack didn’t need to look down to know that although his mind might not want anything more to do with Ida’s mouthy granddaughter, another, more vital part of his body was literally throbbing with the need to bury itself inside her.

“Goddammit!”

He pushed himself up from the sofa, jerked the tape from the VCR and locked it away in the chest again. Then went upstairs and stripped off his clothes, tossing them uncaringly onto the floor since there was no longer anyone around to complain. Jack’s last thought, as he drifted off to sleep, was a strict command to both his mind and body to forget about Raine Cantrell.

When he awoke the next morning stiff, sore, and painfully horny, Jack reminded himself that a man couldn’t hold himself responsible for his dreams. But that didn’t make him feel any better as he showered, the stinging, ice-cold needles of water designed to chill any lingering desire.

R
aine awoke to the clear, sweet song of a morning bird. Momentarily disoriented, she lay in the tester bed, looking up at the dancing dots of water-brightened light on the white plaster ceiling. It was when her gaze shifted to the square of sunshine on the bedcover that she remembered where she was. The familiar quilt was a living history of her family. Raine remembered her grandmother pointing out the pieces of her own mother’s blue-serge church going dress stitched next to the red-and-black-checked flannel shirt Raine’s great-grandfather John had worn while logging.

There was a pink square from the dress Ida had worn to her first day at school, two dotted Swiss triangles from the dress she’d worn to receive her medical degree, and a piece of lace, once white, now aged to the hue of old parchment, that had been cut from her wedding dress. Raine thought it ironic that although her grandparents’ marriage had ended in divorce, the memory lived on, along with others, the fabric of so many lives sewn into this brightly colored family quilt.

Pushing herself out of bed, she made her way into the adjoining bathroom, which seemed smaller than she remembered it, brushed her teeth, ran her fingers through her hair, and decided to put the coffee on before her shower. Before going downstairs, she paused to look out the bedroom window.

Last night’s rain had moved eastward toward Seattle, leaving the air as clear as crystal and from her window, located at the very top of the house’s tower, Raine had an eagle’s-eye view of the jagged, snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountains in one direction, the town and bay in the other. In the distance, a white ferry chugged from the dock toward Seattle. Three small skiffs—one with an eye-catching red sail—skimmed over morning-still water like butterflies over rippled blue silk.

Closer to home, Raine could see Coldwater Cove waking up. Kathleen Walker, pharmacist and the third generation of Walkers to run the Walker Drug Emporium, was on the sidewalk outside her redbrick, brass-plaqued storefront, unfurling blue-and-white awnings. The Orca Theater’s marquee announced a Mel Gibson festival while across the street, the smoke coming from the chimney of the Gray Gull Smorgasbord & Grill revealed that Oley Swensen had begun smoking ribs for the lunch and dinner crowds. Although some might not consider barbecue a traditional Scandinavian dish, faithful customers swore Oley made the best ribs on the peninsula.

Directly below her window, a flock of shiny black starlings strutted across the dew-bright lawn like an army laying claim to conquered territory. In the center of the lawn, a pair of nuthatches splashed in a white stone birdbath surrounded by daffodils; the scattered water from their energetic wing flapping sparkled like diamonds.

The house was quiet, suggesting the others were still sleeping off the effects of yesterday’s events. Raine tiptoed down the staircase, avoiding the stair that had always creaked like a rusty hinge.

The country kitchen was blinding yellow—like the inside of a lemon. It had always been this way, at least as long as Raine could remember. The paint strip Ida kept in the kitchen junk drawer referred to it as
buttercup
, but it had always reminded Raine of sunshine. Winter on the peninsula could, at times, turn unrelentingly gray and wet; the color was an uplifting antidote for the gloom.

Although Ida’s cooking talents were marginal at best, the kitchen had always been the heart of the house, the room where new days were greeted with fishing reports broadcast on the old tabletop radio and broken hearts were soothed over cups of hot chocolate made with Quick from the yellow can that had been a mainstay in the pantry for as long as Raine could remember. Her own kitchen back in New York was closet-size, certainly not big enough for people to gather, not that she had any time for entertaining.

She spooned some dark ground coffee from a Starbucks stoneware jar she found on the counter into the white paper filter of the coffee maker, and poured in water. While she waited for the water to drip through the machine, Raine sat down at the pine table in front of the window, intending to make a list of all the things she needed to do today.

It seemed so strange not to be rushing off for work. Drumming her fingers impatiently on the tabletop, she glanced up at the copper-teapot clock. It was still too early to show up at the hospital. Last night she’d been informed that Ida couldn’t be released until after morning rounds, which began around nine.

“Perhaps I’ll just check in,” she decided out loud as she compared the silence of the kitchen—disturbed only by the soft hum of the refrigerator—with the beehive of activity of her office. Undoubtedly a host of phone calls had been piling up.

Conveniently ignoring the fact that Brian ran their little corner of Choate, Plimpton, Wells & Sullivan with the efficiency of the joint chiefs preparing for an invasion, Raine called her office.

“You haven’t even been away for twenty-four hours yet, Raine,” Brian reminded her, amusement evident in his voice after she expressed concern about the work she’d left behind. “Don’t worry, I’m certainly capable of holding down the fort.”

“I know.” What had she thought? That Choate, Plimpton, Wells & Sullivan couldn’t survive three days without her? “Thank you, Brian. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

After laughing at his assertion that he didn’t know what she’d do without him, either, Raine hung up, feeling vaguely dissatisfied by the brief conversation. While she was grateful that things hadn’t fallen apart without her, deep down inside, part of her wished that they also weren’t going so smoothly.

“What did you expect? You’ve been gone less than twenty-four hours. No one’s indispensable,” she muttered into the stillness. “Not even a Warrior Princess.”

Since the coffee seemed to be taking forever to drip through the filter of Ida’s jazzy new coffee maker, Raine had just decided to use the time to go back upstairs and take a shower when something outside the window caught her attention. Grabbing a corduroy barn jacket from the hook beside the kitchen door, she marched outdoors.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded of the man hunkered down behind her car.

“Taking care of your taillight,” he answered with bland innocence. He held up some broken pieces of red plastic as evidence. “I’ve just about got it replaced.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Sure it is.” He tightened a couple of final screws. “Since I’m the one who broke it in the first place.”

“Surely the rental agency has people to take care of things like that.”

“They probably do. But if you tried to drive with that taillight, I’d have had to write you up a citation, which would involve you having to stop by the magistrate’s office—”

“That’d be Wally.”

“Got it in one.” His smile suggested that she’d just given the correct answer for Double Jeopardy. “Anyway, while you can undoubtedly afford the fine, I figure we both have better ways to spend our time.”

“I don’t suppose you could just overlook it? For today?”

He rubbed his chin and appeared to be giving her question serious consideration. “Surely you wouldn’t be trying to talk a law enforcement officer out of doing his sworn duty?”

“Not at all. I was merely suggesting that you must have more serious crimes to handle than worrying about my taillight.”

“Not really.” He shrugged. “This is a pretty peaceful county.”

“Except for the occasional standoff situation.”

“There is that.” Jack stood up. “Nice pajamas.”

Irked by the laughter in his voice, Raine pulled the edges of the jacket together over the top of the men’s styled pajamas where black lambs gamboled on a background of red flannel. “I suppose you’d prefer it if I’d come waltzing out here in some black lace nightgown from Frederick’s of Hollywood?”

“Now, that’s a real nice offer, and I sure wouldn’t want to discourage you, if you’ve ever a mind to greet me some morning in a getup like that,” he said. “But I’ve always been partial to black sheep. Being sort of a black sheep, myself.”

“Since you brought it up, I have to admit I was surprised when I realized that you’d taken over your father’s job. I always figured you’d end up on the other side of the bars.”

He laughed at that. “My folks figured the same thing. Especially my dad.”

“So, what happened to turn you around?”

“The same thing that happens to most black sheep, if they’re lucky. The love of a good woman.”

She studied him and decided he was serious. “Some women might consider that an outdated, chauvinist statement,” she said finally.

“Some women might be right. But that doesn’t stop it from being the truth.”

Before she could decide how to answer that, the Nano Kitty beeped. She watched him press the buttons, handling whatever electronic-cat emergency had occurred this time. Although it didn’t make any sense at all, as she compared Jack’s behavior with that of her own absent father, who’d never acknowledged her existence, Raine found herself almost envying Amy O’Halloran.

“Got that taken care of,” he said with satisfaction as he stuffed the flourescent green egg back into his shirt pocket. “When it gets sick, you have to make sure it gets its antibiotics on time,” he explained. “Otherwise, you run the risk of it getting worse. Maybe even becoming catatonic.”

She couldn’t quite hold back the smile. “That’s terrible.”

Instead of defending his foolish pun, Jack gave Raine a slow, appraising study that warmed his eyes and her blood. “You know, Counselor,” he said, “you really do have a nice smile.” He tugged on the ends of hair curving around her jaw. “You should use it more often.”

Before she could determine how that outwardly casual touch had affected her, he was headed back toward the Suburban. “See you in court.”

Raine blinked away a new, distressing hallucination she’d become momentarily lost in. One that had her standing in the fog, the motors of a 1940s propeller plane droning behind her. She was looking up at Jack O’Halloran, who’d inexplicably changed last night’s parka for a trench coat, and was desperately wishing he’d tell her that the fate of the world didn’t mean a hill of beans when compared to a man and a woman’s happiness.

Just when she’d been about to beg him to let her stay in Casablanca with him, the familiar word brought her hurling back into the 1990s.

“Court?”

“For the juvenile hearing. Old Fussbudget will undoubtedly call me to testify in the kids’ case.”

“How did you know the girls call her Old Fussbudget?”

“Hell, everyone in the county calls her that. But as annoying as the woman can admittedly be, she’s got a reputation for fairness. I don’t think Ida’ll have too much of a problem keeping Gwen. And the girls, for the time being.”

He touched his fingers to the brim of his hat. Then climbed into the truck and drove away.

The coffee was finally done when she returned to the kitchen. Raine tossed the broken pieces of plastic taillight into the wastebasket beneath the sink, quickly downed two cups while standing at the kitchen window, then went upstairs to get dressed to go to the hospital for her confrontation with Ida.

“I’m not hearing a word of it.” The elderly woman was sitting on the top of her bed, dressed and obviously more than ready to escape the institutional confines of the hospital. The scent of talc floated over that of disinfectant and illness. Her salt-and-pepper hair was pinned up, looking like an untidy bird’s nest atop her head, but her crimson lipstick was intact. “Those poor girls have been moved around enough, Raine.”

She folded her arms across the front of a sweatshirt which read:
I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow’s not looking all that good either
. “Old Fussbudget assures me that Renee and Shawna’s aunt and uncle will make good parents, but I’m not going to let anyone take Gwen away.”

“Did it ever occur to you that your shenanigans yesterday—telling them to bar the door and not talk to anyone, for heaven’s sake—didn’t exactly endear you to the authorities? You didn’t just hurt your guardianship chances, Gram. You caused some pretty serious black marks on those girls’ juvenile records.”

“Nothing would have happened if that Old Fussbudget hadn’t gone and called the sheriff,” Ida grumbled.

“Well, she did. Which made things really serious.”

“Lucky for me I’ve got a good lawyer.”

“I suppose it slipped your mind that I’m not licensed in Washington?”

“Would you believe me if I said it did?” Ida hedged.

“Not in a New York minute.”

“Well, then, I suppose there’s no point in lying. Of course I realize you’re not licensed in the state, Raine, darling, which, by the way, I’ve never been able to understand, since it is your home, after all—”

“My home is in Manhattan.”

“Don’t be silly. Manhattan is where people work. Not where they live. And while I understand your desire and your need to be independent, Raine, I think you’re overdoing things a bit by moving all the way across the country and living with…with…,” she searched for just the right word, “…Easterners.”

“Some of them can be quite pleasant. When they’re not eating their young,” Raine said, her tone as dry as a legal brief. “And you’re not going to sidetrack me, again, Gram. My point is that I can’t possibly be your attorney because I’m not licensed in this state.”