Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One (33 page)

Cassie thanked her, dropping the duffel bag
by the door and walking around the living room, studying the odd
collection of books and knickknacks that lined the shelves. The
books themselves ranged from huge, leather bound collections that
looked to be hundreds of years old, some in foreign languages, to
modern western and science fiction paperbacks. She brushed her
fingers over the silky surface of the writing table and peered at
the titles of the discs above. Mostly jazz, she noted, and no one
she had ever heard of. Cassie stepped into the dining room, where a
small oval table rested on the off-white linoleum.

The apartment must have been bigger than she
had at first thought, Cassie realized, as she noticed the entrance
to a second hallway.

A picture, resting on top of the piano,
caught her eye and she crossed the room to it. It was an old,
square, colored photo, similar in vintage to her baptism picture.
That, however, wasn’t the only common factor.

Three young people, with the beach and ocean
behind them, stood, arm in arm, smiling at the camera.

Kathy Belanger was in the center.

Her hair hung in long, dark braids, her face
broken in a carefree grin, and Cassie’s breath caught in her
throat, seeing her mother at a time before the sadness and fear had
come to her eyes.

She was wearing a t-shirt that read LBCC
Youth, and a pair of white cutoffs that showed her long, shapely
legs all the way down to her bare feet. On her right was Jack,
twenty years younger than the man who lay sleeping in the Ocean
Park Hospital, medications slowly dripping into a needle in his
wrist. No, this was Jack soon after the picture in his wallet was
taken, the one of him in Vietnam. He, too, was grinning, and giving
the camera a cheesy thumbs-up with one hand as the other was draped
across Kathy’s shoulder, his hand resting on the shoulder of the
man opposite him. To Kathy Belanger’s left, with a slight smirk on
his lips, was a man that Cassie had never seen before, but a chill
went through her all the same. Tall and lean, his bare chest and
arms tanned, and his long black hair shining in the hot summer sun,
was William Beckman, her father. He stood with his arm protectively
around his young wife, one dark hand resting on her light-skinned
waist.

Cassie slowly lifted the small photo from
its place on the piano and gazed at it, so lost in thought that she
didn’t hear a door open and close softly from the hallway behind
her. Shakily, her fingers traced the fading images of her mother,
her father, and Jack. There was a faint ringing in her ears and
everything seemed suddenly very bright. The small room began to
spin.

“
I’m going to faint,” Cassie
whispered matter-of-factly.

She might well have fainted, too, dropping
the photo and slipping bonelessly to the cool, white floor, if a
man’s voice, sleepy and confused, hadn’t, at just that moment,
spoken up right behind her.

“
Beth?” the voice asked,
softly and slightly slurred.

Cassie spun with a blood-chilling shriek,
dropping the picture after all, and lurching backwards into the
piano. The man stood in the entrance to the hallway, clad in a gray
t-shirt and matching sweatpants, shifting his weight from one
barefoot to the other. He was tall, and looked to be going slightly
to fat in his middle age. His hair was short and peppered with gray
and a long pink scar ran down the left side of his face, from
temple to jaw-line. His right eye seemed to bulge and be slightly
off center. The man looked at Cassie with confused, slightly dull
eyes, his lips wet and slack and his big hands clutching a worn
stuffed rabbit nervously.

In another, less terrified frame of mind, the sight of the
grown man with the toy bunny might have struck Cassie as humorous.
Instead, as she stared at the man’s face, her mouth gaped open and
her breath came in a choked whistling gasp.

He was older, certainly, and had put on some
pounds, but the man in the gray pajamas, one side of his fleshy
face oddly skewed, was unmistakably her father.

Bill’s reaction to Cassie’s shriek was a
shrill cry of his own, bringing the stuffed animal up to be
clutched protectively to his chest. For just a moment, Cassie
Belanger thought for sure that he was going to burst into tears.
All of this happened in a heartbeat. Then, just as suddenly, the
walls began to warp and close in, the pictures, the furniture, even
Bill himself loomed in on her from where he stood, filling her
vision, suffocating her.

Cassie whirled...she couldn’t breathe!

She heard, over the roaring in her ears, the
sound of Beth calling her name, faintly and from far away. Then she
was out the door and down the wooden steps, barely catching her
balance and saving herself from a nasty tumble to the concrete
sidewalk below.

In the cold darkness, the streetlights were
ablaze and bolted to the one sitting on the nearest corner was a
large sign, bathed in yellow light, which read: “Public Beach, 3
Blocks,” a huge white arrow pointing the way. Cassie didn’t
hesitate, even at the sound of the older woman's voice calling to
her from the landing, but ran, gasping the cold morning air as
tears streamed down her pale cheeks.

Beth Marshall, formerly
Elizabeth Beckman, once known to her older brother and a certain
sandy-haired friend, as
the
snipe
, stepped back from the door and
into the kitchen, where William Beckman stood clutching Pete, his
stuffed rabbit, fearfully.

“
It’s okay, Billy,” she
murmured, taking his hand and rubbing his back, comfortingly, with
the palm of one hand, “it’s all right, I think you scared her as
much as she scared you. She’s a friend of Jack’s, that’s
all.”

Bill sniffled, brushing tears from his eyes
with the back of one hand. “Heard a noise, sissy, thought it was
you…”

“
I know,” she whispered,
“but it’s still early, you need to go back to sleep. When you wake
up, I’ll make us all French toast, okay?”

Bill forgot his fears at the mention of his
favorite breakfast, “Promise?” he asked.

“
Promise,” Beth replied and
led the big man back down the hall to his room.

After tucking her brother in, and switching
on the little Looney-tunes night-light by the door, Beth walked
back out into the dining room with a frown.

“
Now what in the world
was
that
all
about?” she muttered to the empty room. Who was this strange girl
that Jack had, more or less, brought home, and what, exactly, was
wrong with her? She bent to pick up the picture frame, which had
landed face down on the floor. The glass had cracked in the fall
and, as Elizabeth Marshall, aka Beckman, aka
The Snipe
, set the photo back
on top on the old piano, she glanced at the picture and
froze.

“
Oh my god,” she whispered,
her hands beginning to shake, "Oh sweet Jesus…”

Now she realized why Cassie’s face had
stopped her and sent her mind racing furiously for a connection.
Hadn’t she seen those same faces peering out at her from this
picture for so many years? The faintest mixture of her brother’s
face into that of the young woman he had married, but Beth had
never met.

“
Oh Lord,” she prayed again,
her knuckles turning white around the edges of the frame,
“Cassie…”

Elizabeth turned, the picture still in her
hand and, pausing to grab the blanket that covered the back of the
couch, she rushed out into the cold morning, the door of Jack’s
apartment slamming closed behind her.

August 1982.

Outside the stuffy confines of Long Beach
Community Church, tourist season was in full swing. For the last
four months the music of the carousel, the roar of go-carts, and
the smell of popcorn had wafted, dawn to dusk, through the small
window of Pastor Karl Ferguson's office. Those, and the goose-like
burble of the crowded sidewalks, which rose and fell like the surf,
went unnoticed by the two men seated across the wide, cluttered
desk from each other.

Jack felt old, as if he had aged five decades in as many
months. Deep, gray circles bruised the flesh beneath his eyes, and
the hand that held a tepid can of soda trembled
slightly.

"So," Karl asked, "How's Bill?"

Jack took a deep breath, rubbing his free
hand across the tight, stress-corded muscles at the back of his
neck.

"He has another surgery next month," Jack
replied, "they're hoping it's the last one. The plate they put in
seems to have been accepted okay, no infection or anything." Jack
sighed. "It looks like he'll just have the scar, maybe lose some
sight in the one eye."

He waved a hand down the left side of his
own face and Karl nodded. He'd seen the devastation that Bill
Beckman caused himself when he pulled the trigger.

Sometimes, more often than
he would have wanted Jack to know, Karl wondered if it might have
been better for everyone in general, and his young assistant
especially, if Bill
hadn't
flinched as the pistol went off, the bullet
creasing his frontal lobe and exiting above his left temple to
leave a ravaged mess of ruined flesh and bone chips in its
wake.

Despite all the Sheriff's certainties, Bill
had, indeed, been breathing when the EMTs had wheeled his
blood-soaked gurney through the emergency room doors of Ocean Park
Hospital.

Maybe it would have been better if Paul
Bradley had been right. Karl knew that his thoughts went beyond
being uncharitable, denying a man the chance to accept his
salvation, condemning him to everlasting torment, just for the
convenience of those around him.

Jack wasn't the only one who felt older.
Bill's attempted suicide had shaken the church, and there was a
whispered undercurrent of questions, accusations, and gossip that
would flow, like a dark, noxious river, through Karl's beloved
congregation for years to come.

"What about…" Karl continued, "…what about
the other thing?"

Jack set the can down on the corner of the
desk with a sigh.

"His brain?" Jack asked, "Doctor Blanchette
keeps saying that it's a miracle he ever regained consciousness,
much less his eyesight and speech. He said we should consider it a
gift from God that Bill isn't a vegetable, but that we shouldn't
hope that he'll ever have more than a six or seven year old’s
mentality."

Karl had glanced up at the sound of raw
bitterness in Jack's voice when the younger man spoke of a gift
from God.

He knew, better than anyone,
how Jack blamed himself for Bill's actions. The young pastor had
tearfully insisted that Bill had somehow known, somehow
sensed
, Jack's own
feelings for Kathy, and had been driven to his terrible deed that
stormy night in March, because of that knowledge.

And, of course, there was the gun.

The pistol that Jack had inadvertently left
on the bookcase shelf, that Bill had found, after waking up alone
in the tiny cabin, and carried with him down to the shores of
Willapa Bay. Karl knew that Jack blamed himself for all of this,
and more. The younger man was plagued with unanswerable questions
about Kathy Beckman as well. In the months that had passed, no word
had come, no one at the bus station, train station, or taxicab
offices had remembered her, or recognized her picture.

The young woman had simply disappeared into
the storms, and the uncertainty of her fate was slowly consuming
Jack Leland's soul in an agony of self-loathing and guilt.

Karl’s voice softened, "Are you sure you
want to do this, Jack?"

For a moment Jack thought
his pastor was referring to his decision to accept guardianship of
William Beckman, and he closed his eyes, too tired to go another
round in
that
particular fight.

He had told Karl, again and
again in the last two months, that if someone didn't take
responsibility for Bill, he would end up in an institution
somewhere. Some state funded hellhole of an asylum where he would
be locked away, only his most basic needs seen to, maybe. A prison
for the incompetent, the embarrassing, and the unwanted. Jack knew,
somewhere deep inside him, that the knowledge of Bill, existing in
a place like that because of
him
, would quickly drive him
mad with guilt.

Bill had no other family. His sister, Beth,
would have liked to help, offered to in fact, when she and her
husband Bob had come down to see Bill in the hospital. Jack had
seen in one brief glimpse into Robert Marshall's eyes, that Bill
wouldn't long be welcome in that home.

Jack had thanked her, thanked them both, but told them it was
important for Bill to be in familiar surroundings for his recovery
and rehabilitation.

And what could be more familiar than the
town, and the house that he had grown up in?

Beth had cried, asking him
repeatedly, if he was sure, if he was
certain
, that he wanted to do
this? Jack had told her he was very certain and had put her and her
much-relieved husband back on the train, heading east.

Jack had sat down, in his long hours at the
hospital in Seattle, and again here at Long Beach, and worked it
out.

Between the social security that Bill would
receive from now on, and the modest income to be had from the
oyster farm, they should be able to get by.

Jack had helped with the sale of a little
less than a third of the acreage in June, to pay off the bank, and
this year’s harvest was beginning to show a decent return.