Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One (36 page)

As far as Bill was concerned, he had won the
lottery, and he spent the rest of the evening blissfully lost in
the wonderfulness of his new toy.

With great excitement he showed them, again
and again, how the little door popped open and how to adjust the
headphones, grinning from ear to ear all the while.

Dottie handed Jack a heavy
rectangle wrapped in white tissue. Tearing open the paper revealed
a red, tooled-leather case holding a matching hardbound volume of
Tolkien's
The Lord of the
Rings.
The edges were gleaming gold
and, opening the front cover, he saw that it was a first edition,
printed in 1974. Jack took a deep breath, running his hand over the
warm, textured surface.

"Dottie," he whispered, "this is too
much…"

"Nonsense," she replied, "I've had that copy
forever. No one will pay what I'm asking for it and I'll be darned
if I'll lower the price!"

Jack thanked her, his gaze never leaving the
crisp, unread pages of Middle Earth, and Dottie smiled, satisfied
with his reaction. After Bill had fallen asleep on the couch, Jack
and Dottie sat up late, nibbling on sugar cookies and sharing
memories of Christmases past.

From that year on, the invitation was open
and by the holiday season of 1985, the custom had expanded to
include Thanksgiving and Christmas both, usually held at the
Beckman house, with the much larger kitchen and dining room.

Before long, Jack and Bill became the
outrageous old woman's unofficial dates to the tourist events and
music festivals that toured the coast each season.

She would walk, arm in arm
with
her men
, flattering Jack shamelessly and buying sweets for Bill
whenever his protective guardian's back was turned.

When he was with Dottie, something about the
irrepressible old woman was infectious, and Jack found himself, for
a few brief hours, setting aside the pain, which by now seemed as
much a part of him as his beating heart.

He could almost forget those things in life
that had been denied him, his mistakes and regrets, casting off the
shadow of his guilt and living again. Soon enough, the day would
end, though, and Jack would lead Bill back across the old porch and
into their home, with its lonely, empty rooms and gray future.

*

The years of abuse were starting to take
their toll, and over the winter of 1991, Jack was hospitalized
twice for an irregular heartbeat. The doctors gave him the same
choices both times, stop drinking or die.

Bill remained much as he had been since the
accident, much as he would forever remain, a child in an aging
man's body. Both men grew a bit thicker at the waist and thinner at
the hairline, though in contrast to the lines that began to etch
Jack's face, Bill's appeared to remain untouched by time. Life
seemed as though it would continue, unchanging and unchangeable,
until time claimed one or both of them, as it had Karl Ferguson.
This was Jack's only real concern during those dark years, when his
mind was lucid enough to worry: who would take care of Bill, when
his guardian finally drank himself to death?

One cool June morning, a Saturday, Jack rose
at first light.

After scrambling up some
eggs and oysters, a dish known to the locals as
Hangtown Fry
, he bustled around
the house, preparing for their weekly visit to the
bookstore.

Dottie had assured him the latest John
Grisham legal thriller would be in that week, and Jack was excited
to get the book in his hands.

After showering, hunting up some clean
clothes, and making himself as presentable as possible, Jack loaded
Bill into the pickup and they headed into town. First stop was the
Coffee Clutch (now owned by some big, nationwide company, but Jack
refused to call his little java brewery by any other name) for
their weekly mocha. Then they briefly admired the new house of
worship that had risen, phoenix-like from the ashes of his former
church.

Though the pastor's name, etched into the
hanging wooden sign, was unfamiliar, the building itself was still
"Long Beach Community Church.” There was, Jack knew, a marble
plaque above the double doors of the new fellowship hall that
proclaimed it to be dedicated to the memory of Karl Michael
Ferguson.

Knowing that always seemed to start his
Saturday off a little brighter.

As the pickup rounded the corner onto the
sixth street, Jack noticed a police car parked near the staircase
leading up to Dottie's little apartment.

One of the new Long Beach
deputies stood beside the cruiser filling out paperwork as they
parked. He saw Jack and waved, more than a cursory acknowledgment,
but a ‘w
ell there you are, get over
here’
gesture. The windows of the shop
were dark, and the front door's small cardboard sign, which should
have been flipped an hour before, still read
closed
.

Jack stepped from the truck
and up onto the curb, trying to remember the young officer's name.
Brett? Brent? Something like that. The gold nametag above the
pressed pocket of his uniform shirt was no help, reading
B. Hallworth
.

"Hey Jack." Officer Hallworth greeted him,
shaking his hand warmly, "Sheriff Bradley just sent me to go find
you, must be ESP or something. I sure wish you'd get a phone out
there."

Jack considered, briefly, telling him that
it wasn't anything as esoteric as ESP; Saturday's were just the
only mornings that he wasn't too drunk to drive. He dismissed the
urge, deciding the humor might be lost on the eager-beaver young
cop. Besides, he liked the kid, whatever his name was.

"That a fact?" he asked, turning and giving
Bill a reassuring nod, but motioning for him to stay in the
truck.

"Jack," he said, the grin slipping from his
face, "I'm afraid I have some bad news."

Jack looked up at the tiny, unlit window of
the apartment. It didn't take a genius to figure out what the young
officer was going to say. Dottie was creeping up on her nineties
now, and had never opened the doors of her shop a minute past eight
in the morning in all the years that he had known her. The last few
months she had seemed to be slowing down a bit. She had asked Jack
to help her pick up deliveries with his truck a time or two, and
place a few orders on the computer when her eyes hurt. Still, being
able to take care of herself and a business, at her age, had lent
an air of immortality to the cantankerous old woman, and Jack had
never thought of her actually being gone someday. She had waggled a
disapproving finger at him, the last time he had asked her about
retirement plans, glaring at him over her hipster glasses.

"You can just pack that talk right back in your ditty-bag,
Mister!" She had said, her mouth wrinkling down into a contemptuous
frown of disapproval.

"Some of us still have work to do," she'd
glowered, "and I'll tell you this, the only way they’re going to
get Dottie Westcott out of here is to carry her out, feet
first!”

Standing on the sidewalk with Officer B.
Hallworth, Jack felt a sudden flood of sad relief that he hadn't
shown up an hour earlier to see that very thing.

"When?" he asked softly.

"Well, barring an autopsy," Hallworth
replied, "the guess is around midnight, maybe one o'clock. I'm
sorry, Jack."

There was a long silence, and the young
policeman shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. Jack
felt tears fill his eyes, but he blinked them back, scowling and
biting the inside of his cheek until the wave of emotion passed.
Dottie was no Karl Ferguson, and her reception into eternity was a
much more questionable thing. One more weight, one more burden of
guilt, as Jack thought of all the hours he had spent in this little
building, talking, laughing, and arguing with her. Maybe he should
have been more concerned with Dottie's soul than with her opinion
of him.

Had he ever asked her?

Even back in those first weeks when he was
still a pastor, when he had still felt worthy of raising the
subject of salvation with another human being? Had he? He didn't
think so, and the burden for the old woman's destiny slowly settled
on his tired, but obliging shoulders.

Officer Hallworth cleared his throat, and
the sound brought Jack back to the moment.

"One of her customer's came by to pick up a
book that Ms. Westcott was holding for her," Hallworth said, "when
the woman couldn't get an answer from the shop, or at the
apartment, she got worried and called us. We found Dottie in her
bed; looks like she went peacefully, in her sleep."

"Well," Jack said, "thank God for that much,
I suppose. What did Bradley want me for?"

"For this," a voice like a bag of broken
glass spoke from the upper landing, deep and gravely from a
lifetime of cigarettes. "We found this on her desk; it has your
name on it."

Sheriff Paul Bradley descended the
staircase, each wooden step creaking beneath his six-foot-six
frame, and his broad shoulders brushing the side of the building.
The years, if they had any effect at all, had only touched the big
man's close-cropped auburn hair and mustache, peppering them with
gray. As he reached the sidewalk, he held out a large, mustard
colored manila envelope. Jack took it and saw that his name was
written plainly in the center, in Dottie Westcott’s firm block
script. In the upper corner was stapled a white business card with
the name and number of a Vancouver law firm, and the name of an
Alan Jarrell, Attorney at Law.

"What's this?" Jack asked, looking from one
cop to the other.

"Dunno," Bradley replied shortly,
"Envelope's sealed, your name’s on it, so I thought it'd be best if
you were the one to open it."

Jack felt somewhat unnerved as he gazed at
the envelope, then a thought struck him. "You don't think that
I…"

Sheriff Bradley uttered a short, unpleasant
bark of a laugh.

"Please Jack," he grimaced,
"Dottie Westcott was ninety-three years old, and everyone knows
that you were the only soul on the planet that she said more than
‘
morning’
to.
I just thought that if she wanted you to have it, it might be
important to get it to you before her belongings were dealt with.
It's probably a little out of line with police procedure, but
you're one of us here and, as long as you dry yourself out before
you climb behind the wheel, we'll try to watch out for each
other."

Jack saw Hallworth's eyes
widen at his boss's bluntness, but Jack just nodded. Bradley was
doing him a favor, in his own way, and, after all, Jack
was
the town drunk.
No offense taken.

"Thanks Paul," he murmured, slipping his
thumb beneath the sealed flap and tearing it open. Inside was a
single sheet of paper, an ostentatious gold and black masthead
named the same law firm that was listed on the business card.

Jack was surprised to see the letter was
addressed to him.

It requested that he call
the firm, at his earliest convenience, to begin proceedings to
transfer title and ownership of the Sand Castle Bookstore, the
contents thereof, and the estate of
Dorothia Jean Westcott
into his
name.

Jack stared at the paper blankly. "I don't…I don't
understand…" he stuttered.

Bradley, who had shamelessly read the letter
over Jack's shoulder, smiled. "Well," he said, "I'm no lawyer, but
I'd say that you just inherited yourself a bookstore."

*

Two nights later, Jack found himself in room
107 of the Budget Inn of Vancouver, gazing down out of his single
occupancy window onto the dark flowing expanse of the Columbia
River. Bill was safely ensconced in his own room, back in Long
Beach, by now. As soon as Dottie's service ended, Jack had pressed
the farm supervisor into spending a couple of days baby-sitting (at
time and a half), and had left a tearful Bill waving from the porch
as he pulled away. Jack realized, on the long drive up the river,
that this would be the first night in a decade that he had slept
somewhere other than in his own small bedroom in the Beckman
farmhouse.

He stood, chewing ice from his plastic water
glass, and thumbing through the first pages of the Tom Clancy novel
he had picked up at the bookstore across the street from the
motel.

He realized, with some sense
of irony, as he paid for the mass-market paperback of Jack Ryan's
latest cold-war adventure, that by this time tomorrow he would very
likely own a half-dozen copies of the book. Still, that was
tomorrow, this was tonight, and he needed a thick best-seller to
keep his mind off the rows of tiny bottles lined up in the
mini-fridge
beside the
room's desk. He hadn't even dared to open the refrigerator door,
but he could sense them, little vials of sweet oblivion to cool the
burning itch that was already forming in his throat.

Jack swallowed two tiny red Benadryl tablets
with the last of his water, hoping the allergy pills would help
knock him out. Then he walked across the room and lay down across
the double bed, holding the paperback before his eyes, trying to
banish the siren song of the mini-bar.

Jack had an eight-o’clock appointment with
Alan Jarrell, at the Smith, Jarrell, and Weinstein offices on Mill
Plain Boulevard.

Mill
Plain
, the smiling bookstore manager
had assured him, scribbling a map on the back of Jack's receipt,
would be easy to find. Jack wanted to be clear-eyed and coherent
for that meeting, which might just be the most important of his
recent life. A hangover was the last thing he needed.