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Authors: Elizabeth Bass

BOOK: Wherever Grace Is Needed
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When Grace heard a groan, she worried it had come from herself. But she pinpointed the source—Dominic, who had sunk a foot lower in his chair. Over his head, Lily and Jordan exchanged a quick look, but that one glance spoke volumes. The war between the sisters was over.
The battle against Muriel Blainey had just begun.
 
The day Grace was to leave for the spa, on the eve of her father’s move, Sam was running between rooms to help both of them. Lou required the most assistance; he grew more agitated as his possessions disappeared. As soon as one box or suitcase was filled, he would fretfully start taking things out again, looking for a favorite shirt.
Grace could hear them down the hallway, both growing increasingly frustrated. In the old days, they had argued over politics and aesthetics; now they got their dander up over what went where.
“Dad,
all
your clothes are going. You don’t need to worry.”
“But I especially want that one. The red one.”
Moments later, Sam appeared at Grace’s door, as he had twice before, and didn’t seem any more pleased with her progress than he had been with Lou’s. Perhaps because there had been none since the last time he’d come to badger her. His voice rose in frustration when he saw her perched on the edge of the bed, petting Heathcliff. “Why aren’t you packed? You’re supposed to be leaving. You’ve got a two-hour drive.”
“I’m not going,” she said.
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, you are.”
“I need to stay here. With Dad. Now of all times.”
“No, now of all times you need to leave. We’ll manage fine. Steven’s coming over later tonight. We’ll probably spend the evening repacking all the stuff that Dad’s going to pull out of the suitcases.”
“Put
The Forsyte Saga
on,” she instructed him. “As long as it’s playing, Dad will be distracted and you can finish doing everything. And as soon as you’re done packing something, take it to the car, or stack it on the back porch so he won’t see it.” Steven and Sam were hiring a rental van for the big move the next day.
Sam absorbed her words, nodding. “Clever girl.”
“See? You need me here.”
“No—you’ll just be in the way. And you’ll start weeping.”
“No, I won’t!”
“Grace, you’re crying now.”
She lifted her hand and felt her damp face with a little surprise. She hadn’t noticed. “This doesn’t count. I’m only really crying if I’m sprawled across a piece of furniture, wailing and bashing my fists into cushions.”
Sam sat down next to her. “It’s okay, Grace. He’ll just be on the other side of town.”
“But we won’t be together. Not here, in this house. At home.”
“You might be the only thirty-one-year-old feeling empty-nest syndrome for her father.”
“It’s easy for you to laugh—you were always a true blue Oliver. But for the first time this past year, I was actually starting to feel like part of the family. Like I really belonged. And now it’s all disintegrating.”
He looked into her eyes. “Did you think we were living some kind of
Leave It to Beaver
life while you weren’t around? We were always an odd bunch, lost in our own activities. To my mind, you
were
part of the family. The best part.”
She tilted against his shoulder, leaning against him as she absorbed those wonderful words. It was so great to have a brother here to talk to. Even though she and Sam had been separated by extreme distances most of their lives, nothing could break that bond of his being the closest sibling to her in age.
“Anyway, it’s totally understandable that you’d feel like crying today.” Sam paused before adding, with just a slight twitch of his lips, “There’s so much stuff moving.”
She straightened, stone faced, and when she had gathered up all the indignation she possibly could, she gave him a firm shove.
He fell against the bed, hooting with laughter as she stood and left the room.
“Grace!” he called after her. “Grace—don’t be so sensitive!”
She marched down the hall. Her father had gotten into the bathroom box. Towels and washcloths covered a wing chair in the corner. “Hey, Dad, do you want to watch the Forsytes?”
He looked up, his eyes eager. “Do you?”
“I can probably squeeze in an episode before I have to leave.”
They went down and she put a disc in—the one he pointed to—and they settled themselves down on the couch. The flat-screen television had been a birthday gift a few years ago from Steven, and at the time Lou had scoffed about it to her over the phone. “When I was young,” he’d said, “companies attempted to design their televisions to seem like they belonged in a home. They were pieces of furniture—almost works of art, some of them. But this thing! It’s as if a hideous Cineplex screen were sprouting in my parlor.”
She never would have guessed that the last moments she and her father would be spending together in this house would be in front of that hideous screen, and that he would be glued to it almost to the exclusion of everything else.
He turned to her, smiling happily. “Are you comfortable there, Gracie?”
She bit her lip, nodding. “Just fine, Dad. Press play.”
42
T
REASURE
H
UNT
S
he drove for two hours—twenty minutes of which was spent lost on a lonely back road—and when she arrived at the spa, it was already dark. Ray, the kids, and Muriel had gotten there hours before. Grace had called ahead to tell them not to wait for her to eat dinner. As she checked in at the lodge-style old lobby, the separation from her father and everything that was happening in Austin was making her feel torn in two. She barely spared a glance for the immense stone tiles on the floor, or the vaulted ceiling overhead.
A bellboy of sorts, a rangy-looking teenager in a cowboy hat, led her to her room. She followed him past a low-lit dining room with vast picture windows on two sides, and then back outside down a covered walkway to another building—one of three of similar modest gray stone appearance—and was shown into her room. Her surprisingly sumptuous room. There was a queen-size bed with a down coverlet festooned with a ridiculous number of fluffy pillows. Across the room, double doors opened onto a patio, which she decided to wait until morning to investigate. She crossed to the bathroom, which was like something out of a magazine. Just the sink itself, an elegant bowl fashioned from pink marble, seemed almost museum worthy. Plush white bathrobes hung on brass hooks next to plump towels. And light-colored tiles led to a sunken tub big enough for three people.
What was she doing here? All the pampering and lavish excess seemed so crazy, given her present mood. It was wasted on her. How was she going to survive till Sunday?
The kids came by to inspect her room, which Jordan, with true disappointment, declared not as cool as hers and Lily’s. Dominic was more interested in showing her how to use the television, which had satellite and a Wii player connected.
Finally Ray came by and rescued her, after Muriel had retired for the night. Grace felt a strange sort of flush, a loss of equilibrium when she met his gaze, which she chalked up to the strangeness of seeing him there, on foreign soil. They were both unwillingly out of their element.
“I was worried you would decide not to come,” Ray said. “You must have had a hard day.”
Grace nodded. “Hard, long, sad.”
Ray wasted no time herding everyone out of the room. Yet Grace was glad when he lingered a moment after the others had gone. “I’m happy you’re here,” he said.
“I’ll be more in the spirit of things tomorrow,” she promised, even though she had her doubts.
But when she woke up the next day and looked outside through the glass doors, a rush of excitement took her by surprise. Because she’d driven in after dark the night before, she had not realized that the scenery would be so spectacular. The spa was situated in an area where light gray granite bluffs rose above the Guadalupe River. Through the millennia the rock had been worn down in places, so that the granite formed a lip over the low-water river, and at various higher elevations the stone jutted precariously out into space like jagged granite balconies. Live oaks dotted the landscape and smaller bushes, some also evergreen, clung to the thin topsoil on the shelflike protrusions.
She slipped into the fluffy terry-cloth robe provided in her bathroom—a robe so soft it was a little like stepping into a plush cocoon. Then, she threw open her doors and went out onto her patio. Moisture hung in the air and she had to hug her arms around herself to ward off the bracing morning chill. Even so, the clean air brought a blissful smile to her lips.
She didn’t realize she wasn’t alone until she caught a flash of orange out of the corner of her eye. When she turned, Jordan was peering at her critically from the next patio over.
“You do wear make-up, then,” Jordan said. “I wondered, but it’s pretty obvious when you’re
not
wearing it.”
“It’s eight
A.M.
”
“Yeah, but shouldn’t you . . . I dunno . . . make yourself look decent?”
Grace laughed. She couldn’t believe she was getting a fashion critique from the girl with Ringling Brothers hair. “I’m hoping to get a facial this morning.”
“That’s good,” Jordan said. “Just so long as you’re finished by one o’clock. At one we’re going on a geo-caching treasure hunt.”
“I have no idea what that is,” Grace admitted.
“It’s like a treasure hunt, only you use GPS devices.”
Grace frowned and looked out toward the river. “Actually, I was hoping to hang out around here and relax. Maybe read a book.”
“Well, you can’t,” Jordan said. “We already signed you up.”
Lily rushed out in her bathrobe. “What’s going on?”
“She’s saying she won’t go geo-caching this afternoon,” Jordan said, clearly miffed.
Lily gasped. “But you have to!”
“She says she wanted to read.”
“You can read anywhere,” Lily said. “Wouldn’t you rather explore with us?”
It was a topsy-turvy world when Lily told people they
shouldn’t
read and a chummy Jordan and Lily invited her out for rambles in nature. But rambling with Jordan West didn’t strike Grace as a dream vacation.
Looking into Lily’s pleading eyes, however, she felt powerless to resist.
“Okay,” she said, caving. “Count me in.”
She spent the rest of the morning getting massaged and facialed, buffed, manicured and trimmed. By the time she presented herself at the treasure hunt meeting place, the kids were waiting, although neither Ray nor Muriel had arrived at the designated spot yet. Dominic scrutinized Grace closely as she approached, his face taking on a relieved expression when she stopped next to him. He turned to his sisters. “She looks okay to me.”
Lily tactfully ignored him. “We’re waiting for Dad and Muriel,” she explained. “Muriel wanted to play golf, so they went out to a driving range. I hope she hasn’t tired him out.”
Grace laughed. “I think your ancient dad still has a two-activity day left in him.”
He certainly seemed perky when he and Muriel ambled up. Ray was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved polo shirt, but Muriel was decked out in her Dinah Shore golf clothes—white golfing shoes, a baby blue skirt, and a matching knit top. Grace wished Sam was there to see it.
“Okay,” Jordan announced, barely giving the late arrivals time to catch their breaths or say hello to Grace. “Here’s your tracking device, Dad.” She handed him a small plastic doodad about the size of an iPod. “And here’s a list of the stuff you’re supposed to bring back. You and Grace are on one team, and Muriel, Lily, and I are on the other team. We’ll all be going for the same treasure, but our team will start by trying to find position A and work down to G, while you guys start at G and work the other way. The coordinates for each letter are programmed into the device. Oh—and you can only grab one item at each location. And no cheating. Got it?”
Lily and Jordan were already starting to head out when they noticed the adults weren’t following. The two girls were forced to turn around.
“Is there a problem?” Jordan asked, hands on her hips.
“How did these teams get picked?” Muriel asked.
“When
did they get picked?” Ray followed up.
Grace added, “And what about Dominic?”
In a disturbingly Jordan-like gesture, Lily rolled her eyes. “Since y’all were late, we went ahead and picked. We only have until dinner, so there’s not a lot of daylight to waste. And Dominic isn’t playing. He signed up for pool chess.”
Grace glanced over at Dominic, not quite believing this could be voluntary. “Really?”
He nodded mutely.
“We could do three teams of two,” Grace suggested. “Dominic and I could be a team.”
“No, you can’t,” Jordan said quickly. “Because Dominic wants to play pool chess in the luxurious heated indoor pool. Don’t you, Dominic?”
Dominic nodded again.
“But shouldn’t the rest of us draw straws or something?” Muriel asked.
“We drew for you,” Jordan said. “Congratulations—you won. You’re coming with us.”
“Unless you don’t want to be on our team,” Lily said, challenging her. “I mean, if you just don’t like us or something.”
Jordan and Lily stared at Muriel so pointedly that Grace almost felt sorry for the woman. To respond she would either have to lie or be offensive.
Sensing her dilemma, Muriel capitulated with a huff. “Well, at least let me carry the cockadoodie list!” she grumbled, snatching the list out of Jordan’s hand as she stomped past.
After they were gone, Grace turned to Dominic. “You can still join us, you know,” he said. “Even out the numbers.”
Dominic shook his head. “I signed up for pool chess. I figure I have a pretty good chance of winning after all my practice with Professor Oliver.”
Grace also figured he had a pretty good chance of getting clobbered by his sisters if he dared joined Ray and Grace’s team.
Ray turned to Grace with an amused smile. “I guess that leaves you and me chasing G to A.”
They set off down a well-worn path, Ray walking slightly ahead. Now that they were alone, Grace felt awkward, and a little miffed. She wasn’t so desperate that she needed two teenagers to fix her up with their dad—especially since it was clear they were doing so only because she was less loathsome than the alternative.
Especially when their dad seemed just as happy with the loathsome alternative.
Ray flicked a glance back at her. “Is something wrong?”
“Why?”
“You’re walking a few steps behind me, as if I were a king.”
“Sorry—I had the impression that you were walking ahead of me, as if I were a leper.”
He slowed down.
“Although you have seemed a little kinglike lately,” she pointed out. “You seem to have your would-be consort orbiting around you.” The minute she said it, she wanted to slap her hand over her mouth. Where had
that
come from?
He stayed focused on the screen of the GPS device. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He pointed to a smaller path. “This doohickey is telling us to go this way.”
She nodded, grateful for once for his studied obliviousness.
G turned out to be a plastic bag hanging from a tree. They hauled it down and examined the contents, then compared it to the list. Two of the things they needed were in the bag—a kazoo and a red plastic heart.
Ray frowned. “We can only take one thing from each site.”
“So we’re gambling that the thing we don’t choose will be in another cache?”
“Right. So which do we choose?”
They both thought for a moment.
“Heart,” she decided.
“Kazoo,” he said at the same moment.
They laughed. “We’ll go with the heart,” he said.
She shook her head. “No—the kazoo. That way if we get hopelessly lost, we’ll at least have music.”
“That decides it. We’re definitely taking the heart.”
After that, the ice, if not broken, was at least chipped a little. She and Ray rambled down pathways and picked up a tiny mirror at F.
“So where next?” she asked.
He arched a brow. “I think that would be E.”
Wiseacre. “I know the letter, but what direction?”
He punched in F and then gave the letter E as their destination, and the words
north 100 yards
flashed up on the screen. “That way.”
“Wouldn’t north be over there?” she asked, pointing to their right. “The river bends sharply here, doesn’t it?”
He frowned. “How do you know that?”
“They had a drawing on the place mat at breakfast. Didn’t you notice?”
Judging from his expression, her argument wasn’t very convincing. “We’re supposed to use your foggy memory of a place mat as a road map?”
“It’s a very clear memory of a place mat,” she argued.
“Okay—but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Her memory might have been right, but after ten minutes it seemed as if the place mat wasn’t. They had to double back in the direction of the river.
“This will probably cost us,” Grace said, wryly apologetic. “We’ll probably be out here forever now.”
He sent her a strange look—whether hurt or exasperated, she couldn’t tell. Pained, probably, at the idea of being stuck out here with her much longer.
“I’m sure Muriel would never have gotten you lost.”
He didn’t say anything.
She wanted to slap herself upside the head for the sting of jealousy she felt. Why was it that the minute you started to play a game, no matter how old you were, the desire to beat the pants off the other team kicked in?
In her case, the person whose pants she wanted to kick was Muriel.
Maybe he
did
like Muriel. More power to him. It was certainly no skin off her nose if the two of them wanted to live happily ever after. She was foolish even to have come on this expedition.

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