Return to Eagle Cove

by M. L. Buchman

  And he couldn’t do a thing about it.

  “He is, dear,” her mother replied cheerily.

  “Does he do that to you a lot?” It was starting to get unnerving. In very short order, it would start pissing Jessica off. He’d been three years behind her in school. She’d dated his older brother for a while—he’s the one who earned her first kiss at fifteen, but not all that much more. Her prior visits home hadn’t overlapped with either brother being here, though she’d eaten the Judge’s breakfasts before and had been looking forward to some comfort food since they’d turned west across the Willamette Valley. Her lemon-curd brownie from Loretta’s in Chicago was many hours behind and much too far away.

  “I don’t think he’s doing it to me, Jessica.”

  “Well, it had better be us and not just me. We are two fairly dazzling women after all. Besides, if he does it much longer, he’s likely to get a dinner plate cracked over his skull.”

  Greg Slater shook himself like a wet dog and replaced his gape with a cautious smile. He’d done a lot of growing up since she’d last seen him. The gangly kid—who’d spent large portions of his freshman year in the principal’s office—had turned into such a decent-looking guy that she might not have recognized him if they’d passed on the street.

  “Hi, Jess.”

  “Jessica.” Her high school nickname was one of the things she’d left behind along with Eagle Cove. She and Jessie Hamilton had been in a lot of classes together and everyone had called them both Jess despite their opposing genders. “I’m not a man, so don’t expect me to answer to a male nickname.”

  “No you’re definitely not—” she could see where his eyes were going, along with his smile. She gave him a second to recover, then two. She didn’t give him three.

  Jessica picked up a dirty plate from a freshly vacated table. It had a pool of syrup and a large splotch of leftover ketchup on some crispy hash browns. With a quick grab, she captured both the front of Greg’s apron and his belt—maybe his underwear as well but she wasn’t going to think about that. She tipped the plate into the space over his flat abs and managed to shove it half down his pants for good measure.

  Jessica ignored his squawk of protest, letting go as he backpedaled away and almost landed on Cal Mason Sr.’s lap right in the middle of eating his tall stack.

  “Let’s sit over there, Mom,” she waved hello at the Judge before they sat down. He flapped a spatula back in her direction.

  The Judge never whispered, so she and the half dozen other late morning diners could hear him clearly when he told Greg, “Lady’s got your number but good, son.”

  Did she ever.

  Greg had been a real slouch, the classic underachieving little brother. A decade and a half later and he was still in town working as a waiter for his dad. He’d grown up lean and dark. His neat black hair hung to his collar and the close-cropped beard accented a strong chin. He’d have looked Keanu Reeves’ dangerous if it wasn’t for the easy smile that still hadn’t quite gone away. Greg Slater had come a long way from being fifteen…other than being another Eagle Cove failure-to-launch kid.

  The last time she’d seen him, he’d been just starting his sophomore year in high school and panting after Dawn something—the hussy of the class. They probably had a trailer down at the end of Shearwater Lane that was slowly returning back into forest in a state of semi-decay, with a half dozen little Greggies bouncing about.

  Maybe she should track down Greg’s big brother Harry when she returned to the real world. Last she’d heard he was still single and practicing law in New Orleans…not that she was that interested in living in New Orleans, but it was a great place to visit. Maybe have some fun while she was there. She could even set up a few interviews in the jazz clubs and then write off the trip as well as selling a couple of articles to the trades. A couple of human interest stories, maybe find something unique enough to turn into a feature as well.

  Though that was getting harder and harder. A few years ago she’d been able to get an article by the Rolling Stone Magazine editor way more than twice a year. And AAA used to give her bimonthly space in their magazines, but that had dried up as well. The collapse of print journalism was finally catching up with her.

  Maybe if she’d been a straight newsie, she’d have stood a chance, but she wasn’t. She’d always enjoyed the special interest story. Someone or some place that had found a way to be exceptional. A hot band, an innovative inventor, an amazing kid…those were the stories that had fascinated her. They’d shaped her career. And now they were “fringe” stories that didn’t command much share in the shrinking print journalism bucket.

  E-magazines were worse, paying nothing. The Huffington Post had offered her a regular blog column, for no pay at all, which said too much about the state of that part of the industry. Maybe she should do a piece on The Puffin Diner; there was a laugh. That was probably below even HuffPo’s standards.

  “So…” she took a deep breath and decided that since she didn’t have a choice about being in town for the whole week that she’d agreed to come for anyway, she might as well put a good face on it. It wasn’t like the editors of the world were in a bidding war for her next story.

  She and her mother settled at a clean table beneath a watercolor painting of The Puffin Diner, one of Ma Slater’s last, based on the date. “Not for Sale” was in bold type on the little card taped to the wall close beside the frame.

  “So, tell me about the dress, Mom.”

  Greg retreated. Actually, he didn’t retreat, he ran away. The old Monty Python gag about “That’s one nasty rabbit” came too easily to mind. Jessica Baxter was beautiful and looked all sweet and…fluffy.

  Then she shoved a plate of cold food down his pants, ramming it right down inside his underwear in front of everyone. Cal Sr.’s howl of laughter had followed him right back through the service door into the side hall.

  The one bathroom was occupied, so he detoured through the service door into the kitchen, his only other option.

  Judge Baxter kept tending his omelets, “temperamental things omelets, can’t look away from them for a second.” But Greg also knew from experience that the Judge missed nothing of what happened in his restaurant.

  With nowhere else to go, Greg moved over by the clean-up sink and shed the apron and his pants. At least his underwear had caught most of it. He shed those, wiped himself down with a couple of wet paper towels and pulled his pants back on commando. Greg wasn’t really a commando sort of guy.

  His shirt had taken the brunt of the attack. He stripped it off over his head and chucked it into the laundry bag along with his underwear and yesterday’s service apron. He crossed to where he kept a spare shirt on one of the dry good storage shelves, but had never thought to keep underwear there as well. Greg yanked on the fresh shirt and buttoned it up.

  “Not a word,” he muttered at the Judge as he wound a fresh apron about his waist.

  “The court will maintain a respectful silence at this time,” the old man said with a tone as dry as week-old toast.

  Restored to some semblance of order, Greg returned to the dining area. Cal Sr. gave him a smile he wished he hadn’t seen. “Don’t know what you did to piss her off, boy, but you did it good.”

  Greg considered telling Cal a thing or two, except he and the Judge had been friends since before Greg was born, and Greg knew that was dangerous ground.

  Plastering on his best maître d’s smile, he grabbed two menus and returned to the Baxters’ table. Yes. That was a safer way to think of it. Not Jessica’s; the Baxters’.

  “Good morning. Welcome back to town, Jessica.”

  If she had any remorse for her abrupt action, she wasn’t showing it in the least. “Thanks, Greg,” she took the one-sheet menu and turned to study it without saying anything else. He’d swear there was a laugh lurking somewhere below the surface, but with her face turned down, he couldn’t see it.

  “Can I get you anything to drink?” He already knew M
rs. Baxter’s preference for black teas before noon and herbals after lunch and had brought that to the table with the menus.

  “Hot chocolate. No whip. With marshmallows if you have them.”

  “What? Are you a child?” And Greg could have shot himself. The Judge’s crazy rules about what people should and shouldn’t want had ruined his brain.

  Jessica looked up at him with steady eyes the light blue of an ocean wave with the sunlight shining through…just before it crested and broke, smashing the unsuspecting rocks.

  “No,” her look was very cool, but her tone had a laugh hidden in it somewhere. “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “A child? Still twelve maybe?” The last added with a wry smile.

  Greg opened his mouth, saw Mrs. Baxter’s widening eyes—perhaps at the danger zone he’d just flown into. A quick glance to the side revealed that the Judge was watching him intently.

  “Um, that would be no. I’m not still twelve. Nor thirteen.”

  “Fourteen then?” Jessica’s smile lit her face, as if bantering with him was the best part of her morning. This wasn’t Jessica Baxter of eighteen. He was now facing a formidable woman who absolutely knew that she’d totally unnerved him.

  “Not fourteen either,” was the best rejoinder he could come up with. Before he could lose even more ground he said, “I’ll get your cocoa,” and turned for the wait station. Greg did his best to ignore his father’s courtroom stare—the one he used when the defense counsel was making a particularly specious argument fabricated from too many Internet searches.

  “Chicken!” Jessica whispered just loud enough for him to hear. “Buck-buck-bu-caw!”

  Then she and her mother broke into a flurry of giggles that he did his best to ignore.

  Cal Mason, who’d been leaning over to hear the exchange, added another of his loud guffaws.

  Jessica listened and made appropriate sounds in the right places about this time’s wedding dress.

  But she was having trouble focusing. The last time she’d seen Greg Slater he’d been a pimply underclassman. When she’d been dumping the plate’s contents down his shorts, she’d found a flat stomach with no give. He was now a handsome man awesomely in shape.

  That was a point that had been emphasized when he’d stripped off his shirt. She could only see him from the midriff up over the edge of the steel service shelf that separated the dining room from the kitchen, but Greg clearly worked out and, loser or not, it looked very good on him. She wasn’t that shallow, not really. But she was less certain about how shallow her Coast County regression might ultimately make her.

  When he delivered her hot chocolate, with the marshmallows, she kept her head down and pretended she was paying more attention to her mother than she actually was. He was nothing more than a Puffling—a baby puffin being the lamest sports mascot on the coast if you didn’t count the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs. Greg might be a Puffling who hadn’t had the skills or drive to get out of town, but he was a very attractive one. That utterly shallow part of her double-checked for the ring or a tan line as he set down the cocoa. Nothing. Didn’t mean he wasn’t—she’d learned the hard way—but it didn’t mean he was either.

  Not that she could possibly care.

  Nine days and she’d be gone again, Friday through next Sunday.

  A glance out the window showed that day one was almost half done already which she’d count as a good omen. The sun was almost due south, lighting the length of Beach Way brightly. She could see Cal Jr.’s beat up red pickup parked right next to Cal Sr.’s beat up blue pickup alongside the Blackbird Bakery. By the speed the people on the street were moving, they were locals running errands. They moved much slower than a Chicagoan but with purpose—like crows walking over to see if something was edible. The few tourists who were checking out the taffy and kitsch shops moved slower but with a frenetic energy—like sparrows never quite coming to roost.

  Eight and a half days to go. It wasn’t enough time for anything to happen, even if she was interested. Flings had stopped working for her before she got out of college. Since then it had become a slightly depressing quest for what she was starting to fear she’d never find, someone who loved her the way that her dad loved Mom.

  She’d make sure to hit Cal’s bakery while she was here. And see if Maybelle had any particularly good used books in Early Bird Books. At least one lunch at the Plover Bay Inn… Jessica turned away from the street with the sad realization that she could do everything she wanted to in the town in about a day and she still had eight to go.

  Greg kept his fifteen-year-old thoughts to himself as he served them a pair of the fluffiest mushroom omelets available anywhere. She turned to nod her thanks to the Judge—he didn’t cook fancy fare, but it was always the very best.

  She also noticed that the Judge hadn’t missed a single jot of his son’s shortcomings. She’d always liked Harry and Greg’s dad, but she wasn’t so sure that she liked the look in his eyes at the moment. Jessica had learned the day after her first kiss with Harry that she could read Judge Slater’s facial expressions far too easily, even if everyone else in town declared him to be wholly inscrutable. It was a skill that had served her well in journalism, too. She’d always been able to tell exactly what topic the interviewee was doing their best to avoid.

  However, right now the Judge was looking at her as if he was having an idea that he found both interesting and curious. The last shift in his expression surprised her, partly because it was clear enough that anyone except a dunderhead like Greg would be able to see it.

  Judge Slater had just decided that whatever he was thinking was pretty funny and that worried Jessica.

  Not much amused the Judge.

  Greg kept to the shadows after locking the door behind the last customers. It was almost eleven; the Baxters had taken their time. Jessica and Monica Baxter walked across Beach Way. Except Jessica didn’t walk. She…

  He wasn’t sure what she did, but it was doing strange things to his thoughts.

  Her sudden reappearance had hit him as hard as any slap—and he’d earned a few before he’d learned decent manners while still a high school sophomore. Seeing her so out of the blue took him back to when he was in seventh-grade and she was already an over tall and impossibly sophisticated fifteen; even then she’d had an amazing sense of style that set her apart from all of the other girls. That was the age when he’d started thinking that girls weren’t just different than boys, but that the differences were very interesting.

  Today she wore light slacks and a blouse that looked loudly…Hungarian, though he had no idea what a Hungarian blouse might actually look like. Perhaps it was the blue scarf loosely knotted about one wrist that made her look a bit like a blond gypsy.

  Half of the fights he and Harry had as kids, and there’d been plenty, didn’t have a thing to do with being brothers. Though he’d forgotten the reasons until this moment.

  He’d seen Harry kiss Jessica Baxter, and a need to pummel his brother had burned to life inside him. They’d battled often enough over the next three years before Harry went to college for Greg to completely forget the reason behind it. Even after he’d grown up enough to stop getting into fistfights with his own blood-kin—an offense the Judge had curiously left completely for them to work out—Greg had never been able to explain why he’d begun in the first place. By the time he and Harry had discovered that they actually liked each other, about the same time Greg graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, Greg hadn’t remembered the Jessica-based origin.

  He did now…and felt incredibly stupid. He’d have to apologize to Harry the next time they talked. Jealousy, deep and dark green as the Coast Range forest. Impressively stupid, even on his personal, deeply sad scale of stupidity.

  Out the window, Jessica slid into the far side of her mother’s blue Toyota hybrid. Just before her face disappeared below the roofline, she looked back toward the diner. No—she looked right at him. Without noticing, he’d mov
ed up to the diner’s front window until his nose was practically pressed against the glass between the black-and-gold “e” and “C” in “Eagle Cove.”

  He could feel her laugh like a blow to his chest even if he couldn’t hear it through the glass. Her sparkling laugh had him retreating once more into the shadows.

  When he turned, his father was watching him watch Jessica, the grill’s wire brush clenched in one yellow-gloved fist and a large sponge in the other.

  “What?”

  The Judge offered one of his thin, unreadable smiles.

  “What?” Greg was sufficiently aggravated with himself for getting caught staring that the word came out loud and sharp. He half expected to be banished from the room.

  Instead his father simply raised his eyebrows in mock surprise and said softly, “You always did have a soft spot for that girl.” Then he turned back to cleaning the grill.

  Greg didn’t have a “soft spot” for Jessica Baxter.

  She’d been his first mad crush and just now he’d learned that he’d never gotten over it.

  Chapter 2

  (Friday Afternoon)

  It had been almost a decade since the previous wedding between her parents, and four years since Jessica’s last visit to Eagle Cove. Her life had kept her busy and the time had slipped by too easily to notice.

  To push back the guilt, she concentrated on the view out the car window as they drove through town.

  It was amazing how little yet how much Eagle Cove had changed. Or rather how little it had changed and how much she noticed each detail that had. The Flicker movie theater across from the diner still had a massive chainsaw carving of a northern flicker woodpecker clutching the marquee, but it also sported a fading sign which proudly declared: “Now in Digital!” They were running The Big Year. She’d bet that they reran the birding film every year for the summer tourists coming to Eagle Cove for fair weather coastal birding. They’d probably bring it back in the spring too.