Losing Penny

by Kristy Tate

  From Losing Penny and Pounds

  Penny swam against the cold waves until her arms felt as powerful as strings of yarn and her legs had all the propulsion power of jelly blobs. Letting the tide wash her on shore, she flopped down on her stomach and laid her head in her crossed arms.

  Wolfgang snuffled his snout in her curls. She didn’t like it, but she lacked the energy to push him away. After a moment he laid down beside her with a humph.

  The sun dried her back and a small breeze tickled her bare skin. She still had that pinpricking sensation of being watched. She knew she should have left that feeling in Laguna along with the Lurk. She knew he would never follow her so far. Thank goodness for friends. Between Phoebe’s car, Aunt Mae’s house and the photos—Penny was safe. Or at least she hoped she was.

  A faint jangle of guitars wafted from the Marx house, and Wolfgang sat up to listen. The smell of a barbeque drifted down the bank. Wolfgang whined. Someone must be having party. Penny’s mind wandered into forbidden territory of juicy burgers and crisp, salty fries. She replaced standard American beefy fare in her diet with portabella mushrooms, grilled strips of peppers, and onions doused in balsamic vinegar all wrapped in foil and thrown in the fire. Despite her gurgling, though nicely flat belly, Penny was happy.

  When her back had dried, Penny rolled over and watched the clouds chase across the bright blue sky. After a moment she closed her eyes and dreamed of goats. Her lips curved into a smile.

  But that evening, when the dark and fog rolled in, the enormity of what she had done sat on her shoulders. The thought of spending the entire summer alone at the beach house weighed on her mind and her heart. Could she really stay in this isolated place without any one to talk to? Anxiety hammered in her chest and Penny reached for her mind-numbing medication.

  ***

  Hours later, Penny woke to find Wolfgang’s snout hovering above her nose. He blew a warm, meaty breath on her face. She tried to push him away, but he whimpered and nudged her. She remembered that she hadn’t taken him out before she’d fallen asleep, and the sun had long since disappeared into the Sound. A full moon cast long shadows against the red bedroom walls.

  Struggling to keep a quilt wrapped around her shoulders, Penny cursed the big dog in vain; he already had his nose pressed against the front door of the cottage. She padded after him. He whimpered and pawed at the door. The doorknob felt icy, and cold seeped through the doorjamb. Penny shivered in her quilt and pulled it tightly across her chest. She shivered again when the damp, frigid air blew in.

  Wolfgang bolted and Penny sighed. She sunk to a squat on the porch, pulled her knees up to her chest, and waited for the dog to come back. Closing her eyes, she leaned her head against the wall and wished she had a cat complete with a litter box. She rolled her head to the side and looked for Wolfgang in the dark. The trees swayed in the wind and the full moon’s light filtered through clouds.

  The music next door played a few dying notes and stopped. Chatter and the clink of dishes and glasses filled the night air. The party must be over. The Marx family had always had a steady stream of parties in the past, but with Mae and a collection of books and chocolates to keep her company, Penny hadn’t ever wanted to join them. Not that she’d been invited. To the Marx’s, Penny and Mae might as well have been on the moon.

  Maybe now that she wore a size four instead of a twelve they’d notice her. Maybe now that she had a successful cooking show she would be worth knowing. She shouldn’t think that way, but what was she going to do all summer, by herself? The cookbook wasn’t going to eat up every waking moment. Her thoughts drifted to Trevor Marx, the object of her teenage crush. She wondered what had happened to him.

  Wolfgang barked and Penny stood to see what he saw, a shadow crossing the lawn. Wolfgang’s barks turned from warning to ballistic and he ran toward her. Maybe not the most brave dog, but a very noisy one. The shadow disappeared around the back of the house. With a hammering heart, Penny followed. Wolfgang bounced beside her, throwing a volley of panicked barks.

  The intruder flipped on the switch in the kitchen—her kitchen—and flooded the dark with yellow light. Penny pressed herself up against a tree, hiding and watching. Tall, thin, blond, dressed in faded jeans and a button down white shirt that offset his tan skin and startling blue eyes—he didn’t look like a Lurk. His gaze peered into the dark, looking past her and focusing on Wolfgang. “Shoo!” he called. “Go home!”

  Wolfgang responded with a snarl.

  The blond Lurk pushed the door open and stood in a halo of light.

  Penny held still and didn’t breathe. He was beautiful…and oddly familiar. An invisible string tugged at her, urging her toward him, but she stayed rooted behind the tree. She had read that stalkers, like vampires, have charisma, beauty, and charm—wiles that trap unsuspecting females into a web. He stepped out onto the porch. He had a knife in his hand, the moon glinted off the long blade that dripped…something.

  Penny grabbed the hem of her nightgown and bolted for her car.

  “Hey!” he called after her.

  For being barefoot she was fast, but he was faster. Penny reached her car and fumbled for the door handle. Locked. Of course. Looking over her shoulder at the light burning in her room, she considered running upstairs and grabbing her purse and keys, but she knew she’d never make it. Pressed against the Volkswagen, Penny opened her mouth and screamed. Wolfgang, a snarling angry bundle of fur, stood guard.

  The Lurk looked around. “What the hell?”

  Penny opened her mouth even wider and summoning her inner opera singer, she upped her scream an octave.

  The Lurk approached and stood in a patch of moonlight, his arms dangling at his sides. Somewhere he’d lost the knife.

  An engine roared and a white catering van rumbled past. Penny waved her arms at the driver, but he looked bored and waved back at her, slowly shaking his head. She tried to run after him, but the gravel hurt her feet. She limped until a vice-like hand on her arm stopped her.

  “Hey,” the Lurk said softly.

  Wolfgang growled, his head low, his stance in pouncing position.

  “Call off your dog,” he said.

  “I’m not—“ Penny began and then reconsidered. “Attack! Wolfgang, attack!”

  But Wolfgang was not an attack dog. Penny looked at him with disappointment and then at the man holding her arm.

  “Who are you?” he asked, his gaze traveling over her wild hair and cottony gown.

  Penny struggled against his grip. “Let me go!”

  The Lurk thought about this. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. You might hurt me.”

  “Try me,” Penny said through clenched teeth.

  He dropped her arm and Penny shot out with a right hook, smashing his lip.

  He howled in pain, backing away. Penny followed and delivered another punch to his gut. He doubled over and blocked her next blow with his arm. “See, I was right about you,” he woofed in pain. “Alright, I give!”

  Penny’s breath came out in short huffs. This Lurk wasn’t nearly as in shape as her trainer. If he were a rapist or a murderer, wouldn’t he at least fight back a little? “You give what?” she asked, backing behind her growling dog.

  “I give up!” He straightened and touched his bloody lip with the corner of his shirt. “What are you, a ninja in a nightgown?”

  Penny looked down at her nightie. In the moonlight it was completely see-through. She bunched it up in front of her and glared at the Lurk. Pointing at the beach house with a trembling finger, she asked, “What are you doing here?”

  The Lurk looked over his shoulder. “I was making a sandwich. What are you doing here?”

  “I live here.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since…wait, that doesn’t matter!”

  “Yeah, I think it does. I have a signed lease for the summer.”

  Penny slowly shook her head. “That’s not possible.”

  The Lurk motioned toward the house. �
��Do you want to go inside? We can talk where it’s not cold.”

  “No!” Penny scoffed. “I am not going inside that house with you.”

  “Are you sure?” His gaze traveled to her chest. “You look cold, and you’re not wearing… any shoes.”

  Penny straightened her shoulders and did her best to be modest in her see-through nightie. “This is my family’s beach house.”

  “Is there a little old lady named Mae Lee in your family?”

  “How do you know my aunt?”

  “I rented this house from her for the summer,” he said in an ultra patient voice, the type school teachers use with obtuse students.

  “Are you a teacher?”

  He laughed. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “So, you are. What do you teach?”

  “The Romantics and American Lit. Why?”

  So, he knew Atticus as well as Emerson, Thoreau and Twain.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to have this conversation inside?” he asked.

  Penny shook her head.

  The Lurk shrugged and turned away.

  “Where are you going?” Penny called after his retreating back.

  He turned to face her, but continued walking backwards. “I’m going to fix a sandwich then I’m going to bed. It’s late.”

  Penny looked down at her bare feet rooted in the dirt. She would not put one foot in that house.

  “Are you sure you don’t want sandwich? I’ve got some gouda cheese and some croissants.”

  Croissants. A butter croissant, depending on its size, easily had two to three hundred calories. Penny shook her head.

  “Coffee?” He watched her face. “No, not me, either. It’d keep me awake. Cocoa?”

  She felt like a fly being enticed into a web. Penny sniffed and considered her options. The closest hotel was thirty miles away. “I didn’t see any of your things inside.” She didn’t like how small and uncertain her voice sounded. Reminding herself of her self-defense training, she straightened her spine, drew herself up to her full height—easily a foot shorter than the Lurk. He had at least a hundred pounds on her, but she had Wolfgang. She rested her fingers on top of the dog’s head.

  “I’m very tidy,” he said.

  A tidy, beautiful, man offering her a croissant with cheese. And cocoa. She did love gouda, even at a hundred calories per ounce. And cocoa, depending on the brand, had twenty-five calories to two hundred and forty calories, without whipped cream. She looked into Drake’s gorgeous, smiling blue eyes. He didn’t seem like a twenty-five calorie cup of cocoa type…or a Lurk. He looked like bona fide whip cream—not one of those oily, in-your-dreams Cool Whips.

  There could be worse ways to die.

  Chapter 16

  “I am a keeper,” she told him. “Commissioned by my grandmother to protect the sacred text.” “Then we shall carry it with us to my homeland,” Hans told her.

  “You do not understand,” she told him with sadness filling her eyes. “The text must stay here, on my ancestor’s land, where my fathers are buried and our future is born. As keeper, I too must stay.”

  From Hans and the Sunstone

  Thirty minutes later, Drake removed the cup of lukewarm cocoa from Penny’s hand. The cream had melted to a mocha color. He set the mug on the coffee table and tucked a quilt over her sprawled legs. The dog lying at her feet lifted a corner of his lip in an exhausted growl, and Penny mumbled something and nuzzled into the quilt. Drake stood above her, feeling like an intruder in his own home.

  Well, it really wasn’t his home, it belonged to Penny’s aunt. He’d liked Mae Lee. Despite her age, she hadn’t seemed like the sort to make such a horrible mistake. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe Penny was the intruder.

  With this uncomfortable thought lodged in his mind, Drake picked up the mug, rinsed it out in the sink, and placed it in the dishwasher. He threw Penny a worried glance. He had shown her the rental agreement and the slew of texts and e-mail exchanges he had had with Mae Lee, which had pacified Penny, but he really didn’t know anything about her.

  He crept up the stairs to find some sort of identification. Her things lay scattered over the floor and bed of the red room. Drake sniffed and picked his way across the floor. He was careful not to step on her things, but something smashed beneath his shoe anyway. A bottle of pills. Antival, for anxiety. May cause drowsiness. He tried to push the plastic bottle back into cylinder shape, but the lid no longer fit. He placed the pills on the nightstand and sat down on the bed, wondering why Penny needed benzos.

  Maybe her purse would tell him. Her purse was as jumbled as her things scattered over the bedroom floor. Receipts, candy wrappers, tampons. Geesh. Finally, he found her driver’s license. This couldn’t be her. This woman had strawberry blond hair and an extra fifty pounds. Penny Lee—the name and face rang a bell. He knew her somehow. She shared Mae’s last name, but it was more than that. He was sure they had met. They were the same age and she had said that she used to spend her summers here.

  Curious, Drake headed into the kitchen and turned on his laptop. Penny didn’t stir as his computer whirred on. Since he’d been upstairs, she’d curled up onto the sofa. A tiny thread of drool stained the throw pillow beneath her head. He pulled a blanket around her shoulders.

  Drake typed her name into the search engine and was instantly rewarded with thousands of hits. He scanned over her blog, Losing Penny and Pounds. Penny, the chubby, strawberry blond Penny, had chronicled her weight loss journey online, and now she had thousands of followers and her own cooking show, Penny’s Pantry. That was how he knew her.

  Last year, shortly after the Magdalena debacle and long after Blair, when he’d been in such a funk, he’d taken to watching hours and hours of The Food Channel. He loved Penny’s Pantry. But what was she doing here outside of her pantry looking nothing like the Penny the world knew and loved, especially when she was supposed to be traveling the world?

  He did some more online research and finally found something he could use. Smiling, he closed the computer and went to lie on his bed. For once his imagination brewed over something non-Viking related.

  Drake had an amazing idea that had nothing to do with Hans and his sunstone.

  Chapter 17

  For a good night’s sleep, say no to caffeine. Some people can drink a coke at 10 p.m. and still fall right to sleep, but if you’re an insomniac, it’s just not worth the risk. Plus, if you do eliminate or cut back on caffeine, your body will become more sensitive to it. And don’t forget that caffeine lurks in chocolate and many teas.

  From Losing Penny and Pounds

  Penny woke to the smell of French toast and bacon. How could she have fallen asleep with a strange man in the house? She remembered the medication. Feeling isolated and frightened, she had taken the pills sometime before dinner. Penny sat up to watch the man in the kitchen. He had an ugly, fat and purple lip. Thank you, kickboxing class. He wore a giant lobster apron and bent over a pan sizzling with snapping grease.

  “Good morning,” he called out to her.

  Penny ran a tongue over her fuzzy teeth and tried to formulate a game plan. Of course, the prudent thing to do was to contact her aunt who happened to be on a transatlantic cruise, but Mae’s phone wouldn’t work at sea. Penny could e-mail Mae, but the police had warned Penny off e-mail and social media sites to help her avoid the Lurk. Penny cleared her throat.

  The man slid a perfectly formed slice of French toast onto a plate and topped it with a pat of butter and few fresh raspberries. He smiled as he watched her eyes widen.

  “You recognize your own creation,” he said.

  “French toast and berry butter,” she breathed. “BFDF.”

  Confusion crossed his face.

  “Before diet food,” she clarified.

  “Aren’t there too many F’s?” he asked, looking down at the plate.

  “No. If anything there should be more F-words.” Penny planted her feet on the ground and straightened her spine. Eve
n if she didn’t know this man, even if she didn’t know where she was going to live, she knew better than to eat French toast and berry butter.

  He laughed. “I knew I liked you.”

  “You know who I am.” She watched him and the dreaded plate of food cross the room. He sat down beside her and the sofa cushions sunk beneath his weight, pulling her his way. She tightened her grip on the quilt and edged away.

  “If it helps, I never would have guessed if I hadn’t found your driver’s license.”

  “That was rude—going through my things.”

  He shrugged. “You would have done the same.”

  Penny lifted one shoulder to acknowledge this simple truth. “Now that you know who I am, who are you?”

  “Just one of your humble followers.”

  She flinched, suddenly uncomfortable, and he noticed. “I’m not your stalker,” he said. “I’m actually a very decent guy. I would never try to frighten you.”

  “You know about the stalker.” Penny pulled the comforter around her shoulders. “And I still don’t know what you’re doing here. I don’t even know your name.” He had told her, and she had read it on the rental agreement, but his name didn’t really matter, because he had to leave. She didn’t have anywhere else to go, but he probably did. He looked like the kind of guy that anyone would love to have as a houseguest. He probably had parents, siblings, and tons of friends, so if he didn’t have his own place, he could stay with one of them.

  “I’m Drake Islington, remember?” He set down the plate of food, reached into his back pocket, and pulled out his wallet. He handed her his driver’s license, his ID from Western Washington University, and a season pass to a theater called the Rose Arbor Repertory. “I teach American Lit, and I’m also a ghostwriter—”