The small bit of New Hampshire that she had to drive through offered her a Motel 6, and by midnight she had slipped off her shoes, wrapped herself in the bedspread, and dove into a punishing sleep. Tomorrow would be her last day on Peak’s.
Chapter 29
Checkout time was noon, but Rocky had been awake since seven. She drank a glass of heavily chlorinated water from the tap and thought that New Hampshire didn’t go for things like chlorine. Maybe this part of the state was too close to Boston. Then she sat back on the bed with the spread wrapped around her and planned her departure from the Island. She’d wait until Isaiah returned. He was, after all, her boss. Or she could just leave the truck and the keys to everything at his house. No, she had promised to feed their cat. That was the last attachment that she had left and she was not going to fuck that up.
She heard a voice say, “Feck. Feck that up. No need to be vulgar.”
She threw off the blanket and stood up. “Bob? Oh my God, I’m going crazy in a Motel 6.” She knew that it was not uncommon to hear the voice of a loved one who had died. Sometimes the effect was soothing, but more often it was startling, and clearly she was startled. She had been searching for him in her dreams for months, and she had been comforted by the one dream of him that she eventually had, but the clear tone of his voice in his mock Irish accent shocked her.
When Bob said that something was fecked, there was the barest chance of hope; and one could say it in front of one’s mother. He clearly had not said fook, which was a more serious condemnation. Was there hope?
She said to the empty room, “You’ve got to give me more than that. I’m looking everywhere, and hope isn’t in the picture.”
She waited until noon in exactly the same spot, on the bed, in the same position with the bed cover wrapped around her shoulders in case she heard the voice again. The only sound Rocky heard was the coming and going of other travelers, cars starting up, doors slamming, and finally silence. She drove to Maine, picked up the yellow truck in Portland, and headed for the ferry. She had not eaten in over twenty-four hours so she bought a bag of barbecue chips on the ferry and after eating them, wished that she hadn’t. The grease and salt met in an unfriendly tangle in her stomach. She’d pack up quickly before the day was done.
The sky was thick with high clouds, the kind that foretold snow. It was a shadowless day. Rocky wasn’t ready to stop at Melissa’s house yet to tell her that Cooper was now beyond their reach. He’d never be coming back. She would have to work up enough courage to tell Melissa.
It was midafternoon as she pulled up to her cottage. A light was on inside. Oh yeah, she thought, I told Melissa to look after the place. She prayed that Melissa wasn’t there waiting; she wanted a few more moments before she had to tell her. Dread grew in Rocky’s throat and wrapped around her heart. Fook, she thought, Melissa is inside, I can hear something.
As she approached the steps, she turned her head slightly to one side as she tried to discern a familiar sound. After the startling voice of her dead husband earlier in the day, she was cautious. Rocky turned the knob and pushed open the door. She saw the great black shape of Cooper wagging and twisting toward her with his lips pulled into the biggest retriever smile. Tess and Melissa stood on the far side of the island counter with jubilant faces, eyebrows high, eyes glowing, their cheeks spread wide and high from smiling. Cooper took one huge lunge and put his front paws on her chest and flattened her against the wall. He made a high sound like singing.
“Oh, Cooper! Oh my God, Cooper-Lloyd.” Rocky slid to the floor and dug her fingers into his thick winter fur around his neck. “What are you doing here?” she asked him. Getting no answer, she looked at her two guests. “How did he get here? What’s going on?”
Rocky had never seen Melissa excited before. The girl spoke rapidly.
“I was here bringing in the mail, leaving some cat food out, and this car pulled up. It was those people who took Cooper. They brought him back. I couldn’t believe it!” Melissa said. Her face lit up, and for one second Rocky got a glimpse of how Melissa would look as a grownup, when she was first in love, or standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon.
“You mean the Townsends, Jan and Ed? What did they say?” The dog whirled his way to Melissa and wrapped his body around her thighs. The girl crouched down to get the full effect of his affection.
“The guy said they changed their minds, that’s all. But the woman said they couldn’t do right by Cooper and she wanted to make it right. She wanted to make it right with her daughter. Do you know what she was talking about? Look, they brought all this food and a new water dish and everything.”
Rocky took her eyes off the dog long enough to see that the Townsends had delivered a fifty-pound sack of food and a food dish with little paw prints that looked far too poodle for Cooper. A blue nylon leash sat abandoned near the couch.
“Did you happen to tell the Townsends where I was?” said Rocky, her shoulders falling. The image of Ed and Jan staring at the broken glass on the backdoor mat suddenly bore down on her.
“Since I didn’t really know who they were, I did what my Dad taught me to say. I said you were off on business, or doing business, I can’t remember which I said. But my father said never give people who you don’t know more information than they absolutely need.”
Tess raised an eyebrow at the girl. “Let me guess, dear, your father is a lawyer.”
“Yeah, he is. Did I say the right thing?”
Rocky sighed with relief. “You did great, Melissa. I don’t know why they returned him, but I’m not going to argue with the best thing that has happened since I got to this island.”
Tess slid her jacket on. “I leave this place for five days and the world gets turned upside down. I want to hear about everything that happened, but right now I have to check on a handful of summerhouses. Melissa filled me in on Cooper’s odyssey, but I have a feeling that you have been through hell and back. You look dreadful, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
Rocky hugged the older woman as she left. “I need to talk to you, but I’m ready to drop. Will you come by tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow, late afternoon. I need to make a quick trip into Portland to stock up on groceries.” Tess turned to look at the two people and the dog. “This place is so filled up with good juju that I hate to leave.”
Melissa stayed longer than she ever had at Rocky’s. The exhausted, well-fed dog dozed on his side and fell into a dream. He whimpered in dream talk, his feet jerking as if he were trotting. Rocky and the girl stopped talking and watched him.
Melissa said, “I think animals dream like we do, but they can’t tell us their dreams, so we’ll never know.”
Rocky paused and looked, really looked at Melissa. This was the first time that the girl had offered something that she had pondered. This was the first of a nest of pollywog thoughts that for some reason at this very moment, Melissa shared. One egg of her self dropped into the air and Rocky took it in. The fragility of the moment was not lost on her; anything that she could say now might be wrong. She tried to remember her old life, when she knew the right words to say to people to let them open up all the dark places on the inside. She stopped trying to think and just asked, “What do you think Cooper is dreaming?”
Melissa tucked one leg beneath her on the far corner of the couch. “Maybe he’s dreaming about running before he got hurt. I heard that people who get their legs amputated always dream with their legs on.”
“I never would have guessed that,” said Rocky. “I would have said food or catching a stick. You’re more complicated than I thought…” Rocky stopped. This could go wrong, she worried that Melissa would retreat again into her thinning bones.
“Melissa, I did something stupid when I was in Providence trying to find Cooper. I broke into the Townsend’s house. I broke a window on their back door. I don’t know what to do. I’ve never done anything like this before.”
Melissa turned her head abruptly to Rocky. “That’s like bre
aking and entering. You entered, right?”
“Yes, I broke and I entered. What would you do?” asked Rocky. She didn’t want to lose the window that opened with Melissa and she was willing to brace open the portal with her entire body. And she believed that the girl might really know.
Melissa leaned toward Rocky. “Never tell them. Never.”
For her entire career, Rocky had urged all who came to her to tell the truth, be brave, walk through the fear of emotional confrontation, and they would all be stronger for the effort.
Rocky nodded. “You’re right. I can tell a lie in this case.”
Chapter 30
Melissa was back at school for a full week before she noticed that she hadn’t gone to the YMCA even once after school. Instead, she took the first ferry home and stopped to get Cooper for a walk. A fast winter storm had dumped six inches of snow and the dog rolled in it like a displaced polar bear.
Rocky had even taken to calling her Lissa and she let her. Nobody called her that except her old friend, Chris. Everything had changed with Rocky once Melissa had helped her through that rough spot. There was a moment when she knew that Rocky truly didn’t understand how to bluff her way through a situation and that Rocky was programmed to confess the tiny little crime of breaking and entering that she had committed. Even the day after Melissa had plainly told Rocky to never, never tell the truth about smashing the Townsend’s window, Rocky had a moment of doubt.
Rocky had said, “I should call the Townsends and confess that it was me who broke into their house. Nothing good can come of lying.”
“No! No! Don’t call them. They don’t know it was you. They live in Providence. My history teacher said Providence is the crime center of the universe. Why would they think you’d broken into their house? Do not, repeat, do not tell them it was you.”
Melissa couldn’t believe that Rocky would risk losing Cooper again by letting the Townsends know she was a psycho lady crawling around in their backyard.
When Rocky asked Melissa for help, she had looked like some weird kind of kid, or a lost animal, or someone who doesn’t get that being honest is not always the best answer. Before Melissa left Rocky and Cooper, she said, “Now promise me, no calling and making confessions.”
Rocky had promised. And she looked ready to drop on the floor. She had dark circles under her eyes and looked like she was straight out of chemotherapy treatment. Melissa had checked out Rocky’s kitchen before the big dog reunion. Rocky had no food in the house. Okay, two cans of tuna, a greenish loaf of bread, a jar of dill pickles, and milk that said it was best if consumed six days ago. Rocky had terrible eating habits. Didn’t she know anything about nutrition? It had been weeks since she had logged on to the pro-Anna websites, but she remembered the caloric count of every food she had ever encountered.
Melissa rattled through the kitchen at home and found a brownie mix, read the directions, and with exacting measurements, produced a Pyrex pan of brownies. She didn’t mind any of the ingredients except the oil, which if half the high school girls knew was in brownies, they wouldn’t eat it.
Her mother returned home after dark. When she walked in the kitchen, she said, “This house smells unbelievable, Melissa. Did you make something?”
Her mother looked at the tray of brownies, then again at Melissa and she seemed like she was going to say something, anything, which was going to be too much. Melissa cut her off before she could speak.
“Most of these are for Rocky. I don’t think she knows how to cook. I’m worried about her.”
Her mother sat down without taking off her coat. She slowly pulled off her fleece hat.
“I can’t tell you how good this smells. It’s like our house is beautiful again,” she said quietly. Her mother didn’t say any more and for that Melissa was grateful.
Chapter 31
Rocky knew she had been wrong about Isaiah’s intention with Cooper and she left a phone message for him to call her when they returned. When Isaiah called her that night, he said their flight had been delayed from North Carolina.
“Does this mean you’re speaking to me again?” he asked.
“Yes, and it means a lot more than that. It means I’m not going to quit my job, which I was going to do, and it means some really good things happened along with some moderately terrifying things. Can we be friends again? I’m sorry,” she said. They agreed to meet at his office the next morning.
She told him everything, or mostly everything, leaving out the breaking and entering. And she didn’t tell him how confused she had been when Hill said he had slept with Liz, that he had known her. She did say that she was done with her archery lessons.
Isaiah asked her why. “You worried about crossing the bay in bad weather? If the crossing is dangerous, the ferry doesn’t run. And there’s a place to practice in the winter. The VFW in Portland has a crappy banquet hall that they used to let people use for archery way back when. That’s an indication of how bad the banquet hall was; they had one section with hay and targets.”
Rocky considered telling him everything about Hill, and she knew Isaiah would be the perfect person to tell. He had heard everything when he was a minister, so she wasn’t worried that she’d shock him or that he’d judge harshly. But to her surprise, she had already carved a space for Hill where she afforded him temporary protection. She had told no one about the paper target with Hill’s mark on it that she had seen at Liz’s old house in Orono. Tess had already guessed that Rocky was falling for her archery teacher. She told Rocky that her color was vastly diminished since she’d banned Hill from coming to visit. Rocky quickly switched the topic before Isaiah went down the same road.
“There’s one more thing. Liz’s old boyfriend probably has figured out that I have Cooper by now. I sent him on a false trail, and unless he’s an idiot, he knows what I did. He sounded determined to get him. This guy has no right to Cooper, but he still sounds obsessed with Liz, and now that Liz is dead, Cooper has become his focus.”
Rocky didn’t tell Isaiah exactly how scared she was after Peter drove off. She already saw Isaiah’s eyebrows moving together in a mountain of worry.
“What’s his last name?” he asked.
“I don’t know, but I might be able to find out. I met a friend of Liz’s in Orono.”
“Once you get his name, I can call the Portland police. They’re used to me calling about ridiculous things. But I doubt there’s anything they can do about a man with poor social skills who wants a dog that doesn’t belong to him.” The older man paused.
“Did he threaten you?”
“No, it wasn’t me who he threatened. It was like he was still after Liz, or anything that belonged to her. I’ve worked with a few men who became obsessed with ex-girlfriends, and their ability to stay focused on one person was staggering,” said Rocky.
“I’ve known them too, and I’ll tell you what works with them; a slap on the head. They give men a bad name and we’re skating on thin ice as it is.”
Rocky had still not been able to find out Peter’s last name. Shelly, the receptionist at the Orono Animal Clinic said she never knew it, and she only met him once. When Liz started up with Peter, she left everyone behind.
Peter’s last name came from a surprising source. The Townsends called her to say that Peter had called them right after they got back to Providence. They also mentioned that their house had been broken into and they figured it was Peter. Jan said, “And the nerve of that guy. He called us the next day to see if we had Cooper. I told him he was one sorry son of a bitch and if he came anywhere near here, we’d call the police. He made like he was surprised and insulted.”
Rocky felt queasy. “Well maybe it wasn’t him who broke into your house. Could be a coincidence.” She pressed her lips together to keep from confessing.
“I think you’re right. The police said the same thing. They said the footprints were more like a young boy or a woman.”
Footprints. Rocky decided to throw her running shoes away
the next day and get another pair in Portland. She froze and didn’t know what else to say.
Jan’s voice got softer. “How is the dog?”
“He hasn’t left my side except when his fan club is around. He’s pretty popular around here. Thank you for bringing him back.”
“I think Liz would like that. I’ve never been good with animals. That’s probably a sign of me being a defective human being, but I’ve got to be honest with you, dogs give me the creeps. Got bit by one when I was a kid. Eighteen stitches on my thigh. Liz wanted a dog from the time she could speak, but I was terrified of them.”
Rocky pictured Liz longing for the thing that most terrified her mother and she saw how mismatched the mother and daughter had been. And then she remembered that Jan had ostracized her own daughter and she wondered how she would live with that. Given all her options back then, Jan made a lousy choice.
“What made you decide to bring him back?” asked Rocky.
A long silence. Rocky waited, knowing that Jan was struggling with her emotions. “I made mistakes with Liz and I have to live with that. But you were right; she never would have hurt her dog. And he would have protected her at all costs. I can at least let Cooper live with someone who loves him. He deserves that.” Jan’s voice shook. “There’s something missing in the picture about her death and I wish I knew what it was.”
Rocky said, “I know what you mean. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Jan, did Peter say his last name?”
“I think he did. What the hell did he say it was? Ellis, yeah, like Ellis Island.”
Lost & Found With Bonus Excerpt Page 19
