by JoAnn Ross
“Thanks.” Nora could envision the cellulite leaping to her thighs from the aroma alone. “It smells delicious.”
She’d already gained ten pounds since returning to Tribulation, mostly from her patients’ peach cobblers, berry pies, fresh-caught—and thankfully cleaned—fish, corn muffins and numerous other local delicacies.
It was as if everyone realized she was undercharging them for their visits, and although they were grateful, pride insisted that they augment the reduced fee with whatever they could spare.
“I figured you could use a little fattening up.” Ingrid’s bright eyes swept judiciously over Nora’s slender frame. “You’re not gonna get yourself a man unless you put a little more meat on those bones.”
“Actually, I’ve been too busy to even think about men.”
“Well, I expect that’ll change, now that Caine’s back in town,” the older woman declared.
“My marriage to Caine ended a long time ago,” Nora replied, reluctant to be discussing something so personal, but feeling that her disinterest in Caine O’Halloran needed to be put on record.
And who better to start with than Ingrid? Nora doubted that there was a person in Tribulation who didn’t pop into the eatery sometime during the week. Especially on Wednesdays, for Ingrid’s pot-roast special.
“Legally,” Ingrid agreed, closing her pocketbook with a snap. “My experience has been that feelings are quite another kettle of fish.”
Determined to get the last word in, she left the office without giving Nora an opportunity to respond.
For the rest of the day, Nora continued to smile and nod and write prescriptions and listen to yet another story depicting the life and times of Tribulation’s local hero.
Twenty-one years ago, Tribulation, a timber town founded a century earlier by a Swedish logger and an Irishman who’d been laying railroad tracks up the coast, had gone through hard times.
People who could trace their roots back to those original settlers had been forced to leave their homes and seek what they hoped would be temporary employment in the Puget Sound cities of Seattle, Olympia and Tacoma.
Storefronts had been boarded up; the school established by the founding fathers had been in danger of closing, which would have forced the students to be bused to Port Angeles. Morale had been at an all-time low.
Until a cocky fourteen-year-old took the pitcher’s mound during a state high school championship game between the Tribulation Loggers and the Richland Bombers and threw what Washington sportswriters the next morning were calling “the pitch heard ’round the state.”
From that day on, Caine O’Halloran was known as the Golden Boy with the golden arm. His natural ability to throw a ball gained him fame and admirers and his hometown was eager to bask in the reflected glow of his popularity.
He went to college on an athletic scholarship, then on to play professional baseball. He spent some time in the minors because although his fastball flew at ballistic speed, no one, including Caine, ever had any idea exactly where it was going.
A sportswriter for the Seattle Times once remarked that O’Halloran, then playing for the Tacoma Athletics, didn’t throw to spots, he threw to continents.
However, with time, he’d garnered control and began making headlines for his energetic play both on and off the baseball diamond as he moved from team to team, league to league, barreling into every new town like a hired gun, paid to win championships. Which he did, with almost monotonous regularity.
He was one of those rare, powerful athletes known as a “closer”—a pitcher brought to the mound in the last innings to win the game. And like so many relief pitchers Nora had met during her brief marriage, Caine was a bit mad. Mad angry, and mad crazy.
One particular stunt she recalled vividly was during his stint at Tacoma when he’d relieved the boredom of waiting to be called to the mound by telephoning other bullpens throughout the Pacific Coast League. By imitating the voices of the other teams’ coaches, he’d ordered relievers hundreds of miles away to begin warming up.
The prank had resulted in a fine and more nationwide publicity than money ever could have purchased.
But now, according to the articles she’d read, Caine’s golden arm had turned to brass and his most recent team, the New York Yankees, had put him on waivers.
Speculation ran rampant concerning his future; doctors who’d never examined him were interviewed on television and in the papers, their prognoses ranging from Caine’s return in time for the fall playoffs, to the prediction that his career was over. The one thing every article agreed upon was that Caine refused to accept that his playing days were over.
Which wasn’t surprising, since in Nora’s experience, most athletes possessed a seemingly genetic inability to accept the fact that their bodies might be more fragile than their determination. Or their egos.
The afternoon was almost over when Karl Larstrom, a rough-hewn former logger in his late seventies, showed up at the clinic without an appointment, his seven-year-old great-grandson in tow.
“Gunnar here got a fishhook in his ear,” he advised her laconically. “Tried to clip it off with a pair of wire cutters, but it won’t budge.”
Nora smiled down at the boy whose wet blue eyes suggested he’d been crying. “Hi, Gunnar,” she greeted him. “Why don’t you hop up here and I’ll see what we can do.”
“I’ve been teaching the boy how to cast,” Karl told her while she worked on the metal fishhook firmly imbedded in the boy’s earlobe. “Guess he needs a mite more practice.”
“It was the damn tree,” Gunnar insisted, flinching when Nora experimentally jiggled the hook. “It got in the way.”
“Watch your mouth, boy,” Karl advised. “Your mama’s not gonna let you keep fishing with me if she thinks I’m teaching you how to cuss.”
“But that’s what you said when the line got tangled in the first place,” Gunnar argued. “Ow!”
“Those trees are infamous for eating fishing lines,” Nora assured the boy, who’d gone pale.
“I suspect you heard about Caine,” Karl Larstrom offered.
A spot of bright red blood beaded where the now freed hook had entered the skin. Nora swabbed at the minuscule hole with alcohol.
“Several times. All done,” she declared, hoping to forestall any more conversation concerning Caine.
“Joe Bob Carroll saw him driving toward town around noon.”
“Really?” Nora asked in a tone of absolute disinterest.
“Yup.” Karl had never been one to pick up on subtlety. “He was driving one of them fancy Eye-talian sports cars.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out some bills.
“So Eric told me.” Nora put the rumpled money in the cashbox she kept in the top drawer. Instead of gasoline, these dollar bills smelled vaguely of fish. “He said it looked like a Batmobile.”
“Yup,” Karl said after chewing the description over for a moment. “I reckon it does, at that. Did Eric tell you about him playing chicken with Harmon Olson’s log truck?”
Despite her determination to ignore every bit of unwelcome news about her former husband, that particular tidbit earned her reluctant attention.
“He wasn’t!”
“Joe Bob Carroll was right behind Harmon in his pickup.” Karl’s eyes brightened when he realized he’d finally hit on a piece of information Nora hadn’t already heard.
“I thought you and Gunnar were out fishing all day.”
“We were. But word gets around.”
“Tell me about it,” she murmured.
Gossip was the motherlode of small towns and in this case, Tribulation’s grapevine was obviously working at warp speed.
“Caine was riding the centerline, just the way he did back when he was workin’ overtime to be the town hellion, and from the way Joe Bob
tells it, it looked like he wasn’t gonna move, come hell or high water.”
Obviously, Caine hadn’t changed one little bit. Not that she would have expected him to.
Stupid reckless idiot!
Although she told herself that she didn’t care what happened to Caine, Nora had spent too many years in the chaos of emergency rooms, trying to save lives, to stand for anyone foolish enough to risk throwing his life away.
“I take it Harmon gave in.”
“Yup. I expect Caine’ll drop in at The Log Cabin to have a drink with his old friends. In case you wanna stop by,” he added slyly.
Just what she needed—another matchmaker. Nora quickly declined but after Karl and Gunner had left she couldn’t stop her troubled thoughts from drifting to The Log Cabin and to Caine O’Halloran.
Chapter 2
If Tribulation, Washington, brought to mind the type of neat little New England villages that had proliferated at the turn of the century, it was because the residents preferred to keep it that way. It was a town of Nordic cleanliness, where shop owners still swept the sidewalks each morning and the streets remained as clean as a Swedish kitchen.
A traveler leaving the interstate would find no franchise restaurants in Tribulation; there were more churches—three—than taverns—one—and the movie theater was only open on weekend nights. The crack of Little League bats was heard on Saturday mornings, the chime of church bells on Sundays.
When he’d first arrived in America from his native Sweden, Olaf Anderson, one of the founders of Tribulation, had worked as a lumberjack in the forests of Maine. During those frigid winter months when logging came to a standstill, he would migrate down to Massachusetts, or Vermont, where he worked as a handyman. Eventually, he’d made his way to Washington.
Since he’d thoroughly enjoyed his time in the East, it had seemed a reasonable idea to build a replica of a New England village in this wild Western territory.
Olaf’s best friend, Darcy O’Halloran, a wild Irish, hard-drinking Saturday-night brawler and jig dancer, had argued that the unruly land cloaked in a tangle of forests, steep mountains and deeply glaciated valleys bore scant resemblance to New England.
But Olaf had a very clear vision of the town he and Darcy would build together. A town that Olaf planned to name New Stockholm, while Darcy held out for New Dublin.
For a time it seemed the settlement of loggers, miners and fishermen would go nameless. Finally, after they’d been arguing for nearly a year, one frustrated citizen suggested they call the town Tribulation. The moniker, Olaf and Darcy decided, fitted nicely in a region that already boasted a Mount Despair, Mount Triumph, Torment, Forbidden, and Paradise.
More than a century later, the centerpiece of Tribulation remained a wide, grassy, green square. A fountain bubbled at one end of the green, a horseshoe pit was at the other. A clock tower, made of dark red brick that had weathered to a dusky pink over the century, could be spotted for miles in all directions.
In the middle of the green square was a lacy white Victorian bandstand, erected in the early 1900s by an O’Halloran ancestor who’d believed that every town needed a band. Beside the bandstand was a larger-than-life-size wooden statue of Olaf Anderson, erected by one of his descendants in the 1940s. A woodpecker, displaying uncanny precision, had pecked a hole in the statue’s posterior.
Across from the square, between the post office and the fire station, was the gray-stone three-story city hall, the tallest structure, save for the clock tower, in town. The bronze plaque on the cornerstone revealed that the building had been erected in 1899. It also named the mayor of Tribulation at the time, Lars Anderson, and the builder, Donovan O’Halloran.
Although he’d been born into one of the town’s founding families, Caine’s ambition had always been to get out. Firmly believing that he was meant for life in the fast lane, he’d always found Tribulation’s slow pace and old-fashioned, unchanging ways suffocating.
Slate clouds threatened in a darkening gray sky as Caine drove through the two-block downtown area, through a residential neighborhood of neat frame houses trimmed with colorful shutters, then turned onto the graded road out of town.
Drawn by emotions too complex to consider, he stopped the Ferrari in front of the wrought-iron gates of the Pioneer Cemetery, cut the engine and sat there, his hands draped over the steering wheel.
A rush of unbidden, unwanted memories flooded his mind. Memories of a little boy, plump cheeks pink from the brisk spring winds, smiling mouth stained with strawberries, a beloved green-and-yellow Oakland A’s cap perched rakishly atop his blond curls, his husky legs pumping away as he ran toward the front door, eager, as always, to go anywhere with his daddy.
Daddy. The word tore at Caine, even now, years later. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, shook out a cigarette, lighted it with the dashboard lighter, then slumped back into the leather seat and drew the acrid, yet soothing smoke deep into his lungs.
He sure as hell hadn’t planned for Nora Anderson to get pregnant. On his way from a farm team in Montana to his new Triple A team in Tacoma, Caine had made the fatal mistake of stopping off in Tribulation the night of the Midsummer Eve festival.
Nora, a senior at the University of Washington at the time, had also been home for the weekend; at first Caine hadn’t recognized his best friend’s little sister.
The heavy, dark-framed glasses that had always made her look like a studious little owl had been replaced by contacts, the ugly metal braces had come off, leaving behind straight, dazzling-white teeth, and although she could never have been called voluptuous, the skinny angles he’d remembered had been replaced by slender curves in all the right places.
The young woman Nora had become had proved different from the sex-crazed baseball Annies Caine was accustomed to. Not only was she gorgeous in a quiet, understated way, she was also sweet and intelligent. And she’d smelled damn good, too.
Caine had offered to drive Nora home. When he’d taken a detour to his cabin, she hadn’t offered a word of complaint.
And when he’d drawn her into his arms, she’d come. Willingly. Eagerly.
When he’d left Tribulation the following morning, Caine hadn’t expected to see Nora again. After all, he had his rising career, and she’d soon be off to medical school.
Six weeks later, Caine’s mother, of all people, had called him with the unwelcome news.
He’d definitely been less than thrilled when he’d learned he was going to be a father, but he’d felt the pressure of being a role model to America’s youth. And as much as he’d hated the idea of giving up his carefree lifestyle, Caine had known that knocking up, and then abandoning some innocent hometown girl just wasn’t who he wanted to be.
Nora had been no more eager to marry than he was. But after some painfully stilted discussion and not a little coaxing from both families, they’d reluctantly decided that marriage would be in the best interests of their unborn child. After the baby was born, they would divorce and go their separate ways.
The kicker had come when Nora had argued against allowing possible emotional entanglements to interfere with what was nothing more than a legal contrivance. And although Caine hadn’t been wild about the prospect of celibate cohabitation, he’d agreed to her condition.
So he’d done his duty, albeit grudgingly. And although he hadn’t exactly been husband of the year, neither had he ever—despite Nora’s frequent angry accusations—been unfaithful.
Then, six months after their shotgun marriage, Dylan had come crashing into his life, all eight pounds, twelve ounces of him, and Caine had fallen head over heels in love.
Exhaling a long, weary breath, Caine leaned his head back against the car seat, closed his eyes and pressed his fingers tightly against his lids, trying to block out memories too painful to remember. But the indelible images remained,
reaching out across the intervening years.
Sixteen months after Dylan’s birth, Caine had been called up to the majors. He’d packed a case of beer, cold cuts from the deli and his son into the car and headed off to his cabin for a poker game with his teammates to celebrate having finally achieved his lifelong dream.
He was going to The Show.
“Hot damn, Dylan,” he’d said, buckling the baby into the padded car seat. “Your daddy’s gonna be a big leaguer! What do you think about that?”
“Bid beader!” Dylan had clapped his hands, picking up on his father’s good mood.
Caine had laughed. God, how he’d loved his son!
Two hours later, Dylan was gone—taken away by a cruel twist of fate and a drunk driver. In that one fleeting second, Caine’s entire life had fallen apart.
And nine years later, he still hadn’t figured out how to deal with the loss.
Cursing viciously, Caine crushed his cigarette into the ashtray, then twisted the key in the ignition; tires squealed as he slammed down on the accelerator, ignoring the posted speed limit. He needed a drink, dammit. And he needed it now. Less than five minutes later, he pulled the Ferrari into the parking lot of The Log Cabin, spraying gravel in all directions.
Like everything else about Tribulation, The Log Cabin hadn’t changed. Oley Severson was still behind the bar, where he’d been for as long as anyone could remember.
Caine stood just inside the doorway for a moment, allowing his eyes to adapt to the lighting that was purposefully dim to keep customers from complaining about smudges on the bar glasses. Not that any of the locals would dare, but there were more and more tourists these days and everyone knew that city folk tended to be finicky.
Neon signs advertising a variety of beers glowed in the dim haze. Mounted trophy-size steelhead trout and salmon Oley had pulled in from northwestern streams and the Pacific Ocean adorned the knotty-pine walls. Along with the fish were antique signs dating from when Oley’s great-grandfather had opened the tavern designed to serve the needs of thirsty timbermen.
