With Strings Attached (Gabriola Island)

by Vanessa Grant

  How many years since he had spoken to a strange woman, fully intending to pursue her? In recent years his affairs had been careful, safe, and not all that frequent. Today, for example, the man-woman game had been the last thing on his mind. He had been deep in the problem of the Haddleson top-down design, oblivious to the world. He could not remember giving his commuter pass to the woman in the BC Ferries ticket booth. Or had it been a man? Patrick had been too deep in thought to notice. He did remember pulling away from the booth, though, driving into the ferry line-up; except that in mid-afternoon it wasn’t a line-up at all. Just one other vehicle.

  Patrick had braked and turned off the engine, snapped open his briefcase and pulled out his notebook computer. Haddleson. The cursor had blinked as the file came on-screen. Outline, level one: input-output criteria. Level two-

  His eyes had moved away from the screen, caught by some movement in his peripheral vision while his fingers kept typing.

  Then his hands had stilled.

  She was walking towards him, must have come out of the waiting room. Immaculate blue denim jeans and medium-heeled sandals. A green collar under her bulky, rust-colored sweater. She was tall enough to make those long, slender legs seem right. Perfect, in fact. She had a loose, long-limbed way of moving that made him think of innocent sensuality. Her hips were slender, but the movement of her walk encouraged her sweater to pull against a woman’s voluptuous breasts.

  He had felt the hard rhythm of his own pulse echoing through his body. Something about the way she walked. Something...

  For a man who sometimes had problems remembering the names and faces of people he’d just met; Patrick was left with an impossibly vivid picture of her face. Her features were drawn a little too sharply. His mother would say that she needed feeding. Big, big eyes that caught at something inside him. Patrick thought she worked too hard, too intensely. She needed laughter. He wanted to give it to her.

  She was not beautiful, although it would be impossible to feel the pull of any other woman if she were in the room. Something in her eyes. He wished he were closer, could see better.

  Eyes. Her eyes. Not brown. Not blue either. He had to know...

  Was he really following a total stranger to learn the color of her eyes? The van slowed abruptly and Patrick shifted down into second gear. She was driving a little erratically, a stranger to the awkward curves that made speeding both dangerous and uncomfortable on Gabriola. Ontario plates. He had memorized the numbers, had memorized the woman, seeing the echo of her face and remembering her voice all through the twenty-minute ferry ride. Her face, when all he could actually see was the dark silhouette of her hair through the van’s windows on the ferry. Her voice, when she had said a total of six words to him. What makes you think that? And Yes.

  His mind dissolved into a graphic fantasy. Yes. Would she say yes if he kissed those lips gently, exploring the softness, searching for her surrender?

  More likely, she would slap his face.

  He had spent the entire ferry ride to Gabriola trying to concentrate on the screen of the computer, fighting the magnetic pull that drew his eyes to the silhouette in the window of the van in front of him. Impossible, it turned out, and in the end he had actually started a new file and typed into it what he knew about her.

  She came from back east. Toronto, perhaps? Age, mid-twenties. Height, five foot seven or eight. He tried to put that into centimeters but got lost in deciding that the top of her head would come somewhere around his lips. He would bend and bury his face in the soft riot of her curls. She had a walk that would make a fortune for a dancer. A husky, low voice that sent crawling awareness along Patrick’s veins. What would her laughter do to his pulse? Would her eyes soften with loving? He had not seen their color, but the message had been very plain. She had no interest in the searing awareness she had stirred in Patrick McNaughton.

  But she had felt it. He remembered that electric feeling of awareness, her hand fumbling with the keys to her van.

  Five minutes after the ferry left the Nanaimo dock, Patrick had watched her get out of her van and walk forward to stand at the rail. After a few minutes in the cool ocean wind, she had gone inside to the passenger lounge. Patrick had wanted to go with her, to shelter her from the cold with his arms.

  He had forced himself not to follow her. She obviously did not want him at her side, had carefully avoided looking at his car. He was certain, though, that she was every bit as aware of him as he was of her. He would follow on the Gabriola side, until he found out the color of her eyes and where she was staying. She wasn’t a woman to be picked up by a stranger, but if he met her in the normal way it might be different. Uneasily, he realized that with all the new people moving onto the island recently, he might not know the people she was staying with.

  She might have come to visit a girlfriend or some distant cousin. She might be staying at one of the bed and breakfasts, a tourist on holiday. He would find out.

  She might be married.

  He suspected that he would wake up sometime this evening and feel like a fool. Following a woman, for heaven’s sake! Those few seconds of watching her in motion kept playing again and again in his mind. She was lean, yet soft woman. His blood kept pounding. He felt hot, dizzy, as if his fingers had brushed the soft, warm curves of her femininity.

  Abruptly, her van pulled off onto a wide gravel shoulder. Patrick was past before he could brake, his eyes echoing with a glimpse of her face turned to watch as he drove past. Resentment or anger in her eyes.

  He realized that his hands and his feet were making motions, gearing down, braking. Stop. Go back. Ask her...

  Ask her what, for God’s sake?

  He jammed his foot to the floor. The Corvette took off along South road with a whine of power.

  It was probably that damned book his sister Sarah had been reading. Just last night she had been telling him he was overdue for his thirties crisis.

  “You see, Pat, you’ve built your empire.”

  “A big frog in a little pond,” he’d countered lightly. “Vancouver Island isn’t the world.”

  “No, but—Listen to me, Pat! You’ve been devoting all your time to success. What about falling in love? Having children of your own? It’s going to hit you one of these days! Time’s running out for you, and you’ll go down like a ton of bricks, because you’re ripe for realizing how much you’re missing.”

  With Sarah’s theory ringing in his ears, Patrick followed South Road around the bottom of the island until it became North Road, then he turned off and drove up the hill, past the McNaughton farm and on to the small subdivision of five acre parcels his father had developed twenty years ago. Sarah and her brothers had each fallen heir to one of the parcels on their twenty-first birthdays. Sarah and her husband had build a bed and breakfast on their land. Patrick had built the cedar home that was really too big for him, but he could not imagine living anywhere else now. David, their older brother, had sold his acreage and put the money into the family farm that he now managed.

  Funny tricks the subconscious played. Sarah’s self-help book, her words echoing in Patrick’s mind. To be honest, he had caught himself now and then lately, feeling an emptiness in the moments between jobs. He needed a change, something new, had even considered saying yes to the committee that had approached him about running for a seat in the British Columbia legislature.

  New frontiers, that was what he needed.

  He had always thought he would marry eventually, when the time and the woman were right. But the years had passed and he had never met a woman he wanted to share his home with. He would have liked children, but the thought of opening his walls to the wrong woman was frightening.

  The woman in the van, waking in his bed with her eyes sleepy and filled with love.

  A symbol. She would be married, her own life, even her own children. Something in her walk had caught his imagination that was all. A signal, perhaps, that he should think about finding someone to share his home with, his
life.

  No hurry, he decided, shaking off the stranger’s spell. He turned into his own driveway, more comfortable now that the crazy compulsion to pursue the strange woman had passed. He parked beside the two-story cedar home nestled under the evergreens. A wisp of smoke crawled out of the chimney. He had banked the wood fire down this morning. After a surprisingly cool night, the April sun had risen to warm the house, beating in through the skylights in his cathedral ceiling.

  Patrick froze as a strange sound echoed through the clearing. A second later, it resonated again, a grating noise invading the quiet. How many times lately had he woken in the middle of the night to that strange cross between a rustle and a twang? Too often!

  He dropped the briefcase on the veranda and ran around to the back of the house. Patrick liked to eat back here in the sunroom, enjoying the sight of the pond where the deer came at sunset, the smell of the dogwood blossoms. Every spring he took the glass windows off and replaced them with screens, only this year Saul Natham had bought the property next door, had moved in and almost immediately added that damned cat to his household!

  There she was, attacking the sunroom again!

  “Get off there!” His voice rang angrily through the trees and the cat froze. “Yes, you damned ball of fluff! I mean you! Get the hell off my screen!”

  She was half way up the side of the building, a streaky black and white mass of soft fur, plastered flat against the screen, claws curling through the fine fabric of the mesh. Patrick could see the scars from the path she had taken on her way up.

  He turned away. He needed the ladder. What the hell could a man say to an animal who was probably only looking for a warm place to curl up? He would peel the bloody cat off his screen again, and then he would feed it, although last time it had refused to touch his offerings.

  This time, Patrick wasn’t going to replace the bloody screen until Saul Natham turned up from wherever he had gone. Natham was going to get a surprise when he returned. So far, Patrick and Natham had shared a few lazy conversations, nothing more. Enough talk for Patrick to know the artist was both entertaining and eccentric. An interesting neighbor, and thankfully his faults did not include sending loud heavy music echoing through the trees.

  Now, though, Patrick was determined to make the irresponsible artist take his damned cat and look after it properly if it was the last thing he did! What kind of a man adopted a cat from the SPCA, then went off and left the thing to fend for itself? The poor beast had been howling for days after Natham disappeared, then it had decided to attach itself to Patrick’s house.

  To his house, but not to Patrick himself. The cat had accepted the odd offering of food, but hadn’t consented to come inside when Patrick was home. That hadn’t stopped her from trying to break in when the place was empty, tearing up window screens and once getting stuck in the chimney and emerging black and wild-eyed. Patrick had angry red scratches on his forearms from his battle to bathe the sooty cat after that fiasco!

  The cat didn’t want a new home, she wanted Saul Natham back. God knew what it was about the aging artist next door, but the female population of the world was determined that he was irresistible- including the cat currently stuck to Patrick’s sun-room screen. How else could you explain the parade of long-legged women next door? Patrick had seen at least three different blondes draped over Natham as they walked the path through the back of Pat’s property. But a cat, for heaven’s sake! Surely a feline should have sense enough to abandon such an erratic personality and find herself a dependable master!

  When Saul Natham got back...

  Chapter Two

  Damn Saul! He had talked as if the island were too small for Molly to lose her way. Lot three, McNaughton Road, he had told her. No other directions.

  After Molly had shaken the disturbing man in the sports car, she had driven all over Gabriola Island, looking for McNaughton Road and finding everything but. Had the man really been following her? A golf course. A community centre. Houses scattered lightly, half-hidden in the trees. Signs for everything from Degnen Bay to Drumbeg Provincial Park, but no McNaughton road.

  Peterson Road. Silva Bay Road. Of course he had not been following. Just a coincidence—Whoops! That sign said North Road, not South. She frowned and followed the winding pavement past a miniature shopping centre, a medical clinic nested in the trees, and a school.

  She ended up back at the ferry terminal.

  She did the whole circuit again looking for a turn-off she might have missed. Twice around the island and she learned that the evergreens growing on the roadsides reached to touch each other high over the road, that the ocean could be glimpsed in sudden spectacular explosions here and there along the route. South Road ran for thirteen kilometers before it turned into North Road. North Road ran the thirteen kilometers back to the ferry terminal.

  Welcome to Gabriola, the sign said. It was a map of sorts, painted on a large board where anyone driving onto the island would see it. McNaughton Road was not named on the map.

  While she stared at the painted map, a school bus backed down the road to the ferry ramp. She realized that she had the island turned around in her mind. Somehow she had thought west was that way, but-

  The ferry docked again, this time ejecting thirty or so teenagers who ran noisily onto a waiting school bus. The bus roared away slowly, then the cars streamed off the ferry. Useful facts she was collecting about this island. The high school students went to Nanaimo for their schooling, came back just after four in the afternoon. There was a post office, a pub, at least three restaurants and two gas stations. A medical clinic.

  No McNaughton road.

  Once the traffic from the ferry had thinned out, Molly started on another circuit, intending to explore some of those side roads. Soon it would be time to stop and ask, but it would be a small victory if she could find Saul’s cabin for herself, without help from the locals.

  She turned left and lost herself in a network of interconnecting side streets. When the pavement changed to gravel, Molly turned back and took a break in a provincial park nestled on the shore. She walked on the beach, through the trees, breathing the salt air and enjoying herself, realizing that she was never going to find Saul’s cabin without asking the way.

  She drove to the neighborhood pub near the ferry terminal. It was noisy, friendly, and when the waitress said, “Dinner? Or just a drink?” Molly realized that she was hungry. She ordered a hamburger that turned out to be massive, and then ate while she watched the regulars enjoying a baseball game on television. This time, when she set off again, she had directions.

  “Follow North Road past Peterson. First turn right after Peterson, follow the road up the hill. Then right again past the McNaughton Farm. There are only six lots up there. You’ll find the one you want easy enough.”

  Easy enough, if Saul had thought to give instructions. Molly had the papers from the lawyer with her, and the echo of the command from Saul. She had a house and a cat and she had wasted several enjoyable hours wandering this island. Soon it would be dark.

  Where was the man in the white sports car? For a while there, she’d had the breathless conviction that she would never escape him. Driving, knowing he was following her, she had succumbed to the weirdest fantasies, straight out of some romantic, far-out novel. Thank God he had driven on when she pulled off the road! If he had stopped and walked back to her...

  Molly forgot the black-eyed man as she drove up the hill past the farm. Those open fields, the cows grazing. Pastoral, glimpses of little meadows winding through the forest. A bed and breakfast sign, then another driveway winding into the trees, a carved board announcing lot two and the name McNaughton. The instructions were working!

  McNaughton of McNaughton Road and McNaughton farm, she decided with a grin. Undoubtedly the McNaughtons had lived here for generations, perhaps emigrated directly from the old country to build their family empire here on Gabriola Island.

  Odd that her wandering father should buy a property in t
he midst of all this obvious stability.

  The next drive must be hers, although there was no sign, just a winding gravel drive that badly needed smoothing. Molly jolted along, the van scraping against the branches of overgrown fir trees on one side, dragging bottom briefly on one rutted section. If there was a house up here, she couldn’t see it. How big was five acres? Was she actually on lot three? She followed the winding detour around a big, old tree.

  There it was.

  The cabin might well have been built from logs cut down from this very property. Cut and chinked and painstakingly assembled into a home. A small home, but there must be a loft. The upper part had a little balcony that overhung the porch, supported by big logs. Molly had never been in a house with an open loft, but the thought of standing up there at an easel, looking down into her home, out over her land...

  She blinked away moisture at her eyes. Had Saul known how she yearned for a real home? Twenty-six years old, and finally her father was making a home for her. She left the door to the van swinging wide, her attention on the cabin, the cedar trees with their branches hanging down over the cedar shake roof.

  Hers.

  She turned, her eyes sweeping a circle from the cabin, over the clearing and the drive. The sun was low in the sky, reddish light slanting through those trees. That must be west. She swung further; saw the beginning of a narrow path that led into the trees, a stand of thin young trees behind the cabin, then the cedars. She had to learn the names of all these other trees.

  No neighbors in sight. Five acres, Saul had said, but the lawyer’s papers had described it as just over two hectares. Metric or imperial, it was enough land for total privacy.

  All hers.

  What would a tyrannosaurus Rex look like, wandering out from those trees? She giggled, thinking of the man in the sports car. He would think she was a nit if he could overhear her thoughts. Dinosaurs and fantasies. Whoever he was, he would never know how fanciful she could be. No one would, because Molly knew how to keep her fantasies in their proper place.