Body Search

by Jessica Andersen

  Numbly, Dale reached for the ring, remembering how it had sat on his mother’s left hand, nestled beside a matching wedding band. “Dad started saving for it on his fourteenth birthday. Even then, he knew they’d be married.” The ring felt strange in his hand. Cold. Detached. He cleared his throat. “Where did you find it? On the southern claw beach?”

  He winced. To think that his mother’s body had washed up on shore and he hadn’t known about it made Dale feel even worse.

  “No.” Trask shook his head. “Young Eddie found it last week.” He paused. “Inland.”

  Dale snapped, “Impossible. She was lost at sea.”

  She had to have been lost at sea. If she hadn’t been, then he’d failed her. He’d failed his father, and his aunt, by not staying on the island to look for them. To discover what had happened to them.

  When Tansy touched his arm, Dale shook her off, pressed the heels of his hands against his temples and ground out, “They were all lost at sea.”

  “You once believed otherwise.” Trask’s eyes were shadowed with age and regret, but they didn’t waver. “What do you believe now?”

  What did he believe now? Dale almost laughed.

  He believed in the power of medicine and the strength of loneliness. He believed in rights and responsibility, and in the shadowed shell of Tansy’s eyelids when she used to sleep beside him.

  Once, he had believed in himself. But no longer. He’d made too many mistakes, chosen wrong too many times. He’d believed Trask a hopeless drunk, but the others claimed it was a one-time thing. He’d believed he was right to chase Tansy away, knowing he didn’t deserve her, knowing she wouldn’t want him if she knew where he’d come from.

  He’d believed…

  Finally, he shook his head. “God. I don’t know what to believe anymore.” This time, when Tansy touched his hand he didn’t shake her off. Instead, he laced his fingers between hers and hung on, drawing a measure of comfort from the contact.

  She was right. He had to know what had happened to his parents.

  Trask’s eyes flashed. “Good. Then we’re getting somewhere.” He gestured to the same old chairs that still sat around the same old kitchen table. “Sit.”

  Tansy took the ring and held it up to the light. The ruby glittered beside the smoky diamond, catching the wink of the stones at her wrists and ears. The ring would suit her, Dale thought, as it had suited his mother. Rich-looking. Elegant.

  But the difference was, his mother had only looked rich. Tansy actually was. And he wasn’t, and would never be, anything more than a lobsterman dressed in fancy linen and imported wool.

  Diamonds and ugly rocks didn’t mix, and Tansy was a weakness he couldn’t afford, especially now. Irritated, Dale let go of her hand beneath the table, took the ring from her and handed it back to Trask.

  “When did Eddie find it?” he asked, knowing the child was still in a coma. When they’d checked in at the motel a half hour earlier, Hazel said there had been no change.

  Either their treatment wasn’t working, or it was taking a hell of a long time. Too long, maybe. Frustration pounded at Dale’s temples, and he scrubbed a hand through his hair, hoping to ease the tension but knowing it was no use.

  “He found it right after the big storm that knocked out our lines to the mainland. It’s been a powerful year for storms,” Trask grunted. “Haven’t had a storm season this bad in fifteen years.”

  Who the hell cared about the bloody storms? “He found it last week?” Dale snapped. “After all this time? That doesn’t make sense. Maybe he found it in my parents’ house and lied about where he was so he wouldn’t get in trouble.”

  Trask’s nostrils flared and his face darkened, as though Dale had insulted him, rather than the child. “Mickey’s boy wouldn’t lie about this. I’ll excuse the suggestion because you’re upset, but take heed. I’m warning you.”

  I’m warning you. Dale had heard the threat before, and its echo brought back memories of other fights, other threats. He turned away and ground the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. Pain speared through his temples, hot and vicious, reminding him how long it had been since he’d eaten. Almost a day. How long had it been since he’d slept through the night?

  More than three months.

  He glanced at his watch and swore when he remembered it had quit working after the plane crash. “We need to check on Eddie.” He turned back to his uncle. “We’ll talk later.”

  Though he had no idea what was left to say. Eddie couldn’t possibly have found the ring inland. Not when the bodies had been lost at sea.

  Trask’s eyes flashed, but he nodded. “Later, then. Here,” he tossed the ring in a glittering arc and Dale caught it midair. “She would have wanted you to have it.”

  Dale took one long look at the ring before he dropped it into his pocket, where it clinked softly against the lucky rock his mother had given him the day before she died. “Thanks, I… Thanks.”

  Without another word, he gestured Tansy out the door. He needed to get away from Trask, away from the questions.

  Away from the growing certainty that he’d left the island too soon, and that the oversight could mean his death—or worse, Tansy’s.

  DALE AND TANSY SPENT the remainder of the day at the motel clinic, monitoring the patients, drinking bottled water and flinching at shadows while the winds rose and the waves crested higher and higher against the docks. Churchill stopped in briefly to report that Hurricane Harriet was stalled off Cape Cod, so they were in for a night of gusts and not much else.

  The main storm would hit the following day.

  By dusk, the able-bodied islanders had finished boarding up the motel windows with sheets of plywood. Of the remaining patients, the sheriff and the mayor were failing. The young woman, Miranda, was breathing on her own, but hadn’t yet regained consciousness. And Eddie was unchanged.

  Then, just as the last of the gray daylight fled the sky, Dale left the motel room for a breath of stagnant, stormy air and found Mickey outside. He lifted a hand to his cousin’s shoulder, not sure what to say, but knowing he needed to do something to ease the bleakness in Mickey’s face.

  A few minutes later, Tansy came out of the boy’s room with tears in her eyes. Dale’s heart stuttered.

  Mickey let out a low, hopeless groan. “Is he—”

  Dale reached for his cousin just as Tansy grabbed them both, turning it into an awkward three-way hug. She whispered, “He’s breathing.”

  It took precious seconds for the words to sink in, then Mickey whooped and spun Dale nearly off his feet. “He’s breathing? He’s breathing! Did you hear that? He’s breathing! Oh, God. Where’s Libby? Where’s DJ? They’ll want to see Eddie!” He ran to the other end of the motel block, where his wife and older son were playing penny-ante poker.

  Dale watched the quick excitement and tearful embraces, and saw Tansy smile as the entire family thundered into Unit 2, where little Eddie was finally breathing on his own.

  She sighed wistfully. “They love each other so much. It’s kept them strong through this.”

  No, Dale thought, rejecting the quick warmth he’d felt during that three-way hug, love makes you weak. Vulnerable. Just look at what it did to Trask.

  It wasn’t until he saw Tansy looking at him that he realized he’d spoken aloud.

  Disappointment washed across her face, as though he’d rejected her once again. Then she stuck out her chin and snapped, “Yes, just look what love did to your uncle. Then take a good look at yourself, Dale, and tell me what you see.”

  The frustration in her tone punched at him, as did the sheen of tears in her eyes.

  She stalked back into Eddie’s room and was greeted with cheers and whoops from the excited family. But Dale didn’t feel like celebrating. He wasn’t sure what he felt like doing.

  Feelings had never been his strong suit. Nor had communication.

  Overhead, thunder grumbled. He touched the ring in his pocket and felt it clink against the stone.
Both were warm from his body heat. He pulled the ring out and looked at it in the dull storm light, remembering how it had flashed on his mother’s hand when she’d grabbed him around the waist and spun him in a big circle the night she died. “I’ve done it, Dale! I’ve got it! I know how we’re going to send you to college!”

  “Aw, Ma!” He’d shrugged her off, though there was nobody around to see her doing that touchy-feely stuff. “I don’t want to go to college. I’m fine here.” At seventeen, he hadn’t wanted a world bigger than Lobster Island. It had been enough for every other member of his family, and it was enough for him.

  “Nonsense.” The ring flashed again when she took his face between her palms. As always, her hands were cool. Pie-baking hands, she’d called them—cool enough not to wreck the crusts when she kneaded them. But they were also strong enough to fight a tiller, and tough enough to dump the angry lobsters from the netted wooden traps.

  She was strength wrapped in a five-foot-two package. Strength…and love.

  As an adult, standing outside a falling-down motel while the muted celebration carried on without him, Dale turned his face to the darkening sky and closed his eyes. The rising storm wind was cool on his skin, like his mother’s hands had been.

  “Dale?”

  He turned at the sound of Tansy’s voice, and for a moment, her image was overlain with that of a small woman wearing a diamond and ruby ring. Then the memory was gone, and with it, his careful control disappeared.

  “Dale.” Tansy walked up beside him and touched his arm. “I’m sorry for what I said. I was way out of line.” She took a deep breath. “And, you’ve said it before. It’s really none of my business.”

  The tone of quiet defeat touched something in Dale, but he couldn’t find it amidst the shame and the helpless anger towards a situation that he hadn’t been able to control back then.

  Seemingly couldn’t control now.

  “She wanted me to go to college,” he said, remembering the fight, remembering his anger and her disappointment. Remembering how she’d given him his lucky stone that night and told him it was the key to his education.

  Tansy stilled, and the rising breeze ruffled through her hair. “Your mother?”

  He nodded. “She’d even figured out how to pay for it—though God knows how, because the storms that year were as bad as they’ve been this year. The catches back then were small, the money tight. Churchill didn’t even own the fleet—it was just a collection of family boats barely scraping by.” But he hadn’t cared about the worn clothes and the third-hand jeep. It was all he’d ever known. He smiled grimly. “I wanted nothing to do with college. I was going to be a lobsterman like my father and his father. Like my uncle.”

  Trask. How he’d looked up to Trask, who could find the lobsters when nobody else could. He could sail faster, swim further and laugh harder than any other man on the island. How could Dale not have worshipped him?

  If Trask had been on the boat that night…

  Tansy touched his hand. “She got her wish, didn’t she? You got your education, thanks to Churchill. I think she’d be proud.”

  He bared his teeth, though he knew it wasn’t Tansy’s fault. “Proud that I’ve become a rich, sanctimonious doctor, you mean? Or proud that I ran for the mainland and buried myself in school rather than sticking around long enough to find their bodies?”

  Or long enough to save Trask from himself. The man was living in the past, wallowing in guilt and memories. If Dale had stayed on the island and forced his uncle to listen…

  “I think she’d be proud that you became a doctor and joined HFH,” Tansy shot back, high color staining her cheeks. “For God’s sake, Dale, you were seventeen years old. What could you have done if you’d stayed? It’s not the child’s job to save the parents.”

  The red shame soared higher as Dale thought it bloody well was the duty of family to save family. Then he saw the frantic glint in her eyes and knew she was trying to convince herself as much as him.

  “This isn’t about you,” he snarled, emotion overriding manners and good sense. “This isn’t about poor, rich Tansy with her unfaithful father and her unbalanced mother, don’t you get that? This is about my family, and my parents. We were poor, and we were happy.” Shame drummed in time with his heart, but he couldn’t seem to stop the shout. “Don’t you get it? I failed them, not you. This isn’t about you, and it isn’t about us.”

  He felt the demons take over, heard the rage pounding in his head, or maybe that was the thunder again. He took a menacing step towards Tansy, who stood in the motel parking lot with her hands fisted at her sides, temper, grief and shocked sadness reflected in her expressive eyes. He leveled a finger at her. “I don’t—”

  “Stop it, Dale.” Suddenly, Mickey stepped between them. “That’s enough.”

  The brutal fist of guilt just made Dale madder. He tried to push Mickey aside, but the lobsterman held firm. Dale snapped, “Damn it, Mick, get out of my way. This isn’t your business!”

  “It is now.” Mickey matched him glare for glare. “I’m making it my business.” He glanced over his shoulder at Tansy. “She saved my boy. That makes her family, whether you like it or not. So stand down.”

  “Eddie’s not saved yet. We won’t know that until he wakes up.” And in the sudden, windy silence that fell over the parking lot, Dale heard his own words. A knot jerked tight in his gut. “Oh, hell. I’m sorry, Mick.”

  “I’m not the one who deserves the apology,” Mickey growled, glancing over toward Tansy. “She is.”

  But when Dale opened his mouth, she shook her head. “Don’t bother. That’s probably the first time you’ve been completely honest about your feelings. It’s what I asked for all along, so there’s no point in my being upset.”

  Her eyes were stark holes in her pale face, and her short hair moved restlessly in the rising wind. Dale felt pressure building in his chest. He wanted to shout at her and drive her away. He wanted to pull her close and never let her go. He wanted to hurt her with his words. He wanted to punish himself for hurting her.

  Why did she have to be here when his world fell apart?

  He took a deep breath and felt the anger, and his remaining energy, drain away. “Damn it. I didn’t mean any of it. I was hurting, so I aimed where I knew I could hurt you, too. I’m sorry.”

  Her features didn’t soften in the uncompromising lights of the dusky parking lot. “That’s not the sort of thing that comes out of nowhere, Dale. There’s usually at least a kernel of truth in the things we say in anger.”

  “What is that, one of your mother’s slogans?” he snapped, then cursed and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “God, I’m sorry. I need to… I need—”

  “You need to turn it off for a few hours,” Hazel an nounced, sliding an arm around Tansy’s waist. “You’re both exhausted. I’ll stay with Eddie and the other patients. Mickey, you drop Tansy off at Churchill’s mansion and take Dale home with you.”

  “No way.” Dale scrubbed both hands across his face and could have sworn he heard the sound of his sanity cracking over the howl of the building winds. “I go where she goes. Don’t forget that someone’s trying to kill us.”

  When Hazel protested, Tansy held up a hand in the harsh light. “He’s right.” She glanced from Mickey to Hazel and back again. “Thanks for standing up for me, but he’s right. We have to stick together for the next few days until our reinforcements arrive. No offense, but I don’t know who to trust on this island.” Her eyes slid to Dale. “Dale and I have our problems, but he doesn’t want me dead.”

  The subtext read, Dale doesn’t want me at all. He winced, but didn’t bother to contradict her. It was what he wanted her to think, after all.

  Wasn’t it?

  THEY BORROWED MICKEY’S jeep and rode to Churchill’s place in silence, not even commenting when they passed the burned, wrecked house that had once belonged to Dale’s parents. The vehicle bounced and slid along the dirt road, and Tansy gritted
her teeth to keep from cursing when each bump sang up her spine.

  She ached from head to toe. Her back hurt from the hours she’d spent bending over the motel beds, administering the sticky coconut and brown sugar mixture to the patients. Her feet hurt where the borrowed shoes pinched, and her eyes stung with the memory of smoke and fire from the night before. That was why they burned, she told herself, not because of what Dale had said.

  She wasn’t a poor little rich girl. And even if she was, then what did that make Dale?

  A poor match, whispered a voice in the back of her head, and Tansy closed her eyes. She hadn’t wanted to believe it, not after everything they’d meant to each other. Not after everything he’d meant to her.

  He parked the jeep in Churchill’s carefully raked clamshell drive and sat for a moment, hands gripping the steering wheel, eyes staring straight out into the night, which had fallen with a heavy, stormy abruptness. Lacking the energy for another fight, Tansy reached for the door handle.

  His voice came out of the darkness, carrying across the intimate little space like a caress. “Tans… I really am sorry for what I said.” He was silhouetted against the lit front of the mansion, and light glinted off his hair when he turned toward her. “You hit a nerve. I’d been sitting there, thinking of all the things I did wrong, all the things I could’ve done differently…and there you were, like my conscience.”

  Tansy’s own conscience nagged at her with the knowledge that she’d slapped at him while he was reeling from Trask’s revelations. That hadn’t been fair, or wise, but there had never been a middle ground for them. It was always either excitement or anger, love or hate. Nothing in between.

  She opened the door and jumped from the jeep, clenching her teeth when the jolt sang through her tired body. “It’s okay, Dale. Let’s just forget about it.”