Castaway Cove

by JoAnn Ross

“Your poppy’s a smart man,” she said. “You should listen to him.”

  Then pulling her roller bag behind her, she walked out of the room. Leaving behind the scent of flowers and Mac wondering, yet again, what she was wearing beneath that summery sundress.

  19

  “You’re never going to believe what happened this morning,” Annie told Sedona as she picked up the order of cupcakes for little Peggy’s birthday party.

  “Unlike my mother, who’s claimed, with some validity, to be psychic, I’m not,” Sedona, who was wearing an apron with three cupcakes printed across the front, said as she retrieved the pink box she’d had waiting beneath the counter. “So, why don’t you just save me having to play twenty questions and tell me?”

  Fortunately, the front of the store was empty, providing privacy for this all-too-personal conversation. Except . . .

  “Denise is in the kitchen,” Sedona said in answer to Annie’s unspoken question. “And she’s got the radio on, which will keep her from hearing anything you say. So spill the beans.”

  Denise Rogers had recently graduated from the culinary school Chef Maddy had set up at Lavender Hill Farm. The former resident of Haven House, a home for victims of domestic violence, had demonstrated a talent for making light-as-a-feather pastry crust. Since Sedona had added pies to her menu, she’d hired Denise right after graduation. Then, using her former CPA skills, she had helped her new pastry chef plan a budget that allowed her to rent an apartment within walking distance of the bakery.

  “I just met Mac Culhane. At Still Waters.”

  “Really?” Sedona ran Annie’s credit card. “That’s right. Although he hasn’t shown up at the cookie-decorating group I run there, I remember Emma mentioning her great-grandfather was a resident.”

  “I’ve been working with Charlie since you and Adèle talked me into volunteering, and get this—he’s been trying to set me up with his grandson.”

  “Didn’t he say who his grandson was?”

  “No. He tends to get confused from time to time. . . . Well, a lot, really. And he kept saying his grandson was a doctor. So, of course, I figured he was talking about his son, Dr. Buchanan.”

  “Dr. Boyd Buchanan is Mac Culhane’s father? I wonder why they have different last names.”

  “I wasn’t about to ask. But don’t deejays often use professional names?”

  “I think they might,” Sedona agreed. “Perhaps because they tend to jump around from station to station and town to town so often. Which makes it even funnier that you decided to use an alias, too.”

  “I told you, it just slipped out.”

  “But it is something you both have in common.” She tapped a short, buffed fingernail against her lips. “Well, this is certainly interesting.”

  “That’s one word for it. It gets worse. He’s coming to the store today.”

  “Why?” Annie watched as comprehension dawned in Sedona’s eyes. “Ah. He’s bringing Emma to Peggy’s party.”

  “Exactly. So, what do you think I should do?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Nothing. I definitely don’t want him to figure out that I’m Sandy from Shelter Bay.” She dragged a hand through her hair. “I think, from the way he looked at me so intently for a minute, he may have recognized my voice.”

  “He probably looked at you like that because he’s a male and you’re a gorgeous woman.”

  “Please.”

  Although Annie knew she was attractive enough, she certainly wasn’t the kind of woman who turned heads or had men walking into walls, as she’d seen happen with Sedona. “Besides, it wasn’t that kind of look.”

  “Boy, your ex must’ve done a number on you—I’d kill for those exotic black curls and the fact that you seem to be able to eat whatever you want without having to run miles every morning to work the calories off.”

  Annie didn’t want to talk about her marriage. But the comment, Sedona actually comparing her own amazing looks to Annie’s, momentarily stunned her into silence. If there was one woman on the planet she would never have suspected of possessing body-image problems, it was Sedona Sullivan.

  “But he didn’t say anything about suspecting who you were?”

  “Not a word. But that may have been because his grandfather and daughter were in the room. She has the beginning of a really bad black eye from some boy hitting her.”

  “I hope she hit him back.”

  “Apparently she hit him first. For saying mean things about her great-grandfather.”

  Sedona nodded with satisfaction. “Good for her.”

  “I thought you were firmly anti-violence.”

  “I am. On principle. But one thing I learned during my admittedly unorthodox upbringing was that family should always stick up for family.”

  “That’s what Charlie Buchanan told Emma.”

  “Sounds like the old guy’s still got some of his mental faculties. Along with a romantic streak that’s really sweet. Now that you know who he’s talking about, are you going to take him up on his fix-up plan?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why not? What could it hurt?”

  “The first time I met Charlie’s grandson at Still Waters, we definitely didn’t click.”

  “The first time?” Sedona folded her arms. “I thought you didn’t know who he was.”

  “I didn’t. At least not then. He wasn’t exactly wearing a stick-on badge saying, ‘Hi. I’m Midnight Mac.’ The truth is that although he’s admittedly probably the hottest single guy in town, I found him totally unlikable and if he’d asked me to go out right then, I would’ve said no. I’m pretty sure he feels the same way about me.”

  The moment he’d introduced himself, Annie had felt shaken by the idea that the warm and empathetic man she’d come to feel an emotional nighttime bond with was also the same rude, cat-hating individual who’d caused an instantaneous, and definitely unbidden, spike in her pulse. It was as if while her heart might be falling for Dr. Jekyll, her rebellious body was hot for Mr. Hyde.

  “Could you tell if he knew who you are?”

  Before Annie could respond, the glass door opened and a sixtysomething woman entered. “Good morning, Ms. Sacchetti,” Sedona greeted her after shooting Annie a sharp We’ll talk about this later look. “Don’t you look dashing.”

  The woman patted her Lucille Ball fluorescent-hued hair. “Thank you! I did it myself from a box. It only took twenty minutes, and just like magic, I was a new woman.”

  “Well, it’s certainly a new look. And quite appealing with your coloring. So, are you having your regular today?”

  “No. I decided to think outside the box and go with the marionberry cheesecake.”

  “That is a change from your usual vanilla with buttercream frosting.” Sedona took a cheesecake cupcake topped with bright berries from the glass-fronted display counter.

  “I was listening to Midnight Mac talk about taking risks and falling in love,” the woman said. “When I woke up, I realized I’d gotten into a rut, and decided to make some changes.

  “So I drove over to the market as soon as it opened, bought the hair color and went home and, although it recommended a twenty-four-hour test, I just mixed it up, applied it, and voilà! I was a redhead.

  “After I leave here, I’m going to walk down the street to Passages travel agency and book one of those seniors’ Alaskan cruises and have myself a shipboard romance. Just like Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember. But without the part about getting run over at the Empire State Building. Because that scene always makes me cry like a baby.”

  “Wow!” Annie entered the conversation. Maureen Sacchetti was also one of her customers. The elderly woman always reordered her favorite supplies, and had never indicated any desire to attend a class or try some new technique or paper-crafting tool. “When you decide t
o shake up your life, you don’t fool around.”

  “I’m sixty-eight years old, dear,” the older woman said. “And I come from sturdy peasant stock, which means that I’ve still got a lot of years of living to do. No way do I want to end up being one of those boring, dried-up centenarians content to be rocking on my front porch when the mailman shows up with a birthday card from the White House. And as nice as it would be to have the president wish me a happy birthday, by then all the glaciers might be gone.

  “And with women outnumbering men, at my age there aren’t nearly enough of them to go around, either. Which is why I’m also stopping by the Dancing Deer Two and having the twins set me up with cruise outfits that’ll knock some hot geezer’s socks off.”

  “I think that’s a grand idea,” Sedona said.

  “So do I. You know what they say about regretting the things you don’t do more than the things you do,” Ms. Sacchetti said.

  “Funny,” Annie murmured, “someone said the same thing to me just the other night.”

  “Well, whoever it was, you ought to listen,” Maureen stated firmly. “Or you’ll end up like me, living in your dead mother’s house, surrounded by all her antiques, spending your free time knitting and making sympathy cards for all the widows and widowers of your friends who are passing away left and right.”

  And wasn’t that a pleasant thought?

  After Mrs. Sacchetti had left with her adventurous cupcake, which Sedona had insisted was on the house because a change-your-life day deserved a celebratory cupcake, Annie remembered their conversation about the two of them ending up being elderly cat lady roommates.

  “You know,” Sedona said, “although she might be going overboard just a bit, she really does have a point. So, what are you going to do about Mac Culhane?”

  “Nothing. I’m also going to stop calling the show.”

  “Why? Was it because of what I said about him not seeming all that friendly?”

  “No. Although my first impression was admittedly negative, you were right about him being very sweet with his daughter. He was also very patient and loving with his grandfather.”

  Which gave him major points in Annie’s book. Which was part of the problem. He was exactly the type of man she could fall in love with.

  “But it can’t go anywhere.”

  “For heaven’s sake, would you stop staying that?” Sedona, who was usually the epitome of calm, blew out a breath. “If you only date men you think you’ll end up marrying, you’re going to lead a very lonely life. Do you really want to wait until you’re nearly seventy, like Maureen Sacchetti, to have yourself a fling? Or to get married again?”

  “Hello, Pot. This is the Kettle, pointing out that you’re getting a bit rusty yourself. Besides, getting married again is definitely not on my agenda.”

  “Ever?”

  “No.” Of that Annie was very sure.

  Sedona tilted her head, narrowed her eyes, and subjected her friend to a long, judicial look. “Do you have any idea,” she said, “how frustrating you can be at times?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.” The blond Barbie ponytail bobbed as Sedona nodded decisively. “We’re supposed to be friends.”

  “We are.”

  “So you say. And it’s not that I don’t really like you, but sometimes it drives me crazy that you never share anything about yourself with me.”

  “That’s not true.” Not exactly.

  “Of course it is. You know all about me. Including the fact that one of the reasons I quit my job in Portland was that the guy I worked for expected to be a boss with benefits.”

  “You could’ve gotten another job at any other firm in Portland. Or Seattle. Or even San Francisco.”

  “True.” Along with her beauty queen looks, Sedona had a mind like a steel trap and an innate confidence that she wore like a second skin. “But I really hated working in the city, and I prefer working with cake batter to working with numbers all day.

  “But my point is, I told you all about it. Including why I decided not to file a sexual harassment suit. But all I know about you is that you were abandoned as an infant, went to college, headed off to D.C., where you married your rich lobbyist boss, and when it didn’t work out, you moved back home to Oregon. Hell, I don’t even know why you opened Memories on Main. Instead of a flower shop.”

  “Maybe because I have a black thumb.”

  “That’s not what I meant and you know it. Shelter Bay isn’t exactly a town you stumble across. It’s literally on the edge of the continent and you have to make the decision to go out of your way to move here. Plus, people don’t go to all the trouble and expense of opening a business if that business doesn’t mean something important to them.”

  “I’m not sure that’s always the case,” Annie argued. “It could have been purely an economic decision. All you have to do is go into any big-box craft store to see that paper-crafting items are taking up more and more room.”

  “I haven’t noticed, since I’m always there for baking supplies. But I’ve seen you in action. You’re every bit as dedicated to making scrapbooks as I am to making the world happy one cupcake at a time.”

  “I like making scrapbooks.” Annie didn’t share how, for many years, one particular scrapbook had been her anchor in the storm-tossed sea that was her life.

  “So do a lot of people. But they don’t spent all their divorce settlement money and go into debt in order to sell pretty paper and rubber stamps.”

  “I went into debt to fix up the house.” As Sedona well knew, since she was the one who’d helped Annie achieve the funding for the lovely but decidedly run-down Victorian on Castaway Cove that Annie had spent the past eighteen months refurbishing.

  Before Sedona could respond to that, the door opened again and a rush of German-speaking tourists flooded into the shop.

  “Later,” Sedona said, handing her the pink box of cupcakes. “And hey, have a great party.”

  “Thanks.”

  Sedona’s tone had been conciliatory. But as she left the store, Annie realized that while her friend looked as sweet as one of her own cupcakes, Sedona possessed a will of pure forged steel, and now that the subject had been broached, she wasn’t going to be able to keep her personal secrets to herself for much longer.

  20

  “Does Poppy’s head hurt?” Emma asked as they drove down Harborview from Still Waters. Unlike winter, when Shelter Bay could look like a ghost town, at this time of year the sidewalks were crowded with tourists. Even more than usual since the upcoming Fourth of July festival had grown into such a popular event.

  “No, you don’t have to worry about that. Because it doesn’t.”

  “But you said it’s sick.”

  “Not the kind of sick like when you fall down and skin your arm,” he said.

  “Or get a black eye.” She reached into her pink purse, took out the Barbie compact, and studied the purplish-blue skin surrounding her eye with a feminine satisfaction that suddenly, God help him, gave Mac a fleeting glimpse of what she would look like as a teenager.

  “Which isn’t going to happen again,” he felt obliged to warn, putting aside the idea of checking out the availability of chastity belts once she hit puberty.

  He didn’t admit that he had certainly earned his own share of black eyes growing up. Although he’d never considered himself a nerd just because he liked working on radios, a small group of school bullies had. And they, like Kenny, had learned the lesson that neither Culhanes nor Buchanans backed down from a righteous fight. Apparently his daughter took after him in that regard.

  “When I pushed Poppy’s wheelchair down to the ice cream machine, some old lady wagged her finger right in his face and told him he should never wear a striped bathrobe with a Hawaiian shirt.”

  No way was Mac going to admit that he’d thought the same thing when
he’d first entered the room. His grandfather’s choices of clothing had definitely become more eclectic lately. There were days, even as the weather warmed, when Mac would find him wearing three sweaters over an ancient Oregon State sweatshirt.

  “Your poppy always liked going to Hawaii.”

  Charlie had been a young sailor stationed at Pearl Harbor during the attack. Mac felt long-buried emotions stir as he remembered visiting the memorial to the sunken Arizona with his grandfather. The thought of all those sailors buried beneath the sea had had Mac thinking about his own father’s death on that Arizona desert.

  Now, after losing his Air Force father, and seeing war up close and personal himself, Mac had an even better idea of what his grandfather had experienced. He wondered if Charlie was ever visited by ghosts other than that of his beloved Annie.

  Like so many veterans, he seldom talked about his war experience.

  Maybe, Mac thought, he could ask Annie Shepherd if there were any more photos of Charlie’s Navy days that might spark some memories of stories about to be lost to the mists of time. His grandfather had been a member of the Greatest Generation; decades from now Emma, and her children, along with future descendants, should be able to read those stories and learn not just about Charlie Buchanan but about the times that had formed him.

  “We’ll have to go to Hawaii someday,” he said.

  “That would be lots of fun,” Emma agreed. “Maybe I could get a grass skirt, like Peggy did when her parents took her to Hawaii. We hadn’t moved here yet, but she wore it to the kindergarten Halloween party and everyone says it was the best costume ever. And we could get you a shirt with palm trees, just like Poppy’s.”

  Although Emma had proven to have a mind of her own, it hadn’t escaped Mac’s notice that she seemed happy to do anything that involved being with him, even if it was just hanging out together. Which triggered more guilt about the years he’d spent away from home.

  “I told that lady who said bad things about Poppy’s outfit that I like to wear stripes and flowers together all the time. Because I’m a creative artist,” Emma said, drawing his mind back to their conversation. “So it just means that Poppy’s creative, too.”