by Lee, Rachel
A few weeks ago, when he’d been released from rehab, he’d thought it would do him good to be absolutely alone for a while. He’d figured he’d be able to face his demons and get on with life.
Instead he felt as if he were mired in quicksand and going nowhere. His problem with the darkness didn’t seem to be improving much. He’d thought he’d made a great stride when he came home the other night and was able to get out of his car in the dark and walk to the house, but Dave’s unwelcome appearance had put paid to that. All Dave had done was reinforce Chase’s paranoia. There really had been someone waiting for him in the dark.
Then later, finding the chair moved… well, it was probably another example of how he was losing his mind. In the daylight he was convinced he must have moved that chair himself, somehow, during the scuffle with Dave. In the dark, he had been convinced that something else had moved it.
And no amount of talking to himself seemed to be making it any better. He was sitting up night after night, like some lunatic, keeping company with his pistol again and listening to the voices in the night wind.
This was bad.
And even worse, he was starting to feel like a useless, unproductive slug. Never before in his life had he been utterly without work, utterly without goals, utterly without plans. He was drifting in the sea of his paranoia like a boat without sails or rudder. Hell, he was even withdrawing from the society of his friends.
This was all so unlike him that it was making him seriously uncomfortable with himself. Somehow he had to get on the stick again, pick up the pieces of his life as best he could, and start doing something with himself. The longer he remained in this isolated cove in the company of his nightmares, the worse he was going to get.
The solitude thing had been a stupid idea.
Maybe he ought to reconsider Dave’s offer of a job at the insurance company. He didn’t like the idea of a desk job, but he could live with it. Or he could open a dive shop of his own. He certainly had enough savings to front the costs. Or he could really face his nightmares, and take that job that Tom had offered aboard the Lady Hope.
Deciding that it was time to take control of his life again made him feel better than he had in a while. All he had to do was take a first step.
And the easiest first step was to be neighborly to Callie and Jeff Carlson. Instead of refusing Callie’s offer to join them for dinner, he ought to accept it. Instead of sitting around in his cottage brooding about his problems, it would do him some good to think about other people’s.
Besides, Callie appealed to him. He figured she was ruining her brother by mothering him too much, but otherwise he found her very attractive. While he was bound and determined never to get seriously involved with a woman again—one bad marriage was enough—it wouldn’t hurt to make a friend.
His mind made up, he headed back toward the Carlson house.
The roast was cooking, filling the house with delicious aromas. With nothing else to do until Jeff awoke, Callie found herself getting out the family photo albums. There weren’t a whole lot of photographs. Her parents had taken them in haphazard fashion during their early years together, and when Callie and Jeff had been small. Callie sometimes thought most of the photos had been taken by her mother to share with her father when he came home from the sea, particularly when she and Jeff were little and changing so rapidly.
There were very few photos of her father. Most were of Jeff and Callie, but there had been a handful of times when her father had turned the camera on her mother. If she had wanted to reciprocate, it was difficult to tell from the albums.
And after her mother had died, no one had taken any photos at all. After that, the only pictures of Jeff were school photos.
Sitting at the table, with the overhead light on, Callie went through the albums, watching Jeff grow up, watching herself grow up. Watching her father age.
There was one particularly good picture of him, apparently taken by her mother, as he sat on the veranda one evening, smoking his pipe. Wes Carlson had been a good-looking man. Captured as he was in a contemplative pose, he was an enigma.
Callie sat staring at that photo for a long time, trying to read it for answers to questions that would always remain unanswered now. She hadn’t known him very well—what child ever really knows a parent?—but with each passing year she felt that lack more and more. She had been twenty-four when he died, and they had been strangers to one another.
After her mother’s death, Wes Carlson had become a quiet and withdrawn man. He still fished as he always had, vanishing out to sea for weeks on end, but Callie suspected he did it only because he had children to feed. When he came home, he said little and spent long hours sitting on the veranda, staring into the distance as if he were waiting for something.
Sometimes Callie thought he’d been waiting for death to take him to Lily. She’d cooked his meals and washed his clothes, but deep inside she felt her father had died along with her mother.
Many times in the last four years, she had wished he were still here. What would he have said when Jeff was charged with aggravated assault? Maybe he would have known how to handle things better than she had, and maybe Jeff wouldn’t have been convicted at all. And now… what would he do now that Jeff was charged with murder?
She told herself she was an adult, and as capable of dealing with this as her dad would have been. It wasn’t as if either of them had any experience with this sort of thing. Sometimes there was no choice except to rely on common sense and competent advice such as Shirley’s.
But she still wished her dad were here. She wished she could smell his cherry pipe tobacco, and feel his powerful arm around her shoulders, and hear his rough voice say, “It’ll all work out, Calypso. You’ll see.”
As rarely as Wes Carlson had been home, he had still managed to make her feel safer than anyone else ever had, including her mother.
Blinking back tears and trying to swallow the lump in her throat, Callie turned to a photo of her mom. She hardly remembered Lily. That made her feel terrible, but after fourteen years, all that was left of Lily Carlson was an occasional snatch of remembered song or a wisp of perfume.
And a horrible, vivid image of scarlet blood pooling all over the white tile of the kitchen floor. It was as if every other memory of her mother was in black and white except that final one. Even after all this time, that image was still seared into her brain in horrifying detail, and had become her main memory of her mother.
Lily had been killed by an ectopic pregnancy, and the doctor said she had probably bled to death so fast that nothing could have saved her. But Callie still felt somewhere inside that if she hadn’t been out with her friends, if her father hadn’t been out at sea, if Jeff hadn’t been staying over with a friend, maybe one of them could have gotten her help in time.
She still lived with that fear and guilt, and suspected her father had, too. Maybe that was part of the reason he’d become so withdrawn. Maybe in his heart of hearts he believed he could have saved Lily if he’d been home.
Callie wondered if he had ever guessed how much she had blamed him. Probably. She had only been fourteen, and it had probably been obvious in a million ways.
It’ll all work out, Calypso. Her dad had been the only person in the world who called her by her given name rather than her nickname, and right now she would have given anything in the world to hear him say that just once more. It’ll all work out, Calypso.
She was on the edge of tears, and breathing raggedly as she tried to hold them in. Jeff might wake up at any time, and she didn’t want him to find her like this. But one by one, errant tears dropped onto the album, and one by one she wiped them away.
Chase rapped on the Carlson’s door, and when Callie answered, he gave her a crooked smile. “If the invitation’s still open, I’d like to join you for dinner.”
Her eyes were reddened, he noticed, as if she’d been crying, and now they widened with surprise. “Uh, sure,” she said, as if he’d caught her totall
y unawares. “Come on in. Jeff just got up a little while ago. He ought to be out of the shower soon.”
He nodded and followed her into the kitchen. She told him to have a seat at the table while she checked the pot roast.
“It sure smells good in here,” he remarked.
“Pot roast always smells delicious,” she agreed.
As a conversation it had nowhere left to go, and Chase found himself at a loss for what to say next, especially since he was acutely conscious of Callie’s reddened eyes. The sight made him feel awkward and intrusive.
Jeff appeared, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a towel around his neck. “Smells good, sis,” he said. Then he saw Chase and paused awkwardly.
“Hi,” Chase said. “Callie invited me to join you for dinner. Do you mind?”
Jeff shook his head, and after a moment’s hesitation came to sit at the table. “It’s nice to have company,” he said. It sounded as if he was relieved not to have to be alone with his sister.
Chase glanced at Callie, wondering what she might have said to Jeff. Not that he could blame her for saying almost anything, given the parameters of the problem. She had her back to him, and he couldn’t help noticing her bottom, cradled very nicely by a white pair of shorts, and her long, smooth legs. Uncomfortable with his reaction, he returned his gaze to Jeff. “I’m glad you’re out of jail.”
Jeff colored to the roots of his hair and looked utterly miserable. “I didn’t do it!”
“I know you didn’t.”
The young man’s face grew hopeful, and his blush began to fade. “You must be the only person on the planet who believes that.”
“Well, I think your sister believes it, too.”
“Of course I do,” Callie said vehemently.
“They think I did it because of what happened with that doctor on the boat when I was sixteen,” Jeff said. “I know they do because one of the cops said so. He said any guy who would pull a knife on a man would just as soon kill him. But I didn’t pull a knife on that guy, either!”
“What exactly happened?” Chase asked.
“I was crewing on a fishing boat. We took this group of doctors out for a day of fishing, and this one guy just kept getting more and more obnoxious. He kept telling me how stupid I was. You know, picking on me. Finally, I was trying to cut his line because he got it caught on something, and he told me I was just a chickenshit fag who wouldn’t even stand up for myself. So I turned around and told him to shut the fuck up or I was gonna punch him.”
“And you had a knife in your hand.”
Jeff nodded miserably. “I was cutting the line. I forgot I had the knife, but I swear I never waved it at him or anything. He told the cops I’d jabbed it at him.”
Callie spoke. “The prosecutor wanted to plead it down to a misdemeanor, but the doctor wouldn’t let him. So Jeff got a felony conviction and two years’ probation.”
She handed Jeff a stack of plates and some flatware, and he started setting the table. “I’ve got water, juice, cola, and milk for beverages. Nothing stronger, I’m afraid.”
“Water for me, thanks,” Chase said. He realized his eyes were following Callie as she moved around the kitchen, and he dragged them away, only to find Jeff giving him a speculative look. Needing to find a safe subject to discuss, he returned to the immediate problem.
“What you need to do,” he said to Jeff, “is write down everything that happened out there for your lawyer. And Callie and I should write down how we talked to you on the radio. If we put all of it together, it might help.”
Jeff nodded almost eagerly. Apparently he was glad to have something to do about the mess he was in. “I can do that. I think they took the boat’s log, though.”
“Did they?” Callie frowned. “They didn’t tell me that. And Shirley said they were supposed to give me some paper saying what they took, but they didn’t.”
“Great,” said Chase. “Slipshod police work. Really helpful.”
Callie glanced at the clock. “It’s too late to call her.”
“She probably didn’t find out anything yet, sis,” Jeff said. “You know how slow things go.”
Callie looked down at her hands and nodded, looking so sad that Chase had the worst urge to reach out and hug her. Whoa, he told himself. That was a good way to get into trouble.
After a moment, she lifted her head and set her chin. “It’ll all work out,” she said, as if she were repeating a mantra. “It’ll all work out.”
“Oh, man,” Jeff said, his face twisting, “I sure hope so. Shirley said they’re thinking about asking for the death penalty and I didn’t even do anything!”
He jumped up from the table and hurried out of the room. Callie looked at Chase, her expression reflecting anguish. “I don’t know what to say to him.”
“I don’t know what you can say, Callie.”
She gave a little laugh that sounded almost like a sob. “You’re right. What can you say to make a charge of murder look any better?”
“Life is a bitch sometimes.” And sometimes there wasn’t a damn thing you could do to mend things. He made a lame shot at trying to distract her. “You know, I could really use a cigarette.”
She drew a deep breath, closed her eyes a moment, then said in a pleasant hostess’s voice, “I’ll get you an ashtray.”
“Forget it. I haven’t smoked in years. But I could sure use one right now. I’ve got half a mind to drive to the store and get some. In fact, why don’t I bring back a carton, and we can all sit around and smoke until we turn green.”
She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind, then a small laugh escaped her. “I’ve got half a mind to drive off the Seven Mile Bridge.” She turned away quickly, showing him her back.
He didn’t need to read her face, though. He could read the slump of her shoulders, and the way her hand covered her mouth. In spite of himself, feeling almost as if he were moving in six fathoms of water, he rose and went to her, turning her around to face him, then wrapping his arms around her. She fit against him as if she’d been created to do so. The feeling almost overwhelmed him, but he forced himself to ignore it.
“You won’t,” he said grimly. “You’re not going to give the sea the satisfaction.”
A shudder passed through her, but she didn’t make a sound He held her tighter. After a little while, she spoke in a small, strained voice.
“The sea’s taken everything from me,” she said, her voice breaking. “Everything. And now it wants my brother.”
“It does seem that way.” Another man might have thought she was crazy, but not Chase. He’d wrestled with the sea too many times to think Callie had gone off the deep end.
“It sounds crazy,” she said, her voice shaky. Pulling out of his embrace, she pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes a moment, then dropped them. “It just seems that the sea did this, too. I mean… it’s like it wouldn’t take that boat, just so Jeff and Eric would find it and salvage it. Just so they could be… could be…”
“Don’t let yourself think that way, Callie. Jeff’s going to be okay.”
She looked up at him, anger sparking in her gaze. “You can’t know that! I have every right to be worried.”
Christ, he just kept putting his foot in it. He was beginning to think that the diving accident had stolen his ability to deal with people. “I didn’t say that. What I mean is you can’t afford to give up hope. You can’t afford to think there’s no way out of this. Because if you start thinking that way, you’ll miss opportunities to do something about it.”
“What opportunities? They think my brother killed these men because he salvaged their boat! I can’t prove that he didn’t do it!”
He didn’t know what to say to that, but it was wholly against his nature to assume there was no way to avert a catastrophe. There had to be something to do that would help Jeff. He just wished he knew what that might be.
All he knew was that as a white knight he was failing abysmally. Finally, he said, “I’m go
ing to talk to Jeff. How long till dinner?”
“Um… fifteen minutes, I guess.”
Turning, he went to look for her brother. It seemed safer than dealing with her—which made him a coward, but what the hell. He knew he was a coward these days.
Callie watched him go, feeling angry beyond words that there was nothing she could do, and worried almost to the point of despair. There was no way she could prove Jeff hadn’t killed those men, and the knowledge terrified her. It was like a nightmare, where no matter how fast you ran, you couldn’t outpace the monster coming after you.
Needing to keep busy so she didn’t start screaming like a wild woman, she pulled glasses out of the cupboard and filled them with beverages.
She couldn’t prove Jeff didn’t do it.
Unless she could find out who had.
Turning the idea around in her head, she felt her heart begin to accelerate. Maybe she could find out what had happened on that boat that day before Jeff had found it. Maybe she could find out something about the victims, about the fishermen who had gone out on the boat with them. Maybe she could find a clue there as to what had gone wrong.
At this point, she decided, anything at all was worth a try. First she had to learn everything Shirley had been able to get from the cops. She also had some contacts through her job. Maybe they could point her in the right direction. Those men hadn’t been killed for no reason at all, and if there was a reason, maybe she could find out who was behind it.
Just the thought of taking action, any action, made her feel better. With a new sense of determination, she put dinner on the table and called Jeff and Chase.
Feather wisps of orange and fuchsia clouds spread across a turquoise western sky as the sun set. Chase stood on the Carlsons’ veranda, looking up at the clouds, aware that night was encroaching once again. He could feel the tension returning, burgeoning in every cell of his body.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Callie said.
