by JoAnn Ross
“And smells like the garden after it rains,” John broke in.
“That is a decided plus.”
While the thunder rolled across the fog-blanketed cove, John fell silent. Dan could tell that he was mulling something over. Knowing his nephew would share his thoughts when he was ready, he turned to the sports section to check out last night’s box scores.
John was cleaning off the counter ten minutes later when he looked up from putting the pancake batter bowl in the dishwasher. “Do you think you and Savannah might get married?”
“Marriage is a pretty big step,” Dan said mildly.
Certainly it was a bigger step than either of them was ready for. Even so, he had been thinking about her a lot lately: during the day when he was wading through legal briefs at the office, in court when he should be keeping his mind on the case he was arguing, and mostly late at night when he was lying alone in bed, watching the lights still on in the lighthouse, and wondering if, just maybe, she was thinking of him, too.
“People usually date for a while before they start thinking about making a commitment like that,” he said.
“Then maybe you ought to ask her out on a date,” John suggested.
“Maybe I will.”
They were in the Tahoe, on the way to Nelson’s Green Spot, where John had a weekend day job when his nephew shared another, less optimistic thought.
“You don’t think Ida Lindstrom’s going to bring her meatloaf to the dinner tonight, do you?”
Dan laughed at the expression of dread on John’s face. “I’m afraid that’s pretty much a given, Sport.”
Ida pushed her cart around the mercantile, gathering up the ingredients for her meatloaf. Eggs, two pounds of ground chuck—because although Savannah insisted the round was less fatty, chuck had more flavor. Then, of course she needed a pound of ground pork, which she had to wait for Glen Harding to grind for her, which wasn’t all that much of a hardship since they had a nice chat about the weather and his wife Betty’s lumbago, which was doing much better, thanks to the ointment Ida had suggested, Glen revealed.
“I’m pleased as Punch and Judy to hear it,” Ida said. It was always rewarding to know that you’d made a difference in someone’s life.
She moved on to the vegetable section, where she ran into Winnie Randall pulling back the husks from ears of sweet corn.
“Good morning, Winnie.” Ida bagged a fat yellow onion for her meatloaf. “How’s your mother doing?” Winnie had recently gotten a nursing home in Gray’s Harbor closed down after she’d visited and discovered that her aged mother, Pearl, had acquired bedsores about as dark and deep as Mount St. Helen’s craters.
“A lot better.” Winnie discarded three more ears of corn. “We’ve got her at Evergreen, and she seems more alert and coherent. That treatment you had the nurses put on her sores worked like a charm.” Two fat yellow ears made the cut and ended up in the cart.
“It always does.” Ida remembered the case well. After the horror of finding Pearl in conditions the county would have shut down the dog pound for, Winnie had checked out Evergreen six ways to Sunday. Although she trusted the staff, she’d still asked Ida to drop by and examine her mother. Ida had driven to the care center that same day and immediately prescribed a “baker’s cure.”
The mix of equal parts of granulated sugar and hydrogen peroxide might be an old remedy and not nearly as fancy as the medicines being manufactured today, but it still worked, and as far as Ida was concerned, that was all that mattered.
While she no longer kept office hours, Ida still considered herself a working physician. A person didn’t retire from the medical profession the way one might from selling insurance or working for the telephone company. When you became a doctor, you signed on for life. Ida wouldn’t have had it any other way.
She exchanged a bit more chitchat, sidestepping questions about Henry’s recent move into her house, Savannah’s divorce, and when Raine was going to make her a great grandmother. Claiming the need to hurry home to begin cooking, Ida moved on to aisle six and picked up the Quaker Oats that was her meatloaf’s secret ingredient. She checked her list, satisfied that she had everything she needed.
As she pushed her cart toward the checkout counter, where Olivia Brown was waiting behind her newly computerized cash register, a vivid memory of Winnie’s mother flashed through Ida’s mind. In her years as a doctor, she’d witnessed a lot of tragedies, but the sight of Pearl, who’d once been the prettiest flapper in Coldwater Cove, wasted away to bones and skin and looking like a death camp survivor had been one of the worst.
Deciding that she’d rather drop dead right here in the mercantile than spend the last years of her life in a nursing home, even one as nice as Evergreen admittedly seemed to be, Ida pushed her cart straight past Olivia, who was busy gossiping with Fred, the seventy-year-old bag boy, about Lilith Lindstrom Cooper having had the nerve to show up at the VFW dance.
Old biddy, Ida thought.
“Well, I guess if her war-hero husband can overlook her behavior back in the sixties, the town might as well,” Fred was saying as Ida continued out through the automatic doors into the parking lot.
She was putting groceries in the back of the Jeep when a huffing and puffing Olivia—who’d gained fifty pounds since starting work at the market where the Klondike ice cream bars were all too available—finally caught up with her.
8
S avannah was taking a shower in the claw-footed bathtub when the ringing of the phone finally infiltrated through the drumming of the water and the rattle of the hundred-year-old house’s copper pipes. She snatched a towel from the rack, shoved aside the curtain, scrambled over the tub’s high rim, and, dripping water on the floor, dashed into the bedroom, managing to scoop the receiver from its cradle just as the ringing stopped.
“Damn.” Water from her hair streamed off her soap-slick body in rivulets. Wrapping the towel around her, Savannah shoved her wet tangle of hair off her forehead and blinked her eyes against the sting of shampoo.
She stood beside the bed, waiting another long moment for the phone to ring again, hoping that whoever had tried to call would give it another shot. The only sounds were a rumbling warning of thunder and the muffled clang of a buoy from somewhere out in the fog-draped harbor. Even the birds refrained from singing their morning songs, apparently hiding out somewhere in the treetops, anticipating the coming rain.
A louder clap of thunder shook the house, followed by a jolt of lightning that flashed in the bedroom like a strobe light. Old fears sparked at her nerves and made all the hair on her arms and the back of her neck stand up. Reminding herself that she was no longer that fearful child who hid from storms—both natural and emotional—Savannah returned to the bathroom, hoping that the roofers who’d finally finished up yesterday had done as good a job as they’d promised when they’d accepted their hefty check.
“It’s about time you got here,” Raine complained when Dan arrived at the office.
“I took a little detour to drop John off at the Green Spot, since it was raining too hard for him to ride his bike.” With his mind on Savannah, as it had been too often lately, he’d forgotten to turn on his cell phone.
“I figured that might be it. Warren Cunningham’s been calling every five minutes for the past half hour. He’s in Tokyo, shoring up some sort of Asian Rim finance deal.
“Jack picked his son up about four this morning on a complaint, and since you’ve taken care of the kid’s problems in the past, Warren wants you on the case.”
J. C. Cunningham was a sixteen-year-old who spent the school year with his mother in Dallas, and summers and holidays at one of his father’s many homes here in Coldwater Cove. Dan suspected a great deal of the trouble he caused was his way of trying to get attention from parents too wrapped up in their own lives to notice that their only son was falling through the cracks.
The boy wasn’t really a juvenile delinquent. In fact, he wasn’t much more wild than Dan’s own cousin
Jack, whose teenage stunts had landed him in judicial hot water on more than one occasion during his teen years. Fortunately, Jack had outgrown his infamous reputation and matured into a respectable adult, even following in his father’s footsteps as sheriff.
But these were different times and since what once might have been considered normal juvenile transgressions seemed to be leading to more dangerous adult crimes these days, Dan could understand why Jack felt the need to lay down the law.
“What did J.C. do now?”
Raine’s lips twitched. “According to Mildred Zumwalt, J.C. and his pals got a little too rambunctious last night and committed a ‘drive-by shouting.’”
“That’s a new one.”
“It’s also typically Mildred.”
The woman who’d terrified a classroom of eighth graders for nearly half a century appeared to have decided to liven up her golden years by filing lawsuits against everyone in the world. Just last week she’d wanted to sue God for destruction of property when a lightning bolt had struck her tree. No fan of nuisance lawsuits, Dan had been able to talk her out of the suit by patiently reminding the former middle school civics teacher that every defendant had a legal right to answer the charges against him or her in court, and until someone came up with a way to serve a subpoena on God, he doubted there was a judge in the country that would hear the case.
“Mildred is the easy part of this morning’s caseload.” Raine’s expression sobered. “On the flip side, I think Kathi Montgomery might just be ready to file for divorce. Looking at her, I think you’re going to want to file for an order of protection as well. I put her in your office.”
Dan glanced down the hallway. “It’s about time,” he murmured.
Jason Montgomery was a former fisherman who’d lost his boat to an Olympia bank and his sense of manhood to the bottle. It was Coldwater Cove’s dirty little secret that he’d begun to beat his wife; it was Dan and Jack’s dual frustration that short of tossing the guy in jail whenever his behavior got bad enough to result in a 911 call from the neighbors, they’d never been able to talk his wife into testifying against him, or taking the steps necessary to save herself.
She jumped like a startled doe when he opened the office door. The last time he’d tried to talk reason into her, her nose had been slender and delicately sloped. Today it was swollen to twice its size, her top lip had an ugly split, and her flowered print cotton blouse bore rust-colored blood spatters he hoped to hell were from Jason, but suspected were from her broken nose. Bruises new enough to still be blue braceleted both upper arms and darkened the puffy flesh around her left eye. Both eyes were dulled with pain.
A cold rage shot through Dan. For her sake, he controlled it. “Hey, Kathi.” They’d dated for a time, in school, when they’d been on the debate team together. It hadn’t gone beyond some making out on the bus trips to various competitions around the state. After two months, she’d dumped him for Montgomery, who’d been all-state high school offensive linebacker three years in a row.
“Oh, Dan.” Her split lip quivered. Her eyes swam. “I’m so sorry.”
“You don’t have a damn thing to be sorry for.” He crouched down in front of her. When he touched his hand to her hair, she flinched and fear filled her eyes.
“Now there’s where you’re wrong.” She sniffled. “I’m sorry for so many damn things. Especially for having chosen brawn over brain.”
The words were the same ones that, suffering from wounded teenage pride, he’d thrown at her when she’d broken up with him. Her soft tone revealed a vestige of the spunk that had drawn him to her in the first place. Back then, before Montgomery had broken her spirit, she’d reminded him a lot of Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Unfortunately, Dan thought grimly, Kathi had ended up with her own personal bogeyman.
“I’ve always believed that there should be a general amnesty for everything we say and do in high school.” He took a Kleenex from the box on the table next to the couch and gently dabbed at her swimming eyes. She flinched again when he touched the swelling beneath her black eye.
“I tried to make things right between us. I kept thinking that if only I worked at our marriage harder, if I was more understanding of Jason’s feelings, we could make it work.”
Dan privately considered that Mother Teresa couldn’t have made marriage to that goon work.
“I’d just graduated from school when we got married. I was looking forward to working as a speech therapist, but Jason didn’t want me to work outside the home. He said I made it look as if he couldn’t support me.”
Once again Dan thought the real problem was that Montgomery hadn’t wanted Kathi out in the real world where she could meet someone who might truly care about her. Once again he kept his thoughts to himself.
“We moved to Alaska, and we were doing okay. But the fishing wasn’t what he’d hoped it would be, so we came back here.” She dabbed at her eyes. “Then things got even worse. The more he was out of work, the more he drank. Which made it harder to work. It was a vicious cycle.
“After the boat was repossessed, I went back to work for a private home-care agency. That’s when things really started going downhill….
“Then last night he called me a lot of things I’d just as soon not repeat.” She pressed the balled-up tissue against her mouth and struggled for calm.
“You don’t have to. That’s all in the past, Kathi. What you need to concentrate on is the terrific future that’s waiting out there for you.”
Dan smiled encouragingly, not because there was anything at all humorous about her situation, but because she needed it.
An hour later, he’d prepared the divorce complaint and had arranged for Kathi to move to a shelter for abused women at least until her husband could be picked up and put behind bars.
Ida had been the impetus behind the shelter back in the late seventies. Bucking initial objection from those who believed that a man’s home was his castle where he was entitled to do as he pleased, she’d gone on a statewide speaking tour, pitching her project to the Rotarians, the Elks, the American Legion, PTA, AMA, any group who’d listen and write out a check.
With typical Ida-like candor, she’d told of her own abusive experience, something that wasn’t being done in those days when tidy homes in nice neighborhoods had harbored dark secrets that weren’t really secrets, and neighbors looked the other way.
Dan would have preferred to cut the wife beater into little pieces of shark bait, but civilization being what it was, he figured he’d have to settle for putting the guy away for a very long time.
That problem taken care of, as well as he could for now, he moved on to J.C., whose situation at least offered a bit of comic relief, he thought as he entered the sheriff’s office.
Any prospect of humor instantly died when he viewed Ida sitting in the office, looking like death warmed over. Her complexion was the color of cold ashes, there was a trapped animal look in her eyes, and she was gripping the scarred arms of the wooden chair as if trying to keep herself tethered to earth.
She was also doing something Dan had never seen before. Indeed, he doubted that very few people had ever witnessed the sight of Ida Lindstrom openly weeping.
Henry Hyatt was frying eggs when Savannah entered the kitchen. The aroma of bacon filled the air.
“Ida said I was welcome to help myself,” he said defensively, “since I chipped in for the groceries.”
“Fine.” Savannah looked at the dishes already piled up in the sink and wondered if Henry was expecting her to clean up the mess. “Have you seen my grandmother this morning?”
“Isn’t she in her room?”
“No.” Ida’s bedroom door had been open when Savannah had passed by, the bed neatly made. She wondered if the call had been from Ida and worried that her grandmother had gotten into trouble.
“I don’t suppose you could have picked up the phone?”
He shrugged and flipped the eggs. “I was taking the bacon from the pan when it rang. B
esides, odds are it wasn’t for me.”
Savannah had to practically bite her tongue to keep from setting down some house rules. It was, after all, her grandmother’s house, which meant that if there was any rule setting to be done, Ida’d be the one to do it.
She went to pour herself a cup of coffee, but the carafe was empty. Deciding to pick up a cup on the way to the lighthouse, she’d taken her raincoat from the rack when she viewed Dan’s Tahoe pulling up in front of the house. When she saw her grandmother sitting beside him, she flung open the door and ran out into the rain.
“What happened?” she asked as Dan helped Ida down from the high passenger seat. Her heart clenched when she realized that her grandmother had been crying.
“Nothing that important,” Ida insisted. When Dan retrieved two plastic bags of groceries from the back seat, she snatched them out of his hands and marched past Savannah into the house.
“I’ll wait out here,” Dan offered.
On her grandmother’s heels, Savannah didn’t take time to respond. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fit as a fiddler.” Ida’s red-rimmed gaze circled the kitchen.
“Then why did Dan drive you home? Where’s the Jeep?”
“At the market, and you don’t have to worry, it’s not wrecked or anything.” She muttered something under her breath, then shot Henry a stern look. “I’m not cleaning this mess up.”
“Don’t get your britches in a twist, I’m planning to take care of it.” Ignoring her sputtered protest, he took the bags, put them on the counter, and began putting the groceries away. “You’d better sit down.” His blue eyes swept over her. “You look like hell.”
“You’re no Paul Newman yourself,” she shot back as she grabbed the ground meat from him and yanked open the refrigerator door.
“Grandmother,” Savannah repeated with dwindling patience, “what happened?”
“I told you, nothing important.” Ida slammed the door shut. The look she shot her granddaughter was even harder than the one she’d used to scant avail on Henry. “Just a little mix-up at the market.”
