by Lisa Wingate
By the time we reached the sun porch, it was all just a buzz. I couldn’t concentrate on the words. The cold had pressed through my jacket, and my suede dress boots were wet all the way to my socks. On the sun porch, at the urging of Uncle Herb, I took a seat on the faded floral fainting couch that was nearest the old wall-hung propane heater. Mom and Clay headed to the kitchen to get some plates and glasses, and to make a pitcher of iced tea.
“You look plumb wore out,” Uncle Charley observed as he turned up the heater. “I’m gonna go put on a pot of good hot coffee.”
Despite my insistence that he didn’t need to make coffee on my account, he speedily quit the room and was followed by Uncle Herb. I heard the whisper of voices in the kitchen. The last thing I remembered was letting my head fall against the sofa pillows, then catching Blaine Underhill’s name again and thinking that I should tiptoe in there and see what they were whispering about.
A life all turbulence and noise may seem
To him that leads it wise and to be praised;
But wisdom is a pearl with most success
Sought in still water . . .
—William Cowper
(Left by Ben Murray, retired—no longer in a hurry.)
Chapter 5
Family arguments should not be postponed until first thing in the morning, particularly on a gorgeous February day, when the winter sun slips over the water in a hush, biding its time before filtering through the canopy of live oaks into the rocky nooks and misty valley floors. No rush today, a morning like that says. It’s the off season, remember?
I woke to the sound of ducks landing on the water and a cardinal chirping in the winter-bare climbing rose outside the window. My heart was pounding and I couldn’t catch my breath. I’d just had the dream about the door. I’d gone farther than usual, this time. The knob had started to turn in my hand, but then the spider dropped from its web in the doorframe and landed on my fingers. I screamed, jerked back, awakened bolt upright in the bed. . . .
Now I sat clinging to my knees, my mind slowly settling into the fact that I was in the gardener’s cottage behind Uncle Herbert’s place. Frigid morning air chilled the heat from the dream as I gazed out the window at the cardinal, a bewitching splash of red, like a drop of blood among thorns. Beautiful, yet out of place . . . Somewhat noisy and demanding, as if determined to steal my attention.
The perspiration on my skin quickly turned to ice, and I grabbed the coat I’d thrown over my feet last night after piling the bed with dusty quilts. The collar of the coat was cold against my neck, and even the insides of the pockets were stiff and chilly. Something crisp bumped against my fingers, and I pulled it out, then vaguely remembered Mama B handing me the flyer from her suitcase-sized purse.
I unfolded it now, blinking the sleep from my eyes in morbid fascination, trying to bring the first few lines into focus.
Elect Blaine Underhill
County Commissioner
Precinct 4.
The man was everywhere.
Below the name was a list of bullet points, espousing Blaine Underhill’s worthiness for the job of county commissioner.
Lifelong county resident
Experienced leader
Proven businessman—not a politician
Avid fisherman and outdoor enthusiast (now there was an important qualification for office)
Sixth-generation Texan (I sort of admired that one. Being estranged from my mother’s family and perpetually conflicted during visits to my dad’s hometown because of the in-law wars, I felt an absence of the ties that bind. Occasionally, it bothered me.)
A unifier, who would strive to work across party lines (These days, you had to wonder if anyone could make that claim. Maybe the county surrounding Moses Lake was an island unto itself, where people with differing opinions actually found ways to discuss things like rational, civil adults. Despite the fact that he had ignored me in chemistry class, I liked Blaine Underhill better already.)
A man called to serve, with the county’s best interests at heart (Well, he was cute in high school, but I remembered him as kind of a goof-off who got by largely on football talent and an A-list family name.)
A half-dozen endorsements followed. Everyone from the county farm co-op to the local labor union, mostly comprised of employees of the Proxica plant and Proxica poultry farms in and around Gnadenfeld, were squarely in favor of Blaine Underhill’s candidacy. Why wouldn’t they be? He was an Underhill, and besides, if they didn’t support him, his stepmother would borrow a broom from the barrel out front of the hardware store, fly over their houses, and zap them with one of her evil hexes.
It was hard to imagine the goofy, somewhat intractable boy—who’d once kidnapped a neighboring school’s mascot costume—now being qualified to make decisions that affected the entire county. A guy who would show up at a pep rally wearing a contraband buffalo costume along with a pink tutu and ballet shoes couldn’t really change that much, could he?
I turned the paper over, compelled to read whatever was on the back side, which, as it turned out, was actually the front. There were live-and-in-person photos of Blaine Underhill—one of him coaching a pee-wee baseball team, one of him visiting with a young family in front of their home, one of him holding a rather large fish, and one smiling for the camera.
My first thought was, Whoa . . .
The ring of metal striking metal outside tugged my attention away. The noise traveled at light speed through the synapses of my brain, quickly pulling data from dust-covered files. It sounded like someone was moving Uncle Charley’s rental canoes, which in the off-season were stored in an old cotton barn at Harmony Shores.
Why would anyone be down by the lake with the canoes on a frosty February morning?
Sliding from the bed, I pressed my face to the glass while shivering and shifting between freezing sock-feet. The corner of the cottage and a bare crape myrtle blocked all but a glimpse of the weathered board-and-batten barn that had seen its heyday when the valley was a fertile river basin.
Uncle Herbert’s wife, Aunt Esther, occasionally talked about the days when Harmony House was the toast of Central Texas. Aunt Esther herself had been Cotton Queen of 1942, and she didn’t let anyone forget it. Harmony House had been her inheritance, and she never really appreciated the fact that Uncle Herbert had moved his funeral business there in order to help support the expenses of the massive house. Aunt Esther liked to pretend she’d allowed the funeral business into Harmony House as a service to the community, not because her family had spent all the money allotted to them when the Corps of Engineers took their farmland through eminent domain and built the lake.
My teeth started chattering, the cold forcing me away from the air seepage around the wooden windowpanes. I’d forgotten how chilly the place could get at night, even with the heater running on the window air unit. I should have started a fire in the wood stove before going to sleep.
Stiff-limbed and chattering, I did the Frankenstein run to the bathroom and considered the tiny turn-of-the-century propane heater on the wall. A faded box of Diamond Strike-Anywhere matches sat atop, and surprisingly, I could recall exactly how to light the heater. Leaning close, I blew the dust off, then entertained the fleeting question, How long since this thing’s been lit? A vision of myself and the cottage going up in a small mushroom cloud convinced me to forgo the heater. Instead, I hopped and shivered my way through pulling on some sweats, my coat again, and the cute little suede boots that were somewhat bedraggled and still damp after yesterday’s adventure.
The metallic noises stopped as I headed out the door and rounded the cottage, gaining a view of the other side of the barn, where the canoes were stacked under the shed roof on the end nearest the lakeshore. I could just see their brightly-painted tips sticking out—yellow, green, blue, red. Maybe someone was looking them over, deciding how much to pay for the lot at the estate sale.
A nippy February breeze wafted off the lake—not frigid but just cold enough to make
the idea of hanging out by the water seem less than pleasant. Even so, I wandered closer, tempted to take a walk along the shore to clear my head before going up to the house. On this morning’s agenda was the family meeting that had been derailed last night after I fell asleep in the chair on the sun porch. Conveniently, no one had awakened me until it was time for bed, and the lights in the main house were already off. Mom had given me some coffee and muffins in a ziplock bag, and said that Clay had readied the cottage for me while I was dozing on the sun porch. I’d headed down the hill, too tired and foggy-brained to protest.
This morning, I had to get down to business and dispel this craziness about a competing offer on the property. Someone was trying to throw a monkey wrench into the plans here, and I had to find out who and why. Surely Uncle Herb’s son didn’t know about this. If my iPhone wasn’t somewhere in a FedEx box, I would have called him already. If Donny was aware of this situation, he’d be having a fit.
Wouldn’t he?
I knew there had been some hard feelings between Uncle Herbert and his kids in the past, but now that plans for the move had been made, things seemed to be reasonably civil. Donny obviously cared for his father’s well-being, and Uncle Charley’s, as well.
Water splashed behind the barn, and I moved a few more steps, catching a glimpse of Roger-the-dog frolicking along the water’s edge, his tongue lolling and ears flopping as he ran. Someone was on the water in a kayak. . . .
Clay? He was paddling out from the shore with long, even strokes, his orange parka and the royal blue kayak making for a pretty picture. His paddle touched the surface of the lake in perfect rhythm, left, right, left, right, bending and shaping the water into swirls pink-tinged with morning light, drawing the froth upward with each stroke, suspending it in air temporarily before it ran down in glistening streams.
For a moment, I could only watch in awe, breathing in the serenity of the single kayak slicing soundlessly through the waters of Moses Lake. Clay looked perfectly at home there, perfectly at peace, despite the chill of the morning and the solitude on the lake. Looking at him I thought, That’s my baby brother, all grown up. I remembered teaching him to swim during those months we lived at the lake. He was almost ten, and all he could do was dog paddle. Some little girl in his class was planning a swim party for her birthday, and a couple boys had made fun of Clay because, being Clay, he had come right out and admitted that he didn’t know how to swim underwater.
I’d found him on the playground after school, crying his eyes out because the kids made fun of him. I wanted to find the little snots and beat them up, but Clay already had enough to deal with. He was small for his age, sort of a gump, way too honest, his dad was dead, his mom wouldn’t get out of bed, his sister was the town weirdo, and he couldn’t sign up for baseball or soccer because we couldn’t afford it. My father’s life insurance company was too busy investigating the death to care whether we could put food on the table while we waited for them to pay off. The last thing Clay needed was snotty little rednecks picking on him.
Instead of finding the boys and doing them bodily harm, I took Clay to the water and taught him to hold his breath and go under. It was late April, and the lake was still cold, but we did it anyway. By the time we were done, we were laughing and shivering. The next weekend, I walked Clay to that little girl’s birthday party and ended up having to stand at the corner of the patio like a dork, because once we got to the house, all the parents were there and Clay was embarrassed to go in by himself.
Now I watched him alone on Harmony Cove, and I couldn’t believe he was ever the clueless, wimpy little boy who was afraid of the water, the dark, snakes, and (oddly enough) big dogs.
What was that little girl’s name? Clay had such a crush on her. He’d cried when, at the end of the summer, Mom decided to get out of bed—she had to, since I was leaving home for college—and announced that she was going back to college herself. She’d contacted a friend, a grad student at Berkeley, and she and Clay were moving there to share an apartment with the friend. Fortunately, my father’s insurance policy had paid off shortly after that, and Mom had a way to finance her portion of the apartment and her higher education.
A flash of movement caught the corner of my eye, shattering my reverie. I’d been spotted by Roger, and he was headed my way in a dead run, droplets of water spewing from his coat, catching the light, and giving him a wet, glistening halo.
“Roger! Roger, no!” I scolded, trying to abort another mugging. “Stop! Heel! Stay back!” I hurried to a nearby fig bush, putting it between myself and the galloping water sprinkler. I’d only brought two outfits and a pair of sweats in my carryon. This was one of my few clothing options.
Unfortunately, Roger was not the least bit intimidated by fig trees. He went right through the narrow V in the middle and landed on me anyway. I ended up flat on my rear in the wet, dewy grass.
“Oh, my gosh!” someone screamed—a woman’s voice, young with a soft Texas drawl.
By the time I tossed Roger off, Clay’s friend from yesterday was looking down at me, her hands over her mouth. “Oh, my word,” she gasped between her fingers. “Are you all right?” She had a very nice manicure—pink, with little yellow smiley faces on the thumbs. “Roger, no!” she scolded, grabbing the dog’s fur in two big handfuls and holding him away from me as I climbed to my feet. “I’ve never seen him do that to anybody before. He’s usually a perfect lil’ gentleman.”
I blinked at her in disbelief. Gentleman? The dog who’d eaten my sofa, a Formica countertop, and the six-hundred-dollar Gianmarco Lorenzi shoes I’d splurged on during a business trip to Sicily—all in one week at my apartment? Roger was no gentleman, but what I really wanted to know was why this girl seemed to be so well-acquainted with Clay’s dog. And why was she at Uncle Herb’s at seven fifteen in the morning, all dressed for work?
“Are you oka-ay?” she asked again, her drawl stretching and softening the end of the word. She watched me with the sort of expression you might have when an elderly person slips on a spill in the grocery store. Once I’d righted myself, she let go of Roger and stuck a hand out to shake mine. “We didn’t really get to meet one on one yesterday. You probably don’t remember me. Amy Underhill? I was just little when y’all lived here.”
I suddenly felt old and rather frumpy, standing there in my sweats. Amy Underhill? Blaine Underhill’s toddler cousin? The one who attended day care across the street from the school? She used to bolt across the playground when Blaine passed by with the football boys on the way to fourth-period athletics. I’d watched them any number of times from algebra class as he jumped over the day-care fence and she tackled him with hugs. He’d pick her up, swing her onto his shoulder, featherlight, then open the gate and jog off while she laughed and squealed and the daycare-ladies playfully admonished him.
She was all grown up now—nineteen, maybe twenty years old, I guessed. Workin’ it in a small-town sort of way: cute skirt, high heels, white faux leather jacket.
“Great to see you,” I said, self-consciously smoothing fly-away reddish-brown hairs into my ponytail. “Where’s Clay going?” I pointed toward the water, where Clay was almost to the end of the cove. A black boat with a glittery silver rim had just stopped out there, and Clay was paddling toward it. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to be on the water in the morning chill. It also wasn’t normal for Clay to be up before nine, at least as far as I remembered. “Is he meeting someone out there?”
Amy swiveled, watching as Clay glided to the boat and the driver threw out a rope, with which Clay proceeded to tie up his kayak. When Amy turned back to me, she shrugged innocently but averted her eyes and looked at the house. “Oh, that’s my cousin. Do you remember Blaine? He was in your class, I think. Anyhow, they go out and fish sometimes.”
Tires screeched in my mind as my thoughts did a quick one-eighty. Blaine Underhill? My brother and Blaine Underhill had become fishing buddies? Since when had Clay started cultivating connections in Mos
es Lake—girlfriends and now fishing pals? Why hadn’t my mother mentioned any of this during our talks about the real estate sale? It was as if my brother had a secret life, and no clues to it had ever filtered to me.
You shouldn’t be surprised, the voice of conscience admonished. It’s not like you keep in touch.
But I had been in touch lately, quite a bit with my mother and some with Uncle Herbert, Uncle Charley, and Donny. Why all the cloak-and-dagger stuff? Why was Clay’s personal life such a big secret?
“I didn’t realize they knew each other,” I muttered, and Amy gave me a nervous look, her gaze shifting to the ground, searching the frost-tipped grass for a good answer.
“Oh, well, they got to be friends after they started talking so much. Blaine runs the bank now for his folks. He does business with a lot of people. . . .” She let the sentence drift, then quickly pulled her lips to one side.
“My brother’s doing business at the bank?” I squeezed my arms around myself, trying to ward off the cold and the idea at the same time. I was afraid to know where this was leading. “What kind of business?”
Amy took the opportunity to glance at her watch. “Oh, mercy, look at the time. I better head for work.” She sidestepped me and was off like a rabbit, headed toward the driveway. “It was really great seeing you, though. You have a good visit with your family, okay?”
I didn’t answer because there wasn’t time. Amy was out of there as fast as her size-five heels would carry her. I watched my brother exit the kayak and climb into Blaine Underhill’s boat, then motor out of the bay with the red kayak trailing forlornly behind like a leftover Christmas decoration.
When they were out of sight I went back to the cottage, got dressed, and headed for the main house, my mind finally fresh and alert, and my determination renewed. Time to unravel the tangled web of family secrets and sort out the sudden appearance of a supposed competing offer. I needed to get my mother to Seattle as soon as possible to sign the papers that would complete the sale of the family properties. Considering what I’d just seen and heard, maybe the competing offer wasn’t so sudden, after all. Maybe Clay had been planning this hijacking for a while.
