Sea Glass Sunrise

by Donna Kauffman

  So, Barbara didn’t know what had happened, but she knew things weren’t good. Hannah wished that made her feel better, instead of worse.

  “Still, I should have known. Should have called more.”

  “Phone works both ways, so don’t go taking it all on yourself. And you’re home now,” Barbara said in her matter-of-fact way that made it clear the subject was closed. “You’ll know more than you ever wanted to know about things no one ever wanted to know about, most of them by sundown. Which it will be shortly. We should see about getting you a ride home. You need to be resting, not sitting here gabbing with me.”

  Hannah nodded absently, but her mind was skimming back over all the news Barbara had shared with her already. “I can’t believe that, about Delia’s. We all used to go to her grandmother’s restaurant, until it burned down. I always admired Delia for starting up her own place after that. God, I can’t even count how many times I holed up in a booth there during high school. How long has it been since she opened?”

  “Twenty years.”

  Hannah’s eyes widened. “Wow. I’m officially old as dirt. I should go see her. I need to anyway. We’re co-maids-of-honor. Maybe Alex will let her carry that ball—or bouquet, as it were—given—” She gestured to her face. “Where is she? Did she get a new place? When did this—?”

  “Delia’s fine, still has her grandmother’s little cottage. Happier than I’ve ever seen her, in fact. You’ll hear all about that soon enough.” Barbara stood, and tugged Hannah to her feet, hugging her before Hannah straightened fully. Barbara was a fierce force to be reckoned with, and it always surprised Hannah because she barely hit five-foot-five, and that was in her uniform-issue heavy-soled shoes.

  “I’m going to get Deputy Dan to give you a lift,” Barbara said. “Sal said your car—well, that’s for later. I’m sure he’ll be in touch, and between Logan, Alex, and Fi, there will be a car available when you need it.” She picked up her radio and flipped the call button.

  Hannah put her hand out. “Don’t take Dan off duty to drive me all the way out to the Point. It looks like I’m going to need a rental, so I’ll just go take care of that now.”

  “You’re not driving,” Barbara said, and when Hannah opened her mouth to argue, she merely pointed to the chair, then radioed Officer Brentwood.

  Barbara had tagged him as Deputy Dan on his first day, because he was young, with blond hair, blue eyes, and the kind of peach-fuzzed cheeks that would probably follow him well into maturity.

  Her handset squawked just as the door opened to the station house and in walked . . . Calder Blue. Sergeant Benson clicked off the radio, all business. “What can I do for you?”

  “Actually, I was looking for Ms. McCrae,” Calder said, his gaze moving easily to Hannah’s.

  “Is something wrong?” Hannah asked him.

  “I went by the fire station house and the medical clinic, but Bonnie said you were at the police station. Is Beanie filing charges or something? Signage homicide?”

  “What? No. I came to see Logan—my brother—after Bonnie was finished with me.”

  “Right. The police chief.”

  “Why did you go to the clinic? I’m a little banged up, but I told you, I’m fine. Unless—are you . . . is something else wrong?”

  He walked toward her and held out his hand. “I stopped to put gas in my environmentally challenged truck and found this on the floorboard.” He was holding her stuffed-to-the-gills leather day planner. “Must have fallen out of your purse. I figured you’d need it sooner than later. ID for the insurance paperwork and such.”

  She was a slave to technology just like everyone else in her field, but she’d never been able to quite part with her handwritten file book. Once upon a time she couldn’t have breathed without her day planner, and that time hadn’t been so long ago yet. So, it was shocking to find out she’d gone this long without even realizing she’d left it behind.

  He stopped in front of her and gave her a closer look, taking in the cleaned-up face and bandaged gash on the bridge of her nose. “But I guess having a police chief brother jumps a few hurdles.”

  “Being born and raised in a town the size of Blueberry pretty much removes the hurdles all together.” She took the leather-bound book from him, running her finger over the elastic strap that held the bulging contents between the hand-tooled covers. “But thank you. I didn’t even realize I’d lost it. Saved me the additional panic attack I’d have had when I finally figured it out.” Would she have panicked? She wasn’t so sure now. What did she really need it for anymore? Shouldn’t that make her sad? Instead she just felt . . . numb. She belatedly noticed Barbara eyeing the two of them with open interest. “I’m sorry. Barb—er—Sergeant Benson, this is—”

  “Calder Blue,” Barbara finished for her, her voice all business once again as she turned a shrewd, speculative gaze on him. “I’d heard you were coming to town to work for Winstock but didn’t think you’d have the nerve to actually do it.”

  “Winstock?” Hannah said, then looked back to Calder as she put it together. “That’s why you came here? As a contractor? Not to end a hundred-year-old blood feud, but to make sure it lasts another hundred years? You could have stayed home and accomplished that.”

  His expression remained smooth, giving away nothing, his gaze clear and still very much on her. “Contractors build things. It’s my job.”

  “It’s a yacht club,” she countered. “Which we need like we need a . . . well, a yacht club. Which is to say, not at all. Not only is Winstock shoehorning it in between a founding father’s shipyard and your own family’s generations-old fishing business—which employs a fair percentage of the working folks in this town, I might add—but he apparently took down a town icon to do it. The O’Reillys have been feeding residents of the Cove since long before I was born. O’Reilly’s restaurant was like a second home to me as a kid, and Delia’s Diner was the social center for me and my friends throughout high school. It’s the same for a lot of other folks who lived here—” She could hear her voice getting shrill and wasn’t even sure where all the anger was coming from. Well, okay, if she wanted to play armchair psychiatrist for a half second, she knew exactly where it was coming from. But, questionable job choices notwithstanding, Calder Blue was not Tim. And she was better than someone who would make all men pay for the crimes of one.

  She held up one hand, took a moment to gather herself. “I’m sorry. What jobs you choose to take are none of my business.” She held his gaze coolly now, calm and once again collected. It would have been easier to pull off if she didn’t know what she must look like at the moment. “I appreciate your dropping this off. Thank you again for your help today. My apologies for whatever trouble I’ve caused you.”

  “Not a problem,” he said, and though she swore there was a thread of amusement in his tone, it was not at all visible on his face. He looked to Barbara and tipped his chin. “Ma’am.” He turned and walked back to the station house door.

  Hannah watched him go, then swallowed a string of swear words when she realized her gaze had lowered and snagged on those nicely fitting back pockets of his. She opened her wallet and handed Barbara a five-dollar bill just on principle as he reached for the door handle. He was this close to being gone, out of her life. Yet, that didn’t stop her from blurting out, “What did Blue say? Our Blue, I mean. Jonah. Does he know what you’re planning to do?”

  Calder paused and looked back at her. “I don’t know what he thinks, or what he knows. I’m headed that way now, so I guess I’m about to find out. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m running a little late. I got a bit . . . sidetracked on my way in.” Then he flashed her a smile that was only about a hundred times more lethal than that velvety smooth baritone of his, and pushed out into the hushed, pink light of dusk.

  Hannah swallowed against a suddenly dry throat. She might have leaned a slightly unsteady hand on the back of the metal chair.

  “So. That was interesting.”

 
Hannah turned to find Barbara staring at her with open speculation. Hannah instinctively gave the older woman her own version of The Look, the same look that made first-year associates quail in their crisply starched suits and sensible shoes, even as she knew it wouldn’t so much as ping Barbara’s sturdy armor. Which it didn’t. “Whatever it is you think you’re insinuating, don’t.”

  “I’m just saying there was enough . . . ah, energy sparking between you two that I’m surprised something didn’t spontaneously combust.”

  “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about. I barely have enough energy to stay upright. I feel like a wrung-out dishrag at the moment. And he’s on his way to his own funeral.” She felt Barbara’s gaze like a sniper laser and was surprised there wasn’t a little red dot glowing somewhere on her person. “I almost sideswiped his truck, then more or less ordered him to get lost when he tried to help me. I’ve been on the road since before dawn this morning, and, yes, I was more than a little freaked out by the accident, so I was tired, shrewish, and Fiona added rude and impatient to the list of the fine McCrae traits on display. For his part, he was kind, considerate, and played Good Samaritan to the end.” She lifted the day planner as if showing evidence to the jury. “I have no idea why, but I can guarantee you it wasn’t because of anything I did or said.” She lowered the day planner, looked at it, then back at the closed station door.

  “Seems a little at odds, then,” Barbara said, all calm and infuriatingly knowing, “with the kind of man who’d come all the way back to the birthplace of a centuries-old family feud, with the intent to piss his relatives off further by messing with their current status quo.”

  “Yeah,” Hannah said, absently playing with the elastic strap again, gaze still on the door. “It does.”

  Barbara let a slow smile cross her face when Hannah looked back her way. “So . . . why was it you said that Tim the Titan of Finance wasn’t escorting you to the wedding?”

  Chapter Three

  Calder swallowed a sigh and perhaps a swear word or two as he pulled into the gravel lot and spied Jonah Blue standing at the ready, on the dry-land end of Blue’s Fishing Company’s main pier. The sun was setting over the pine tree–dotted ridge that fringed the hill rising up behind High Street at Calder’s back, casting Jonah’s tightly pinched features in a stark, mauve-shadowed relief that didn’t warm his expression in the least. Calder told himself he should feel lucky the old man wasn’t toting a shotgun. Although he supposed that didn’t rule out something equally lethal. Like a nice, sharp gutting knife.

  Feeling a little too close a kinship to a lobster swimming into a trap, he slid out the cab of his truck . . . and tried not to grimace when the sharp briny scent hit him. Calder had discovered that the air had a salty tang anywhere you went in Half Moon Harbor—in most of the Cove proper, for that matter. He liked it well enough, thinking it added a more immediate, visceral element to the historic, seafaring ambience of the little town. But down here, right on the fishing docks, it took on a layer of catch-of-the-day that was fairly aggressive.

  His thoughts slipped to Hannah McCrae and her rather heated argument for keeping change from coming to Blueberry Cove. We need a yacht club like we need . . . a yacht club. He found himself quelling the urge to smile at that. Folks never liked change, even when it would benefit them directly.

  He took in the look and feel of the decidedly blue-collar harbor, from the half dozen main fishing piers, the network of other docks that zigzagged between them, and the throngs of pot buoys, dwarfed only by the stacks upon stacks of lobster traps piled everywhere, to the shipyard just around the curve with its centuries-old boathouses and . . . Calder’s eyes widened and his gaze hung up for a moment, and then another one, on the four soaring masts of the behemoth, full-size replica of what seemed to be a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century tall ship sitting proudly on the shipyard grounds. “Holy . . . schooner,” he breathed.

  He swung his gaze back over to the fishing piers that comprised Blue’s, and finished his thought, which was that he had to kind of agree with Hannah McCrae. What the hell was Winstock thinking, shoving a yacht club in the middle of all this?

  Unless, of course, Winstock didn’t plan to stop his harbor remodel with razing a local diner.

  Which still didn’t explain why he’d specifically dragged a St. Croix River Blue into the mix, Calder thought as he looked at his great-uncle, who hadn’t moved so much as a hair, what little he had left anyway, much less lifted a hand—or a gun—in welcome. He simply stood there, holding his ground, much as Calder assumed all the Blueberry Cove Blues had before him, and waited. Of course, the old man didn’t need a gun, or a gutting knife. Jonah Blue cut quite an imposing figure all by his lonesome. So much for imagining him as a weathered, hunched-over old man.

  The Cove branch family patriarch was somewhere in his mid- to late seventies, and the sparse bit of hair that sprouted in a ring around his otherwise baldpate was snowy white. But that was where the ode to aging began and ended. Jonah was an easy six-four, maybe an inch taller. But where Calder had a fair share of hard-earned muscle lining his frame, Jonah was simply a hulk of a man, born and bred. Broad at the shoulder, thick through the chest, solid shank arms, and big, meaty fists. The lower half was just as imposing, legs thick and long as sturdy oaks, set on feet that likely required special-ordered boots. It would take more than a stiff wind and a heavy surf to topple that old man.

  Good thing I only want to talk to him, and not wrestle him, Calder thought, ranking his odds as only slightly better than they would be grappling with a grizzly. He resisted the urge to hitch his belt or do any other type of male-pattern ground pawing, and opted to simply walk up to the man, stopping a respectful five or six feet away.

  “I’m Calder,” he said easily. When Jonah didn’t so much as blink, he went on. “You must be Jonah. Please accept my apologies for being so late. I was involved in an accident outside of town and needed to see to the other driver’s welfare. I tried to call.” And you couldn’t be bothered to answer. As usual. “I left a message.”

  Nothing. Not even a blink. Hard blue eyes silently stared him down.

  Calder didn’t offer his hand. No point giving the man a second chance to insult him. “I appreciate your agreeing to see me.” It hadn’t been so much agree as didn’t flat-out refuse, but Calder wasn’t going to quibble. “As I said in my note to you, I was hoping to get your input. Not about family business, but about my business here in the Cove.” He had every intention of talking family business at some point, but from what little interaction he’d had with the man, Calder had a pretty good idea that wasn’t the way to get Jonah to start a conversation. Work was something Jonah understood and respected. They both did. Seemed a good place to start. He held the man’s gaze, stare for stare, though he was careful to keep his expression open, congenial.

  “You already accepted the job,” Jonah said at length, his Down East accent as thick as his voice was rough and rumbly. “Nothing to talk about.”

  I accepted the damn job to have an excuse to come here and talk to you, you old buzzard. Though Calder was beginning to question the wisdom of that decision. “Nothing’s been signed. Ground isn’t broken yet,” Calder replied. “I was hoping to get your thoughts on the project. Monaghan’s, too.” And take a closer look at that tall ship now, while I’m at it.

  “Bit late for opinions now,” Jonah said flatly. “What’s done is done.”

  Calder continued to hold the older man’s gaze directly, wondering if Jonah’s remark was aimed at the contracting business . . . or the family feud business. “Nothing’s done until it’s done. Never too late to change course, if you discover there’s a more worthy destination.”

  He saw what looked like a flicker of disgust pass over the man’s face, but with that locked jaw of his, it was hard to tell. “Shows what you know then. Which, no surprise to me, is very little.” He moved for the first time, but only to shift his head a few inches to the left, so he could spit some to
bacco juice.

  Surprised, Calder wondered where the man could stuff a wad of chew, his jaw was so damn tight.

  “Might as well head on back up your river,” Jonah said, at length. “Your like isn’t wanted here at Blue’s.”

  He said it as if Calder’s being a Blue was somehow . . . less Blue.

  “Once the town folk find out why you’re here, you won’t be wanted by them, either. Seems you River Blues still haven’t figured out how to tell the difference between where you’re wanted and where you’re not.”

  It was quite a speech, Calder thought. But rather than put him off, or piss him off, it did quite the opposite. The old man wants me gone, and it’s not because I’m a St. Croix Blue, he thought, surprised yet again. Calder didn’t know Jonah Blue from Adam, but he did know people, how to read them, how to work with them, for them, or get work out of them as the case may be. The success of the family business depended on it. Same could be said for Blue Harbor Farm. Jonah might well hate Calder with the kind of deep-seated mistrust that only a life spent being taught to mindlessly hate could engender, but that wasn’t why he was giving Calder the bum rush. Or not entirely the reason. Jonah Blue was afraid.

  Which begged the question . . . afraid of what?

  “I don’t run from a challenge,” Calder said.

  “Must not be a Croix River Blue then,” the old man snorted.

  Calder had walked right into that one, but ignored the barb. “What our ancestors did to, with, for, or against each other has no bearing on me, or why I’m here. Life is short, Jonah, too short for petty grievances and borrowing other people’s troubles.” Okay, so maybe he was a little annoyed.