Deirdre O’Brien opened the door to her room, peeked out, then quickly closed it again. Unless she put a hat and coat on Stanley and called him “Dear,” they weren’t going anywhere. The same manager who had eyed her with such suspicion six hours ago when she checked in was berating two of the housemaids for not folding the bath towels properly. You wouldn’t think an establishment that prided itself on its easy access to the local truck stop would be quite so fussy about towels, but she had heard him quite clearly. This was not a man who would take kindly to the sight of a dog the size of a baby elephant sharing the accommodations with a paying guest.
NO PETS meant no pets, even if the pet in question didn’t see himself that way.
“Don’t worry, Stan,” she said to the dog, who was sitting at her feet. They were almost eye to eye. “As soon as the coast is clear, we’re out of here.”
Sneaking a boy into her dorm room at St. Adalbert’s Academy had been easier than this.
But Stanley was a patient dog. He yawned, exposing some extremely large teeth, then settled down for a nap. He was a big dog but very well behaved. The woman at the shelter in Pennsylvania hadn’t lied about that fact. “He has a problem with saliva,” she had said to Deirdre, who was leaning toward a tiny mixed breed that would fit inside her tote bag, “but he’s good as gold. Too bad he’s the size of a small grizzly. Not many people have the kind of room he needs. We do our best for our animals, but I’m not too optimistic about Stanley’s chances.”
Deirdre asked what the woman meant by “Stanley’s chances,” and the woman told her quite bluntly that he probably wouldn’t be around this time next month.
That was all she needed to hear. Deirdre mentally crossed herself and told the woman she had a big farm in western Massachusetts where Stanley could run free with her other dogs, Lassie and King. And don’t forget her children. Two girls and a boy, ages six, eight, and almost ten. The woman’s eyes misted over with happy tears, which inspired Deirdre to add a husband, a kid brother, and a grandfather who liked to sit on the front porch and whittle.
Give your audience what she wants and you’ll have her eating out of your hand in no time.
The woman wasn’t sure she should hand Stanley over without doing an at-home check, but when she saw Deirdre’s Massachusetts driver’s license, she surrendered to destiny, and moments later Deirdre was trying to squeeze Stanley into her Hyundai between the harp, the saxophone, and her father’s old suitcase, the one with the travel stickers pasted all over it.
Stanley rolled with the punches. He didn’t seem to care that she not only didn’t own farmland in western Massachusetts, she didn’t even have an apartment. He didn’t get carsick. He wasn’t a finicky eater. And, best of all, he was good company. Maybe he didn’t laugh at her jokes, but then neither did her last boyfriend, and so far Stanley was much better company.
Too bad Stanley was a dog, because in many ways he was the perfect man.
“Elly’s going to love you,” she said, reaching down to scratch behind Stanley’s right ear. “Just make sure you bring your company manners.”
At least, she hoped her sister would love Stanley, since she was going to ask Elly to take him in for the summer. The good people at the Crooked Isle Inn told her they had room for her and for her harp, but not for a one-hundred-fifteen-pound dog. She needed the job. She loved the dog. The only solution was to throw herself on her sister’s mercy and pray Elly was still a soft touch for a hard-luck story.
Finally the manager finished lecturing the housekeepers. Deirdre shot Stanley a warning look as the manager’s heavy footsteps moved past the door. Stanley’s ears lifted at the sound, but, thank God, he didn’t so much as grumble. She peeked out the door again. The housekeepers had dispersed and there was nobody in sight.
“This is it,” she said, slipping the harness around Stanley’s barrel chest and broad shoulders. “Out the door, into the car, then lie down until we hit the main street.”
You could take the girl out of Catholic school, but you could never take Catholic school out of the girl. She could lie with the best of them, but she always felt guilty about it afterward. She pulled her last ten dollar bill from the tiny pouch slung across her chest and left it on the dresser for the maid. It wasn’t much, but it did help to ease her conscience.
Stanley must have been an undercover agent in another life, because he played his role perfectly. He darted from the motel room and leaped straight into the front seat of her Hyundai, where he promptly slumped down out of view.
“Good boy!” Deirdre said as she turned the key in the ignition. “Ellen is going to absolutely love you.”
The engine sputtered. She turned the key again. This time it sputtered and coughed. The third time it sputtered, coughed, then dropped dead.
“Oh, God,” she said, trying again. “Don’t do this to me!”
Punishment, that’s what it was. God’s way of telling her it was time to mend her ways.
She finally managed to get it started just as two of the housekeepers popped out of an adjacent building. Of course Stanley chose that moment to sit straight up in the passenger seat and peer out the window at the astonished women. Deirdre clutched the wheel and prayed all the way across the parking lot, and she didn’t stop praying until they reached the main road.
What was it her mother always used to say to her about telling lies? She couldn’t remember, but she knew it was something Biblical, designed to scare her into walking the straight and narrow. She usually limited herself to white lies with an occasional dip into pale gray, but last night’s desperation had pushed her straight over into the black. She should have slept in the car with Stanley or out on the beach. It was June, after all, and it wasn’t as if she had never spent the night on a beach before. Instead she had bounced all over the place in search of Ellen. Her apartment, the hospital, back to her apartment again until she finally gave up and found herself handing over two twenty-dollar bills for a room at the Cozy Cottage Motor Court.
“You’re just like Billy,” Mary Pat always said, sounding more like their mother every year. “You wouldn’t know the truth if it reared up and bit you.”
No argument there. That was why she was an artist and musician while Mary Pat baked cookies and stifled her children’s creativity.
“Never trust a woman who doesn’t like dogs,” she said to Stanley, who was busy slobbering on the passenger-side window. “A word to the wise.”
The look on Mary Pat’s face when she saw Stanley bounding full speed toward her would have been downright comical if Stanley had only managed to screech to a stop before he reached the woman. Unfortunately Stanley hit the brakes a fraction of a second too late and he careened into Mary Pat, who fell flat on her butt in the middle of the rainswept driveway.
So much for Stanley’s chances of spending the summer at Mary Pat’s cottage on the Cape.
At least Ellen liked dogs. Or so Deirdre thought. Ellen might be a workaholic without much of a social life, but she had a soft heart for hard-luck cases and Stanley certainly qualified.
“One look into those big brown eyes of yours, Stan, and she’ll be a goner,” Deirdre said as she rolled to a stop at the first traffic light. “Elly would never let us down.”
The light changed. Deirdre let up on the brake. The Hyundai gave a mighty wheeze, then collapsed right there in the middle of the street like a beached pilot whale.
Deirdre tried to start the car, but instead of the welcome sound of the engine turning over, she was rewarded with utter silence. She climbed out and circled the vehicle, peering at the rusty back panel, the dent on the right fender, the crumpled rear bumper. Everything was in order. She considered lifting the hood and looking around, but why bother? It wasn’t as if she had the slightest idea what any of that paraphernalia actually was, and, even if she could identify it, she hadn’t a clue what to do with it.
For a main drag, Harbor Road didn’t have a whole lot going for it. Not a gas station in sight. People traipsed
in and out of the doughnut shop in the middle of the block. A few men were chatting in front of Custis Hardware while they sipped from paper cups. One of them gazed in her direction, then looked away. A woman with curly amber hair was arranging baskets of tulips in an eye-catching display in front of a place called Annie’s Flowers. The woman turned and looked in Deirdre’s direction, then started walking toward her.
“Car trouble?” she called out as she approached.
“I think it’s terminal,” Deirdre said.
The woman glanced both ways, then darted into the street. “Did you check the gas gauge?”
“Over a quarter tank,” Deirdre said. “At least, that’s what it said last night.”
“I’m afraid that’s the limit of my diagnostic abilities,” the woman said with an easy laugh. “If you like, you can use the phone in my shop.”
“To call the auto wrecker?”
“You should see my truck,” the woman said. “The term junker would be a compliment.”
Deirdre extended her hand. “Deirdre O’Brien.”
“Annie Butler.” She had a strong handshake. “Let’s push the car over to the curb and then see what we can do.”
“I’m not so sure we can—”
“Watch and learn,” said Annie. She released the latch and lifted the hood. No sooner had she locked it into position than the three men from the hardware store ditched their cups of Joe and galloped toward them like racehorses out of the starting gate. They were followed by two other men, who raced out of the doughnut shop as if they were on fire, and an old guy who screeched to a stop going the other way and leaped out to offer aid and assistance.
Annie made the introductions. Pete. Edmund. Kyle. George. Harold, two Arties, a Daniel, and a Lowell. Deirdre found herself wishing they had their names embroidered on their shirt pockets. So many new faces!
“This works better than cleavage,” she whispered to Annie while the men held a consultation under the hood. “For a minute I thought it was raining men!”
The men decided that the Hyundai was definitely in big trouble and pushed the car over to the curb while Stanley supervised from the driver’s seat.
“You’d better call Jack,” Harold from the doughnut store said. “He’s the best.”
Deirdre looked to Annie, who nodded. “Definitely the best,” Annie said. “Come on. You can call from my shop.”
She glanced over at the Hyundai. “Do you mind if I bring Stanley with me?”
“Not at all.”
“I have to warn you,” Deirdre said. “He’s even bigger than he looks.”
“We have a yellow Lab at home, so I’m used to a lot of dog.”
“No wonder my sister loves it here,” she said as she liberated Stanley. “You’re terrific.”
“You have a sister in Shelter Rock?” asked Lowell. (Or maybe it was one of the Arties.)
Deirdre nodded. “She lives in the condo complex over by the beach.”
“So why didn’t you stay there?” Pete (or was it Edmund?) asked.
“I thought I’d surprise her,” Deirdre said. She had lived in Massachusetts the first ten years of her life and was accustomed to the blunt curiosity of the native New Englander. “I popped by her place three times, then finally gave up around two and found a motel room. I guess she’s out of town.”
“Who is she?” Pete asked. “This is still a pretty small place. We probably know her.”
“You probably do,” Deirdre said. “She’s Dr. Ellen Markowitz.”
Deirdre didn’t believe you could literally hear silence fall until the words “Dr. Ellen Markowitz” escaped her lips and a profound silence fell all around her like a box of rocks.
She forced a small chuckle and looked toward Annie. “Was it something I said?”
A few of the men exchanged looks. Oh, yeah. It was definitely something she said, but what?
Annie blinked the way you did when you were trying to recover your equilibrium, then gave Deirdre a slightly false smile. “Dr. Ellen’s my obstetrician,” she said. “I didn’t know she had a sister.”
“O’Brien and Markowitz?” one of the Arties asked Deirdre. “You married an O’Brien?”
“Maybe Dr. Ellen married a Markowitz,” the other Artie offered.
“Dr. Ellen’s never been married,” Pete broke in. “Elaine was talking to her at the parade and she told her she’d been engaged once, but it didn’t work out.” He turned to Deirdre. “Right?”
It wasn’t that the questions were tough to answer. Ellen was a Markowitz and Deirdre was an O’Brien. If you were looking for the simple answer, there it was. It was the background information that gave her pause. Deirdre was rarely at a loss for words, but this was Ellen’s world and anything she said would reflect back on her sister. She could easily weave a pretty little story that would pacify their curiosity, but she knew instinctively that Ellen would hate that. She also had the feeling Ellen wouldn’t much like it if she told the truth, either.
“Hey, guys!” Bless Annie for leaping into the fray. “This isn’t Meet the Press.”
There was something in her tone of voice that gave Deirdre the feeling that she was warning the men away from pursuing other questions as well. Very interesting. Was it possible that her upright sister might have a few secrets worth gossiping about?
God, she hoped so.
Chapter Four
Claudia parked her Chrysler at the curb and walked up the long path to the front door of the house where she had spent the best years of her life.
Some of the saddest years, as well, but she wasn’t thinking about them today. She was thinking about the day she and John brought their first child home... about how lovely Susan had looked as she floated down the staircase in her wedding dress... Eileen in her prom gown... the boys racing in and out in football gear and baseball uniforms... grandchildren spilling from the guest rooms, somersaulting across the yard, their laughter filling the house from basement to attic with the sound of life.
Such a big house, she thought, as she unlocked the door and stepped into the foyer. How would Ellen Markowitz ever manage to breathe new life into it all by herself?
She laughed at the thought and started toward the kitchen. She could just hear what John would have said to her. Let go, Claudia... you’ve sold the house... let Ellen figure out how to live in it.
But as she wandered through the kitchen, reliving the history of every scratch on the countertops, every dent in the floor tiles, the shelves her son Kevin had put up for her just one week before he died—well, it was hard to let it slip through her fingers without trying to hang on a little bit longer.
* * *
Ellen’s heart sank to her knees when she saw Claudia’s car parked in front of the house. She considered pulling into the driveway as she had originally planned, but it wasn’t her house yet so she parked behind Claudia at the curb.
It was a wonderful house. One of those big sprawling two-story houses that had been built after the Victorian era but before the Levittown era of cookie-cutter construction. “There’s a lot wrong with this place,” Susan had warned when she first showed her the house. “I love my mother, but she did let things get a little out of hand.” The roof needed work. The exterior hadn’t been painted in forever. The only thing holding the windows in place was over forty years of caulking. The entire structure slumped a little on its foundation like a tired dowager at the end of a party, but to Ellen the imperfections only made it more beautiful.
Every room, every staircase, every corner of the house bore witness to family life. The history of the Galloways was everywhere you looked. The pencil marks on the wall near the kitchen door that charted the children’s growth. The shelves Annie’s late husband had put up not long before he died. Susan had made each room come alive in a way that might have unnerved a woman with family stories of her own. But Ellen didn’t have any, at least none that she cared to dwell on. She gathered each and every story Susan told her about the Galloways, then tucked t
hem away to bring out and examine once she could finally call that wonderful house her home.
She would miss the friends she had made at the condo complex, but it was time she made a real commitment to Shelter Rock Cove and the life she was trying to build for herself. Nobody in either of her families had ever owned a house before. Back home on the Upper West Side, she had never even given it a thought. She was descended from a long line of renters, people who were more than happy to hand a check over to the landlord on the first of every month in exchange for knowing that the busted pipes and clogged toilets were somebody else’s problem.
As far as Ellen knew, she was the only one of the clan who had ever yearned for land. The only roots her aunts were concerned about were the ones the hairdresser touched up for them every six weeks. They were New Yorkers, born and bred, and they didn’t need a mortgage to know they were exactly where they belonged.
It had never been that easy for her. From the very beginning she had been looking for something that nobody else in the family seemed to know was missing from their lives. What she was looking for was a sense of belonging, of knowing that her place at the table was secure.
She laughed as she switched off the engine. What table? It wasn’t like her family ever saw each other. Not even during the high holy days. Her aunts had made an effort to keep everyone together the first few years after the accident that took the lives of her mother and unborn brother, but before long the attempt at maintaining the ties between them went the way of 8-tracks and disco fever. Now that the truth was out there and it wouldn’t go away, nobody was willing to keep up the pretense of being a real family.
Her stepfather Cy threw himself into his medical practice, pouring his grief into a passionate commitment to his patients. Unfortunately that commitment came at the expense of the child he had raised as his own from the time she was six months old.
Girls of Summer (Shelter Rock Cove - Book #2) Page 4
