by Gayle Roper
“Let me take you fishing.” It would be fun to introduce her to one of his favorite pastimes.
Several emotions flashed across her face: disbelief, uncertainty, longing. “I’ve never fished in my life. City girl here, remember?”
“So I’ll teach you. It’s not hard.”
“I just hang the line in the water, right?”
“A slight oversimplification, but that’s the general idea.”
“Do you promise to clean anything I catch?”
“The Barnes rule has always been that you clean what you catch.”
She shook her head. “You’re telling me that Ginny cleaned her own fish?”
“Ginny didn’t fish.”
She looked surprised and a tiny bit pleased. Because he was doing something with her that he hadn’t done with Ginny? For some reason that touch of one-upmanship on her part warmed him.
“It was a great shock to me when I found out. We started dating in the late fall, and by the time spring and fishing rolled around and I learned the terrible truth, it was too late to turn back.”
“A hard lesson in how tricky assumptions can be.”
“Tell me about it. In my defense, I came by mine naturally because my mom is a great fisherman. It doesn’t matter whether it’s fresh water or the bay or deep sea. She loves fishing.”
“You’re telling me your mom cleans her own fish?”
He nodded. “Always.”
“Well, I make no promises. Does she put on the worms too?”
“If that’s what she needs.”
“Worms are slimy.”
“We won’t be using worms. We’ll be using squid.”
At her horrified expression, he laughed. “If you’re too chicken to bait your own hook, I’ll do it for you, at least at first. Just say you’ll come.”
She studied him a moment, then nodded. “I’ll go fishing with you. If you want.”
If she only knew.
20
When Andi ran home in a panic, Clooney had been at the beach, practicing the fine art of retrieval as only he could. She had been so tense as she walked into the house, expecting a well-deserved lecture for running out on Carrie, that her knees went weak with relief when she found herself alone. She went to her room and fell back on her bed. As she stared at the ceiling, she took deep calming breaths. She was safe here. She was safe.
If she said it enough, she might believe it.
She’d thought she was doing so well—her heart no longer raced any time she saw a dark-haired man; it just sort of speed walked—but all it took this morning was one look and she’d panicked.
“What’s wrong?” Clooney demanded when he came home and found her all pale and shaky.
“Nothing.” Like there was a ghost of a chance he’d believe that.
He took her by the shoulders and forced her to face him. “Andi darlin’, this is Uncle Clooney. You can’t fool me. What’s wrong?”
She thought for the briefest moment about stonewalling, but Clooney was not some idiot from The Pathway’s compound who believed whatever he was told. In fact, except for herself, she’d never met a more skeptical, cynical person. She told him the truth, just not all of it.
“They were talking at the café about The Pathway. Jase was found dead this morning, and he belonged.” She let her fear show.
“I heard about Jase on the news. I’m sorry. And you knew him from there, from The Pathway?”
She nodded. When she’d first seen him at Carrie’s, she had been both glad and scared. Thanks to Jennie, he’d been one of the few normal people at the compound, so she was happy to see him, just surprised that he was alive.
“You’re looking good,” she had said the first time they were alone in the kitchen. “For a dead man.”
“So it worked.” He looked pleased with himself. “I couldn’t very well hang around to see.”
“It worked.” She thought back to the shock of his “death.”
“They found the burned-up car and said the fire was so intense you were completely incinerated.”
“Good. I was afraid the cops would say a body never completely burns, and they’d have doubts about my ‘death.’ I kept thinking I needed a body double.”
“They gave you a very nice memorial service. Michael’s comments were most inspiring.”
“Oh, I just bet.” Jase studied her. “You were so much smarter than me. You saw them for the phonies they are from day one. It took me a long time.”
“It took Jennie.” Even thinking about what happened made Andi feel sick. “I’m so sorry about what happened to her. I don’t think I got a chance to tell you.”
He was quiet for a moment, like the pain still sliced deep. He smiled sadly at her. “You must miss her too. She was your best friend.”
“My only friend. She was the one who made life bearable for me.” After a minute she added, “She loved you so much.”
He took a deep breath and held up a hand. “Enough or I’ll start to cry, not acceptable behavior at work. Distract me by telling me how you got from Arizona to New Jersey. I want to know how you escaped. If there was anyone they kept an eye on, it was you. You were at the top of their troublemaker list.”
“I hitched a ride with some motorcycle guys.”
“What?”
“Not as dramatic as a torched car but not too shabby either, right?”
Jase laughed. “How did you ever meet motorcycle guys? You were confined to the compound.”
Her jaw went rigid with fury as she thought about how constrained her life had been. “I looked for an escape for years without success. Then there it was, just like that, a few weeks before I turned sixteen. Some of the little kids got really sick, dehydrated and all. We thought they were going to die. They had to go to the hospital.
“I grabbed one of the little girls and climbed into the van. I made sure I had the seat in the far back corner. Everyone was so intent on saving the kids that no one thought about me being along. It was so confusing with parents and kids and crying and vomiting. I just walked out of the ER when everyone was distracted.”
“But motorcycles?”
“Two bikers were in the ER because Stu had fallen and gotten brush burns and scrapes all up his side, and he thought he might have broken his wrist. When they left, I followed them out and asked for a ride. They took one look at me and my clothes and my desperation and told me to climb behind James. They were on their way to Yellowstone, and they took me along. We stopped at the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley and the Tetons and other neat places on the way. They were great, so normal, just regular guys looking for a fun vacation. They treated me like their little sister and bought me real clothes and fed me. After we visited Yellowstone, they even bankrolled my flight east. I’m living with my great-uncle.”
“So you’re vacationing around the country while I’m sneaking home by a roundabout route in case they didn’t believe I was dead. I bet you had more fun than me.”
Jase smiled, something she’d never have seen back at the compound. There he was so intense, so committed to doing Michael’s will that he was like a robot. She’d always thought it a wonder his voice wasn’t a tinny monotone.
Not that she’d ever said that aloud. Too many people were already too happy to report her failings to Michael, even stupid ones like saying someone had a robot voice.
In Carrie’s kitchen that first day, Andi found herself smiling back at Jase in spite of the unwanted memories he represented. She noticed how sad his eyes were, and her heart ached. She understood the sadness.
Could she trust him? She’d love to have someone she could talk to and know that he understood. But she had to go slow and be sure. What if he had been sent to find her?
Improbable but not impossible.
But now Jase was dead.
And people were talking about The Pathway.
She shivered. She no longer felt safe in Seaside.
21
Iran upstairs to change, telling mys
elf not to read more into Greg’s invitation to go fishing than was there. He’d asked me because the day had turned unexpectedly warm. He wanted to fish, but he didn’t want to go alone. His brothers and his friends were all at work—or in Mexico in the case of the missionary. I was available, and in a moment of desperation, he turned to me.
But I was grinning like an idiot, and my heart was hammering, and it wasn’t from the exertion of climbing the steps.
“Well, don’t you look like the cat who swallowed the canary,” Linds said when she saw me.
“Can’t stop to talk.” I rushed past her to my room. I didn’t want to share my happy buzz even with her.
I heard a disgruntled huh as I closed the door. I got rid of the khaki slacks I wore as part of the café uniform and pulled on jeans. My Carrie’s Café shirt went in the hamper, and I yanked on a long-sleeved blue knit shirt that made my eyes seem bluer than they were. I grabbed the navy fleece jacket Greg had suggested I bring and was out of there.
“Where are you going?” Lindsay called after me.
“Fishing.”
“Fishing? You don’t know how to fish!”
I stopped at the door and grinned at her. “And your point is?”
Greg drove us to the creatively named Twelfth Street Marina at Twelfth and Bay. In all the years I’d lived in Seaside, I’d never been to a marina. I don’t know what I expected, maybe yachts and superposh vessels, but most of the boats moored in the slips were practical bay boats like Greg’s proved to be. I did see a couple of white, sleek yachts, and though I knew they were by no means the largest there were, I was still impressed. On one, an extremely handsome man with short dark hair sunned himself as he talked to a shorter, stockier man standing almost at attention. Who, I wondered as I followed Greg through the maze of floating docks, had decided yachts should be white?
Greg’s boat was blue and white and obviously well enjoyed. It was neat and tidy in spite of its dings and scratches, and somehow the yachts now looked effete and phony. Here was a real boat owned by a real person, not a boy toy owned by some rich guy with a fake tan.
The real boat rocked when I stepped on. Why that surprised me, I don’t know. I’d seen enough movies with rocking boats. I gave a little bleat and grabbed a seat back.
Greg swallowed a laugh, not disguising it very well as a cough. I fake glared as he handed me a couple of poles and some other equipment. When the boat rolled under him as he stepped on, I made sure I didn’t even flinch.
“Sit here.” He indicated the seat next to the driver’s seat. I sat. He turned the key, the engine roared, and off we went.
“How big?” I yelled over the motor’s noise.
“Eighteen foot I/O.” I nodded like I understood.
He grinned. “Inboard/outboard.”
He stopped at a spot in the bay that looked just like every other spot to me. The sun beat down, and I thought my jacket superfluous. I squinted even with my sunglasses.
“Let’s get you set.” Greg handed me a pole that felt big in my hands. Then he opened the small cooler he had brought and pulled out a chunk of flesh. I must have looked as ick-ick as I felt because he reached for my hook without a word.
I swallowed. “I’ll do it. Just tell me how.”
“You sure?”
His doubts about my heartiness straightened my somewhat spaghetti spine. “I can do it.”
“Sure you can. It’s just squid. People eat squid all the time.”
“I don’t.” I took the strip of bait he handed me. “Calling it calamari doesn’t fool me one bit.” I looked at the wicked barbs on the hook and thought about impaled fingers.
“Fold the bait in half and push it on.”
I did as I was told and felt a surge of satisfaction as the squid got pierced and my digits didn’t.
“Just drop it over the side,” he said. “When you feel something take it, wait a second, then give a tug to set the hook.”
I stuck the end of the pole over the side and the line dropped into the water, dragged down by the weight of the bait and sinker. I tried to follow my squid visually, but it was swallowed by the opaque depths. I thought for a moment about all the water beneath me and all the strange and unknown creatures swimming in it, and gulped. Then I pushed that thought aside for a more appropriate time to think on it, like in a nightmare or something.
Greg fixed his own line and threw it in. He sat on the back of one of the seats and began whistling softly. If it was a specific tune, I’d never heard it.
I tried not to squirm, but being with him in this boat felt almost as claustrophobic as had the cab of his truck. I was nervous, excited, a breath away from hyperventilating. Alone with him twice in two days. Yikes!
“Are you allowed to talk while you fish?” I needed to know if I was going to break some unwritten fishing rule and make him mad when my nerves got the best of me and I gushed with all the discipline of a volcano spitting lava. “I mean, can they hear you and then they stay away?”
“You can talk quietly.”
I took a deep breath because I was going to tell him something I hadn’t even mentioned to Lindsay. “I think Andi has something to do with The Pathway.”
He looked at me sharply. “Why do you say that?”
“When you were talking about Jase and The Pathway at the café, I was watching her. She turned pale.”
“Maybe that was her reaction to learning a guy she knew was dead.”
A reasonable possibility. “Somehow I don’t see her as that sensitive to something that doesn’t involve her, if you know what I mean.”
“Sixteen-year-old self-involvement.”
“Right. And then she went to that back booth and just stared into space.”
“Again it could be a reaction to Jase’s death.”
I made a “maybe” face.
“How would she know about The Pathway in any personal way?” he asked.
“I don’t know, but she appeared in Seaside out of nowhere, and she never mentions any family except Clooney.”
He raised an eyebrow at me.
“Yeah, I know. Sounds like me at that age. I got creative and made up a mother in the military.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. At the time I thought I was quite clever.”
“And Mary Prudence bought it?”
“I don’t think so. But she never made an issue of it. I mean, there have to be lots of kids left when their mothers are deployed. It could have been true.”
“Sure, but a left-behind kid isn’t usually alone in a new town with a little sister in tow.”
I watched a pair of sea gulls wheeling and diving, squabbling over something one of them had in its beak. The gull with the food opened his mouth to tell the marauder off, and whatever he was holding tumbled toward the water. A third gull that had been floating beside us took off, caught the falling food just before it hit the water, and flew away before the other two even realized what was happening. With outraged screams, they followed.
Greg stood suddenly, completely focused on his pole. Its tip was bending.
I jumped to my feet. “You’ve got something!”
He didn’t respond, too intent on reeling in his catch. Up came a weird-looking fish, all horizontal instead of vertical like the pictures of fish I’d seen.
“What in the world?”
“Flounder.”
“Really? They’re sideways, sort of like a pancake.” All I ever saw when Warren went fishing were the filets. I stared at the sideways flounder. “Amazing.”
Greg pulled him in and measured him. With a look of disgust he said, “Too small. We’ve got to throw him back.”
My rod moved in my hand. “I’ve got something!”
“Start reeling.” Greg struggled to remove the hook from the flounder’s jaw.
I reeled. Greg had just dropped his flounder back in the water when mine broke the surface. I pulled it into the boat.
“He’s bigger than yours!” I couldn’t st
op grinning. My first fishing trip and I caught something. I was a natural at this. “He’s bigger than yours!”
I knew bragging wasn’t the best way to impress a guy, but I couldn’t help it.
“He sure is. Congratulations!” Without even asking, he pulled the hook from my flounder’s mouth with a pair of needle-nose pliers. He measured and weighed my catch and put it in a cooler of ice. “That’ll make a nice supper.”
I saw Warren laying his fillets on the sink for us to admire, which we did, following Mary P’s example. Who’d have ever imagined I’d bring home a catch for others to admire?
Greg and I impaled fresh bait and dropped our lines back overboard. Almost at once he caught another flounder, a keeper. Then we sat for almost an hour before there was any more action. He told me funny stories about growing up in a house full of boys. I told him unfunny stories about life with Mom. I laughed at his stories and he sympathized with mine. I wasn’t surprised when his stories turned to his kids.
“I used to love taking the kids fishing. Not that I had time to do much more than bait hooks and untangle line. But they loved being on the water almost as much as I do.”
“Why do you love it so?”
He shrugged. “When I was a kid, it was just what we Barneses did. You fished and you loved it because everyone else did. As an adult it was wonderful because it was so far from the tension and chaos of being a cop. And now it’s totally removed from how barren my life’s become. It’s like visiting the good parts of my life, the great memories.”
He grinned. “Like the one time I was out here with just Greggie. He leaned over the side too far and in he went. He must have been about four. I watched him sink and waited. Sure enough, he popped to the surface right where he’d gone in. I grabbed his life jacket and pulled him out. We had to stay out long enough for him to dry or his mother would have had a heart attack.”
