Blue Moon Bay (7 page)

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 Moses 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.

When I entered the house, Mother was in the kitchen, sipping coffee at the breakfast table. The uncs were nowhere to be seen. That was fortunate for me, because the person I really needed was Mom. Alone.

“The delivery man usually comes around three,” she offered, just as pleasantly as if we sat down to coffee every morning. “It's a good thing today is Friday. They deliver on Fridays.”

“What?” As usual, we were on two different astral planes. Opening the cabinet to search for a coffee cup, I noted that all the dishes were still in place. In fact, everything in the kitchen was more or less where it had been sixteen years ago. There was no sign of an estate auction having taken place or the packing up of any personal items.

“Your purse,” Mom answered pleasantly. “I'm sure you're missing your cell phone and all those gadgets.”

I poured a cup of coffee and sat down. “I just hope some guy in Hackensack isn't stealing my identity.”

Looking out the window, Mom sighed, as if my presence were a black cloud over her morning. “Terrible, to be in your twenties and be such a cynic. Have a little faith in people, Heather. He was a very kind man. A good spirit. I could tell it when he called on the phone.” Her eyes, a soft, mossy color in the morning light, turned my way, filled with disappointment.

“I just wish you'd told him to take my purse to the nearest police station, or the bus company. Someone official.” Maybe I was being cynical, but losing your ID, your money, and your iPhone a thousand miles from home was about the most vulnerable feeling in the world. I didn't do vulnerable well, especially not in Moses Lake. “And I'm
thirty-four
, Mom. Clay is the one in his twenties.”

She lowered her head into her hand, groaning. “Ugh, don't remind me. Where does the time go, anyway?” Pausing, she looked at me as if I were a stranger she was trying to cipher. “Thirty-four . . .” Her brows drew together.

In some families, I suppose it might have seemed strange, even offensive, for your mother to not know how old you were, but it felt normal enough for us. Mother could have discussed any writer from Aristotle to Maya Angelou ad nauseam, but she couldn't tell you how old her daughter was.

“Seems like yesterday we were here.” She breathed the words softly, turning to the window again. There was a melancholy tone to her voice that drilled deep into me and lit a fuse I feared had the power to reach the bedrock of my soul and blow things apart. “The four of us,” she added.

I felt sick, then angry. All the emotions from that year came back—every day of watching her slowly fade after my father's death, of wondering whether she would disappear completely, pass through the bed sheets by osmosis, and be gone. Every long night of listening to her moan in her tranquilizer-induced stupor and call my father's name, until my baby brother, frightened and distraught, came into my room and crawled into bed with me.

I felt the heat of teenage anger, long dormant, volcanic, rising to the surface, hot and fluid. I hated my mother all over again. “Why are you here?” The words were sharp. “I want the truth.”

She swirled her coffee in the cup. “I just . . . needed to be. Here.”

“Why is Clay here?” The absolute worst thing for Clay was to be offered one more distraction from finishing law school and beginning a stable, self-supporting life. Didn't Mom ever get tired of paying his way? Didn't she get tired of rescuing him from his mishaps—wrecked cars, tuition payments that came up short because of impromptu ski trips he couldn't afford, the time he missed taking his finals because campus police found rolling papers and a Baggie of marijuana in his dorm room. . . . He claimed those things were left there by a friend, but still. He wouldn't ever grow up if Mom didn't stop treating him like a kid.

She smiled, even laughed a little, staring down at her coffee, reading the blobs of creamer like an oracle. “Oh, Clay loves to come here. He comes all the time.”

“What do you
mean
he comes all the time?” Clay and I might not have kept in touch particularly well, but I did have some idea of where he was and when. He'd never mentioned spending time in Moses Lake.

“Roger lives here some of the time,” Mom said simply.

I studied her—took in the loose-fitting plaid shirt, the khaki pants that were just as likely to have come from Goodwill as L.L.Bean, the carelessly plaited brown hair, tinseled with strands of gray. She was dressed in her usual garb for rambling around the English department, discussing quatrains, iambic pentameter, and Haiku as an expression of self. Her appearance was normal enough this morning, but maybe she really was having some sort of a breakdown. “Roger the
dog
?”

“Do you know another Roger?”

I bit my lower lip. If I'd had my money, ID, iPhone, and car keys, I would have walked out the door right then. Even the prospect of being project manager on the Proxica facility design wasn't worth losing my mind. I was starting to rue the day that Mother had contacted me to ask if I could remember where the deeds to my father's portion of the family farm had been stored after his death. She was practically gleeful at the news that Uncle Herbert and Uncle Charley were finally ready to sell out. Shortly after that conversation, I'd happened upon an article in the Proxica shareholders' magazine that said the company was planning major expansions in Texas. I'd asked Richard to quietly make some inquiries, and that had started the ball rolling. I should have known it would swerve badly off course and compact me into the soil before the deal was done.

The insanity of this sudden shift, combined with the ghosts in this town, was too much to bear. I couldn't stand it. I couldn't sit in this house, talking about Roger the dog over coffee. “I want. To know. What. Is going on. There isn't any competing offer for the real estate, is there? No one in their right minds would pay the price Richard got for us—not with the economy the way it is. Even if we hang on to the property until the economy improves, we'd never get that kind of money.”

Her eyelids held calmly at half-mast, regarding me with a measure of coolness that hurts coming from your mother. “Which would make you wonder why this broker is offering such a sum, wouldn't it? Presumably he has to then resell the property for an even higher price. Who, exactly, would he sell it to, if the price we're getting is so astronomically out of line?”

“Why do you care?” I threw up my hands, let them slap to the tabletop, and affected the look of being completely and thoroughly offended. But an inconvenient smidge of conscience landed on my shoulders, squawking in my ear like a magpie. I had been keeping secrets, too. But that was part of the deal with the broker. I wasn't at liberty to divulge any information. “When we started this process, you couldn't wait to be out from under the place. You were tired of having to keep up with the accounting on the farmland and figure out how to divide up the property-tax payments with Uncle Herb and Uncle Charley. You said you wanted to be able to give Clay and me the money from the land, because it was our inheritance. You said that Clay needed the money to pay off some loans. What, exactly, about that has changed?”

Pausing to take a bite of her English muffin, she tipped her chin up and chewed slowly. “We've rethought it, simply enough. Uncle Herbert and Uncle Charley have owned the farm all their lives, for one thing. They and your grandfather grew up there.” Her gaze met mine in a way that seemed intended to stab. “And so did your father.”

Emotion balled in my throat and dripped downward, burning like acid, threatening to eat away the steely coating of anger and morph it into something raw and unpredictable.
My father died there
, I thought. There were two houses on the farm—the two-story white clapboard that had been built by my grandparents in the forties, and the modest stone house beside it. The basement of that little stone house was the scene of the accidental shooting that had changed all our lives. Among other memories, the question of whether the word
accidental
really applied haunted that house. It haunted me.

Even now, sitting here at Harmony Shores, I could feel the proximity of that place, fifteen miles down the rural highway. I could feel the house where my father's life had ended, where my nightmares took me again and again. I'd never set foot on the farm after the week my father died, and I didn't want to now. I just wanted that place to be gone. Maybe then the nightmares would stop.

Stay focused. Don't let her get to you. Don't let any of this get to you.
“Uncle Charley and Uncle Herbert aren't the problem here, Mom, and you know it. Both of them realize that they have to move closer to Donny. This is about you and Clay, and as much work as I've put in on this deal, I deserve the truth.”

She sent a narrow look my way, her lips tightening. I'd finally broken through the layer of serenity, found a nerve. “It's always about work for you, isn't it? Your whole life is about work.” She frowned as if she simultaneously pitied me and wondered how I could possibly be her offspring. “You'll have to talk to your brother about it. Clay can explain everything more clearly than I can. He has a better business understanding.”