In the Waning Light (41 page)

It was late March when Meg took an evening walk with Blake and Noah. They made their way slowly along the ocean side of the spit, along the miles of white beach, dune grasses bending in wind that lifted spumes of spindrift from the waves. Blake was using his cane, slowly rebuilding his strength by gradually increasing distances, his femur healing nicely in spite of the many pins. There’d been other medical visits, and measurements for a prosthesis, which would be fitted soon.

Noah was still seeing his counselor. He seemed to be coping, and happy enough, although Meg knew it was hard to tell with kids sometimes. He ran ahead of them now, chasing Lucy, who was scattering the sandpipers that scuttled along the foam scallops left by waves on hard-packed sand.

Meg thought back to herself at that age, racing along these beaches, sunburned and salt-stung with skinned knees and adven
ture in her heart. Those were good summers, before Sherry’s murder.

. . . full of watermelons and sunblock and backyard barbecues, of purple blackberry smiles, of sea salt tingling on sun-warmed skin, of burning knees skinned raw in pursuit of tree houses and yet higher boughs. Of brightly painted buoys, and crab pots, and driftwood art. Of fresh local cheese from Chillmook farms, and the briny scent of pink crabs being boiled fresh from the bay.

A summer to be lived, full throttle, with the ferocity of youth. And skateboard wind in your hair . . .

Those were the words she’d decided to open her book with, and they were the kinds of summers she hoped would become Noah’s now. He stopped suddenly up ahead, and dropped to his knees. As Meg and Blake neared they saw he was watching tiny fish trapped in a tidal pool left by the high tide.

Noah looked up as they approached. “They’ll die in here! We need to get them back to the sea.”

Up along the high-tide line of flotsam, Blake found an old bucket. He brought it down to the tidal pool, and he and Meg sat up a little higher on the warm sand, leaning against a log as they watched Noah catch fish, and scurry down to the ocean to release them into the wild water. The sun began to set and the world turned gold.

“Do you remember Sherry’s goldfish?” Meg said quietly.

Blake smiled, and his eyes turned light green. “Yeah. I remember how they used to upset you, trapped behind the glass like that.”

She watched Noah running down to the waves with another bucket load, Lucy cavorting after him. “She used to say they were trapped in a perfect world, no predators in their water. But I always thought they’d be happier in the wild.”

“I guess we never know where the danger will come from,” he said, eyes on his son. “Sometimes it’s close to home. Or even right in the home. All we can do is our best to protect our children, the ones we love.” He took her hand in his, laced his fingers through hers, met her eyes. “And hope for luck.”

She smiled ruefully. “Sherry’s spirit stopped talking to me, you know. Once Tommy was dead. Didn’t even say good-bye. Typical Sherry.”

He laughed. “But you did right by her. You must feel that?”

She nodded.

He looked away. “Wish I could say the same about Geoff.”

Meg squeezed his hand.

“He did some terrible things, but I’ll be damned if I don’t miss the idea of having him around.” He paused. “That night he arrived at the marina, after all those years, and he and Noah and I had dinner, and he gave Noah that stone, and encouraged him with his art . . .” His voice caught, and he took a moment to corral his emotion. “I dared dream we might all be a family again, that he’d bring Nate . . .” His voice died.

Meg leaned over and kissed him on the lips. His mouth was warm, the stubble on his jaw rough. He was thinner and a little pale yet, but he was all Blake. “We can still be family,” she whispered.

His eyes glimmered, and he nodded. Then he grinned, and it put the dimples back into his cheeks. “I’ll have to meet this Jonah some day, and thank him for sending you home.”

Charles Dickens once said that “Home” is simply a name, a word, but it’s a strong one; stronger than any magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration. And when I saw Blake again after we thought he’d died, as I held his son’s hand in that hospital room, I finally understood how, sometimes, “Home” is not a place. It’s a person . . .

Meg looked up from her table on the Crabby Jack deck where she was writing. It was April. Noah was under the covered deck around the side of the building, helping his dad lower a sack of fat writhing crabs into boiling water. Steam roiled into the cool salt air. Lucy was down on the dock, chasing gulls. Blake and Noah had put the small boats back into the water and they clunked together, nudging each other playfully, as if in anticipation of the warmth, and the tourists. Irene sat knitting near the gas fire pit, a rug over her knees. Her nurse was inside, prepping lunch.

Spring. New beginnings.

Meg returned her attention to writing.

In all my other books, before I even started, I knew exactly who the perpetrator was. Don’t pick an unsolved case, Day Rigby, my mentor, always said. It was a cardinal rule in true crime—you had to know the ending. You had to know who your villain was, that he’d been captured, charged, tried, and convicted. That justice had been served. That the natural order of things had been restored.

But we knew now who the stranger among us had been, how close to us he had lived. And what he’d done in the waning light of that late summer day, just before the storm.

Sherry got her justice. We got our second chance. It came through a twist in the helix of time, as if we’d all been brought back on stage by Fate to replay, and rewrite, what had gone wrong in our lives that day. The vellum has been scraped down of lies and secrets, like the sand is scraped clean by the tide. We have closure. We can begin again.

Meg smiled. And typed:

THE END, a new one.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It was a trip down the moody Oregon coast in a camper with my husband and black Lab, and some excellent crabbing at a special little marina on majestic Nehalem Bay, that eventually became the inspiration for Meg and Blake’s story. A special thank-you must thus go to Kelly and Janice Laviolette, who run Kelly’s Brighton Marina. I have no doubt we’ll be back!

Thank you also to JoVon Sotak for taking a chance on this story, to editors Kelli Martin and Charlotte Herscher for helping shepherd it into being, to copyeditor Scott Calamar for his feedback, Rick Edmisten for proofreading, Jason Blackburn for the cover design, and to the rest of the behind-the-scenes team at Amazon Publishing. It could not have happened without any one of you.

And as always, a deep debt of gratitude to my husband, Paul, aka my patron of the arts, who supports my writing habit in so many ways.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2013 Paul Beswetherick

Loreth Anne White is a multipublished author of award-winning romantic suspense, thriller, and mystery. A double RITA finalist, she has won the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award, the National Readers’ Choice Award, the Readers’ Crown, and is a Booksellers Best Award finalist, a double Daphne Du Maurier finalist, and a multiple CataRomance Reviewers’ choice winner.

Loreth hails from South Africa but now lives with her family in a ski resort in the moody Coast Mountains of North America’s Pacific Northwest. It’s a place of vast, wild, and often dangerous mountains, larger-than-life characters, epic adventure, and romance—the perfect place to escape reality. It’s no wonder it was here that she was inspired to abandon her sixteen-year newspaper career to escape into a world of romantic fiction filled with dangerous men and adventurous women.

When she’s not writing, you will find her open-water distance swimming, skiing, biking, hiking, or running the trails with her Black Dog, and generally trying to avoid the bears—albeit not successfully. In the summer she will often be on the road, searching out remote camping/fly-fishing spots with her husband or participating in tracking and air scent courses with her Black Beast. She calls this work, because it’s when the best ideas come.

Loreth loves to hear from readers. You can contact her through her website at
www.lorethannewhite.com
, or you can find her on Facebook or Twitter.