Summer on Mirror Lake

by JoAnn Ross

  “She’s working,” Hannah said, a bit too quickly, Chelsea thought. There was definitely something going on here.

  “Is your dad at home?”

  “I have a key.” Hannah pulled it out of her pocket. “We’ll be okay. Like my sister said, I can take care of her.”

  “I’m sure you can. But it’s raining.”

  “It’s always raining.” A pointed chin thrust up. “We don’t melt.”

  “That’s good to know. Because it would definitely be a disadvantage to living here in the Pacific Northwest,” Chelsea said mildly. “Though you can’t beat our summers. Nevertheless, why don’t I drive you home?”

  “We’re not supposed to get into cars with strangers,” Hailey said. “Because of the traffic.”

  “Traffickers,” Hannah corrected.

  Chelsea was relieved someone had taught the girls—who appeared to be on their own in the afternoons—child safety. “You’ve been in my library all week. Have I acted as if I’m a child trafficker?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Would it help if I had the police chief come by to vouch for me?”

  “No!” Both sisters nearly shouted in unison.

  Hannah placed a hand on Hailey’s head. Whether the gesture was meant to calm or warn, Chelsea couldn’t say. Perhaps both. “That’s okay,” the older girl said. “I guess they wouldn’t let you be a librarian if you were a criminal.”

  “There’s a very extensive background check,” Chelsea assured her, making a note to check with Aiden Mannion about what he might know about these girls’ parents. “I was even fingerprinted.”

  Hannah bit her lip, considering. Then glanced out the windows at the summer rain that had, in the short time they’d been talking, gone from a gentle mist, to a drizzle, to a driving rain blowing in over the mountains. “Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “No problem,” Chelsea said easily, even as her instincts continued to tell her that something was off. Why would two young children be so reluctant to have anything to do with the police? Now she was even more determined to ask Aiden about the family. She wasn’t certain how much information the law allowed him to share, but if it could help keep a child safe, she had to try.

  Hannah was quiet on the way to the address she’d given Chelsea, while Hailey continued to chatter away, her rapid-fire conversation jumping from dragons to wizards to a book about a giraffe who couldn’t dance. “He had crooked knees and skinny legs, and when he tried to join the jungle dance, the other animals teased him,” she said, her small face furrowed in a sad frown.

  “Bullied,” Hannah murmured.

  Hailey continued undeterred. “So, he felt so sad. Because he really was a very bad dancer. He felt sad and alone.”

  Chelsea picked up on one of her favorite children’s stories. Dottie Anderson, who’d organized the Saturday children’s reading group, had read it aloud just last week. “But then while he was walking home, the giraffe looked up at the moon and while he was thinking how beautiful it was, a cricket suddenly appeared and told him how everyone is special in their own way.”

  “Yes!” Hailey said. “And when you’re different, you don’t need to feel bad or lonely because all you need is your own special song. So when the giraffe heard the moon playing a tune just for him—”

  “His hooves started shuffling,” Chelsea supplied.

  “They did! And he swung his long legs around everywhere! When all the other animals saw him, they declared him the best dancer ever!”

  “Like bullies are ever going to do that,” Hannah scoffed.

  “But they did,” her sister insisted.

  “Maybe in the story. But the giraffe still never gave the cricket any credit for helping him out,” Hannah pointed out.

  Chelsea glanced up into the rearview mirror, watching Hailey bite her bottom lip as she considered that idea. “Maybe the cricket is like the giraffe’s older sister, who always takes care of him. And always tells the giraffe that he doesn’t need thanks because he’s just doing what big sisters are supposed to do.”

  Glancing again in the rearview mirror, Chelsea watched Hannah’s eyes—which had, during their short time together, been only expressionless or hard—soften. “Maybe so, sprout,” she agreed softly, reaching over to take her sister’s hand in hers.

  Dammit. There was a story there. Chelsea felt it. And not just because she’d been an older sister herself. But because she’d been about Hannah’s age when her once perfect family had cracked apart. She knew all too well the need to make things better. Even when it was proved fruitless.

  They’d reached the house, a Craftsman bungalow in a neighborhood that had once been mill company housing. But gentrification had brought change and now any of the small houses that had been renovated and given a modern interior floor plan could bring in several times over the original cost. It wasn’t easy growing grass near salt water, and whoever lived in this home had apparently thrown in the towel. Where there would have been a lawn, or wildflower garden as many homeowners created instead, fir cones and needles were scattered over dirt studded with weeds.

  Paint that appeared to have once been sky blue was peeling and a white shutter was hanging crookedly on its hinges. While the bungalow could have been darling, with its front porch and low gabled roof, it was just sad. Chelsea was reluctant to drop the girls off here all alone. Or, she thought, worriedly, perhaps not alone at all. Perhaps the reason for spending so much time at the library was because it was a refuge from being here.

  “When does your mother get home from work?” she asked, turning toward the back seat.

  “Anytime now.” Hannah’s hand was squeezing Hailey’s smaller one so tightly her knuckles had whitened. Was she reminding her sister to remain quiet? Growing more and more concerned, Chelsea hoped Aiden would give her more information.

  “That’s good to hear,” she said in a voice that even to her own ears sounded falsely perky and wouldn’t fool the older girl for a minute. “I’ll just wait here until you get inside.”

  “Bye, library lady,” Hailey said.

  After returning the cheerful goodbye, which suggested there wasn’t anyone inside she was afraid of, Chelsea watched the two of them cross the broken pavement of the front walk up to the columned porch and, after Hannah had unlocked the door, disappear inside.

  Then she pulled away from the curb, dialed Aiden and headed to the police station.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HOME, AS SOMEONE had once said, was a shifting landscape. Although many things in Honeymoon Harbor had changed during the years since Gabe had left Washington—including, he’d noted as he’d driven off the ferry landing, an influx of new businesses and tourists crowding the sidewalks and slowing traffic down with their motor homes—it wasn’t, and never would be, like New York. Hell, it wasn’t even like Tacoma. Or Olympia.

  Which was why, even two weeks into Gabe’s self-enforced sabbatical, he was already bored out of his freaking mind. How many miles could he run every morning? Not anywhere near what he’d been able to as a distance runner on UW’s track team. Proving, dammit, the smart-ass ER doctor’s diagnosis. He’d let himself get out of shape.

  Which, hell, was fixable. He’d already come up with a goal metric, which he’d programmed into the schedule on the new smart watch that had replaced the Rolex. He’d also programmed it to report his heart rate, which was currently pathetic. Maybe he’d never been the ultimate jock his quarterback brother, Burke, had been, but he sure as hell hadn’t had the heart rate of a couch potato.

  The first three nights home, he’d enjoyed having dinner with his parents, grandparents, sister and brothers. His mother had always equated food with love, and who was he to discourage her? But it soon became obvious that they all had their own lives and couldn’t spend their days and evenings entertaining him. Which, he supposed, was some sort of karmic payback for a
ll the years he’d stayed away and the events he’d missed, like his sister Brianna’s engagement party.

  When he’d first heard his brother Quinn had walked away from his Seattle law firm to brew beer, Gabe’d thought he was crazy. But he was impressed with the way his brother had reclaimed the old preprohibition business.

  “You do realize that you’re driving customers away,” Quinn said as Gabe entered into his second week.

  “Me?” Gabe looked up from tracing lines in the condensation on the side of his chilled pilsner glass of Good Vibrations, his brother’s new summer release. A not too sweet, light pilsner brewed with local fresh raspberries that blended well with its wheat malt, it was a ruby-colored pour that was pretty enough to almost be considered a girlie drink. But Quinn had captured summer in a bottle as perfectly as he’d always done everything else.

  He glanced around, noticing for the first time that Quinn’s restaurant wasn’t as crowded as it had been when he’d first arrived. “It probably emptied out because we’re between lunch and dinner.”

  “It’s five thirty. And while I realize that after all those years living in Manhattan you’re undoubtedly accustomed to dining at a big-city fashionable hour, Honeymoon Harbor tends to roll up the sidewalks after ten o’clock. Which means we should be starting to fill up with people getting off work.”

  “So what does that have to do with me?”

  “The edgy vibe radiating off you is scaring people away,” Jarle Biornstad, who’d appeared from the kitchen with Gabe’s order of BBQ ribs, said in a deep, rumbling foghorn voice. After years of cooking for fishermen out of Dutch Harbor, Alaska, the Norwegian who claimed to have gotten tired of freezing his ass off during winter crabbing season had ended up in Honeymoon Harbor cooking for Quinn.

  Personally, Gabe thought the red-bearded giant with a full sleeve tattoo of a butcher’s chart of a cow was a lot scarier than he’d ever be, but he was also smart enough not to suggest that to a guy who made Sasquatch look like a preschooler. According to Quinn, Seth Harper had had to take out four rows of bricks in the doorway leading to the kitchen to prevent the six-foot-seven cook from banging his head.

  “I’m not edgy.” Edgy was too close to anxiety. Which, as something he’d already been through, he wasn’t in any hurry to revisit. Thus this trip back to the peninsula. “Just bored.”

  “Antsy,” Quinn diagnosed.

  Gabe couldn’t disagree. Apparently adrenaline was as addictive as caffeine or booze and he was definitely suffering from withdrawal. “My plan is to take the entire summer off.”

  Technically, three months and two weeks, given that he’d left New York a week after Carter’s May Day funeral. With Harborstone already reeling from the death of one of the establishing partners, his announcement that he was claiming all the vacation time he’d never taken hadn’t been met with enthusiasm in the boardroom. Fortunately, he’d made enough profits for the company over the years that no one was willing to complain and risk him jumping to another firm.

  He’d arranged to have Phil Gregg, a longtime friend who’d entered the firm the same week he had, keep an eye on his portfolios. They weren’t as close as he and Carter had been, and Phil hadn’t risen through the ranks as fast, only because he’d married shortly after he’d gotten his MBA, already had one son, and a daughter on the way. Unlike Carter, and definitely unlike all the younger guys at the firm, he’d sacrificed promotions and bonuses in order to achieve normalcy in his personal life. Fortunately, since the accounts were all long-term investments, he usually only adjusted them, if necessary, every quarter.

  “Good for you. Did this plan come with any ideas on how to spend all those days of leisure?” his older brother asked.

  “The idea was to wing it.” Gabe shrugged. “Maybe I’ll go fishing.”

  “You’ve always hated fishing.”

  True. “Okay, sailing. Seth has a boat. So does Aiden. I could borrow one of theirs.”

  “Or you could build one,” Quinn suggested as he drew a pint of his award-winning Captain Jack Sparrow from one of the taps and took it to a man wearing black fishing boots who’d just arrived and taken a seat at the end of the bar. The fact that Quinn had known exactly what the fisherman wanted reminded Gabe of how no one had ever had to ask Carter Kensington what he’d wanted to drink. Even wild, reckless habits could apparently become routine. Like drinking. Smoking. Drugs. Or apparently, in his case, making money.

  “You enjoyed building boats before you headed off to the big city to make your fortune,” Quinn reminded him.

  Again true. When he’d been a kid, Gabe had spent nearly every free minute hanging around the town’s internationally known boat school. By the time he was in the seventh grade, he’d been allowed to sweep up after the builders after school and in the summer. Over the years, he’d gained more experience and responsibility, even, while in high school, making a kayak and a skiff he’d sold to help pay for college.

  He’d occasionally thought of those days on the rare occasion Carter would convince him to travel down to Newport for one of the New York Yacht Club regattas. Where the gleaming world-class yachts were a far cry from the boats that sailed Honeymoon Harbor waters.

  “Why would I make a boat?”

  “Because you’d enjoy it, it’d get you out of my pub, and because our mother would quit worrying about you.”

  That got Gabe’s attention. “She is not.”

  “Is, too,” Quinn uncharacteristically snapped back. Terrific, Gabe thought. Now they’d reverted to grade-school behavior. “She worries about all of us. Just in case you might think you were special. Or that she loves you more.”

  Gabe put down a rib long enough to salute his brother with his middle finger.

  “You could make a Viking boat,” Jarle said.

  “You’re suggesting I make a longship large enough for a crew of a hundred oarsmen, then go raiding off the coast?”

  “No.” Jarle folded his arms over the front of a T-shirt reading That’s too much bacon... Said no person ever. “I’m suggesting you make a replica. And not one of those cutesy miniature ones old guys make that fit in a bottle, but one you could actually sail.”

  “You built that sloop for Seth,” Quinn reminded him.

  “True. But that’s nothing like what you’re talking about. It’s a totally different process. I made the sloop stitch-and-glue, starting with the frame, the way American boats are made. The way I learned all those years working at the school. The Viking faerings were clinker-built, with the planks overlapping to form a hull.” Apparently it worked for them since Scandinavians continued to build their rowboats the same traditional way.

  “How about we make a deal?” Quinn suggested. “I won’t talk brewspeak to you when we’re discussing beers, and you’ll talk about boats in a way normal people can understand.”

  “Okay.” Gabe took a long drink of the summer beer. Damn, his brother was good. “Long story short, because a faering doesn’t need a frame, it’s lighter, thereby riding higher in the water, which let the Vikings go faster and travel down more shallow rivers for their raiding.”

  “Would’ve also helped them escape other guys who went after them trying to get their stuff back,” Jarle suggested.

  “Probably so. Your people weren’t exactly an Amish community.”

  “We were fierce, that’s for damn sure,” Jarle agreed, squaring broad shoulders with obvious pride.

  “So, why don’t you build one?” Quinn pressed.

  “Even if I wanted to, which I haven’t said I do, it’d be a push to get a decent-size one done in three months.” Which was his deadline. By then he’d be rested, at his fighting weight and ready to get back into the fray.

  “Because your summer schedule is so booked.”

  Gabe gave him a hard stare. “You’re pushing me.”

  “Just saying,” Quinn said mildly. That was a
funny thing about the eldest Mannion. Gabe couldn’t remember his older brother ever yelling, or even raising his voice. Yet, somehow, just like his dad, who was the quieter of his parents, he always got his way, always made things happen.

  “You must’ve been one hell of a lawyer,” he muttered. Then tore another strip off a rib.

  “No point in doing something if you don’t do it well.” Quinn dunked a glass into the sudsy water of the bar sink, rinsed it and dried it with a towel before putting it back on a shelf beneath the bar.

  “This is a challenge, isn’t it?” Gabe shot him a hard look. “The same way you double-dog dared me to go down that zip line when I was seven.”

  “That was Aiden who dared you,” Quinn corrected easily as he washed another glass.

  “Yeah. But I still remember your silence speaking louder than our bad-boy brother’s taunts.” Who, after following his own winding road, was now Honeymoon Harbor’s police chief. Go figure. There’d been a time Gabe guessed even those oddsmakers in Las Vegas wouldn’t have taken that bet.

  “You could name her Freya.” Jarle jumped back into the conversation.

  “Why?”

  “Because Freya’s the Norse goddess of love. Also sex, beauty, gold, war and death.”

  “The death part isn’t exactly encouraging if you’re taking it out on the Sound,” Gabe pointed out.

  “Just ignore the war and death part and concentrate on the love part,” the Norwegian cook advised. “That’s what I’d name a boat, if I had one.”

  “Until hooking up with Ashley Winters, Jarle fell in love at least once a week,” Quinn said dryly. “Fortunately, it was always from afar, so I never had to fire him.”

  “What can I say? Our Norse blood makes us a passionate people.”

  “I thought Scandinavians were cool and distant,” Gabe said.

  “That’s the Swedes,” Jarle scoffed. “We Norwegians are more extroverted, laid-back and a helluva lot better at outdoor sports than other Scandinavians. Plus, we’re better looking...