Summer on Mirror Lake

by JoAnn Ross

  “You’re probably right.” Chelsea sighed. As much as she needed all the volunteer help she could get, Janet’s insistence on arguing every little point took up valuable time they didn’t have. “Too bad there probably aren’t enough oatmeal cinnamon balls on the planet to get her to bond with me.” She and Lily shared a laugh, enjoying the sunshine, the folk singers who were playing on a nearby stage, and their friendship.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE DAY AFTER her market lunch with Lily, Chelsea had just wrapped up this week’s library purchase order with a nonfiction book featuring the nine Native American tribes of the Olympic Peninsula. Along with offering insight into the unique legacy of the groups, whose stories too often went unnoticed or forgotten, the essays, written by members of the different tribes in their own voices, moved beyond the popular romanticized views of American Indians and portrayed real-life experiences.

  Lily, on her way out the door, stopped at the desk. “I forgot to ask, how did things go with the Viking boat builder?”

  “They didn’t.” Chelsea rubbed her forehead where a headache had been building all day. “He turned me down. Flat.”

  “That’s too bad. I was having coffee with Kylee the other day. She’s going to be taking photos at the scholarship dinner in September, and pointed him out to me as he was leaving with his coffee and a bag of doughnuts. I was going to volunteer for that adventure, just to have an excuse to meet him.”

  “I suspect you’d be underwhelmed. Brianna warned me not to expect Mr. Rogers, but he’s more like Heathcliff.”

  “That bad?”

  “No.” Chelsea wanted to be fair. Although she was in the camp of those who’d never considered Brontë’s character a proper romantic hero, Gabriel Mannion, while gruff, hadn’t shown any signs of being a cruel, sadistic sociopath. “He was nowhere near that. But I could tell that he spells Trouble. With a capital T.”

  “Trouble can be appealing in a guy. Not long-term, but as a change of pace from the possible husband material. I’d do him.”

  “Lily!” Chelsea glanced around, looking to see if there were any patrons still hanging around to overhear her.

  “Just saying. Not only is he hot, he’s a gazillionaire who made New York Magazine’s list of hottest eligible guys in the city.”

  “You’re well-read,” Chelsea observed.

  “I lived in Manhattan for a year while trying out the ad business as an intern at a Madison Avenue agency. Perhaps it was too much of a sudden contrast in lifestyle, coming straight from the University of Hawaii, but I decided that while the city was a great place to visit, it wasn’t for me.

  “I did keep up my subscription to the magazine because it’s a great mix of politics, culture, food, fashion and gossip. Along with the occasional high-profile society crime, which gives me the same kind of guilty pleasure I get from watching Dateline.”

  “I love the investigative part of that program.”

  “Me, too, and figuring out the killer from all the suspects, like a real-life Law and Order. But then I feel bad that I’m using someone’s death as entertainment.”

  “I’m right with you there. But Dateline’s so addictive I have my DVR programmed to record it.”

  “We should start having watch parties. Its tagline is ‘don’t watch alone.’”

  “I like that idea.” Chelsea also liked Lily, who’d become one of her closer girlfriends. “You can bring the ice cream and I’ll make the chocolate martinis.”

  For someone whose family tree, on her mother’s side, included the engineer/entrepreneur who built the Pennsylvania Rail Road and made it, during its heyday, the largest company in the world, and a model for technological and managerial innovation (and yes, Chelsea had researched it), Lily Carpenter was as down-to-earth as anyone in Honeymoon Harbor. Even more so than some, whose roots went back to early founders and felt that gave them some sort of privilege. Such as not paying their library fines. Nor, until Aiden Mannion had become police chief and stopped the practice of police courtesy cards, their parking and speeding tickets.

  “Though,” Lily said, as she put the strap of her lambskin bag with its iconic double interlocked Cs over her shoulder, “it does say something about the men in this town that two smart, beautiful, successful women have nothing else to do on a summer night than to sit in front of a TV, eat ice cream and drink alcohol.”

  “It could also say we’re choosy.”

  “It could. Though it’s not as if Honeymoon Harbor isn’t populated with hunks. The Mannions are all gorgeous, then there’s Seth Harper—”

  “Who’s taken.”

  “True. And it’s impossible not to like Brianna, so I can’t even be jealous. Desiree snatched up that hottie Cajun sax player and chef Bastien Broussard the first day he hit town, but apparently they have a long backstory, so none of us would’ve had a chance. Still, Quinn’s not taken. Nor is Luca Salvadori who could feed a woman well, which is a decided plus. So could Diego Chavez. Is it true he’s turning in his taco truck for a restaurant?”

  “I was at a town council meeting when he said that even after he gets his restaurant open, he’s keeping his Taco the Town to take to various festivals around the peninsula.”

  “That’s a smart business plan... Oh! And let’s not forget warmhearted animal rescuer Cam Montgomery and megafit fire captain Flynn Farraday who, having been trained to carry people down ladders, could undoubtedly carry a woman upstairs to bed.”

  “Over his shoulder. Which isn’t exactly Rhett carrying Scarlett up the curving stairs of Tara.”

  “I’ll bet there are a lot of women in town who wouldn’t mind if he carried them piggyback, as long as they ended up in the bedroom... Which brings us back to Gabriel middle-name-Trouble Mannion. Since you appear to be the only woman besides his sister who’s actually spoken with him since he arrived in town, that gives you an inside track. Maybe you should go back and try again. For the sake of the library, of course.”

  “Of course. But he’s only here for the summer.”

  “So?” Lily shrugged. “There’s something to be said for a summer fling. That’s why so many books and songs are written and movies made about them.”

  “Believe me, he wasn’t the least bit interested. In fact, the few minutes I was in the boat shop, he barely tolerated me.”

  “Then he’s a fool,” Lily said. “Gotta go. I’m leading the after-dinner singalong at Harbor Hill. Then the readers’ group gets another chapter of The Sorcerer’s Stone read aloud.”

  “That’s an ambitious project for such an elderly age group.”

  “That’s why I chose it. I figure waiting to find out what happens next gives them something new to live for.” She waggled her fingers and left the library.

  Before turning off the lights, Chelsea retrieved the white bag of treats, paper plates and napkins she’d brought with her that morning from the lunch room. Then went to the children’s section, where she found Hannah helping Hailey read.

  “Hi, Ms. Prescott,” Hailey said. “I’m reading Dragon Rider! It’s a story about dragons. Bad people are going to flood the silver dragon’s special valley, so a brave dragon named Firedrake and Sorrel—she’s a girl, like me, but a forest brownie—go on a quest to find a mi-mi-mi—”

  “Mythical,” Hannah murmured. “That’s a magical place called the Rim of Heaven, where the dragons could be safe and live in peace. They meet an orphan boy, Ben, who goes along to help them.”

  Hailey’s cupid lips turned down. “He’s like me, too, because he doesn’t have any parents. But he’s a boy.” Despite Hannah’s obvious efforts to continue the deception, Hailey had let their foster situation slip last week.

  “Tell her about Nettlebrand,” Hannah suggested, in an obvious attempt to change the conversation from the fictional boy’s orphan status. From their orphan status.

  “Oh, Nettlebrand is really bad! H
e’s called the Golden One and isn’t really a dragon. He has metal scales and was made to kill the last of the dragons.”

  Her small brow furrowed. “I hope Firedrake and Sorrel find the Rim of Heaven before he finds them.”

  “I guess you’ll just have to keep reading to see.” It did not escape Chelsea that the story was about finding a safe home. She was going to have to be more careful about what themes the five-year-old read.

  “I am! And I’m almost reading it all by myself, aren’t I, Hannah?”

  “Yes, you are.” The older girl looked at the bag, then up at Chelsea.

  “You keep bringing us stuff to eat.” She jutted out her slender jaw. “We’re not two poor, starving orphans, like from some Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale. We don’t need charity.”

  “I’d never suggest that,” Chelsea said mildly. But they did, she believed, need love. And nurturing. “When I was your age, I spent a lot of hours here in the library after school and Mrs. Henderson—she was the librarian before me, while I was growing up—would bring me treats from home. She likes to bake.” Something the former librarian still did for the funeral lunch committee at St. Peter’s.

  “Hannah taught me to make S’mores,” Hailey volunteered. “We couldn’t make a fire in the backyard, because it would be dangerous, but she knows how to make them in the microwave. They’re really good. And gooey.”

  “I remember doing that with my sister,” Chelsea said. When she’d returned home from camp, Annabelle had wanted to hear everything she’d done. Which hadn’t been all that much, given her lack of participation, but she had shared stories about the things she’d watched others doing, making it sound as if she’d taken part because it was more than a little obvious that her terminally ill little sister was living vicariously through her at that point.

  And since Chelsea couldn’t build a campfire in their backyard, she’d made microwave S’mores from a recipe she’d found in a cookbook at this very same library.

  “You have a sister?” Hailey’s eyes brightened up with interest.

  “I had.” Damn. Chelsea wished she hadn’t brought the topic up.

  “Did she go away? I have a friend whose sister went to college.”

  “No, she died.” How did they get into this mine-strewn conversation?

  “Oh.” Hailey bit her bottom lip as she considered that. “Did she die in an accident?”

  “She was sick.” For a very long time. But she had managed to get down one of the graham cracker treats and declared it the best thing she’d ever eaten in her life. It also turned out to be the last solid thing she ate, because the next morning she was put on a liquid diet. Before ending up on a feeding tube, which, even with all the drugs the doctors had been throwing at her, still hadn’t been enough to keep her from wasting away.

  “That’s sad.” Hailey’s teeth continued to worry her bottom lip. “Our mommy and daddy died in a car accident.”

  “That’s very sad, too.”

  “It was.” Her small chest beneath a Big Bird T-shirt expanded as she drew in a deep breath, then blew it out on a long sigh. “We were there, too, but I don’t remember it. Hannah rescued us. And then we lived a lot of other places, but now we live here. Not at the library. That would be silly. But in this town, which I like. It’s fun watching the ferries come in with the seagulls diving into the water and pulling out fish. We never had anything like that anywhere else we stayed.”

  Hannah’s expression revealed nothing. She stood as still as a stone while her young face could have been carved from ivory.

  “But it really doesn’t matter where we are, because we’ll always be together.” Hailey looked up at her silent sister. “Right, Hannah?”

  “Right, sprout.” The older girl’s eyes softened as she looked down into her sister’s face, so eager for confirmation of that promise. Then hardened as they turned to Chelsea. “Always.”

  One of these days, after they’d spent more time together, gotten to know each other well enough that Hannah might begin to trust her, Chelsea was going to steal her away for a private conversation. Even remembering Lily’s warning at the market, there had to be more she could do to help than baking and ordering every child’s book on dragons she could find in the catalog.

  “Well, I’m not Mrs. Henderson, and I didn’t bake these cinnamon apple bites because they don’t even need baking, which is good because cooking has never been one of my talents. But they’re still, in my humble opinion, just like having yummy apple pie without the crust. Why don’t we go over and sit in the lounge where the coffee cart is, and you can have some milk with them?”

  “Gotta build those bones,” Hannah muttered, her tone dripping with sarcasm.

  She was a hard nut to crack, but Chelsea refused to stop trying. She knew how it felt to lose a family. Her loss might not have come in one fatal, horrific moment. Instead, it had taken years of pain before that final blow.

  She’d mostly moved passed the survivor guilt of not being able to somehow save her sister’s life and feeling that somehow, someway, there must have been something she could’ve done to keep her broken family together.

  If she’d only been quieter. If she’d only known what to say when she’d feel the explosive energy building up in the house, the way she’d read that the sky in tornado country would turn an eerie shade of yellow and you could feel electricity sparking in the air before the tornado hit and blew everything away.

  If she’d only been able to stop her father from being so angry. Or her mother so...well...empty. If she only could’ve been enough to keep her mother from hurting so badly, needing to be with Annabelle. If only Harry Potter and his merry band at Hogwarts had been around back then to perhaps give her a reason to live one more day. Then another. And another. Until her mother was an old lady playing cribbage with Mrs. Henderson and others at the senior center that had been established in St. Peter’s annex.

  Realizing that Hannah was watching her, studying her, Chelsea shook off the threatening cloud. “You’re certainly right about that,” she said, in her cheeriest voice.

  It was the same voice that she’d used to make plans with Annabelle of all the things they were going to do once she got better. The voice that tried so desperately to bring sunshine into a house where, even in this land of long dark winters, the windows were always covered with closed blinds and heavy draperies.

  The voice that, due to nerves, had gotten out of control at the boat shop and probably left Gabe Mannion thinking she was one plank short of a faering.

  “We need all the vitamin D we can get, living up here in this rainy part of the country.” Which had her wondering if the children were given vitamins. Like nearly everyone else she knew, she dutifully took her tablet of artificial sunshine every day.

  The cinnamon bites were as good as the recipe had promised, which she already knew because she’d sampled three of them when she’d made them last night. Merely for product testing. Just because a recipe was on a healthy after-school snack board on Pinterest that promised it was good didn’t mean it was. She didn’t want to give the girls something that wouldn’t taste like love.

  After the snacks and more discussion about dragons, she drove them home. Hannah had finally stopped protesting being driven, because, Chelsea suspected, it gave Hailey more opportunity to chatter. To connect with someone besides her sister. Someone who cared.

  As she watched the older girl unlock the door and let them both into the house, Chelsea wondered, yet again, how much time their foster mother spent at home. One of these days, she decided, she’d make up an excuse to drop in later in the evening. Just to check.

  * * *

  CHELSEA HAD NEARLY reached her apartment when her phone rang. At the caller ID announcement from the car’s speaker, she pushed the icon on the steering wheel. “Hi, Dad.”

  It wasn’t that often her father called her. For a long ti
me after he’d left his family and Honeymoon Harbor for an anesthesiologist’s position at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, it was as if he’d forgotten she’d ever existed. As if she’d died. Like Annabelle had. After a few years, she began receiving postcards, showing palm trees and beaches, yet more proof that he’d left the Pacific Northwest behind in his rearview mirror as he’d driven away from their waterfront home.

  It was only later, after he’d remarried—and yes, she had been invited to the wedding, and although it was a little weird, she’d gone—that communication had increased. Not so much in person, but calls on the big holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, and her birthday. Along with cards, actual paper letters with seasonal headers, made up with some sort of publishing software showing photos of the half brothers she’d seen only a handful of times, growing up from infancy to kindergarten graduation. Every card, every letter, had included an invitation to visit anytime.

  “Hello, Chelsea.”

  Although she might not be all that close to his second family, her first thought was concern that someone had been hurt. Or worse. Bad things could happen to anyone. Any day. Without warning. “What’s wrong?”

  “Why does anything have to be wrong?”

  “Well, it’s not every day that I get a call from you.”

  “It’s not every day my only daughter has a birthday.”

  If she hadn’t been driving, and didn’t want to avoid crashing into cars coming off the ferry, Chelsea would have closed her eyes, taken a few deep breaths and pictured herself lying on a tropical beach while a hot surfer smoothed coconut oil onto her bare back. The meditation technique was one Jolene Wells had learned while working on a movie set in LA and had become a popular start to treatments at her mother’s day spa.

  “My birthday was last month, Dad. You sent a card. And a box of chocolate truffles.” Which she’d taken to the library committee meeting the following day. This call was also yet more proof of what she’d already known. That her stepmother (and wasn’t that a strange word for a woman only a few years older than she was?) had sent them.