Keeping Katie

by Stella Quinn

  She changed tacks, apparently giving up on trying to describe who she’d expected. “I need a bit of help.”

  “Sure. Anything.” Had he said that too quickly? A year of finding no interest in anything besides his newspaper page, and now he was falling over himself trying to flirt with a woman who attended summer festivals in a dog suit? He had issues.

  She smiled up at him gratefully, and if he hadn’t been smitten before, he sure as heck was now. “I’d be so grateful. The thing is, I’m terrible at games.”

  “You’ve come to the right place. I’m great at games.”

  “It’s my sister. She’s missing.”

  He frowned. “Um…like, missing in a game of Hide and Seek? Or actually missing?”

  She shrugged. “The police don’t think it’s anything to worry about, but I need answers, even if the police don’t. Which is why I’ve come here.”

  He glanced around the office. Okay, so their old-fashioned building could have mirrored a detective agency, with its desks piled with papers and its shelves crowded with books and broken cameras and spiralbound notebooks. But the clues he solved here had nothing to do with the real world.

  He hesitated. Getting involved was not what he did—he was in retirement from all and everything—but his brain had just remembered what Dr. Goodly had suggested, that he find a project that made him feel uncomfortable and accept it.

  Well, he felt uncomfortable all right, but he let his mouth do the talking before the cowardly part of his brain could intervene. “Maybe you could have a seat and tell me a bit more. I’m not quite understanding what sort of help I could be.”

  “Oh, could I? I’d be so grateful.”

  The look she bestowed on him cut a path straight through the fog of apathy he’d been living in for the last year and landed straight in his heart. “I’ll do whatever I can,” he said. And meant it.

  “Are you okay with me having my dog inside?”

  “No problem,” he said, blithely ignoring the fact that he had zero idea what the landlord’s opinion of dogs indoors might be. “He need some water?”

  “She. Her name’s Rose.”

  He reached out a hand to shake hers. “Anton Price. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Katie Shields,” she said. “Wait. Anton Price the novelist?”

  “Former novelist. Current crossword creator cunningly disguising himself among the Redwood Cove community as Tuna Yango.”

  “That is seriously the weirdest name ever.”

  He grinned. “Sure, but there’s a method to the madness. It’s an anag—”

  The dog stepped on his foot, and he looked down. “Hey, girl. What’s up?”

  The dog looked up at him and—he could have sworn it—winked.

  “It’s an anagra—”

  The dog stood on his foot again, this time putting about fifty pounds of weight onto it.

  “Rose!” said Katie. “I’m sorry, she’s not usually so clumsy.”

  “No problem.” He ushered Katie over to his desk and swept all the Dear Anna letters into the top drawer. Rose settled onto the floor by her owner’s side, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

  Creative brains were the worst, he thought. Dogs were winking at him now? He really had to get a grip.

  “So,” he said. “Maybe we can start with why you think Tuna Yango can help you with your missing sister?”

  She took a moment to speak. “Okay,” she said. “You remember a year ago, when Redwood Cove was struggling with the economic downturn?”

  Yeah, back when every news headline was like an arrow straight to his heart. Of course he remembered…hadn’t his own darn novel predicted it? Become a runaway bestseller and filled him with guilt and self-doubt and an oversensitive panic reflex?

  He cleared his throat. As beautiful as this visitor was, perhaps he should have let Danny or Jules deal with this. His therapist was wrong; he wasn’t ready to leave the safe rut of his anonymity. “I remember.”

  “We—that is, my sister Veronica and me—lived with our Uncle Roly then. He’d looked after us since our parents died when we were little.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  She smiled at him gently, and he felt a little of his angst slide away. Wow. If he’d known the therapeutic results of a pretty smile earlier, maybe he’d have stopped hiding away in his cliffside cottage.

  “I’m rambling, I’m sorry,” she said. “Short version: Uncle Roly and Vee loved puzzles and games, that sort of thing.”

  “Games.”

  “Yes. And he and Vee used to work on the crossword page together in the Cove to Coast Herald. It was something they...well, sorry, I seem to be giving you my life history.”

  “I’m in no hurry.” Which was true. Anton hadn’t been in a hurry since he’d tossed his last manuscript into the hundred-year-old fireplace in his restored cottage.

  Her fingers were twisting themselves into knots around the lead she had clutched in her hand, and he suddenly clued in to how stressed she was. Enough of his flippancy—the woman really wanted help.

  “Just tell me the important bits,” he said.

  She smiled at him, and he felt his heart go loop-de-loop, which was amazing for two reasons. One, since when did sweet women track him down and ask for his assistance, and two, when had his heart last beat with anything other than resignation?

  “Fast forward a few months after Uncle Roly passed away, and Veronica moved to Maple Ridge. She had this kooky idea that one way for her and me to keep in touch was to write each other a letter each week and she’d teach me how to do a crossword clue.”

  “And her letters have stopped arriving? Is that what’s happened?”

  “I got one last Friday, same as always, which is kinda why the police think I’m overreacting. But this week’s didn’t arrive, and she’s not answering her calls, and she’s not at her apartment. It’s what the first letter said that has brought me to you.”

  He waited.

  “She wrote in it, Thank heavens for Tuna Yango LOL.”

  He sat back in his chair. “Huh. I can see why you came here. Anything else in the letter?”

  “Just that she’d been keeping something from me for a while now, the fact that the reason she moved towns wasn’t so much for the promotion it offered but to get away from someone at her work she’d had a crush on. And now she wasn’t embarrassed about that anymore, because she’d met someone. THE someone. And then the line, thank heavens for Tuna Yango.”

  “LOL,” he muttered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The first time you said it, you said ‘LOL’... that’s exactly what she wrote?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  He pulled a pen towards him and found a notepad so he could write down the phrase. Tuna Yango was definitely him. LOL meant laugh out loud. Thank heavens? No idea.

  “Veronica, you say. Veronica Shields? Same surname as you?”

  “Yes.”

  He pulled his laptop towards him. “It’s not ringing any bells, but I’ll do a content search in my columns since I took over the page a year ago, see if it pops up.”

  He typed the letters out into a search string and hit go.

  No results found, his laptop blinked back at him.

  “No luck. I’m kind of at a loss. Does she look like you?” Because boy howdy, he was pretty sure he’d remember if someone who looked like Katie had passed within hailing distance.

  “A little. Here, I’ll show you a photo.”

  He waited while she scrolled through her phone until she’d hit on the Reel Life app. A stream of photos popped up, and she tapped one so it filled the screen, then leaned in closer to the desk to show him. A waft of spring flowers and sea breeze lifted from her hair, and it took a second to remember he was supposed to be being helpful here. He looked at the two women smiling out from the screen.

  Katie was wearing a bright yellow dress, a sleeveless summer number that showed off her tanned arms. In her hands s
he held a posy of hot pink flowers…carnations, perhaps. Beside her smiled a taller, blonder version of her. Jawline a little squarer, expression less sweet, but definitely a sister. They made a lovely pair, and he knew without a doubt he’d never laid eyes on Veronica.

  “Can you send me that?” he said. “Danny—he’s the owner of the newspaper—and his sidekick, Julia, are the ones who are here in the office every day. If your sister ever came in here, they’re the ones to ask.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Can I add you on Reel Life?”

  “I don’t have an account, but I run the newspaper’s. Share it as a private message, and I can show it to Danny and Jules.”

  “Okay.” She sounded despondent. “I can’t think of any reason why she would have mentioned Tuna Yango. It’s just so weird.”

  He shrugged. “She’d been sharing crossword clues with you for a while, you said. Could it have anything to do with them?”

  Her eyes widened. “Well, heck! Maybe. I wonder—”

  She came to a stop and held a hand to her mouth.

  “You look as though you’re having a brainstorm.”

  She smiled. “Not quite a full-on brainy moment. The opposite, actually. The thing is…she thought I was trying to solve all the clues she was sending me. She’d give me little tips. You know, thinking I’d just arrive at the answer, but I suck at these things. Truly. What if the crossword clue had some meaning in it that I just didn’t get?”

  “Maybe.” It seemed a total longshot, but hey, who was he to understand the intricacies of a random woman’s brain? “Which clue was it?”

  “I should have brought the envelope with me. Do you have the last few Saturday papers here?”

  He grinned. “Only about a hundred copies. Sure, let me grab some from out back. Umm…” He hesitated. What if she took off while he was gone? What if this was the only time he’d see her? Some long dormant drive for action had stirred itself into wakefulness when Katie Shields walked into the office of the Cove to Coast Herald, and he wasn’t ready to let it go back to sleep. “There’ll be a pot of coffee out back. Would you like a cup?”

  “Oh, heavens, yes,” she said. “Black, no sugar. Strong enough to land a jumbo jet on.”

  He grinned. Oh, yeah. Katie had woken him up all right.

  Chapter 9

  Katie rested a hand on Rose’s head as the cryptic crossword guy headed through a swing door and disappeared of sight.

  “Anton Price!” she whispered into the fur between Rose’s ears. “I can’t believe I didn’t recognize him last weekend. He is famous.” Like, possibly Redwood Cove’s most famous resident after Finch Jameson and Hawk Hawkins. And famous was just one thing about him that had stopped her heart in its tracks. If she’d known how Hollywood hero the local crossword compiler looked, she’d have put in a lot more effort into working out those kooky clues her sister was obsessed with.

  Dark, sun-streaked hair, the sort that you had to earn with long hours spent on a surfboard or swimming vigorous lengths of the cove. Shoulders that looked more suited to crushing granite or felling cedar than plying a trade on a keyboard. And those eyes! Dark, like the color thrilling secrets would be, if thrilling secrets were a soft-centered chocolate.

  She glanced down at her dog. “I’m not delusional, am I, Rose? The guy’s a looker, right?”

  Rose stood up on her back paws, looked over Anton’s messy desk, and casually knocked a pile of his business cards onto Katie’s lap.

  Katie frowned at her dog. “What, you’re psychic now? Well, you’re wrong. I do not need to know some random hot guy’s contact details. I’m here for some help, then I’ll be on my way.” She waited until the dog had flopped back to the floor before discreetly sliding a business card into one of the credit-card slots in her phone cover.

  She’d shivered her way through all of his books over the years…usually tucked up under a thick quilt, her bedside lamp burning deep into the night as she read about secret agents defusing missile launchers and data analysts foiling global economic bank heists. Anton could write!

  She wondered what on earth had led him to give it all up to work here, on an ancient desk in an equally ancient building in the white-washed timber tourist district of Redwood Cove.

  When he shouldered his way back through the doors, he was carrying a stack of newspapers under his arm and a huge mug in each hand. “No cookies,” he reported. “You want goodies around here, you need to keep a secret stash in the janitor’s closet, which is the one place guaranteed to never be disturbed.”

  She laughed. “The refuge kitchen is like that. You’re more likely to find liver treats in the goodie-jar than a chocolate-chunk cookie.”

  “Oh, you work at the refuge?”

  She grinned. “You think I dress up like a dog for fun? Of course I work at the refuge. We were fundraising at the festival, which was why I was lurking in dark alleys dressed in a lot of gray fur.”

  “That’s pretty inspiring.”

  “Thanks. I volunteer there a couple of times a week—and it’s more Rose’s gig than mine. She’s a therapy dog for animals who’ve been diagnosed with fear-aggression, which limits their chances of being re-homed. Rose is their last chance for redemption. She’s very patient, and she lets them learn how to get closer to her in a gradual way. We build up to play, tug-o-war, that sort of thing. If we get to the point where I can take the troubled dog for a walk through the park with other dogs around, then we know we can try to find a suitable home.”

  “I am so impressed.”

  She smiled. Helping dogs survive a fear-aggression problem was her vocation, but the reason for that wasn’t something she ever felt the need to talk about. “It makes a change from my day job. I work in traffic control at the airport, which is very exact, all numbers and vectors and graphs. Training the dogs gives me as much therapy as the dogs receive, because it’s such a different way of using your brain.”

  “I bet.”

  “I’m sorry, I rattle on when I’m nervous. You find last week’s newspaper?”

  “I found a few back issues. Here’s crossword 2086. Any of these clues ring a bell?”

  She pulled the newspaper around so she could read the list. “Oh yes, this one’s familiar. Here, thirteen across, six letters. My twin initially, she is sweet to every relative.”

  “Sister.”

  “Um…that’s right, we’re looking for my sister.”

  “No. The answer to that clue is sister. This is one of the easy clues I put in each week to help the beginners fill some squares in the grid. It’s an initial letter clue. She is sweet to every relative…the first letter of each of those words spells sister.”

  She looked blankly at the words in the clue. “I didn’t see it. I must be the dumbest person alive.

  He smiled. “Honey, if you can keep planes spinning about in the air without crashing into each other all day long, I’m pretty sure you’re not the dumbest person in this room. See the word initially?”

  “I see it.” Did she sound defensive? She felt like she was back in grade school explaining to Mrs. Stilton that she really did know the difference between a noun and a verb.

  His hand rested on hers for a fraction of a second. “It’s totally fine. Brains work in different ways. Don’t worry about fathoming the answers; that’s why I’m here. The interesting thing about this clue is that it is sort of relevant. Maybe we should keep going.”

  She felt a blush warming her cheeks for some silly reason that probably belonged back in grade school along with her noun and verb lessons. “Thanks for the answer. I would never have worked it out.”

  “I can give you the answer grid for the whole crossword, if you think that would help?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know, Anton. We only ever worked on the one clue, you know?”

  He pulled the stack of papers towards him. “We’ll go backwards, then. I’ll pull out the crossword, you circle the clue that your sister sent you. Maybe we’ll see some kind of patte
rn.”

  “I guess. Sure.” It was a plan, and she sure didn’t have any other suggestions to offer. They got to work, Anton tearing out Page Seventeen of every Saturday issue, and her circling the clues she could remember with a fat red pen.

  “Read them out,” he said, when they’d gone back three months.

  “Three down, six letters: Help! One who profanes wildly,” she read.

  “Rescue.”

  “Hang on a minute, I’ll write that on my list. Okay, next up is one across, five letters: Love from afar? More space needed.”

  “Crush.”

  She rolled her eyes. Seriously, people wasted their Saturdays on this stuff? She wrote it on the page and turned to the next crossword. “Twelve across, seven letters: In California, color would, we hear, suit state symbol.”

  Anton looked at her. “Come on, this is an easy one. Know any state symbols for California…?”

  She looked at his expectant face. “Nope. I’ve got nothing.”

  He smiled. “Redwood.”

  “Redwood? I’m not even going to try and fathom how you got that. Let’s see, what have we got. Sister, redwood, crush, rescue. Could be gobbledygook, could be totally menacing.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Katie. These clues are so random, I’m really struggling to think how any of this could be helpful in finding your sister.”

  “It’s got to help, because I’m all out of options.”

  “You checked with all her usual gal pals?”

  “Yep.”

  “Old school friends? Old boyfriends?”

  “Yes, checked.”

  “Distant cousins? Godparents? The batty great-aunt you only ever see at Thanksgiving?”

  “If we had any of the above, I’d have checked with them. Thorough, aren’t you?”