by Nancy Bush
Meet me at my dock at noon.
It was Joe’s boat. He’d planned on taking it out. That’s why he wanted Sam to meet him at his dock.
“We recovered a male body. It’s at the morgue. I could meet you there.”
Sam felt ill. His head ached. “I’ll be there in half an hour,” he said, realizing dully that he would have to let his father know about Joe sometime soon. Donald Ford was not in complete command of his wits, however, so Sam didn’t know how much would actually penetrate into his functioning mind. He wasn’t looking forward to trying to explain to his father that his eldest son was gone.
Later, he told himself.
He drove to the morgue with no memory of the trip. In fact, he didn’t remember much of anything until he was at the hospital, in the basement, and shown into a cold, sterile room where a body lay on a stainless steel gurney, covered by a white sheet. Langdon Stone had been waiting for him and had led the way into a viewing area. An attendant in scrubs had lifted the sheet off the deceased person’s head, and Sam stared down at the man’s face for a long, long time. He could hear seconds ticking off inside his head, though there was no clock in the room.
Stone cleared his throat. “Is this your brother, Joseph Ford?”
Sam nodded slowly. “Yes. That’s my brother.” He swallowed. Still wanting to disbelieve. God, Joe . . .
“Cause of death?” he managed to get out.
“Drowning. There’s a head injury, but the lungs were full of water. Do you want an autopsy?”
“No. I don’t know. Not yet.”
“The sheriff may order one if there’s a question of foul play,” Stone said, “so it might not be your choice.”
“Yeah, I know.” Sam turned away and headed toward the door. “I’ll connect with the sheriff,” he said over his shoulder.
Stone asked, “You okay? You want to sit down?”
“Nope.”
“Where’re you going?”
“To have a talk with my sister-in-law . . . and then my father.”
* * *
She was dreaming.
It had been a beautiful day. She and her father were walking along the shore and had stumbled across a small collection of sea glass. Beautiful blues and teals and greens. A collector’s dream. Nobody found much sea glass anymore. The practice of people burning and burying their trash in the sand had gone out with the days of recycling, and sea glass was mostly litter, forgotten pieces of glass honed and polished by the waves. Worthless. Abandoned. Still, the pieces were more precious than jewels to her. Absolutely gorgeous and good luck to boot.
She took her bounty home and showed her mother, who managed a weak smile, but didn’t show much more emotion of any kind. She never did. Life had worn her down, like the sea glass, until there were no more edges, just smooth corners that let everything pour over them, nothing sticking.
Her good mood disappeared and she began to cry. Why was Mama always so distant? Why didn’t she care? Dad cared. He took her everywhere and told her that she was his princess and she believed him. But what was wrong with Mama?
“She’s sad,” Dad said. “You understand.”
Did she? She didn’t think so. “She doesn’t love me like you do.”
“Of course she does. She just loved Clem. . . .”
More, she thought jealously. Mama loved Clem more. That stung, though she knew it to be the truth. Clement, her little brother, had been swept away by a sneaker wave and drowned. She had been there and screamed and screamed, but he was gone. She wanted to miss him now, but he’d been gone a long time and she scarcely remembered him. Still, it kind of made her mad that he was gone and Mama was still boo-hooing about him.
“I don’t love her,” she declared, and her father suddenly put his hand over her mouth and pressed it hard.
“Take it back,” he told her sternly. “You take it back.”
She screamed and screamed, but her voice was muffled by his strong fingers. She tried to remember why she’d been feeling so good, but all of that was gone. She just knew that Mama loved Clem more than her and it wasn’t fair.
And then she was somewhere else. And Mama was there, except she wasn’t. She was seated in a rocking chair but she wasn’t moving. Her eyes were staring, staring, staring at something, but there was nothing there.
“Mama?” she asked, turning to look at whatever Mama was seeing. She saw the other side of their living room and through the window to the ocean. She squinched her eyes, struggling to see. Outside, way out at sea, a buoy with a red flag snapping in the wind, a warning that the wind was up. Was that a body out there? Was that an arm? Was someone dead?
Her eyes flew open and she gasped with fear. No more ocean. There was a television across the room, above her head, its blank eye staring in the dim room light, and blankets and a pillow and the smell of disinfectant. A hospital room?
Someone was dead.
Her hands covered her mouth. Her heart was beating madly. She saw the mound of her feet beneath the covers. She was in a hospital bed? Why? What had happened?
Beside her bed was a tray with a water glass and flexible straw. She reached for it with her right arm and a wrenching pain shot through her shoulder. Moaning, she dropped her arm, belatedly aware it was in some kind of sling. She was strapped to an intravenous line at the back of her left wrist. She followed the line with her eyes and wondered what fluid she was being fed. She was suspicious of hospitals, suspicious of doctors, ever since—
She blinked, froze in the act of reaching for the water glass with her left hand.
There was something niggling, twisting just outside her peripheral vision. Something about her dream?
She broke out in a cold sweat.
Outside the room she heard the clatter of a gurney or cafeteria cart. Soft conversation in hushed tones. The sound of approaching footsteps.
“Sir . . . sir!” A woman’s voice called out and then bunny quick footsteps followed after a stronger, heavier tread.
It was a man’s stride, she realized. Coming her way. Fear swam through her veins, and if she could’ve, she would have leapt to her feet and run out of the room. But she was tethered and she hurt all over, especially her head . . . and her shoulder.
A moment later a man blasted into her room, his clothes rumpled, his face haggard, his hair in need of a serious combing. It was a nice face. Concerned. Dark eyes searching for hers, though their color might have been a trick of the light, and a set, grim mouth, as if it were forcibly holding his lips together.
There was a twitch in her brain. A memory? It shut down so fast she wasn’t sure it had even been real. And it was followed by a heavy weight that fell over her like an iron shroud.
“Hey,” he said tautly.
A nurse shot into the room on his heels, her body stiff. “No one is allowed here unless their name is on the list!” she declared. “The guard just left for a moment. If you don’t leave I’m calling the desk.”
“I’m her brother-in-law,” he growled. “If you want to kick me out, give it your best shot.”
“The guard will be right back!”
“She’s allowed family.”
“You’re not on the list!”
“I don’t give a good goddamn. Put my name on it. Samuel Ford.” His gaze swung back to the bed and he stared at her. “You’re awake.”
She tried to answer but the words wouldn’t come. The nurse looked infuriated and anxious, ready to launch herself between this man and her bed. She could see the woman’s valiant effort to pull herself together and it was anyone’s guess if she would manage it.
The man was still staring at her hard, so she cleared her throat and managed a raspy, “Yes. I’m awake.”
The nurse, after a tight moment of indecision, spun on her heel and marched back out the door.
“What happened?” he demanded.
She stared at him helplessly. Her brain hurt. The iron shroud had eased a bit, but the hovering gray mass seemed to be just over her r
ight shoulder, affecting her thought. She tried to turn to look at it, but it disappeared. Pain shot through her skull. Something wrong there.
“Joe texted me to meet him at your dock at noon,” the man was saying, “but he wasn’t home. You took the boat out. Both of you. Why’d you go on the boat? Where were you going?”
His questions were rapid-fire and accompanied by sharp looks at the door, as if he were expecting the nurse to return with reinforcements.
She shifted position and her shoulder jabbed her. “I can’t think,” she murmured. The pain in her head was evolving into something harder, a hammering throb that was narrowing her vision. With a tortured inhale of breath, she closed her eyes.
“I know you don’t want to talk to me, but we don’t have a lot of time. Joe wanted me to meet him because something was wrong. Why did you take out the boat? How did it catch fire? Something happened, something dangerous? What started it?”
“Something dangerous,” she repeated. That gray mass was behind her, reaching into her skull.
“And now Joe’s . . . gone.” He stopped, his voice tortured.
She lifted one lid a teensy bit. Gone? Did he mean dead?
“They’re going to kick me out of here. I can already tell. Give me something to go on. Joe asked for my help, and I want to help him.”
She squeezed her eyes shut tightly again. He kept saying Joe . . . Joe. . . .
“Was it just the two of you? Or was someone else there? Was it really an accident? How did it catch fire?”
The grayness converged on her, an enveloping cloud, muffling his voice.
“For God’s sake, what the hell happened?”
His voice grew far away, disappearing. She wanted to help him. She really did. She tried to speak, but her breath was caught in her chest, her lungs ready to explode. She struggled with all her might, but all she got out was, “Who’s Joe?” before she faded back into blessed twilight.
* * *
Sam stared down at his brother’s wife in disbelief as the nurse with the grim countenance suddenly charged back into the room, accompanied by the previously missing guard. Sam let them hustle him out of the room without protest, mostly because Jules was unconscious again and he was too tired to fight. Seeing Joe’s frozen face had knocked the stuffing out of him. Getting back to normal was going to take a while, and it didn’t help that Jules wasn’t tracking yet. Or, maybe she just didn’t want to talk to him, for a whole lot of reasons. He got that, but he hadn’t even gotten to say much about Joe before she’d retreated back into unconsciousness. It didn’t bode well for the future.
The guard had been shooting questions at him, which he’d ignored. Now he held up his hands and cut in, “I’m her brother-in-law. I’m a cop . . . ex-Seaside PD. Call it in. Find out. But back the hell off.”
“A cop,” the guard repeated.
The nurse said, “This patient is under protection ordered by the Tillamook Sheriff’s Dep—”
“Talk to Detective Langdon Stone from the Sheriff’s Department,” Sam snapped. “I was just with him at the county morgue. Identifying my brother’s body.”
That stopped them both for a moment. Then the guard said gruffly, “If that’s true, we still need to see some ID.”
Sam opened his wallet. “Take it all. I don’t give a damn, but I need to find out what happened.”
“The Sheriff’s Department is sending someone to interview Mrs. Ford,” Grim-face started in, but Sam didn’t give a shit.
“I know Jules . . . Julia. I know her well.”
That was the truth; at least it once was. He knew her mother was dead, a victim of a wasting mental disease, and that her father had jumped or fallen from a bridge over the Columbia River. Peter St. James had never learned to swim, was despondent over Jules’s mother’s passing, and had talked of joining her. One day he made good on that promise, plunging from the bridge into the river far below. Unfortunately, his body was never discovered, washed out to sea, which only added to Jules’s grief and torment. Rudderless after her father’s suicide, that’s when she’d accepted Joe’s offer of marriage.
At least that’s what Sam told himself in his bitterest moments. He didn’t want to believe she’d fallen in love with Joe, but maybe she had. Maybe he’d been just kidding himself all these years.
“I’m probably her closest next-of-kin,” he said to the guard, who was still blocking his way.
“We’ll wait until we hear from the Sheriff’s Department,” the nurse answered for him. She wasn’t backing down.
The guard, however, was looking at Sam out of the corners of his eyes in a way that suggested he might be starting to realize he wasn’t a threat to Jules’s safety. The man didn’t relax his vigil on her behalf, but something had subtly shifted.
At that moment rapid footsteps approached and a young, male doctor with an open lab coat that billowed out cape-like behind him entered the room. He glanced at Sam. “You’re Mrs. Ford’s next-of-kin?”
“She’s my sister-in-law.” He held out his hand. “Sam Ford.”
“Ron Lillard,” he said, offering a firm handshake as Sam read Dr. Ronald Lillard on the tan name tag pinned to his white coat. “We were instructed by the Sheriff’s Department that a guard would be placed outside Mrs. Ford’s room. Until we hear differently, no visitors are permitted. Not even family,” he said as Sam opened his mouth to protest. “If you could come with me down the hall . . .” He held out an arm to Sam while pointing to the door with the other. “Maybe we can expedite you seeing your sister-in-law.”
Sam wasn’t going to get anywhere by bullying, so he let himself be led out of Jules’s room and down the hall to where a couch and two chairs were clustered in an alcove around a square coffee table.
“She acted like she didn’t remember Joe,” Sam muttered, glancing from the doctor to the western windows where a half-moon was rising, a line of quivering moonlight visible against the ocean.
Lillard gestured to one of the chairs, but Sam shook his head. He didn’t feel like sitting.
The doctor remained standing as well, glancing out the window to the small, well-lit quad below with its frame of sidewalks and benches surrounding a central fountain. A woman was sitting on a bench in the lamplight, staring down at the toes of her flip-flops as if she could decipher all of life’s mysteries if she just tried hard enough.
“Your sister-in-law’s had a head trauma,” Lillard said. “I understand you’re the one who found her.”
“On the beach.” He then spent a few minutes telling Lillard how he’d swum around the rock promontory to the secluded beach in order to reach her.
Lillard said, “You should rest, too.”
“I know. But I’m not going to.”
“Nothing’s going to be accomplished tonight.”
“Well, when can I talk to her? In the morning?”
“Possibly.”
“Possibly?” Sam repeated, frustrated.
“The guard’s there for her safety, but my main concern is your sister-in-law’s continuing recovery.”
“About that . . . how long will this ‘amnesia’ last?”
“She’s had a trauma. A concussion. Give her a chance. She may not remember all the details of the accident that caused her injury. It happens that way a lot. She’s still recovering and will be for a while.”
“Okay, but how long does it usually take to remember?”
“She needs to heal. She’s physically exhausted and may be unable to help you right away.”
“My brother died, Doc. I need to know how this happened. Do you understand?”
“If I could help you, I would, and so would your sister-in-law,” he said sincerely.
They stared at each other. Sam understood the doctor was being patient with him. He didn’t want anyone to be patient with him. He wanted to hit something, or someone. He wanted to yell long and loud until his lungs gave out.
Instead he turned on his heel and stalked away.
* * *
/> The bar was full of city people taking a weekend at the beach. Lots of tank tops, bare midriffs, and flip-flops. The man idly watched a group of young women who were all from some sorority, he thought, as he could overhear snatches of their conversation: “Kappa” this, “Dee Gee” that, and “Phi” whatever the fuck. They were partying on like school was in session, not like it was the middle of summer. A tall, blonde woman with the broad shoulders of a swimmer and chlorine-stiff hair, probably from too many hours in a pool, pointed at another one and declared, “You can’t beat last year’s rush, you just can’t! Carrie put on the best one ever.” She smiled at another girl, who was shit-faced to the extreme.
The shit-faced girl—Carrie—responded with a deep nod that almost took her off her bar stool. “We got good pledges.”
“Like I said. You can’t beat that, Ingalls,” Broad-shoulders said, still addressing the first girl.
“I wouldn’t even try,” Ingalls declared, smiling a bit uncertainly at Carrie. “Nobody beats Carrie when it comes to recruiting.”
Both girls were clearly vying for Carrie’s attention and endorsement, and he found the whole fake-lovefest interesting. Sorority girls, you had to love ’em. Carrie herself wasn’t half as cute as Ingalls, or even Broad-shoulders for that matter.
Still, all those young women with half their clothes on . . . His cock twitched expectantly. He thought about screwing one of them senseless. He had a vision of taking one on the boat and down in the cabin. Her legs up over her head, her mouth open in an O of ecstacy. Moving in and out of her, watching her. Jesus . . . He had to shift in his seat to get comfortable again. He wondered if they would be interested. Maybe if he offered money? It was surprising how venal those hot little snatches could be.
Or . . . maybe he wouldn’t have to ask? Just let one of the drunkest stumble off for a while and he might be able to talk her into his car.
Immediately he shut that thought down. He already had the hottest piece of ass available anytime he wanted it, so there was no need even to fantasize. He needed to drag his gaze away from that tight butt in the blue shorty-shorts that seemed to be beckoning.