by Nancy Bush
And then her father called, begging her to come back to the beach. “I can’t take care of her,” he said. “You need to. I can’t be here.”
Jules had left school and gone home. Her father, who’d been so good to her when she was a child, now was a stranger. He spent as little time with them as possible. Money was tight. He’d sold their beach house, which had been too expensive to maintain, and he’d moved them into a rental. Jules had accrued quite a bit of debt in student loans, and suddenly she was her mother’s caretaker, unable to work and unable to make payments.
It was Joe to the rescue. He offered to help her financially, through this crushing time. She refused, still believing her father would snap back to reality and help his wife and only child. But he left Jules to take care of everything, and she cried herself to sleep every night. She tried to help her mother, who couldn’t do even the simplest thing for herself, and she railed at her father for emotionally abandoning them. The only positive was that her mother had deteriorated enough that she didn’t remember who Jules was . . . and therefore stopped blaming her for Clem’s death.
Julia was with her mother when she died, and finally her father seemed to momentarily snap out of his depression. Then six months later, he killed himself. Threw himself into the Columbia River
Joe to the rescue again . . . and Georgie. They had become her family. The people who cared about her. When Joe had asked her to marry him, she said yes. The only hiccup was her previous relationship with Sam, but she’d told herself it didn’t matter. Besides, he was all wrapped up in Martina Montgomery—engaged, if the rumor was true—and there was no reason not to run to Joe with open arms, so she did. They went to a justice of the peace and she became Mrs. Joseph Ford.
For those few months after her mother’s death, her father, who was a mentor to Joe, had seemed really happy that Jules had married him, and appeared to be coming around. But then he was gone, too. And then Sam married Martina and apart from one very uncomfortable dinner at Donald’s cabin—Thanksgiving again—he’d made a point of staying away from them and they’d pretty much done the same.
Jules.
She’d almost forgotten he still called her Jules. No one else did but Sam. It bothered her that she’d latched on to that name over Julia. What did that mean? Was she still thinking about Sam, pining for him? It embarrassed her to admit to herself that she’d never completely gotten over him. It was—
She stopped and went cold. What the hell was wrong with her? Joe was dead and she was thinking about Sam? Joe was good and kind and had taken care of her. God, what kind of person was she?
Joe. She couldn’t believe he was gone. It was a lot like when her father died, impossible to accept. It had taken her a long time to grieve for her father and she was struggling now with Joe. All the deaths linked to the water. Her brother, Clem, and the sneaker wave, her father who had jumped to his death near the mouth of the Columbia, and now . . . now Joe on the boat . . . Oh, God. She shuddered at the memories.
Snap out of it! You need to remember what happened on the boat. That’s what matters now.
Forcing herself, she tried to turn her mind to yesterday’s events and immediately broke into a cold sweat. The gray curtain hovered, felt like a guillotine ready to cut off her head if she remembered.
“You’re nuts,” she whispered.
She stood up again. Too fast. The room reeled. Immediately she sat back down and put her head between her knees. She felt anxious, tight. With a concentrated effort, she got herself to relax a little. She would remember it all in time. Even the accident. She had to. And Sam was going to take her to her home tomorrow, so it would all be okay.
A vision came to her of kissing Sam, him atop her, making love to her at his father’s cabin in the light of the flickering television, kissing her in an effort to stop her laughter and his while the Julia Roberts movie, Sleeping with the Enemy, played out on screen.
She realized instantly that this particular vision was one she’d pulled out often. A memory she’d clung to, even while married to his brother. A favorite memory, although there was something tainted about it now.
Because it’s the wrong brother.
One of the aides appeared and began cleaning up the mess Jules had made. “I’m sorry,” she said lamely.
“No problem,” the aide said, then she gathered up the remains of the turkey, potatoes, and congealing gravy and stowed it all in a plastic bag, which she held away from herself in rubber gloves as she whisked off again.
It’s not like it’s radioactive, Julia wanted to mutter.
She caught herself up. Maybe you’re not that nice after all.
For some reason she found that cheering.
The nurse came back in a few minutes later and asked if she would like anything else. “Some ice cream, maybe?” she suggested.
“Oh, no, thanks.”
“You sure?”
The thought of ice cream suddenly had huge appeal. Maybe it was one of her favorites. “Well . . . maybe . . .”
“I’ll go get it.”
She returned with an ice cream cup, a swirl of vanilla and orange, and Jules sat back in the chair and ate it, feeling memories dart around like fireflies, impossible to grab as they lit up just for a moment or two before fading out.
She tried to watch television, but nothing appealed to her. She suddenly craved a book, but she couldn’t think of anything she wanted to read. She couldn’t, in fact, think of one title.
Well, okay, fine. It was going to take a while, but at least she felt that her memory might actually finally return. That was a relief. It had been bone deep frightening to think it might not happen.
She got back into bed, starting to feel glad she would be leaving the hospital tomorrow. The television was tuned to a sitcom that wasn’t even close to funny, in her opinion, but her eyes were getting heavy. Good. She’d go to sleep and face the new day and maybe something good would happen. If not good, then better.
Maybe, just maybe, if she was lucky, she would recall what had happened on the boat.
She was dozing when she heard soft footsteps outside her door coming her way. Her eyes flew open and she was suddenly full of terror. Someone was coming for her!
“Get to the boat,” Joe yelled at her, and she was scrabbling to climb inside.
She was halfway out of her bed when she came to and spied a woman with gray hair tied up into a bun appear in the doorway, carrying a small notebook and a gray cardboard carrier with two cups of coffee in paper cups.
“Hello, Julia,” she said.
Jules froze with one leg out of the bed. “Who are you?” she questioned, instantly panicked. She wanted to run far away from her, an irrational and immediate reaction.
The woman tilted her chin and assessed Julia frankly. “You really don’t know who I am?”
Yes, she did know. She couldn’t quite remember, but she did know. And it was tied up with something else. Something she couldn’t bear to know.
“I’m Phoenix Delacourt,” the woman said. “And both of these are decafs, given we’re past five o’clock. I don’t know about you, but I can’t handle caffeine this late in the day.” She set the cardboard tray on the swing table.
Jules’s mind had shut down. She fought the urge to flee and got back in her bed, pulling the covers up tight.
The woman, Phoenix, gazed at her thoughtfully. “Some kind of amnesia, I hear. Or, maybe you’re faking?”
“What do you want?”
“It’s actually what you want, Julia. I’m the reporter. The one you came to see. You found me, not the other way around, and it was you who gave me the file on Ike Cardaman. Remember that? You told me you wanted to make sure that the investors got their backs, no matter who swindled them. And that included your husband. . . .”
Chapter Nine
“No,” Julia Ford said through lips that barely moved, but Phoenix could read the dawning horror crossing her face.
Maybe she was faking, maybe she wa
sn’t. But she sure as hell was afraid Joe Ford had been wheeling, dealing, and cheating.
Phoenix took in the young woman trembling before her and decided in that split second that no, Julia Ford wasn’t faking. She looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights, just waiting for the car to hit her. It was a good bet she had one helluva story to tell.
“Relax,” Phoenix said. “I’m here to help. Mind if I take this chair over here?”
Julia mutely shook her head, so Phoenix chose one of the cups of decaf and one of the cups of cream nestled beside the cups and took a seat. Twenty long years as a reporter for the North Coast Spirit had taught her patience, something sorely lacking in her character when she’d first graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in journalism and then had applied for jobs up and down the Willamette Valley and from California to Washington with no success. Too young. No jobs. Sorry, sorry, sorry . . . So she’d come home to the coast, her dreams dashed, her tail between her legs, and old Mr. Templeton, who owned the paper and had a soft spot for idealistic individuals who wanted to change the world and had enough energy to do so, had hired her as a gofer around the newspaper office, which was settled in the right half of the lower floor of an old brick building in Tillamook. The left half was originally a printing/copy shop, which seemed a natural next to the paper, but it had only lasted a few years. The space then turned over to a number of businesses—shoe repair, computer repair, appliance repair, whatever. Currently it was a coffee shop, which was why Phoenix had come to the hospital with two cups of coffee snug in a gray paper carrier the exact color of her hair. She had never colored her hair in her life, even when the first strands of silver had shown up in her late twenties. It just wasn’t her style, then or now. She’d always let her mass of gray hair grow because she didn’t want to fuss with it. She also eschewed makeup of any kind, and when she appeared in Jules’s room, she looked like the aging hippie everyone accused her of being, although she’d missed that particular stage in American culture by about as many years as she’d been on the planet.
“Joe would never do that to his investors,” Julia said.
“You sound just like your brother-in-law, but that wasn’t what you said when you came to see me.”
“What did I say?”
“You said, and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘I don’t know if my husband’s involved with Cardaman or not, but maybe this will help.’ And you handed me the file, which is locked up in my office file cabinet.”
“What’s in the file?”
Phoenix could barely hear her, she spoke so softly. “A list of names, mostly. People you wanted me to check out. I’m about three quarters down the list, and no one’s blamed your husband yet. Of course, with his death, that could change, I suppose, and if there’s no clear head of the company, I’d imagine those investors are going to be lining up to get their money back. Do you know who inherits the company?”
“No.”
“Would you like your coffee?”
Julia turned blankly toward the table that held her cup, still in the cardboard carrier. Like an automaton she picked up the paper cup and removed the lid, peeled back the top of one of the miniature cream tubs, dumped it in. She put the lid back on and took a sip.
“I usually drink regular coffee,” she said, as if testing out the idea.
“I tried to see you yesterday,” Phoenix said, “but there was a guard outside your door. I thought he was going to be there for the duration, but he’s not there now. Apparently you’re no longer either in danger, or a suspect.”
“A suspect!” She nearly dropped her coffee.
“I don’t think you’re a suspect,” Phoenix said, “but yesterday I didn’t quite know what was what. The general consensus was that boating accident was just that, an unfortunate accident that sent you to the hospital and took your husband’s life.”
“But you don’t think that,” she said, lifting the cup to her lips. Without makeup, she looked about twelve years old.
“You handed me the Cardaman file after Denny left the company. Your husband had just closed his Seaside office, and you were no longer working for him. You wanted me to see if there was any wrongdoing.”
The blood drained from her face. “Who’s Denny?” she whispered.
Once again, Phoenix thought the amnesia wasn’t an act. “He was your husband’s bookkeeper. There were a few other employees, off and on over the years, but he was the last one. He left around March. He complained to me about financial fraud.”
“I can’t . . . remember,” she wrenched out.
Phoenix debated how hard to push. The answers were inside Julia, no matter what the cause of her amnesia, so it was a matter of unlocking them. “You know what happened, even if you don’t have all the pieces yet.”
“I don’t have any of the pieces.”
“Yeah, you do, and I think you know it. You just can’t access them right now.”
The last few years of her tenure with the North Coast Spirit, since Phoenix had diverged into her own kind of reporting—a decision made when old man Templeton died and left her a big chunk of the paper—she’d learned a few things about coaxing information out of reluctant informants. This was a little different, but along the same principles. Phoenix felt she was pretty damn good at her job, so it was just a matter of fitting the right key in the right lock. “How about I tell you all I know about you and then maybe that’ll be the grease that gets things going, hmm?”
“I’m afraid I won’t like what I hear,” she said, swallowing.
“I wouldn’t worry about it. Apart from what you told me, I didn’t know much about you, so I did some research. I asked people about you. And everyone who knows you said you were good people.”
Tears suddenly filled her eyes. “That’s nice to hear,” Julia choked out.
“But the question’s about your husband and whom he was in bed with, financially speaking.”
“You think he’s sleeping with the enemy. I was just thinking about that movie,” Julia said, her lips twisting.
“You were the one who brought me the file,” she reminded gently.
Footsteps sounded in the hallway. Rapid. Approaching. Phoenix moved up to Julia’s bed and said quietly, “You met me at the coffee shop next to my office. Perfect Cup, which I think truly overstates their product, but it’s handy. You were the one who set up the meeting. Do you remember that?”
“No.”
“You said you wanted to know the truth about your husband, no matter what it was, and then you handed me the file. Do you still want to know the truth?”
A nurse pushed into the room, older, solid, with a take no prisoner’s attitude. Phoenix knew she was about to be bounced out of Julia’s room, but she kept her eyes on the girl, waiting.
In this Julia didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” she said firmly. “I want to know the truth.”
* * *
Sam arrived at Tutti’s a little after six-thirty, tying his canoe to one of the shiny, silver cleats on the dock, then swinging onto the ladder that reached from the dock into the water and hauling himself up it. Hap and Tina weren’t there yet and he looked down the canal and saw Tina move out to their deck and look his way. Neither of them waved. It had taken Hap and her a good twenty minutes to drive from Joe’s around the bridge on the north end of the canal and back down to their house, a much longer route than across the water. Hap came out to join her and they moved together to a motorized rubber raft floating near the attached boathouse. Beyond them sunlight glittered on the green waters of the canal, which took a sharp bend on its way to the main body of the Nehalem River, then the bay and eventually the ocean.
Sam’s head was full of questions for Hap about Joe’s business. He would like to get him alone for a deep discussion, but if it had to play out in front of the other Fishers, he didn’t know if he much cared. He wanted results fast. He wasn’t interested in finessing answers if it was going to take too long.
“There you are!” Tutti d
eclared, spying Sam as he walked up the five steps from the dock to the upper deck, which was on the main level of her house. The sun beat down on the back of his neck, but the breeze was cold, now coming off the ocean. No more east wind.
He let himself be propelled by Tutti toward an outdoor wooden table where a sweating, ice-filled bucket held bottles of wine and beer. Sam added his wine bottle to the mix, but chose another Corona for his drink, which Tutti immediately took from him. She stuffed it with a lime slice and handed it back to him with a flourish. Only one other couple had arrived thus far, and they were inside the house in front of the television. Sam could see them through the screen of the sliding glass door. The man had the remote in hand, aimed at the television.
Tutti was saying, “. . . and Jackie Illingsworth. They’re on your side of the canal, or Joe and Julia’s side, I should say, four houses down, right over there.” She pointed and Sam dutifully turned to look. “The house next to the Illingsworth’s is empty, just sold, and it’s a second home, I believe. I haven’t met the new owners yet. Then you’ve got Byron and Zoey, and between them and right next to Joe and Julia are Stuart and Bette. They’ve got the German shepherds.” Less and More.
Sam’s cell rang at that moment. The local news was just coming up on the television. “Excuse me,” he said, glancing down at his cell.
“Sure,” she said, but she didn’t move.
The caller was Gwen. He gave Tutti a “just a minute” sign as he moved toward the steps that led back down to the dock. “Hey, Gwen. How’s Georgie?” he answered.