by Nancy Bush
“Fine. Better. Sorry about that. I didn’t know she’d called you. She was in her room.”
“I’m happy to talk to her.”
“Yeah, thanks. She’s finally resting. I had to give her one of my sedatives to calm her down.”
“Okay.” He sure as hell hoped she wasn’t giving a prescription drug to her twelve-year-old. “She can call me anytime.”
“It’ll probably be tomorrow. She wants Julia’s number at the hospital, too. Do you have it?”
“Call the hospital, they’ll connect you to her room, but . . . um . . . Jules is having some memory issues, so don’t expect too much.” A collective gasp went up from inside Tutti’s house. They must have just learned about Joe. “I gotta go.”
“When you see Julia, warn her that Georgie is going to want to see her. Probably she’ll talk me into that tomorrow. I just can’t do it today. That kid sure can make life miserable when she doesn’t get her way. You’re lucky you don’t have any.”
Her attitude stunk, he thought as he jogged quickly to the upper deck. The screen door was open and Tutti was inside with the other couple, the Illingsworths, Sam reminded himself. Tutti turned to Sam accusingly, her hand to her mouth.
The hand dropped. “Your brother’s dead?” she cried.
“I didn’t want to say anything earlier.”
“Oh, my God!” The TV screen showed a shot of the ocean and then the back side of The Derring-Do, the boat’s name visible through the blackened charring of the stern.
“I wasn’t planning on coming,” Sam admitted.
“What about Julia?” she practically shrieked.
“She’s in the hospital. She’s okay. She’ll be okay.”
“Well, what happened? What did she say happened?”
“She . . . hasn’t been able to remember the accident.”
The man detached himself from his willowy wife, who was balancing a martini, looking stunned as she teetered on high heels. “Rob Illingsworth,” he introduced himself as he stepped onto the deck and shook Sam’s hand. He was just under six feet, muscular and wiry. He sported a close-trimmed beard, tan Dockers, and a dark brown T-shirt. His wife was in white capris and a shiny red top.
“This is Sam,” Tutti said distractedly. “Joe’s brother.”
The woman sloshed her drink onto Tutti’s carpet before joining them outside. “Jackie!” Rob snapped at her.
“Sorry . . . sorry, I’m so sorry,” she murmured. She looked absolutely shattered, and she was clearly already less than sober.
“Why is Jules in the hospital?” Tutti asked Sam anxiously as she closed the screen door behind her. “Is she okay?”
“She’s got a broken collarbone. Some head trauma.”
“Can she remember what happened?” Rob asked, frowning.
From the corner of his eye, Sam noticed that Hap and Martina had arrived. Hap was tying up his raft before helping Martina out. Both of them had changed. Hap wore a black silk shirt and pressed denim jeans and Martina had changed into a different sundress, this one black, which showed off her tan legs and a pair of black high-heeled sandals. It took Sam a moment to realize they’d dressed in black for Joe.
“Are you staying at their house?” Rob asked Sam as Hap and Martina greeted everyone.
“No, I’m just trying to piece some things together.”
“You’re investigating?” Rob asked. “Tutti said you’re a cop with the Seaside Police.”
“That’s what Julia told me,” Tutti inserted quickly.
“Was. I’m in between jobs,” Sam said at the same time.
“Jackie and I raised dairy cattle. My dad’s farm outside Tillamook. Big farm. Too much damn work, so we sold a few years ago, and we’ve been looking for something else.”
“We invested with Joe,” Jackie gasped out tearfully. “Now what?”
Tutti grabbed Sam’s arm again. “I’m so sorry,” she declared again. “I’m just so sorry.”
Tina, who had overheard the remark, said a bit huffily, “Your investments are safe, Jackie. Hap’s going to take care of everything.”
“How’s Hap involved in Joe’s business?” Sam asked her.
“Hap has his own firm. Well, with his father, but Walter isn’t doing all that well these days. He’s had some heart trouble, so Hap’s taking over.”
Jackie asked Tina on a gulp, “Did you know about Joe?”
“I heard earlier. It’s terrible. Come on, let’s get you another martini.” Tina put her arm around Jackie and steered her back inside the house where apparently the hard liquor was kept.
Everyone kept commiserating with Sam and each other. Sam’s throat grew tight and he had to cough to clear it several times. Two other smaller boats arrived, bringing two more couples.
The first couple docked their craft and headed up the ladder onto the dock. The man followed beneath the woman. He must have made some comment on her short, blue silk skirt because as soon as she was on the dock, she lifted it higher so he could get an unadulterated view. He laughed and she smiled and strutted away from him. He was carrying a plastic bowl of some potluck dish, balancing it as he got to the dock.
Then the woman spied Sam and he got a good look at her face.
He immediately was thrown back in time to the night of the Triton/Hawks football game . . . the night of Hap’s party . . . the night he met Jules.
Zoey Rivera, he thought in surprise.
What the hell was she doing here?
Zoey saw him at the same time. “Sam!” she shrieked, then ran up the stairs to greet him.
Byron and Zoey. Sam hadn’t clicked to it, when Tutti had said their names. He’d been thinking about other things. Now, as Zoey threw herself into his arms, he saw that her companion was the same Byron from high school, Byron Blanchette, her onetime boyfriend, the one who’d broken up with her because she’d supposedly been with Rafe Stevenson.
“Oh, my God, oh, my God. I heard about your brother,” Zoey said, her whole body shaking. “I’m so sorry. Are you okay? How’re you doing? It’s terrible. Just terrible. What about Julia? Oh, my God, I’m so sorry!”
Byron came up behind her and diffidently offered Sam a hand, which Sam shook. “I’m Byron,” he said. “I remember you.”
“I remember you, too,” Sam said. Byron was about Sam’s same height, though he carried a few extra pounds on his six-two frame. There were faint touches of silver in his dark hair, but he looked fit and strong, as did Zoey.
“We all remember each other,” Tina said with a tight smile as Zoey eased herself out of Sam’s arms.
Hap added, “A lot’s happened since then.”
Zoey’s eyes were teary. “I’m just so shocked. And so, so sorry, Sam.”
“It’s all right.” Sam weathered Zoey’s continued sympathy for a while. He learned Zoey and Byron both worked in Seaside. He was a real estate developer and she was an agent. Zoey wasn’t wearing a ring and it came out that they were living together and had been for quite some time, but there were no wedding plans in the future as yet. Byron handed off the bowl to Tutti, who set about placing it on the outdoor table atop the red and white checked plastic tablecloth.
The other arriving couple was Stuart and Bette Ezra, Jules and Joe’s next-door neighbors, the couple who owned the German shepherds. They were as shell-shocked over the news of Joe’s death as everyone else. Stuart was in his late thirties or early forties and wore a black Polo shirt that emphasized the muscles in his arms. His hair was brownish blond and he sported a close beard a few shades darker. His wife, Bette, had large breasts and was stuffed into a black cotton tank dress that was beyond form-fitting and hugged her curves. Her skin was honey colored and she surveyed him critically through large brown eyes.
Stuart set the casserole dish, filled with some pasta and cheesy thing he’d carried from his rowboat, onto the table beside the bowl from Byron and Zoey, then came up to Sam. “Sorry, man. It’s hard to believe. Joe’s a great guy . . . was, I guess. . . .”
Fragile? Not the Jules he knew. Sam explained about Jules’s injuries to the crowd as a whole. They were all sober, all stunned. He did mention that she was having some troubles with memory, but they all took it that she simply couldn’t recall the accident. He didn’t correct them.
While they were all talking, Tutti buzzed around as the host, checking to make sure the guests had everything they needed. But she kept coming back to Sam, grabbing his arm and hanging on as if for dear life, maybe more for her support than his. Hap spent a lot of that time checking his phone, and Tina seemed to slowly relax a bit, chatting with Zoey and Tutti, while the Illingsworths stood to one side, in some kind of deep discussion.
Sam tried to catalog Joe and Jules’s friends with a detached part of his mind, but their shock and grief renewed his own, and he found himself drifting out of their conversation. The one thought that kept circling was about the gasoline. Why had Joe purchased a can of gas from the marina gas station? Why had he taken it on his boat? The boat fire had been fueled by gas. How had that happened?
Who set the fire?
Tutti opened the bottle of wine Sam had brought and poured herself a glass, taking a large gulp. She then stopped for a moment and leaned her back against the warm exterior wall of her house. She’d changed into short shorts since he’d seen her earlier, which showed off a nice pair of legs. Her pink halter top barely kept her breasts in place, but she seemed oblivious to that fact. Her gaze, Sam realized, tended to fix on Stuart Ezra from time to time.
Huh. Sam glanced across the canal to the house next to Joe and Jules’s, where the dogs, in the slanting sunlight, were now sleeping on the wooden deck. All of the houses on the canal were nestled close together, just a quick boat ride or swim from one back door to the next.
Zoey was going on about high school, a classmate of both Sam and Byron, and it was clear she kind of longed for those days again. Byron, however, made terse, snappish remarks to all of her reminiscences, which seemed to suggest he felt far differently.
When the subject of Joe’s death and Jules’s injuries was exhausted, the group finally moved to other topics, except when one of them was including Sam. If he was part of the discussion they wanted to make sure he was okay, so they kept asking him how he was. Though Sam’s whole purpose for joining the barbecue was to learn anything he could about Joe, he couldn’t get past the well-wishing. Finally Tutti, misunderstanding why he was so quiet, demanded that everyone stop making Sam feel bad, and then she took it upon herself to jabber away about anything under the sun, as long as it didn’t have to do with Joe. It was frustrating, but Sam figured he’d let some time pass, then maybe direct some conversations himself back to Joe and the accident.
In the meantime he learned Tutti’s real name was Kathy Anderson, but no one called her anything but Tutti. It was a nickname her ex, Dirk the bastard, had given her when they were dating because she’d ordered tutti-frutti ice cream on their first date to the fair and spilled it down his front, then had proceeded to lick it off his shirt, right in the middle of the fairgrounds, which had quickly led to their first sex in the fair parking lot in his Dodge Ram truck, right in front of God and everybody, had anybody been walking by at the time, which they hadn’t.
“Got pregnant right away, wouldn’t you know,” she added at the end. “Sean was already here by the time we got married and Devon was the next year. Too bad Dirk turned out to be such a bastard. We had good sex.”
Hap drawled, “The way I hear it, you have good sex with everyone.”
Tutti threw him a surprised look. “Well, if it isn’t good, why have it?” she asked.
“Amen, sister.” Hap gave her a “just kidding” wink, and Tutti waved a hand at him, like he was such a wag. But Sam saw the set smile on her face as her eyes followed him the rest of the evening . . . except when those same eyes slipped a look in Stuart’s direction.
Sam sipped his beer while Tutti went prattling on, explaining that Sean and Devon were thirteen and twelve, respectively, and they lived with their father. “Their choice,” she said shortly. “You know boys that age. They think they’ll have more freedom with him, but they should know better. They want to be here on the weekends, though. They like crabbing and fishing, anything to do with the boat, and of course that god-awful drone, also Dirk’s idea. I make them take it down to the beach.”
Zoey broke from Byron and came back to Sam. “Can I ask you a question about your brother?”
“Go ahead,” Sam said, ready to get back on topic.
But Tutti popped in with, “Sam doesn’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“It’s all right,” Sam assured her.
“How did you learn that it was Joe’s boat? Did the coast guard or Sheriff’s Department call you?” Zoey asked.
“They didn’t have to because I’d guessed before I knew.”
“It’s not all right,” Tutti interrupted. She tried to steer Zoey away, but Zoey wasn’t about to be moved.
Sam continued, “Joe asked me to meet him on his dock, but when I got there, The Derring-Do, Joe’s boat, was gone. I figured he must be on it.”
“Were you supposed to go with him?”
“Zoey,” Tutti complained.
“Not that he said,” Sam said.
“Well, why did he want you to meet at the dock, then?”
“I don’t know,” Sam answered honestly. The question had certainly crossed his mind when he’d gotten the text, but then everything had gone to hell. “He didn’t say there was a plan to go in his boat.”
Tutti gave Zoey a speaking look, so Zoey said, “I won’t ask any more questions if you really don’t want to talk about it any longer, Sam. It’s just . . . it’s so terrible and hard to believe.”
“And that’s why he doesn’t want to talk about it!” Tutti declared.
Zoey ignored her, keying in on Sam, waiting to see which way he’d jump.
“Go ahead,” Sam encouraged her.
“So, the Sheriff’s Department found . . . Joe, or maybe the Salchuk Police?”
“The Salchuk Police,” Byron declared loudly, coming over to be with Zoey. “They’re worse than useless. How’d their name come up in conversation?”
“We were talking about Joe,” Tutti said shortly.
“The coast guard was there,” Sam said.
“Oh, sure.” Zoey shook her head. “I just was wondering how it all happened.”
At that moment Rob Illingsworth called from inside the house. “Sheriff’s on the news about Joe!”
Tutti sighed heavily. She turned to Sam and made a face. “I tried,” she said as the group traipsed into the house.
“It’s okay. It’s all we’re thinking about,” Sam said.
On the television Vandra was relating the facts of the case to the media. He explained that Joseph Ford had drowned following a boating accident. There was a picture of The Derring-Do, up in flames, from either a chopper or a drone. The sheriff said it appeared Ford’s wife was onboard as well, but she was alive and being treated for injuries sustained in the accident. She had been rescued by her brother-in-law, Samuel Ford....
Bette Ezra turned to Sam, eyebrows high. “You saved Julia?”
“I was first on the scene,” Sam said.
“But you saved her,” Zoey repeated. “You did.”
Tina drawled, “Well, of course he did. It was Julia.”
Hap laughed. “You gotta find a way to hide that jealousy, honey.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tina said, and shot him a hard glance.
Jackie Illingsworth had finished her second martini and was swaying on her feet. Stuart Ezra reached out and grabbed her elbow, steadying her. “You might want to sit down.”
Tutti took over from Stuar
t, fussing over Jackie, helping her into an overstuffed chair positioned near a river rock fireplace.
About that time there was a knock on the back slider—another guest, a single man, who had come around the side of the house and onto the deck. Leaving the slider open, he stepped inside, kissed Tutti on the cheek, and introduced himself as Scott Keppler “You’re Joe’s brother,” he guessed, eyeing Sam. “Tutti told me she’d invited you.”
“That’s right.”
“Sorry to hear, about him. Must be rough.” He shook hands with Sam and said that he lived on the same side of the canal as Tutti and had decided to walk rather than travel by boat. He was a big man, about a decade older than the rest of them, somewhere in his forties. He gave Sam a long look, said he looked a lot like Joe, and offered condolences again, saying that he’d seen the earlier news report.
Bette Ezra watched Scott’s back as he took his bottle of wine out to the dock to add with the rest. “He was Joe’s lawyer,” she said in an aside to Sam. “But something happened, and he no longer is.”
Sam really examined Jules’s next-door neighbor. There was something sultry about Bette that was arresting. “You have the German shepherds, Less and More.” He hitched his chin toward the Ezras’ house where he could see the dogs still sleeping on the deck, though clouds had crawled across the sky, blocking the sun.
“I just picked ’em up from doggy day care. They haven’t bothered you, have they? How’d you know their names?”
From behind Sam, Stuart said, “Joe told him,” in a tone that suggested Bette was slow on the uptake.
“Actually, I heard Hap call them by name,” Sam explained.
“Hap?” Bette looked over at Hap, who was back to examining his phone. “The dogs don’t like him.”
“They’re in fine company then,” Stuart said. “Lots of people have issues with Hap.”
“Yeah?” Sam asked, taking a sip from his beer.
Stuart shook his head and said quickly, “Just kidding.”
Sam wondered. He sensed all wasn’t exactly Norman Rockwell perfect on Fisher Canal. Despite the laughter and conversation, the pretense of congeniality, there was something more going on here.