by Robbi McCoy
“Did you have tacos last night?” Jackie asked.
“No.” She was past holding back now. “But I did give him a cookie. They were so good. Mr. Wiggles loved it, didn’t you, Mr. Wiggles?” She took his face between her hands and kissed his nose.
“What kind of cookies?” Jackie asked.
“No chocolate. Just regular sugar cookies with macadamia nuts.”
Jackie drew in a sharp breath. “Macadamia nuts are toxic to dogs.”
“They are?” Mrs. Chen’s eyes widened.
“Yes. How many nuts would you say he had?”
“I don’t know.” Mrs. Chen looked alarmed. “One cookie’s worth.”
Jackie told Mrs. Chen she’d keep Mr. Wiggles for observation for the rest of the day, to make sure he didn’t show any signs of nervous system disorders.
“Don’t worry,” Jackie said. “He’ll be fine. It just has to work itself out of his system.”
Mrs. Chen went away in tears, understandably distraught that she, not her neighbor, had been the agent of harm to her dog.
“Let’s find you a quiet spot to rest,” Jackie said to Mr. Wiggles, tucking his compact body under her arm. “It’s that cute little mug of yours, isn’t it? Who could resist giving you a treat?”
By three o’clock, Mr. Wiggles was much livelier, running around the back room playing with a ball. His temperature had returned to normal. Jackie gave him a little food, which he kept down.
“I’m going to take Mr. Wiggles home,” she told Niko around four. “We can lock up a little early today.”
“Do you have plans?” he asked.
“Nothing special. Maybe I’ll take the kayak out. You can leave whenever you’re done.”
“Thanks. But before you go, there’s something super important I have to tell you.”
About to leave the room, Jackie stopped and faced Niko. “Oh? What?”
“A dog wearing a cowboy hat, spurs and chaps limps into a vet’s office with his leg wrapped in bandages. He sidles up to the counter and says, ‘I’m lookin’ for the man that shot my paw.’”
CHAPTER FIVE
Remembering the woman and golden retriever from a few days earlier, Jackie headed to Duggan Creek after taking Mr. Wiggles home, this time by herself, paddling down the center of the waterway under a late afternoon sun. She didn’t expect to see the woman again, but had been thinking about her, wondering who she was.
As she approached the spot she’d first seen the dog, she could hear a steady banging, like someone hammering on wood. She stopped paddling and listened. The noise was coming from some distance back from the creek. She paddled over to the edge and stepped out of the kayak into shallow water. She pulled her boat up on shore, then scrambled up the bank and emerged in what was clearly a cow pasture, evidenced by a heavy pattern of hoofprints in dried mud. There were no cows in sight, just a field of straw-colored grass with a barbed wire fence marking a boundary to the north. Beyond that, a couple of horses grazed in the neighboring field.
She walked to the top of the rise toward the hammering noise. As the view opened up and the noise got louder, she saw something she would never have anticipated: a houseboat. She stopped walking and stared. Definitely a houseboat. It was a rectangular white box with pale blue trim, a flat, railed-in viewing deck up top and two torpedo-shaped pontoons underneath. It had a flat deck that extended a couple feet on either side of the main cabin and several feet fore and aft, altogether about forty feet long. The fore deck was covered with a permanent metal awning and had two folding chairs on it. The boat looked old, beat up, in need of a good paint job and probably a lot more. It sat atop heavy wooden blocks, the pontoons clearing the ground by several inches. There was no one in sight.
The hammering stopped.
Overcoming her surprise, Jackie started moving again, walking toward the vessel as the buzz of a power tool ensued. As she neared the boat, she noticed there was a road nearby, a small country lane, and an unpaved driveway leading right up to the boat like any driveway to any house. Parked in the driveway was a silver and black motorcycle.
As she cleared the bow, the power tool went silent, but she could now see the source of the noise. A woman stood next to a pair of sawhorses, positioning a sheet of wood paneling across them. It was the same woman, Jackie realized, that she and Gail had seen the other day: Miss Tall, Dark and Delicious. She wore olive green shorts and a black tank top. Her smooth, muscular arms were bare, biceps flexing as she put the panel into position. Her wavy brown hair fell across the side of her face, obscuring her eyes from view. A circular saw lay on the ground beside her feet, an orange extension cord connecting it to some unseen power source behind the boat.
Jackie was about to say hello when the golden retriever burst out from behind the woman, barking. The dog rushed at her, but stopped six feet away, standing between Jackie and his owner. Startled, Jackie stumbled backward just as something whizzed past her head. She reeled, tripped over her own feet and fell to the ground, butt first.
The dog barked again, but didn’t appear menacing. In fact, a couple of whimpers interspersed between barks told Jackie he wasn’t sure how to respond.
“Deuce!” the woman called sharply. “Sit!”
He obeyed her and went silent, looking anxiously back and forth between the two women. Still on her butt, Jackie got her first good look at the stranger’s face. Wow! she thought. She’s gorgeous! In contrast to her dark hair, her eyes were light, bluish-hazel and wary. Her face was angular with pronounced cheekbones. Her lips were so full and pouty she looked a little like she was sulking. She seemed about the same age as Jackie, somewhere around thirty, give or take. She held herself with an air of confidence and vigilance, as if she were just shy of snapping to attention. Remembering the camouflage pants from the other day, Jackie wondered if Miss Tall, Dark and Delicious had a military background.
She walked over to where Jackie sat in the dirt, raised an eyebrow with an expression of curiosity, then stepped past her to yank a dagger-like knife out of the trunk of a tree. Jackie realized that was what had gone singing past her head a moment ago. The woman held the knife firmly in one hand. Then she reached the other out to Jackie, who hesitated before taking it. She felt the strength of the arm that pulled her to her feet.
“You could have killed me with that,” Jackie accused, indicating the knife.
“I could have,” agreed the woman matter-of-factly, “if I’d been aiming at you.”
They stood facing one another. The expression on the woman’s face was passive, her eyes calm and unrevealing. Her forehead was beaded with sweat, a few strands of hair pasted in place across it.
“A girl’s gotta defend herself,” she said in a breezy voice that seemed to mock the whole idea of a girl needing to defend herself. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people.”
“I wasn’t sneaking. I didn’t have a chance to say anything before your dog came after me.”
“Deuce,” the woman said, snapping her fingers toward the dog. He trotted over to her side. “This is Deuce. And I’m Stef.”
“Stef? Short for Stepha—”
“Just Stef.”
“I’m Jackie. Golden retrievers are usually pretty mild-mannered. Deuce seems kind of high-strung.”
Stef shook her head. “He’s not. You scared him. He’s actually really gentle.”
As if to prove it, Deuce wagged his tail and came over to sniff Jackie’s hand. She patted his head and began to feel more relaxed. “Personally, I prefer a gun for self-defense,” she said. “More control.”
Stef looked amused, curling up one side of her mouth as if in a reluctant smile.
“See the light spot on the trunk of that oak over there?” she asked, pointing to a tree forty feet away. A five-inch circle of bark was missing from the tree trunk, revealing the lighter wood beneath. Stef pulled the knife behind her head, then threw it hard, one foot coming off the ground behind her like a pitcher releasing a fast ball. The knife flew so fast Jackie b
arely saw it before she heard a sharp crack of wood and it stood embedded in the dead center of the target.
“More control than that?” Stef asked coolly.
Jackie stared with disbelief at the knife, then at Stef, who smiled condescendingly, her expression one of haughtiness. She thinks she’s all that, Jackie realized, and then decided maybe she was, at least when it came to knife throwing.
“If I tried that,” Jackie admitted, “I’d slice my hand off.”
“You don’t actually touch the blade. You’re thinking of the spinning method. This knife’s better for straight throwing.” Stef walked over and retrieved her knife, then returned with it lying across her palm. “It’s a World War II combat knife. Fairbairn-Sykes. It belonged to my grandfather. He was an Army Ranger.”
“Nice souvenir. And your skill is scary cool.”
“Just a matter of practice.”
“Same with a gun,” Jackie pointed out.
“You have a gun?”
“A shotgun.”
“Do you hunt?”
“I do some target shooting now and then. I don’t get any pleasure out of killing animals. How about you?”
“I’m not into guns,” Stef said flatly.
“Have you ever shot one?”
“Yeah.”
A woman of few words, Jackie noted. “What about fishing? Do you fish?”
“Never tried it.”
“You don’t hunt or fish. You might not like it here much. Everybody’s into hunting and fishing around here. Other sports too. Water sports, mostly. Skiing, parasailing. I like kayaking myself. I saw you the other day when I was out with my friend Gail. Maybe you remember.” Jackie waited, but Stef didn’t seem inclined to respond. “Do you kayak?”
Stef narrowed her eyes at Jackie, her expression solemn, and shoved her knife into a tree stump. “What are you doing here, Jackie?”
Jackie shrugged. “Just curious. I didn’t know anybody lived here. I thought this was all grazing land, this side of Duggan Creek. I haven’t been down this road in a long time, but there were never any houses along this stretch.”
They both glanced at the houseboat.
“Or boats,” Jackie quipped.
“Then you haven’t been here in a while. This boat’s been here three years.”
“It has?”
“That’s what I was told. I bought it from an old guy who used to live on the river. This was his idea of settling down, I guess. Actually, he didn’t have much choice. The condition she’s in, if you tried to put her on the water, she’d sink.” Stef laid a hand on the side of the boat and patted it like a pet. “I got a good deal on this tub.”
“I’m not surprised,” Jackie said. “Does this tub have a name?”
“He called it Compton’s Castle. That’s not going to work for me. Still working on its new name.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Three weeks.”
“I figured you must be new. The town’s so small, everybody knows everybody and I know I’ve never seen you.” Jackie let her gaze drop momentarily to Stef’s chest where the skin just under her collarbone sparkled with perspiration. “I would have remembered,” she added.
Stef tilted her head and regarded Jackie coolly. “I won’t be staying long. The plan is to get her back in the water in a few weeks.”
“Really?” Jackie glanced at the boat, astonished. “Is that possible?”
“Don’t see why not. Obviously, it’s going to take some work. The engine’s dead. Propeller’s broken. There’s some wood rot. That’s what I’m working on now. Replacing ceiling panels in the main cabin. I guess it had a few leaks up top, but I’ve put on some of that rubberized roof coating, so it should be good now. It’ll all come together.”
Stef smiled. She had a pretty face, lean and smooth like the rest of her. Her luxurious brown hair was beautiful. Her multi-hued eyes were serious, solemn even, a trait that appealed to Jackie. She didn’t like frivolous women. You could tell right away there was nothing frivolous about Stef.
“You’re going to live on the river?” asked Jackie.
“Yep. They say there’s almost a thousand miles of navigable water here in the Delta. Plenty of room to explore.”
Or get lost, Jackie thought, remembering that Stef had never been fishing, so didn’t likely have a boating background. “What made you decide to do that?”
Stef looked momentarily thoughtful, then said, “I’m pretty busy here. I need to get back to this.”
“Oh. Sorry. I could help. I know how to handle tools.”
Stef smiled half-heartedly. “No, thanks. I’d just as soon do it myself.”
“But it would go faster if—”
“No,” Stef said more firmly, “thanks.” Her expression was tense and unwelcoming.
“Okay,” Jackie relented. “Good luck, then.”
Stef nodded tersely and turned back to her paneling. Jackie realized there was nothing to do but leave, so she walked back across the pasture to the line of trees marking the edge of the creek, then launched her kayak and went on her way. As she paddled, she went over the encounter in her mind. Stef had asked her nothing about herself, had shown absolutely no interest. Nor had she attempted to be friendly as you might expect from a new resident. But then she wasn’t planning on staying, as she had made clear. Still, she didn’t have to be so indifferent. If you counted the knife-throwing, it was worse than indifferent. More like hostile.
What kind of woman goes off to live on a houseboat on her own? Jackie asked herself as she headed home.
***
Stef dug through the musty hold looking for a slotted screwdriver. Old man Compton had been thoughtful enough to leave his tools behind. Fishing equipment too. Most of it. He’d taken one fishing pole and a tackle box in case he wanted to do a little fishing from the bank. He’d pronounced himself done with boats. She could have the rest.
She wasn’t sure she wanted the rest. There were rods, reels, lures, spools of fishing line, packages of hooks and sinkers and a lot of rust. She’d decided to hang onto this stuff for a while. Living on the river would be a whole new sort of life. Fishing might be fun, a good way to pass the time and relax. But at the moment the fishing gear was just in the way.
Once she found the screwdriver, she walked to the stern of the boat, passing by her knife sticking out of a tree stump. That reminded her of her visitor from earlier: Jackie. Cute girl. Late twenties with a trim body. Short brown hair. Intelligent, thoughtful brown eyes. Big, eager smile. Except when that knife flew past her head. She might have thought it was a close shave, but it wasn’t. Stef had given her a three-foot berth, easy. She just didn’t want her to feel too welcome. Even if she was nice to look at, Stef had no time for or interest in making friends. Stillwater Bay was just a place she was trying to get out of.
She pulled the knife from the stump and slid it into the leather holster on her belt. Then smiled to herself, remembering Jackie’s wide-eyed disbelief when she’d realized what had sailed past her head. Screwdriver in hand, Stef positioned herself above the open engine.
Gay or straight? she asked herself as she removed the flywheel to get to the points and coils. Hard to say. Nothing stood out. Probably straight. Most people were. Law of averages. Stef thought she herself gave off a definite lesbian vibe, so if Jackie were gay, she’d have picked up on that and given some indication they had that in common. Which she didn’t.
Didn’t matter anyway, Stef reminded herself, since they weren’t going to be friends…or anything at all to one another.
Thinking of friends “or anything at all,” Stef’s mind drifted to thoughts of Erin. It had never been truly serious between them, though Erin had been spending nights at Stef’s apartment for a while. But they both seemed to be taking things lightly, enjoying one another’s company, not making any demands, not talking about the future. Everything had been cool until…
The old coils in the engine were visibly cracked. She removed them a
nd opened the package containing the new ones, wishing every train of thought didn’t lead to the same place. It was like there was a meaningful life before that day three months ago and then something else after it—a kind of purgatory she was trapped in.
CHAPTER SIX
Over the years, Jackie’s mother’s passion for gossip had been a frequent embarrassment to her daughter. In a town where everybody knew everybody, Ida Townsend knew everything about everybody. At least that was her goal and she spent endless hours engaged in the social networking that kept her in the know. Owning a local business helped, as it kept her in touch with everybody in town, with no more than two or three degrees of separation. Jackie hadn’t inherited the interest or skill for invading people’s privacy, but tonight she was counting on her mother’s resources to inform her about Stef. Surely Ida would know something about the mysterious young woman in the houseboat. And if she knew something, she’d be happy to tell it.
Jackie hadn’t been able to get Stef out of her mind. There was something about her, a look in her eye that undermined all the bravado and derision she demonstrated with her words and behavior. Jackie knew that look. It was the look of an injured animal that disguises its infirmity with a show of exaggerated aggression. It was a posture of desperation. That’s what Jackie saw in Stef and it called out to her.
When she arrived at her parents’ house, she found it empty. This time of the evening, she knew she’d find them sitting outside by the slough. They used their private dock like a patio most evenings, sitting on lawn chairs and watching fish jump for mosquitoes.
It was still light out when Jackie walked through the backyard and up a steep flight of wooden stairs to the top of the levee and the dock. Her parents sat in their usual places, her father on the left, her mother on the right, only the tops of their heads visible above the railing of the deck. They sat in sturdy redwood chairs facing the water, its murky green surface calm and unbroken. Dad was drinking a beer, which rested in a cup holder fastened to the arm of his chair. Mom had a can of mixed nuts open on the little table beside her and her bare feet were propped up on a wooden stool. Her sneakers had been placed side by side under her chair. Adam, Jackie’s five-year-old nephew, sat at the edge of the dock with his bare legs dangling over, a blue baseball cap on his head, a fringe of straw-colored hair protruding beneath it. It must be a school night for her sister Becca, Jackie realized, if her parents were babysitting.