Keepsake for Eagle Cove

by M. L. Buchman

  “What?” Jessica sounded only a little friendlier than the dangerous bride had been.

  “I just realized that my elementary school back in Chicago was a couple times bigger than this entire town. And my high school was ten times that.”

  “Chicago?” Jessica lit up like he’d just said the magic password. “What part of the city?”

  “North, mostly. And central,” and it felt like dust on his tongue to even say that much.

  “The Gaztro-Wagon,” Jessica said with a happy sigh.

  “The Southern Mac & Cheese Truck.” Devin did miss the food already even though he’d been gone for only three days. To find another fan of the Chicago food trucks out in the wilderness of the Oregon Coast was something of a relief. Maybe civilization wasn’t so far away.

  “The Mexican-wrestling-mask and sombrero guys,” Jessica offered next. “Their truck had a weird name.”

  “Tamalli Space Charros! Those guys are the best.” Devin felt a sudden homesickness so deep he almost felt ill.

  “No,” Jessica said as if commanding him not to go there. “The Flirty Cupcakes food truck. They’re the best.”

  And he did feel a little better for meeting her.

  Tiffany had watched their reactions.

  Jessica’s acceptance of Devin grew rapidly based on no more than shared gastronomical experiences in a city thousands of miles away. Such simple things to tie people together. Why did she never find that? Her connections were never simple.

  Devin, too, was much more complex than he’d first appeared. He shifted between joy at discovering a fellow urbanite and…Tiffany almost wondered if he was going to be sick at other moments. There was some history there that wasn’t sitting comfortably. He—

  “Where are you from?”

  “Nob Hill, San Francisco,” Devin’s question surprised the answer out of her.

  “Well, that explains the long hair,” Jessica declared, as if San Francisco was still rooted in the 1960s and ’70s.

  It wasn’t true. When she’d been growing up there, she’d had the same stylish haircuts as the other girls. Eventually she’d learned to dislike the attention they drew, at school and from her stepfather. She’d burned her hip clothes and grown her hair long to hide behind, but it had been too little, too late. Even after she’d managed to have him jailed, which created a major scandal for the global bank he was on the board of, she’d kept the frumpy look. By graduation she’d had the longest hair of her entire school except for two girls from India.

  Last night she’d been reading her ancestor’s journal that had become her guide on being a woman and come across a passage she had long since forgotten about. It directly contradicted the town legend that the town’s streets had been so curiously named because the mother and daughter had fought and were no longer on speaking terms. That was the part that she had referred to when speaking with Jessica. Tiffany liked to remember Lillian’s sense of humor when she was feeling sad herself.

  August, 1887

  Clarence loved to brush my hair. My husband was not an expressive man, but my long hair was an endless wonder to him. Now he has gone and left me with a seven-year-old daughter and a town that is little more than a dozen shacks and a bounty of timber and fish.

  We are lost here in the Oregon wilderness.

  But it is not in my blood to give up, not when my little Pearl grieves so. To cheer her, I have made a game. Together we have designed how the town of Eagle Cove shall someday appear. No longer a rough logging and fishing camp huddled by the bay.

  We have drawn a map. Pearl has run a ruler line down the middle of the main street. “I’ll name all of the streets on this side.”

  “Then,” I told her, “I shall name all on the other.”

  “My half is seabirds,” Pearl declared. When I indicated that she had selected the landward side of the town and yet would name it for seabirds, she did not care. “Don’t use any of my names,” she has commanded. Taking her instructions to heart, I have named my “half” for land birds.

  Eagle Cove is only forest and clearing, so it matters not that her streets wander and curve strangely. In response, I have drawn one that follows the entire shore to the far distant bluff of Orca Head though I cannot imagine the town every reaching so far. I have named my wandering street LBB Lane, complaining that there are too many Little Brown Birds to sort out. That made my daughter’s laugh ring once more in our lonely home and we are both happier for it.

  The game has served its purpose and distracted her from her grief. A task well done though it fails to distract me from my own worry and grief.

  I so miss the man who loved to brush my hair.

  Tiffany’s own hair was now as long as her ancestor’s. Though there had never been a man to brush it for her. But when she brushed her own hair each night, she would pretend it was Lillian’s Clarence caring for her. Of course he’d be far too old for her, well over a hundred and fifty if he’d lived, which would have made Tiffany laugh had she been alone. Her cat would appreciate the story; she made a mental note to tell Fitz tonight when she retur—

  “How many in your high school?” Devin asked.

  “Too many!” His question acted as a whiplash out of the past. There had been too many who wanted to take down the rich girl with the long hair. Too many with grasping hands who knew how to corner a shy girl and—

  “Man do I know that feeling!” Devin agreed.

  For a second she jolted. Had he too been—

  “Feels like you’re lost in a crowd.”

  No, he was happy.

  Joking.

  Which was as elusive for her as flirting.

  She did her best to nod as if she’d felt the same about her school days.

  After high school she’d changed her name, packed her harp and her several times great-grandmother’s diary (her second cherished possession), and taken her trust-fund inheritance with her to Lewis & Clark Law School in the woods of Oregon.

  She didn’t go back for her stepfather’s funeral after he was killed by a couple of lifers inside the jail. He’d probably bragged to the wrong person about his “conquests.” Or maybe they just didn’t like bankers.

  Tiffany didn’t go back to her mother’s third high-society wedding, either.

  And, though she’d considered it seriously, she also didn’t go back and confront the harassers and abusers from her high school in a court of law. Though it had been very tempting, she knew that without hard evidence there was little she could do. However, she had listed them prominently on multiple molester sites. Several reputations had been destroyed but she refused to feel guilty, especially after other women had begun adding their own accounts to those listings.

  In all of California, the only person who knew her present name and whereabouts was a lawyer who utterly despised the family lawyer. Tiffany could trust him to keep her confidence out of mere spite, completely aside from professional attorney-client privilege considerations.

  “Won’t get lost in the crowd here,” Jessica was telling Devin. She had not departed along with Mrs. Winslow but had remained to chat, yet another skill Tiffany could wish for but had never acquired. “My graduating class had thirty-three of us.”

  “There he is!” Gina Lamont shouted out as she rushed up. “Devin, you made it!”

  “Told you,” Jessica made it an aside. “No hiding here.”

  Tiffany had done a fair job of that so far, but she could feel it crumbling around the edges, chipped away by good intentions of kind people. She had roots here now, roots grown from seeds planted by the discovery of the old journal in the family library. But today’s revelations were more than—

  “Oh good, Jessica,” Gina patted her on the shoulder. “You’re sitting down. Tiffany, keep an eye on her. Don’t let her help with anything.”

  Tiffany nodded. She wouldn’t have anyway.

  Jessica groaned in disgust at being pampered, though she made no move to rise either.

  Gina turned to inspect Devin,
who was struggling to his feet. She did that to people. Her five-ten height was the only trait Gina shared with her daughter. Natalya was a dusky-skinned, slender, and dark brunette with nearly black eyes and a sharp sense of humor. Her mother was a voluptuous, blue-eyed redhead with almost as much joyous energy as Becky. She too had changed into wedding black, but with a flirty cut that must be making her new husband crazy.

  Sure enough, Tiffany spotted Cal Mason Sr. crossing in their direction with his son and his new daughter-in-law in tow. Unlike the Lamont women, the two Mason men were cut from nearly identical cloth—or perhaps baked from the same dough as they co-owned the town’s bakery. (Tiffany kept her smile at the apt analogy to herself. Devin noticed far too much, as if from him she had no secrets at all.) They were both well over six feet tall and built like Swedish linebackers. In their matching charcoal-gray tuxedos, they were completely astonishing to look at. They’d have dominated any setting…that didn’t have Gina and Natalya in it.

  A small husky puppy trotted along behind Cal Jr. It had a good bite on its own leash.

  Natalya noticed the direction of her attention, “I gave her to Cal as a wedding present.”

  “The little devil is gonna chew through everything in the place,” Cal Jr. said with obvious affection as he tugged back and forth on the leash to play with the dog.

  Then the puppy noticed the strap on Tiffany’s harp case and lunged for it. Cal scooped him up just a moment before she could cry out.

  “Scamp! Should name you Gnat Jr. for your troublemaker mom.” Tiffany had heard him call Natalya “Gnat”—a nickname that apparently went back to kindergarten.

  “You do and you’re spending your wedding night on the couch. Alone,” Natalya wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding her smile while making the threat.

  Cal looked at the dog. “Sorry, buddy. Guess you won’t get your name until tomorrow. Got me some things to do tonight.”

  “Such as locking up all of our shoes,” Natalya tickled the puppy’s nose.

  “This the boy?” Cal Sr. ignored his son’s and new daughter-in-law’s antics as he slipped his hand around Gina’s waist and looked Devin up and down. Both women looked ridiculously pleased at the attentiveness of their new husbands.

  Would Tiffany look that way on her own wedding day? If she ever found someone she was willing to have a wedding with. It was an event she’d never been able to picture clearly. Lillian Lamont’s journal offered little guidance as it was not even the highlight of the day’s entry:

  March 1, 1879

  Wed to Clarence Lamont by the ship’s captain before he delivered us and our supplies to this unnamed strip of desolate beach close beside the Eagle River in Oregon. Though the beach is straight, I have called it Eagle Cove because I need some sense of boundary in this terrifying wilderness.

  “He is ‘the boy’,” Gina confirmed, then asked, “Aren’t you?”

  “I think so,” Devin replied calmly despite the arrival of so many new people. It was an equanimity she had never managed herself. “Of course, that depends on who you think I am.”

  Tiffany had been puzzling at that since his arrival. Had almost managed to ask the question herself before Mrs. Winslow’s interruption. Not a guest. Hired by Gina. But he’d been given the second best room in the B&B (Gina lived in the best rooms—her ancestor’s master suite). For what? She already had her summer help at the B&B lined up.

  “What have you built, boy?” Cal Sr. asked.

  “Now, Cal,” Gina tried to stop him. “We both asked Devin plenty of questions when we interviewed and hired him.”

  “That was over the phone,” Cal grumped. “I like to judge a man in person.”

  Tiffany glanced around. Natalya, Cal Jr., and Jessica were all as lost as she was. So it wasn’t something that she’d missed by only coming to town twice a week for knitting group and to sell her produce.

  “It’s okay, ma’am,” Devin told Gina, who smiled at being called “ma’am.”

  Devin waved a hand at the B&B.

  “I’ve never built anything as pretty as that, but I’ve restored several of them. As to modern houses, I’ve designed a couple dozen and built them myself, or my crew did—some designs many times. Degree in architecture, but make my living as carpenter and general contractor. Wanted to build my own company to see what it was all about before joining my father’s big business.”

  Tiffany could see the flinch. That last statement had thrown Devin at least as badly as her own admission about knowing a key piece of the town’s history. But unlike her own instinct to duck and dodge, Devin continued easily and no one besides herself seemed to notice.

  “Doesn’t look like this old girl needs much help,” he waved again to the grand Victorian, directing everyone’s attention there.

  But not looking himself.

  Tiffany could see him watching the others cautiously, then slowly relaxing. She was glad that he didn’t check in her direction.

  “Oh,” Cal Jr. winced at some memory as he spoke, “she has her issues now and then.”

  “Wimp!” His wife informed him.

  “You weren’t the one who had to go swimming in the basement last winter to fix the sump pump. That water was so cold that—”

  “Whiner!” Natalya and her mother said in unison, then shared a smile while Cal Jr. sputtered, then Gina patted his cheek in obvious appreciation.

  “Maybe I should just talk with the pup,” Cal addressed the dog currently shedding fur on his dark tuxedo. “You women are dangerous.” Then Cal Jr. looked down at Tiffany. “Tiffany, are you dangerous, too?”

  Tiffany could feel her jaw flapping. She hadn’t even realized that Cal knew her name.

  “Of course she is,” Jessica announced, resting a hand on Tiffany’s shoulder. “Don’t mess with her or you’ll regret it.”

  Tiffany noted Jessica’s smile and felt the warm squeeze on her shoulder. Tiffany wasn’t dangerous, but she did like the way the tingling sensation of being included felt. Natalya, on the other hand, was the most dangerous of them all and was gearing up to renew her attack on poor Devin.

  “What is he here to build then?” Tiffany tried to turn the conversation back to the safer topic. It earned her surprised looks from Natalya and Jessica that she did her best to ignore.

  “You can show him on your way home,” Cal Sr. dug a key ring out of his tuxedo pocket with one key on it and tossed it to Tiffany. There was a small, stamped-metal label threaded onto the same ring. USCG Keeper’s Cottage—Orca Head. She showed it to Jessica before passing the key across to Devin.

  “We purchased it from the US Coast Guard,” Gina announced happily.

  “Gonna be a nice annex for my wife’s B&B. So you make it pretty, Devin. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Devin shook hands with Cal Sr. It looked very strong and manly. “But where is it?”

  Tiffany pointed up at the lighthouse perched atop the rocky headland of Orca Head. “If you thought this house was remote…” And that’s when she understood that for the first time, there would be people, well, one person, much closer to her farm than the Lamont B&B.

  She was definitely going to declare her own country. And she’d install a large moat and train her cat in border patrol.

  Chapter 2

  “Should I have brought my truck?” Devin couldn’t help looking back down the narrow lane as the B&B disappeared from sight, swallowed by the towering pine trees. He felt as if he was never going to see it again.

  “Is it a four-wheel drive?”

  “Sure. A Toyota pickup.” They were walking in side-by-side ruts, up something Tiffany insisted on calling a road despite the deep grass and low brush that was growing between them. The woods were a profusion of thick trees, a half dozen kinds of conifers and a couple more leafy types—the only ones he recognized were maples and some variety of oak. The undergrowth was so thick he wondered if a machete would even be sufficient, though farther in, deep under the pines, the way looked passable, but not along this r
oad/path/track into the wilderness. Even the pine trees looked different than the ones in the parks back home. He really should have traveled more, but he’d never felt a need to leave the city…until it ejected him forcibly.

  “Yours is the little blue SR5?”

  “Uh-huh,” she didn’t miss anything. He’d parked among the fifty other vehicles on the far side of a line of trees, yet Tiffany had picked it out through the branches as not belonging.

  “You may want to fix the road first, before trying it with that. Peggy has a road grader you can borrow.”

  “Peggy?”

  “Small woman with red hair, married to Judge Slater.” He couldn’t place her, though the Judge had been hard to miss: as big as Cal Mason Sr., though not quite as tall as Cal Jr.

  “And she has a road grader?”

  Tiffany looked at him as if he was being an idiot. Well, maybe he was. They were hiking into a wilderness that could be filled with wolves or cougars or whatever. All they were armed with was Tiffany’s harp in a padded backpack case. He didn’t think the Swiss army knife in his pocket would count for much in a life-and-death situation. “Music soothes the savage beast,” was a misquote he’d rather not test personally.

  And he was being told he could “borrow” a road grader from the Judge’s wife? Had he landed in the land of the Amazons?

  “I’ve never driven anything bigger than a Bobcat.”

  “Oh, I have one of those if you ever need it. Though I’m not sure I could get it from my farm to the lighthouse. I’d have to take some measurements along the trail.”

  “Your farm. You have a farm?”

  She waved vaguely up the hill.

  “Up here?” Now Devin himself could hear how stupid he was sounding. He wasn’t used to being so out of his depth. Today was being a harsh lesson.

  “Farther back,” Tiffany didn’t explain more. “But this is where you’ll be working.”

  The path crested the ridge and at first he didn’t see what she was talking about as the trees to the east were still thick as could be.