Lakeside Cottage

by Susan Wiggs

  The flow of events unfolded with a peculiar inevitability. Later—much, much later—Harris would watch the videos made by both the security monitors and the press corps, but he would remember none of it.

  Seconds before the personnel in the hallway responded to the alert, the patient swept aside the thermal blanket. With his free hand, he yanked away the gown to reveal rows of dynamite duct taped to a body-hugging vest.

  “Anybody takes me out,” he screamed at the glass wall, “and I go up like the Fourth of July. And I take this whole wing of the building with me.” He leaped to the floor and glared at the horrified crowd on the other side of the glass. His fist closed around the igniter, ready to detonate the explosives.

  The President stood stock-still. Darnelle Jefferson gave a hiccuping gasp of sheer terror. Harris froze, too experienced to let fear get in the way. He recognized the shield tattooed on Muldoon’s forearm. It was the iron falcon and sword of a Special Forces unit.

  So they were dealing with a rogue from Special Forces, as highly trained as Harris himself, a disciplined killer gone awry. The assassin hadn’t seen him yet. He was strutting in front of the wire-embedded glass while a dozen firearms were aimed at him.

  Harris studied the homemade explosive vest and wondered how the hell the transport crew had failed to notice it. The explosives appeared to be plastic ordnance with an igniter operated by a toggle mechanism secured with more duct tape and connected to wires that would activate the explosives. It would have to be detonated manually, unless there was a secondary trigger he wasn’t seeing.

  Outside the cubicle, bodyguards and marines broke into action. Honed by countless drills, procedure would be followed to the letter. There would be an immediate lockdown, all units would come to full alert and alarms would shriek across the vast, snowy campus of Walter Reed. Even now, a security squadron was probably surrounding the building.

  Mrs. Jefferson made a tiny sound for such a big woman and fainted dead away, taking a Lifepak monitor along with her. It crashed to the floor, startling Muldoon, and Harris was sure he’d spook and ignite the explosives. His left hand, which had been gripping the manual trigger, let go momentarily as he regrouped.

  Darnelle had given Harris a seconds-long window of opportunity. Knowing he had a chance was all he needed. It was only one chance, though. If he blew it, they were all toast. Or confetti, more accurately.

  He burst through the double doors, everything focused on the assailant’s trigger hand. His entire body launched itself at the assassin in a single-move tactic, one he’d been trained for but had never used until now.

  Muldoon went down, screaming as Harris crushed the man’s left wrist to disable his hand. They hit the floor together. Muldoon was shocky from the crushed wrist. That was something.

  There was a sound like a rifle shot. Harris felt something hit him like a cannonball. Jesus, had the son of a bitch detonated the explosives?

  No, the igniter, Harris realized. The impact had triggered it, but it had misfired. That was the good news. The bad news was, the failed explosion was killing him. His limbs went immediately ice cold as if everything had been sucked out of him. He was aware of movement all around, the President taking cover, the frenzy of highly trained Secret Service men jolted into action. Alarms bayed and someone was screaming. A furious ringing sound blared in his ears. The reek of chemicals seared his throat.

  The world dissolved into double images as Harris’s consciousness seeped away like the blood on the floor. Sounds stretched out with an eerie echo, as though shouted down a well. “Freeze…freeze, freeze….” The barked order reverberated through Harris’s head. “Nobody move! oove, oove….”

  Harris’s pulse was thready. Lying in a widening pool of blood, he imagined each system shutting down, one by one, a theater’s lights going dim after a final performance. He felt himself quiver, or maybe it was the assassin struggling against him. To die like this, he thought, at the President’s feet. That just sucked. Offended his sense of propriety. Sure, it wouldn’t matter to him after he was gone. It shouldn’t matter at all, but somehow it did.

  Harris could see his own reflection in the dome of the 360-degree security camera mounted in the ceiling. Blood spreading out like an inky carpet. It always looks worse than it is, he told himself. He said that to his patients all the time.

  The swarm descended, a pandemonium of black suits and dress uniforms as the Secret Service came forward to apprehend the crazy and secure the chief executive.

  Harris was cold and headed somewhere dark. He could feel himself slipping, falling into a black well.

  “Make way,” a loud voice barked, the words echoing, then fading. “Somebody get this man some help.”

  PART TWO

  “The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it.”

  —Alan Saporta, American musician

  Two

  Port Angeles, Washington

  Summer

  “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a half-grown boy must be in want of a husband.” Squinting through her vintage cat’seye glasses, Mable Claire Newman defied Kate Livingston to contradict her.

  “Very funny,” Kate said. “You tell me this every year.”

  “Because every summer, you come back here, still single.”

  “Maybe I like being single,” Kate told her.

  Mable Claire aimed a look out the window of the property management office at the half-grown boy and his full-grown beagle, playing tug-of-war with a sock in Kate’s Jeep. “Are you at least dating someone?”

  “Dating I can manage. It’s getting them to come back that seems to be the problem.” Kate offered a self-deprecating grin, an almost jaunty grin, just wide enough to hide behind. Men were often startled to discover she was a mother; she’d had Aaron at twenty and had always looked young for her age. And when they saw what a handful her boy was, they tended to head straight for the door.

  “They’re nuts, then. You just haven’t run into the right fellow.” Mable Claire winked. “There’s a guy staying at the Schroeder place you ought to meet.”

  Kate gave an exaggerated shudder. “I don’t think so.”

  “Wait until you see him. You’ll change your mind.” She opened a cupboard with an array of tagged house keys and found the one marked with Kate’s name. “I didn’t expect you until tomorrow.”

  “We decided to come up a day early,” Kate said, hoping there would be no further questions. Though Mable Claire had known Kate through all the summers of her life, she wasn’t ready yet to talk about what had happened. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “Nothing wrong with starting the summer a day early. The housekeeping and yard crew have already been to your place. School out already?” she asked, tilting her head for a better view of Kate’s boy through the window. “I thought the kids had another week.”

  “Nope. The final bell rang at three-fifteen yesterday, and third grade is just a bad memory for Aaron now.” Kate dug through her purse, looking for her key chain. Her bag was littered with small notes to herself because she never trusted her own memory. Besides, this made her feel organized and in control, whether or not she actually was. She had a number of projects lined up for the summer. She needed to regrout the downstairs bathroom tile at the cottage. Paint the exterior trim. Not to mention renewing the bond with her son, reinventing her career and finding herself.

  In that order of importance? She had to wonder at her priorities.

  “So are you going to be all right,” Mable Claire asked, “just the two of you in that big old house?”

  “We’ll be fine,” Kate said, though it felt strange to be the only one in the family headed for the lake house this summer. Every year, all the Livingstons made their annual pilgrimage to the old place on Lake Crescent, but recently everything had changed. Kate’s brother, Phil, his wife and four kids had relocated to the East Coast. Their mother, five years widowed, had remarried on Valentine’s Day and moved to Flori
da. That left Kate and Aaron in their house in West Seattle, on their own a continent away. Sometimes it felt as though an unseen force had taken her close-knit family and unraveled it.

  This summer it would be just the two of them—Kate and her son—sharing the six-bedroom cottage.

  Quit wallowing, she warned herself, and smiled at Mable Claire. “How have you been?” she asked.

  “Good, all things considered.” Mable Claire had lost her husband two years before. “Some days—most days—I still feel married, like Wilbur never really left me. Other times, he seems as distant as the stars. I’m all right, though. My grandson Luke is spending the summer with me. Thanks for asking.”

  On the form to activate trash pickup, Kate filled in the dates. The summer loomed before her, deliciously long, a golden string of empty days to fill however she wished. A whole summer, all to herself. She could take the entire time to figure out her life, her son, her future.

  Mable Claire peered at her. “You’re looking a little peaked.”

  “Just frazzled, I think.”

  “Nothing a summer at the lake won’t cure.”

  Kate summoned up a smile. “Exactly.” But suddenly, one summer didn’t seem like enough time.

  “‘In want of a husband,’ my eye,” Kate muttered as she locked the Jeep at the Shop and Save, leaving the window cracked to give Bandit some fresh air. Aaron was already scurrying toward the entrance. Heck, thought Kate, watching a guy cross the parking lot, at this point I’d settle for a one-night stand.

  He was a prime specimen in typical local garb—plaid shirt, Carhartts, work boots, a John Deere cap. Tall and broad-shouldered, he walked with a commanding, almost military stride. Longish hair and Strike King shades. But was that a mullet under the green-and-yellow cap? From a distance, she couldn’t tell. Ick, a mullet. It was only hair, she conceded. Nothing a quick snip of the scissors couldn’t fix.

  “Mom? Mom.” A voice pierced her fantasy. Aaron rattled the cart he’d found in the parking lot.

  “You’re acting like an impatient city dweller,” she said.

  “I am an impatient city dweller,” he replied.

  They passed beneath the sign of the giant laughing pink pig, which had stood sentinel over the grocery store for as long as Kate could remember. The marquee held a sign that advertised, Maple Sweet Bacon—$.99/lb.

  What are you so happy about? Kate wondered, looking at the pig. She and Aaron went inside together to stock up on supplies, for the lake house had sat empty since last year. Something in Kate loved this process. It was like starting from scratch, with everything new. And this time, all the choices were hers to make. Without her mother or older brother around, Kate was the adult in charge. What a concept. “Mom? Mom.” Aaron scowled at her. “You’re not even listening.”

  “Oh. Sorry, buddy.” She selected some plums and put them in the cart. “I’m a bit preoccupied.”

  “Tell me about it. So did you get fired or were you laid off?” he asked, hitching a ride on the grocery cart as she steered toward the next aisle. He regarded her implacably over the pile of cereal boxes and produce bags.

  She looked right back at her nine-year-old son. His curiously adult-sounding question caught her off guard. “Maybe I quit,” she said. “Ever think of that?”

  “Naw, you’d never quit.” He snagged a sack of Jolly Ranchers from a passing shelf and tossed them into the cart.

  Kate put the candy back. Jolly Ranchers had yanked out more dental work than a bad dentist. “Why do you say I’d never quit?” she asked, taken aback. As he grew older, turning more and more into his own person, her son often said things that startled her.

  “Because it’s true,” he said. “The only way you’d ever quit on your own is if something better came along, and I know for a fact that it hasn’t. It never does.”

  Kate drummed her fingers on the handle of the shopping cart, the clear plastic scratched with age. She turned down the canned-goods aisle. “Oh, yeah?” she asked. “What makes you so darned sure?”

  “Because you’re freaking out,” he informed her.

  “I am not freaking out,” said Kate.

  Oh, but she was. She absolutely was. At night, she walked the floors and stared out the window, often staying up so late she could see the lights of Seattle’s ferry terminals go out after the last boat came into the dock. That was the time she felt most alone and most frightened. That was when Kate the eternal optimist gave way to Kate in the pit of despair. If she had any interest in drinking, this would be the time to reach for a bottle. L’heure bleue, the French called it, the deep-blue hour between dark and dawn. That was when her relentlessly cheerful façade fell away and she engaged in something she hated—wallowing. This was her time to reflect on where she’d been and where she was going. This was when her lonely struggle to raise Aaron felt almost too hard to carry on. By the time the sun came up each morning, she snapped herself out of it and faced the day, ready to soldier on.

  “We should get stuff marked with the WIC sticker,” Aaron advised, pointing out a green-and-black tag under a display of canned tuna.

  She put back the can of albacore as though it had bitten her. “Why on earth would you say that?”

  “Chandler told me his mother gets tons of stuff with WIC. Women, Infants and Children,” he explained. “It’s a feld…fed… Some kind of program for poor people.”

  “We are not poor people,” Kate snapped.

  She didn’t realize how loudly she’d spoken until a man at the end of the aisle turned to look at her. It was the same one she’d stared at in the parking lot, only he was much closer now. Beneath a five-o’clock shadow, she could make out a strong, clean jawline. He had traded the shades for a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, one side repaired with duct tape. In the split second that she met his gaze, she observed that his eyes had the depth and color of aged whiskey. But duct tape? Was he a loser? A nerd?

  She whipped around to hide her flaming cheeks and shoved the cart fast in the other direction.

  “See?” Aaron said. “This is how I know you would never quit your job. You get too embarrassed about being poor.”

  “We are not—” Kate forced herself to stop. She took in a deep, calming breath. “Listen, bud. We are fine. Better than fine. I wasn’t getting anywhere at the paper, and it was time to move on, anyway.”

  “So are we poor or not?”

  She wished he would lower his voice. “Not,” she assured him.

  In reality, her salary at the paper was barely a living wage, and the majority of her income came from the Seattle rental properties left to her by her father. Still, the job had defined her. She was a writer, and now that she’d been let go, she felt as though the rug had been ripped out from under her. “This means we get to spend the whole summer together, just the two of us.” She studied Aaron’s expression, spoke up before he turned too forlorn. “You got a problem with that?”

  “Yeah,” he said with a twinkle of mischief in his eye. “Maybe I do.”

  “Smart aleck.” She tugged the bill of his Seattle Mariners baseball cap down over his eyes and pushed onward. Lord, she thought, before she knew it, her little red-haired, freckle-faced boy would be as tall as she was.

  The storm of his mood struck as it always did, without warning and no specific trigger. “This is stupid,” he snapped, his eyes narrowing, the color draining from his face. “It’s going to be a stupid, boring summer and I don’t even know why I bothered to come.”

  “Aaron, don’t start—”

  “I’m not starting.” He ripped off his hat and hurled it to the floor in the middle of the aisle.

  “Good,” she said, trying to keep her voice emotionless, “because I have shopping to do. The quicker we finish, the quicker we get to the lake.”

  “I hate the lake.”

  Hoping they hadn’t attracted any more attention, she steered the cart around him and fumbled through the rest of the shopping without letting on how shaken she was. She refused to
allow his inability to control his behavior control her. When would it end? She had consulted doctors and psychologists, had read hundreds of books on the topic, but not one could ever give her the solution to Aaron’s temper and his pain. So far, the most effective solution appeared to be time. The minutes seemed endless as she worked her way up and down the aisles, ignoring him the whole time. Sometimes she wished she could get into his head, find the source of his pain and make it better. But there was no Band-Aid or salve for the invisible wounds he carried. Well-meaning people claimed he needed a father. Well, duh, thought Kate.

  “Mom,” said a quiet, contrite voice behind her. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’ll try harder not to get all mad and loud.”

  “I hope so,” she said, her heart quietly breaking, as it always did when they struggled. “It’s hurtful and embarrassing when you lose your temper and yell like that.”

  “I know. I’m sorry,” he said again.

  She knew a dozen strategies, maybe more, for where to go with this teachable moment. But they’d just driven three hours from Seattle, and she was anxious to get to the cottage. “We need stuff for s’mores,” she said.

  Relief softened his face and he was himself again, eager-to-please Aaron, the one the teachers at his school saw so rarely. His storms were intense but quickly over, with no lingering bitterness.

  “I’ll go,” he said, and headed off on the hunt.

  Some practices at the lake house were steeped in tradition and ancient, mystical lore. Certain things always had to be done in certain ways. S’mores were just one of them. They always had to be made with honey grahams, not cinnamon, and the gooey marshmallow had to be rolled in miniature M&Ms. Nothing else would do. Whenever there was a s’mores night, they also had to play charades on the beach. She made a mental list of the other required activities, wondering if she’d remember to honor them all. Supper had to be announced each evening with the ringing of an old brass ship’s bell suspended from a beam on the porch. Come July, they had to buy fireworks from the Makah tribe’s weather-beaten roadside stand, and set them off to celebrate the Fourth. To mark the summer solstice, they would haul out and de-cobweb the croquet set and play until the sun set at ten o’clock at night, competing as though life itself depended on the outcome. When it rained, the Scrabble board had to come out for games of vicious competition. This summer, Aaron was old enough to learn Hearts and Whist, though with just the two of them, she wasn’t sure how they’d manage some of the games.