by M. K. Wren
Corey, you were the joy forever, and I loved you for it.
And at times he had wanted to be in love with her. She brought something into his life so delightful, he wanted to capture it. But he was well aware that some things do not fare well in captivity, and when he considered the matter objectively, he knew he wasn’t willing to assume the rigors of fatherhood—which Corey would expect of any man she loved; she and Kit were a package deal—nor was he willing to give up his hard-won and stringently maintained freedom.
Freedom, as many a philosopher had observed, has its price.
But Lyndon Hatch had been in love with Corey and willing to make her—and Kit—the fulcrum of his life. And Corey had been on the verge of lowering the barriers she had raised against that kind of love during five years of widowhood. Conan wondered if it would be any comfort to Lyn to know how close she’d come to reciprocating his love and expectations.
So many loose ends, when a life is cut off so suddenly. The pattern seems to unravel and become indecipherable.
Was that it? he wondered. Was it simply a sort of gestalt need for a pattern that nagged at him now?
…doesn’t look like there’s much of a case here to work on.
Sergeant Roddy was probably right about that. Probably.
Conan was a licensed private investigator, but he didn’t advertise the fact. He didn’t have to, thanks to the continuing success of the Ten-Mile Ranch; he had been sole heir to Henry Flagg’s sagebrush empire. Conan considered the PI role an avocation, but then everything he did seemed to fall into that category. He had sought the PI’s license simply because he’d had some excellent training at one time in G-2, and it seemed a shame to waste it.
That was, he knew, only a glib rationale. Perhaps his real motivation was simply curiosity: a compulsive dissatisfaction with incomplete patterns. There was that mental itch to get it right, to understand, to complete the pattern.
And now grief added a bitter impetus to that compulsion.
Begin at the beginning.
When was that? Not when he’d first met Corella Benbow. Perhaps later, when he discovered that both Corey and Diane were—as he was—members of The Earth Conservancy, an organization whose primary function was the purchase and preservation of land it identified as ecologically critical. ECon had during its relatively short history taken part in the preservation of two million acres in the United States, and it owned and managed nearly seven hundred sanctuaries and preserves. One of them was near Pendleton in Eastern Oregon, and its 8,500 acres had once been part of the Ten-Mile Ranch: the Annie Whitefeather Flagg High Desert Preserve. Conan could think of no better memorial to his mother.
He hadn’t been surprised to learn that Corey and Diane were also ECon members. Diane had worked at the Marine Science Center in Westport and was as well grounded in earth sciences as in art. Corey had reached ECon through a love of natural things that was apparently innate, and her husband had been a marine biologist at the MSC.
Perhaps the beginning was the day, over a year ago, when Corey learned that her grandfather intended to sell Shearwater Spit to a California developer, Isaac Wines, who, under the corporate identity of Baysea Properties, planned to make the spit the centerpiece of a high-bracket resort / residential complex. Baysea, as the development was to be called, would take up nearly six thousand acres south and east of Sitka Bay, including nearly a mile of its southern shore, as well as the thousand acres of the spit, threatening the fragile ecosystems of one of the last nearly pristine estuaries left on the Oregon coast.
The Earth Conservancy had rallied to the cause and sent a field representative and habitat inventory team from Portland immediately. Lyndon Hatch was that field representative. ECon’s legal department and land acquisition and fund-raising committees had also gone into action, and within a few months ECon was prepared to equal Baysea Properties’s offer to Gabe Benbow of $3,000,000.
This undertaking had been to a great extent Corey’s responsibility primarily because Gabe wouldn’t so much as talk to anyone else he suspected of being remotely connected with ECon. But finally, after months of wheedling, arguing, begging, and cajoling, she had succeeded, only three weeks ago, in garnering from Gabe a verbal agreement that he would accept the ECon offer, with only the minor stipulation that the sale wouldn’t be completed until after the first of the year. The delay had to do with taxes, he said.
Conan had held an impromptu victory celebration at his house, with Diane and Corey, Kit and Melissa, Jory Rankin—the teenager who worked part-time at Rainbow Wings—Miss Dobie, and even Mrs. Early, who simply happened to be working at Conan’s house that day, as well as Lyn and two other Portland-based ECon members, who had taken part in the long campaign, all tipsy with triumph on nonalcoholic fruit punch.
That victory celebration had been—and he should have expected it, knowing Gabe—premature. And it was the conclusion of a pattern of events, not a beginning.
The beginning of the pattern that led to that unreal scene on Dunlin Beach Road tonight—rather, this morning—he could mark in retrospect as occurring only a day and a half ago. Nearly two days now, if the dawn ever came.
Thursday morning. Thanksgiving Day.
The next time I saw darlin’ Corey,
She was standing on the banks of the sea….
On the morning of Thanksgiving Day, Conan awoke to find his bedroom flooded with sunlight, warming the cool blues and browns that had for the last week assumed the gray cast of winter rains. He propped himself on one elbow and squinted out the west windows, and there a grimacing Oriental face looked back at him.
Conan only laughed and threw the covers back. He remembered to find his robe and pull it on before he opened the sliding glass door and went out on the deck. The kites were back, and if the event was not as predictable or as portentous as the return of the swallows to Capistrano, he was no less elated.
One of the profound contributions Corey and Rainbow Wings had made to life in Holliday Beach was the kite shows that blossomed on this beach every summer day when there was sunshine and wind enough, and on any suitable weekend the rest of the year. Purely crass commercialism, Corey had insisted, but Conan knew she’d have her kites up even in the dead winter of the tourist season if the wind were right. But for the last few weeks, she’d been inhibited by bad weather. This Thanksgiving Day display was a celebration not only of a four-day weekend that would bring people flocking from the inland cities, but of the clear, sunny day that seemed a misplaced fragment of summer.
With Jory Rankin’s help, Corey was struggling with a huge, orange-and-blue Jalbert parafoil. Two more teenagers—volunteers, no doubt; there were always plenty when school was out—tended various lines, and another leaned into the wind, a line in each hand, maneuvering a stack of seven stunt kites, each a different color, making a bright rainbow, long tails describing exquisite, simultaneous arcs on the sky. Melissa had a golden butterfly with twin tails rising skyward, while Kit launched a winged box kite of colored Mylar that looked, when it caught and refracted the light, like a giant alexandrite.
Other kites were already airborne, strings anchored on any handy driftwood log or stump. Peacocks, dragonflies, butterflies, and eagles spread their wings to the sun, while fluttering octopus and dragon kites tugged at their bridles. Corey had taught Conan the names and history of the various types, and he took pleasure in identifying them. She had also let him try his hand at flying most of them, and he could sense now the rhythmic impulses of dragons; the sustained pull of delta wings or Eddy diamonds on the steady wind; the electric, darting tugs of Indian fighters; the smooth surges of a rack of stunt kites tracing out its graceful choreography.
He watched another dragon mounting into its element. They were his favorites: a hundred, two hundred, three hundred feet of shining color undulating in long, slow waves that gave substance to the unseen shapes of the wind. Perhaps that was the fascination of kites. They made visible powerful forces that were otherwise invisible; forces that
had once been deities, who conferred something of their power on the kites that were their messengers or personifications. For as long as humankind had called itself civilized, kites had flown into its myths, legends, and ceremonies.
At length, Conan reluctantly went back into the bedroom. He dressed in nearly record time, then hurried downstairs to prepare a hasty breakfast, which he ate at the table in the window alcove off the kitchen. Finally, after only half a cup of coffee, he emptied the rest of the carafe into a thermos, donned a windbreaker, and, automatically locking the front door behind him, went out to the paved beach access north of the house. He made his way down an easy slope of sea-worn cobbles to the sand. Winter sand, even if the day seemed like summer; gray sand streaked with heavy minerals, blue-black and purple-green. And it wasn’t a summer sea today, although the breakers weren’t high. Still, there was power behind these rumbling white cataracts.
He surveyed the beach, a long, flat scallop enclosed between two wooded headlands, Hollis Heights on the north, Jefferson Heights on the south. Houses were packed with hardly breathing room between them along the beach, scattered more loosely on the headlands. The town of Holliday Beach could muster a population of no more than twelve hundred permanent residents, but in the summer and on holidays it housed up to ten thousand. The number of people already on the beach promised that this weekend Holliday Beach would be filled to capacity.
Corey was standing alone now, head tilted back to watch the kites. There always seemed to be something of the dancer in her, a honed grace in her carriage and in her long, supple limbs. She wore denims, sand-caked running shoes, and a red jacket that had gone pink on the shoulders. Her brown hair, if left to its own devices, would fall straight and shining to her waist, but she made an attempt to tether it with a ribbon at the nape of her neck.
She saw him coming, and her hands came out of her pockets for a semaphore wave. When he was near enough to hear over the surf roar, she shouted, “Conan! I’ve been waiting for you.” She leaned down to pick up a kite lying at her feet, a four-foot diamond, and held it sideways to the wind.
“Waiting for me? Why?”
“The launching!”
“A new kite?”
“Yes. Oh—you brought coffee. You’re an angel of mercy. I forgot.” Then she added with a laugh, “But you knew I would.”
“It’s happened before.” He twisted the thermos into the sand by a half-buried log. “Let’s see the new kite. One of Diane’s designs?”
Corey nodded, lifting the kite for him to see. “Di made it for me. Oh Lord, isn’t it beautiful? How come she got all the brains and talent and the good looks?”
The kite was, indeed, beautiful, made of silky, translucent rip-stop nylon, the design appliquéd on a white background: a bluebird, in profile, flying upward within a circular spectrum. Conan sighed. “Thank God for the inequitable distribution of human talents.”
“I guess some things shouldn’t be diluted. It was something I said that got her started on this design. At least us lesser mortals are good for inspiration.”
“Besides, producers need consumers. One of the basic laws of nature. What was it you said?”
She shrugged and squinted out at the breakers. “Oh, something about how if you get high enough above a rainbow, you can see the whole circle. The bluebird—well, it’s my personal bird. Back in Montana, Aunt Irene used to say whoever saw the first bluebird in the spring could make a wish and it would come true. I don’t ever remember what I wished for, but I sure saw lots of bluebirds.”
Conan smiled at that. “I’d have expected your bird to be the seagull.”
“That’s my second bird. Maybe bluebirds are reincarnated as gulls when they die. Anyway, let’s get this kite launched! Kit! Lissa! Come on.”
The children anchored their respective kites and came running, making an impromptu race of the short distance. Melissa was fortunate enough to favor Diane, her hair a paler gold, eyes the same grayed blue. Christopher apparently favored his father, fair skinned and freckled, a grin that curled at the corners of his mouth, and a head of dazzling copper-red curls.
Both children shouted greetings to Conan, Kit adding, “Sure took you a long time to get here.”
“Next time, you come on up to the house for me.”
Corey interposed, “Don’t give him ideas. He’ll be prying you out of bed at dawn. Okay, let’s get this kite up on her maiden flight. Kit, you hold the spool, and you can pay out the string, Lissa. I’ll run with the kite.”
Kit asked, “Why can’t I run with the kite?”
“Because it’s my kite. Besides, you’re too short; not enough wind down there.” She ran lightly up wind, lifting the kite high with one hand. “Come on—give me some slack!”
Kit picked up the spool, small hands easy on the handles, while the string spun out, and Melissa expertly payed it out, maintaining the proper tension, shouting in a piping voice, “Higher! Lift it up higher!”
Corey stretched upward, and Conan, watching her, felt the wind take the kite from her hand as if reclaiming something of its own. For a moment, she stood poised, and it seemed that with a little more effort she might follow the kite as it leapt into the sky. Then she flung her arms out and ran back to embrace the children. “Look at her! Isn’t she gorgeous?”
Melissa asked, “What are you going to name her?”
“Well, I’ll let you two decide that.” A heated discussion ensued, and Corey rose and went over to Conan. “What are you doing for dinner tonight? Di and I are having a proper turkey-day bash—bird and all. Want to help?”
“I’d love to, but I already have plans for the evening. I’m taking Miss Dobie out to dinner.”
“Sort of an early Christmas bonus?”
“Bonus?” Conan made a show of looking around for listeners. “The management at the Holliday Beach Book Shop doesn’t recognize the term.”
Corey laughed. “Trouble is, at the Holliday Beach Book Shop, it’s a little hard to figure out who’s management.”
“Oh, I know who’s really in charge. That’s why I’m taking her to dinner.” He checked his watch; it was nearly ten. “And it’s time I got to work. Take care, Corey.”
*
A brisk two-minute, two-block walk east up Day Street’s gentle incline brought Conan to Highway 101 and to the heart of Holliday Beach, if not its actual center. Like so many coast towns, it had spread in accretionary lumps both north and south along the axis of the highway. Conan paused at the corner and looked across to the east side of the highway, where the businesses were randomly separated and of varying vintages: a plumbing and hardware store, a fish market, a “boutique” that changed hands and inventory nearly every spring, Driskoll’s Garage, and the jewel of the lot, Rainbow Wings, with multicolored windsocks flying against its jaunty facade.
On the west side of the highway, the buildings presented a more united front with little space between them, although they too varied in vintage. At the south end, the Post Office, then an antique store, an insurance agency, a beauty shop, the Chowder House restaurant, and at the north end, a Mom-and-Pop grocery. Between the latter and the restaurant was a haphazard, silver-shingled building with three large, windowed gables adorning its second story. This was the Holliday Beach Book Shop, which Conan fondly regarded as a historical monument, a haven for the world-weary, his pride and joy, and, occasionally, the albatross around his neck.
The bells on the front door announced his arrival. Behind the counter across from the entrance, Miss Beatrice Dobie—auburn-curled, no matter what, and virtually unflappable—worked the ancient cash register to register the purchase of a stack of used books by a middle-aged couple.
“Good morning, Miss Dobie.”
“Good morning, Mr. Flagg. Happy Thanksgiving!” She beamed as she meted out change for the customers, then slammed the cash drawer shut. “Yes indeed, a day to count our blessings!” She didn’t add that the blessing she particularly enjoyed counting was the cash accumulating in the
old register. The dark, shelf-lined nooks and crannies of the shop were crowded with browsing potential customers.
Conan nodded as he looked around, then, “Where’s Meg?”
“Hiding. In your office.”
The door behind and to the right of the cash register sported a sign reading “private,” but it was open. Conan found Meg asleep amid a clutter of papers on the Hepplewhite desk. Meg always chose her surroundings carefully, and perhaps that was why she seemed to prefer this small but comfortably appointed room, with its wood-paneled walls adorned with paintings, and the ruby-and-maroon Kerman carpet that was her favorite claw-sharpening place.
Meg was a blue-point Siamese, and most of the regular customers at the bookshop recognized her as the ultimate management. She woke to look up at Conan with lucent, sapphire eyes, gave him a throaty greeting, and stretched luxuriously, as only a cat can. Conan sat down in the leather armchair behind the desk to give her the obligatory morning rubdown.
“Good morning, duchess. Yes, tell me about your night. How many mice did you catch, and where, in God’s name, did you leave the bodies?”
The imperative jangle of the bells on the front door distracted him. He looked around, frowning irritably as the door slammed shut. Then he came to his feet.
Nina Gillies.
Nina had a tendency to dramatic entrances, and she was undoubtedly accustomed to second looks—even stares—especially from men. She had been born beautiful, and as she approached forty, she obviously had no intention of forfeiting that asset. Her blond hair was shoulder length and coiffed with skillful nonchalance; her faultless features were so artfully enhanced with cosmetics that the blush of pink in her cheeks, the dusky shading and velvety lashes emphasizing her green eyes, seemed integral to her. Her ensemble—and no one would make the error of calling that combination of velour, leather, and Glen plaid anything less—would be entirely appropriate on the streets of Beverly Hills, but was startling in Holliday Beach, where attire tended to jeans and T-shirts.