The Complete Where Dreams

by M. L. Buchman

  She turned to Cassidy, “I warn you. He is even a worse patient than my boy Angelo.”

  “Baggage.” Angelo grabbed the handles to the wheelchair and pushed he and Russell clear of the group. “We definitely need to find baggage.”

  “And a bar,” Russell put in.

  “Definitely a bar,” Angelo agreed.

  Angelo had overruled the women’s vote to head straight home in a very simple way. He’d settled Russell into his car and gotten behind the driver’s wheel. Then he drove them out of SeaTac airport, across Highway 99, and right into the 13 Coins Restaurant parking lot. It was their traditional stop after crazy trips. The place offered twenty-four hour fine dining and alcohol from six in the morning until two the next morning.

  He’d dragged Russell here after his ill-fated first trip to Italy with Cassidy and let him drink himself straight through oblivion and into passed out. Russell had made sure Angelo got good and loose, though stopped him short of plastered, after he’d returned from his first time as a guest instructor at the Culinary Institute of America last fall. Cassidy had kept telling him what fun it was to teach there, and he’d fallen for it like a babe in the woods. He still shivered at the memory of it. The CIA wanted him back this fall, but he had never been one to get up in front of a room full of people. Just let him hide in the kitchen and cook. Besides, he’d need to buy a new suitcase.

  The 13 Coins had deep booths with high, dark leather backs and soft lighting. You could crawl into a booth and not be seen for hours. The waitresses were discrete, understood the necessity for speed on drink orders, and always offered to keep track of your flight time if you were outbound to make sure you didn’t miss your plane. Even the stools in front of the bar were tall, cozy, and wrapped around you shutting out the rest of the world.

  In the middle of the room were low tables and comfortable chairs scattered about like someone’s living room. They found a table with room for six plus Russell’s extended leg.

  “I came down wrong is all.”

  “Yes. Right on top of a jet skier’s head, then got tangled in the controls as it rolled over.”

  “You thought those looked like fun too.”

  “Suicidal stupid fun? Yes. Something any rational, thinking human would actually do? Not so much. Don’t you hear adjectives?” She turned to face everyone else. “I took a nap on the beach and next thing I know a polite Italian ambulance driver is waking me up. The guy he landed on was the cameraman and his camera is now deep in the Mediterranean Sea, so we don’t have video of it. Though if we did, I could lord it over him whenever he got out of line.” Cassidy was clearly enjoying herself. Quite happy with being right, she did nothing to halt the sharp rap Maria Amelia Avico Parrano landed on Russell’s cast each time he whined.

  “Are you trying to extend my lifespan or something?” Russell groused at his wife.

  Angelo shook his head and whispered to his friend, “Still a crazy thought, you being married.”

  Russell nodded in agreement and he studied his beer while Cassidy kept going. She was having way too much fun at Russell’s expense, which Angelo was trying not to laugh about in his friend’s face.

  “Hey, you’re the one who showed me that I loved you. So if you die before I do, I’m going to have to kill you.” Cassidy dipped up a cracker full of the Crab and Artichoke Dip clearly feeling she’d won the point.

  Angelo would have to agree that she would have to kill him, so, out of loyalty he kept his mouth shut. All he really wanted to do was run everything by Russell, but he couldn’t with his mother and Jo sitting right there. And he wasn’t so sure he wanted to talk about Jo with him anyway. He could hear Russell’s answer right now without asking.

  “She’s hot. You should go for her.”

  Not really helpful. The first part he couldn’t argue with. The second part he already knew, it just scared the heck out of him.

  Jo sat between his mother on one side and Cassidy and Perrin on the other. They were just far enough away that he couldn’t make out their soft conversation.

  “What happened to you?”

  Angelo turned to face Russell. “What are you talking about?”

  Russell rolled his eyes toward Jo.

  So much for not bringing it up. “Uh, I hit my head. And we went for a bike ride together.” Could he sound more stupid? “And a run.” Yep, he could.

  Russell studied him over his beer for a while before continuing his thought.

  “You know, this whole being married thing is strange. It changes your outlook in some really interesting ways.”

  “Like what?” Angelo tried not to scoff, but it must have come out that way.

  “Like being married to Cassidy makes me think of the other two as my sisters. I always thought they were beautiful and a lot of fun. But now it’s more than that.”

  Angelo sipped his own beer in acknowledgment.

  “I love you like a brother, but if you hurt one of them, I’m gonna be hurting you so much worse. Whether or not I’m still in this cast.”

  Angelo slumped in his chair. Okay, that was even less helpful than he’d expected.

  “Angelo didn’t tell me you had moved here to Seattle.” Jo had gone with ginger ale. She’d needed to be awake in under five hours and headed to the gym before work. She really needed to be home in bed, not chatting with Angelo’s mother in some all-night in-crowd airport bar.

  “Ah, I was more than right. You are the girl who rides the bicycles. That is good.”

  Jo eyed her carefully, but the smile was genuine. A quick glance showed Cassidy’s attention was with Perrin at the moment which, Jo decided, was a good thing.

  “My Angelo’s taste. Sometimes it is good, sometimes not so good. I tell him that he should find someone as pretty and nice as you, and now he has.”

  Jo glanced over at Angelo, slumped in his chair and pretending to ignore Russell. “So you told him to chase me and he does? Doesn’t speak much for his initiative.”

  “No. No.” Maria flapped Jo’s words away. “He said he was going riding, and I tell him I hope she’s as nice as the pretty one at the wedding. The boy, he doesn’t say a word yes or no, not that I gave him the chance.” Her smile was easy. “It does good to keep that one a little off his balance. He is too sure of himself. Men always are. Cassidy does it to Russell, I’ve never before seen him so fascinated, as if he is always waiting for the next act of the magic show to see what Cassidy will do next.”

  “It’s true,” Cassidy joined the conversation. “Around Russell I get all of these great ideas. It’s like our thoughts spark off each other.”

  “And your bodies, I hope,” Perrin leaned in from Cassidy’s far side.

  “Oh yeah,” Cassidy smiled at her. “Seriously.”

  “Until he earned the cast,” Jo noted.

  “It ends mid-thigh,” Angelo’s mother offered a far-too-wise smile.

  “It does,” Cassidy sighed happily. “Indeed it does. You know, Italian hospital beds aren’t all that narrow.”

  “I knew it!” Perrin flagged the waitress for another cosmopolitan. “Where else?”

  “Well, we hadn’t gotten to the sailboat yet. But we did stay with my friends at their villa in the Piedmont. In the middle of the vineyard they have a splendid little gazebo and a spread of grass open to the night sky.”

  Jo heard her sigh echoed by the other two women as well.

  “Then there was this powerboat with a small, but well-appointed cabin on Lake Como. Let’s just say that we spent a lot of time on the water, but didn’t see the lake very much.”

  “Then the idiota broke his leg.” Maria pulled Cassidy over across Jo’s lap and kissed her cheek in sympathy before letting her go.

  “Then the idiota broke his leg.” Cassidy sipped her wine. “I’d be angrier if he didn’t keep apologizing so much. He does feel really awful about ruining the honeymoon.”

  “Well,” Jo thought about all that was going on in her life and felt guilty for saying it from s
uch a selfish place of needing to talk to Cassidy, but it was true anyway. “We’re really glad you’re back safe. And had some fun.”

  “We did.” Then Cassidy grinned a bit and blushed. She glanced sideways at Perrin who burst out laughing.

  It only took Jo and Maria a moment to catch on.

  “Of course Russell did need some help getting back and forth to the bathroom on the flight home,” Perrin said right on the verge of one of her merry giggles.

  “He did,” Cassidy acknowledged, her smile deepening. “He did indeed.”

  Chapter 11

  Jo spent most of Tuesday inhaling international law. The UNCLOS, United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, had been ratified by all parties bordering the Arctic Ocean, except for the United States. As usual with international treaties, even ones the U.S. sponsored, it remained unapproved despite all common sense and decency.

  That didn’t stop the U.S. from claiming Territorial Waters to twelve miles offshore, the Exclusive Economic Zone to two hundred nautical miles and, in addition, trying to claim continental shelf out to three-hundred-and-fifty miles. They were attempting an undersea land grab much of the way to the North Pole. All of the countries were.

  The U.S. government was also claiming some of the same territory as Canada. Oddly enough the border where the Russian claim neighbored Alaskan waters to the west was clear and undisputed. Of course the Russians and Norwegians couldn’t agree on anything. And Canada was duking it out with Denmark over a tiny, useless uninhabited island. That made the whole thing a pretty typical international fiasco.

  In addition, the melting of the polar ice was opening up the Northwest Passage for shipping for the first time in recorded history. No one could agree which law would take precedence in case of a disaster, like a wreck requiring rescue in the deep Arctic or an oil spill. As the Passage actually existed primarily among Canadian-owned islands and the Alaska seaway, the points of law should be clear, but they weren’t. Canada’s laws were much stricter than those in UNCLOS and no one could agree on any of it.

  Jo had been brought in because, putatively, the fisherman were being chased out of the entire Beaufort Sea even though only a small wedge not much bigger than New Jersey was all that was under contention. Yet the oil companies had been granted six leases for exploration in the disputed region. The yelling had barely begun and because of her success fending off the madness in the last lawsuit, she’d been brought aboard to do so once again.

  As to what fisherman was crazy enough to want to fish in the Arctic, she couldn’t imagine. Or perhaps she could.

  Jo pulled up the legal complaint that had started the whole cascade of suits and countersuits on her screen and scanned the signatories. Earnest J. Thompson had signed. The chance of him ever striking a hundred miles beyond Ketchikan were so minimal as to be laughable. That her father might make the insanely hazardous three-thousand mile voyage simply to fish wasn’t even a possibility. But he had signed nonetheless.

  It was so ludicrous that she could almost certainly use it against the small fishermen if needed. Probably one signatory in a hundred actually might fish the Arctic Ocean if given the chance. After all, she wasn’t being paid to represent the fisherman. Or, it would give her a chance to recuse herself from the case based on conflict of interest that now existed, no matter how marginal.

  Jo set that thought aside. First, it was a flimsy excuse to get out, and second she knew that to do so was always tempting in the first month or so of research on a new matter. In the beginning, lawsuits were terribly messy. The larger the lawsuit, the worse the mess. Relevant documentation could be spread across dozens of states or even countries. The pertinent fifty-eight articles of UNCLOS had clearly been drafted by committee, worse, an international multi-lingual committee. Hundreds of pages of brilliantly impenetrable legalese that, once analyzed in the full sight of legal case precedents, probably signified little to nothing.

  She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. The lack of sleep was starting to tell on her and it was only two o’clock. Three more hours, plus she really should put in four or five more to make up for missing all of Friday afternoon. Her whole body throbbed with the exhausted beating of her heart, as if it were pumping out tired blood with each stroke instead of the freshly oxygenated little red cells she so needed.

  “You need a break, boss.”

  Jo hadn’t heard Muriel come in. She didn’t bother to open her eyes.

  “No, I just need sleep. And maybe one of those big shots of adrenalin they punch into your heart.”

  “How about another piece of chocolate? I saved some.”

  “Anything would help.” Jo held out a hand without bothering to look. Something cool and solid slid against her palm and she looked up.

  A slim tube-style vase of pale-blue blown glass bore a single red rose.

  She blinked again, but it remained in her hand. It really was there.

  “Let me guess. No note again.”

  “Not even a ‘PPM’ one this time,” Muriel simply smiled at her. “What am I doing wrong that I’m not getting gift baskets and beautiful red roses?”

  “I’ll get you one of each for Christmas.”

  “But then I’ll know who it’s from. Besides, that’s over six months away.”

  Jo considered if another piece of chocolate with an aspirin chaser would avert the pending headache.

  “I’m too tired to guess, just tell me.”

  Her assistant raised her hands palm out. “I don’t know this time. Honest. I even grilled the delivery guy, a nice young boy named Marko. Phone-in order, no idea who sent it. Even gave him a nice tip from your petty cash, and he didn’t give. Want me to hound the owner for the name on the credit card? Actually, I can’t, I’m not sure what shop he was with. But I could call around.”

  Jo scowled at the rose. Renée? Not likely. Angelo? She’d left him less than a dozen hours earlier at the bar. He and Russell had been talking about speedboats and parasailing. Apparently, despite Russell’s broken leg, his head was dense enough to think it had been a pretty cool experience. That left Yuri and she definitely didn’t want to think about that.

  She set the rose by her monitor. It was pretty after all and the vase was exquisite in its simplicity. Another Renée bribe she decided.

  “That wasn’t chocolate.”

  Muriel pulled out a bar of chocolate she’d tucked in her skirt pocket. She wore a close-fitting white angora sweater and an actual fifties’ poodle skirt, except that it was black with pink poodles instead of the other way around. Knowing her assistant’s attention to detail, she probably had on bobby socks and two-tone whatever they were called shoes. Jo sat up a bit straighter to see as she reached for the chocolate that Muriel broke off and handed over, but the desk still blocked her view.

  Without being asked, Muriel raised a foot for her to see. Black bobby socks topped with pink lace and those white-and-tan shoes.

  “Saddle oxfords,” Muriel informed her recognizing the blank moment.

  Jo nodded. They’d long since stopped trying to figure out how they knew what the other was asking without, well, asking. It wasn’t because they’d been working together for five years either. They’d done it since the first day Muriel had showed up, fresh from college with a resume in her hand.

  Jo ate the chocolate, dark, candied ginger–chili pepper this time. She wanted to close her eyes and just lay her head on the desk, instead she focused on convincing her body that she’d just eaten some magic, high-energy candy rather than soothing dark cocoa.

  “You also have a visitor. Or will in another two minutes.”

  “Who?” that straightened Jo back up a bit. Yuri had gone back to Alaska, hadn’t he? She waved a hand toward her jacket.

  Muriel took it from the hanger on the back of the office door and handed it over.

  Jo pulled it on and checked the lie of it in Muriel’s appraising look and quick nod. She was going to have her power armor in place in case it was Yuri.

/>   A tap on her partly open door and Renée Linden stuck her head in.

  “I’m not interrupting, am I? Oh, what a pretty rose. Who sent you that?”

  “I thought you might like to see the shoot for my final ad campaign. They can be quite fun actually.” Renée led Jo out of the office and toward the Market. “I still haven’t had a chance to talk to the board, their next meeting isn’t until tomorrow evening. I hate to impose, but I’d appreciate keeping it between us girls until then.”

  “Of course,” Jo granted easily. What she hadn’t found, despite two days of thinking about it, was a gracious way to inform the most influential female power broker on the Seattle scene that Jo’s answer was a definitive, “No.” Part of the problem was she didn’t know if her guess was right, though she had circled back around to it being a job offer.

  However, the answer was no even though Renée hadn’t technically made the offer, at least not in as many words. Even if she had, Jo wasn’t going to take the Executive Directorship, it still made no sense.

  Her first intention, of informing Renée of her decision while in her own office and on her own turf, had somehow failed. Perhaps on a stroll through the Market she’d find the right moment to acknowledge Renée’s kind and subtle offer to suggest her for the Executive Directorship and to thank her kindly as she turned her down.

  “We do a great deal of tourism marketing,” Renée was telling her as they walked together down Pike Place and into the heart of the market. “We use websites, airplane magazines, participation in television cooking shows, and the like. I decided that it was time we expand that clientele. The Pike Place Market has long been a destination visit for travelers, but I think there is a high-end that we’ve been missing.”

  Jo nodded. It made sense. She’d seen the Market change and shift over the decade she’d been in Seattle. There were still the odd little kiosks at the north end where amateur artists rented six feet of table to display hand-crafted earrings or their latest knit fashions for toddlers. Cute and very good for what it was. But in the heart of the Market there were some true artists selling their wares. Clothing designers, high-end galleries, and antique stores specializing in rare collectibles had joined the food entrepreneurs which were the backbone of the Market’s image.