Snowfall on Lighthouse Lane

by JoAnn Ross

  Because his father had gone to bat for him, risking his own reputation, Aiden had started growing up on the spot by keeping to his part of the deal. Later the Marines, as tough as his Afghanistan deployment had been, had proved to be the best thing that had ever happened to him.

  They sat at the table where he and all his brothers had carved their initials, to the feigned consternation of his mother. The fire in the kitchen fireplace, which before electricity had made its way to this upper part of the Olympic Peninsula Coast had served as both heater and oven, added a wood-scented comfort. Bodhi was sitting on the edge of the counter, tanned legs swinging.

  “Axel Swenson had a stroke.” John Mannion broke the comfortable silence.

  “That’s too bad.” Aiden and the chief of police had had an adversarial relationship, which he had to admit, had all been on him. “How is he?”

  “Okay. There are some memory issues that may or may not clear up. And lingering weakness in his right arm, but he’s going to undergo therapy for that.”

  “That’s good to hear.” Brianna had called and told him that their grandfather Harper had had a TIA, commonly referred to as a ministroke because it supposedly doesn’t leave behind the damage of a “real” stroke. While Jerome Harper continued to insist all was fine, Aiden knew his mother worried about her father more than she let on. Although he knew enough not to talk about this with his grandpop, Aiden hated the idea of losing the gruff old family patriarch.

  “Yeah. Axel might have a chance of coming back to work, but his wife put her foot down. She wants him to focus on getting better, then she’s booked that cruise to Alaska he’s been promising her for the entire forty-five years of their marriage.”

  “Sounds about right.” And a lot like Seth’s parents taking off to see the country in a motor home. Apparently boomers aged into nomads. But not his parents. He couldn’t imagine them ever leaving the farm they’d gotten married on. Built a house and raised four sons and a daughter on.

  “Here it comes,” Bodhi warned.

  “I’d like to see those glaciers before they’re all gone, myself,” his dad said. “Maybe your mom and I can book one of those cruises next year. After the new trees are planted.”

  “I’ll bet Mom would like that.” Aiden couldn’t remember the last time his parents had taken a real vacation, other than a few days here at the coast house.

  His dad took another pull on the brown bottle with the snow-flaked fir tree on the label. “The thing is, it’s going to be hard to find someone to fill Axel’s shoes.”

  Bang! The damn ninja star hit its mark.

  “No.”

  John lifted a brow, but didn’t bother to pretend not to know that Aiden had jumped a step ahead. “Why don’t you just hear me out?” he suggested. “I did bring pizza. And beer.”

  “What would Mom say if she knew you’d stooped to bribery?”

  “As it happens, we’re on the same page about this. Well, except for maybe the triple meat on the pizza. Which she needn’t know about.”

  His mother had always been into healthy eating before farm-to-table became a concept. Her one exception was her award-winning fried chicken that had been passed down through generations of Harpers before her becoming a Mannion by marriage.

  “My lips are sealed.”

  “Mine, too, unfortunately,” Bodhi moaned. “That Italian sausage would be making my stomach growl.” He put a hand on his buffed-up abdomen. “If I had one.”

  It was all Aiden could do not to roll his eyes. While he liked pizza and burgers as much as the next guy, Bodhi had always worshipped in the church of carnivores. With fries and onion rings on the side. Their woman captain, a fortysomething vegan who was into yoga, had always sworn Bodhi’s arteries must look like the Pacific Coast Highway at rush hour and claimed he was a walking heart attack waiting to happen.

  Unfortunately, Bodhi hadn’t lived long enough to test the validity of her accusation.

  “I’m not talking about a long-term commitment,” his father said. “Unfortunately Axel had his stroke on the night we were at Mannion’s, celebrating his twenty-fifth anniversary in the job.”

  “He could’ve taken that as a sign it was time to get out of law enforcement,” Aiden said.

  “There is that. My point is the position is open and we need someone. Now.”

  “You’re the mayor. Appoint someone. Anyone but me.”

  “You’re the only viable candidate. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve got some good young deputies, but they’re green. We’re also a small town with a small budget, so the others who have more experience under their belt are either volunteers or retired from other cities and don’t want to get back into full-time police work.”

  “I fully appreciate their thinking.”

  “This isn’t the same as what you were doing in California,” his father said. “Instead of working the rough streets chasing down bad guys, you’d mostly be helping out Honeymoon Harbor citizens.”

  Previous generations of Mannions had been doing exactly that since their arrival on the Olympic Peninsula, though he was the only police officer in the family that he knew of. The tallest building in town, discounting the clock tower, was the three-story gray town hall built in 1876 by one of Seth Harper’s ancestors. The bronze plaque on the side of the building named Finn Mannion as mayor. The same position his dad had held for years. Partly, he’d say, because no one ever wanted the unpaid job, and that kept anyone from running against him.

  “Take it from me, any streets can be rough these days,” Aiden said.

  “Your dad obviously doesn’t watch Dateline,” Bodhi said. “Hell, if you watch that show enough, you’d never leave your house.”

  Aiden bit back the smile, not wanting his dad to think he was smiling at the idea of Honeymoon Harbor’s former bad boy playing Andy Griffith for the Pacific Northwest’s version of Mayberry. His mother used to claim that just because his name meant he’d been born from fire, didn’t mean he needed to be constantly setting them at every opportunity. He’d admittedly been the family black sheep, a wildling who’d constantly rebelled at what he’d viewed as the constraints put on him growing up with the town’s mayor as his father and a high school principal mom.

  He routinely got into fights, could have papered the wall of the bedroom he’d shared with his brother Burke with parking tickets, and had once gotten caught TP-ing the house of a guy who’d stood up his teenage sister, Brianna, for the Spring Fling.

  Luckily, he seemed to have inherited whatever family gene had made his uncle Mike the Mannion family charmer, and Aiden would have been the first to admit that he’d talked his way out of more trouble than a lot of guys would have gotten away with. But even his family name and charm came screeching to an end when he swiped a twelve-pack of Coors from the back of a delivery truck outside Marshall’s Market. That had caused the judge to issue his ultimatum and give seventeen-year-old Aiden a choice: the military after graduation or he could leave the courtroom and go straight to juvie.

  “The city council approved me hiring you this afternoon.”

  Given his former reputation, that showed how desperate they were. “Good for them. Now you can go back and tell them to come up with another candidate because I’m not interested.”

  “We’re not meeting again until next month. Are you suggesting the town go without a police chief while we’re doing a hiring search?”

  “You could always contract with the county sheriff’s department.”

  “They’re good people,” John allowed. “But although Honeymoon Harbor has always been the county seat, we value our independence and prefer to run our own town.”

  Which, as mayor, his dad had always done well, while managing to handle expanding growth with environmental concerns. “Even if I were to consider it, which I’m not,” he said quickly, holding up a hand, “the operations I worked in LA weren�
��t play-by-the-book deals. I spent a lot of time undercover that definitely didn’t involve playing with others.”

  Other than his partner, who’d always had his back. “How do you know I even have leadership skills?”

  “You know, I watched a documentary on the History Channel last week,” his dad said mildly, as he appeared to sidetrack the conversation. But Aiden knew that he was just buying time to set up another ninja attack. “How, since 1775, Marines have embodied our country’s standards of courage, esprit and military prowess. You may have taken off the uniform, son. But you’ll always be a United States Marine. There isn’t anyone who’d be better.”

  “He’s got you there, dude,” Bodhi chimed in again. “Besides, now that you’re not drinking yourself into a stupor trying to get over misplaced survivor’s guilt, you’re going to need something else to do. I gotta tell you, dude, I’m getting cabin fever hanging around here.”

  Aiden hated to admit it, but they both had a point. Now that he was sober, he was beginning to get bored. And restless. And there was also the fact that he owed his dad. Without this isolated coast house to crash in when he’d gotten out of LA, he wasn’t sure how far off the rails he might’ve gone.

  “How long are you talking about?”

  “Well, ideally, you’d settle in and like the job—”

  Aiden crossed his arms. “How. Long?”

  “If you find you don’t feel like the job’s a good fit for you, only until we find a replacement. Say, sometime mid-February?”

  “That’s six months.”

  “He can do math, too,” Bodhi said.

  “Why don’t you sleep on it?” his dad suggested. Then, savvy politician that he was, he turned the conversation to the Seahawks’s chances of making the Super Bowl while they finished off the pizza.

  “Having been a detective in a previous life, I happened to have noticed that you failed to mention a salient fact,” Bodhi said as they stood in the doorway, watching Honeymoon Harbor’s ninja disguised as mild-mannered mayor drive back down the tree-lined road toward the coast highway that would take him along the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Honeymoon Harbor.

  “Which would be?” But Aiden knew exactly what he was referring to.

  “That the guns-for-drugs deal we were on was going to be your last bust. You were getting out and transferring to the youth gang suppression unit.”

  The unit had been established to try to keep kids from turning to gangs in the first place, so cops like him and Bodhi wouldn’t have to be rearresting them. And it would hopefully save the lives of the kids, innocent bystanders and police officers.

  “That was the plan.”

  “After the clusterfuck, you were also offered a police shrink and paid leave to get your head back together.”

  “I didn’t want either one.”

  He’d already been on the brink of burnout. That night had continued to play through his mind and pushed him over the edge into the deep dark pit he’d finally begun to crawl his way out of. But he hadn’t done it alone. Because damn if somehow Bodhi hadn’t shown up as backup.

  “Would you rather have ended up being the dead guy?” his partner asked.

  “What the hell kind of question is that?” But Aiden knew. And yeah, given a choice, he would’ve willingly changed places and been the one having “Amazing Grace” played by a kilt-wearing, bagpipe-playing homicide detective at his gravesite.

  “You always talked about how your father’s spent years serving your hometown. And how that big brother of yours is such a Boy Scout. But guess what, dude? You’ve got the same blood running in your veins. You may have joined the Marines because your only other choice at the time was juvie, but we’ve dealt with enough kids back in the ’hood to know when a basically good teenager is acting out. Which you definitely must have been to get the judge to force you off that dangerous path everyone thought you were headed down. But the deal is, deep down inside, you’re a stand-up guy. The kind who’d stand up for your fellow jarheads—”

  “You weren’t there.”

  “I didn’t need to be. I’ve watched you in action. It was like you had that protect and serve motto tattooed over your heart. How many funerals of gangbangers and their victims did you go to?”

  Aiden shrugged. “I’ve no idea.”

  But he did. Because every damn one of them was embedded in his mind. He went to the funerals of the teen bangers, not just to watch for the killer to show up—that happened more times than you’d think—but also in respect of their friends and families who’d loved them. The same with the victims, but those had been harder, because many had been so damn innocent. Like the toddler shot sleeping in the tub—the one place her mom thought she’d be safe—during a drive-by shooting at the wrong house.

  “Getting back to my question, would you rather have had your parents burying their son in that flag-draped casket instead of mine?”

  “That’s an impossible choice.” Struggling out of the quicksand pit of despair those memories triggered, Aiden opened another bottle of the winter ale and wished he hadn’t dumped all the real stuff down the drain thirty days ago.

  “Aren’t you glad it wasn’t your choice to make? Or mine either? Life’s out of our hands, dude. All you can do is ride the wave you get, and stay upright as long as you can. Then, if you’re lucky enough to survive the wipeout, you get back on the board and wade out into the surf again. No one makes it through alive, Mannion. And to quote the great Mark Foo, ‘It’s not tragic to die doing something you love.’”

  “Isn’t Foo the guy who died surfing?” Although Bodhi had a degree from UCLA in philosophy, of all things, mostly all he’d ever talked about was someday quitting the cops and joining the pro surfing circuit.

  “Yeah. He bought it on his first ever session at the Mavericks Big Wave competition at Half Moon Bay. That made it kind of a sucky omen, but he wouldn’t have wanted to go out any other way.”

  “So you’d rather have drowned than gotten shot?”

  Tanned shoulders shrugged. “It’s six of one, half a dozen of another. I got the same rush from chasing bad guys down a dark alley as I did doing barrels in shallow water.”

  Aiden had learned that surfing move was more dangerous than in high water because—not that he’d ever intended to try it himself—sand apparently was like concrete when you hit it, which left more than a few surfers with broken necks.

  “You never really loved being a big-city cop,” Bodhi pressed his case. “It was too impersonal. That’s why you went to all those damn funerals. To make a connection. But, bro, those were some really effing painful connections.”

  Aiden didn’t answer. There was no need. Sometimes he figured he’d gotten more than a lifetime of violence in Afghanistan, which was why he’d only lasted six months on the SWAT team before asking for a transfer. SWAT had felt too much like war.

  The Gang and Narcotics unit working with Homeland Security had been just as bad, triggering nightmares he wouldn’t classify as full-blown PTSD, but had made him so edgy he couldn’t stop wondering if maybe he had slipped up somehow that night Bodhi was killed. Clusterfuck, indeed.

  Hell. Maybe his dad was right. Maybe playing police chief for a few months might not be such a bad thing while he figured out what to do with the rest of his life, now that drinking his way through it hadn’t turned out to be a viable option.

  “Women like men in uniforms.”

  “So?”

  “So, you could try it out on that redhead from the wedding.”

  “Are you talking about the bride?” Who, if Bodhi hadn’t been able to tell from the two Wonder Woman figures on top of the wedding cake, wouldn’t be the least bit interested in him.

  “No, the other one. With the sexy streaked auburn hair. The one you were pretending not to be scoping out. While Gidget was doing her best to pretend to not notice you.”

&n
bsp; “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.” But he did. At the time he’d tried to tell himself that long, deep burgundy hair with the sunlit copper streaks was as impossible to miss as a flashing red stoplight. The fact that it was tousled in a way that looked as if she’d just gotten out of bed had caused the numbness inside him begin to stir.

  “Dude, there were so many sparks flashing back and forth between the two of you, I’m surprised that flowered arbor over those two brides didn’t burst into flames.”

  “Gidget’s name is Jolene Wells. She grew up here, too. But I was a year older so we didn’t move in the same crowd.” That part was true. Especially since Jolene hadn’t belonged to any clique.

  The mean girl queen bees had called her out for being trailer trash; the nerdy girls hadn’t seemed to notice anyone else around them, given that their noses were always stuck in books; and the girl jocks were always out on the field, doing their own energetic, athletic things. Being a guy, Aiden hadn’t missed noticing that sweaty, superfit girls could be hot and had dated enough to know that they could be every bit as energetic in the back of his truck as they were running, kicking soccer balls, shooting baskets and slamming each other’s shins with field hockey sticks.

  “Jolene and I barely knew each other.”

  It was a flat-out lie.

  Aiden had never forgotten those secret nights when they’d lain on the deck of his boat anchored in Serenity Cove, talking and looking up at the stars. There’d also been a lot of making out, that had, on more than one occasion required a cold shower when he’d gotten home, but as the daughter of a former teen mom, Jolene had had no intention of risking pregnancy. Also, he’d been trying to stay on the straight and narrow to avoid going to lockup, where the actual juvenile delinquents would probably love nothing more than pounding on the guy whose mom had kept sending them to detention.