Wuthering Kites

by Clover Tate

  “Yeah.” Her voice was quiet.

  “I found a kite charm at Strings Attached. A little silver one with the tail broken off.”

  Again she stopped, and again she searched my face. “I know that charm,” she said. “Grandpa Sullivan made them for all of us. Me, Jack, and Dustin. I keep mine on my keychain. It reminds me of when we were kids.”

  “Allison never had one, did she?”

  “No. Grandpa Sullivan had died long before Allison and Uncle Gus ever met.”

  “Do you know anyone else who might have one?”

  Claire plunged her hands in her pockets. We’d reached the bottom of the hill and entered Astoria’s tiny but busy commercial district. “As I understand it, one of Grandpa Sullivan’s buddies made them. I’m not even sure who.”

  “How about the broken-off tail?” Jack’s charm had broken. Anyone who could produce a charm with a whole tail would be off the hook.

  “I think mine’s the only one that hasn’t broken by now.”

  Claire slipped her purse from her shoulder as we approached Sea Star Tattoos. “You don’t think Jack really did it, do you?”

  “Of course not.” I took a breath. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that so loudly.”

  “Neither do I,” said Claire, in a quieter voice than mine. “Is the charm all the evidence the sheriff has against him?”

  “The charm and the fact that he’s now rich. Plus, he’d claimed to have gotten a text from Allison after she had died.”

  “Jack was framed. That has to be it. Besides, I inherit, too. You don’t think I’d murder anyone, do you?”

  I forced a laugh. No, she couldn’t have done it. She was Jack’s twin sister. But in her jean jacket and eyeliner, her heart-shaped face, which had once looked so innocent, now wasn’t so easy to peg.

  We arrived at a narrow storefront with a peach-and-maroon-tiled entrance and front windows angled toward the door. A hand-painted sign in red and black reading “Sea Star Tattoo” dangled from the overhang. Three seniors—one with a walker—waited on the sidewalk outside.

  “Hi, folks,” Claire said. “You from the cruise ship?”

  “And how,” a sixtyish woman in a baby blue jogging suit said. “You do mermaids?”

  “I’ll show you the book,” Claire said. She pulled a ring of keys from her jacket pocket and selected one for the door’s brass lockset.

  I pulled back her arm. “Claire,” I whispered.

  “What?” She drew back.

  “There’s no kite charm on your key ring now.”

  chapter sixteen

  Claire fanned her keys over her palm. “You’re right. It must have fallen off.” She examined her key ring again, flipping through an assortment of keys plus a beaded heart.

  “You going to open up, or what?” one of the waiting men asked.

  “Sure, of course.” Claire shook her head in disbelief and pushed open her shop door. She flipped the light switches inside the door. “It was there when I lent the shop key to Maddie to make a copy. I’ve carried it around for so many years, I’m sure I would have noticed if it were gone.”

  “When did you lend them out?” I asked.

  “Let’s see. Last week, I guess. Tuesday.” As if in a daze, she raised a hand to the thermostat and the furnace chugged to life. She turned to the door. “Come in, take a seat, and put your name on the list on the counter.”

  The three vintage barber chairs bolted to the floor across from old beveled mirrors made the tattoo shop look like it was housed in a Depression-era barbershop. A stool sat next to each chair, and a massage table was pushed to the rear of the room, probably to make it easier to work on back tattoos.

  A breathless man in a stocking cap and scruffy beard arrived. “Hey, Claire. Sorry I’m late. I’ll be ready in a minute.” He dropped his messenger bag and turned on the faucet of a sink in the rear.

  “That’s Kurt,” Claire said. “The other artist working this morning.”

  She turned to the other tattoo artist. “Kurt, would you put on music?”

  “Sure.” He dried his hands and moved toward a laptop near the sink. Reggae music roared through the shop for a split second before he turned down the volume.

  “We need to account for all the charms—yours, Jack’s, and Dustin’s.” I glanced at Claire’s key ring. Any of us could have lost our charms then.

  “We picked you up there before dinner, remember?”

  “But no one was anywhere near the fireplace, where it was found.”

  Claire seemed torn between her customers and me. “I want to talk about this more, but I have to work.”

  “You’re getting quite a group,” I said, looking at the five more people who crowded the small waiting area.

  “Usually I’m booked two months out for appointments, but we keep a first-come, first-served schedule for cruise ship days.”

  “Oh.” I’d hoped for an alibi that would clear Jack, prove he went nowhere but straight home after the bonfire and stayed there. Instead, it was only getting more complicated. I needed to know more about who benefited from Allison’s death and why.

  Claire hefted her key ring and examined it again. “Do you have time this afternoon?” she asked all of a sudden.

  “Yes, why?” I should be working on sewing more wind socks, but that could wait.

  “Maddie’s coming in the afternoon, and the cruise ship pulls out after lunch. I was thinking about visiting Rosa—my uncle’s housekeeper—to talk about Allison and see how she’s handling the news. Would you like to ride with me out to the farm?”

  * * *

  • • •

  I spent the next few hours wandering through Astoria, including a long walk along the docks on the wide, flat Columbia River. When the coffee and oatmeal I’d had for breakfast burned off, I dropped by the Labor Temple café for waffles and eggs, and I listened to regulars talk about a church potluck.

  Astoria still felt resolutely working-class, but the chichi bistros and art galleries elbowing in—not to mention Claire’s tattoo parlor—reminded me of the dilemma Rock Point would be facing sooner rather than later. These towns could no longer rely on timber and fishing alone to survive. Besides that, tourists were discovering how much they loved the area’s rugged scenery and “authentic” atmosphere. Marcus seemed ready to think about how to move Rock Point and its businesses ahead with the times. Strings Attached certainly depended upon him.

  Thoughts of the election led to thoughts of Stella and Ace. I hoped they’d work out their differences, and quickly. One of them was going to blow up soon, and it wouldn’t be pretty.

  After lunch, I met Claire at Sea Star Tattoo. “Why don’t we take my car?” I offered. Even if I couldn’t peel the “Bowl Naked” sticker off its rear bumper, my parents’ old Prius had great gas mileage.

  “That would be great, if you don’t mind. My car’s having some transmission issues, and I haven’t had the money to have it fixed yet.”

  “It’s no trouble at all.”

  “You don’t have to take me all the way back to Astoria. You can drop me at Rock Point. I want to be there when Jack gets home, anyway.”

  We walked to the car, an unseasonably cold breeze ruffling our hair. I squinted against the sun. “You and Dustin are close.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He named the yacht after you.”

  The pink in her cheeks might have been due to the wind. Or not. “You’re dating my twin brother, and I know he cares about you”—now I was the one blushing—“so I guess I don’t mind saying that I’ve had a crush on Dustin since I was a kid, and he helped me fold a paper airplane that could beat Jack’s.” The climb up the hill sapped some of her breath. “Lately, I’ve been thinking he might feel the same.”

  At last we’d come to Claire’s house and my car. Down the hill, the Columbia River flowed sapph
ire blue, with Washington’s green landscape on its opposite banks.

  “Here’s my car. Do you have everything you need?” I asked.

  “We’re good to go,” she said and climbed into the Prius’s passenger side. “Head down 101, and we’ll drive toward McMinnville that way. It’s a couple of hours, maybe longer. You don’t mind?”

  “I’ve been wanting to see the farm since Jack mentioned it.” The picture in my mind was of the classic whitewashed farmhouse with the sun perpetually flowing through a canopy of moving leaves, and the smell of fresh dirt in the air. “Plus, I’m glad to be able to spend some time with you.”

  “I feel the same,” she said.

  We were now passing over Youngs Bay and leaving Astoria behind us. The sun broke in sparkles on the water.

  “You and Jack seem happy together,” Claire said.

  “Yes.” I didn’t want to sound too dreamy, but I couldn’t help but smile. “It was touch-and-go at first.”

  “But,” Claire said, “you’ve had an easier time of it than I have. I mean, relationship-wise.”

  “What do you mean?” I had to slow down behind a semi with a full load of logs.

  “I don’t know why I mentioned that. I shouldn’t have said anything.” She turned to stare out the passenger window.

  “You mean Dustin.” The road was clear. I gave the Prius the gas, and we passed the logging truck. “By chance, I had dinner with him last night. I ran into him at Martino’s.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  I kept my eyes on the road, but I could feel her looking at me. “He seems to care about you a lot.”

  “I guess, since Uncle Gus’s death, he’s been on my mind, too.”

  “Tell me about it. You said it hadn’t been easy.” I understood the awkwardness of falling for someone you weren’t supposed to—like a cousin, even if he wasn’t a cousin by birth—but what could be awkward about getting involved with an attractive, affectionate genius with a fat bank account?

  “Uncle Gus wasn’t keen on me and Dustin getting together. I think that’s what kept Dustin so aloof for so long.”

  “You think his father told him to lay off?”

  “I don’t know what he told Dustin, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Once I was making plans to visit Dustin. Uncle Gus pulled me aside and said he’d give me a ticket to anywhere I wanted, as long as it wasn’t to see Dustin. He wouldn’t say why. He was adamant. So I went to visit a friend in New Orleans, instead.”

  “Could it have been because you’re cousins?”

  “Not that. I don’t think so, anyway.”

  “I guess we’ll never know now.” I thought this might be a good time to start to shift the conversation to Allison. “How did your aunt and uncle meet?” I’d never spent time with either of them—well, not really—but Allison had to be a bit younger than Uncle Gus.

  “Up at Orr Cellars, actually. Matt’s winery.”

  “She was at a tasting?”

  “She was in public relations. Matt’s working on raising the winery’s profile, so he hired Allison’s firm to help. Uncle Gus was over—probably looking at the seching machine; he always seemed interested in that—and they met.”

  “A hazelnut farmer and a PR agent.”

  She rested back into her seat. “He was a good twenty years older than she was, too.” She stretched her hands to her knees and pulled them back. “In a strange way, it made sense. Allison was always looking for adventure. Life on an old farm must have felt like adventure. Until it didn’t.”

  Until it didn’t. Dustin was only a few years younger than Allison. Could something have happened there? It would explain Gus’s reluctance to see Dustin and Claire together. No, that was ridiculous. I wiped that notion from my brain. It could have been as simple as the fact that Gus didn’t want his son settling down so soon.

  We passed a house with a dilapidated dinghy filled with primroses at the edge of its driveway. Another driveway featured a pickup truck with a “For Sale” sign in its windshield.

  “It’s strange he seemed to want you two not to get involved.”

  “Like I said, I don’t know for sure what it was all about. Sometimes I wondered if he’d wanted to punish Dustin for leaving Oregon and not taking over the farm. Sometimes I think it was because Dustin was kind of a screwup early on. He even had a few tangles with the law—little stuff. He was clearly destined for bigger things, though.”

  Inventing the grape-seching device was definitely a bigger thing. “I wonder if Allison would have taken over the farm.” Had she lived, I left unspoken.

  “My first thought is that, no, Allison would have sold it. But, you know, I’m not so sure. She was hard to predict.” She sighed. “When Uncle Gus adopted Dustin, he’d thought he was getting a true heir. It took Dustin a few years to find his way in life, and it wasn’t growing hazelnuts.”

  “Still, he must have been proud of him.”

  “He had to be. He just wasn’t the kind of guy who showed it. Although I do remember him beaming at the seching machine.”

  Just above Rock Point, we took the highway east toward the valley. The road cooled as we entered a forest. I could almost smell the switch from salty to piney air even from inside the car.

  “So,” I said, “what’s going to happen to the farm now? You’re half owner.”

  “I’m not a farmer,” she said.

  I noticed she had not mentioned Jack.

  chapter seventeen

  I’d always adored Oregon’s wine country. My sensibility resonated more with the ocean, but I loved the rolling hills and farms through the Willamette Valley.

  We passed through patches of trees interspersed with grazing dairy cattle, groves of hazelnut trees in soldierlike rows, and farmland tilled after its harvest, leaving little trace of what it bore over the summer. And, of course, vineyards roped the hillsides. Some of the local wineries were still homey barn-based businesses, but a few modern buildings dotted the hills.

  Jack loved this country, too. His whole demeanor softened when he talked about eating cookies in Rosa’s kitchen or playing fetch with the dog out by the barn. I didn’t have the same idyllic country memories Jack did, but if things continued to go well with him, maybe someday I would.

  Mom’s words snuck into my head: No future tripping. Her way of saying, no living in a future that might not happen. I drew my mind back to the present.

  “Tell me about the farm,” I said.

  Claire’s mind seemed to be somewhere else, too. “Oh. The farm. It’s been in the family for generations—at least a hundred years. It was certified a Century Farm when I was a kid.”

  “So your family were pioneers.”

  “Mom’s family was.” She sat up straight. “Turn here. Right after the mailbox.”

  I pulled the Prius off the winding road onto a bumpy gravel lane. Claire grabbed the dashboard. We were approaching a whitewashed farmhouse with a wide porch and two outbuildings behind it bigger than the house.

  “Is that it?” I said.

  “Yep. Uncle Gus’s house. You can park next to the tractor.”

  A slender black Lab mutt with a patch of white on his chest bounded out of one of the outbuildings. Claire opened the car door, and the dog nearly leapt into her arms.

  “Porky!” she said.

  The dog looked lean to me. “Porky?”

  “He was a chunky pup,” Claire explained. “There’s Rosa.”

  A salt-and-pepper brunette emerged from the house, wiping her hands with a flower-sprigged dishtowel. She wrinkled her brow at me and the Prius, but her face relaxed into a smile when she saw Claire.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? I don’t have anything special prepared for dinner,” she said.

  Claire collapsed into her arms for a hug. “It’s you we came for,
not dinner. Rosa, I’d like you to meet Emmy. Jack’s girlfriend.”

  I hadn’t been introduced as Jack’s girlfriend, except to Dustin, and I felt my cheeks flush. “Nice to meet you.”

  “And I bet by ‘nothing special for dinner,’ you mean you only have, oh, an eggplant lasagna with tomatoes from the garden you put up yourself, or maybe a shepherd’s pie,” Claire said.

  “A roast, actually. I thawed out a pork roast after the funeral. I thought your parents might stay another day.”

  Porky jumped around our feet as we walked into the house. Closer, I saw the shadows and creases of, likely, grief on Rosa’s face.

  “Rosa’s been with the family for years,” Claire said.

  “Decades,” Rosa corrected. “I watched you kids grow up. Helped out Gus’s first wife. Allison, too.” Her voice softened, and she touched her heart. “Bless her.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “She was found in your shop, wasn’t she?” Rosa said. “That’s what Dustin said.”

  Her expression wasn’t accusatory, but I felt the urge to explain. “No one can figure it out.”

  “Allison was a good woman. Always wanted to do right. She called me right after Gus’s death and let me know she’d take care of everything. And now this.”

  Claire hugged Rosa again and held her a few moments. “Don’t worry, Rosa. Jack and I will take care of things, too. There might be changes, but you won’t have to worry.”

  Rosa looked as if she hadn’t heard—or didn’t want to hear—Claire. “Will you stay for supper, then?”

  Claire looked at me, and I nodded. “Sure,” Claire said. “I’ll show Emmy around. It’ll be nice to walk a bit after sitting in the car.”

  “Fine. Dinner will be on the table in half an hour.” Rosa folded her dishcloth and she returned to the house. The dog slipped through the front door with her.

  “Is that all right with you?” Claire asked.

  “Yes. A walk sounds good.” Inland, it was still cool, but the air didn’t carry the pierce of moisture that it did on the coast. Out of the wind, it was almost warm as the afternoon’s last rays reflected off the house’s walls.