by Lily Everett
Quinn seemed to be comfortable, nestled under Marcus’s arm. She didn’t stray as she started ticking off facts on her fingers. “Well, he’s married. And he has a website. According to his bio, he’s trained in the science of unraveling psychic blockages and resolving spiritual heartache. Apparently, Marcus, once we unlock our inner selves, doors in the outer world will open.”
Her voice was heavy with a cynical contempt that Marcus was almost surprised to hear from her. Not that Quinn was New Agey at all, but generally she was a lot more upbeat and less critical. In the few sessions he’d joined in on at the barn since that first day when he’d spilled his guts while coaxing Captain in from pasture, Marcus had been very impressed with Quinn’s seemingly endless reserves of patience. No matter how slowly things moved with her clients, or how long it took them to grasp what she was trying to show them, she stayed engaged and interested in every step of the process. And it was a process that felt almost as fuzzy to Marcus, at times, as the string of buzz words Quinn had rattled off from Ron Burkey’s website.
The major difference, he thought, was in how much Quinn cared about helping people. No matter how much Ron smirked and simpered and smiled, he never seemed to genuinely care for anyone but himself.
“Oh,” she said suddenly, as if something had just occurred to her. “His site also mentions that he requires payment up front. So he’s already been paid for the work he’s doing with my parents. Which makes it feel like the reason he’s going above and beyond for them must be to take them for a lot more money.”
Marcus considered that. “We need more information. Can we find out more about his practice in New Mexico?”
“I can call them up, pretending to be a prospective client!” Quinn pulled away, beaming up at him as if he’d come up with the final fix that enabled the moon landing. “That’s brilliant. I can ask all kinds of questions that way. Maybe I can even get a few referrals to past clients, and talk to them about his business practices.”
She was so excited about this little foray into espionage. Marcus didn’t want to find it adorable, but he couldn’t help it. To hide the no-doubt besotted look on his face, he walked over to the edge of the woods where Ron had been measuring. He didn’t see anything particularly interesting over there … pine needles and pinecones and a lot of rough-barked trees.
But when he glanced back, across the field of cord grass separating the Harpers’ property from his father’s, Marcus froze.
There he was. Dr. William Beckett. Standing outside of the dilapidated, rundown house that used to be the home Marcus’s mother had been so proud of.
Marcus stared across the expanse of time and distance between them, and his father stared back, motionless. He couldn’t name what he was feeling, but whatever it was nearly choked the breath from his lungs. One of Marcus’s arms twitched, unsure if he wanted to raise it to wave. Before he could decide, his father climbed the sagging stairs to the wraparound porch and vanished inside the house.
“I’ve seen him out there a few times in the last week,” Quinn said softly, joining him under the trees. “He comes out to watch you work. I think … I think he misses you.”
That broke Marcus out of his paralyzed indecision. He turned on his heel and headed blindly for the garden shed. “You don’t know anything about it.”
“I know I don’t.” Quinn dogged his steps all the way down the winding garden path. “Because you won’t tell me anything about it.”
“There’s nothing to tell. I don’t want to see him. End of story.”
“Oh, Marcus, that’s the middle of the story, if anything!”
He shot her an unimpressed look before throwing the shovel into the shed and slamming the door closed with more force than necessary. “Well, it’s my story and it has nothing to do with you. Leave it alone.”
Quinn drew back as if he’d struck her, and Marcus fought down a wince at the harsh tone of his voice still hanging in the air between them. But he didn’t have time to figure out a way to walk it back.
“Sure,” she said quietly, eyes shuttered. “Sorry. Of course I have no right to an opinion about your relationship with your father. You only know everything there is to know about my family, all the gory details. But I won’t mention your father to you again.”
“Don’t be like that,” Marcus said, guilt wrenching his voice tight and guttural.
She blinked. “Like what? You were right. It was my mistake. It won’t happen again.”
Marcus caught at her wrist when she turned to leave him standing there. He hated feeling this way, twisted up and jagged inside. He didn’t know how to stop it, only that the feeling got worse when Quinn left him alone.
“I’m sorry,” he said, the words punched out of him. “I know I keep hurting you. That’s not what I want.”
She wouldn’t look at him. “For something you don’t want, you’re pretty damn good at it.”
Marcus ground out a curse and let go of her wrist to run his hands through his hair. “This—all of this, being close to you. It’s not easy for me. But I want it. I’m trying.”
The thin, hard set of her mouth softened. “You are. I can tell. I wish it were easier for you. I wish I could help.”
“You do help.”
Marcus reached for her, and to his intense relief, she came into his arms easily and laid her head on his shoulder. It felt like the snick of a locked door behind the person you were guarding so you knew they were safely in for the night. Marcus closed his eyes in the waning light of evening and tried to hold on to that sensation as tightly as he held on to Quinn.
Chapter 14
Quinn clutched her plastic container of wineberries to her chest and carefully skirted around the broken boards in the steps up to the wraparound porch. It would be just her luck to fall through and break her stupid ankle when she wasn’t even really supposed to be here.
I’m not doing anything wrong, she told herself firmly as she marched up to Dr. William Beckett’s front door and reached for the knocker. I’m being neighborly. That’s all. And if I happen to find out anything that can help me mend fences between Marcus and his father, well, that’s the icing on the cake.
With that in mind, she gripped the dull brass knocker and rapped it smartly against the door.
Silence spread around her like a pool of water, broken only by the lopsided porch swing swaying on its rusty chains. Quinn knocked again and waited.
Just when she was about to give up, a thud from somewhere inside the house made her pause. “Hello? Dr. Beckett? Are you home?”
Of course he was home. He almost never left the house except to get groceries, ever since he retired a few years back. Quinn didn’t know anyone who’d had an extended conversation with the man in almost a decade. Dr. William Beckett had gone from respected surgeon to basically a hermit, and no one really knew why.
Well. Other than the grief over his wife’s death and the loss of contact with his son.
“Who’s there?” said a creaky voice from the other side of the door.
Quinn’s heart rate picked up. She leaned closer to the door and spoke as clearly as she could. “It’s your next-door neighbor, Dr. Beckett. Quinn Harper? My mother’s wineberry bushes got ahead of themselves and started producing so much fruit, we can’t handle it all. I was hoping I could offload some on you.”
There was a short pause. Quinn bit her lip. She was banking on the fact that everyone on Sanctuary Island loved wineberries. A smaller, sweeter relative of raspberries, wineberries grew thick and wild along the sunniest parts of the island all summer long. It was a surprise to see them this early, but that only made this crop more special. And hopefully, more tempting to Marcus’s father.
“Dr. Beckett?” she wheedled.
The door opened a crack, showing nothing but darkness inside the house. William Beckett peered out at her, overlong gray hair tufting out all over his head like the fuzz on a gosling. Quinn smiled encouragingly and did her best not to show how surprised she was to
see the former surgeon looking so unkempt.
“Hi,” she said brightly, holding out the plastic tub of wineberries like a peace offering. “I picked these myself, just this morning, before the birds could get them.”
But to her surprise, Dr. Beckett didn’t even glance at the plump, scarlet berries. Instead, he stared at her as if she were some sort of mythical creature. Quinn shifted her weight from foot to foot. Not for the first time, she wondered if this was a bad idea.
There was no way Marcus wouldn’t be angry when he found out about this little visit. And if she hoped to hide it from him, then what was the point of doing it? Because ultimately, she wanted to help Marcus build a bridge back to his father.
She was gaining insight, Quinn told herself. Just like with her investigations into Ron Burkey. She needed information in order to understand the best way to give Marcus the help he’d practically asked for. Almost asked for. If she squinted.
Anyway, she’d get more info if she got inside the house. She wanted to assess the conditions enough to be able to let Marcus know how his father was living and how badly he needed assistance and care. Marcus might be angry with his father, but Quinn had never known anyone in her life with a stronger sense of duty than her fake fiancé. If his father was in trouble, Marcus should know.
Armed with that determination, Quinn beamed at Dr. Beckett. “Would you mind if I came in? I can put the berries in one of your bowls and bring the Tupperware home with me to my mother. How does that sound?”
Dr. Beckett blinked his red-rimmed eyes. They were the same silvery gray as Marcus’s eyes, Quinn noticed with a pang.
He cleared his throat rustily, as if he weren’t used to using it for speech. “You know him. Don’t you.”
Quinn didn’t pretend not to know who he meant. “Yes. Your son is a wonderful man.”
His jaw worked silently for a moment, as if he had more questions to ask but didn’t know how to begin. Finally, he pushed the door open wider and disappeared into the depths of the dim hallway, leaving Quinn to waver on the doorstep.
Did he mean to invite her to follow him? Okay, he didn’t slam the door in her face, but that wasn’t exactly the same as an engraved invitation. But Quinn Harper wasn’t the kind of woman who waited around to be asked to dance—she did the asking, if she wanted to get out on the dance floor. This wasn’t any different.
Quinn shoved open the door and marched into the house after Marcus’s father.
Whatever sort of messy or depressing living situation she found here, she promised herself, she wouldn’t judge Dr. Beckett. He’d had a hard, sad life with a lot of tragedy. Quinn mentally prepared herself for towering stacks of old newspapers and magazines or flies buzzing around forgotten plates of half-eaten food. She was ready, she told herself.
But nothing could have prepared her for what she found in Marcus’s father’s house.
*
“I can’t believe you went over there. You know how I feel about this, Quinn.” Marcus’s hands were shaking so he shoved them in his pockets. He felt as if he’d been standing on a rug that someone had come along and wrenched out from under him.
“I don’t know how you feel about it,” Quinn said, “as you so rightly pointed out last night, because you won’t talk to me. That’s why I went, to see if I could figure out a way to help you at least talk about it, if not do something about it. But I found so much more than that.”
Marcus felt something jump into his throat. Maybe it was his heart. Maybe it was the instinctive urge to stop Quinn from saying anything else. He didn’t want to hear how badly his father was doing on his own. He didn’t want to feel obligated to help the man who had kept him from saying good-bye to his dying mother. But Marcus wasn’t someone who could turn his back on his responsibilities.
For better or worse, his mother had raised him right.
“How bad is it?” he asked, sticking his hands under the faucet to wash the sandy dirt from his hands. The stone circle was almost finished, after a solid week of work. Marcus was looking forward to not having to scrub under his nails for half an hour every night.
“That’s just it,” Quinn said eagerly. “The house looks beautiful. Clean, tidy, you’d think he had a maid service three times a week or something, but it’s just him.”
The line of Marcus’s spine went loose with relief. He shut off the water and dried his hands, turning to prop his hip against the lip of the kitchen sink. “That makes sense. He spent a lot of years as a surgeon—he always liked things clean.”
Quinn nodded. “I was really glad to see it. I’d had some awful fantasies about him having turned into a hoarder or something. You hear about it with older people on their own. I think it gets hard to let go of things when you feel your life slipping away.”
Reluctantly touched by the compassion in Quinn’s soft voice, Marcus pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table. He folded his hands in front of him, stilling any possible fidgeting or telltale movement. “But his life isn’t slipping away. He’s fine.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say fine,” Quinn hedged. “He’s lonely, I could tell. But the way he’s channeling that loneliness is … honestly, it’s inspiring, Marcus. You’d be proud of him, I think.”
Marcus snorted. “Not likely. Pride isn’t a feeling we’re used to having about each other anymore.”
Not since Marcus rejected his father’s life and hopes for his future by turning down medical school in favor of the army. Marcus knew exactly how much Dr. William Beckett had wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. Refusing to take that path had been the only revenge Marcus could conceive of that would come close to paying his father back for stealing Marcus’s last moments with his mother.
“It’s not what you would expect.” Quinn grabbed two tall glasses from the cupboard and filled them up with lemonade from the pitcher in the fridge before sitting down across from Marcus. She pushed one of the glasses over to him, and he accepted it gratefully.
“I don’t expect anything,” Marcus told her, completely truthfully. “I don’t care what my father is up to or how he’s coping. He made his choices, like everyone else in this life, and now he has to live with the consequences. He’s the one who taught me that.”
“He taught you other things, too, didn’t he?”
Marcus had a sudden, vivid image of himself trying to get his father to play catch with him, like the other guys’ dads did on the weekends. But not Marcus’s dad. He had to take care of his hands, protect them from injury, because they were his most important surgical instruments. The disappointment had been crushing … but Dad had made it all go away by taking Marcus fishing instead.
He thrust away the memory of a lazy afternoon floating in a rowboat across the mirror-smooth surface of Lantern Lake. “I’m done talking about this.”
“But there’s so much more I could tell you, if you’d just listen…”
“Move on, Quinn. I mean it.” Marcus stared her down.
Taking a frustrated sip of her lemonade, Quinn pursed her lips at the tartness of it. Or maybe she made a face at Marcus’s stubbornness. He couldn’t be sure.
“Fine. I get it. You don’t care how your dad is doing emotionally. But let me at least tell you the main thing I found out!”
Marcus sat back in his chair, getting ready to stand, but Quinn reached across the table and stopped him with an urgent hand on his wrist. “What?” he asked shortly.
“Your father recently—like, in the last few weeks, recently—was approached about selling his house.” Quinn paused, her gaze boring into Marcus. “By an out-of-state real estate developer.”
Carefully controlling the muscle spasm that wanted Marcus to clench his hands into fists, he forced his brain out of shocked paralysis and back into working order. “That’s quite a coincidence. The only other house on Lantern Point besides your parents’ is sold, right around the time someone starts trying to get your parents to put their house on the market.”
“Right?” Quin
n released him, obviously aware that she’d succeeded in capturing Marcus’s interest. “I thought it was too much coincidence to be believed, so I asked your dad more about it. He said he hadn’t put the house up for sale and hadn’t planned to move, but he was approached last month by a woman he’d never heard of. The offer she made him—it’s well above market value for a residential home on this island, especially one this far out from the heart of downtown.”
Marcus was glad Quinn had let go of his wrist. It enabled him to drop his hands under the table to his lap, to surreptitiously wipe his clammy palms on his dirty jeans. “He took the offer.”
“He didn’t.” Quinn tilted her head, her eyes steady on his face. “But he’s thinking about it.”
The pang in Marcus’s chest surprised him. He turned it into anger as quickly as he could. “Of course he is. He doesn’t care about keeping my mother’s home safe. So what if she loved it? She’s dead now. It doesn’t matter what she would have thought.”
Quinn flinched from his harsh, biting words, nearly knocking over her lemonade glass. Marcus would have been lying if he said he got no satisfaction from that.
“I don’t think that’s fair,” she said, sticking her pugnacious chin in the air. “Your father cares more than you might realize.”
“He doesn’t. He’ll move on and he won’t look back.” Guilt and shame roughened Marcus’s voice. Hadn’t he done exactly that? Moved on and never looked back?
Like father, like son.
Temper snapped in Quinn’s blue eyes. “Well, as the person who has spoken to the man in the last decade, I’m telling you that you’re wrong about him. Not about what he’ll do—I couldn’t predict that. But if he accepts the deal, it’ll be because he’s finally ready for a fresh start … and I guarantee, even then, he will still treasure the past.”
Marcus felt his lip curl mockingly. “That must have been some visit. Did he give you his whole life story or what?”
“We talked for an hour or so,” Quinn said, tart as a green apple. “I asked questions and he answered them, openly and honestly. It’s called a conversation. You should try it sometime.”