The Drifter

by Susan Wiggs

  But instead, he found himself clambering into the dinghy by the rocks, scraping a bare foot on a barnacle-encrusted stone and feeling the sting as he bled into the salt water. Infuriated, he picked up the oars and went back for his clothes. Only then did he allow himself to look for Leah.

  She had reached the crest of the bluff where the water washed into sea caves and gouges in the rock. Dainty as you please, she lifted her hand. She might have been signaling for a cab in the city.

  Grumbling and rowing fast to warm himself, he went to fetch her.

  “You see,” she said reasonably, “if you’d walked over here with me, you could have simply gotten in this way.” Sure enough, the rock grade formed a gentle incline leading to the water. She lifted her skirts and made her way down.

  Just as she had one foot on land and one foot in the boat, something happened. Jackson would go to his grave swearing he did not push away too soon, that he did not smile when he saw her arms cartwheel in the air, that he did not guffaw loudly as she slammed, backside first, into the cold blue waters of Puget Sound.

  But of course she would accuse him otherwise.

  She came to the surface spluttering and whooping for air, her hands grabbing for the boat. Jackson held out the end of an oar and she latched on.

  “You did that on purpose!” she said.

  “Did what?”

  “You know very well what. You—oh!” She only had time to gasp for breath before she was sucked under. Unlike Jackson, she was clearly not prepared to battle the tidal currents. Her full skirts swirled downward, dragging her along like the bell of a jellyfish.

  “Leah!” He could see the white of her skirts flowing away toward a dark opening in the rock face. He rowed like a madman, one hand scooping down to clutch a handful of fabric. He could feel the tug of the current, but he fought it, dragging her up to the surface again.

  She spewed out water and gulped in air. He pulled her into the boat and took her across his knees, thumping her on the back as she choked out more seawater.

  It all happened in a matter of seconds, but it seemed like a lifetime, and when it was over, Jackson caught her against him, holding her cheek to his chest and saying her name over and over again. This panic was a new sensation, far different from the edgy worry he used to feel for Carrie. This feeling consumed and horrified him, took him by surprise with its intensity.

  At last she drew away. “I wouldn’t have fallen if you hadn’t moved the boat.”

  “You’re welcome.” He glared at her.

  Her teeth chattered. “Thank you for saving me.”

  “I’ll send you a bill.”

  She shivered, hugging her knees to her chest. “Can we go back now? We’re in danger of hypothermia.”

  He picked up the oars, but didn’t start rowing immediately. The rogue current that had dragged Leah was now dragging the boat. They were headed for the rocks, and he knew he’d have to fight it. But he was curious, looking over Leah’s shoulder at the mysterious gouged rock face. He recalled the shadows he’d seen that early dawn coming home from the Amitys’ farm. This was where he’d seen them.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked through lavender lips.

  “Are those caves?”

  She swiveled around to see where he was looking. “I believe so. Why?”

  “Just curious.” Rather than starting back, he let the small boat drift, then used one oar as a rudder to navigate them into the mouth of one of the caves.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Leah demanded.

  “Exploring. It’s a hot day. We won’t get hypo-whatever you called it.”

  “There are probably bats in here. Bats and—eek!” Something shadowy flickered past her head.

  “Yeah, that was a bat,” he said.

  “Sweet heaven.” She slumped down in the boat and covered her head.

  Jackson wished he had a match. The afternoon light slanted into the cave, but not far enough to see. Still, he could swear he’d spotted something. A few strokes of the oars and he had his answer. Without speaking, he hefted a large wooden locker from a shelf of rock where the water didn’t reach.

  “What did you find?” Leah demanded.

  He struggled to get the oblong box into the boat. The dinghy sat lower in the water from its weight.

  “Well?” Leah demanded. “What is it?”

  Jackson said nothing, but rowed out into the light.

  She studied the sturdy wooden coffer. “Buried treasure?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up. It’s probably guns.” He pointed to the stenciled lettering on the side of the box. It read, Government Issue—Property Of U.S. Army.

  Leah frowned. “Why would the army leave their guns in a cave out in the middle of nowhere?”

  She was so naive he didn’t know where to begin explaining. There were more boxes in the cave, but he wouldn’t be able to get them in the dinghy. It wasn’t his job anyway. He kept the one box in the boat, then took up the oars and started rowing toward home.

  Home. Why did he persist in thinking of her house as home?

  “Well?” she prompted.

  “The army didn’t leave the guns there,” he said.

  “Then who did?”

  “Whoever stole the guns.”

  She gasped. “You mean they’re stolen?”

  “Twice stolen, now that I have a crate of them.”

  “Is that why you’re a fugitive?” she asked. “Are you a gunrunner?”

  He had to laugh. “God, no. Although it’s never too late to start—”

  “Don’t you dare.” Her expression sobered. “Dear heaven. A gun like one of these could have killed Sophie’s half brother on Camano Island.”

  “It’s real likely, Doc.”

  “Dear heaven,” she said again. “What are we going to do?”

  * * *

  Joel Santana knew he was dying when he saw his mother in the desert. Only she didn’t look like his mother as he’d last seen her before she died. She looked like she had many years earlier in San Antonio when Joel’s father had called her mi Rosita and brought her bolts of red silk and baskets of ripe limes. Looming huge on the shimmering horizon, she gave Joel the beautiful smile that told him all was well with the world. Then her face shifted, transformed, and the color washed out of it, and Joel found himself looking into the lovely, soulless face of Caroline Willis. Brittle female laughter shattered the silence of the endless desert; then the woman’s face went up in wavering flames.

  Yet even after the mirage had trickled into empty heat shimmers on the horizon, Joel was haunted by her. Like a chimera, she moved too quickly and was too beautiful to be caught.

  He suspected only he knew the past that lay like a wasteland behind her. Near as he could figure, the man called Jack Tower had hooked up with her the night of the murder. He couldn’t know what she’d done in the past. He couldn’t know what Joel had found out by questioning people who were in the Rising Star saloon that night.

  Now maybe no one but Joel would ever know.

  “I don’t want to die this way,” he said between cracked lips. Fatal mistakes, he reflected, happened in the blink of an eye. In the blink of an eye, he’d made the acquaintance of a Pima Indian who claimed he’d seen the yellow-hair man and the woman in the picture. In the blink of an eye, he’d agreed to ride by night with the man when the temperature was cool. And in the blink of an eye, he’d found himself stripped of his money, his gun and his food, left to die in the desert with his horse.

  He’d prided himself on being an ace tracker, yet he’d been taken in by the crafty Pima. He couldn’t remember what day it was. But then, as he staggered along, he fixed his gaze on the horizon and the thought came. He wasn’t supposed to die like this. There was something he was supposed to do.

 
; Christ Almighty, he was supposed to live his damned life. He couldn’t possibly die until he managed to do that. His thoughts were a muddle, but he kept thinking about a place that was cool and green, a woman who smiled a lot and bossed him around...a place and a woman he’d only ever seen in his dreams.

  * * *

  Jackson had wanted to avoid any dealings with the local law. He should be gone by now, lost in the wilds of Canada. So what the hell was he doing standing in the sheriff’s office, the opened crate of guns at his feet?

  He was doing what any ordinary, law-abiding citizen would do. If he did any less, he’d rouse suspicion. But he wasn’t ordinary, and he sure as hell wasn’t law-abiding. He only hoped his act was convincing.

  “Well now, you’re quite the hero.” Sheriff St. Croix propped one foot on the crate. His tall, hand-pegged calfskin boot gleamed with a coat of polish. “Much obliged to you.”

  “You’ll need a big cargo boat to get the rest of the guns. There must be another dozen crates.”

  “I might just do that.”

  “When?” Jackson didn’t try to hide his irritation. St. Croix was a hell of an excuse for a lawman, more interested in the cut of his clothes than in protecting folks.

  “I guess as soon as I get around to it. It’s a big operation—”

  “Look, someone could stop in and pick up the guns at the next tide. You’d better do it now. Next high tide.” Damn, he was sounding as high-horsed as Leah Mundy. But he kept thinking about Sophie, her half brother killed by a stolen gun.

  Wariness flickered across the sheriff’s face, then disappeared into a look of stern agreement. “Course, you’re right. I’ll get right to it.”

  “I’ll join you.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “I can show you where they are.” Jackson narrowed his eyes. “Unless there’s some reason you already know where they are.”

  The sheriff hesitated again. “I know my territory. But you’re right. It’d be quicker if you’d just come along. High tide this evening, then.”

  “All right.” Jackson had a strange feeling as he left the office. It was probably the dried salt water stiffening his jeans, he decided.

  But he still hadn’t liked the sheriff’s manner.

  * * *

  Around midnight, Leah gave up trying to sleep. She’d lain awake for a long time, reliving the day with Jackson Underhill. Over and over again, she saw them walking along the beach and through the woods together. A quiet yearning had tugged at her heart and intensified each time she saw him lift his mouth in that maddeningly familiar half smile. When he touched her, the yearning became a conflagration—irresistible, forbidden—that consumed her.

  Wanting a man, craving his touch, savoring the taste and smell of him, were new experiences to Leah. She wondered if he was aware of his effect on her. She had no idea what to do about it.

  Restless, she poured herself a glass of water and went out to the front porch, barefoot, sitting on the swing and gazing up at the stars over the water. Out at the harbor where Jackson’s boat lay moored, he slept. Or perhaps not.

  In the evening, he’d gone with the sheriff and some men in the steamer pilot to retrieve the rest of the stolen guns. After he’d returned, he hadn’t come to see her. Maybe he was confused, too. Maybe he, too, was troubled by the feelings that sparked between them.

  Releasing a soft sigh, she shut her eyes and remembered the place in the woods, the nestlike house draped in lush greenery. It was a place that stood apart in time, a sanctuary. For a few moments, she had been someone else there. She had been a wanton woman desired by a seductive man. He’d wanted to make love to her. She’d wanted him to. So why had she pushed him away? Why had she denied them both the pleasure of intimacy?

  Jackson was different from the prim-lipped suitors her father had paraded before her so long ago. He wasn’t intimidated by the things she knew, by her ambition to succeed as a doctor. He looked at her and saw a woman, treated her like a woman. Then why was she so afraid to let him into her heart?

  The fear had been planted years ago, and it had spread into her life, pervasive as a weed that wouldn’t die. Instinctively, she knew she was bound to disappoint any man who dared to get close to her. Because he would look into her soul and find it empty of those virtues a woman was expected to possess.

  Using a corner of her chenille robe, she wiped the tears from her face. She seemed to weep a lot these days. It wasn’t like her. Before Jackson had come into her life, she’d been frozen. Now that she was thawing, she was beginning to hurt.

  Damn Jackson Underhill. He wasn’t good for her. This wanting wasn’t good for her.

  A small, defiant voice inside her raised a protest. Why not? Why not? She’d devoted her life first to her father, now to her patients. What harm in wanting something for herself?

  The harm, she told herself, was in harboring a perverse desire for the wrong man. It was only a matter of time before he left. Then she’d have a broken heart on top of everything else. It was safer to keep her distance.

  A breeze swept up from the Sound, and she lifted her face to the sky and silently asked for a sign that she was right to guard her heart. Better to have it empty than broken. She sat there for a long while, swinging absently, listening to the sounds of the summer night and feeling as if she were the only person alive in the world.

  And then, in the middle of the deepest quiet of the night, an explosion punctured the silence.

  One moment she was sitting and crying on the swing; the next she was on the floor of the porch, splinters digging into her knees as she scrambled toward the door. From the corner of her eye, she could see fire flashes at the harbor entrance. A bell began to clang—the harbormaster’s bell, used to signal fog or an emergency. The sound of running feet and shouting came from the house. She rushed inside to find Zeke Pomfrit fumbling with a lamp.

  “What’s happening?” Perpetua asked. She held Bowie in her arms, cradling him with implacable maternal protection.

  “I’m not sure. An explosion down at the harbor. Gunshots, I’m afraid.”

  They could hear distant bellows and then an equine scream.

  “Get everyone down to the basement,” Leah ordered, summoning a fierce calm from somewhere deep inside her. “Don’t forget to wake Iona. She can’t hear the noise.”

  “My canary! I won’t go anywhere without my canary!” shrieked Aunt Leafy. A grumbling Battle Douglas fetched the shrouded cage.

  “What about you?” Pomfrit demanded.

  “I’m going to see what this is all about. Someone might be injured. The rest of you should wait in the basement.”

  “But—”

  “Just do it, Mr. Pomfrit. You can make certain everyone’s accounted for. Please.”

  Leah scrambled into a dress, stuffing her feet into slippers as she did up the buttons. Jackson. She didn’t want to believe he had anything to do with the trouble in the harbor, but she couldn’t help wondering. He was so silent about his past. She left the house at a run, a single braid trailing down her back and a pounding dread in her heart.

  Brunn’s dry-goods store and chandlery were in flames. The roof of the telegraph and post office smoldered. People and livestock filled the street.

  Leah skirted the crowd, making for the harbor. A fishing boat was also burning, as was the dock in front of the harbormaster’s office. She heard a sound like crackling underbrush; then something streaked past her, sucking the air as it went. Some yards behind her, a small building went up in flames.

  Sweet heaven, Coupeville was under attack. But why? Why?

  The guns. The guns she and Jackson had found. Dear God, had they stolen from brigands or pirates? Was the entire town paying the price?

  Leah made her way along the landing. A few men worked feverishly, silhouetted by the
leaping flames. In the water, a canoe glided swiftly toward the mouth of the harbor.

  In the deadly orange light of the fire, she could make out a ship in the distance. A steamer with sails. And it was leaving.

  She found Davy Morgan. The wiry youth churned desperately at a pump attached to a fire hose while the harbormaster doused the flames.

  “What on earth is happening?” she shouted.

  “We were attacked!”

  “Is anyone hurt?”

  “Underhill.” Davy dragged his sleeve across his sweating face. “I’m sorry, Dr. Mundy.”

  Horror. Disbelief. And finally, a searing grief. She pressed her hands to her face, amazed to feel old tears there, the tears of yearning she’d shed while sitting on the porch. Was it only moments ago?

  She found him lying on the foredeck of his boat, shirtless and completely motionless. “Jackson,” she whispered. “Oh, dear heaven...” As soon as she touched him, she knew. “You’re not dead. Thank God, thank God...” But he was unconscious.

  Working by the light of burning boats and buildings, she observed an ominous powder burn near his temple and a large bump on the side of his head.

  “Jackson?” Sparing nothing for gentleness, she slapped him, then shook him by the shoulders. “Jackson, wake up. You have to wake up.” She leaned over him, smelling burned powder and something elusive, something that reminded her of his kisses. She chided herself roundly for thinking of that at such a time. Mooning over a man was going to take the hardworking doctor out of her; that was a fact.

  “Wake up, damn you!” She shook him again.

  He rewarded her with a moan, then a foul curse.

  “Same to you,” she retorted, finding a wad of canvas and propping his head on it. “You scared me to death.”

  “What’d I do?”

  “I’m not sure. You almost got yourself killed.”

  He blinked, squinted at the leaping flames behind her. “Oh. The pirates. Damn, I hate pirates.”

  “What happened? Do you remember?”

  “They came into the harbor—nice steam sailer and a ballsy crew to sail in the dark—and opened fire. I saw a couple of canoes going back and forth, but with bullets flying everywhere, I didn’t have much of a chance to figure out what was going on.” He put up a hand, unexpectedly touched her cheek. “Hell’s bells, Leah. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”