by Karis Walsh
Table of Contents
Synopsis
By the Author
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
About the Author
Books Available from Bold Strokes Books
You Make Me Tremble
Animal rescue worker Iris Mallery thinks she has created a stable and secure home for herself, but when her small town is battered by an earthquake, Iris needs to rebuild not only her own life, but the lives of the displaced dogs and cats now filling her shelter.
The quake’s effects are personal for Iris, but not for seismologist Casey Radnor. Casey is a scientist above all else, logical and disconnected from the natural disasters she studies. When she rescues a stray dog from some rubble, she finds herself caught up in the lives of Iris and the others affected by the quake, despite her best efforts to remain professional.
The beautiful San Juan Islands in Washington State become the epicenter of both the earthquake and the collision of Iris's and Casey’s hearts. Can love bind the shattered fragments together again?
You Make Me Tremble
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You Make Me Tremble
© 2017 By Karis Walsh. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-62639-902-0
This Electronic Original is published by
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P.O. Box 249
Valley Falls, NY 12185
First Edition: July 2017
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editor: Ruth Sternglantz
Production Design: Susan Ramundo
Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])
By the Author
Harmony
Worth the Risk
Sea Glass Inn
Improvisation
Mounting Danger
Wingspan
Blindsided
Mounting Evidence
Love on Tap
Tales from Sea Glass Inn
Amounting to Nothing
You Make Me Tremble
Chapter One
Casey Radnor put her book down and climbed out of the Tundra. She had been waiting in line for a ferry for over three hours now. Before the first cancellation, she had sat in her truck while the line inched forward maddeningly every so often as the people in front of her anticipated the expected ferry and closed gaps between cars. During the second hour, she had occasionally moved forward an entire car length because some people gave up and left the line. Now, with the announcement of yet another cancellation, she figured pacing around the ferry dock would be more productive than sitting inside the truck and pretending to read.
Casey had lived in Seattle long enough to have idled in many a ferry line. Usually, however, she had to wait because so many people were trying to escape to the Olympic Peninsula and the ferries’ expansive bellies couldn’t accommodate them all. Not the case here at the Anacortes terminal. Only twenty or so vehicles were queued up in the holding area, and Casey assumed this was highly unusual for such a beautiful fall Friday. Hordes of tourists should be here, vying for spots on the ferry and snapping photos of the scenery. Instead, most people remained huddled in their cars as they waited for a ferry that might never come. Casey was sure it would be full when it arrived—if it arrived—of those who wanted to escape the earthquake-damaged San Juan Islands.
Her hand shook as she used the key remote to lock her truck. Not that she had anything valuable in the cab worth stealing. A few clothes—mostly in need of a wash after her trip to the Bay Area. A couple paperbacks and a small toiletries case. No one looking at her dinged and scratched truck with its messy cab would expect the old aluminum truck box in the bed to contain thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment, but just one device from the selection she had in there cost more than her truck and the cars in front and behind her combined.
A salty breeze tossed her short reddish-brown hair into her eyes as she walked across the paved parking lot and toward the pier. She had meant to get a haircut before speaking at the conference at Stanford, her alma mater, earlier in the week, but her new job at the University of Washington seismology lab had kept her too busy to even think about personal vanity. She had spent most of her speech self-consciously pushing her hair across her forehead. Any hope of getting it cut once she returned home had been destroyed when the earthquake struck.
Casey rubbed suddenly sweaty palms on her jeans. People usually assumed that earthquakes didn’t bother her at all, probably because she had chosen to study them as her life’s work and because she could get admittedly carried away when she started talking about transpressional faulting and subduction quakes. But when a real earthquake struck, she was as scared and helpless as everyone else in the area. Her fear might be camouflaged somewhat by her scientific curiosity and hidden behind a driving desire to help people learn to anticipate and survive significant seismic activity, but it was real nonetheless. Years of schooling and work hadn’t made her immune to the sense of panic that gripped her when her plane had shimmied across the tarmac yesterday.
She left the paved lot, and smooth, large rocks rolled under her feet as she walked down a slope and toward the water. The stones got progressively smaller as she got closer to the waves lapping against the shore, but they never gave way to sand. Normally, Casey would be sifting through the rocks in search of some non-indigenous specimen or an imprint of a fossilized shell, but today she couldn’t focus on the details of the rocky beach. She chose a flat, gray oval and flicked her wrist as she tried to skip it across the surface of Puget Sound. It disappeared with a heavy splash on the first bounce.
Casey sighed and looked for another skipping stone. The rocks under her feet shifted again, and she almost lost her balance. Aftershock? No. She regained her balance, calmed her breathing, and tossed another flat stone into the water with a non-skipping plop. She had been tense on the flight yesterday, even before the quake hit, and the sudden lurching motion had made every muscle seize. The pilot had been taxiing to the terminal, and most of the passengers—Casey included—had ignored the lit seat belt sign and unbuckled as they prepared to deplane. What could possibly happen on the ground? Casey of all people should have known the answer to that question. Instead, she had been one of the people tossed into the aisleway as the plane had lurched to the side, one set of landing gear buckling under the weight of the aircraft and throwing people and heavy carry-ons to the side.
If she had a sense of humor about earthquakes, she might have wryly decided that the plane ride h
ad been a fitting end to a lousy week, but she couldn’t let herself take such a violent phenomenon lightly. Still, her time at Stanford had sucked. Running into not one, but two ex-girlfriends in the span of one day? Definitely unpleasant. She shouldn’t have been too surprised—not because she had hordes of exes in every city along the West Coast, but because she knew both women were still at the university. One was an applied mathematics professor, and the other was working on yet another doctorate.
Sophie, who collected degrees like some people collected stamps, had been arm in arm with her new girlfriend when Casey ran across her in the bookstore. She had looked at Casey with something suspiciously resembling pity as she asked how she was, if she was seeing anybody, and how well she had been sleeping lately. New girlfriend hadn’t seemed fazed by the conversation, no doubt familiar with and attracted to Sophie’s nurturing ways. Casey had been, too, when they had first started dating, but she had been at a loss how to respond to so much attention, and unsure of her ability to reciprocate. Besides, she had guessed it was only a matter of time before Sophie’s attentions grew less intense.
After the drawn-out breakup with Sophie, Casey had reexamined her dating philosophy. Relationships should be a meeting of minds between two people who respected each other and shared the values of seeking knowledge, working for a higher purpose, and being independent. Math professor Shelby had fit that description perfectly, and their relationship had been about as much fun as it sounded. They had parted ways easily, in a sterile and mutually agreed-upon fashion, and Casey had been left with no real direction for the future except for a resolution to never again date a woman whose name began with S.
The green-and-white ferry appeared on the horizon, thankfully bringing Casey out of her memories and back to the present. She turned her back on the view of the Sound, with its patchwork of hilly, fir tree covered islands, and walked back to the ferry line. Part of her recognized how gorgeous the setting was, but most of her longed to be back in the city where people and cultural options filled in the gaps when she wasn’t busy at work. Here, she could only focus on the fascinating geological formations surrounding her for so long before the quiet beauty of the place invited self-reflection and contemplation. She needed to get to San Juan, the largest island and namesake of the San Juan Islands archipelago, and get busy with her instruments and notepads.
She had been strangely relieved when her boss had called before she’d even reached the airport parking lot and asked her to go to the islands, close to the epicenter of the earthquake. She had been prepared to get right to the lab and begin examining the loads of data that must have been coming in since the quake, but he wanted her on the island with minimal instruments. She knew this was an audition of sorts. She already had the job at the lab, of course, but her observations and performance when alone in the field would tell him a lot about her. This was her chance to prove her worth—anyone could be trained to read the information provided by high-tech instruments, but not everyone had the instincts and intuition to interpret clues without them. She had gone straight from the airport to the university lab where she picked up the portable gear she would need for the trip.
She had seen evidence of the earthquake’s magnitude as she inched through the city traffic. Closed roads, buildings with whole sections sheared off, emergency vehicles on every street. Even out here, where most of the rural areas seemed untouched on the surface, her practiced eye recognized the pattern of fallen trees, and she was able to guess which ones had recently come down and which were unrelated to the earthquake. She hadn’t bothered to return to her apartment, though, to assess the damage to her own space. She didn’t have much to lose. She had a few geodes she had collected, and those would survive a fall from a shelf. Her filing cabinets might have fallen over, but her books and papers—the main objects she cared about—were probably fine. Once she had made sure her local friends were okay, she had been left without anything else to worry about except doing her job to help make the future safer. She saw other people frantic about lost homes and belongings, and she wanted to do what she could to prevent more damage when the next quake hit.
She got back to the truck and double-checked the instruments in the box before settling in the driver’s seat and putting on her seat belt. The slow-moving ferry was still a distant speck on the horizon, but she was ready to get on board and get to her destination. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel for several minutes before taking out her notepad. She had already made notes about the damage she had witnessed on her drive from Seattle to Anacortes while she sat in her cheap hotel room last night. The blaring television and her rapid scribbling had calmed her mind enough to let her eventually fall asleep. Now she let her fingers capture what she observed at the ferry landing.
Except for the older trees that had fallen, there was little out here to indicate that a 7.2 magnitude earthquake had occurred the day before. She wasn’t much of an artist, but she had needed to learn the basics for her job, and she drew the small wooden terminal and the cars idling beside and in front of her. She drew a series of sketches of the ferry as it approached and docked. She was just penciling in the name of the ferry—the Klahowya—when the first vehicles began to disembark.
As she had expected, the ferry was full because of the destruction on the islands and the canceled routes from earlier in the day. Once the vehicles—she counted eighty-six—had been cleared, she and another twenty-three cars filed on board in their place. She considered waiting in the truck with her instruments since the trip would take less than two hours, even with stops at Lopez and Orcas Islands, but she hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before. She scrounged in the truck’s console for change for the vending machines, checked the lock on the instrument box yet again, and climbed the narrow stairwell to the passenger deck. She sat inside while she ate her barbecue potato chips and drank a Coke, and then she pushed through the door leading to the observation deck.
A blast of chilly autumn wind struck her, and she leaned in to it as she walked toward the bow and rested against the railing. She brushed her bangs out of her eyes again. She was going to have to buy a pair of scissors and cut her own damned hair once she got to Friday Harbor.
Gulls swooped alongside the ferry as the craft made slow progress toward their first stop at Lopez Island. Casey noticed a few seals that occasionally popped to the surface and watched the ferry slide by. She saw fins break the surface now and again. Too small to be whales. Dolphins? Porpoises? She had only taken the bare minimum of biology classes, so she wasn’t sure. She occupied her time by counting them instead of identifying. Eleven fins spotted during the forty-two-minute trip to Lopez.
Once there, she watched three cars drive off the ferry and down the two-lane road leading away from the dock and to the rest of the sparsely inhabited island. A tiny terminal and a log-cabin-style convenience store were the only signs of habitation. Casey hoped the town of Friday Harbor, her destination on the more populated San Juan Island, would be more active and lively, but she knew better than to expect a bustling metropolis anywhere out here. Her attention shifted from the miniature ferry landing to the towering fir trees to her still-grumbling stomach before coming to rest on one of the few walk-on passengers.
A seismic reaction. Casey usually was strong enough to resist them, but this one caught her with the same force as the Sound’s heavy wind current.
The woman paused before walking up the ramp and squinted up at the ferry, seeming to pick Casey out of the small crowd. She was pretty, in a windswept, wild way. Her gold-brown hair was caught in a ponytail, but several strands were loose and wisping across her face. Her face was as carefully sculpted as if an artist had labored long and hard over every detail. Her expression seemed weary, but that might be more attributable to the animals currently pulling her in different directions. And her body…
Casey sighed and moved away from the railing. The woman was a walk-on, meaning she was probably a local. And she had at least three dogs with h
er, maybe another one in the small pet crate she carried. Casey wasn’t an animal person and she wasn’t looking for a date. She headed back toward the vending machines. Chocolate. That’s what she needed.
Chapter Two
Iris Mallery stepped over a leash before the Chihuahua on the other end could pull it tight and trip her. An identical small dog was lashed to her wrist with a makeshift leash made of rope, and a German shepherd mix tugged her mercilessly along. A small crate, complete with pregnant cat, was heavy in her other hand. She had started the day wearing a fisherman’s knit sweater under a bulky jacket, hoping to fight off the biting wind, but now she wished she had worn something lighter. The shepherd stubbornly wanted to go in the opposite direction, no matter where she was headed, and the matched set of Chihuahuas were intent on running in circles. Iris didn’t see any opportunity in the foreseeable future for her to remove one of her warm layers. She hadn’t expected such a workout since she had only come to Lopez to pick up the two tiny dogs.
She was tempted by the elevator that would take her to the passenger deck, but the other walk-ons had the same idea and were waiting in line for it. Besides, she wasn’t sure how her charges would react to a shifting, shuddering ride in an enclosed box. She wasn’t especially keen on the idea, either, since she was still jumpy from the day before. Even being in Agatha’s car this morning, on the way to the ferry landing, had made her anxious. She needed open spaces and fresh air, and the best route was the wooden staircase. It was barely wide enough for her, let alone three meandering dogs and a plastic crate, but she climbed one step at a time. She couldn’t risk tripping and falling backward with all four animals. Luckily, no one was on the stairs going in the opposite direction, and she finally made it to the passenger deck. She paused for a few seconds, breathing hard from the steep climb with her charges, and then struggled to open the heavy glass door leading to the outer deck.