Where Dreams Books 1-3

by M. L. Buchman

  While other students were partying, she was taking courses at the CIA. The Culinary Institute of America was less than a dozen miles up the road after all and it was too good a chance to pass up. No big surprise, what with being her father’s daughter, that she had an exceptionally well-trained palate. By the time she’d graduated from high school at sixteen, she’d read a hundred books about wine. She’d graduated from both Vassar and the CIA at twenty. Columbia School of Journalism had occurred by chance as much as conscious choice. The class assignment to write a review of the Punk and Wine Bistro had led to her first sale and she’d never looked back.

  Daddy was wrong, it certainly hadn’t been by chance. She’d planned and she’d worked so hard and given up so much. She was out here alone wasn’t she?

  “Given up a hell of a lot, Daddy.” She brushed at a tear raised by the cold wind.

  Her fingers were frozen, even colder than her cheeks. Blowing into her curled hands warmed them little. She pulled the gloves back on, forming fists with her hands, leaving the chilly fingers of the gloves empty.

  The lighthouse stood high above. The sailboat was disappearing southward, continuing its own chilly journey. A container ship sliced northward, but there were few other craft on so bitter a day.

  She’d planned…to get as far away from Seattle and Bainbridge Island as she could. Marketing had started out as a degree in business. A thousand times she’d pictured herself smashing through the glass ceiling at some huge corporation. Of being like Carly Fiorina, then a top AT&T exec. She’d gone on to be president of Hewlett-Packard. Cassidy had written her a piece of teen fan mail, the only she’d ever written, but no answer came. One thing Cassidy knew, though, a woman could do anything.

  “If Carly can do it, so can I.”

  “Absolutely!” Her father would agree. “Anything but food or wine. The reviewers are such an old boys’ club.” His voice was a whisper in her memory, as warm as the wind was cold. He’d warned her of that so many times that she’d taken on the challenge.

  “But I found a way through. You know, Daddy, I did an end run on them.”

  “Right,” she waved her arms about to make her point and then waved them some more to get a decent blood flow. “I ignored that old boy’s club completely and forged my own path to the tables.” She’d cut quite a swath; and stepped on a number of toes, but success forgave many sins.

  “I knew what I was doing.” Even as she said it, the words went sour. Her path that had been so clear, was only so in retrospect. Maybe that part of Daddy’s letter was true.

  “But I’m in control now. The rest of your letter is just plain silly. I know where I’m going.” And she did. A year maybe two more on the west coast, a couple in Europe, and she’d swing back into New York at the very top. Let the New York Times beg her to come aboard. They were the only major metro newspaper that didn’t syndicate her column. Well, other than the Washington Post, but that was such an inside-the-Beltway paper that it didn’t bother her nearly as much.

  “I know what I’m doing. My path is clear, Daddy.”

  The roar of the wind and the crash of the waves against the beach were her only answers.

  “Crystal clear.” Again the sour taste. Her path wasn’t that clear. What was clear was that she was losing her mind.

  She was sitting on the windiest point of Seattle in a below-freezing day on the first of February. Sitting here with icicles where most people had fingers, holding a conversation with her dead father about career choices he’d be the first to argue were hers to make.

  That was a laugh. Actually, it was. It bubbled up from somewhere deep inside her. It started small and it built and built until it burst forth and she could barely catch her breath.

  “Totally and completely nutso!” she shouted at the wind and her words drifted away, wrapping around the lighthouse on their way landward.

  “It will all make sense by-and-by, my ice sweet girl.”

  She spun around, but there was no one near. No one but memory to whisper to her with her father’s voice.

  # # #

  Angelo lay back on one of the cockpit benches of the sailboat, his back against the cabin wall. His hood was raised against the wind. He clutched a silver travel mug in his gloved hands.

  Russell imagined that someday he’d be able to feel his cheeks again, but not anytime soon—damn but it was cold.

  “Hey Angelo.” His friend had been quiet for the whole trip.

  “What?” A one-word answer. His friend was Italian and never gave one-word answers.

  “It’s Saturday. How can you afford to be out here with me? Thought you did a Saturday lunch. Not that I don’t appreciate it and all.” He pointed the boat up a few points tighter to the wind. Even with the reef in the main and the small jib up forward, she still skidded over the wave tops at better than seven knots.

  “We do a lunch.” Angelo’s voice was so quiet Russell could barely make out his answer over the wind.

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?” It wasn’t like him to be obtuse. Angelo took a long pull of his coffee, so long he seemed to be avoiding the answer.

  “Well?”

  “No traffic, my man. Saturday lunch is so slow, the sous chef can handle it. With one arm behind his back.” More coffee. “And his head in a sack.”

  “But you’re the best cook there is, Angelo.”

  “Don’t let my mother hear you say that.”

  He still had his sense of humor, that at least was a good sign. Russell kept them headed down the Sound, maybe they’d circle Vashon Island.

  “What about your wonderful wine reviewer? Didn’t she make it all better?”

  Angelo shook his head. “A nice article about the tasting, business picked up a little, but people don’t come to restaurants to drink hundred-dollar bottles of wine. They come for food. I still haven’t really paid off the tasting and that was three weeks ago.”

  “How much did you spend?”

  “Publicity, a couple of ads in the right places, I picked up the hotel for the guy from Gourmet Week, all the appetizers. The wines alone cost a grand. Wholesale.”

  “Shit!” Russell eased out the sails a bit so that he could pay less attention to the boat and more to his friend.

  “How close are you to failing?”

  Angelo shrugged and he didn’t look up.

  “Look. You need money, it’s not an issue. You know that.”

  Angelo nodded. He’d never taken money from the Morgans, except for the college expenses Russell’s dad had insisted on giving him. Not even pocket change from the Morgan millions.

  “What’s your hook?”

  Angelo squinted up at him. “My hook?”

  “Sure, every ad has a hook. Every business has one too. My hook as an ad photographer was, ‘Highest quality, spare no expenses.’ And I didn’t. If I needed an elephant in the distant background, I hired the elephant, handlers, and whatever. My clients paid, man did they pay. And they got the best damn quality that could be achieved in return. What do you have?”

  Angelo looked puzzled for a moment, shifted on the cockpit seat.

  “Authentic Italian cooking.”

  “Tony’s fast pizza claims that in every mall store.”

  Angelo’s glare was intense enough that Russell decided to back off rather than push harder. He really didn’t want to go for a swim in February. They’d reached the north tip of Vashon Island and he decided to take the western side. The wind was just right to take the narrower Colvos Passage south and then they’d have room to tack back and forth coming up the wider East Passage into the wind. It would be his longest sail yet, and it might give them some time to work something out.

  “Other than your mother, you’re the best damn cook. Right?”

  “Damn straight.” Angelo was still pissed about the mall store crack.

>   “And still you aren’t a big success.”

  The pissed look eased back toward sad, such an unusual expression on his friend’s face that it took Russell several moments to identify it.

  “So we need to come up with a hook. Something to get you noticed—other than a thousand dollars of wine.”

  “Damn good Italian food should be enough.”

  “That’s better.”

  “What is?”

  “Damn Good Italian Food. It’s a good pitch.”

  “My mother would slap us both and wash out our mouths with soap.” But there was a shadow of a smile. Better.

  “Your mother gonna slap you even worse if you give up.”

  Angelo nodded and for the first time on the trip, took some interest in the sailboat. He pulled a winch handle out of the pocket mounted inside the cockpit and cranked a couple of turns on the jib sheet. A little too far, but Russell decided that the better part of valor was to keep his mouth shut. Sailing with the wind was warmer and quieter, but also less demanding. If Angelo was still sulking when they rounded the south end of Vashon, his mother wasn’t the only one who’d be slapping him.

  “What part of Italy do you know better than any other?”

  Angelo shrugged, “You know that. Liguria. Mama’s from Liguria; Pop was from Tuscany. Mama and I went back every year. You came with me for the whole summer after senior year in high school. Why you ask such a stupido question?”

  “I knew the answer. Wanted to make sure you did, dummy.”

  Angelo’s glare finally had a bit of energy behind it.

  “How much of your menu is Ligurian, even northern Italian?”

  Angelo gazed off the side of the boat at the big ferry passing off the stern.

  “Maybe half. Maybe less. Sicilian is a big draw. So is the far north, up in the Piedmont.”

  “So you’ve got to stock ingredients for everywhere from Sicily to Venice to Milan. And all those fancy wines you served to the Madonna wine lady?” About the right image with her perfect coif and perfect poise.

  He blinked this time. “Why…uh…none. Only two were even Italian.”

  “Mi amico. I, the great Russell Morgan, have found your problem and your answer. The best damn Ligurian food in the Western Hemisphere. Okay, the title sucks. No one knows nothing from Liguria anyway. Best Damn Tuscan Food in the West. Still sucks. We’ll work on that. First thing, you sell off or drink any wine not from northern Italy. Eat the out of region ingredients on your days off.”

  He pinched Angelo’s cheek and pulled on it like a matron auntie.

  “Then I make-a you an ad spread,” he blew a kiss in the air off his fingertips, “that will-a make you mama proud.”

  “You? I thought you were done with that, man.”

  Russell had thought he was as well, but Angelo needed help. His kind of help.

  “That’s okay, I’m gonna make you pay, brother. Through the nose.”

  Angelo lost some of his happiness. “You know I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “No. But you make the best damn pasta sauce on the planet.”

  Angelo perked up. “I do, don’t I.”

  His punch thudded into Russell’s shoulder hard enough to hurt. He’d let his friend get away with that…for now.

  # # #

  “You left New York for this?” Melanie stood on the pitching dock barely wide enough to walk on and clutched tightly onto Russell’s arm for stability.

  “Yep! Isn’t she beautiful?” Melanie was used to being called beautiful, and had made a career of it. But if it meant that she was similar to this boat, a shudder rippled up her spine, she’d give it up.

  The boat, which was moving with a life of its own that had nothing to do with the dock, lay spread out before her. In the late afternoon light she could see the blue paint on the side was peeling. The white masts were doing the same. There was a great expanse of red material wrapped about the horizontal piece—the boom, Russell called it. It looked like a virulent growth that one should spray immediately with Lysol. A lot of it. Before burning it in the bathtub. The floor was all torn up, great strips of gray and black canvas had been peeled up to reveal rough wood that looked even worse.

  “Want to come aboard?”

  “No!” But Russell was already stepping up onto the boat and her tight grip on his arm dragged her along. The boat was so small that it rolled back and forth just from their weight. The only boat she’d ever been on was the New York Circle Line, a massive ferry filled with thousands of tourists. And that had been for a fashion shoot, so she hadn’t paid much attention to anything but the photographer. That had been her second spread and first cover for Elle. Even for that she might not have climbed aboard this boat.

  “See, over here I’ve been replacing the deck.”

  Deck, not floor. She repeated the word a couple of times to remind herself.

  He had ducked under the virulent boom thing and was pointing at a place she couldn’t see along the cabin. She took a breath and leaned over to see. If felt as if she was going to be flung headfirst into the inky depths between Russell’s boat and the ragged old powerboat parked next door.

  The deck looked better on this side. More like the parquet of her kitchen floor though not nearly as pretty.

  “It’s so,” narrow, she wanted to shout. The water was right there. “Nice.” She checked Russell’s face and he beamed like a newborn’s father. The right answer. Perhaps it was okay to relax a little.

  “Down below is still a mess.” She hadn’t really thought about the inside of the boat. The cabin was barely as tall as her knees. There was a tiny door that might do for the White Rabbit, but she was no Alice in Wonderland to go crawling on her hands and knees, especially not in her cashmere coat.

  He opened the door and then slid a part of the roof back. A little ladder went much farther down than she thought. Down far enough to stand in. Down until, she glanced over the side and then back down the ladder, until she’d be standing underwater to her knees.

  “Make sure to hold on as you come down.” Russell clambered down into the cabin like he was born to it, facing forward as he dropped down the ladder holding onto nothing at all. She knew from experience that men lived in a world of their own. Russell had always been a cut above: more civilized, more polite, and usually more thoughtful.

  At the moment, she could kill him.

  But if she wanted him, she was going to have to do this stupid male test. One of thousands they threw at women, but at least with Russell it didn’t have a backing of cruelty behind it, just his own version of naïveté. And she did want him. Why else had she cancelled two shoots on short notice when he’d called with a Valentine’s Day invitation to come to Seattle? Even at her level, those cancellations would have ripples across her career for months to come.

  “Get a grip, girl.” She took hold of either side of the doorway, thankful for her leather gloves. Though they didn’t stop the cold, at least she didn’t have to risk a splinter. There was no way to descend the ladder as Russell had. She turned and went down it backwards. Even one at a time, the steps were steep and difficult. The boat kept shifting, little jerks in unexpected directions. This is how clumsy people must feel. She hated it. Hated it so much she wanted to cry. She clamped down on that hard, careful not to bite her lip.

  The floor was a surprise when she ran out of steps. Then she turned. There was just enough room to stand upright, but her instincts wanted to hunch down like a troll.

  The ceiling was high in the middle, but sloped down to either side. The floor was a narrow strip running all the way to the front. The walls sloped outward from the floor. Seating was perched part way up the wall, making more use of the wider space. God, it was even smaller than her father’s trailer—may the old bastard rot in hell.

  “I’m going to put the galley here,” he pointed to a coupl
e cardboard boxes of groceries, an ice chest and a small camping stove.

  “Pilot’s berth there.” A bed no bigger than a coffin, across the narrow walkway from the galley. How could you even climb into the thing? The deck was just two or three feet above the narrow bench.

  “A settee that can be a dining table or collapse into a comfortable double bed right here across from this little woodstove.” He continued forward oblivious of the fact that all this meant nothing to her. Whatever he was calling a settee was now a card table and two folding chairs. And how that became a bed for two was beyond her and a place she’d certainly never be found.

  A section of the flooring was pulled up and she half expected to see the ocean beneath it. Instead, about six inches down, was concrete and, she swallowed hard, a wash of blackish water running back and forth with each motion of the boat.

  A loud buzz below her right foot made her jump. There were splashing noises and slowly the skin of water disappeared. The buzzing stopped with a sigh and a gurgle.

  “That’s just the bilge pump.”

  The smell of fresh-cut wood and paint added to the queasiness in her stomach. The bilge pump, she did her best to catalog all of the strange words he kept using. Booms and tillers and hulls. Even something called a fang or a vang that he wanted to replace for reasons she’d never understand.

  Again she focused on the curve of the hull. It had looked wider from outside. She peeked out one of the round windows and could just see the water. The floor was deeper than she’d thought, she was in the ocean up to her waist.

  The “head” was next on the tour.

  She blinked twice but it didn’t go away. A porcelain toilet. With handles and levers that would make a dentist chair look safe. Sitting right there in the open on the floor. It was a good thing that he’d promised her a hotel room or she’d be on the red-eye back to New York.

  He waved at a blank section of hull, “Books, maybe a bench seat that could double as a bunk. Don’t really know yet.”