Bunny Elder Adventure Series: Four Complete Novels: Hollow, Vain Pursuits, Seadrift, ...and Something Blue

by J. B. Hawker

  They didn’t bother Ljuto, so he didn’t mind crashing here, temporarily.

  He wondered, briefly, if he should try to find out how Grgur died, and perhaps avenge him. At just that moment he became distracted by the gyrations of the scantily clad performers on the television and thought no more about his late partner.

  Just as Bunny got home, the phone in her pocket vibrated, demanding her attention.

  “Hello? Hi, Max. How are you?” Bunny chirped, happily.

  “I’m fine, but how are you? Are your bruises and the wound on your shoulder any better?”

  “Better every minute. Soon I won’t even remember where it hurt.”

  “I doubt that, but I am glad to hear that you are improving. I’m afraid I’ve got some disappointing news. We’re in the midst of a crisis here at work and I won’t be able to get out there for at least a week.”

  “Oh, Max! I am disappointed. But, never mind. I really am quite all right and perfectly able to wait a while longer for your visit. It will give me time to finish up some projects I’ve been neglecting in all this drama.”

  “You’re sure? If you really need me I can tell these guys to take care of things themselves for a change and come right away.”

  “That’s sweet, but completely unnecessary.”

  Bunny strolled out to the patio and sat on a bench while they chatted comfortably.

  There seemed to be a new relaxation in their relationship, she reflected happily when she’d clicked off.

  Firmly closing her mind to thoughts of the past traumas and potential future dramas, she applied herself to earning a living for the rest of the morning.

  For lunch Bunny fixed a chicken salad sandwich made with chopped apples, grapes, celery and cashews, all mixed with a vanilla yogurt dressing and tucked into a whole wheat pita. She was just clearing up her dishes when Scott called.

  He was making a visit to an elderly church member who was now living near Cannon Beach and he thought Bunny might enjoy the scenic ride and a visit to that popular tourist spot.

  It sounded like just the break she needed, so she accepted without a moment’s hesitation and quickly changed into more appropriate clothes for an impromptu trip to the beach.

  Scott’s new car was very comfortable and carried no reminders of their previous wilderness escapade.

  The beauty of the scenery as they drove north along Tillamook Bay was a balm to Bunny’s soul. Just north of Newport Beach they left the highway and drove inland about fifteen minutes more to the home of Miss Dorothea Grugenski, age ninety-eight.

  Miss Dottie, as she asked to be called, lived with her great-grandson and his wife, but was fiercely independent in body and spirit. She served her guests tea in fine china teacups in a parlor decorated with museum quality quilts made by her own hand from her original designs. A work in progress was attached to the large quilting frame in the sunniest corner of the room, testifying that her quilting days were not yet behind her.

  As they drove away an hour later, Bunny thanked Scott for bringing her to meet that amazing woman.

  “Look at this exquisite hot pad she gave me! Such vibrant colors. I’m going to hang it on the wall. This is art. I wouldn’t dare use it for fear I would get it dirty.”

  “Dottie’s quite a special lady. She can’t get out as much as she used to, but it is well worth the effort for me to come to her. She isn’t just gifted with her hands, you know. That woman is one of the wisest souls I’ve ever encountered. More than once she has helped to straighten me out.”

  “I can’t imagine you ever needing to be straightened out about anything,” Bunny teased.

  Scott blushed, but only shrugged in reply.

  Their dinner in Cannon Beach was a treat. They had walked on the beach and gazed at Haystack Rock before coming to a delightfully upscale beachside restaurant. The table overlooked the water and they observed a wedding party posing for pictures on the beach below, framed by a spectacular sunset.

  “Look, Scott. What high hopes those young people have for their life together. Let’s pray that God blesses them with an abundance of love and joy.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “No, but I remember what it was like to be young and in love, with a world of possibilities ahead. I’d like to spare them some of the harsher disappointments that can hide in wait just around the next curve in the road.”

  Their food arrived and Scott included the newlyweds in his prayer, then they devoted themselves to their dinner.

  “Have you had a lot of harsh disappointments on your life’s travels, Bunny?” Scott asked, seriously.

  “No more than I deserve, I suppose. Some people’s lives are so dire that I don’t like to even mention my feeble woes. I’ve been blessed much more than I’ve been disappointed.”

  “So, nothing worth mentioning, eh? What about your husband’s murder?”

  “How do you know about that, Scott? I didn’t think I’d talked to anyone in Bannoch about how Eustace died.”

  “My sister has a friend in Redding and she remembered reading about those murders in Clark’s Hallow a few years ago. When she mentioned the name of the minister that was involved Rosamund recognized his name. Why don’t you ever talk about it?”

  “Because it doesn’t make me happy. Both the marriage and the way it ended were painful. That is part of my life I would rather forget. There’s nothing to be gained by reliving it…isn’t that why you don’t talk about the deaths of your wife and daughter?”

  “Fair enough. I never used to be able to speak about the accident, at all, without breaking down completely, so I just stopped trying. The ache is still there, like an echo of the original pain, but, for some reason, I felt like talking about it with you, and I wanted to hear about your husband, too.”

  “What did your sister tell you?”

  “Oh, she repeated some pretty unbelievable rumors, including that you were nearly a victim of the serial killer, too.”

  “Well, that’s true enough. I suppose it would have been fitting for me to have been his last murder in the series, since Eustace was his first. The Lord spared me, then, as he did last week. So, I guess he’s still got lessons for me to learn or work for me to do. That reminds me; it’s getting late and I have a writing assignment that will miss the deadline if I don’t get back to it. Shall we go?”

  Bunny was uncomfortable talking about Eustace and the events before and after his death. She felt that there were details that were best forgotten.

  Scott put a generous tip on the table then reluctantly walked Bunny out to the car. He was frustrated. That wedding party had seemed like the perfect opportunity to turn the conversation to more personal subjects, but Bunny kept shying away.

  They listened to classical music on the drive back and talked of inconsequential things.

  Walking into her home when Scott dropped her off, Bunny felt happier than she had in months. This little outing had been the perfect break and she was ready to tackle whatever lay before her.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  …my companion, my close friend – Psalm 55:13

  Bunny was smothering. She couldn’t move. A weight pressing on her chest held her down and she felt waves lapping around her body, growing higher and higher as she gasped for air. With a desperate heave, she threw off her oppressor and twisted away, landing with a thud on the floor beside her bed.

  She gulped in air and tried to quickly disentangle herself from the blankets she’d dragged with her when she fell. Where was her attacker?

  As her heart rate slowed and her mind cleared, she realized that she was alone...she’d been having another nightmare.

  Bunny emitted a weak chuckle, got to her feet and shakily sat down on the bed, trying to clear away the phantasms swirling in her head.

  A glance at the clock showed it was three o’clock; still too early to get up.

  One of the hardest parts of living alone was the nights, like this, when she awoke frightened by bad dreams with no one arou
nd to comfort and reassure her.

  She made a brief trip to the bathroom for a drink, straightened up her bed covers and tried to return to sleep. When the visions from her dream refused to dissipate, she turned to her remedy of choice and began to recite the Twenty-third Psalm, finally falling asleep in the midst of her fifth or sixth repetition.

  Bunny overslept the next morning and was just clearing up her breakfast things when Naidenne called.

  “Hi! Are you busy for lunch today? I’ve got something I would like to show you.”

  “I got a late start and was planning to work through lunch today. Why don’t you come over for dinner? Can it wait until then?”

  “Sure. Not a problem. I’ll see you around six. Shall I bring anything?”

  “You can bring the wine, if you want. See you later.”

  Before Naidenne arrived Bunny was catching up on some paperwork. She dug into a stack of unopened mail and was thrilled to find a letter from the publisher of a national monthly Christian periodical.

  Bunny had been sending them pitches for articles on a fairly frequent basis. The last few had been accepted, but she was still amazed and thrilled to read their request for her to provide a regular monthly column on the sorts of faith issues she had been pitching them.

  This would be her first on-going assignment and steady paycheck since becoming a ‘real’ writer.

  She was dancing around her living room, praising and laughing, when Naidenne rang the doorbell.

  Bunny reined in her celebration long enough to open the door, but then grabbed her friend by the hands and danced her into the room, where she collapsed onto the balance ball and promptly rolled off onto the floor with a thump, squarely on her bottom, laughing.

  “Bunny! Are you okay? What’s going on?”

  Bunny grinned broadly as she sat more sedately on the ball and shared her good news.

  “Why, that’s wonderful. Golly, I’m friends with a national magazine columnist. Would you like my autograph?”

  “Naidenne, you are so funny. You’re supposed to ask for my autograph. I’m the celebrity, now. But, seriously, this is a start, you know? I am beginning to make a living as a writer. I feared this day would never come.”

  “Well, you’ve been working hard at it, so you deserve some success.”

  “Come on into the kitchen and you can tell me your news while I get dinner on the table.”

  “I think I’ve figured out what you have on that flash drive that caused all the trouble, Bunny. You probably thought I’d never figure it out, but I didn’t get around to looking at it right away. I don’t know what it all means, but this seems to be a schedule of shipping times, vessel names and numbers, and shipping container numbers, along with a list of people’s names that correspond with the various arrivals.”

  “Really? How can you tell?”

  “Look here at this line, YMKAOHSIUNG-, IMO:8902565, MMSI:310665000 – 8574932786194323398 – 11082013 – Olympic. The first group of letters is the name of a container ship. The IMO and MMSI are the ship’s identification numbers. The next eighteen digits could be a container’s SSCC number, followed by the date of arrival at the Olympic container terminal in the Port of Tacoma.”

  “IMO, MMSI, SSCC…what about XYZPDQ? Where did you get all that? How do you know what those letters mean?”

  “I worked at the Port of Tacoma when I first moved to the Northwest, Bunny. I’ve seen plenty of shipping manifests. I looked up the YM KAOHSIUNG, and those are the accurate IMO and MMSI for a ship of that name. I checked the schedule on the Internet and that ship is due in on the 11th of August at the Olympic terminal.”

  “So, whatever nearly got me killed is arriving in Tacoma next month?”

  “I think so.”

  “If there is a container with that serial number coming to the Port, I would sure like to know what’s in it that made those men so crazed to get this information.”

  “They may not have needed the information, Bunny. They may have been trying to keep anyone else from getting it. It was all encrypted, remember.”

  “That would mean that whatever is arriving on that container, and the others on the list, is probably illegal, wouldn’t it?”

  “I can’t think of any other reason to keep it such a big secret.”

  Bunny shook out a yellow and white checked tablecloth and began to set the table.

  “Are you going to give this information to the police, Bunny?”

  “That would have been my first impulse, but I haven’t had such good luck with being taken seriously by the authorities, lately. It’s not very pleasant being treated like a paranoid idiot, let me tell you.”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to sit down with my dear friend and eat dinner. I hope you like curried quinoa with marinated tofu and roast veggies. I’m feeling vegetarian tonight.”

  After Naidenne left, taking a copy of Bunny’s recipe with her, Bunny sat on the patio thinking about the list.

  She surmised that Naidenne was probably right about it being a shipping schedule, and most likely it was for some sort of contraband. She should turn the list over to the Port Authority and let them handle it…or not, as seemed likely from her past experiences. But, it really wasn’t any of her business.

  On an impulse, she called Scott and asked him to come over. She needed pastoral guidance on this.

  Max sent off a quick email to Bunny before going to bed. He was eager to get to Oregon as soon as he got the situation at work cleared up. He wanted to see for himself that she was okay.

  He had returned from their encounter in Italy intent on winning Bunny back. To that end Max had been attending a large non-denominational church in one of Houston’s suburbs. Even after he and Bunny had quarreled about her move to Oregon, he had continued to attend services and social gatherings there.

  Max had discovered that mature single men were a hot commodity in churches these days and he had basked in all the attention for months before growing tired of being valued only for what he might have to offer the unattached women in the congregation.

  Women sometimes accuse men of undressing them with their eyes, but Max had begun to resent these women for mentally dressing him in a groom’s tuxedo.

  He knew that Bunny appreciated him for who he was, not for what he could do for her. In her eyes he would always be the quarterback and star student of their youth, even with all his acquired fears, flaws and idiosyncrasies. And she loved him, anyway. Or at least, she used to.

  In the past, Bunny had tended to romanticize or idolize Max a bit too much. She was always his biggest fan.

  When he made the mistake of pointing out to her that she saw him as some sort of fantasy superhero, she had flipped. She didn’t deny it, but, instead, had been jolted by the truth in what he said. Now, she was so intent on finding herself and developing a clear vision of Max, that he feared he may have lost her.

  He had been taking her love for granted since they were teenagers, never realizing what a precious gift it was, until now.

  Max hoped to get everything resolved during his upcoming visit to the cold, clammy Oregon Coast.

  There was still the small issue of Bunny’s outspoken faith to deal with, plus deciding where to live and whether she would insist on marriage. But he was certain that those petty concerns could be handled easily enough.

  He had absorbed plenty of the churchy jargon and practices, by now, to satisfy Bunny’s worries about him being a non-believer. The rest was simply persuasion and logistics. As a successful district manager that was right up his alley.

  “Thanks for coming by, Scott. I need some help deciding what I should do,” Bunny perched on her balance ball across from Scott who sat on the small sofa.

  “Do you need advice on whether or not to invest in a few more pieces of furniture, perhaps a chair or two? Come sit next to me, Bunny, I won’t bite,” Scott teased and patted the seat cushion.

  Bunny got up and picked up the lists from he
r desk, then settled herself on the loveseat beside Scott.

  “This is what I wanted to talk to you about. These papers are the decoded contents of that flash drive.”

  “I thought you said it was a meaningless jumble of numbers and letters.”

  “That’s what I thought when I looked at it. Here, what do you see?”

  Bunny handed Scott the papers.

  “I see what you saw; random numbers and letters. Are you saying that you have figured it out?”

  “I didn’t, but Naidenne did. She used to work at the Port of Tacoma and recognized this as shipping information. Apparently, it is the schedule for containers that will be arriving at the Port in the next few weeks and months.”

  “Why go to so much trouble over shipping information? First they encrypt it on the USB drive, then, when they lose it, they break into your place to get it back, then chase us all over two states and finally come here and attack you…just for arrival times on some containers? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Well, it might, if whatever is in the container is very valuable…and illegal.”

  “You mean like drugs, or bootlegged DVD’s or a terrorist bomb?”

  “I don’t know, but something they don’t want anyone to know about. Just in case, should I report this to the police or the Port Authority? Or am I letting my imagination run away with me?”

  “It hardly seems believable. Only, when we consider all the unbelievable things that have been happening because of that list, I don’t think we can just ignore it.”

  “You think so, too? I thought I might send it to the people at the Port. Naidenne already checked and these are real ships and valid container numbers. In fact, the first one on the list comes in to SeaTac pretty soon.”

  “If you don’t want your letter to get lost in the mailroom shuffle or misdirected, maybe we should go there and hand it to someone in person.”