He scanned the roof, cedar shakes that were rotting. A hole gaped toward the peak. “I think so,” he said.
She nodded. When she started forward, he stayed close beside her. He let her push the door farther open and, after a barely perceptible hesitation, step inside first.
The interior looked like a lot of these rustic resort cabins up and down the Pacific coast probably had. Maybe still did. A now-rusting potbellied stove tucked in a corner would have allowed crackling fires. The stove pipe had broken off, and damage showed rain had poured in. In another corner had been a kitchenette with a small refrigerator, two burners and a couple of cupboards. One was cracked open enough for him to see that something had been nesting inside.
Against another wall slumped the remains of a sofa with rusty springs showing through tattered fabric.
Sophie stood stock still in the middle of the room, her face too pale, her eyes huge and dilated. He left her briefly to glance into the second room, where a double bed had half-collapsed. The room also held a built-in dresser and closet, and he could see through another doorway to a small bathroom. When he turned around, she was staring at the sofa.
“I slept there,” Sophie said, her voice thin. “It pulled out into a bed. Mom…” She had to swallow. “Mom and Dad had the bedroom.”
“Makes sense,” he said. “It must have been cozy going to bed out here when a fire was still burning.”
She blinked, as if jarred from the darker memory. “Yes. I loved having fires. There’s a pit with a grill outside, too. Sometimes we cooked hot dogs there.”
“And marshmallows.”
Her mouth curved just a little. “I ate a lot of s’mores every summer. After the last day of school, we’d do a big grocery shop so we had enough food for at least the first week or two. I’d beg Mom to buy marshmallows and graham crackers and chocolate bars to bring, so we could have them our first night here. It was…like a ritual. We had to have a fire and eat s’mores.”
“It’s good you have those summers to remember.” He hesitated, wanting to leave it at that, but knowing it sounded like a platitude. “My mother never had more than a couple of weeks a year off work, and mostly we’d do stuff near home, like go to the zoo.”
Sophie looked at him directly, her eyes pained. “I haven’t let myself remember. I hope Mom doesn’t know.”
Well, damn. He’d managed to keep his hands off her this long, but he couldn’t do it any longer. He stepped forward, lightly gripped her upper arms and met her eyes. “If she does,” he heard himself say gruffly, “I’m going to guess she understands.”
“Yes.” She tried to smile, blinked hard, and with a muffled cry bent her head so that it rested against his chest. Daniel wrapped his arms securely around her and leaned his chin against the top of her head. After a moment, her arms crept around his torso, too.
They stood like that for several minutes. She wasn’t crying, but she was leaning on him, gathering strength, he thought. He was happy to give her whatever she could draw from him.
He hadn’t realized she’d gone lax until she began to gather herself to retreat, her body tensing. Reluctant as he was to let her go, he knew he had to. For her sake, and for his own.
Her distress seemed to have eased some when she backed away from him. He waited while she stepped into the bedroom, then without a word turned and walked out of the cabin.
“Show me what you did summers,” he suggested.
“Oh.” Sophie turned her head to look around, her eyes almost blind. She was seeing another time.
Coaxed by him, she led the way around the cabin and showed him the fire pit and a picnic table, rotting like everything else made of wood. Here they were looking down at the river. For once, no mist danced with the current, although a cool breeze blew in off the ocean. The resort was upriver from the pier that thrust out on the town side. A couple of fishing boats were tied up to it. Jed Fitzpatrick’s boat was gone, Daniel noticed; the months from May through September, Jed didn’t take a day off from the sealife cruises so popular with tourists. Winters he filled in with odd jobs; he’d rebuilt the front porch on the small house Daniel had rented when he moved to Cape Trouble, and done a hell of a job. Once again, Daniel wondered what Jed thought of the Save the Misty Beach campaign – and of Doreen Stedmann.
Once Sophie started talking, though, he forgot Jed and the small town dynamics that were as tangible as the grid of streets. Her memories of those long-ago summers poured out as if she couldn’t stop herself. She’d often swam in the river, she told him, but not in the deep channel – her mother let her swim where the river threw out shallow ribbons as it spread wider to cross the beach. Driftwood gathered there, huge trees turned silver and stacked willy-nilly by winter storms like pick-up sticks. Sophie had made simple rafts from smaller pieces, sometimes using the same one all summer long. She told him how she’d try to hide it, and get so mad if she came down to find bigger kids had stolen it.
They circled back around the cabin and started down the paved lane toward the lodge. He noticed she didn’t seem to want to look at the sand dunes, rising to their right.
“There were always other kids,” she told him. “It didn’t seem to matter whether we were the same age or not, or boys or girls. We’d form a sort of gang. The Crawfords came every August for the whole month.” Her face had softened as she pointed at a cabin closer to the lodge. “They always reserved the same one, like we did. They had a girl a year younger than me. Paige Crawford. We’d be shy for about two hours when her family arrived, and then best friends for the rest of the summer. Her family lived in Eugene, so we didn’t see each other the rest of the year.” Sophie went quiet for a minute. “I wonder what she thought when she arrived that summer and I wasn’t here. I got a postcard from her and then a letter, later after she was home again, but I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.”
Without a word, Daniel reached out and took her hand. He’d been keeping an eye on the remains of a split rail fence separating road from sand dunes. Even now, what had always been the opening leading to the beach was obvious. This beach was still popular.
There was good reason. The town side didn’t have the same vast, sandy expanse; sea stacks were picturesque, but they were accompanied by low rock formations, too, that created fascinating tide pools and were fun to climb on during low tide. What sand there was often barely covered jagged rocks. Bare feet weren’t recommended. North of town, the beach ended in a rocky point that jutted out into the ocean. A lighthouse, now decommissioned, still crowned that point.
If you just wanted to walk, or let the kids build sand dunes, or hunt for sand dollars, the beach south of the river was where you went, despite the no trespassing signs.
“Is this the way you came that morning?” he asked.
“Yes.” Her steps had slowed, and, finally, her gaze was pulled to the well-traveled path leading between dunes. “The fog was really dense here. I started toward the lodge, thinking my mother might have gone there. They sold some basics, the kind of things people forgot to bring. You know, toothpaste, small jars of instant coffee, dish soap, paper towels. There was a refrigerator case, too, with margarine and pints of milk and pop, and a freezer for ice cream bars. I didn’t see lights in any of the other cabins. Some were vacant, but people must still have been asleep in others. I was used to the fog, but, I don’t know, that morning it was creepy.”
He still held her hand. He doubted she’d noticed how tightly she held onto him.
“I got this far and that’s when I heard voices. So I thought Mommy must have met someone and they walked down to watch the sun rise or something. For a minute I thought maybe my father had arrived last night and I just didn’t hear him.” She looked shyly at Daniel. “He did that sometimes, drove over late at night and surprised me in the morning. But I was sure his car wasn’t there, only Mommy was talking to a man and I didn’t know who that could be.” Her tone was bemused, childish – she was the little girl hunting for her mommy.
�
��So you started into the dunes.”
Ahead, there was the merest glimpse of the ocean. The tide, he knew, had just turned and started to go out. He’d had a hand in several rescues of people who hadn’t respected the power of undertows and ocean currents.
Once he nudged Sophie foreward again, she followed the trampled sand that led between dunes. On the dunes, beach grasses grew unpredictably. A few wildflowers were in bloom, too.
Not twenty feet along, Sophie turned into another dip between dunes, tugging him along. All sight of the ocean was lost, but never the sound or the rich, salty scent. Their feet slithered in the loose sand. He was glad of his athletic shoes but had a suspicion they’d end up full of sand. Sophie was dressed much the same he was, in jeans and T-shirt and athletic shoes. She took a sweatshirt or sweater with her every day to the storage facility. Cloudless summer days might bring temperatures into the eighties inland, but here on the coast the ocean kept days cooler.
It was like a maze here in the dunes, but she seemed to know where she was going.
And then she stopped, looking ahead at a spectacular vista of beach and ocean, perfectly framed by dunes and the grasses, swaying slightly in a breeze. A scrappy rugosa rose grew here, the blooms single-petalled, a soft pink. Hell, he thought, his eyes stopping on a couple of clumps of lupine. Not, thank God, in bloom yet.
In that moment, he knew she was right. This was the scene Elias Burton had painted. He must have set up his easel right over… Daniel’s head turned. There.
“That’s where she was.” Sophie pointed, and having seen the photos he knew she was right. That’s exactly where her mother’s body had lain. “The fog had thinned,” she continued after a minute, her tone far away. “As if the breeze had pulled it into ribbons. One of them seemed to…to curl around her. That’s when I started to scream,” she added, in a small, almost matter-of-fact voice.
A raw sound seemed to tear its way out of his throat. He spun her to face him, so she was no longer looking at the place her mother had died. “I’m a goddamn idiot,” he said hoarsely. “I shouldn’t have made you do this.”
She shook her head. “No. You were right. I want…” Maybe she couldn’t help the small hitch of her voice, but as if in defiance she lifted her chin in unspoken determination and finished more strongly. “I want to go to the beach.”
His chest hurt with everything he felt, but after a moment he nodded. “We can circle around…”
“No,” she said again. “Mom hasn’t been here in a long time.” And she took the first step forward, toward the ocean.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sophie couldn’t believe she’d done that. One minute, the ghastly sight of her dead mother was all she’d been able to see, and then suddenly she’d smelled the ocean and had a flash of remembering what it felt like to slither down dunes, the sand so hot and silky flowing over her bare feet. She was always careful to avoid the plants, especially the wildflowers. Mr. Billington had talked to her about how fragile the ecosystem was. She’d asked why he didn’t build fences and keep people off the dunes, but he sighed and said fences wouldn’t do any good anyway, and, besides, look what fun she had.
And she saw the beauty of the scene, and wondered how she could possibly have lived for twenty years without once stepping foot on this beach she’d so loved.
So now she and Daniel stood right where the dunes opened out onto flat beach, and she stole a glance at him, hoping he didn’t think she was crazy.
But he only grinned and said, “Let’s take our shoes off and get our feet wet.”
So they both sat and took off shoes, stuffing their socks inside them, and rolled up their jeans, then first walked and finally ran down to the water’s edge. Fingers of foam caught her almost immediately, and she squeaked at the surprise of how cold it was – how could she have forgotten? – and then laughed and curled her toes into the wet sand. It felt so good.
Daniel smiled at her, held out his hand, and said, “Let’s walk.”
They turned in concert away from the river and Cape Trouble, and simply walked the arc of the beach, right where waves rushed over their feet. The sandpipers with their quick, darting movements delighted her. She hadn’t seen them in so long. How many generations separated these from the ones she remembered? Gulls floated overhead, calling hoarsely. On the far horizon she saw a ship, but no whales today. Once in a while, those long-ago summers, they’d been lucky enough to see a humpback spouting, far out from land.
They must have walked for a quarter of a mile before either spoke. Then it was her. “Why did you take the job in Cape Trouble?” she asked.
She felt his quick, startled look. He kept walking without saying anything for long enough, she thought he wasn’t going to answer.
“I was burned out,” he said finally. His eyes were trained on the distant curve of the earth. “Or maybe I just don’t have the constitution to work homicide. One hideous scene after another. The victims are mostly scum, no better than their killers, and you start getting callous. Then you get a call and go out to find a woman who was raped and her throat slit, or, God, a child killed by some sick fuck. Or, maybe worse, by her own parent. I told myself finding justice for the victims was what I was meant to do, and maybe it is, but one day I got out of bed and thought, there’s got to be something else.”
“You could have applied for a transfer,” she said tentatively.
He stopped walking, and she did the same, turning to face him. He’d dropped her hand, and now rotated his shoulders but as if he were unconscious of his need to loosen muscles. “Yeah. To what? Vice? Sex crimes?” He shook his head. “But you’re right. I could have gone to Fraud or, hey, back on the street. Trouble is, I didn’t know what I did want to do. I needed a break, I guess. Time to think. I had this probably deluded idea that small towns are different. Hey, worse thing that’s going to happen is some domestic violence, right?”
Reacting to his self-mockery, she said, “Not so peaceful, huh?”
He grunted. “Actually, I was mostly right. Since I got here, we’ve only had one rape, when a twenty year old woman used fake I.D. at a bar, then left to walk back to her hotel alone at two in the morning. Never made an arrest, although we have some DNA and are still hoping the creep will pop up somewhere else.”
“You don’t plan to stay in Cape Trouble, then?”
“Forever? Probably not. I’m sleeping better at night, though.”
“I’m glad,” she said softly.
They looked at each other then, without the usual filters. She could see his discomfiture – he hadn’t liked telling her as much as he had, admitting he’d been traumatized by too much violence. But she was touched to know he’d bared himself, his doubts and what he probably saw as his weaknesses, because she had trusted him enough to do the same. The fact that he wanted there to be balance between them meant— She wasn’t quite sure. That he felt something more than a cop’s interest in her.
She shied away from analyzing that too thoroughly. However long he meant to stay, he lived in Cape Trouble. Her life was in Portland, too far away for them to practically have any kind of lasting relationship.
She was bothered to realize how her original objection to him had faded. She’d felt such certainty, even repugnance - he represented this place she intended to turn her back on and never, never think about again. Only now… Now she stood on the beach with the wind tossing her hair and she had seen the place her mother died and knew it would never hold quite the same horror to her again. Thanks to him, she could think about that day as the adult she was, not the child she’d been.
“Shall we start back?” Daniel suggested.
Sophie nodded, but didn’t move. Neither did he. Instead, they kept looking at each other. She drank in every detail of a face she knew objectively wasn’t handsome, but still fascinated her. His nose was not only a little too large, she suspected it had been broken at some point. She knew now how those care-worn lines had formed. His dark hair was disheveled. Those dark
blue eyes studied her as intensely as she studied him.
“Sophie.”
He was going to kiss her, and she wanted him to, as she hadn’t wanted anything in a long time.
He lifted a hand and cupped her cheek. His thumb skated over her lips, and she heard herself give a little moan, her head turning to follow that touch. Daniel groaned then, and took the half step to close the distance between them. Even as his other arm went around her, she flattened her own hands on his chest and let them slide upward until they closed over the powerful muscles that connected his neck to his shoulders. She couldn’t help squeezing a little, reveling in the way his eyes darkened.
Rather than immediately capture her mouth, he nuzzled her a little, then his lips brushed hers, came back to do it again. That was all it took to have her body melting like candlewax. Her lips parted, but still he took it slowly, sucking gently on her lower lip before his tongue slid along the damp flesh just inside. She touched his tongue with hers, and that’s when a rumble vibrated through his chest and abruptly the kiss deepened. His hand splayed on her back brought her hard against him. His fingers were now tangled in her hair, allowing him to tug enough to tilt her head so he had the best angle to gently devour her.
Dazed and unthinking as she was, she was still aware of his astonishing combination of unmistakable hunger with a tenderness that took care not to hurt her in any way. He had such…restraint. She felt his arousal in the rigid bar that pressed into her belly, but he wasn’t shoving his hips at her, or groping her. Only holding her close, and kissing her as if she was the best thing he’d ever tasted in his life.
A cold slap of water made them both jump. A wave had surged in farther than its predecessors, up to their shins. He swore and she giggled as they beat a retreat.
“Damn it, now I’ll have to change,” he muttered.
Shroud of Fog: (A Cape Trouble Romantic Suspense Novel) Page 10