Love Finds You in Carmel by-the-Sea, California

by Sandra D. Bricker

  Only about halfway up the wall toward encouragement, but it was something, and Annie snatched it while she could.

  “Okay! We’ll go to Turtle Bay for Mexican.”

  “But tonight you’ll think about it a little more,” she reiterated.

  “Yes, Zoey.”

  “And maybe pray about it?”

  “Yes, Zoey. I’ll think about it. I promise. I’ll think and think, and then I’ll pray.”

  As Annie drove back to Carmel, her mother called on her cell phone. She sent her straight to voice mail. Why did she need a conversation with her mother when she’d already had all of her hopes dashed so effectively? She would save her mother for a fresh day of renewed hope and excitement just waiting to be dashed.

  Funny thing about family, Annie realized as she drove right past the entrance to the highway, abandoning the idea of going straight home. Their existence is something like the relationship between a moth and a flame. The moth should know from experience that getting too close can be dangerous. I mean, if not from the scorching demise of all their moth friends, then at the very least the increasing intensity of the searing heat should be a dead giveaway! But how many millions of moths have given their lives anyhow, by approaching the flame despite their own misgivings?

  Making what she knew would be a regrettable decision, Annie pulled into her parents’ driveway, parked her car, and headed up the sidewalk toward the house.

  “What have you done to your hair?”

  These had been her mother’s first words to her on nearly every one of Annie’s entries into the house since 1991. But had it ever stopped her from going back?

  Moth to a flame, I tell you. And all part of the intricate web of life’s little mysteries.

  Smoothing her daughter’s wayward curls into submission with the palm of her hand, Annie’s mother pecked her cheek with three quick kisses. It was a ritual for her, like approaching Annie on two different sides. One side said, “Your hair is the thorn in the side of our family’s entire existence.” And on the other, a sugary greeting certain to make her daughter feel welcome.

  Is it any wonder I’ve spent such a large part of my life in utter confusion?

  “What are you doing here in the middle of the week?” she asked. “You didn’t get fired again, did you?”

  “No, Mom. I wasn’t fired the first time; I was laid off. And getting fired ‘again’ would imply that I’d started a new job since landing on Gram’s doorstep this week.”

  “That’s a relief. Have you found anything yet?”

  “Well, actually—”

  “Will you stay for dinner?”

  “What are you having?”

  “Stuffed peppers,” she announced. “With fresh-baked bread sticks.”

  “I’ll stay.”

  “Set the table, then. Oh, and your brother may stop by, so set it for four.”

  Annie shuffled across the kitchen obediently, menial labor being a small price to pay for her mother’s stuffed peppers. But dinner with her brother? A horse of a different color.

  “Look who’s here,” her mother announced as Annie’s father strolled through the back door. “It’s our little girl.”

  Their little girl.

  Annie took a moment to ponder the dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship. Zoey and her mom, for instance, went shopping and took spa trips together. But the fleeting visual of Annie’s roly-poly mother having a sea-kelp massage on the table next to her made Annie laugh right out loud.

  “What’s so funny?” her dad asked.

  “Me. As a little girl.”

  “You’re always our little girl, Annabelle. You know that,” her mom tossed over her shoulder from the stove.

  Her father tilted his shoulder in a shrug and kissed her forehead before heading to the living room toward his favorite chair.

  “Let’s wait awhile to dish up and see if Teddy arrives.”

  Or if Ted doesn’t arrive, Annie thought hopefully. We don’t always have to be a glass-half-empty kind of family, do we?

  Annie nodded at her mother and then strolled into the living room as her father propped his feet onto the ottoman in front of his chair. “What’s new and exciting, Annie?”

  “Well, actually…” Annie bent down, lifted her father’s feet, and dropped to the ottoman herself, putting his feet on her lap. “I do have some news.”

  “You have news?” her mother called out from the kitchen. “Wait! Wait a minute and let me dry my hands.”

  Sonar like a shark. They can sense a possible feeding frenzy from miles away, too.

  “Oh, Nathan, for pity’s sake. Don’t put your filthy feet on Annabelle.”

  “They’re not filthy,” he returned. “They’ve been in socks and shoes ever since I stepped out of the shower this morning. Now let’s hear Annie’s big news.”

  All eyes on her, Annie’s heart suddenly started to pound a little harder. Reminded of senior year when she’d backed her mom’s Buick out of a space too fast and rammed into a cement post that popped up out of nowhere, Annie decided to follow Zoey’s coaching advice from all those years ago: A clean, honest statement is always the best way to go. Just come right out with it.

  “Mom, Dad, I’ve got a new job.”

  “Oh, honey, that’s wonderful!” her mom exclaimed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Is it still in banking? You know how important it is to establish yourself in one industry.”

  “Well, no, it’s not in banking. It’s a whole new career, and I’m really excited about it.”

  “Annabelle, tell us. What is it?”

  “I’m going to be…a private investigator.”

  Zoey must have phoned ahead. They had the same frozen expressions that she’d had.

  “What do you mean—like Perry Mason?” her mom asked.

  “Mason was a lawyer, Bess.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” she replied thoughtfully. “Like Barnaby Jones then.”

  “Is that it?” her father asked, somewhat sternly. “You’re going to be like Barnaby Jones?”

  Have these two turned on a television in the last two or three decades?

  “Ooh, or Matt Houston!” her mother exclaimed. “Now, he was my kind of man. I like how he wore those big, silver belt buckles.”

  Guess not.

  “I’ll start out learning the ropes,” she told them, hoping to fill the conversation void herself rather than letting them run amok. “After a little while, I’ll get my own cases, and then I’ll get my license.”

  “What does it pay?”

  Her father always had been straight-out-forward like that.

  “It pays okay, Dad. And it will pay more as I go along.”

  “Why would you want to leave the bank?” her mom asked. Annie didn’t tell her that she’d never worked in a bank in her life. In the Equity Now call center, she was one of 112 other cubicles, and she had a headset, a battery-operated calculator, a computer, and, when no one made off with them, a couple of pens.

  “Will the new place give you a retirement plan?” her father asked.

  Now she felt pretty certain about it. Zoey must have phoned ahead.

  “I didn’t exactly choose to leave the old job, Mom. I was laid off. And I’d been thinking about making a change for a really long time anyway. It’s something I’m excited about, and I’m looking forward to learning something completely new.”

  “What’s completely new?” Ted asked from the doorway of the kitchen, and Annie’s heart leaped right out of her chest and went splat on the floor.

  Just what I want to do next: tell my overachiever lawyer brother that I’m—

  “Teddy made it for supper!” Mom erupted as she hurried toward him for a hug.

  “What’s going on, sis? You moving again or something?”

  “Annie’s going to be a PI now. Like Barnaby Jones.”

  Ted’s eyebrow arched right over the top of his conservative glasses, and one side of his mouth curled up into a spontaneous
grin.

  “Is that so?” he said before turning back toward their mother in the kitchen. “Need any help, Beautiful?”

  Annie looked to her father with hope, silently pleading with him to say something encouraging. Anything. Just a trace of hope. Come on, Dad. You can do it.

  “Annie, what’d you do a fool thing like that for?”

  I’ll call Gram on the drive back to Carmel. Surely she’ll give me a little rah-rah.

  “Well, isn’t that just perfect,” Nick said after a groan.

  “Sorry,” Thorton replied, giving Nick a casual shrug.

  “I poured three months of effort into this guy, and he lawyers up ten minutes before I get the rest of the story?”

  “Whaddya gonna do?”

  Nick snagged a couple of quarters from his desk drawer and headed down the hall toward the vending machines for a bottle of OJ. On his way back, he diverted into his chief’s office and plunked down in the chair across the desk.

  “Smitty lawyered up,” he stated, twisting the top off the bottle and guzzling the drink straight down.

  “That’s rough,” his boss commented. “What are you gonna do about it?”

  “What can I do? His lawyer isn’t going to let him say another word to me.”

  “Guess you’ll have to get some evidence without him leading you to it.”

  Nick stared him down for a long moment before letting out a cluck of a laugh. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Look, Bench, I know you want Smitty.”

  “Like you can’t believe.”

  “So it’s frustrating. But you’re a smart guy. You can still have him. Keep looking.”

  Nick turned his attention to the window. A couple of gulls sailed by and circled the tree before moving on.

  “How’s Jenny?” Chief Sheldon asked. “Getting settled in?”

  Nick continued to follow the path of the gulls as he replied, “Yep.”

  “You going to Vinny’s tonight?”

  “Nah. Gotta head over to the center.”

  Sheldon nodded. “Good. That’s good you do that—volunteer at the youth center, I mean.”

  Nick shrugged.

  “So, anything else you want to discuss?”

  Nick gave it a second’s thought and replied, “Nah.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “Okay.”

  After a moment of silence, the chief leaned forward slightly. “This is where you get out.”

  “Right.”

  Nick waved halfheartedly as he vacated the office, entertaining thoughts of how to get around his perp’s untimely sleight of hand.

  “Thorton,” he called as he moved across the squad room, “let’s go interview Smitty’s daughter again. Maybe we can get something out of her before they get a family rate on legal counsel.”

  Thorton nearly tore off the collar of his jacket when it caught on the hook as he snatched it and ran for the door behind Nick.

  Chapter Three

  “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  Humphrey Bogart, Casablanca, 1942

  “Gram?”

  “In here, sweetheart.”

  Annie unclipped the leash from Sherman’s collar and the two of them moseyed into the kitchen to find Evan seated at the table with Dot, a pot of tea between them.

  “You’re drinking tea?” Annie asked him before leaning down and planting a kiss on her grandmother’s cheek. Evan shrugged.

  “Did you have something to eat?”

  “Yeah. I stopped by Mom and Dad’s.”

  “Uh-oh,” Evan remarked. “How are the folks?”

  “Would you like some tea too? Or maybe something a little stronger,” Dot added, deadpan.

  Annie grabbed a teacup from one of the hooks under the cabinet and brought it to the table, joining them.

  “Let me recap,” she said, pouring from the china pot. “I’ve accepted this perfectly wonderful, exciting new job. Then my hairdresser refuses to glam me up and my best friend does that ‘Oh, Annie, please!’ thing she does so well, only to be compounded by the frosting on the cake of having dinner with my parents and my perfect brother, all of whom think I’m wasting my life in a repeat of Barnaby Jones.”

  Evan snickered.

  “I’ve just been telling Evan about your new job, Annie. And if it’s any consolation at all, we both think you’re going to make a fine private investigator’s assistant.”

  “Very Charlie’s Angels,” Evan added with a nod.

  Annie managed a thankful grin.

  “Hey, look what came today!” he exclaimed, holding up a DVD case. “Rear Window.”

  “Just in the nick of time!” Annie cried happily. “Just when I can’t go another ten minutes without some Hitchcock in my life.”

  Evan laughed, and Dot pushed to her feet. “You two fire up the television and I’ll get the snacks,” she said.

  Evan Shaw never watched anything on television that wasn’t shown on The Cooking Channel or The Discovery Channel. In fact, he and Annie had very little in common on paper, except for this one passion for classic films. Kicking off her shoes, Annie curled into one corner of Gram’s sofa, and after queuing up the movie, Evan plopped down into the other corner. Sherman crawled up and stretched out between them with his chin resting on Evan’s knee.

  “Year?” Evan queried.

  “Nineteen fifty-four. Studio?”

  “Paramount. Screenwriter?”

  “John Michael Hayes. Based on the Cornell Woolrich short story ‘It Had to Be Murder.’”

  “Show-off.”

  “I know.” Annie grinned, stretched out her leg, and poked Evan’s shin with her sock-encased toe. “Riddle me this, Batman. Who plays the part of Miss Lonelyhearts?”

  Evan thought it over. “Irene Winston?”

  “Nope!” Dot exclaimed as she set a tray down on the coffee table—two cans of diet soda, large and small bowls of popcorn, and a glass dish brimming with peanut M&Ms.

  “Gram, you’re the best,” Annie told her, grabbing a handful of the candies as Evan popped open her drink and passed it to her.

  Dot sat down in the wingback chair and set her cup and saucer on the mahogany table beside it.

  “So it’s not Irene Winston,” Evan stated. “Then who is it?”

  “Irene Winston is the actress who played Mrs. Thorwald,” Dot told him. “Miss Lonelyhearts is Judith Evelyn. Hitchcock liked her so much that she went on to play in two different episodes of his Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

  Evan glanced at Annie. “Definitely your grandmother.”

  “My appreciation for celluloid skipped a generation,” Dot told them, “but Annie makes me proud.”

  They all fell immediately silent as bamboo shades rose slowly above four rectangular windows and a cat scampered up the stairs of a Lower East Side apartment building in sharp black-and-white images.

  Evan’s eyes fixed on the screen as he began mechanically raising kernels of popcorn to his mouth, and Annie couldn’t help but watch him for a moment.

  No Brad Pitt, Evan. In fact, he looked a lot to her like Jay Bush, the guy who made baked beans and traveled around with his traitorous family dog. Evan was a tall, husky guy who insisted upon referring to his baldness as being “follicly challenged” and had spectacular eyes, which he shielded behind round, rimless glasses he called “specs.” Thirty-four going on twenty-four going on sixty-four; consequently, a barrel of fun to be around but not much fun in those phases when the relationship morphed into something that could be more than friendship. He and Annie had taken that ride three times now, and it had become a little like an amusement-park roller-coaster ride to her. The coaster had lost its appeal, and she didn’t plan on ever being coerced to ride it again.

  He must have sensed her watching him. Evan turned toward her with a blink.

  “What?” he mouthed. She smiled and turned her attention back to the screen.

  “Hey,” he whispered, tapping her knee with his soda c
an. When she looked back at him, he asked, “Did you change your hair? I like it.”

  Well, doesn’t that just toast the big marshmallow! Nobody compliments or notices my hair all day long, but Evan is the one to notice.

  Evan was like that. Whereas Annie’s mother’s sonar detected fresh blood, Evan’s tended to hone in on every inclination Annie got to set out again on the search for a real relationship. Had she not been making all the changes in her life lately, she would have been willing to bet he’d never have noticed her hair.

  “Thanks,” she whispered. “Just a trim.”

  Just about the time that Grace Kelly slipped the accusatory note under Raymond Burr’s apartment door, Dot leaned forward and asked, “How about a quick potty break?”

  Annie paused the screen and took a sip from her soda as her grandmother left the room. Evan’s face lit up suddenly, and he reached into the pocket of his jeans and produced a plastic baggie of lettuce leaves, dangling it in front of the beagle still resting on his leg.

  “Look what I brought you,” he said. “Your favorite snack, boy. Salad.”

  Sherman heaved to his feet and panted enthusiastically.

  “It pays to know people in high places,” Annie told Sherman. Evan often brought fresh lettuce leaves and other booty from his job as a lunch chef to his favorite dog.

  “I’ll take him for a quick walk, if you’d like.”

  “That would be great.”

  Annie watched them as Evan clipped the leash into place and they headed out the back door of the kitchen. They seemed like a cartoon to her just then, a man and his dog connected by a bright blue leash, both of them a little too chunky for their own bodies and neither of them caring about it in the least.

  Annie glanced down at her cell phone and noticed the light blinking. Upon further investigation, she read the text from Zoey.

  SORRY ABOUT TODAY. DIDN’T MEAN TO BRING YOU DOWN ABOUT THE NEW JOB. JUST REMEMBER TO THINK ABOUT IT TONIGHT? I WILL TOO. IN THE A.M. WE’LL KNOW IF IT’S THE RIGHT THING OR NOT.

  Subtle, Zoey. Very subtle.

  Evan sauntered in and released Sherman from his leash just as Dot reappeared and folded into her chair. As Grace Kelly made her escape and returned to Jimmy Stewart’s apartment, Annie found herself glancing at Evan again.