Girls of Summer (Shelter Rock Cove - Book #2)

by Barbara Bretton

  * * *

  “I have good news and better news,” Ellen said as she entered Patsy Wheeler’s hospital room.

  “I’ll take the better news first,” Patsy said. She was looking much healthier than she had in the emergency room a few days ago. Her color had improved and at least a little of her regular sparkle had returned.

  “Where’s Doug? He’d like to hear this, too.”

  “I forced him back to work today. No sense the two of us being trapped in here.”

  Ellen grinned and sat down on the side of the bed. “He was driving you crazy.”

  “Big time,” Patsy said with the first laugh Ellen had heard from her in days. “His boss said to take all the time he needed, but...” She rolled her eyes and let the sentence fade into laughter.

  “Hope you can track him down out there in the field, because you’re going home today!”

  Patsy’s whoop of joy had Ellen plugging her fingers in her ears in mock horror. “Tell me it’s not the meds making me hear things! Am I really going home?”

  Ellen checked her clipboard. “The ambulette will be here to pick you up sometime after two o’clock.”

  “Oh, God,” Patsy said, some of her excitement dimming “How much will that set me back?”

  “I had Jana check and your insurance has preapproved the entire amount.”

  “You weren’t kidding when you said you had good news for me. I’m going home and my insurance will pay for the ambulette.” Her eyes glistened with happy tears. “You don’t know how much I—”

  “Yes, I do,” Ellen interrupted, “and now it’s up to you to follow instructions to the letter.” She handed her a packet of information in a brown envelope. “Instructions, phone numbers, guidelines. I want you to promise to call me no matter how small the problem is. That’s part of the deal.”

  “I’ll call you if I think it’s serious.”

  “No.” Ellen fixed the woman with a no-nonsense look. “You call and I’ll decide if it’s serious.”

  “I don’t want to be a pest.”

  “Be a pest,” Ellen said. “I like pests. Pests deliver healthy babies.” She stood up. “Trish from Social Services will be in to see you before you leave. She told me the hospital bed arrived yesterday, and Doug had a place cleared for it in the master bedroom.”

  “He even set up a network so I can use my laptop and connect with the office. I can’t afford to lose my job with the baby coming.”

  “But easy does it,” Ellen warned. “Your first priority is bringing that baby as close to term as possible.”

  Patsy was vice president of Shelter Rock Cove’s oldest bank, a position that held a great deal of responsibility and prestige. She was accustomed to making things happen, to bending life to suit her needs. The business of conception was the first time that her considerable drive bumped up against a situation she couldn’t influence by the sheer force of her will. The difficult pregnancy had further undermined her self-confidence, which made her tend to overdo anything and everything. Getting Patsy to understand the gravity of the situation and the need to follow instructions to the letter was an ongoing proposition. It was only normal to relax a little once the crisis passed, but Patsy’s crisis was one that would be with her every single day until she delivered a healthy baby.

  Ellen left Patsy in the capable hands of one of the floor nurses, then checked in on two postop patients who were both making quick recoveries. She had office hours from one until five, which gave her an hour to grab a bite and write up a few notes.

  She was halfway across the parking lot when she heard Hall call her name.

  “Do you have a few minutes?” he asked. “I need to talk to you.”

  She started to say what she had said a number of times before over the last few days but caught herself. The look in his eyes brought her up short.

  “I was heading over to the diner for a quick lunch.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  The protest died in her throat.

  Five minutes later they were seated opposite each other at the Chowder House, a small diner on the outskirts of town. They didn’t need to order. It was Thursday and Thursday meant split-pea soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked after Glenna deposited two glasses of water, then walked away. “You look like hell.”

  “Karen Blaiser,” he said. “Stage IV ovarian cancer.”

  Ellen felt as if she had been kicked in the midsection by a team of horses. “Oh God, but she—” Her voice caught the words and wouldn’t let them go. Karen was a twenty-three-year-old med student who was engaged to marry Jim Westgaard, the hospital’s chief pediatric resident. The wedding was set for the Fourth of July weekend, little more than a month away. “Does Jim know?”

  Hall shook his head. “Karen’s corning in for results this afternoon, and I—” It was his turn to stumble into a wall of emotion. “She shouldn’t be alone when she hears this.”

  “Call Jim,” Ellen said. “Make sure he’ll be with her.”

  “That’s crossing the line. Legally he isn’t—”

  You can’t call her parents. She’s over twenty-one, and besides, they’re down in Florida.”

  “If I call and tell her to bring someone with her, she’ll know.”

  “That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You’d be giving her time to prepare for what you’re going to tell her.”

  “And she’d still be alone.”

  “You could call her best friend.”

  He dragged his hand through his thick silvery-gold hair and met her eyes. “Jim’s her best friend.”

  They fell silent as Glenna deposited their grilled-cheese sandwiches and bowls of soup in front of them.

  Ellen shook her head. “They tell you in med school that it stops hurting so much after you’re in practice awhile.”

  “They lie,” he said with a rueful smile that tugged at her heart. “It still hurts like hell.”

  “It’s not supposed to. The smart ones learn how to compartmentalize.”

  “Yon didn’t.”

  “Maybe I’m not so smart.” She tried to force an answering smile but couldn’t quite bring it off. “I’m the one who left the big city to work in some little town in Maine.”

  “You’d be driving a Mercedes if you’d stayed where you were.”

  “My dad gave me a Mercedes when I turned twenty-one, but I wasn’t terribly impressed. I traded it in for a Jeep.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “So am I,” she said.

  They were, of course, not talking about cars at all.

  He reached for the salt as she reached for the pepper. Their fingers touched, then intertwined. A powerful one-two punch of lust and tenderness sent her reeling. She could handle either emotion on its own, but the combination overwhelmed her heart and made it impossible for her to pull her hand away. The diner was crowded. They were far from invisible, sitting there in the third booth from the door. This wasn’t how you nipped gossip in the bud. This was how you made more.

  Wrong man. Wrong woman. Wrong time. Wrong place. Wrong everything. It had no business feeling so right.

  Chapt er Fourteen

  Before she became a harper herself, Deirdre had entertained an entire series of fantasies about harps and the women who played them. The women were all beautiful, ethereal beings who floated from venue to venue where their harps, perfectly tuned and magically transported, awaited the golden touch of their talented, perfectly manicured fingers.

  Nobody ever mentioned the fact that harps were unwieldy, mercurial, and sensitive to changes in light and temperature, as demanding of time and attention as a first-class diva.

  Harps required daily tuning. Depending on the weather, the amount of play, the phases of the moon—or so it sometimes seemed to Deirdre—harpers often found themselves going through the tuning process with greater frequency. You tuned before a performance. You tuned after transporting the harp back home again. You tuned if someone look
ed cross-eyed at the harp.

  She fed Stanley after they returned from the morning’s unsuccessful reconnaissance mission, then settled down for some much-needed practice. She plugged in her electronic tuner and set about the task of bringing each string to the perfect pitch and tone. She still cringed when she thought about her impromptu concert the other night. Hall Talbot’s little girls had been so excited at the prospect of actually touching a harp that she had paid only the most cursory attention to tuning it.

  Still that hadn’t seemed to hurt her music any. She had played with an enthusiasm she hadn’t felt in a while, and the crowd in Ellen’s living room had responded. Those were the times you lived for, when the synergy created between musician and audience lifted both to a higher plane. If only there was some way to bottle the magic for days like today when she needed something to help her push past the insecurities that took over when she wasn’t looking.

  She had neglected her music the last few days. Nighttime was usually her best time, the time when she was able to let go of her worries and allow the music to seep into her bones. But Ellen’s hours were long and unstructured enough as it was. She didn’t want to do anything to disturb her sister’s sleep. Not that Ellen had complained about anything. She was far too polite for that. She always seemed pleased to see Deirdre, concerned about her welfare, but the sudden burst of sisterly intimacy they had shared the other night had long since disappeared.

  And was it any wonder? You didn’t drop a bomb like that on a sister you barely knew. She should have kept her big mouth shut about Antonio and the abortion. She had never told anyone about it, not Mary Pat or her mother or any of the acquaintances who passed for friends.

  Yet the truth had spewed across Ellen’s bed, raw and painful as an open wound. Her emotional radar was acutely tuned to censure, both real and imagined, and there had been nothing but concern in Ellen’s voice. Nothing but affection in her eyes. For a second she had found herself wishing she had turned to her sister for help, but then reality stepped in to remind her that Ellen hadn’t a clue what it was like out there in the regular world.

  Ellen had never had to worry about money a day in her life. She didn’t know how it felt to worry about the landlord showing up on your doorstep, demanding last month’s rent. She had never watched as the repo man hauled her car back to Auto City or had the phone service and electricity turned off because she couldn’t afford to pay the bill. If Ellen was pregnant, she would find a way to handle things, a way that included the best medical care, a private room in the hospital, a baby nurse, day care, Harvard when the kid turned eighteen, and the father of her child.

  Deirdre had had nothing to offer a child. She had no medical insurance, no apartment, no steady job, and no prospects. Antonio had disappeared back into the safety of the family she hadn’t known he had, leaving her with a baby who deserved better than the load of nothing she had to offer.

  So on a sunny May morning so beautiful it made her weep, she made what seemed the only decision possible at the time, and now, almost two years later, she regretted it only every other waking moment.

  No, this wasn’t something Ellen could ever understand. Ellen’s decisions were based on lofty medical and philosophical considerations while Deirdre’s decisions were usually based on money. Her lack of it, to be precise.

  One of the many reasons she had gravitated toward the lever harp as opposed to the concert pedal harp was a question of economics. Not only couldn’t she afford the five-figure cost of the instrument, she couldn’t afford a vehicle large enough to carry it from gig to gig. Before she purchased her Hyundai, she had tried loading her harp into the backseat, and it was only when that task had been accomplished that she forked over the money.

  She wished somebody had told her early on just how much outlay was involved in establishing yourself as a harper of note. As usual, talent was only a small part of the picture. Harpers required suitably ethereal outfits that were also practical. There was nothing ladylike about wedging a harp between your knees. You needed long flowing skirts, elegant trousers, the right combination of style and functionality. You needed formal but understated costumes for weddings and receptions; tailored outfits for corporate appearances; hippie-chick threads for the folk festivals and coffeehouses. She was surprised to discover that vulgar considerations like finances could figure so prominently in an artist’s chosen path, but that was one of the many things Deirdre learned when she turned away from singing the blues and decided to make a go of her new career as a harper. Performing in clubs had required nothing more than her voice, something interesting to wear, and the appropriately love-worn persona common to blues singers. She had all three of those commodities in spades. She even had talent. Too bad the combination had never equaled success.

  Early in her career she spent an inordinate amount of time berating God for the record deal that didn’t pan out, the concert gig that fell through, the endless stream of disappointments. It took awhile, but she finally realized God either wasn’t listening or maybe had other plans for her, plans that apparently didn’t include the need for tax shelters or limousines.

  She had tried very hard to steer clear of the Celtic harp because of its obvious connection to Ireland. Irish music was her father’s territory. Let him keep the toora-looras and the smiling eyes. Let him spend his life singing “Danny Boy.” She decided early on that she would quicker embrace the glockenspiel than anything so uniquely identified with the heritage Billy O’Brien had parlayed into something approaching a career. She had a deep affinity for Celtic music, but she buried it beneath layers of rock and cabaret, jazz and blues. Anything that would pay the bills and keep her far away from Billy’s venues.

  How strange it was now to move in some of the same circles, to meet people who had grown up with her father, people who had known some of her family’s secrets before she did. Ellen’s mother, Sharon, had been part of his world for a long time. A singer with a classically trained voice, Sharon Cooper had joined up with a group that often traveled with Billy in the late sixties. In Billy’s version of the story he had been away from home for a long time.... He and her mother had been having troubles and were on the brink of divorce.... Sharon was so young and so vulnerable.... She had needed his protection. A load of Irish bullshit meant to explain away his sins.

  Her mother claimed Sharon had zeroed in on Billy from the first moment she saw him, moving in on the middle-aged singer with the unshakable confidence of a very young and very beautiful girl who knew she wouldn’t be turned away.

  Sharon had torn the fabric of the O’Brien family asunder, and only God knew if she had paid for her sins.

  Deirdre was far beyond viewing music as some sort of therapy for her inner child. As far as she was concerned, her inner child was on her own. She had returned to Celtic music for purely business reasons, because her days as a not-very-successful blues singer happened to come to an end just as interest in all things Celtic came to the fore.

  The celestial music the instrument produced was the result of rigorous attention to the care of both harp and harper. Harp strings snapped. Harmonic curves pulled to the side. Pillars twisted and soundboards developed cracks that only sometimes improved the sound. And the harpers themselves didn’t get off any easier. Their bodies took a beating few suspected. Only the music was gentle. Harpers were secretly tough as nails. Maybe that was part of its appeal.

  She wasn’t sentimental by nature. Her family had seen to that a long time ago. You couldn’t maintain a belief in the wonders of love and loyalty when you were raised in a household built by a man who screwed around and a woman who let him get away with it. She often wondered how her mother had managed to put up with his philandering for so long. It was one thing to know your husband took lovers. It was something else again when he brought home his child by one of those lovers and expected you to welcome her into the family because he was feeling guilty.

  Not that she wasted a lot of time thinking about the past. The past was
what it was and all the pissing and moaning in the world wasn’t about to change a second of it.

  Right now it was the future that was worrying her. If Scott the Mechanic didn’t pull a miracle out of his hat before the day was over she was in big trouble. She couldn’t ask Ellen for more help. Leaving Stanley there for the summer was probably pushing the generosity envelope as far as it could go. Besides, Ellen knew what was going on with the car and everything, and so far she hadn’t made an attempt to bail her out. It was probably hard for her sister to understand that when she said she had no money left, she meant it. The doughnut she’d shared with Stanley had wiped her out.

  There was no doubt that Ellen was making the big bucks. This hotel-sized house had to cost a bundle, especially with the ocean view and dock. She didn’t seem to pay a whole lot of attention to petty cash, either. When she paid for the pizzas the other night, she had stuffed a wad of cash in one of the cutlery drawers in the kitchen. There were some fives and tens in the nightstand. Two twenties in the desk drawer. Ellen probably hadn’t a clue how much money she had scattered around the house. You had to have a fair amount of the stuff if it was so easy to lose track.

  Deirdre doubted if her sister would even notice if she pocketed half of the cash. Not that she would ever do it, of course, but she would be lying if she didn’t admit to feeling more than a little bit tempted. If she had some money, she wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not Scott the Mechanic would be able to get the job done. All she would have to do was pick up the phone and call a rent-a-car place and reserve a nice roomy air-conditioned sedan to drive up to Bar Harbor.

  Then, of course, God would send down a lightning bolt and strike her dead. Probably right at the moment when she was about to sign a seven-figure contract with Virgin Records to become the first multi-platinum harper.

  Okay, so she wasn’t going to turn to petty crime to bail herself out of her difficulties. If Scott the Mechanic failed her, she would do something much worse: call her sister Mary Pat and beg.