Cottage at the Beach (The Off Season)

by Lee Tobin McClain

  “Whoa, man, let me get that.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine.” Denny tried to grab the trash bags.

  Trey held on. “I can get them.”

  “You’re an idiot.” Denny followed him outside, beer in hand, and watched while he tugged the bags down the steps. “You can’t be a hotshot on the force, so now you’re trying to be a hotshot at, what, taking out the garbage? You’re gonna set yourself back.”

  What does it matter? Trey opened his mouth to say, but snapped it shut, realizing he didn’t feel that way anymore, not exactly. The PT was undeniably awful, but he’d noticed a slight improvement in his last session. Maybe, just maybe, it would help. And he definitely didn’t want to set himself back, because if he lost more of his mobility, if he couldn’t get groceries or do his own laundry, where would he be?

  A silver Camaro pulled up and parked at the curb. Both he and Denny stopped in the middle of the driveway. What was the chief doing here?

  Chief Lincoln, whom they all privately called “Abe” because he was tall and thin like President Lincoln, came around and greeted them both, asked about their progress on the house, about Milo, about Trey’s back. All of it was friendly enough, but Trey got an uneasy feeling.

  “Gotta go,” Denny said, waving his phone. “Wife’s on my case.”

  As Denny drove away, Trey invited the chief up on the porch for a beer.

  He was pretty shocked, though, when the man accepted. Lincoln had been a mentor to him and Denny from their rookie days, but he tended to hold himself aloof on the personal level.

  “There’s a reason I stopped by,” Chief Lincoln said after cracking the bottle open. He put it down without taking a sip. “Heard some things from Earl Greene, the officer in charge of the disabled-officers program over in Pleasant Shores.”

  “Yeah? What?” Trey’s heart stuttered a little, not just because he hated being called a disabled officer, but because of the censure he heard in his chief’s voice. He lowered himself carefully onto the porch swing, wincing.

  “He seemed to notice a negative attitude in you.”

  “I barely met—”

  The chief cut him off with a raised hand. “Apparently, the cooperating teacher complained. Asked if there was anyone else who could come in and work with the kids, short notice.”

  Trey looked down at his knees, his fists clenching. Had he really been that obnoxious when he’d met Greene, and during that beach encounter with some long-legged beauty whose name he still didn’t know?

  You should’ve asked her name, made nice. “You’re going to replace me,” he said, dreary certainty pressing down on him. Not many guys could fail at rehab. He was a real standout, all right.

  “I don’t have anyone else to suggest to them, not now. And the other two departments they’re working with are waiting for full approval, so they can’t put anyone forward yet.” The chief sighed. “I want it to work for you, but you’d better shape up. I look bad to have recommended you if you don’t.”

  In a corner of his mind, he recognized the opportunity for a second chance, and seized it. “Will do, sir. I’ll have a better attitude.”

  The chief stared Trey down. “A lot better, because attitude was a part of what got you in the fix you’re in now. That incident shouldn’t have happened. Your head hasn’t been in the right place for months. If you hadn’t gotten injured, I would’ve put you on a desk job.”

  The chief’s words weighed him down again. He’d known he was off his game but hadn’t realized it was noticeable to others. Reflexively, he reached for King, put a hand on his furry back.

  “If you can’t make it work, or prove to me you’ve changed, I won’t recommend you for reinstatement to the force, even if your back does heal,” Lincoln said, standing. “Look at it as a kind of a test.” He turned and strode down to his car.

  Leaving Trey to wonder how he was going to succeed at something he didn’t even want to do, in an environment where the people he’d be working with already disliked him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  JULIE WHITE PULLED the baking sheet of chocolate chip cookies out of the oven just as her teenage granddaughters walked in the door from school, and she congratulated herself on her perfect timing. “Who wants cookies?” she singsonged.

  Her younger granddaughter, Kaitlyn, looked at her with an open sneer. Great. She’d come on too strong. Figuring out how to navigate her new home here, living in a suite at her daughter’s motel and helping with her granddaughters at their house adjacent to the motel would take some time.

  Her older granddaughter, Sophia, was busy talking on her phone, but waved a greeting and snagged a cookie on her way through the kitchen. At sixteen, she was learning to drive, did well in school and had seemingly dozens of friends, including a boyfriend she didn’t take all that seriously, thank heavens. Her sunny demeanor reminded Julie of her daughter, their mother. Little to no adolescent angst, just the self-absorption you’d expect from a teenager.

  Kaitlyn, the thirteen-year-old, plopped down at the kitchen table with a loud sigh. She was going through an awkward stage, worsened by her parents’ divorce and, probably, the fact that her grandparents had divorced shortly thereafter. It didn’t help that she had a popular, gorgeous sister like Sophia, even though Sophia was actually very nice to Kaitlyn. But Julie understood why Sophia’s niceness didn’t sit well with her younger sister; it smacked of charity, or pity.

  Julie slid the cookies from the cookie sheet to a plate and put them on the table. “Milk?” she asked, automatically going to the fridge and opening the door.

  “Don’t do dairy,” Kaitlyn mumbled around a large mouthful of cookie.

  That was news to Julie, but she knew better than to question it. She just got a glass of ice water and set it down on the table. “Would you and your sister like to go over to the big beach in a few minutes?” she asked. The big beach was on the wealthier side of Pleasant Shores, and unlike the narrow, rocky beaches most common on the Chesapeake, it had a wide swath of actual white sand.

  “Why?” Kaitlyn swiped a napkin across her mouth and took another cookie. “It’s only April.”

  “And it’s seventy degrees. The heat wave will end soon, but you could still get a little bit of sun.”

  That seemed to pique Kaitlyn’s interest; her mother wouldn’t let either girl go tanning at the salon...though Julie suspected that Sophia had finagled a way past the parental-permission-under-eighteen rule, since she looked continually healthy and golden-bronze.

  “Hey, Soph,” Kaitlyn yelled. “Grandma wants to go to the beach.”

  That wasn’t strictly accurate; Julie would rather have stayed home, in her cute little suite at the far end of the motel, with the latest mystery novel. But she was justifying living here, at least temporarily, by keeping an eye on her grandchildren during the notoriously dangerous after-school period: making an after-school snack, starting dinner and suggesting wholesome activities.

  Besides, as her friend Mary said, she needed to get out of the house. To combat her gloom with sunshine and meet new people.

  The meeting-new-people part had exactly zero appeal, but it wasn’t likely to happen today. Having Kaitlyn plodding sullenly at her side would protect her from all but the most intrepid extroverts in town. People were afraid of teen girls.

  Soon enough they were walking the three blocks through Pleasant Shores’ little downtown to the beach, carrying beach towels and, in Julie’s case, a folding beach chair. Both of the girls had insisted on wearing jean shorts and T-shirts over bikinis, over her protests. It was an optimistic clothing choice since, even with the unusually warm temperatures, the breeze at the beach would be cool and the bay’s water frigid.

  Julie caught a glimpse of herself in a shop window and winced. Capris and an old hoodie of Ria’s: she’d let herself go since the divorce, the eighth
deadly sin according to her ex-husband, Melvin. Not that it had done her much good to keep herself in shape for him.

  He’d fallen out of love with her. He didn’t want to be married. Even though it had happened seven months ago, she still had trouble believing that thirty-five years of marriage were over, just like that. That Melvin had moved up to Saint Michaels and was living in some business-suite hotel close to his job.

  She glanced up and down the quiet main street of town. She hoped she wouldn’t run into someone she knew, but then again, who cared? It wasn’t like she was out to impress anyone.

  Still, she ought to try harder with her appearance. Look good, feel good, her determinedly perky, stylish mother had always said. “What do you think about a top like that for me?” she asked her granddaughters, pausing to look through the window of Pleasant Shores’ only “better women’s clothing” shop. Read: middle-aged and expensive. But for now, while she was getting alimony, she could still afford to shop there. The top in question was a dusty pink and had the forgiving waistline she needed.

  “It’s cute,” Sophia said, glancing up from her phone and giving Julie an encouraging smile. Of course, she’d barely looked at the top.

  Julie turned to Kaitlyn and lifted an eyebrow. “What do you think?” Partly, she was encouraging Kaitlyn to express an opinion, showing she valued it, but she did in fact expect more honesty from Kaitlyn.

  Kaitlyn shrugged, her forehead wrinkling. “It’s fine. It’s just like everything else you wear.”

  In other words, what did it matter what Julie wore? She was old, a grandma.

  “You should get that one,” Kaitlyn muttered, jerking her head toward a purple-and-turquoise tie-dye tunic.

  “Really? It’s so bright.”

  Kaitlyn shrugged and they walked on, but Julie gave a glance back at the top Kaitlyn had pointed out. It would definitely be a new look.

  As it turned out, Julie did see people she knew: a friend from the bookstore, then someone she’d met recently at church. She’d been a year-round resident for ten years, but to the locals, that was nothing; she was only now differentiating herself from the summer visitors.

  Sophia saw some girls she knew and ran screaming to hug them, then started an intense conversation. Kaitlyn and Julie slowed their pace. “Do you know who they are? Old friends?” Julie asked. “Seems like she hasn’t seen them in a while.”

  “They go to our school. She saw them an hour ago.” Kaitlyn’s lip curled. “That’s just how they act.”

  Julie remembered, then, the shrill excitement Ria had exhibited every time she saw a girl she knew. “Should we keep walking?” she asked Kaitlyn. “She can catch up. Or we can wait for her at the benches.” The benches adjoined the big beach and were a gathering place where music groups performed and tourists clustered during the season.

  “Whatever.” They trudged along, and Julie felt marginally glad that she’d gotten the girls out and about. She worried about Kaitlyn’s morale, in particular.

  The sun was warm on her face, the breeze not too strong, the bay’s smells rising up as they got closer to the water. Julie loved the Eastern Shore, always had; it had been her idea to use her inheritance from her grandfather to buy a summer cottage here.

  They reached the benches and sat down, and moments later Sophia joined them, breathless. “Sorry! Let’s go down.”

  They walked through the shipped-in sand, debating where to sit. As they found a place to set up the chair and towels they’d brought, Sophia put an arm around Julie. “This was a good idea, Grandma.”

  Her heart warmed. “It’s fun to spend time with you girls. Now, be sure to put on sunscreen.”

  There were several groups of people on the beach, even though it was way too cool to swim. Cabin fever, she guessed.

  Kaitlyn grunted and nudged her sister, and they both looked toward a group of boys, closer to Kaitlyn’s age than Sophia’s.

  Kaitlyn finger-combed her hair and checked her appearance in her phone camera. “I look bad,” she said, tossing the phone down.

  “You should totally go talk to them,” Sophia encouraged.

  “No way!”

  “Well, just...walk by them, then. Give them a chance to talk to you.”

  “Will you come?”

  “Okay, sure.” Sophia got up and grabbed her phone and slid back into her denim shorts. Kaitlyn had never taken hers off, and the two of them started in the direction of the boys, who were throwing Frisbees. Then Sophia turned back. “Is this all right, Grandma?”

  “Go. Have fun.” She felt successful now, like she’d had a good influence on her granddaughters, getting them to come outside. She pulled out her mystery novel and leaned back in her chair, looking out at the water, watching as the girls got farther away. A buzz let her know that Kaitlyn had forgotten her phone, and idly she picked it up.

  Make sure you spend time with Grandma like we talked about, was the message on the lock screen.

  Oh. So it wasn’t that she was helping her granddaughters; it was that they were helping her, per their mother’s instructions. Embarrassed, she leaned her head against the back of the chair and closed her eyes.

  Apparently, “spending time with Grandma” was a topic of discussion between her daughter and her granddaughters. She was a project.

  She looked down at her pale legs and counted two more age spots. Great.

  Grabbing her novel, she tried to read, but her thoughts kept returning to that text. If she wasn’t really helping her granddaughters, then she felt sort of...pointless. And that annoyed her. She had no intention of being one of those divorced women who dwelled on problems or pitied herself. She’d always been someone who took action.

  She needed to make a change. But what?

  * * *

  MONDAY MORNING, TREY got lucky.

  He walked with King down the rocky coastline toward the school. Walking on uneven terrain wasn’t the easiest thing for a guy with a spinal injury to do, but today, the outdoor setting gave him an advantage. Or at least gave him access.

  Erica and her students—ten or eleven teenagers, mostly boys—were out on the beach. The kids stood or knelt in a rough semicircle, and Erica was talking to them, gesticulating with her hands, bending over to pick up something and hold it up.

  Looked like a science lesson, and they’d chosen a rotten day for it. After that unseasonable warm spell, the temperatures had plummeted and the sky had gone heavy. Now a cold wind whipped Erica’s dark, shaggy hair. She forked it back with an impatient gesture and kept talking.

  Businesslike. Serious. That was why he figured he was lucky. He didn’t think she’d have let him into her classroom, given what his chief had told him about her attitude, but anyone could walk on the public part of the beach, right?

  As he got closer, he could see that the kids were sketching and taking notes, most seemingly engrossed in what she was saying. Not all, of course; one boy was daydreaming, and a couple of others seemed to be arguing, one giving the other a subtle punch in the arm. No serious misbehavior, though.

  He seized the opportunity to study Erica more closely. Know thine enemy.

  She was skinny enough that it verged on unhealthy—you could see that even through the thick sweater she wore. Khaki pants and duck boots—nothing to emphasize those mile-long legs. Practical. Not his type; he’d always liked curvy women who dressed up pretty.

  And yet when you looked at her face—those huge eyes, those high cheekbones—you realized she was, in her own way, stunning.

  She looked up, caught him staring and strode over, parking her hands on her hips. “Why are you here?”

  He gave his friendliest, most ingratiating smile. “Reporting for duty,” he said.

  She didn’t smile back. “Students, keep working,” she said over her shoulder. Then she faced Trey. “I thought they were assigning someone else.”

/>   So she wasn’t even going to pretend she hadn’t requested that he be replaced. Fine. “I talked them into giving me a chance.”

  She glanced back at the kids, who were gawking or goofing around rather than writing. One glare from her, though, and they mostly hunched over their notebooks again. Then she looked back at Trey, equally severe with him. “This is supposed to help?” she asked. “You’re distracting the students.”

  Beside him, King stood and whined a little. Trey gave the settle command, which King did, but with a glance up at him that spoke volumes.

  King was still a police dog in his heart, just like Trey was an officer, and he’d noticed something wrong. Trey dropped the leash. “Search,” he commanded without thinking it through.

  Almost instantly, he realized that was inappropriate; he wasn’t on duty. But it was too late. King ran into the group of kids, several of whom reeled back in fear. King was large, focused and panting, which showed his mighty teeth.

  “Get your dog away from them,” Erica said.

  “Just a minute.”

  “No, now!”

  Suddenly, King sat. Utterly still, focused on one boy’s backpack.

  Trey called him back, watching the boy. He said something to another kid beside him and shifted the backpack out of sight, blocking their view with his body.

  “That kid has drugs in his backpack,” Trey told Erica.

  “What?”

  “That kid in the red jacket,” he said. “He’s carrying drugs. King found them. He’s a drug dog,” he explained as he reached into his pocket for King’s favorite tug toy and knelt for a quick play session, King’s reward for a job well done. He tried to keep from wincing as King’s enthusiastic yanks on the toy shot pain down his back.

  Erica blew out a breath. “You’re sure?”

  “Uh-huh.” He was still watching the kid. “You’ll find it, unless he manages to ditch it somewhere.”