Secrets in the Sand

by Carolyn Brown

  Delia whined about the time and effort and red tape involved in rescinding grandfathered permissions to keep farm animals in the city limits.

  “I don’t care,” he said again. “You showed me this place on a quiet Sunday afternoon, and I’ll bet you scheduled the showing then for a reason.”

  “Aw, Quinn, come on. Stop being dramatic.”

  “Come on yourself, Delia. You never even answer your phone on the weekends. I should have known something was up when you couldn’t meet me here during the week.”

  She declined to respond to that one. “I guess you need to vent, Quinn, so go ahead. I’ll listen till you’re done.”

  “Your lack of candor has caused me a big problem, and you need to fix it.” If he couldn’t sell this place, the money he had squirreled away for renovations wouldn’t be worth a thin dime. “Tell you what. I’ll pay you a ten-thousand-dollar bonus when you sell this estate for double what I paid for it. That’s on top of your normal commission.” He paused for a minute to let that sink in. “And remember that other little property you told me about.” Quinn gazed out over the landscape where a hundred acres of marshland met the bay. “If and when it goes up for sale, we can both quadruple our profits. Now. Can you, or can you not, make the zoo next door go away?”

  He heard her take a breath, then let it out.

  “Well?” He took another pull at his beer, only to find that the bottle was empty.

  “I’ll do what I can,” she said. “If I can.”

  “Fine. I’ll trust you to handle it, for your benefit as well as mine.”

  “I will,” Delia answered. “I’ll handle it.”

  “Good. Keep me posted.” Now that he had vented, he felt much more relaxed and easygoing than he had a half hour before. He strolled into the pool house, dumped the empty bottle in the kitchen’s recycle bin, then went to wipe down the bathroom tiles.

  He hummed and scrubbed, clinging to his pie-in-the-sky vision of the retired couple who would enjoy their happily-ever-after lives in the dream home he was determined to create here.

  ***

  That evening, Abby dumped the day’s trash bags into the can by the road, thinking about the For Sale sign the motorcycle dude had discarded in the weeds in front of the neighboring estate. She had completely forgotten to tell Aunt Reva, and maybe that was a good thing, because Reva deserved at least a few days of bliss before hearing that the animal shelter she’d been campaigning for would never happen. Abby slammed the trash-can lid. “Oh well.”

  Reva had begged the Magnolia Bay City Council to buy the abandoned estate next door and convert it into a much-needed animal shelter for the city. She had even offered to run the shelter as an extension of Bayside Barn, since all the strays got dumped there, anyway.

  Abby looked down at Georgia. “Any bright ideas from the canine quarter?”

  Georgia, as usual, was on it. She tunneled through the tall grass toward the downed sign. Her gray speckles and black spots disappeared in the vegetation, but her white-tipped tail waved above the tasseled grasses, setting dandelion seeds free in the warm Louisiana air. After a minute or two of consideration, she came back grinning as if a direct line to the powers that be had assured her everything would be okay.

  Abby wasn’t so sanguine, but Reva’s dog encouraged her to take the long view. “You think the city will buy the marshland behind here instead?” Not likely, since the bayside marshland behind the estates on this road wasn’t for sale. In addition, the water-soaked bog filled with snakes and alligators was unsuitable for anything but a great view unless someone had a fortune to spend on fill dirt.

  In other words, the land was unavailable, unsuitable, unattainable. Sort of like the men in Abby’s life.

  Bored with the ongoing conundrum, Georgia crossed the blacktop and sniffed at a tangle of smothering vines that edged the easement. While beautiful, cat’s-claw could strangle every living thing for miles, and it had made a good start here.

  Georgia growled and peered into the vine-covered forest with her hackles up.

  “What’s with the mean fur?” Abby imagined a pair of predatory gold eyes staring through the vines, watching. A chill poured through her. The fine hairs on her arms rose and she shivered. Cat walking over your grave, Reva would’ve said.

  Abby scolded herself the way her mom always had. “Abby Curtis, your imagination is as wild as your hair. There are no cougars or wolves in Louisiana.”

  The eerie feeling of being watched wasn’t just Abby’s imagination, though. Georgia felt it too. The little dog barked at whatever was hiding in the cat’s-claw, threatening it with a don’t-make-me-come-in-there-and-get-you tone.

  “Come on, girl,” Abby coaxed. “Let’s go home.”

  Without warning, Georgia darted into the forest, sounding an alarm that would make most animals exit the scene immediately. But Georgia’s barking came from a fixed location now. God only knew what poor creature cowered on the receiving end of her scolding. Not more kittens; Georgia never barked at cats. Probably a snake…

  Abby’s ever-present stream of worry escalated into a roaring river of panic. “Georgia!”

  ***

  Wolf sat on his haunches under the canopy of vines. The little multicolored dog shot into the cat’s-claw forest and charged at him. Hackles raised, she lowered her copper eyebrow spots into a fierce scowl and growled. “You don’t belong here.”

  Wolf looked away, showing deference.

  Georgia advanced. “What are you doing here? Go away.”

  Wolf hunkered down and crawled backward, retreating farther into the shadows. He refused to meet the challenge in her intelligent brown eyes, but he tried to use his body language to send a message of peace. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “You aren’t supposed to be here,” she insisted. “Go home.”

  He eased back until his tail brushed the front wall of the half-roofed house hidden beneath the grasping vines. He’d been sheltering here ever since his human caretaker drove him far from home and shoved him off the back of the truck.

  Discarded in disgrace.

  He didn’t understand why, even after days of hunger and thirst and thinking, thinking, thinking.

  The woman’s voice called out. “Georgia. Get back here, now.” Beneath the command was fear, concern, love. His chest felt as heavy as the water-filled doormat he had once—in his exuberant puppyhood—dragged off the porch and torn up.

  The dog named Georgia looked back but didn’t retreat. “You don’t belong here. Go home.”

  Wolf lowered his elbows to the ground and flattened himself in submission. He sent a silent message to Georgia. “I can’t go home. I am being punished. My people left me here, and I think they will come back for me. I have to wait.”

  Georgia sat, panting. “What did you do wrong?”

  Wolf didn’t know. He waited for Georgia to ask a different question he might know the answer to.

  “Georgia,” the woman’s voice called out, still high-pitched with anxiety but softer and sweeter than before. “Girlfriend, what are you doing in there?”

  Her voiceless reply: “I am talking to the gold-eyed dog-thing.”

  So. She could tell he wasn’t fully dog or fully wolf. She turned her fierce gaze on him, but the white tip of her thick brown tail flickered a greeting.

  “Georgia.” The woman’s voice sounded sharp again, the tone veering between fear and love. “Get back here.”

  Georgia stood. “Abby is calling me. I do what I want, but it is time for me to go. You can stay.” She turned tail and trotted back to the woman.

  Wolf put his head on his paws and ignored the hungry rumbling of his belly.

  ***

  With a last parting shot in the one-sided argument, Georgia bounded out of the cat’s-claw, her gray speckled coat covered in damp yellow petals.

  Abby’s con
cern evaporated. “Did you tell ’em?”

  Georgia sneezed, a gesture that looked like an emphatic yes.

  “Good. Can we please go home now?” Abby waited for Georgia to trot past, then closed the wrought-iron gate and fastened the padlock. “What in the world were you barking at?”

  Georgia danced around Abby’s feet, whining and yipping as if she had important information to share.

  Reva claimed that anyone could communicate with animals, and she’d given Abby a hundred thousand short tutorials. But as Reva had often said, practice and trust were essential ingredients, and Abby had to admit that she hadn’t provided either of them. So if Georgia was trying to say something, Abby didn’t get it. She petted the good dog’s silky head. “Whatever it was, I’m sure you took care of it.”

  But an image of watchful gold eyes made Abby’s shoulders twitch. Georgia barked, tail wagging, reminding Abby that daylight was fading fast. “You’re right. It’s time to feed critters and toss the ball.”

  In the big barn with its hand-painted sign—Welcome, Bayside Barn Buddies—above the open double doors, Abby poured feed into various bowls and buckets, humming along with the faint melody coming from the new neighbor’s stereo. It played loud enough for her to hear the tune, but not loud enough for her to recognize the words. After seeing him on that motorcycle, dressed in black leather, she might have expected him to be the sort to play abrasive music with abusive lyrics loud enough to rattle the windows.

  Maybe he would be a good neighbor to Aunt Reva, who had never quite fit in here in Magnolia Bay. Though she had married a born-and-bred resident of the area, her hippie clothing and unusual talent of telepathic animal communication made most people around here act a little standoffish. When Reva’s husband died two years ago, her chance of blending into the clannish community died too. A good neighbor next door would be a blessing for Reva, and Abby should do whatever she could to facilitate that relationship.

  She should bake a loaf of the secret-family-recipe pound cake and offer it to the new guy as a welcome to the neighborhood. It’s what Reva would have done. Even though she wasn’t really accepted around here, Reva remained unfailingly polite to everyone.

  Removing her barn boots, Abby set them in the boot tray inside the back door, then padded into the old-fashioned farm kitchen and poured a glass of merlot.

  Georgia sat, front paws in prayer position, a blue tennis ball in her mouth.

  “You’re right. It’s ball time. But let’s check on the kitten first.” Abby went into the white-tiled laundry room with Georgia at her heels. The kitten growled and spat and hissed, all the purring and promise of yesterday forgotten.

  “Baby,” Abby chided. When she stuck her fingers through the bars, hoping to calm the kitten with a caress, it scrambled into the cardboard hideout, knocking over the food dish on the way. Georgia set the ball down long enough to eat the scattered kibble off the floor. Then she snatched up the ball and streaked through the dog door onto the pool patio.

  “Right behind you,” Abby promised. She set her wineglass on the dryer and stripped naked, then threw her clothes in the washer and turned it on. She took her swimsuit off the hook by the door—and had an epiphany. She was alone here! She could go naked if she wanted to. She hung the swimsuit back up and grabbed a towel. Feeling a slightly naughty sense of exhilaration at her secret indecency, she carried her wine outside and eased into the gently bubbling hot tub. Naked. Totally and completely naked.

  It seemed like she was the only human in the universe.

  So why couldn’t she manage to relax? She ducked underwater to get her hair wet, then slid up onto the seat, tipped her head back, and willed her tense body to let go. Every muscle, every tendon, every molecule was clenched like a fist ready for battle.

  Georgia dropped the ball and nosed it toward Abby’s wineglass. Abby tossed the ball a few dozen times, then plunked it into the hot tub where Georgia wouldn’t go. “No more playing.”

  Georgia settled on her haunches, elbows to the ground and feet pointing straight ahead in the classic cattle-dog pose. Eyeing the floating ball the way her ancestors had once eyed flocks of sheep, she waited patiently for Abby to make the next move.

  Abby sipped her wine and surveyed her aunt’s domain. Three—no, four—cats lounged within sight: Max, the big, gray tabby; Princess Grace, the elegant Siamese mix; Glenn, the black-and-white-spotted feral with a notched ear; and Jessie, another gray tabby with a notched ear. The others were all off doing cat things. Across the fence that separated the parking lot from the blue clapboard farmhouse, the petting-zoo animals rested in the big, red barn. Down the hill toward the bay, an owl hooted, answered by its mate a short distance away.

  If Reva had been here, she would have told Abby what the owls were saying. “I’m here,” probably. And “I’m here too.” Animals weren’t always running off at the mouth like humans. Most often, their calls back and forth were quick check-ins establishing location and well-being.

  Family keeping up with family.

  Something her parents had never seemed interested in. When Abby spent summers with Reva and Grayson, her parents hardly ever called. When Abby graduated from high school, they exchanged their three-bedroom house for a top-of-the-line home on wheels and offered to pay a year of storage fees for her stuff until she could “get the hang of adulting.” When she graduated from college with a business degree, they didn’t come; they’d been too busy avoiding the hot Louisiana summer by touring every campsite in Oregon.

  When Abby cut herself adrift from her own life, she should’ve known to ask Reva for help first. Reva was a generous and forgiving Mother Earth, while Abby’s father (Reva’s brother-in-law) made Narcissus look like a philanthropist. Abby’s mother, well, she was more like a ghost. Even when she was there, she wasn’t really. Winston Curtis was the dense magnetic planet that kept his wife’s dimming star from spinning off into oblivion. Whatever he said, she echoed, because she wasn’t a whole person without him. Full of their customary thimbleful of compassion, they had advised Abby to tighten her bootstraps.

  So when she found herself sitting in a leaking dinghy watching her bridges burn behind her, and her parents had given unhelpful advice but no actual help, Abby had asked her aunt Reva for a patch of uncharred earth on which to land. “Yes, of course,” her aunt had replied without skipping a heartbeat. “You’re welcome to stay for as long as you like.”

  Family taking care of family.

  Abby thought of the little girl she’d met today—Angelina—and hoped that if the child couldn’t be with her family, at least she lived with people who loved her. Everyone, human or animal, deserved a home in which they knew unconditional love and acceptance. Abby thought of the child she’d had to leave behind in order to save herself, and swallowed a mouthful of wine along with the worry and regret that never left her mind. That it wasn’t her child didn’t make it better.

  With the comforting bulk of the house behind her, Abby leaned her head back and let her feet float up. A couple of early stars winked on in the deepening sky, and solar lights glittered off to the left, lighting a flagstone path to the aviary and the pavilion. Straight ahead and down the hill, a fenced pasture surrounded the swimming hole whose brown water glittered dimly as the sun’s last ray disappeared beyond the horizon.

  The granddaddy oak Abby remembered from every summer of her childhood stood guard over the wooden dock. Fifty feet up into its fern-covered branches, a tire swing’s hefty rope was tied so older kids could swing far out over the pond before letting go.

  Beyond, rolling pastureland led down to a wide strip of marshland that bordered the bay a few miles away. A boat’s motor made a whining sound in the distance; someone night fishing or checking trotlines.

  Abby heard a munching sound and peered into the gathering shadows. At the property line between her aunt’s farm and the new neighbor’s estate, two long, curving horns b
obbed in rhythm—a goat with his head buried in the privacy hedge. “Gregory.” Out again, that bad, adventurous goat. “You could teach Houdini a thing or two.”

  Ignoring the goat—she could figure out how he’d gotten out of the pasture and into the yard tomorrow—Abby stood and set her empty wineglass next to her towel. The cooling night air tingled on her bare skin, raising goose bumps. She stepped onto the diving board, bounced a few times, and dove into the cool water.

  ***

  Quinn sat by the pool in the gathering dusk. The frogs’ mating song blended nicely with his new favorite song, “Any Man in America.”

  He felt kind of bad that tomorrow he would destroy the frogs’ happy habitat with pool chemicals and a scrub broom. But maybe frogs also needed to learn about getting too comfortable and feeling too safe.

  The Blue October song ended. Silence…then a strange rustling noise in the privacy hedge. Was crazy Old Ms. McDonald snooping on him? He eased to his feet and padded over, planning to surprise the old bat.

  The hedge shook. He pulled apart a couple branches and met two blue eyes with strange-shaped pupils. He jumped back. What the fork?

  He bent down and encountered a devil’s face, complete with horns. “Maaa,” the thing bellowed.

  “I’ll be damned.” Quinn picked up a stick and poked it through the hedge-covered chain-link fence, right into the goat’s nose.

  “Maaa…” The goat bolted, leaving a perfect, goat-head-sized peephole into his new neighbor’s backyard.

  The sparkling-clean pool glowing blue, lit from within.

  The kidney-shaped patio surrounded by globe lights.

  His next-door neighbor’s perfectly proportioned body diving naked into the swimming pool.

  “Whoa.” Quinn stumbled back, tripped over something, and fell on his ass.

  He wouldn’t be able to think of her as Old Ms. McDonald anymore.

  Chapter 4