Castaway Cove (30 page)

“I had a t
hought,” Annie said as she made waffles for Mac and Emma the morning after the Fourth. They might be from a packaged mix, which Maddy would probably consider a cardinal culinary sin, but at least she’d managed to make a stack without having batter run all over the counter. “About your school uniform.”

Emma’s mouth turned down as she smeared a piece of waffle into a puddle of marionberry syrup. “I can’t wear any pink.”

“On the outside,” Annie said. “But the rules don’t say anything about what you wear under the uniform, do they?”

Blue eyes dazzled like sunshine on a summer sea as Emma caught Annie’s drift. “No. They don’t!”

“Well, then. When I bought my dress for the dance, I noticed that there’s a new Tots to Teens section down at the Dancing Deer Two. What would you say to you and I having a girls’ lunch out, then going shopping for underwear?”

“I’d say yes!” She knocked the chair over as she jumped off it and flung her arms, and the heavy cast that was on one of them, around Annie’s neck. “That’s the bestest idea ever! Isn’t it, Daddy?”

The warmth in Mac’s eyes, as they met Annie’s, had her feeling as if she’d swallowed the sun.

“The bestest,” he agreed.

•   •   •

“Are you going to be my new mommy?” Emma asked across the table at the Lavender Hill Farm restaurant.

“I think it’s a little early to talk about things like that,” Annie replied, hedging.

“Why?”

Wasn’t that what her friends had been asking? What Annie had even begun asking herself?

“It’s complicated. How was your mac and cheese?”

“Really good. But I like yours better.”

Annie decided not to point out that she’d used this same recipe and, unsurprisingly, Maddy’s was definitely the superior dish.

“Thank you. Do you want dessert? Or would you rather wait and stop for a cupcake after shopping?”

Emma took a moment to weigh her options. “A cupcake,” she decided. “Why is it complicated?” Her smooth forehead furrowed into a frown. “Is it because of me?”

“Oh, no.” Having been rejected so many times growing up, Annie knew that even as bright and cheerful as Emma was, and as hard as Mac was working to fill both parental roles, her mother’s abandonment had to have left the child feeling more insecure than she sometimes let on. “I can’t imagine a more extra-special daughter than you.”

“Then why won’t you marry my daddy?”

“You’ll understand when you’re a grown-up,” Annie tried, not having the answer to that one herself.

Emma’s frustrated sigh ruffled her corn-silk bangs. “I
hate
it when grown-ups say that.”

“I know.” Annie reached across the table and stroked Emma’s hair soothingly. “But relationships take time if you want to do them right. Your daddy and I are in the getting-to-know-each-other stage right now.”

“Oh!” The last of the worry and frustration on her small face cleared. “Like Belle and the beast did. Although he seemed really mean and grumpy at first, he let her read his books and then they had to become friends before they could have a romantic dinner and dance and fall in forever-after love.”

“Exactly.”

That seemed to settle the problem.

At least for now.

Later that afternoon, as they returned home with cupcakes, shopping bags filled with cotton underwear covered with pink flowers, hearts, and various Disney Princess designs, Annie considered making a thank-you card to send to those Disney filmmakers.

•   •   •

The days that followed were, hands down, the most wonderful ones of Annie’s life. Although it still took some juggling to make time for Mac and her to be alone, and there were some nights that they barely got any sleep at all, for the first time in her life, Annie was learning to play.

Since summer days were long on the coast, they spent every evening together. Barbecuing, walking on the beach, even going out on Cole’s boat for a private whale-watching trip. As if they were becoming the family she’d always dreamed of, those evenings were always spent with Emma. Less and less with Boyd, who’d begun seeing Marian Long, a widowed nurse he’d met while dropping by the hospital to visit a patient.

The possibility of the handsome, eligible doctor being taken off the market had not only cut back on the amount of baked goods flowing into the Buchanan men’s home, but it had the couple claiming Mac and Annie’s spot in the Shelter Bay spotlight.

“I tell you, it’s the water,” the mayor said one day when she’d been standing at Take the Cake’s counter, waiting her turn after Emma and Annie. “One of these days I’m going to come up with a marketing campaign and bottle it. After all, this town was started by selling water from the hot springs as a miracle cure. What’s more miraculous than falling in love?”

Annie couldn’t argue with that.

Another evening, Annie was outside setting the picnic table while Mac grilled prawns for dinner, when Emma, who was tossing wadded-up pieces of paper to Pirate—who Annie had belatedly discovered knew how to fetch—asked, “Why is he named Pirate?”

“Because he was found on this cove,” Annie said as she set down the coleslaw, which she’d actually made herself from one of the recipes she’d learned in Maddy’s beginning cooking class. “It’s called Castaway Cove because there was this pirate, Sir Francis Drake, who had the fastest ship on the sea.”

“The
Golden Hind
,” Mac volunteered from the grill.

“That was it. And actually, Sir Francis was a privateer, but that’s pretty much the same thing as a pirate. He was just working for the queen of England instead of for himself.”

“Like Daddy works at KBAY.”

“Sort of like that,” Annie said. “But his job was to run down other ships and steal their treasures.”

“That’s a pirate, all right,” Emma said, with a decisive nod. “I saw them at the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. I wonder if he chased women like those do.”

Annie ignored Mac’s smothered laugh.

“I’m not sure about that,” she said mildly. “He was actually quite a gentleman, for a pirate. He’d force the other ships close to the land, then allow all the crewmen to wade ashore. This was one of his favorite spots to catch the ships, so they’d end up here. Which is why it’s called Castaway Cove.”

“I like that story,” Emma decided. “We should make it into a scrapbook page. With a picture of Pirate.”

“I think that’s an excellent idea.”

As she exchanged a look with Mac, she could tell he was thinking the same thing. That this moment in time was about as perfect as life could get.

But as life had taught her, perfection, like so many things, was fleeting.

A month after the Fourth of July, Annie received a call at the shop. “I thought I’d better warn you,” Mac said. “We’re having a funeral tonight.”

Her heart clenched. “Don’t tell me Charlie—”

“Oh, sorry. Hell, no. He’s fine. At least Analiese said he is. Emma and I are going over to see him today. But Nemo died.”

Nemo being one of Emma’s two goldfish.

“Oh. Well. That’s too bad. Is she terribly upset?”

“Not as bad as I thought she’d be. There were some tears. But I promised her we’d bury him in the backyard, so she’s busy coloring a box to put him in.”

“I have some stickers of goldfish. I’ll bring them over to the house after work.”

“Thanks.” He paused. “You know what?”

“What?”

“Even burying a goldfish together just feels right.”

When she didn’t answer right away, he said, “We’re going to have to talk about where we’re going.”

He’d tried before, but she kept putting him off. Because, she knew, she couldn’t quite trust what might be around the bend.

“Tonight we’re going to a funeral for a fish,” she said.

“Annie—”

“I just need a little more time, Mac.”

He sighed and she knew he had to make an effort to bite back his frustration. She couldn’t blame him. As Sedona and the others kept telling her, she had no good reason not to move their relationship on to the next step.

Mac was not just sexy Midnight Mac, the deejay that women all over Shelter Bay probably lay in bed fantasizing about. He was a good man. A decent man. He’d already told her he loved her and she had no reason to doubt his word.

They had, as Emma pointed out about Belle and the Beast, become not just lovers but friends.

So why, Annie wondered as she greeted a customer who had come in for supplies to make a whale memory page, did she feel as if she were standing on the edge of a cliff where one false step would send her tumbling headlong over the edge?

“My fish died, Poppy,” Emma told Charlie later that afternoon when Mac took her to Still Waters. “Nemo. Daddy and Annie and I are going to bury him tonight. In a box I made him.”

“I’m sorry you lost him, Emma. And that’s nice you’re going to bury his body. But you don’t have to worry. Because he’s already up in heaven with your great-grandmother.”

“Fish go to heaven?”

“Sure they do. They’re actually happier there because instead of a bowl, they have a whole ocean to swim in.”

“What if the big fish eat them?”

“Not in heaven,” he assured her. “Believe me, honey, he’s one happy goldfish right now.”

“Okay.” She exhaled a long, relieved breath. Then her brow furrowed. “Maybe if I took Dory out of the water, she’d die, too. Then she could be happy in heaven, with Nemo.”

“No, you wouldn’t want to do that,” Charlie told her. “Because like my Annie always tells me, we all have to go in our own time. And it’s not Dory’s time yet.”

“Oh. But do you think she misses Nemo?”

“Probably. But if my Annie can come visit me, he’ll probably be able to visit her, too. And tell her all about all the wonderful things he’s seen in the sea up there.”

“She’d like that,” Emma said. “Because I named her after Dory, from the movie, who likes to talk. So this way she’ll still have Nemo to talk to.”

That problem solved, she went on to tell him all about tonight’s sleepover with her friend Peggy. A sleepover where she’d be staying for breakfast, Mac thought with anticipation.

Which should give him and Annie plenty of time to talk about their future.

•   •   •

“Nemo is
too
in heaven,” Emma told her friend after her daddy had dropped her off for the sleepover. It was the last one they’d be having before she began first grade.

“Is not,” Peggy said. “Goldfish don’t go to heaven.”

Emma put her hands on her hips. “Poppy said they do.”

“Ha.” Peggy tossed her red head. “Everybody in town knows your grandfather’s crazy. That’s why he’s locked up in that home.”

“That’s not true.” Emma’s hands curled into fists. “Take it back.”

It was Peggy’s turn to put
her
hands on
her
hips. “Make me.”

Emma was about to hit her, right in the eye, the way she did Kenny. Then she remembered what her daddy had told her about hitting people.

But her poppy had told her that standing up for family was the right thing to do. And Peggy had just said bad things about Nemo and her poppy.

“If you hit me, I’ll tell,” Peggy said. “And you’ll get grounded. And probably even spanked.”

Emma was momentarily shocked into silence. Then she said, “My daddy would never hit me.”

“He might. My mother says that he was a soldier in the Army.”

“Shows how much you know. Daddy was in the Air Force.”

“It’s all the same thing.” Peggy’s skinny lips twisted in a sneer that had Emma’s temper shooting so high she thought it might take the top of her head off. Or make it explode like those fireworks on the Fourth of July.

“My mother says that lots of times soldiers have PMS,” her friend-turned-enemy said. “And when they have it they can go crazy and shoot people so I should be careful when I’m over at your house.”

“My daddy would never shoot anyone!” Emma shouted.

Her palms were hurting from her fingernails cutting into them as she tried her hardest not to hit Peggy and get grounded for her last week of summer vacation. Especially since her daddy and Annie were taking her to Seaside for the weekend.

“He was in the war,” Peggy said. “People in war shoot people all the time. I’ve seen it on TV. And he got blown up, so my mother told my father that there’s no telling what that did to his brain.”

“You are such a liar.” Her daddy was the smartest man she knew. His brain was just fine.

“And your family is crazy with people who shoot people and who think fish go to heaven,” Peggy shot back.

That did it. Grabbing her rolling overnight bag, Emma marched out of the room, down the stairs, and out the door.

Headed for home.

Mac was as gray as a ghost and obviously frantic when Annie arrived at his house. Kara was already there, looking grim and official in her starched khaki uniform.

“What happened?” Annie asked.

“Emma’s gone missing. I’ve got to go look for her.”

“I’ve got deputies out doing that. And I’ve called in an AMBER Alert,” Kara said. “Let me just get a couple more details about what she was wearing and we’ll get a search party started. Believe me, there’s a way to handle this, and just running out without a plan isn’t going to make the situation any better.”

“How could she go missing?” Annie asked, confused. “Wasn’t she at Peggy’s for the sleepover?”

“She and Peggy got in a fight and she left.”

“Left? Peggy’s mother allowed her to leave alone?”

“She wasn’t there,” Mac said. “She left the girls with her teenage daughter while she stopped by the casino in Lincoln City to play the slots on her way home from work.

“When she got home, Peggy was in her room playing Barbies. She’s not sure how long it’s been since Emma left. And her older sister, who isn’t exactly the sharpest crayon in the box, was listening to music on her iPod while texting with her boyfriend and didn’t even notice.”

He raked his hands through his hair. “I dropped her off right after I fed her an early dinner. She could have been gone for two fucking hours. Maybe more.”

“We’ll find her,” Kara promised even as the radio she wore on her uniform shirt crackled. “Let me get this and I’ll be right back.” Looking very much like the big-city police officer she’d once been before returning to her hometown to take over her father’s job as sheriff, she stepped outside.

“I need to go look for her,” Mac repeated.

“Someone needs to be here for when she comes home,” Annie said, refusing to think Emma wouldn’t come home. That was one outcome she wasn’t going to consider. “Where’s your dad?”

“In Portland. He took Marian up there to the symphony. He’s on his way home.”

“Okay.” Annie wanted to be with Mac more than anything, but she also knew that there’d be no keeping him here while his daughter was missing.

Kara came back into the room. Her expression gave nothing away, but her eyes weren’t positive. “Does Emma have a Barbie suitcase?”

“A rolling one.” Mac literally swayed and grabbed hold of the back of the couch. “She took it to Peggy’s. Why?”

“Because a man watering his front lawn found one lying on the sidewalk. On Bayview.”

“Oh, Christ. That’s a good mile from the Murrays’ house,” Mac said. “In the wrong direction.”

“We’ll find her, Mac,” said Kara, who, along with being a sheriff, had a son and daughter of her own. “I promise.”

•   •   •

Charlie knew he should be grateful to get out of Still Waters. Everyone was always telling him that the field trips were good for him. That they kept him engaged and out in the world. Which may have been true. But they also put him on a van with a bunch of people that he had nothing in common with except that they were all in various stages of losing their minds.

As he sat trying to ignore the chatter of the women sitting at the table in the sports restaurant just outside town where they’d stopped to eat after a sightseeing trip to the lighthouse—during which he’d been forced to listen to stuff he’d known all his life—he hunched his shoulders, bit into his burger, and tried to concentrate on the baseball game up on the TV screen over the bar. Which wasn’t easy, since he couldn’t hear the announcer over the women’s damn voices.

He was about to tell them to tone it down when the AMBER Alert crawled across the bottom of the screen.

“Emma?”

Okay. Maybe her name on the TV was another hallucination like people said he sometimes had. He stood up from the table.

“Where are you going?” the orderly—
Jack
, Charlie remembered—demanded to know.

“To the john,” Charlie shot back. The kid didn’t look old enough to shave. What right did he have to be monitoring where Charlie went or telling him what to do? “Want to come along and hold my dick?”

That shut the biddies up.

“Just hurry up,” Jack said. “Because the van’s leaving in ten minutes.”

“I might be old,” Charlie said. “But it doesn’t take me
that
long to piss.”

He knew this place well, from the days when he’d bring fish into the harbor. His memory might not be what it once was, but he damn well could find his way to the john. He stopped at the bar while Jack flirted with the girl who drove the van that had brought them all down here.

He was wearing his WWII Navy vet baseball cap, which usually got him some respect. The Greatest Generation, they were calling him. How about the oldest? But the anchor tattoo on the bartender’s forearm was a positive sign.

“Was that an AMBER Alert?”

“Yeah. Some little girl. Six years old.” The guy shook his head as he drew a draft beer into a frosted mug. “Hope they find her. I’ve got a daughter just her age. Sometimes these things hit home, you know?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “I know.”

Only too well.

He glanced back behind him, where Jack the Jerk-off was still making lame jokes to the girl, who obviously had good taste since she was trying to ignore him.

Taking advantage of the diversion, Charlie headed toward the restroom and then instead of taking a right turn, turned and went through the kitchen and out the back of the restaurant.

He might not remember what he had for breakfast, but he did remember Emma talking about that cave where she’d suggested they could go if he ever felt the need to run away from Still Waters.

Charlie could not let himself believe that someone had snatched his great-granddaughter. For such an angelic-looking little tyke, she had one helluva temper. She’d probably just gotten pissed over something at her friend’s house and was headed there.

So, he thought, as he cut through the woods to keep out of sight, then headed back toward the beach, Emma would hide out in the cave, the same way he and Ollie had hidden overnight on that island that time the engine on their whaleboat broke down.