Mariner's Compass (18 page)

“Forget it,” he said, his voice cool. “I have to get up early anyway. Give me a call when you get back to Morro Bay.”

He walked around the front of the truck and opened the driver’s door. “You’d better get moving or you’ll miss your friend.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, standing on tiptoe and kissing his jaw. “I’ll make it up to you.”

“Drive carefully,” he said, his expression neutral. That bothered me even more than anger.

“You, too,” I said to his back as he walked away. Guilt ate at me, not to mention the desire he’d stirred that would now simmer all night, but the lure of finding out one more clue about this mystery man was irresistible. More irresistible, apparently, than making love to my husband. For the first time I really began to wonder whether I would have been better off letting the government have the inheritance. Let Tess and her sons and Beau be angry with Uncle Sam instead of me and not create yet another tiny fissure in my delicate cliff of a marriage.

I caught Geoffrey walking out to his Volkswagen Beetle, carrying the box holding my pot.

“I wondered what happened to you,” he said, holding out the box. “I left a message at your house. I’m sorry, but this pot was not created by anyone I’ve seen or represented, but I’ve only been here on the Central Coast for ten years, so take that into consideration. It’s exquisite, though. If you find out who did it and they’re interested in showing in a gallery, send them down.”

“Thanks,” I said, cradling the box against my chest. “I’ll do that, when all this is over. But you know pottery in this area better than anyone so you were my biggest hope. Any suggestions about where I should go next?”

“Thanks for the flattery, but there are lots of people who are more knowledgeable than I am. Have you tried the people in Harmony?”

Harmony was a little town north of Morro Bay. Infinitesimal was probably a better description. With a population of about thirty-five, give or take a cat or two, the town consisted mostly of artists and craftspeople who sold their wares in the old Harmony Valley Creamery buildings.

“That’s a great idea. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

He looked at me sympathetically. “Heard about what happened at the council meeting. Please give my condolences to Dove.”

“I will, but don’t count them out yet. If I know my gramma, there’s an ace or two she hasn’t played yet.”

“Good for her,” Geoffrey said. “Tell her to let me know if she needs bodies to walk a picket line. Me and some of my friends could dust off our radical chants and modify them for the occasion.”

I laughed at the eager look on his middle-aged face. “I’ll pass it on. You may be getting a call.”

“Power to the People,” he said cheerfully. “Just have her make sure to stock up on bottled mineral water and low-fat bagels. We’re too old to be protesting on empty stomachs and we definitely don’t want to dehydrate.”

“You wild and radical guy, you. Thanks again.”

Back in Morro Bay, I called Gabe immediately, an apology and detailed plan of future physical appeasement ready. The only reply I got was from the answering machine.

“I’m back and okay. See you tomorrow,” I said, slightly irritated. Where was he? Why demand I call the minute I arrived safely when he wasn’t even there to take the message? Or maybe he was there. I pictured him sitting there listening to my voice, and that really pissed me off.
Fine, play your stupid games
, I said silently to the phone.

Then I called Elvia and updated her on the developments and whined as one only can to a very old girlfriend about how annoying men are.

“And you’re bugging me to make it permanent with Emory,” she said.

“Yes, then we can suffer together.”

“I’m telling you,
gringa blanca
, if you keep them at a distance, they treat you like a queen. Show them any weakness, and they’ll have you scrubbing floors and slapping out tortillas in no time flat.”

I sighed. “Gabe mops the floors in our house.” The thought of his kiss and what I knew came after was making me really regret my decision to choose following another clue rather than go home with him.

“Go to bed,” Elvia said. “Watch
Jay Leno
. He’s the safest man I know. Gabe’ll get over it and be moaning
mamacita
at you again before you know it.” She paused for a moment. “And, Benni, be careful. You’re the only best friend I’ve got.
Buenos noches.
” She hung up with a sharp click.

“Back at ya,
mi amiga,
” I said softly to the dial tone.

The next morning I walked uptown with Scout and had breakfast at a small cafe called the Egg Place. When I finished, it was only nine o’clock. I wasn’t sure what time the pottery studios in Harmony opened so I decided to walk back down to the bookstore on the Embarcadero. I hadn’t yet bought a card for Dove for Mother’s Day, so this seemed a good time to work that into my schedule.

Stopping by the house for a bathroom pit stop, I found a message blinking on the answering machine. Rowena Ludlam’s voice crackled on the tape.

“I don’t know what kind of joke you’re playing, young woman, but it’s not a bit funny. This ain’t my brother Jacob. He ain’t a stinkin’ lizard.”

She hung up the phone with a loud click.

He wasn’t her brother? He wasn’t a lizard? What in the heck did she mean by that? I quickly dialed her number. She answered on the sixth ring.

“Mrs. Ludlam? This is Benni Harper, the person who—”

“I know who you are. What’s the idea of sending me a picture of this strange man? What kind of scam are you trying to pull? I don’t have a penny but my Social Security, so don’t think you can get anything out of me.”

“Mrs. Ludlam, I assure you this is not a scam. That’s the man who died, who owned this house. Are you sure it’s not your brother? I mean, you haven’t seen him for over thirty-five years. People do change.”

“They don’t grow fingers, do they?” she snapped.

“Huh?”

“This man has all his fingers. Jacob lost his right forefinger in a bicycle accident when he was four. Like I said, he ain’t a lizard.”

“I’m sorry. I . . . I don’t know what to tell you.”

“You can tell me what happened to my brother and why this man has his name.”

“I’ll look into it and call you. I promise.” I hung up before she could answer, my heart like a clenched fist in my chest.

Who was buried in that coffin? And where was the real Jacob Chandler? What did all this have to do with me?

I left the house and started walking, hoping the brisk, morning air would clear up some of the confusion this latest revelation had caused. I walked the length of the Embarcadero twice, Scout following me, tail and ears up, his whole body reveling with the pure joy dogs take in this simple activity. When I passed the bookstore—Joe and Leslie’s Seaside Books—for the second time, I remembered the card I had intended to buy before Rowena Ludlam’s phone call.

The store sat at the end of the Embarcadero in one of the newer gray wood buildings. Next door, from the tiny Morro Bay Aquarium, the sound of barking sea lions and honking seals echoed through the clammy morning air.

It was ten o’clock when I reached the front door just as the clerk was unlocking it.

“Good morning,” she said, her genial voice welcoming. “If there was a prize for being first, you’d win it today.” She held the door open for me.

“Thanks,” I said, walking in. “Do you carry greeting cards?”

“Best selection in town. Over by the romance novels, back wall.”

I slowly perused the cards, feeling as I did every year at this time, a thick, sad feeling that lodged somewhere between my heart and my stomach. To be honest, I didn’t think a lot about my mother. When your mother dies so early and you have someone who is as warm and loving a substitute as Dove has been, you don’t feel as set adrift as you might had you been left literally alone. I’d always had someone there to feel my forehead when I had a fever, argue with about cleavage in prom dresses, and cajole about later curfews. Dove knew children, knew how to raise them, and she loved me as fiercely as if she’d born me herself. I had no doubts about that. The hole left inside me when my mother died had almost been filled by Dove’s love and intense protectiveness. Almost.

This time every year, when I had to choose a card to express my sentiments to the woman who for all intents and purposes was my mother, it always hit me like a swift, unexpected blow that she wasn’t really; she was my father’s mother. Every year I bypassed the cards printed especially for mothers and studied the cards made for grandmothers. It never failed to occur to me that I’d never bought a Mother’s Day card in my life and never would.

I grabbed a four-dollar Hallmark covered with violets, Dove’s favorite flower, and walked quickly away from the card section. I wandered through the store, picking up a few paperback novels that looked interesting to help kill the long evenings I still had left in Morro Bay. At the counter I asked the friendly, peppery-haired lady, “So, are you Leslie?”

The woman smiled. “Oh, no, my name is Eleanor. Eleanor Newhard. Leslie and Joe haven’t owned this store for about a year now. They sold out to me and bought a sailboat. Last I heard, they were in Fiji somewhere.”

“Sounds like a dream come true.”

“Not to me,” she said, shaking her head as she rang up my purchases. “I’m living my dream now, just wallowing around in books. Of course, that’s how I’ve spent my whole life. I was a librarian in Long Beach before I bought this store with every penny of my retirement fund. If it doesn’t work out, guess I’ll have to hire out as a fish cleaner on my little brother’s boat.”

“Your brother’s a fisherman?”

“Has been his whole life. So was our father. Ray owns a party boat now. He hasn’t done commercial fishing in years. Too old and too many regulations, he says.”

“Have you been in Morro Bay long?”

“Two years. I volunteered at the Morro Bay Library for a while, then I started working down here for Joe and Leslie. When this place came up for sale, I said, ‘What the hay, I’ll give it a whirl.’ Now I have all the books in the world and no time to read them.” She smiled at me and handed me a shiny red bag. “But I love it. Everyone in town comes in here or the library eventually. There’s not much that goes on around these parts that I don’t know about.” She smiled at me. “Ms. Harper, new heiress.”

I smiled back, thinking,
Benni
,
you’ve hit a solid gold source here
. “Then I don’t have to tell you that I knew practically nothing about Mr. Chandler. Can you fill me in?”

“Now, Jake. Chandler, there was a strange character. Nice a man as you’d want to meet, but just a tad different.”

“As in?”

She studied me with sharp, knowing eyes that I was willing to bet could see through book bags hiding torn pages from library encyclopedias to guilty hands that had written silly graffiti on the library’s bathroom walls. Not a woman you could lie to. “He just wasn’t all he seemed.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you’ve worked with the public as long as I have you get to know people. You watch them and you just get to know when someone is hiding something, and that man was.”

“Anything specific that made you think that?” Though I held a certain respect for feelings of intuition, what I wanted were hard facts.

She thought for a moment, her face serious. “There was this one time last summer. I had this nice young clerk working with me for the summer. Polite young man from North Carolina whose grandmother was a longtime customer. Jake was over in the craft section. I remember I’d sent him over there because I’d gotten in a new book on wood carving. I called out ‘Garrett’ just as loud and clear as a foghorn, and darned if Jake didn’t turn around and say, ‘What?’ the same time as my clerk. The minute he did, his face turned beet-red and he flew out of here like the proverbial bat. I thought he was just embarrassed because he was losing his hearing or something, but I’d never noticed him having any more problems before that or after. Now, I don’t need a sledgehammer over the head to tell me that there was something fishy going on. Why would he answer so quickly to a name completely different from his?”

That answered one thing—who the “G” was in the old copy of
Treasure Island.
Garrett. I had a first name now.

Eleanor looked at me curiously, waiting for a reply.

“Maybe it was an old nickname,” I said lamely.

“Perhaps,” she said, shaking her head. “But you should have seen his face when he realized what he’d done. He looked . . .” She thought for a moment. “Scared. That’s what I say . . . flat-out scared.”

I thanked her and left with my bag. Okay, so now I had a first name. Garrett. It wasn’t much, but it was something. On the walk back to the house, I went over the possibilities in my mind.

Maybe this Garrett person and the real Jacob Chandler changed identities. Like the prince and the pauper. Two people who for some reason wanted to leave their lives, start whole new ones without the hassle of inventing a new identity. Maybe there was a Garrett somebody living up in Alaska, happy and content with his children and grandchildren, carving walrus tusk or something. It happened.

Well, on soap operas anyway.

That only left one other possibility. That the real Jacob Chandler was dead. That he’d been dead for thirty-five years. That this Garrett somebody had stolen his identity and made a new life for himself.

Which meant the fake Jacob Chandler was possibly a murderer.

Suddenly all I wanted to do was run home and leave this whole mess. I made the decision to call Gabe as soon as I got to the house and tell him that I was abandoning this quest and would let the government have everything. If Jacob Chandler had gained everything he owned because he murdered an innocent man thirty-five years ago, I didn’t want one penny of his money.

The phone was ringing when I walked through the door. I caught it before the answering machine picked up.

“Hello!”

“Benni?” My cousin’s voice sounded strange. “Thank goodness I got to you before anyone else.”

“Emory, what’s wrong?”