The Stolen Canvas (9 page)

Annie’s question jarred Ian. How could he have let one bold stranger distract his attention from her? Not a fair trade at all. “What?” he said distractedly. She had hooked her purse over one delicate shoulder, preparing to leave. “Oh I’m sorry, Annie. I guess I was thinking about something else.” He snatched his check and hers, and stood up.

“Oh, you don’t need to …” she began, reaching for her check.

“Want to,” he said firmly but with a smile he felt down to his feet. “Let me know how your mystery girl gets on with Carla …”

“
Calloway
,” Annie finished for him, giving him a level look, quickly followed by the laugh he had grown to like so much.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” he said in a tone meant to prove he had been effectively chastised.

9

“Ouch!” Carla snatched her hand away from the owl’s sharp little beak, dropping the fistful of grasshoppers she had brought as breakfast. She hadn’t been foolish enough to open the cage door with her bare hands, but Gomer had pierced the flesh on her wrist between the glove and her flannel shirt.

She’d found the barred owl behind one of the sheds, its tibia broken and the toes of one foot badly mangled. In its search for prey the bird had likely been attacked and become prey himself. It was no easy task to affect a rescue. She’d thrown her wool sweater over it to keep it warm, knowing it was likely to be traumatized by the action. Wild creatures often died from shock rather than from their injuries. But the bird had survived. Soon she might be able to release it back into the wild.

Slightly smaller than a great horned owl with no ear tufts, Gomer was brownish in color with broad streaking on its breast. Hence the name barred owl. Its length was about twenty inches and its wingspan about forty inches. She’d named it Gomer for no reason she knew, except that he looked like a Gomer. She pressed the napkin against the sore spot where he’d nipped her and glared into the bird’s round face.

“I know you prefer field mice, but talk about biting the hand that feeds you!” She spat the words out, surprised by the level of dismay the creature had evoked. Most of the animals she tended expressed their appreciation for the care she gave them. Of course, they were in large part abandoned domestic animals that people had simply grown tired of.

“You OK?” Vanessa had come in just as Gomer had struck.

“Blamed bird bit me!” she fumed. She pressed a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin to her wrist. “Why aren’t you out cleaning the cages like I told you to?”

“I finished them,” the girl said quietly without looking up. Her drape of dark hair fell over her forehead as she edged toward the door. “I was just going to wash my hands.”

“Well, get me a bandage from the back while you’re at it. And hurry before I bleed to death!”

Carla turned her back to the teenager who had proved to be her best volunteer yet. She’d had a string of them. Most got tired of the hard work involved in handling shelter animals. They quickly got over being charmed by sweet little puppies and kittens, and left her in a lurch.

Vanessa Stevens worked hard and never made excuses for not coming in. She wasn’t lippy either.
Not like most kids these days
, Carla thought. She bit the inside of her lip, sorry for her outburst. She’d better watch herself if she wanted to keep the girl around. But she had to find a way to get more of the animals adopted. What she really needed was someone with computer skills. She needed a website to help find people willing to adopt her ever-growing menagerie. With her reputation around Stony Point, would anyone answer her ad?

“It’s a wonder anyone hangs around the way you badger them.” Ian Butler had minced no words when he’d stopped by recently. He’d welcomed her when she’d moved into the area and even facilitated her land-grant deal. He didn’t come around much, but she knew he kept an eye on her, like he did anything that had to do with his beloved Stony Point.

“I’m not running a personality contest here, Mr. Mayor,” she’d spouted back. “I’m just trying to help the animals your good people leave on my doorstep anytime they get tired of them.”

She knew abandoned animals didn’t always come from Stony Point’s citizens; more likely they were castoffs from summer visitors or area strays. And she knew he was secretly glad the animals were being taken care of. He hadn’t flung a bunch of rules about licensing and such in her face. He’d been very patient.

Mayor Butler had pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes at her. “Nobody’s holding a club over your head, madam. It’s your land.”

“You’ve got that right!” she had huffed and left the handsome mayor standing in the driveway of the country acreage she’d purchased with the last of the Henderson trust fund.

Carla sat down heavily at the makeshift desk with its scattered papers. She kept a log on every animal she took in, and it surprised her now to see how the pile of paper had grown—and how her resources had dwindled. When Vanessa told her she was part of a needlework club and that the group was going to raise funds for the shelter, she’d been even more surprised. What was behind their generosity? People always had ulterior motives.

She’d never intended to come back here, of all places. As a child she’d been taken to a lot of resort towns and dragged to places she didn’t want to go. Mostly she was left on her own or with one of the nannies charged with her care and keeping. Stony Point was just another vacation spot for her wealthy family, but here her life had begun. And ended! After that terrible summer, she dreaded even the sound of its name. So what was she doing here? Was it a kind of self-flagellation? Some twisted sense of impending fate? She shook her head against the memory.

When she left home after her degree from William & Mary, she wasn’t sure anyone even noticed. Her father spent most of his time amassing a fortune, and her mother, obsessed with her societies and clubs, found little time for child rearing. What was the point of thinking about it now? They were both gone, her father at the tender age of 55 and her mother ten years later of lung cancer. Carla had been a young woman when they passed away, but she’d felt like an orphan long before their deaths. She fingered her sore wrist.

So what is this,
she asked the wary-eyed bird soundlessly,
a private pity party?
She laughed out loud at her thoughts. At the sound, the owl ruffled its feathers and opened its deadly little beak in alarm. What was it the poet Walt Whitman had threatened? To turn and live with animals? Yes, she recalled the lines from her brief sojourn in English literature. It was the same year she’d fallen in love with Ed. He might have joined her quest if he hadn’t been sidetracked by a face far prettier than hers and taken off for South America on a wildlife expedition. Likely, Edward Mellinger didn’t even remember her anymore.

“This big enough?” Vanessa returned with the bandage. The old chocolate lab with hip dysplasia loped awkwardly behind her. He’d been left at the far end of her property a few weeks before and seldom let her out of his sight. Poor old boy; he’d never be adopted, and he wouldn’t be around long. The dog nuzzled Carla with his wet nose.

She took the bandage from Vanessa’s tanned fingers. “It’ll do,” she said, searching for the thank you she knew she ought to say but not finding it. “Did you fill Boomer’s water bowl while you were back there?” she quipped.

“Yup.” Vanessa nuzzled her face in the dog’s velvety fur. She gave his ear an affectionate tug and looked up at Carla. “Gotta go.” She glanced at Carla’s arm. “You sure you shouldn’t see someone about that?”

“It’s just a scratch,” she said roughly. “Gomer there may have a ton of germs from all those squirrels and mice he’s eaten, but he doesn’t have rabies.” Why did she insist on naming the animals? Simply to inflict more pain when they were gone, to savor it like a hair shirt penance? “Don’t forget to close the gate,” she added sharply. She turned her back to Vanessa and went into the little kitchen behind her office.

She’d barely finished a ham-and-cheese sandwich when she heard a car pull up. If someone else had come to get rid of a pet she would send them away in no uncertain terms. Dropping her dishes in the sink, she went back into the office.

Two women climbed out of an old burgundy Malibu. The driver looked to be in her forties. She had medium-length blond hair, a quick step and a trim figure—the kind of build that made Carla draw in her expanding waistline.

“You’ve got to stop eating all those sweets; you’ll blow up like a balloon!” Her petite mother’s frequent cant when she was a child had only made her crave desserts more. Why did the memory still rankle after so many years? She’d been an oyster in a family of cultured pearls. Well, maybe she liked it that way! She strode to the door and prepared to quickly dispatch whoever was calling.

At least the arms encased in a pale blue sweatshirt held no animal. The woman wore slim jeans. A paisley fabric bag was slung over one shapely shoulder.

“Hi, I hope we haven’t come at a bad time. My name is Annie Dawson, and this is my friend, Tara.” She extended a hand with a smile and hopeful green eyes. When Carla didn’t take the outstretched hand or move from the doorway, she continued somewhat more hesitantly, “I’m a member of the club that’s hosting a benefit for your shelter … the Hook and Needle Club run by Mary Beth Brock.”

Carla mumbled something in return, but she had been distracted by the face of the younger woman at her side. Rail skinny with enormous brown eyes, she had dark hair as curly as corkscrews … a lot like
… Drat! What is wrong with you, Carla Calloway? Get a grip!

“Tara is interested in the ad for temporary employment you posted in
The Point
,” Mrs. Dawson was saying. “She’s good with animals, and she really needs the work right now. I wonder if you might have time to talk with her.” Tentatively she stepped away. “I’ll just—I’ll wait in the car.”

Carla recovered. “Sure,” she said, aware that her voice sounded more like the croak of a tree frog. Green Eyes had returned to her Malibu, and the young woman was stepping gingerly inside. “Have a seat,” she said, pointing to the chair opposite the desk. Her legs felt weak, and her mind seemed to be in some kind of time warp. She pulled an application from her desk drawer and concentrated on its bare whiteness. “Name?”

“It’s Tara. Tara Frasier. I …”

“Spell it please.”

“F-r-a-s-i-e-r,” she responded. “Mrs. Calloway—”

“It’s Miss, but you can call me Carla,” she said without looking up. “Experience?”

“I don’t have any, but I really like animals, and I know I could do the work.”

“How do you know?” Carla demanded. She knew she sounded hard—angry even. But it was the memory, that memory that had nagged her for all those years. Why did it come back to slap her in the face just because a young woman happened to look like
her
? Thinking quickly of her own life, Carla wondered what she had hoped to accomplish by coming back here? “If you have no experience you have no idea whether you can do the job or not!”

The girl seemed stunned. Then with a little lift of her chin, she said, “You could at least let me try.” The brown eyes darkened. The girl was angry too, or determined. A lot like … Suddenly Carla was sixteen again, and she was with Corky. They were sunning on the beach at Butler Point, the boom box turned up high while they swayed dreamily in their bikinis.

“You can call me Corky if you want to. And you’ll be Carlotta,”
Corky had said.
“Wasn’t she some hoity-toity princess or something?”

“I’m not a hoity-toity princess. Take that back!”
Carla had retorted.

Then the memory shifted, and they were walking to the wharf, hoping to be noticed by the lobstermen on the dock who hauled in their catch with brown, muscled arms. Climbing up to the top of the point, they pretended they could fly. Later they would stop by Mrs. Holden’s house on the hill for lemonade and homemade cookies. But the summer would end, and knowing it, the pair linked arms fiercely, trying to squeeze the last ounce of adventure before they went back to their boring lives.

“We’ll be going home tomorrow. They never go to the same resort twice! What if we never see each other again?”
Carla had asked.

Now Carla could almost feel the hot sun on her face, the smooth young arm linked in hers as they walked past Butler’s Lighthouse.

“I won’t forget,”
Corky had mumbled.

“Give me one of your curls,”
Carla had begged.

Corky had allowed her to snip one of her kinky curls with the tiny manicure scissors from her beach bag.

“I’ll keep it always!”
she had told her friend.

At first, Corky had rolled her eyes, and said,
“You’re crazy, Carlotta!”
But then her dark eyes had misted over, and she had kicked hard at a stone in their path.

“I mean it. I’ll never forget …”

Tara’s repeated plea jerked Carla back to the present. “Won’t you at least let me try?”

Carla dropped her pencil onto the blank page and regained her composure.

“Look, it’s more than taking care of animals. What I really need is someone to help with all this paperwork.” She swept her arms over the sea of white in front of her. “And I need someone who can operate this blamed computer, to get word out about animals that need homes. Unless you can …”

“I can,” Tara said, interrupting. “I can do that, and I know a lot about advertising. I used to work for a sign company.”

Carla faced the young woman across from her, and took in the wild mass of curls and the eyes filled with determination or hope or something else. Her finely etched lips tightened as their gaze held. Whoever she was she had touched some deep place inside Carla, a place that hurt more than her wounded arm.

“Pay is ten dollars an hour, but I can only afford half days.”

“That’s OK. I’ll—”

“I expect you to earn every dime.” Carla stood abruptly. “Just because you’re friends with that society needlewoman …” she paused, not knowing how to phrase her thoughts. “I’ll accept their charity for the animals’ sake, but I don’t kowtow to anybody.”

She sounded like a shrew even to herself. What must this girl be thinking? Perhaps she would simply bolt out the door and never come back.

“We’ll be best friends forever and ever, won’t we?”
Carla—or Carlotta as Corky called her—slipped the expensive gold ring she’d been given on her fourteenth birthday onto the thin, tanned finger of her friend. Best friends forever! Her heart was big enough to explode. In a few days she would have to go back—back to the endless parties and socials, the stiff regimen of private tutoring, the emptiness of her heart. And her best friend would go back home too. They’d be separated by so many miles—it might as well be oceans.

“Best friends forever!”
she whispered as she twirled the handmade bead ring Corky had given her in exchange around her finger.