Under the Boardwalk

Under the Boardwalk (A Pajaro Bay Romance)

Barbara Cool Lee

~*~

Copyright © 2012 by Barbara Cool Lee 

Excerpt from 
Christmas in Pajaro Bay
 copyright © 2012 by Barbara Cool Lee

First Kindle Edition, September 2012

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author.

Under the Boardwalk
 is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

~*~

Have you been to Pajaro Bay?

The Honeymoon Cottage

Under the Boardwalk

Christmas in Pajaro Bay

Shadow's Lady

And coming in 2013, the 
Pajaro Bay Seasons
 Novellas:

Blast From the Past
 (spring)

Beach Blanket Bijou
 (summer)

Billion Dollar Baby 
(autumn)

Dashing Through the Surf 
(winter)

~*~

Dedication

As always, for Mom, my co-writer.

~*~

Table of Contents

1
 
2
 
3
 
4
 
5
 
6
 
7
 
8
 
9
 
10
 
11
 
Epilogue

Christmas in Pajaro Bay Excerpt
 

Notes

TOC
  
Start

~*~

CHAPTER ONE

Pajaro Bay, California

June 17, 2:23 p.m.

"Yo! Paging Ms. Reed!"

Hallie headed for the bubblegum pink 1969 Volkswagen Beetle pulled up at the bus stop.

"Took you long enough," Windy Madrigal said through the open window. "Get in."

"Hi." Hallie struggled to open the bug's door, finally getting a grip on the slippery handle and opening it with the familiar screech of the old hinges. "The bus was late," she explained.

"You're here now," Windy said with a laugh. "That's all that counts. No classes, no flipping burgers at Rudy's joint, nothing but fun." She flicked a strand of black hair out of her face. "We're going to have a great summer, girl!"

Hallie got in and held her backpack on her lap. "I still have to work."

Windy giggled. Even for Windy she was giddy. "Don't you worry about that. That's the best part. I've got the greatest surprise just for you."

Hallie knew that Windy felt everything was the greatest and the most incredible ever so she just asked, "surprise?" and waited to hear the latest: that Windy's little brother had won the basketball game at school, or she'd planned a bicycle trip to Pacific Grove with the gang, or she'd discovered that putting peanut butter on chocolate graham crackers was a taste sensation. Hallie sometimes wondered if she'd been as silly when she was nineteen, but knew it wasn't possible. Still, she sometimes wished she could believe that life was wonderful and full of exciting surprises around every turn, too.

"So what's up?" she asked.

Windy didn't respond, just pulled out into traffic and started meandering down the main street of Pajaro Bay at a crawl. The town was chock-full of tourists, and in five minutes the little car had gone about a block and a half through the crowds.

Hallie lurched forward suddenly when Windy braked hard to avoid hitting a couple in matching orange Hawaiian print shirts. She winced as her hands hit the dashboard with a sharp crack. "Ouch!"

She put her hands in her lap and rubbed them to ease the ache. "It's not like you could've missed seeing them in those outfits, kid. Should I start praying now, or wait until we get another block?"

"Not yet. Save your prayers for when we pass Paco's Bluff up on the mountain. It's the rule. Gotta say a prayer for old Paco—"

"—and the horses," Hallie finished, having heard the story many times in the past year.

The legend of Paco's Bluff was one of Windy's endless tales of her family's history. Many nights in the dorm, when they should have been sleeping, Windy had kept her awake telling the stories of the Madrigal family and Pajaro Bay. Windy's family were Californios who had received one of the first Spanish land grants in the state hundreds of years ago, and they still owned half the town of Pajaro Bay. Windy's California history thesis would be a compilation of her family's papers into a book, and each new chapter led to more late-night storytelling sessions. But Hallie hadn't minded. Having no family history of her own made hearing of great-grandmothers who did trapeze acts at the old amusement park, and cousins twice removed who drove stagecoaches off mountainsides on rainy winter nights, seem fascinating and romantic.

Then the car lurched again, and Hallie shouted, "Watch it!"

"Don't worry," Windy said. "We've been playing 'dodge the tourist' down Calle Principal since I learned to drive." She patted the car's dashboard. "Haven't we, Little Guy? We haven't winged one yet."

"You know most people don't have conversations with their cars," Hallie said.

"Yup."

"You also know you're nuts." It wasn't a question.

Windy giggled again, then honked the Beetle's horn at a pair of cyclists in skintight Golden State uniforms. One of the cyclists made a rude gesture at her. Windy just laughed, then slowed to a crawl and let the bikes go ahead of her.

They'd been roommates for a whole year now, and Hallie knew the kid well enough to know something was up. Windy's lopsided grin still lingered as she continually shifted gears, first gear to second, then back to first. The summer traffic was intense in the little town. But Hallie knew that grin had nothing to do with the traffic. Windy had a secret she was dying to let out.

The last time Windy had looked this excited was when she'd thrown Hallie a "wake" for her 30th birthday in the UC Davis dorms. Hallie had known something was up days in advance, since Windy couldn't stop grinning and giggling every time she looked at her.

Hallie smiled at the memory of coming home from her job at Rudy's that night, wearing her green polyester uniform and smelling of fry grease, only to have Windy shout "Surprise!" and reveal her big scheme: a full-fledged wake, with the group from jazz class playing "When the Saints Go Marching In" amid the black crepe paper and candles, a coffin-shaped cake with an angel rising out of it, and Windy's eulogy declaring Hallie's life story to be "born/married/divorced/reborn."

That was a pretty good summary of her life up to now. And Windy had been the only person who really understood how important that rebirth had been—leaving the old life in the past, and starting fresh, with everything in front of her. "Thanks, you nutcase."

"For what?"

"For inviting me to stay with your family this summer. For dragging me out of my shyness. All that junk."

Windy shrugged, and laughed again as she expertly wove between two cars fighting over one of the last parking spaces in front of the general store.

"Okay. I give up. What are you scheming now?"

Windy bumped her with her elbow as she shifted the old bug into first gear yet again. "You have no idea, roomie. Glad you came?"

Hallie nodded. They were passing candy-colored storefronts with names like
Robin's Nest Real Estate
and
The Surfing Puggle
. Through the car's open windows, the sounds of the tourists' chatter mingled with the squawk of seagulls overhead, almost drowning out the little car's puttering engine.

The sky was a true Grumbacher cerulean. Artistic license, she'd always thought when she'd seen an oil painting of the seashore with a perfect, almost glowing blue sky. But the sky on this June day in Pajaro Bay really was like that intense shade straight out of the paint tube, without a wisp of Van Dyke brown mixed in to tone it down to something less... "perfect," she said.

Windy giggled. "Just wait."

"All right. Out with it."

Windy turned those big green eyes on her. "I have no idea what you're talking about." It would have almost been convincing except she snickered at the end of it, ruining the innocent effect.

"Come on, Windy."

"You have to wait until we're home. Zac and I want to tell everyone at once."

Zac was one of the twins, Hallie knew that much. Windy had three brothers, one older, and the fifteen-year-old twins. She felt she knew them all, though she'd never met them. The oldest was the father figure, the one who called weekly to make sure Windy had enough money and was doing her homework. Chris was the basketball player. And Zac was the one who shared Windy's obsession with family history.

"So is this about your family? Something you and Zac worked out?"

"It's about you, too. Just you wait."

"Come on, kid. At least give me a hint."

Windy shifted gears again as they finally turned onto a road leading up the hill out of town. "Just sit back and enjoy the view...."

~*~

"Boy, did you take a wrong turn."

Kyle Madrigal flushed more water through the sprinkler head and another tadpole wiggled out and plopped into the mud at his feet.

"Of all the sprinklers in all the world, you had to wiggle into mine," he muttered. He'd better quit soon. Carrying on a conversation with a couple of wanna-be frogs was definitely delusional behavior. He checked one last time to be sure the sprinkler was unplugged, and then screwed it back onto the irrigation line.

"Ninety down and"—he looked down the row of raspberries and sighed—"ninety to go." The afternoon fog was just beginning to drift in from the coast, and soon he wouldn't be able to see more than a few feet in front of him, but he didn't need to. He'd learned the lay of this land at his father's side, and he'd had thirteen years to learn how to coax a profit from these fields on his own.

"Move it, punk," he said, pushing the gasping tadpole into a puddle, where it swam happily around in circles. "Yeah, yeah, I'm a sucker for a hard-luck story."

He picked up his pipe wrench and moved down the row toward the next sprinkler. Along the way he stopped to push an errant cane back into place, slipping it between the guide wires that held the plants in tidy rows.

It was amazing how one little thing could cause so much trouble. Some momma frog had slipped through a broken screen over the irrigation intake, and he ended up spending hours pulling her babies out of every sprinkler head on the ranch.

It wasn't the worst way to spend his time. The sky had been glorious today, and now, just when it threatened to get too hot, a gentle mist had started drifting in from the ocean. As he walked through the fields as familiar to him as his kids' faces he couldn't find a thing to complain about—it was restful to be out here walking the land his grandparents had walked, and their grandparents before them.