Blue Moon Bay (10 page)

It didn't matter now. If he had any intentions of taking advantage of my family, he had another think coming.

Every ounce of nostalgic sentiment evaporated from my thoughts, and I welcomed the empowering rush of righteous indignation. It was easier to handle than leftover puppy love and mushy gushy thoughts of an unrequited adoration. Blaine Underhill was about to find out that the wimpy, quiet, messed-up girl who let everyone push her around in high school had grown up and gotten a backbone.

He hooked the nozzle back on the gas pump as I hit the dock, the wooden heels on my suede boots making a hollow
ping-tap-ping
on the half-frozen wood. I took note of the cracks between the boards. The boots didn't have high heels, but they did have heels, and those cracks were wide enough to create a misstep that would entirely ruin my entrance and put a kink in the strictly-business and slightly dragonlike persona that had served me so well in a male-dominated career field. The banker was about to see that not everyone in the Hampton family was filled with impractical dreams.

Wiping his hands on a rag, he looked up, blinked, and cocked his head to one side, as if a woman in dress boots, skinny jeans, and a giant camouflage coat weren't an everyday sight on the dock.

Employing a strategy I'd long ago learned from Mel while dealing with difficult clients, I opened the dialog and got right to the point. “I'd like to know what, exactly, is going on between you and my brother.”

His expression went completely blank, and he backed away a step as I made it to the platform near the gas pumps. The decking rocked slightly in the current, causing me to spread my feet like a gunfighter about to draw down at the O.K. Corral.

“Ma'am?” A dark brow lifted, and his chin drew inward a bit, the little cleft there growing more pronounced. I'd forgotten about that cleft in his chin. . . .

I admonished myself to remain focused. It was harder than I'd thought it would be. His appreciative look, and the lanky southern cadence of his words lured me in some way I didn't want to contemplate. “Please don't insult my intelligence. He may be falling for this, but I'm not. Let's be honest, shall we?”

Blaine finished wiping his hands and set the rag aside. “All right.” His eyes narrowed, black lashes fanning over the brown centers. His dark hair was shorter than it used to be, windblown right now, curling just a bit over his ears and on his collar.

I took a breath, paused a moment to get my thoughts in order, and remembered watching those lashes drift toward his cheeks as he rested his chin on his hand in chemistry class. “Have you checked my brother's credit rating, looked into his background, investigated his history?”

Crossing his arms over his chest, Blaine leaned against the railing, the barest hint of amusement playing on his lips. I realized I was looking at his lips. I quit looking and focused on his forehead.

“That's not really the way I like to do things. I don't see the point.”

“Don't see the
point
?” I threw my hands up, and the ends of the oversized leaf-print sleeves flopped like tree branches in the wind. “Are you serious?” Maybe Blaine Underhill really was still the goof-off he'd been in high school. Maybe his parents, aging and unable to figure out what else to do with him, were letting him use the bank as his personal play toy. Maybe he was more like my brother than I'd thought. Weren't there federal regulators who prevented bankers from doing stupid things with other people's money? “What kind of sense does that make?”

He shrugged nonchalantly, his response annoyingly calm. “I think it makes perfect sense. Some things just aren't right to do.” He had the same drawl as Clay's new girlfriend, Amy, though Blaine's was less pronounced.

“What?” My tree-branch sleeves flopped up and down once, twice. Talking with my hands was one of those nervous habits I had yet to overcome. “
Some things aren't right to do.
Give me a break. How can you possibly operate like that?” This innocent country-boy act had to be a way of toying with me, trying to throw me off track. Maybe I should report him to some kind of . . . I wasn't sure who . . . the FDIC, or the board of banking, or someone.

“A man's background is his own business.” He brushed a scrap of what looked like hay off his sleeve, and I noted that for a guy who'd just been out fishing, he was strangely neat and clean—pressed jeans, fairly new cowboy boots, and a white collar peeking around the top button of his coat. He looked like he was dressed for a barn dance or a night at the rodeo, rather than an early-morning fishing trip.

I rolled my eyes, irritated with the runaround. He needed to be upstairs telling milk-cow stories with Nester Grimland and Burt Lacey.
No
bank—not even a little redneck bank like the one across the street from the Moses Lake post office—loaned out money without checking the applicant's background. “Pah-lease. Do I look stupid to you?”

“No, ma'am,” he answered, his eyes twinkling. “A little fashion-challenged, maybe, but not stupid.” His lips spread into a grin that went right to the pit of my stomach and did something strange there.

“This is
not
a joke.” And how dare he think that I'd be weak enough to fall for the class-clown act. I wasn't used to people blowing me off, not taking me seriously. I hadn't gotten to the position of senior manager with a major firm by being the simpering little wimpkin I was in high school. “I guess maybe it's a joke to you, or just business, or whatever, but as much as my brother drives me insane, I do care about his future. A lot. I don't want him to end up falling flat on his face and taking the rest of the family with him. As brilliant as he is, he's like a big . . . teenager, basically. He has never managed to stick with anything in his life, and he won't stick with this. He'll be into it just long enough to dig a great big hole, and then something else will catch his eye.” My arms, lost within the voluminous sleeves, beseeched him to look at Clay objectively.

“I hadn't heard that about him, but it's good to know.”

I had the sense that I might be getting somewhere. Maybe I could sway him and end this whole thing. Clay wouldn't be happy with me, but he'd tack in a new direction soon enough, and then he'd be glad he hadn't entangled himself in Moses Lake. So would my mother, actually, and the uncs would be rid of the burden of properties they could no longer take care of. I would continue on to be the project manager, and Moses Lake would have over three-hundred badly needed new jobs. Everyone would be better off.

“So, you can see that the best thing to do is just . . . not help him.”

Uncrossing his legs and then crossing them the other way, the banker blinked, cocking his head back a bit, as if he were trying to make sense of me. “I'm not trying to help him. I plan to come out a winner in this thing.”

My mouth dropped open, and I felt like one of those cartoon characters slowly turning red-hot from the chest, upward. Any minute now, my ears would go off like a steam whistle. He was actually admitting that he planned to take advantage of my brother and my entire family?
How dare he!
“You're going to stand right here and tell me that? You're not even trying to hide it?”
The nerve of this guy! The arrogance.

Did he have reason to be so confident? How involved were he and Clay? Was this situation already beyond salvaging?

“It's no secret,” he said, and I felt sick. “I don't play to lose.”

A lump rose in my throat, and for a mortifying instant, I had that I'm-not-going-to-cry feeling. I swallowed it and rode another wave of anger, instead. “You know what? You have to be the biggest jerk I've ever met. If you think you're going to just . . . take everything my family has worked for . . . for generations, and use my brother to do it, you'd better think again. That'll happen over my dead body.”

His lips tugged at the corners. “That'd be a shame.” He watched me with a look that could only have been described as
hot
. And, sue me, but for a moment, I liked it. The mini-grin morphed into a full-fledged smile, and he shook his head, chuckling under his breath.

“What in the world are you laughing at?” An insistent foot-stomp confirmed that my toes were prickly cold. The suede boots were cute, but dysfunctional in this environment, unfortunately.

Lifting his chin, he uncrossed his legs and pushed away from the post. “I think I just figured out that we're chattin' out two different sides of the barn here. I don't have any idea who you are or what you're talking about.”

I felt my mouth dropping open again, my chin just hanging there against the flame-orange collar, my mind running like a hamster on a wheel, around and around in circles. Perpetual motion but no forward progress. “Wha . . . but . . . you . . .”

I could see it in his face. There was not one hint of recognition in his eyes. “You don't . . .”

“I wish I did.” He delivered another smoldering smile, then wiped it away. “You're not related to that idiot who's running against me for county commission, are you?”

“County comish . . . What?” All I could think was,
Blaine Underhill has no idea who I am. He's looking right at me, and he has no idea who he's looking at.

I wasn't certain whether to feel wounded or pleased. How should a girl feel when confirming her belief that the object of her high-school crush never even gave her a second thought?

He was thinking about me now, though. That much was obvious enough, and even though I didn't want to, I felt my ego purring like a kitten. Right now, he was clearly waiting for me to melt under the heat of that smile. I was tempted to, but of course that was a juvenile impulse. Somebody in my family had to act like an adult, to get down to business before it was too late. “I don't know what
you're
talking about, but I'm talking about my brother, Clay Hampton. I know he and my mother have some wild idea about getting the financing to buy Catfish Charley's, the funeral home at Harmony Shores, and the thirds of the family farm that belong to Uncle Charley and Uncle Herb. They've been talking to you about it, haven't they?”

He didn't answer at first. He was staring at me, his expression one of pure, unmitigated shock. “You're . . . Heather Hampton?”

Once again, I wasn't sure how to feel. I had, at least, managed to completely eradicate my high school self, as well as to wipe that smug look off his face. While I had him off-balance, I decided to go in for the kill. “Yes. And I don't want you doing business with my brother—bankrolling him or in any other way encouraging him or my mother in this idiotic fantasy they've hatched. I don't know what's going on with them, because the last time I checked, neither one of them wanted anything to do with Moses Lake. But this needs to end now. I can promise you that any business they open in Moses Lake would be a bad investment. My brother has a history of starting things and not finishing them, and my mother is . . . Well, let's just say she's no different than she's always been.”

Blaine Underhill shook his head, trying to clear the fog, apparently. “You're Heather Hampton.” An eyebrow squeezed low over one brown eye.

“Yes.” Enough already. This was getting a little irritating, really. “And I suppose you see my point . . . about the bank loans.”

He scratched the back of his neck, looking down at the dock. “Ma'am, I can't discuss someone else's financial business with you.”

“This is my
family
we're talking about.” Why did he have to be so obtuse? “I have a right to know what's happening.”

“You'll have to talk to your family about that.” He lifted his palms in a way that said,
Hands off, sorry
.

I clenched and unclenched my fingers inside my sleeves, a half-dozen broken fingernails from yesterday's adventure pressing jagged teeth into my skin. “You're the one behind this supposed
competing offer
, aren't you? You're helping my brother.”

“Your brother and I are friends,” he answered cautiously.

“You know what? A
friend
doesn't help you do something stupid. A friend doesn't set you up for a fall, so the
friend
can make a profit.”

He drew back as if I'd offended him. “That's what you think I'm doing?”

My thin thread of patience was unwinding at a frightening pace. My feet were ice cubes, the cold had penetrated my jeans, and the damp wind off the lake had changed directions, striking me head on and slipping inside the collar of my oversized jacket. “I don't know
what
you're doing. That's why I asked.” Pinpricks stabbed my left foot and traveled up my leg. An unsteady backward step sent a bootheel sinking between the icy boards, and the next thing I knew, I was staggering off balance, my hands flying in the air, the floppy sleeves flailing, slapping me, then swatting the railing, then some other solid object, which I realized was Blaine, because suddenly the jacket was tighter on one side. He used it to pull me upright and stop me from landing on the deck.

Once I was safely on my feet, he pulled his hands away as if he feared that keeping them there any longer might result in the loss of a finger or two. We stood for a moment at a stalemate. I felt my cold cheeks going hot.

“Look, all I can tell you is that you need to talk to your brother,” he said finally.

Humiliated, angry, and realizing that I'd accomplished nothing other than tipping my hand and refreshing his memory of the uncoordinated, awkward girl he hadn't thought about since high school, I did the best thing I could think of.

I just turned around and walked away, taking care to avoid the gaps in the dock.

The water downstream ain't clear,

if the water upstream is muddy.

—Len Barnes, veteran, proud grandpa, and Moses Lake resident

A
fter having tried to reason with my mother, confronting the highly-irritating banker on the Waterbird dock, and finally attempting to get some straight answers from the uncs during our drive back to Harmony Shores, I decided to attack the problem at its source: my brother. Clay was at the center of this debacle and obviously had been for a while. The frustrating thing was that he would waste time involving himself in Moses Lake at all. Clay was brilliant, talented, personable—amazing, really. He was three times as book-smart as I could ever hope to be. He would be a great lawyer, if he would just buckle down and get through school.

I found my brother by the lakeshore, unstacking the canoes and setting them upside down on the lawn, apparently checking for condition. I remembered the uncs doing that in the past. My dad and I had helped a time or two when I was little. The uncs had engaged in heated discussions as to which canoes needed to be scrapped and which could go another season.

It was fairly cold to be working down by the shore. I'd zipped up my coat all the way to the neck, but Clay had on shorts and a rugby shirt, the sleeves pushed up over his elbows. Daubs of paint dotted his skin, and there were stencils lying on a long, skinny shipping crate that had probably held a casket at one time. Roger was sitting in a nearby canoe that was right side up, his tail brushing back and forth across the aluminum seat, as if he were anticipating an adventure. I was careful not to make eye contact, lest he decide to launch himself at me again.

“So what's all this?” I asked, stopping in front of Clay.

He glanced at me without standing up, his mouth quirking to one side. “I'm . . . painting . . . canoes?” He answered slowly, as in
Duh, what does it look like?
“And checking them out.”

“I can see that. Why are you painting and checking the canoes?”

“Because they . . . need it?” He stated the obvious in the same intentionally clueless tone. Long curls of straw-colored hair, bleached on the ends by the sun, fell over his neck as he turned his attention to the boat again and began sanding some sort of patching material he'd applied over a hole.

After my three previous unsuccessful talks today, I willed myself not to tumble into an emotional exchange. I would remain calm this time, logical. Logic was on my side, after all. “You know what I'm asking, Clay. Why are you here, hanging around Moses Lake, getting Uncle Herb and Uncle Charley all stirred up?”

“They don't look like they're all stirred up.” He shrugged toward the house, where the uncs were crossing a shady veranda that had served as an overflow location for many a funeral gathering over the years.

“Stop toying with me, Clay. This isn't a joke.” My voice rose slightly, and I willed it back down. “You know what I'm asking, and you know why I came here.”

In the canoe, Roger stopped wagging his tail, dropped his ears, and cast a worried look from me to Clay and back.

Clay continued with his work. “I figured you came to see us—have a little visit with the ol' fam.”

I heard myself snort, an ugly, cynical sound I instantly felt guilty about, but Clay knew that we never got together just to visit anymore. Actually putting that into words seemed sad, though. “Come on, Clay, be realistic,” I pleaded.

Clay chuckled and shook his head. “You know me better than that, Hessie.”

The pet name,
Hessie
, pushed past my crossed arms and heavy coat, and plucked a heartstring. He'd given me that name, a combination of
Heather
and
sissie
, when he was still toddling around in diapers. He thought his big sister hung the moon back then.

Looking up from the canoe, he smiled that precocious, frustrating, boyish smile that had always accompanied excuses about lost homework, forgotten chores, and times when he neglected to let us know where he was going before he wandered off to play. The difficult thing about Clay was that he was always so darned cute and he earnestly never meant to do any harm. He never intended for me to end up staying awake until midnight, doing grade-school homework he'd forgotten about, or to leave me running up and down the lakeshore, scared to death that he'd drowned. It just happened, because he was such a dingbat. A sweet, hapless, adorable dingbat with a huge heart that got him into trouble time, after time, after time.

Despite all of that, I fought the urge to smile back at him. “Don't even try to get cute with me.”

“I don't really have to try.” He grinned again and went back to sanding the canoe. “Cute just oozes out of me. Can't help it.” He lifted his green-tinted hands, helplessly.

I wondered if the adorable little country girl he was now courting—Blaine Underhill's cousin—had any idea that she was stepping into a mess way deeper than her cowboy boots. Clay's history with women wasn't any better than his history with college degrees or jobs. Some poor female, usually the older and more mature sort, was always taking him under her wing, and they sailed along blissfully for a little while—Clay was one of the most fun people I knew—until the wind changed and blew him onto another new path. He'd left a trail of broken hearts behind him over the years, but never intentionally.

“Can you please just cut it out? You know, when you go off on these kinds of schemes, other people end up getting hurt. People who can't just go flit off to work at some ski resort or run away with an earthquake relief team. The contracts for the land sale have to go through before the broker offer runs out
next week
. Uncle Herb and Uncle Charley need this money. It's not like either one of them has a pension plan. Everything they have is tied up in property. They don't have time to waste.”

“Why?” Clay sat back on his heels, finally listening. He set the sandpaper on the boat and rested his green elbows on his hairy knees. “What's the rush? Don't you even want to take a little time to look around the old place before you throw everything on the auction block?”

His eyes met mine, his gaze a soft, sensitive green, the color so like Mom's. He looked at me the way she always did, seeming somehow disappointed in who I was. In truth, I guess, we were perpetually disappointed with one another, all of us. “Not at someone else's expense. Not if it causes problems for the rest of the family, Clay.”

I
didn't
want to look around the place, though. I didn't want it to grow on me or speak to me, or call me back to the past. I wasn't seeking any reason to miss it when it was gone from my life. Perhaps that was an advantage I had over Clay. I wanted to be rid of all ties to Moses Lake and the things that happened here. How could he not feel the same way? How could he look at this place and not think of what happened to Dad? “The broker won't wait forever. That's the way brokers are. If one deal doesn't work out, they just invest elsewhere.”

Roger sidled out of the canoe and moved timidly to Clay's side, his large, brown eyes rolling upward as he nudged under Clay's arm. The two of them seemed remarkably, painfully alike—two lost puppies, looking for something they never could quite find.

I didn't wait for my brother to come up with an answer, but pressed on instead, driving the point home. “I know it's hard for Uncle Herbert and Uncle Charley to let go. I know it's hard for them to move. But it's reality, Clay. It's what has to happen. There's no one here to take care of them.”

“There can be.” Clay tipped his chin up defensively, and I had the sense that he meant well. As usual, he wanted to come to the rescue, but he hadn't thought things through.

“Clay, come on. What about law school? How many times have you applied for an extension on your thesis? You're just lucky the school has been willing to work with you. And they did that because you're so incredibly, amazingly smart that they couldn't stand to see you drop out. But this is the real world. People's lives are involved. Mom doesn't need to be here, either. You know what a mess she was when we lived here. What if that happens again? What if she gets all . . . wrapped up in the past, and she starts to act the way she used to? This sale needs to go through.”

“So they can take the land and . . . what . . . develop it or something?” His hand, which had been running through Roger's fur, paused, and for an instant we were locked like a pair of players in a chess match. “Stick some golf course or resort on it?”

“What gave you that idea?” I asked carefully.

“Amy works at the Proxica plant in Gnadenfeld. That place is a gossip mill. She hears things.”

“Well, what exactly did she hear?” Disquiet crept up my spine, clingy and stealthy, like a tick looking for a place to burrow in. Amy worked for Proxica? What were the odds that Clay would just
happen
to be dating a girl with ties to Proxica?

Clay nodded, oblivious to the connections spinning forth in my mind. “She heard that the broker guy's been all over the county, looking at land. Why does he want our place so bad? What's he going to do with it?”

I couldn't come right out and lie to my brother, but the confidentiality agreement wouldn't allow me to reveal the truth, either. “You know what, Clay, why does it matter? What matters is doing what's best for our family.”

“Forget what's best for the town, I guess, huh?” He stood up, a paintbrush still dangling from one hand. “What's best for the area.”

I took a step back, dumbstruck as much by the out-in-left-field remark as by the gravity in Clay's voice. “How do you know what's best for the area? You don't live here, Clay. And if you're looking at this as one of your save-the-world social causes, how about taking a glance at the poverty rate on the other side of the lake, up in Chinquapin Peaks? A broker thinking about development would be a good thing. Look at Gnadenfeld. Look at how much it's grown in the past sixteen years. There are real stores, restaurants, new housing. I checked out their Internet site the other day. The school has a great big gorgeous performing arts center and a new multi-sport stadium.”

Clay squinted into the distance, toward Chinquapin Peaks and the river channel. “Yeah, look at Gnadenfeld.” His voice held an undertone that I couldn't read. Maybe my brother was on some kind of back-to-nature kick, ready to throw himself in front of the bulldozers to keep anything from changing around Moses Lake.

“You know what, Clay, if there's something you want to say to me, just say it.” I squeezed my arms over my chest, shivering.

He seemed to think about that momentarily, and I had the sense that we were finally about to excavate some nuggets of truth.

The sound of a car rattling up to the house caught Clay's attention just as he was about to speak. Casting a curious glance toward the driveway, he moved his paintbrush to a coffee can and started up the hill. I followed, frustrated by the diversion. My irritation sharpened and took on shape when I recognized the dark head, tan barn jacket, and cowboy boots visible above and below the truck door as the driver exited the vehicle.
What is
he
doing here?

By the time we made it to the driveway, with Roger cavorting happily back and forth in our path, Blaine Underhill was headed up the front walk. The uncs had come around to meet him, and my mother was poking her head out the front door, looking curious.

Everyone greeted Blaine warmly, as if he were a long lost friend rather than a potentially greedy, unprincipled robber-baron wannabe bent on ruining my family. Roger ran across his path and nearly sent him sprawling into the flower bed. Good for Roger. Blaine shook a finger at the dog playfully. “Yeah, I know where you've been, buddy,” he said, and Roger stopped frolicking, then sat down and cocked his head, his ears drooping and his tail scrubbing the ground tentatively.

“Anybody here expecting a FedEx?” Blaine asked, and from behind, I could just see the corner of a FedEx box between his sleeve and the side of his coat.

“Me,” I answered. Blaine turned around on the path, seeming to realize for the first time that Clay and I were there. Cradled in his arm, he had the FedEx box—the one that would bring me my credit card, my ID, my iPhone, and my favorite red leather purse. Oh happy day! At least something was going right.

What was Blaine Underhill doing with my FedEx, anyway? “Thank goodness,” I breathed. “I've been waiting for this all day.” I reached for the box, and, oddly, Blaine pinched one corner between two fingers and lifted it from his arm, as if it weighed nothing. The box stretched accordion-style, slowly unfolding, until it was one long string of mangled red, white, and blue cardboard, dangling from his thumb and index finger.

“What in the . . .” I muttered, as family members moved in from all sides, the group of us gathering around the remnants of the box like monkeys in a zoo.