Sea Glass Winter (18 page)

3
6

Matt hadn’t had any real intention of joining the science club, and the idea of giving up a Saturday morning he could’ve been playing ball sucked, but the prospect of shooting off a cannon was impossible to resist.

Since the town’s only real cannon was too big to move, the coach had built his own with help from the school’s metal-shop teacher. It was currently sitting on the beach, its barrel pointed out to sea.

“Okay,” Coach Dillon said as they gathered on the sand in front of the old shipwreck they’d be aiming at. Not that there was any chance of anyone actually hitting the ship’s skeleton, but it exponentially upped the cool factor. It wasn’t raining today, but the sky was still as gray as the metal cannon barrel. “Who knows where gunpowder was first invented?”

“That’s easy,” one kid said. “China.”

“You’re right. It was easy. Who knows why or how gunpowder was invented?”

“For fireworks,” another guy called out.

“Nope. Who wants to try again?”

“Someone, perhaps a Taoist monk, was looking for the secret to longevity,” Aimee said.

“That’s exactly right. The Chinese were big on ingesting chemicals for health reasons. For the bonus question, can you give me the time frame?”

“No one’s exactly sure,” Aimee said without missing a beat, “but sometime in the first century AD.”

“You nailed it.”

Matt would’ve expected more enthusiasm from Aimee for being the only person on the beach besides the coach to have known that. But she’d been uncharacteristically quiet ever since they’d all gotten on the school bus to drive out here. Although he’d been sitting across the aisle from her, she’d pointedly ignored him.

While everyone else on the bus was talking and laughing and having a high old time, the silence between them had been deafening.

“Good answer,” he said, trying to get a conversation going now.

“Thanks,” she said tonelessly.

“I guess you knew it because you’re interested in medical stuff. Since you’re going to be a doctor.”

Instead of answering, she merely froze him out, then walked across the wet packed sand to stand as far away from him as she could.

Well, that went well,
he thought as he kicked at a piece of seaweed. His house was just above the beach, and he was seriously considering just saying the hell with this and going home when the coach zeroed in on him.

“Templeton. Can you tell us what makes gunpowder explode?”

It was a trick question. And he knew the answer.

“It doesn’t,” he said. “It just burns really fast.”

“But it
does
explode,” another kid said.

“It better,” someone else called out, “because I gave up going to the arcade to come blow stuff up.”

“It explodes when it’s compressed,” Matt said. “And when it burns, it releases gases larger in volume than the original powder. The same way steam has more volume than water.”

“Or like how the steam inside the kernel of popcorn keeps expanding until it bursts the shell,” Aimee said.

“Good team answer.” The coach, seemingly oblivious to the tension between them, grinned.

“To cut to the chase before it starts raining again, the Chinese held the secret to gunpowder for a long time. By the 300s AD, a scientist, Ge Hong, had written down the chemicals and described the explosion, but although it was cool for fireworks, it wasn’t until somewhere in the 900s that they thought to turn it into a weapon.

“They started putting small stone cannonballs inside bamboo tubes and shot them out by lighting the gunpowder at the other end. Which is the same principle as the one we’ll be using today.

“And, since Templeton caught the trick to my question, I’m going to let him choose the first powder man to light this baby up.”

“Powder
girl
,” Matt said, looking across the top of the cannon straight at Aimee.

He could tell she wanted to refuse. Only because he’d suggested her. But maybe she couldn’t resist the opportunity to be the first one to set off the blast, or perhaps she didn’t want to cause a scene, because she merely shrugged her parka-clad shoulders and mumbled, “Thanks.”

“Okay,” the coach said. “Since it’s not only dangerous but environmentally wrong to go shooting cannonballs into the surf, we’re going to be using melons. And the chemicals we’ll be using are . . . ?”

“Potassium nitrate, sulfur, and carbon,” everyone said in unison.

The coach assigned a kid to load the cannon; then he gave Aimee a lighter and a long stick. “Don’t want to blow off your hand.”

“If she does blow it off, at next month’s meeting we can try using her own stem cells to grow her a new one,” a kid in a blue aquarium
CAMP FINSTITUTE
counselor slicker suggested. Which drew a laugh from nearly everyone. Aimee—surprise, surprise—didn’t crack a smile.

She took the lighter and touched it to the wadded cotton at the end of the stick. After bringing the flame up to meet the wick, she hesitated a moment to make sure it had caught, then quickly stepped back.

Ka-boom!

The resultant explosion echoed off the cliffs and water, earning loud cheers.

Even she managed a smile. Which she ruthlessly cut off the moment she caught Matt looking at her again.

As everyone lined up to take their turn, Matt grabbed her by the wrist and practically dragged her behind a towering stack of driftwood logs. He suspected the only reason she went with him at all was to avoid calling attention to them.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked, shaking free and putting her hands on her hips.

“You didn’t talk to me the entire bus ride out.”

“Maybe because I have nothing to say to you.” She lifted her chin. “And more to the point, I have no desire to hear anything you might have to say.”

“Not even that I’m sorry?”

Her eyes narrowed. “For what?”

Another trick question. One that had him feeling as if he were on the verge of sinking into quicksand. Over his head.

“Whatever I did to piss you off.”

She stared at him. Then blew out a long, frustrated breath.

“You really don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what?”

“This.” She reached up, pressed her palms on either side of his face, and crushed her mouth to his in a hard, grinding, teeth-clashing kiss.

Heat sizzled through him, flames flared, and when another boom rocked the ground beneath his feet, Matt couldn’t tell if it had come from the cannon or from inside his head.

Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, she pulled back, furious emotions swirling in her brown eyes.

“Remember that,” she said, “when you’re throwing your useless self away on that basketball groupie Taylor Bennington.”

Before he could find his voice, she spun around on a booted heel and went marching back to the others.

Leaving Matt confused, aching, and totally tied up in knots.

37

Th
e sun had set, but as Dillon pulled up in front of the cottage, he saw Matt shooting hoops in the driveway beneath floodlights. It was drizzling, but although he’d grown up on sun-drenched beaches, the wet ball didn’t seem to be affecting the kid’s shots.

As soon as Dillon got out of the Jeep, a small black-and-brown dog that looked like a scaled-down Dobie and another that resembled a black dust mop came running up to greet him, tails wagging. Apparently the good Dr. Charity Tiernan had struck again.

“Getting your daily shots in?” he asked on what sounded, even to his ears, like the lamest conversation opener ever. He rubbed both dogs’ heads, causing the larger of the two to drop to the ground, roll over, and begin wiggling in dog ecstasy so he could rub her stomach. He obliged.

“We’ve got our first game coming up.” Matt told Dillon nothing he didn’t already know all too well. It was mostly all he was able to think about these days. Well, that and Claire Templeton. She’d gotten not only into his mind, but under his skin as well. Which was what had him showing up at her door again. “Don’t want to lose an opener. It’s bad luck.”

“You guys will make your own luck on the court,” Dillon said. “But it’s always a good thing to start the season in the win column.”

“Why are you here?”

And wasn’t that a question Dillon had been asking himself? Especially since she’d already made her feelings clear about getting involved with him.

“I need to talk to your mom.”

“What did I do now?”

“Nothing.” Except work his tail off both in class and on the court. “You’re fine. This is just a . . . booster club thing.” With the exception of bad guys who were trying to blow him up, Dillon was not accustomed to lying to anyone. Let alone a student. Which just went to show how badly the woman was messing with his head.

“Oh.” Matt turned back to the ball, sending up a one hander from the far end of the driveway.
Swish.
“She’s in her hotshop. In the garage.” He tilted his head in that direction, bounced the ball twice, and sent it sailing into the basket with his other hand. Ken had been right about one thing: The kid from Beverly Hills was a phenom.

“Thanks.”

She looked to be finishing up as Dillon entered the garage, which was not only as hot as the surface of the sun, but as bright.

“Wow,” he said, looking at the shelves lining the walls. “You’ve been busy.” They’d been empty the first time he’d been in here. Now they gleamed in the light from the overhead halogen fixtures like Aladdin’s treasure cave. “Guess you got your mojo back.”

“I did.” She pulled off the heavy gloves and wiped her glistening forehead with the back of her hand. “I have to admit that I was starting to get seriously concerned when nothing was working, because I’ve never—not even when my mother was dying—been blocked before.

“Then, as I told you, in desperation, I took some time to go to the aquarium, and everything just clicked. Plus, I think having Matt settling in and getting back into the groove eased my mind enough that I was able to reconnect with my subconscious.”

She did seem more relaxed than he’d seen her. And, Dillon thought, totally in her element surrounded by fire and all that brilliant colored glass. “I have you to thank for that.”

“He’s a good kid. He just needed time to adjust after a rough year.”

“Don’t we all.”

A little silence settled over them. Maybe it was hopeful thinking, but Dillon wondered if she was considering asking him to stay for dinner again.

“I really like this,” he said, filling in the conversational gap by turning toward a tall piece of clear glass with a remarkably lifelike coral jellyfish with light bluish green tentacles trailing down floating inside it. As she’d done with the green flash, clear bubbles rose from the bottom, giving the sense of movement.

“Except for a few commercial pieces I’ve done for places like the Dancing Deer Two, I’ve never been drawn to creating such true-to-life pieces,” she said, coming to stand beside him. “Usually I’ve done more free-form, letting people decide for themselves what a piece might represent. But when I was walking through the aquarium tunnel, through the different life zones, I noticed what I’ve always, on some subconscious level, known. I’d just never really thought about it before.”

“What’s that?”

“On land, with the exception of some insects and other animals who’ve learned to camouflage themselves over the eons, plants and animals look different. But what I realized while I was walking through the passage, surrounded by all that teeming sea life, is that in the sea, they often look alike.”

“I’ve never given it any real thought, either,” he admitted. Which could well be because he’d grown up in the oil patch of West Texas, a very long way from any sea.

“Well, as you know as a physics teacher, there’s a school of thought that glass is neither a liquid nor a solid. Because liquid molecules are disordered and not at all rigidly bound.”

“While solids’ crystals are rigidly bound little armies,” Dillon said.

“Exactly. Glass molecules are disordered, but rigidly bound. Which is why, when people in ancient times looked at wavy cathedral windows being thicker at the bottom than the top, they believed that if given enough time, glass would eventually melt into a liquid onto the ground.”

“Theoretically, maybe. If you were able to wait around two million years or more.”

“True. Which is why it’ll never be proven. As for the cathedral windows, the simple fact is that there was much less quality control at the time, and before our modern float-glass process was invented, most window glass was rolled, which resulted in a lot of the rippled glass you see in old windows of houses even now. When builders got pieces of glass that were thicker on one edge, it was only natural to put that side down.”

“Makes sense. I’ve always liked that old wavy glass.”

“You’re not alone. A lot of people think it gives old homes more character. In fact, Lucas asked me if I thought I could make some windows for the house he and Mary Joyce are going to build. She thought it would remind her of the farmhouse she grew up in back in Ireland.”

“Interesting idea. Are you going to do it?”

“It could be a fun challenge, and I’m considering it seriously enough to start studying up. There’s still so much to be discovered about the thermodynamics of glass, but it seems to me that glass is actually a separate entity somewhere between solid and liquid.

“Anyway, that’s a long story for why it seems natural to use water as a theme for glass objects.”

“Especially since so many things in the sea are transparent,” he said, immediately seeing her inspiration.

“Exactly. That’s what I love about the jellyfish.” She beamed because he understood.

Claire Templeton was an attractive woman. But when her face lit up and her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm, she was, hands down, the most compelling woman he’d ever met. He also wondered if she knew how sexy she was when she started getting excited about molecules.

Physics and fire.

Could any female be more perfect?

“You can actually see right through jellyfish,” she said, “which makes them especially perfect for glasswork. It took a bit of trial and error to keep them that way, especially when I was putting on the striping. But unlike stone, or even wood, glass can create an organic, almost moving quality, which is what I was shooting for.”

“You definitely pulled that off. How did you get the colors?” The dome of the jellyfish faded from turquoise to pale green.

“The light turquoise color came from adding copper oxide, and the palest green is sea glass that I found on the beach, probably originally from a 1900s Coke bottle, which I melted back down,” she said.

“That’s really recycling,” he said, thinking that she’d taken it back to what those original glassmakers had worked with.

“Isn’t it? Oh, and it might be over the top, but I decided to add a bit of phosphorous powder to a few of them, like this cobalt blue one, so it’ll glow in the dark. It’s not for everyone, but I called the owners of the gallery and they sounded really excited about displaying a few pieces in a dark side room lit with black light. I think it should really show well and add fun to the showing.”

The jellyfish in question was floating across the inside of a huge globe, its wavy glass tentacles trailing behind like ghostly ribbons. Below was a brilliant yellow coral reef teeming with colorful fish and plants.

“You’ve done an amazing amount of work since the last time I was here.” Since he didn’t see a dinner invitation on the horizon, he decided to take matters into his own hands. “I’d say you need a reward. How about letting me buy you dinner? I owe you one after you shared your clams and crab cakes.”

“Which you cooked.”

“After being in this place all day, you don’t need to stand over a hot stove. I was thinking of going to Bon Temps for dinner. Why don’t you and Matt come with me?”

Her brows knitted as she looked up at him. “We’ve been over this. Even if I had time to date, which I definitely don’t, you’re too much of a complication.”

He put his hand on his heart. “Ouch. That sound you just heard was my ego deflating.”

“As if,” she countered with a bit of sass he found every bit as appealing as her smile.

“Don’t think of it as a date,” he suggested. One of the things he’d always done best when confronted with a roadblock, on either a basketball court or a minefield, was to figure out a way around it. “You have to eat. I have to eat. And I’ve never met a teenager who doesn’t have to eat.”

When he sensed her weakening, just a bit, he charged for the shot. “When was the last time Matt had Cajun food?”

“I’m not sure he’s
ever
eaten Cajun.”

“Well, then, after how hard he’s been working on the court and in class, don’t you think he needs a reward?”

She shook her head. “That’s playing dirty.”

He decided against telling her that he wasn’t playing. At all. “It’s just dinner, Claire. Three people sharing a meal in a public place. Would it make you feel better if I promised not to kiss you over the popcorn shrimp, then ask you to go steady?”

She laughed, as he’d hoped she would. “You’re impossible.”

“Just hungry.” And not just for Sax’s crab jambalaya. “How long will it take you to get ready?”

She sighed dramatically. “Give me twenty minutes,” she said. “Meanwhile, since you were thoughtful enough to send Lucas Chaffee over with that basketball setup for Matt—which I really appreciate, by the way—you might as well go shoot some hoops.”