Shroud of Fog: (A Cape Trouble Romantic Suspense Novel) (12 page)

Daniel slapped a hand on the table, jolting her, and pushed
back his chair, rising to his feet.  “Damn it, Sophie,” he snapped.  “It’s past
time you faced down your memories.  We’re going over there.”

“What?”  Staring up at him in shock, she didn’t get any
further, and the one word was almost soundless.

“Now.”  He scowled down at his sandwich.  “I’ll get this to
go.”

Panic separated itself from everything else she felt.  “You
can’t make me.”

His expression softened and his eyes were suddenly kind. 
“No.  You’re right.  I can’t.  But you’re a strong woman, Sophie Thomsen. 
Don’t you think it’s time?”

*****

An ancient wood sign that said “Misty Beach Resort and
Cabins” had toppled sideways into a bed of ferns and salal, the supports
rotted.  A much newer sign declared, No Trespassing.  The sawhorses that had
been used to deter vehicular traffic had been stacked to one side ever since
the younger Billington and his wife had come to stay at the lodge.

Once he’d turned off the highway, Daniel glanced at Sophie
to see her staring straight ahead, her face tense.  She’d hardly said a word
since he hustled her out of the café.  Right now, her fine-boned hand had a
death grip on the seatbelt where it crossed her chest.

God.  Was he doing the right thing?  It was too damned easy
to tell someone else she should face her past head-on, and a hell of a lot
harder to do it yourself.  He didn’t even know if he had, or if his retreat to
this job in a remote coastal town was more like running away.

The band of forest here was surprisingly thick, the
undergrowth dense.  He’d left his window rolled down, and the never-ending roar
of the ocean called to them.  Living here, you got so you almost didn’t hear it
anymore, but he’d taken a long weekend to visit his mother in Sacramento a
couple of months back, and hadn’t been able to sleep.  He finally realized what
he was missing.  The distant sound of traffic on the freeway was no substitute.

The front wheel of the squad car dropped into a pothole, and
he winced.  He hadn’t been paying enough attention.

Open sky showed ahead, and to each side the trees became
smaller, more twisted from the force of winter storms.  And then the car
emerged into the open, where he’d been able to tell that there had once been
some lawn, but which now looked more like prairie grass.  Blackberries had
begun to form thickets.  The first cabin was on the right, on the bank of the river. 
It was in better shape than most of the others, sheltered somewhat by the trees
at its back.

Sophie was breathing hard now.  Her knuckles showed white.

“Were you in different cabins every summer?” he asked
gently.

After a moment she shook her head.  “We always had the same
one.”

“Which?”

“It’s…the one right at the curve, between river and beach.”

He knew what she meant.  He’d never counted, but there were
something like fifteen cabins.  The first ten or so had been built along the
river.  But the lane turned to parallel the shoreline before the sand dunes,
and the last cabins were nestled there.  The lodge itself was at the end of the
line of cabins, where the land rose to something like a bluff above the beach. 
He guessed it had quite a view when the sun set.

He let the car roll to a stop in the short, paved driveway
that had once ended in a carport attached to a cabin that hadn’t quite
collapsed, but would given another winter or two.  In the silence after he
turned off the engine, Sophie didn’t move, just kept staring.

Daniel felt like a brute.  What had he been thinking?

Just when he was about to reach for the key to start the
engine and tell her they should forget about the whole thing, she released her
grip and unfastened the seatbelt, then opened her door and climbed stiffly
out.  He followed suit, circling the front bumper to her side.

They both gazed at the cabin, built of logs right after
World War II, from what he’d been told.  The carport roof hung precariously. 
Jagged glass clung in one of the small-paned windows, while the other was
intact.  The door stood half open, making him wonder how long it had been that
way.

He watched Sophie surreptitiously.  He’d seen her shocked
after finding Doreen’s body.  This was different.  He guessed she was seeing
double – past and present.

“Hey,” he said, squeezing her shoulder.  It felt fragile
beneath his hand.

She started and gave him a wild look, then sucked in a deep
breath and seemed to pull herself together.  “Is it safe to go in, do you
think?” she asked in a hushed voice, as if she was conscious of listening ears.

He scanned the roof, cedar shakes that were rotting.  A hole
gaped toward the peak.  “I think so,” he said.

She nodded.  When she started forward, he stayed close
beside her.  He let her push the door farther open and, after a barely
perceptible hesitation, step inside first.

The interior looked like a lot of these rustic resort cabins
up and down the Pacific coast probably had.  Maybe still did.  A now-rusting
potbellied stove tucked in a corner would have allowed crackling fires.  The
stove pipe had broken off, and damage showed rain had poured in.  In another
corner had been a kitchenette with a small refrigerator, two burners and a
couple of cupboards.  One was cracked open enough for him to see that something
had been nesting inside.

Against another wall slumped the remains of a sofa with
rusty springs showing through tattered fabric.

Sophie stood stock still in the middle of the room, her face
too pale, her eyes huge and dilated.  He left her briefly to glance into the
second room, where a double bed had half-collapsed.  The room also held a
built-in dresser and closet, and he could see through another doorway to a
small bathroom.  When he turned around, she was staring at the sofa.

“I slept there,” Sophie said, her voice thin.  “It pulled
out into a bed.  Mom…”  She had to swallow.  “Mom and Dad had the bedroom.”

“Makes sense,” he said.  “It must have been cozy going to
bed out here when a fire was still burning.”

She blinked, as if jarred from the darker memory.  “Yes.  I
loved having fires.  There’s a pit with a grill outside, too.  Sometimes we
cooked hot dogs there.”

“And marshmallows.”

Her mouth curved just a little.  “I ate a lot of s’mores
every summer.  After the last day of school, we’d do a big grocery shop so we
had enough food for at least the first week or two.  I’d beg Mom to buy
marshmallows and graham crackers and chocolate bars to bring, so we could have
them our first night here.  It was…like a ritual.  We had to have a fire and
eat s’mores.”

“It’s good you have those summers to remember.”  He
hesitated, wanting to leave it at that, but knowing it sounded like a
platitude.  “My mother never had more than a couple of weeks a year off work,
and mostly we’d do stuff near home, like go to the zoo.”

Sophie looked at him directly, her eyes pained.  “I haven’t
let myself remember.  I hope Mom doesn’t know.”

Well, damn.  He’d managed to keep his hands off her this
long, but he couldn’t do it any longer.  He stepped forward, lightly gripped
her upper arms and met her eyes.  “If she does,” he heard himself say gruffly,
“I’m going to guess she understands.”

“Yes.”  She tried to smile, blinked hard, and with a muffled
cry bent her head so that it rested against his chest.  Daniel wrapped his arms
securely around her and leaned his chin against the top of her head.  After a
moment, her arms crept around his torso, too.

They stood like that for several minutes.  She wasn’t
crying, but she was leaning on him, gathering strength, he thought.  He was
happy to give her whatever she could draw from him.

He hadn’t realized she’d gone lax until she began to gather
herself to retreat, her body tensing.  Reluctant as he was to let her go, he
knew he had to.  For her sake, and for his own.

Her distress seemed to have eased some when she backed away
from him.  He waited while she stepped into the bedroom, then without a word
turned and walked out of the cabin.

“Show me what you did summers,” he suggested.

“Oh.”  Sophie turned her head to look around, her eyes
almost blind.  She was seeing another time.

Coaxed by him, she led the way around the cabin and showed
him the fire pit and a picnic table, rotting like everything else made of
wood.  Here they were looking down at the river.  For once, no mist danced with
the current, although a cool breeze blew in off the ocean.  The resort was
upriver from the pier that thrust out on the town side.  A couple of fishing
boats were tied up to it.  Jed Fitzpatrick’s boat was gone, Daniel noticed; the
months from May through September, Jed didn’t take a day off from the sealife
cruises so popular with tourists.  Winters he filled in with odd jobs; he’d
rebuilt the front porch on the small house Daniel had rented when he moved to
Cape Trouble, and done a hell of a job.  Once again, Daniel wondered what Jed
thought of the Save the Misty Beach campaign – and of Doreen Stedmann.

Once Sophie started talking, though, he forgot Jed and the
small town dynamics that were as tangible as the grid of streets.  Her memories
of those long-ago summers poured out as if she couldn’t stop herself.  She’d
often swam in the river, she told him, but not in the deep channel – her mother
let her swim where the river threw out shallow ribbons as it spread wider to
cross the beach.  Driftwood gathered there, huge trees turned silver and
stacked willy-nilly by winter storms like pick-up sticks.  Sophie had made
simple rafts from smaller pieces, sometimes using the same one all summer
long.  She told him how she’d try to hide it, and get so mad if she came down
to find bigger kids had stolen it.

They circled back around the cabin and started down the
paved lane toward the lodge.  He noticed she didn’t seem to want to look at the
sand dunes, rising to their right.

“There were always other kids,” she told him.  “It didn’t
seem to matter whether we were the same age or not, or boys or girls.  We’d
form a sort of gang.  The Crawfords came every August for the whole month.” 
Her face had softened as she pointed at a cabin closer to the lodge.  “They always
reserved the same one, like we did.  They had a girl a year younger than me. 
Paige Crawford.  We’d be shy for about two hours when her family arrived, and
then best friends for the rest of the summer.  Her family lived in Eugene, so
we didn’t see each other the rest of the year.”  Sophie went quiet for a
minute.  “I wonder what she thought when she arrived that summer and I wasn’t
here.  I got a postcard from her and then a letter, later after she was home
again, but I didn’t answer.  I couldn’t.”

Without a word, Daniel reached out and took her hand.  He’d
been keeping an eye on the remains of a split rail fence separating road from
sand dunes.  Even now, what had always been the opening leading to the beach
was obvious.  This beach was still popular.

There was good reason.  The town side didn’t have the same
vast, sandy expanse; sea stacks were picturesque, but they were accompanied by
low rock formations, too, that created fascinating tide pools and were fun to
climb on during low tide.  What sand there was often barely covered jagged
rocks.  Bare feet weren’t recommended.  North of town, the beach ended in a
rocky point that jutted out into the ocean.  A lighthouse, now decommissioned,
still crowned that point.

If you just wanted to walk, or let the kids build sand
dunes, or hunt for sand dollars, the beach south of the river was where you
went, despite the no trespassing signs.

“Is this the way you came that morning?” he asked.

“Yes.”  Her steps had slowed, and, finally, her gaze was
pulled to the well-traveled path leading between dunes.  “The fog was really
dense here.  I started toward the lodge, thinking my mother might have gone
there.  They sold some basics, the kind of things people forgot to bring.  You
know, toothpaste, small jars of instant coffee, dish soap, paper towels.  There
was a refrigerator case, too, with margarine and pints of milk and pop, and a
freezer for ice cream bars.  I didn’t see lights in any of the other cabins. 
Some were vacant, but people must still have been asleep in others.  I was used
to the fog, but, I don’t know, that morning it was creepy.”

He still held her hand.  He doubted she’d noticed how
tightly she held onto him. 

“I got this far and that’s when I heard voices.  So I
thought Mommy must have met someone and they walked down to watch the sun rise
or something.  For a minute I thought maybe my father had arrived last night
and I just didn’t hear him.”  She looked shyly at Daniel.  “He did that
sometimes, drove over late at night and surprised me in the morning.  But I was
sure his car wasn’t there, only Mommy was talking to a man and I didn’t know
who that could be.”  Her tone was bemused, childish – she was the little girl
hunting for her mommy.

“So you started into the dunes.”

Ahead, there was the merest glimpse of the ocean.  The tide,
he knew, had just turned and started to go out.  He’d had a hand in several
rescues of people who hadn’t respected the power of undertows and ocean
currents. 

Once he nudged Sophie foreward again, she followed the
trampled sand that led between dunes.  On the dunes, beach grasses grew
unpredictably.  A few wildflowers were in bloom, too. 

Not twenty feet along, Sophie turned into another dip
between dunes, tugging him along.  All sight of the ocean was lost, but never
the sound or the rich, salty scent.  Their feet slithered in the loose sand. 
He was glad of his athletic shoes but had a suspicion they’d end up full of
sand.  Sophie was dressed much the same he was, in jeans and T-shirt and
athletic shoes.  She took a sweatshirt or sweater with her every day to the
storage facility.  Cloudless summer days might bring temperatures into the
eighties inland, but here on the coast the ocean kept days cooler.