Far Harbor (5 page)

Dan had recently represented Savannah’s grandmother Ida’s pregnant teenage foster child in an adoption case. When he’d met the family at the winery of the adoptive parents, he’d taken one look at Savannah, recently returned from LA, and decided that she was even more beautiful than he’d remembered.

With her wild clouds of fiery hair, golden California tan, and emerald eyes, she’d resembled a member of some mythical race of women, forged in fire by a master alchemist. Yet, although she’d grown up to be dazzling, he’d sensed a sadness in her that had nothing to do with the solemnity of the occasion.

They’d been thrown together again a few weeks later at his cousin’s wedding, where Savannah, wearing a dress that shimmered like moonlight on sea foam, had provided a dazzling contrast to the bride’s cooler, luminous beauty.

Watching her closely, Dan had noted that even as her lush ruby lips had curved often, befitting the joy of this family event, the smiles had never quite touched her eyes. As the wedding festivities went on into the night, she’d grown more and more emotionally distant—almost ethereal, like the ghost of Lucy Hyatt, rumored to still reside in the lighthouse.

But now, as she laughed, she reminded him of the Savannah he’d once known, the glowing girl who could make a guy renowned for his hit-and-run dating style think terrifying, forever-after thoughts.

When her floral perfume slipped beneath his skin, creating an inner tug more complex than mere sexual attraction, Dan reminded himself that after a tumultuous and exhausting eighteen months, his life was finally getting back on track. The last thing he needed right now was a romance with a woman on the rebound. Especially one who, despite her apparent whim to settle down in Coldwater Cove, would undoubtedly soon find small-town life too confining for her big-city tastes.

I
da Lindstrom sat at the old oak rolltop desk she’d bought when she’d first begun her medical practice, right here in this very house, and stared down at a leather-bound address book stuffed with pieces of paper. The book, along with the telephone that was now buzzing with that annoying off-the-hook sound, was a sign that she’d been about to make a call. But to whom?

“Think, damn it!” She pressed her fingers against her temple and forced her mind to focus on the clues at hand. She had, after all, become very good at following clues since her once razor-sharp mind had turned so uncooperative.

“A waist is a terrible thing to mind,” she muttered, unwittingly falling back into her unconscious habit of malapropisms.

Frustrated, she pulled one of the pieces of paper from the flap on the inside front cover of the address book and read through the list she’d made the morning she’d returned home from the hospital after that stupid fall that had gotten everyone so excited.

“Number one. Does recent memory loss affect job performance? Ha! It can’t affect my job performance because I’m retired.”

All right, so she may have gotten a bit more absentminded, but that was only natural, especially in this hurry-up world when so many outside things demanded immediate attention, all at the same time. It was perfectly understandable that she’d occasionally forget things, such as her reason for having come into her former examining-room-turned-den in the first place.

“It’ll come,” she reassured herself as she rubbed her uncharacteristically icy hands together. The trick was to remain patient and not panic.
Concentrate
.

“Number two. Does patient have difficulty performing familiar tasks?”

No problem there. Relief came in such a cooling wave, she decided that boiling all the water out of the teakettle this morning didn’t really count. That, after all, could happen to anyone.

She also didn’t have any problems with language. Perhaps she mixed up her words from time to time, but if her family and friends were to be believed, and she had no reason to doubt them, she’d been doing that all her life. Nor had she suffered any disorientation of time and place, problems with abstract thinking, or decreased judgment.

“Does patient misplace things?” She frowned. “Stupid question. Name me one person who doesn’t lose their car keys from time to time.” Hadn’t Raine, whom everyone knew was smart as a tack, done the same thing when she’d dropped by to visit last Saturday? They’d practically turned the house upside down before finding them behind a sofa cushion.

Number eight regarding mood swings didn’t count, nor did nine: changes in personality. She’d never been a moody person, had never suffered PMS, and had breezed through menopause with hardly a ripple even without the hormone replacement that was so readily available for women these days.

Why, she was the same person she’d been at thirty. “Better,” she decided.

Ida had to laugh out loud at the final “warning sign” on her diagnostic list. If there was one thing she wasn’t suffering from, it was loss of initiative. Hadn’t she managed to take care of three delinquent teenagers when the entire social system of the state of Washington had given up on them?

Two of the girls were now safely placed with relatives, and while Gwen, admittedly, might have gone through a rough patch, she certainly seemed on the straight and narrow. Her therapist had assured the family that the girl was coming through the separation from her infant daughter as well as could be expected.

When she heard a car engine outside the house and saw Savannah’s red convertible pulling into the driveway, Ida folded the piece of paper and slipped it back into the front of the address book, hiding it behind a checklist of things she should make certain she did before leaving the house. Not that she’d ever leave the shower running or the stove turned on, but it never hurt to be cautious.

“I’m a doctor. I’ve been diagnosing people’s illnesses for fifty years. I should certainly know whether or not I have Alzheimer’s,” she muttered. “And I don’t.”

The front door opened. “I’m in here, darling,” she called out to her younger granddaughter with feigned cheeriness. Today had been important for Savannah, she remembered, frustrated anew when she was unable to recall exactly why.

“I got it!” Savannah breezed into the den, her smile as bright and happy as it had been back when she’d cheered the Coldwater Cove High School Loggers to victory.

“That’s wonderful!”
Got what?
Ida sneaked a quick glance at her checklist, hoping for some small assistance. “I’m so pleased for you.”

“Of course now the work begins.” Savannah crossed the room and picked up the phone receiver that was still lying on the desktop. “I’m sorry. Did I interrupt you making a call?”

“It’s not important.” So that’s what that annoying sound was. Ida forced a smile that wobbled only slightly as Savannah replaced the receiver in its cradle. “Tell me all about your day. I want to hear everything.”

“You were right, as usual.” Savannah settled down on the sofa, kicked off her shoes, and tucked her legs beneath her.

“Of course. Grandmothers are always right.” In contrast to her icy hands, Ida felt a bead of sweat form above her upper lip. Her mind turned with the heavy, slogging effort of truck tires stuck in a mud bog.

“Offering Henry Hyatt a chance to move in here clinched the deal.”

Henry Hyatt…. She’d treated him for prostate trouble ten years ago. It had been a cold wet June during a spring of record rains that had made it seem as if summer would never come. Ida recalled the case, as she did that of all her other patients, with crystal clarity. But surely that wasn’t what Savannah had been concerned about?

“I’ve always loved that lighthouse, but I have to admit, Gram, I’m still having a little trouble believing that it’s actually mine.”

Ida latched onto the clue like a drowning woman reaching for a piece of driftwood in a storm-tossed sea. The lighthouse! Savannah was buying the Far Harbor lighthouse to turn into a bed-and-breakfast. How had she forgotten such an important thing?

“You’ll make a grand success of it,” she assured her granddaughter with renewed vigor born of her relief at having finally sorted out the puzzle. “And I’m pleased as peanuts that my offer of hospitality to Henry helped clinch the deal. But I have to warn you, Savannah dear, if that cranky old man expects breakfast in bed, like they undoubtedly do for invalids over at Evergreen, he’s going to have to sleep in the kitchen.”

When Savannah laughed richly at that suggestion, Ida’s clenched shoulders relaxed and the blood flowed warmly back into her hands.

“I’m so proud of you,” she said as her mind cleared and her heart lifted. “Not that I ever had any doubts. In fact, anticipating your success, I bought you a little present.” She reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a tapestry lighthouse tote bag.

“Oh, I love it!”

“There’s something inside,” Ida remembered.

Savannah laughed again as she pulled out the message T-shirt. “Behind every successful woman is herself,” she read aloud.

“And don’t you forget it,” Ida said briskly, pleased with the way Savannah was coming out of her recent divorce funk. “We Lindstrom women are tough cookies.” Although she was still furious at that shifty-eyed weasel her granddaughter had made the mistake of marrying, at least his behavior had brought Savannah home again, proving that every silver lining had a cloud around it. “They may be able to chew us up from time to time, but they can’t swallow….

“We’ll have to call Raine right away,” Ida said decisively after grandmother and granddaughter had hugged. “And, of course, Gwen. So you can tell them the good news.”

Everything was going to be fine. Her girls were back home again. All except Gwen, who would soon be back from science camp in time to start her senior year of high school. Even Lilith, after a lifetime of rebellion, appeared to be on the straight and narrow, happily married to Cooper Ryan and working at something she seemed to enjoy.

Despite those recent annoying little memory glitches, life had never been better. Fretting about things she couldn’t control—such as getting older—was a waste of time and would accomplish nothing.

As she found Gwen’s number in her address book and picked up the receiver, Ida put her concerns away and decided to let sleeping ducks lie.

Five very long days later, Savannah sat on the bench in the lighthouse garden, running through the numbers again. She’d borrowed Raine’s laptop computer, hoping the fancy money-management program would make her prospects look more encouraging. It didn’t.

“It doesn’t help that I keep expanding the original concept,” she muttered as she glared at the flashing cursor.

John, who rode his bike to the lighthouse every day, was weeding nearby. His sunflower yellow T-shirt read Cultivate the Garden Within. Every time she’d seen Dan’s nephew he’d been wearing another message shirt, which had Savannah thinking that he and her grandmother would undoubtedly get along like gangbusters.

“You’re unhappy,” he diagnosed.

“Not unhappy.” Savannah sighed. “Just frustrated.”

She took in the sight of the bunchberry he’d planted as a groundcover the first day she’d met him here at the lighthouse. The white blossoms looked like tiny umbrellas amidst the dark green foliage he’d promised would eventually spread all the way along the cliff.

“That’s lovely.” There was something vastly soothing about the garden, which was why she’d chosen to work here today.

“It’s going to be even better,” he assured her with the enviable confidence he seemed to possess regarding his horticultural work. “When summer ends, the flowers will turn to bright red berries that’ll attract more birds to your lighthouse.”

If it
was
her lighthouse by then. Savannah shook her head to rid it of that depressing thought. Henry had begun to waffle about signing the final sales agreement, but she refused to consider the possibility of failure.

“I like the idea of attracting birds,” she said as she watched a fat red-breasted robin energetically tug a worm from the moist ground.

John rocked back on his heels. “Sometimes when I get worried and need to figure out an answer to a problem, I work in the garden and my brain works better,” he offered. “Even when I don’t get any answers, I don’t feel so bad.” He paused. “I have an extra pair of gloves.”

Savannah immediately turned off the computer. “You’re on.” She spent the next hour attacking weeds, and while she didn’t come any closer to solving her financial problems, she discovered John was right: she did feel better.

Despite her new-found garden therapy, Savannah’s stress level escalated as she continued to juggle figures and go around and around with Henry, who appeared to believe that his role in life was to make people—and her in particular—as miserable as possible. Whenever she could steal a free moment, she worked off her frustration in John’s garden. He seemed to enjoy her company, even after she’d mistaken a bed of newly sprouted seedlings for dandelions.

“That’s okay,” he assured her easily, revealing no irritation that she’d destroyed an entire day’s work. “I can plant more.”

She’d shown up the next morning with a Thermos of cold milk and a tin of crumbly, home-baked chocolate chunk cookies as an apology. John had taken one bite, then rolled his eyes.

“These are the very best cookies I’ve ever tasted.” He flashed her a grin that reminded her of his uncle. “Any time you want to dig up more flowers, I won’t mind—so long as you keep bringing more cookies.”

Savannah laughed and promised the cookies without the destruction. But the incident did give her an idea. After checking with the charge nurse at Evergreen to make sure Henry wasn’t on a restricted diet, she showed up at the nursing home with a tin of cookies still hot from the oven. It may just have been a coincidence, but that was the evening he finally agreed to her terms.

Wanting to get the deal locked up before Henry changed his mind again, Savannah was at the legal offices of O’Halloran and O’Halloran first thing the next morning.

The offices her sister shared with Dan were housed in a century-old building next to the ferry dock. The brick had been painted a soft gray-blue that reflected the water, and beneath the front windows scarlet geraniums cascaded from flower boxes she suspected were John’s contribution.

A brass bell tied to the inside of the door jangled as she entered. Apparently the receptionist hadn’t arrived yet, because Raine came out of her office to greet Savannah.

“Congratulations. I hear you’re now a lady of property.”

“I will be as soon as I sign the final papers. I thought I’d go crazy when it looked as if Henry was going to back out.”

“Henry’s an ornery old bird.” Raine shrugged. “I think he was really just trying to make you squirm. He’s an expert at that, of course. Hopefully getting out of that nursing home will give him a new lease on life.”

“At least living with Gram won’t be boring.”

“She’ll whip him into shape, all right,” Raine agreed. “I’ll go tell Dan you’re here.”

“No need.” Dan appeared from the hallway around the corner. “I was on the phone, but I knew the minute Savannah walked in the door.”

Since the offices faced the bay, Savannah knew he couldn’t have seen her walking across the street from where she’d parked her car in front of the Dancing Deer Dress Shoppe. “I hadn’t realized you were psychic.”