Firefly Island (8 page)

“Daniel?” I called, stepping off the porch and onto the stone path. “Nick?”

Something black, white, brown, hairy, and rather large rocketed from the corner of the house and flashed by in a blur. Nick was chasing it with his arms outstretched, laughing and squealing, calling, “He gots it! He gots it! C'mere, doggie!”

Doggie? I watched as what looked like at least a hundred pounds of dog circled the yard. Hair, slobber, and clods of grass flew as it rounded a bush near the stone footpath, then doubled back, racing past Nick before making another hairpin turn. The two played a wild game of keep-away, the dog cavorting back and forth in front of Nick, and Nick jumping and diving, trying to grab something from the dog's mouth.

Whose dog?
There hadn't been a dog around last night. When we'd pulled in, the place was as quiet as—I hated to
even think it in view of Corbin's wedding-breakfast revelations—a graveyard.

Daniel's arm slipped around me, and I jumped. I hadn't even realized he'd come back up the path.

“What's that?” I motioned to Nick's playmate.

“A dog.”

“But where did it come from? It looks like a . . . hairy Rottweiler or something. Should Nick be playing with it?” Growing up, I'd had a friend whose father kept a Doberman in the backyard. My mother wouldn't allow me over to that house to play. She was afraid I would be mauled.

“Stock dog. Australian shepherd. His name's Pecos.”

Pecos . . . So, someone
had
been here this morning while I was sleeping, and left behind . . . a dog?

“Well, who does Pecos belong to?”

“I don't know.” Daniel's fingers smoothed over my skin as Nick caught the dog, wrestled a tennis ball from his massive jowls, and then tossed the ball across the grass, sprays of slobber flicking off in all directions, catching the sunlight.

I had the urge to grab Nick and wash his hands. I could hear my mother saying,
Good heavens, the germs!
“You didn't ask?” Was it a good idea to let a small child play with a strange dog? As much as I was aware of my newcomer status in this threesome, sometimes I wondered if Daniel was too casual about things.

“He doesn't talk much.”

“Who?”

“The dog.”

A little chuckle attempted to chase my worries. “No, I mean whomever the dog was
with
. You didn't ask who he belongs to and whether he's safe for children? I mean, dogs can maul little . . .” I bit my tongue just as Daniel's arm stiffened. This whole stepparent thing was complicated.

“His name's on his collar.” The answer was flat, a little clipped. The meaty, manly hand stopped caressing and instead settled on my elbow. I felt slightly off-balance. There were so many new things to figure out at once. Where did my parental responsibilities for Nick begin and end? At what point was I supposed to start acting like his mother, instead of a casual family friend? Would that process occur naturally, or should we plan it? Everything had happened so fast that Nick was still calling me
Tante M
. We hadn't even talked about whether to change that, and how.

Had Daniel thought of any of those things?

He seemed to have none of my worries. “They're fine. We had a couple dogs like that when we were kids. They're good dogs. I did a genetics thing on the breed in grad school. That one's a tri-color pattern, but if you take two with the blue merle color pattern and breed them, there's a sixty-seven-percent chance . . .” He went on with facts and figures having to do with canine genetics and white puppies born with inherited recessive something-or-other, causing blindness, deafness, or stillbirth.

The science talk dissolved into a background hum as I watched Nick and the dog. Finally, Daniel squeezed me and said, “I'm boring you, aren't I?”

“No, not at all.”

“Why don't you go on in and get your shower? Mr. West—or somebody—will probably show up here pretty soon. The manager and the ranch hands do most of their work over on the main ranch, but they come by here daily to feed and check on the animals. Someone was by this morning while Nick and I were gone. That's probably how the dog got here.”

“Okay.” I wished I hadn't missed the trip into Moses Lake. I wanted to know what it was like. “How was the town, by
the way—other than the bait shop café—what did you call it? The Waterbird?”

“It's . . . small.”

I decided not to ask for details. Sometimes it's better to take things in little bites. I chose not to explore the house, either, but went straight back the way I'd come. I stopped in the living room long enough to get clothing from my suitcase and nibble the breakfast burrito Daniel had left for me in a paper sack, then proceeded to locate the bathroom.

I discovered a few things I hadn't seen last night in the dark.

When I came out, Daniel was sitting on the back porch. He greeted me with a Cheshire-cat grin as the screen door smacked shut.

“Well, how'd it go?” His lips twitched at the corners, anticipating my reaction to the bathroom.

“There's a
stuffed
mountain lion—with a bird in its mouth—hanging over the shower stall.” Tucking my hands between my legs, I took a seat on one of the old metal office chairs that served as porch furniture.

Daniel choked on a withheld snicker. “Technically, it's a bobcat.”

“It
watched
me take a shower,” I added, and he laughed out loud.

“It's not funny,” but I could feel my cheeks tugging. What else could you do with a stuffed bird-eating bobcat in the bathroom, but laugh at it? “You realize we can't, in any way, tell my mother about this. She'll send in a SWAT team.”

“Yeah, you're gonna have some issues with the kitchen, too. It's kind of . . . bare bones.” Daniel shook his head, but he was grinning. “I think Jack said something about this place having been a hunting lodge over the years.”

I groaned. My curiosity about the kitchen floated on a wave of dread. Maybe I wouldn't even go look. Maybe I'd just stay
here on the porch all day and watch the trees sway overhead and the water twinkle in the distance as Nick played in the sand while a stranger's dog stood guard over him, all signs of human activity remaining strangely absent.

Maybe I would just close my eyes, listen to the breath of God, and let it rock me along until finally I woke in the real world and discovered that all this was just one of those silly dreams, like the lions outside Barbie's Dream House, or the bear trying to make off with the Clean Energy Bill.

I was probably talking in my sleep, and Daniel was probably laughing, especially at the part about the bobcat over the shower stall. . . .

All things which make noise on the side of the path,
Do not come down the path.

—African proverb
(Left by Aaron Anderson, who just found out the cancer's gone)

I
had an unfavorable opinion of Jack West before I ever set eyes on him. Aside from the unsolved murder issue, my first reconnaissance mission inside the house ignited an inner simmering that had nothing to do with the spicy breakfast burrito. My dislike for the man grew each time I opened a cabinet door, peered into a dark corner, or looked inside one of the tiny, dark, musty-smelling closets.

The size of the closets wasn't the problem. The real problem was that they were already occupied. When I opened doors and turned on lights, the current residents scampered in all directions, fanning away from the light like drops of rain on the windshield of a car going seventy miles per hour. They disappeared beneath the layers of old wallpaper and cheesecloth that hung over dirty, loosely pieced slats of wood.

In dark corners dust motes gathered, filled with Brillo-like wads of human hair, animal fur of some kind, bits of rodent-eaten cardboard, the droppings that mice leave behind, assorted body parts from crickets and spiders, and the kind of giant roaches that slide quickly between wallboards. The
kitchen cabinets were similarly objectionable, although someone had lined the edges of each shelf with baby-blue powder that I had a bad feeling was intended to kill the roaches.

As disturbing as I found the mess in the cabinets, the mice didn't seem to be bothered by it in the slightest. I saw two of them, and evidence of more. My mother had often preached about the disease-carrying potential of rodents and insects, and as much as I was determined not to become my mother, I'd never in my life been in a place this repulsively filthy or filled with vermin.

There was no way we were unpacking the U-Haul here, much less the shipping crate when it arrived in a day or two. I wanted to grab my suitcase and purse, run out the door, and never come back.

I wanted my mommy. But if my mother saw this place, she'd have me hospitalized and checked for communicable diseases. I couldn't believe I'd slept here last night. On an air mattress. On the floor. No telling what might have been crawling underneath, over the top, under the covers, back and forth over my skin . . .

The sound of a vehicle rattling up the driveway interrupted the horror-movie scene in my mind as a shudder descended down my body.

I seized the only ray of hope I could come up with: Perhaps the person in the white truck was a ranch worker. Perhaps Jack West was out of town—Daniel had said his oil-company offices were in Houston—and he had no idea what shape the house was in. Perhaps whoever was supposed to prepare the house for move-in had failed to do it. Clearly this place had been sitting empty for a while, given over to the closet critters and the stuffed heads on the walls.

Taking a deep breath, I unclenched my hands and shook out the tension. Maybe communications had somehow
broken down, and Mr. West didn't realize we were arriving so soon. No man in his right mind would lure a research scientist with a master's degree and his family halfway across the country to live in a place like this.

No man in his right mind . . .

Outside the window, Daniel stepped away from the U-Haul, and Nick trotted curiously to the gate, trailed by Pecos the dog. I squinted through the dirt-encrusted glass as the truck rolled to a stop and a man stepped out, the patchy shade of a magnolia tree slipping over his cowboy hat and faded pearl-snapped western shirt. He was tall, a head taller than Daniel even, and broad-shouldered with a thick build. His knees bowed outward slightly, his jeans tucked into boots that accentuated the arc.

Grabbing a napkin from breakfast and wiping greasy dirt off the inside of the window, I tried to get a better view of my first honest-to-goodness cowboy. He very much looked the part. He even had a bright red bandana tied around his neck, just like in the movies. I was suddenly enamored. I'd never met a real live cowboy. I'd rubbed elbows with a few congressmen and senators who claimed to be, but this man was authentic. Most certainly, this was not Jack West. Even from here, I could see that his shirt was threadbare, a piece torn away near the elbow. His jeans had holes on both front legs where car keys or loose change had worn through the fabric. This was no millionaire, but a workingman. Perhaps he was the ranch foreman Mr. West had mentioned in his communications with Daniel.

The cowboy and Daniel greeted each other with a handshake, and something about it stopped me just as I was about to move toward the door. My heart did a quick flip-flop in my chest. The burn started in my stomach again. A fluttery, panicked feeling beat its wings with the desperation of a sparrow
trapped in the rafters of a shopping mall. Sometimes you can tell exactly what's being said, just by watching a conversation. I knew even before the stranger turned to follow Daniel to the house—this was the man himself, ragged cowboy clothes or not. This was the infamous Jack West. And it was clear from the body language that he wasn't one bit surprised we were here. It was also clear that no apologies were being offered, which meant that he didn't see any problem with moving a family into a filthy, smelly, vermin-infested house.

I felt our lives sliding off a cliff. If there was one thing my father, who was a fantastic judge of people, had taught me, it was that present behavior predicts future behavior.
Most people will tell you who they are within the first five minutes, Mal,
he'd advised me when I left for my post-college embassy job in Tokyo.
You show me someone who doesn't care what kind of first impression he makes, I'll show you someone who's the center of his own universe. Look out.

I felt sick. No one who intended to treat an employee decently would begin a relationship this way. Daniel and I had just made the biggest mistake of our lives. We'd quit our jobs, we had almost no savings to fall back on, and nearly everything we owned was in a shipping container headed to Texas. We were trapped, hopelessly entangled, like the rat pills and the cricket legs in the dust motes.

Tears pressed, and my last romantic thoughts of this move to Texas as one big adventure faded like a mirage on a hot day. I wavered between running for the bathroom or choking down the emotion and greeting Jack West properly. Years of being dragged along to boring lobby-sponsored family events had taught me the art of the pasted-on smile. I knew how to pretend to be happy when I wasn't, but some situations are beyond even the pasty smile. Our future was involved here. Our family.

They were headed this way now, Jack striding up the footpath with Daniel. Nick followed along, Pecos at his heels, both of them darting surreptitious looks at Mr. West's hulking frame, as if they couldn't decide what to make of him. He gave no regard to either of them. Apparently he wasn't interested in friendly dogs or adorable children. Another one of my father's bits of advice:
You can assess a man by how he reacts to those most vulnerable.

My head swirled, and I turned to make a dash for the bathroom, but something strange happened. I can only describe it as the essence of the Ellery women inhabiting my body. I could hear my mother and Grandma Louisa Ellery whispering in my ear. Invisible hands pulled me upward like a puppet on strings.
Stand up straight,
Grandma Louisa commanded.
An Ellery woman does not bow to anyone.
My mother added,
Make a good impression.
A wife can be her husband's best asset, if she knows how to present herself. . . .

I greeted Daniel and Jack West as they stepped into the sunny porch-like room with the old oak desk and the icky yellow carpet. Jack West was even larger and more intimidating in a confined space. He was six foot five at least, with ruddy skin, black eyebrows, and a thick head of gray hair that tumbled from his straw cowboy hat when he took it off to mop his forehead. His piercing blue eyes were cool and aloof in a way that brought Corbin's rumors to mind again. Daniel's new boss had the countenance of someone who could murder two people, hide the bodies, and not be haunted by his own conscience.

He had the hands for it, too. His broad, long-fingered grip compacted the bones in my knuckles when he greeted me. He didn't smile along with the crushing grip, but merely met my gaze, as if the display of strength were more of a test than anything. I squeezed back. The Gymies would have
been proud. All those pre-wedding workouts were good for something.

“Y'all are settled.” Jack West's words were more of a statement than a question, requiring no answer. His slow drawl, more Southern than western, echoed through the room in a baritone perfect for voice-overs. He seemed oblivious to the echo and the lack of furniture or boxes in the house. If he wondered why we hadn't moved anything in, he didn't ask. His gaze swept the chalky, slightly crazed paint job on the walls and then skimmed the stained yellow carpet without interest.

“Uhhh, no, not . . . exactly . . .” I stammered.
This house is a wreck, have you noticed?

Beyond Jack's broad shoulder, Daniel took a step to one side and widened his eyes with an almost imperceptible headshake. He'd been watching me go into panic mode about the house all morning. He'd even joined me in panic mode several times. He'd agreed that surely there was some mistake, and Jack West was not aware of the condition of the house. Now Daniel seemed to be taking it all back. He was giving me the don't-rock-the-boat look.

I sent an eye-flash back at him when Jack's attention darted to the dog barking outside. On the back porch, Nick had found the tennis ball, and he and Pecos were playing keep-away again.

In the few seconds while Jack's attention was elsewhere, unspoken dialogue pinged back and forth between Daniel and me with amazing clarity, considering that we were new at this marriage thing. All of a sudden, we could read each other's minds. I understood quickly and clearly that Daniel had just found out Jack West thought the house was shipshape as is, or at least that it was good enough for us. The very idea I'd been trying to backhand away was now landing smack-dab in the middle of our reality.

“Swimmin' hole down at the creek,” Jack said flatly, seeming to be talking about Nick, though it was hard to tell. Jack was one of the strangest people I had ever met, and considering that I'd grown up in and around DC, that was saying something. “Rest of the hired hands' kids like it. Or the lake. Save on bathwater.”

While the bathwater comment was weird, I took heart in the fact that he seemed to be suggesting something fun for Nick to do. Maybe he did have some sentiment toward children, after all. Someone who cared about kids couldn't be all bad. The term
rest of the hired hands
bothered me, though. Daniel wasn't a hired hand; he was a scientist, a business partner, a part owner in any future bio-agricultural patents developed here.

“We haven't really looked around at all.” Daniel's answer had an uncertain, almost apologetic quality.

I felt the need to be honest. No sense starting out a business relationship without the terms negotiated. “We've been looking at the issues with the house . . . cleaning . . . and some repairs . . .” My mother would
not
have been pleased with me for piping up rather than waiting for my husband to do it, but there was a great big elephant in the room, and it was standing on my toes.

Daniel lost his balance and took a quick step backward, his mouth dropping open. He sent a warning grimace my way.

Jack gave the house a cursory glance that changed from slightly surprised to patently disinterested in the space of a second or two. His tree trunk arms rested above the thickened midsection of a sixty-something man who obviously worked to keep in shape. “Ranch account at the hardware store in Moses Lake. Need anything—paint, lumber, carpet cleaner—get it there. Put it on my charge.”

How about a flame thrower?
I entertained a mental image of blasting the interior of the house, just nuking everything.

“What about an exterminator?” I asked, and Daniel coughed softly, mortified.

Jack started for the door, dismissing the issue offhandedly. “Ask at the hardware store. They'll tell you what to use. Sprayers are in the equipment shed behind my little house out back. The shed's unlocked, the little house is locked. No one's welcome in there—or out on Firefly Island.” He turned a hard look my way, as if making certain I understood.

Time seemed to hitch for a moment. The look in his eye sent a sharp, icy sliver straight to my stomach.

“Pack a little steel wool or caulk wherever the mice come in, if you're bothered by it.” He reached for the screen door, and Nick moved out of the way on the other side. “Get some new screen for this thing, too. Lake breeds mosquitos. They'll suck you dry while you sleep.” Pulling the door open, he stepped through, then walked toward his truck with long strides.