Kisses in the Rain (17 page)

"She's real bad, Nick. You know as well as I do that Granny's money is all gone, and I don't have much. Also, my kids have been needing things like clothes and a car for Billy Jr., and Gloria had to have an operation on her foot last month."

"I'll be there, Billy. I'll get there as soon as I can."

Nick hung up, threw the few changes of clothes he kept at the office into a small suitcase and rushed to the airport to grab the first flight out. His cell phone was dead, so he couldn't text Martha, but he stopped by her apartment and stuck a hastily written note under her door. At the airport he arrived just in time to hop on the plane to Petersburg, which gave him time to plan what he'd do when he got there.

Billy, highly nervous, met Nick at the airport. Nick had known he would. Billy was dependable in that way, at least.

"How is she?" Nick asked.

"The med-evac helicopter had to come and get her. She started coughing and choking in the middle of the night, and Gloria sat up with her and gave her medicine, but it didn't do any good. That's when we knew we had to get help. They put her in an oxygen tent in the hospital, and the doctors say she has pneumonia."

The hospital and its smells were familiar to Nick by now, and so was the wizened little Tlingit Indian woman with sunken cheeks and skin the color of a walnut who barely mounded the bed covers in the high hospital bed.

"Elsa?" Nick said gently when she opened her eyes and stared at him hostilely from beneath the oxygen tent.

"Who are you?" Her voice was high and thin. She was a querulous old woman, and her memory had been hazy for a long time.

"I take care of Davey. Remember?"

"Oh, yes, Davey. Where's Dolores?"

Nick glanced at Billy.

"Dolores is dead, Granny. You remember that."

Elsa let her wrinkled eyelids drift shut, and Nick thought that she was asleep, but in a moment they shot open again. She regarded him balefully.

"You took Dolores," she said accusingly to Nick.

"No, Granny," Billy said. "Nick didn't take Dolores. Dolores loved Hank, and they went out on the boat together. Remember?"

Elsa Long mumbled something unintelligible.

"Granny? Granny?" Billy said anxiously, but the old woman didn't reply. Nick and Billy sat beside her bed, watching her struggle for life until a nurse asked them to leave.

"Well?" Billy said once they shut the door to the hospital room behind them. "Granny is going to die this time. I am sure of it. She's very old and tired. The thing is, Nick, how long are you going to stay?"

Nick thought of Martha waiting for him back in Ketchikan. Always before on such missions, he'd only had Davey to think about, but now he had Martha and he desperately longed to be with her. Standing here in this cold and antiseptic hospital corridor, Martha with her bright gray eyes and her soft dark hair seemed an inviting vision indeed, but Nick resolutely pushed her image from his mind.

"I'll stay a few days," he promised Billy, and then they went to check Nick into a local motel where the walls were damp and where the sheets smelled of Clorox. Nick didn't complain. He had stayed there many times on similar visits, and he was used to it by this time.

But Elsa Long did not die. Instead she rallied, surprising everyone, and the doctors said she could go home on the third day of Nick's visit. On the fourth day, after paying the part of Elsa's hospital bill that wasn't covered by Medicare, Nick arranged for a private helicopter flight from Petersburg to the isolated house on Bilgewater Creek where Billy Long and his family lived during the summers.

He was touched by the Longs' eagerness to please, but he was all too aware of their lack of creature comforts, so Nick declined Billy's wife Gloria's offer of overnight hospitality. After he made sure that Elsa was comfortably installed in the hospital bed that he, Nick, had provided for her on a previous occasion, he returned to Petersburg on the helicopter in the dead of night. He was exhausted.

Back in his lonely motel room, Nick called Martha for reassurance and love and to tell her that he would return tomorrow. He was both surprised and taken aback when she was angry. He was chagrined when he learned the reason.

Yet he could never tell Martha the reason that departing for Petersburg in such a rush was important to him. Elsa Long's health was precarious at best, and although he was sure that her grandson Billy and his wife Gloria meant well, he knew that their financial situation wasn't good. That was why he'd chosen to become so involved with them. He wanted Elsa Long to have proper health care and enough money in her declining years.

In his mind, she deserved no less. After all, Elsa Long was Davey's grandmother.

* * *

"He's invited me to spend the day with him and Davey tomorrow at Williwaw Lodge," Martha said. It was Saturday; she was taking the day off and Faye was visiting.

"So go," Faye said. She measured out brown sugar for the cookie recipe, which she claimed had become a full-time hobby for Martha. Martha was always fiddling with the amounts of the ingredients, trying to capture the indefinable flavor of those cookies from the kiosk in San Francisco. Privately Faye wondered if Martha was chasing the impossible dream, but she didn't say so. Martha needed something to do, especially if she and Nick were going to break up, which was what Faye figured would finally happen.

"I don't want to go," Martha said. She slid a tray of cookies in the oven, closed the door and began to stir brown sugar into the batch that would go in the oven next.

"So don't go," Faye said.

"I wish you'd make up your mind," Martha said. "First you say 'go,' then you say 'don't go.'"

"Martha, you and you alone can make up your mind," Faye said firmly.

"I miss him. I hate not seeing him every day. Only—"

"Only what?" Faye asked, stealing a chocolate chip from the bag.

"I wonder where he was and what he was doing. Do you realize, Faye, that I don't know if he's involved in something illegal or worse? I don't know if it's another woman or a family he has hidden somewhere in the woods or—"

"My," Faye said admiringly, "your imagination has really run the gamut, hasn't it?"

"I suppose it has," sighed Martha.

"I doubt very much that Nick is involved with anything illegal, so you can put it out of your mind. As far as another woman, somebody in Ketchikan would have heard a rumor if that were so. There have been cases before when everybody had an idea that a married man had a little hanky-panky going on the side, but with Nick that's more or less ridiculous. He's a bachelor. He wouldn't have to hide a woman away in the woods. No, whatever Nick is up to, I'm sure it's both moral and legal."

"I wish I could be so sure," Martha muttered.

"One thing I know is that you'll never find out if you don't give Nick a chance. At this point, he's not going to tell you what he's up to. He's made that clear. He might tell you, though, once he trusts you more. That can never happen if you cut the romance off now."

"That's a good point. How'd you get to be so wise, Faye?" Martha asked, her spirits lifting.

Faye laughed. "Lots of men, honey," she said. "Lots of men." And she stole a few more chocolate chips while Martha went to call Nick's office to leave a message that she would visit him and Davey at the cabin the next day.

Chapter 9

One surprise on Sunday morning, when Nick's Cessna taxied up to the dock in Ketchikan where Martha waited, was that as soon as the propeller stopped whirling, Hallie clambered out of the plane.

"I'm going to visit my sister Wanda while you're at Williwaw Lodge," Hallie said, beaming. "I'll fly back with Nick after he returns you to town this evening. I've cooked some food for your dinner. Nick says he can heat it up." Hallie waved at Davey, who had accompanied them, and hurried off to meet her sister.

Davey eyed Martha solemnly. "Hello, Davey," she said as she always did, even though he never replied. She climbed into the plane where she sat beside Nick, with Davey in the back seat.

She watched Nick covertly, searching for some sign that he felt guilty for leaving last week. She saw none. He was his normal self, friendly and likable. She had almost forgotten her anger in her happiness at being with him, near him, again.

Was such happiness logical—or even normal—under the circumstances? She didn't know. She looked away from his sinewy hands, so capable as they moved along the instrument panel flicking switches and pushing buttons. It wasn't hard to act natural around him, at least not as hard as she'd thought it would be. Maybe that was because he was helping by being ordinary. By being the real Nick, the one she'd come to know in the first place.

They took off in a plume of spray. Davey obviously enjoyed flying. He leaned forward in his seat, eagerly peering out the window as the buildings of Ketchikan grew smaller and smaller below.

Martha lost herself in appreciation of the panoramic landscape. Vertical granite cliff walls rose three thousand feet above the fjords thrusting between them. The mountains were capped with snow, and lush forests carpeted the slopes from the tree line to the salt water.

Nick pointed to a wild river tumbling through a valley. "The water is that peculiar greenish-gray color because there's what we call 'rock flour' from the surrounding glaciers suspended in it," he said, his mouth close to her ear so that she could hear him.

Nick decreased their altitude and followed the river. To Martha's amazement, salmon struggling upstream to spawn were so thick that they seemed to pattern the surface of the water with silver. Bald eagles pounced from the shallows of what, to an eagle, must have been the equivalent of a takeout window at McDonald's.

"Look, I see a bear!" cried Martha. She supposed that if she had to see a bear, the best way to do it was from a safe place in the sky.

Nick swooped the Cessna low over a grass flat where a brown bear was in the process of raking a big fish from the water. The bear raised his head when the plane passed over, then returned his attention to the fish, which was now flopping on the ground.

Nick banked over dense spruce and aspen, and soon Mooseleg Bay appeared.

"That's Williwaw Lodge," Nick said, pointing to a speck in a grassy clearing bordering the water. He soon brought the floatplane in for a perfect landing.

Nick had no sooner docked the plane than Davey scrambled down and ran up the slope and behind the cabin to play.

"Davey seems more at ease with me today, I think," observed Martha, who had caught the glimpse of a tentative smile before the boy took off at a run.

"He's used to you now," Nick said with an approving grin. He would have slid his arm around her shoulders, but she moved away too quickly.

So that's how it is,
Nick thought unhappily. Martha walked briskly to the back of the cabin where Davey was digging among Hallie's carrots, onions, and cabbages with a small trowel. Martha knelt down beside him. On the damp ground beside him were two earthworms, which he apparently had dug up.

"Worms, huh?" she said.

Davey widened his eyes. Finally, cautiously, he nodded,
yes.

"I suppose there are lots of worms in Hallie's garden," Martha observed. She sat next to Davey and picked up a stick. She poked the ground with it a few times and pulled out a worm. "See? Here's another one."

Davey looked at it. He picked up his two earthworms and put them on the ground beside Martha's.

"Now we have three worms. Let's find more."

Nick had silently joined them and sat on a rock to watch. He wasn't about to interrupt. It pleased him that the two were communicating.

"I know another word for earthworms," Martha said. She spared a sidelong glance to see if Davey was listening. "They're called night crawlers. Isn't that a neat name?"

Davey rested the dirty tip of his trowel on the ground and stared at her. Martha pretended not to notice and went on talking.

"In some parts of the world, earthworms get to be about eleven feet long," she said. "That's about as far as the distance from you to Nick. I certainly hope we don't find one as big as that!"

She laughed, suddenly aware of Nick's eyes upon her. He smiled, but she looked away quickly.

Soon Martha and Davey had seven or eight earthworms writhing in all directions on the ground between them. Davey tried without success to keep them in a straight line.