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  Tidal Kin

  Lee Doty

  Publisher Page

  an imprint of Headline Books, Inc.

  Terra Alta, WV

  Tidal Kin

  by Lee Doty

  copyright ©2018 Lee Doty

  First Electronic Edition 2018

  All rights reserved. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents, except where noted otherwise, are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any other resemblance to actual people, places or events is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any other form or for any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage system, without written permission from Publisher Page.

  To order additional copies of this book or for book publishing information, or to contact the author:

  Headline Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 52

  Terra Alta, WV 26764

  www.headlinebooks.com

  Email: [email protected]

  Publisher Page is an imprint of Headline Books

  ISBN 13: 9781946664150

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953702

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  For Izzy, Helen and Ralph

  1

  Samoset Beach was crammed with well-oiled strangers lying inches apart under a turquoise sky. The cloying smell of sunscreen irritated Laney as she wove her way around beach umbrellas. The last hurricane had narrowed the beach, forcing her to tread carefully to avoid kicking sand on people’s lunches.

  She passed Red River Resort, a Victorian behemoth overlooking the salt marsh, the beach and Nantucket Sound. Gran told her it had been built by one of the captains who’d survived the Whaling Disaster of 1871. Judging by its odd, prow-shaped veranda, Gran figured the resort’s main building stood in for the ship the captain had lost at sea.

  At last she reached her spit of land. It looked like a bear’s paw and was her favorite place to swim. She had a clear view of the lighthouse, the marsh, the resort, and Monomoy Island, but because of curves in the shoreline, no one could see her. Sunbathers never came out as far as the Paw, since they’d have to lug their chairs, coolers, and tents along.

  With sweat trickling down her back—at thirteen, Laney kept her T-shirt on over her stubbornly flat chest—she rummaged through her backpack, slipped on water shoes, and raced into the waves. The ice-cold spray didn’t faze her, and the seaweed entwining her legs reminded her of gummy worms, making her laugh.

  For years Gran had forbidden her to come to the beach alone, but they’d finally reached a compromise. “If you take the lifesaving courses at camp, I’ll let you go by yourself.”

  “You’re the best, Gran!”

  But the woman’s pale green eyes had closed for an instant. “That is, when you turn thirteen.”

  When Laney’s thirteenth summer finally arrived, Gran wasn’t happy, but she’d made a deal and stuck to it.

  Hopping on one foot, then the other, to shake water from her ears, Laney left the Paw and tucked herself beneath the nearby bluff. Gran had told her the bluff would eventually erode and provide a wider beach, but in doing so, would disappear. For now, Laney gratefully accepted its shelter from a strong wind.

  She lay on her stomach and lined up her water shoes at eye level next to her towel. The flowery pink and orange shoes were the same ones worn by Isabella Miller, the most popular girl going into the ninth grade. To Laney’s dismay, Gran had chosen the same style for herself, saying she and her granddaughter would look like twins at the beach.

  Even though Laney had lived with Gran for five years, she still missed her mom. At first her longing had hurt so much she could only whisper about it to Bark, Aunt Norma’s dog, who of course understood about missing a mother and allowed Laney to burrow into his furry neck. Laney knew why she’d been sent to live with Gran, but felt she was now old enough to care for herself and her mom. Gran would never agree to such a plan. Her mom’s phone call from two years ago was enough to remind her why.

  “I’m glad you answered the phone, Laney. This is just between us, baby. Promise me you won’t tell Gran. You get your...things together. I need you. Promise you...won’t tell.”

  “Okay, Mom. I promise. Are you coming here? You sound sleepy.”

  “I’m coming to get you.”

  Laney hadn’t broken her promise. She hadn’t told anyone about the call. She’d only asked Gran where her suitcase was.

  Her mom didn’t come that night and didn’t call again for many months.

  Laney’s gaze followed a blue heron gliding low over the marsh, its stick legs dragging behind, marking a path through the gold-tipped grasses. Gran had taught her the names of plants and wildlife by the sea. Purplish beach plum and pink-flowering rosa rugosa now covered the bluff as far as she could see.

  She reached for her summer reading book, but the heat made her too drowsy to read. She flipped onto her back and breathed in salty air. Her hands folded into the shape of binoculars and through them she studied the clouds. All around her waves heaved onto the beach with a crash, then skittered apologetically out to sea, only to come roaring back again.

  Laney sprang upright. A burst of harsh words had startled her. Two men wearing long dark pants and white dress shirts stood in their bare feet at the end of the Paw. One shook his fist at the other, while the other blew cigarette smoke at the fist. Their words sounded foreign. She must have been sleeping when they first arrived, but no sooner had she reached that conclusion than she drifted off again. When she awoke for good, the men were gone. She’d been dreaming.

  The beach crowd had now thinned as it was almost 5:00. Gran would be watching for her. She shook her towel and approached the water for a final rinse of her water shoes. A wave slapped a soggy cigarette pack against her leg. With echoes of Gran’s environmental lectures in mind, she snatched it before the wave carried it off. The gold pack had red lettering—Golden Flake. She didn’t recognize the brand, but she only knew her mother’s.

  “It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?” A tall man, hands caramel against his white cuffs, stood at the end of the Paw. Without waiting for her answer, he bent over to retrieve a pair of sandals. “How stupid of me to leave them here.”

  He sounded friendly, but something about him worried her. His formal clothes were out of place on the beach and his voice sounded foreign, convincing her she hadn’t been dreaming about the men earlier.

  He slipped on the sandals and buckled them.

  She wanted him to leave but curiosity got the upper hand. “Where is the other man who was with you?”

  “Oh. You’ve been here awhile? He left.” The man smiled.

  “Are you staying at one of the cottages?”

  “You are full of questions, young lady. I’ll ask you one. Have you been here all by yourself?”

  Laney nodded, her face turning scarlet because she had no friends to meet at the beach.

  The man shrugged. “I’m a loner, too.” He scanned the beach, then the horizon. Finally he said, “Guess I’d better head home.”

  “Bye.” She waved at his back before realizing how silly that was.

  Laney needed to get home too but didn’t want to follow him. A few more minutes couldn’t matter. When the man had disappeared, she took a final look at the train of soft white clouds chugging along the horizon. An oblong object bobbing in the waves caught her attention. A seal? She knew better than to wade out too far, whether it was a seal or, even worse, a shark. There’d been three shark sightings already this year. She took several small steps closer.

  At first she saw only the duct tape. She knew what that was because Gran had once wrapped her mother’s broken tail light in it. But why wou
ld anyone put duct tape on a seal?

  The waves rolled the object closer and she could see it more clearly now, but what she saw didn’t make sense. A shirt? “No,” she said aloud.

  She stumbled backwards but couldn’t look away. The object had a face. A man’s face. He was staring at her. He kept staring at her. “No! No! No!”

  2

  Norma Bergen despised people who couldn’t be troubled to take their emptied shopping carts to the cart return. If left to her, she’d shrink-wrap the offenders and toss them into their own carts like chicken breast.

  She rolled an abandoned cart from the middle of a parking space to the nearby return, gave it a hard shove and walked back to lock her car. A shiny black BMW pulled in next to her, barely missing Norma’s behind. Its driver was a heavy-set woman in a strapless sundress, wearing large, white-rimmed sunglasses and a small dog on her arm. Norma suspected the woman “summered” on the Cape, which was another thing Norma loathed—people who said they summered somewhere, as it implied wealth and a need to boast about it, to say nothing of the fact that such people turned an informative, concrete noun into an implication-soaked verb.

  BMW lowered her window and aimed her flared nostrils, like twin bores of a shotgun, at Norma. “Maybe you didn’t need to take two parking spaces.”

  Norma noted the sarcasm, another pet peeve. She responded, “Maybe if you lay off the fudge, you won’t need two spaces.”

  She regretted having no time now for a parking lot fight, which normally guaranteed her forty-five minutes of oral argument. For a lawyer, what could beat that? Throughout her childhood, Norma had attended the Turn-the-Other-Cheek Club, until she discovered that that club, worldwide, had few members. She bought her groceries and hit the road.

  Nothing could be less tempting than the stack of cupcakes on Norma’s backseat. They were topped with blobs of red, white and blue frosting, perfect for a Wheezy Wickersham Fourth of July party. She had to amend her earlier thought. One thing was less tempting than the cupcakes—it was Wheezy Wickersham’s party, especially as it fell on the first day of Norma’s annual two-week Cape staycation.

  Visitors over the years had said it must be wonderful living on Cape Cod, yet Norma rarely had a chance to enjoy it. Her days were filled with office work, errands, bill-paying, and all the other things people do who live in Birmingham, Boise, and Buffalo. To solve the conflict of living the life of a drone, in the old-fashioned sense, and living it in paradise, she carved two weeks out of each year during which she pretended to be a tourist enjoying the Cape—swimming at dawn with her dog, Bark, sailing on the bay with Anne and Anne’s granddaughter, Laney, even dining on the day’s catch, in her bathtub, alone. How Norma hated Wheezy’s parties for keeping her from all that.

  “This is the problem,” she’d confided to Anne, who’d also received an invitation. They stood side by side at the transfer station, tossing huge trash bags into a foul-smelling chamber. “I don’t like Wheezy. I don’t like her perfect lawn. Did you see how they planted it? Looked like hair plugs. And speaking of hair plugs, I don’t like that bald stick of butter she married and I especially don’t like her name. Wheezy. Why would anyone refer to herself as chest congestion?”

  One last hoist and the women moved to the recycle area.

  “What’s the big deal, Norm? Just don’t go.”

  Anne had separated her newspapers from cardboard, wine bottles from water bottles, milk cartons from egg cartons, all of which Norma saw as hair-splitting. “I can’t ‘not go.’ I’ve missed the last two parties and if I don’t go this time, she’ll jump out from behind my hedge and ask in that whiney voice of hers, ‘What’s wrong? I thought we were friends.’ She’ll want to understand why I don’t like her and how she can improve our relationship. I’m tempted to tell her.”

  “Norm, you’re a fraud. You’re going to the party because you don’t want to hurt her feelings.”

  Norma hoped Anne was wrong. This was no time to go soft.

  Anne and Norma were the only year-rounders nearby. Both single, they occupied cottages on either side at the top of Samoset Bluff Lane, a short dirt road through a scrub pine forest that ended down by the beach. Their grey shingled capes were like wounded soldiers holding out against the forces of wealthy retirees, all ready to stampede the last two tear-downs with a water view.

  The cottages were about the only thing the women had in common. Anne was creative, poised and refined. For years she’d taught piano at the Curtis Institute of Music, and had retired at sixty to raise Laney on the Cape. Anne’s parents had left her the cottage years before, and as she’d told Norma, the location was far enough removed from her daughter, Gin, Laney’s mother, to assure the young girl some stability.

  A credential like Curtis accounted for little with Norma. It was Anne’s ability to play anything she heard by ear, instantly and movingly, that so astounded her. Nothing soothed Norma’s prickly soul as much as Gershwin descending the bluff on a summer breeze.

  Norma turned off Route 28 and thought back to when she’d met Anne for the first time. It was a windy Saturday in November and Main Street’s trees were bare. Norma recognized her new full-time neighbor when, rounding the corner at the hardware store, they nearly collided.

  “I’m not sure whether this drill bit is the right size.” Anne held one bit and then another, explaining to Norma her bookshelf project as though the two had known each other for some time. “I don’t want to have to drive all the way back here if I’m wrong on size.”

  Norma had been making her own household repairs for twenty years, ever since, a year out of law school, she’d chucked her job at a large Boston firm and bought her cottage, long abandoned but gamely described by her realtor as “rough and ready.”

  While Anne considered drill bits, Norma studied her neighbor’s delicate features: soft, shoulder-length blond hair streaked with gray, and long, tapered fingers. Rumor had it that Anne had suffered bad luck—early widowhood, troubled offspring—but she showed no signs of self-pity or that worse thing, nonstop talking. Norma made a decision.

  “Leave the bits. I’ve got a shop in my storage shed. No tool I don’t have, no repair I haven’t made.”

  Despite being twenty years her junior, Norma enjoyed spending time with Anne. It was a new experience for her, friendship.

  Norma flipped on her blinker and pulled in close to her mailbox, nearly clipping a man rushing by on foot. The man was wearing a tie, unusual for the Cape, and didn’t turn when Norma yelled, “Watch it, Brooks Brothers.”

  She’d spent years stopping by the post office for mail on her way to her office, but now that she’d converted her dining room to a home office, a large mailbox at the top of the bluff made more sense. She reached inside and pulled out a thick business envelope that had been stuffed toward the back. It was crumpled and might have sat for a few days. She pulled into her driveway and opened it.

  Summons and Complaint

  “Who the hell is suing me?”

  3

  Normally Anne took great pleasure in running her fingers along her porcelain-encased desk clock, but now it was telling her Laney was late. She’d spent the afternoon paying bills and preparing macaroni salad for Wheezy’s party, but had eaten as many olives as she’d dropped into the salad, leaving her feeling queasy. Or maybe the cause was resentment at paying Gin $1,800 a month to stay away from Laney. Anne thought of all the things she could have done for Laney with extra money—travel, private school, tennis. As musicians, she and Gordon had never made much money, and the annuity she’d bought with his life insurance proceeds was hardly generous. Gin.

  Anne had missed Gordon at first. His unassuming presence had been part of her scenery for thirty years. Sometimes, when he’d played his cello, his heavy eyelids and long, sad face reminded her of a Nubian goat. A few years into widowhood forced her to admit that Gordon’s main attraction had been his passivity. He wasn’t bothered that she made the important decisions in the household, like where they
lived, how they spent money, even which musical engagements they accepted. In fact, she’d made all the decisions except those concerning their daughter. Gordon had named her Virginia after his own mother. Gin abhorred her name, especially as a rebellious teenager, when she started spelling it without the final I, to make it sound like vagina. They’d reached a compromise with Gin.

  In Gordon’s eyes, Gin was perfect and he discouraged Anne from interfering in her upbringing. As Anne had never wanted a child, and only yielded to Gordon’s desire for one in return for his agreeing to end the sexual side of their marriage, she was happy to oblige him. If he could see his daughter now, how would Gordon rate the job he’d done raising dear Virginia?

  She checked the time again. 5:30. Norma was also due any minute, as they’d planned to go to Wheezy’s together. Norma had taken Laney to the ball game the night before and kept her overnight, and Anne wanted to remember to thank her. She left her study and headed upstairs to change for the party. If Laney still hadn’t shown when she came down, she’d go looking for her.

  Norma flung open Anne’s front door. “For God’s sake, Anne, are you here?” Her voice boomed throughout the cottage. Norma always made a startling entrance, whether she was in full crisis or borrowing a cup of sugar.

  Anne, dressed in an ivory cotton skirt and matching shell blouse, met her in the living room. “Norm, are you sure you want to go to the party in a T-shirt that says ‘Bite me’?”

  She was teasing. Anne would never try to make Norma conform to fashion standards. If Norma wanted to keep her beauty a secret, that was her business. Anne looked at her now. Despite searing blue eyes and full, shapely lips, Norma’s allure was obliterated by hunched posture, duck-footedness, and a complete rejection of feminine style. Norma’s idea of haute couture was the Bite Me shirt, baggy jeans, and a bucket-shaped fishing hat in which she stuffed her long, thick, sun-bleached hair.