Caught You Listening
by Shannon Hollis
Book 2 of the Moonshell Bay series
Watch for Sonnet and Hunter’s story, coming soon! But until then, here’s an excerpt:
Chapter 1
In the cosmic scheme of things, this is just a temporary setback.
Sonnet McKenzie gazed at the small pile of boxes on Mrs. Dempsey’s lawn. What did it say about a person when she could fit everything she valued on the planet in the back of her truck? More important, what did it say about Mrs. Dempsey that she would toss her tenant out on the street, just because she was a bit behind on the rent?
The universe had no answer. Neither did Sonnet, although she did know why the rent was late. She hefted a box containing lengths of velvet into the truck bed. Two of her customers hadn’t paid her yet. Her state-of-the-art sewing machine and a box of muslins and light cottons went in next, followed by a big plastic storage container filled with drawers of buttons and fasteners that rattled and clinked like the contents of a treasure chest. Some of those buttons were period antiques and had cost a small fortune. Another answer to where the rent money sometimes went. But when you catered to high-end clients, you had to produce high-end clothes, and there was no getting around it—antique buttons sometimes put the perfect finish on a gentleman’s frock coat.
She shoved her two suitcases into spaces left between the boxes, and lifted her folk harp onto the floor of the back seat. The only thing she had to get around now was the fact that she was homeless.
Time to default to Plan G. G as in Grandparents. G as in Gabriela Island, a temporary haven of safety in an uncertain world, where she could count on a cup of hot chocolate and a warm welcome on a cloudy September day.
Sonnet sped up I-5 with Puget Sound on her left, heading for left turn at Bellingham that would take her to Moonshell Bay and a temporary respite from financial worries. As long as Gran and Gramps had a phone line and she had her laptop, she could run her business. Pemberley Period Fashions got five thousand Web hits a week, and usually yielded at least a couple of orders a month.
So she didn’t have a place to live. Life was still good. Sonnet began to hum an Irish dance tune as she handed the lady in the toll booth her money, and slid into the ferry lineup. It was short, now that most of the tourists were gone. Idly, she watched a guy in a mechanic’s jumpsuit taping a poster to the side of the refreshment shack. The first drops of rain spattered on the windshield, and not for the first time, Sonnet was glad she’d invested a particularly good season’s money in a practical truck instead of a Miata. It was really hard to get one’s self, one’s business, and one’s harp into a sports car.
The cabin looked just the same as it always had when she pulled into the driveway a short voyage and a decade in time later. Douglas firs leaned companionably over it, and through the brush and shaggy branches of dripping cedars, Sonnet could see the ocean as it heaved and crashed on the rocks at the bottom of the lawn. Gramps was always threatening to cut down the firs in case they fell on the house during a storm, but so far Gran had prevented him.
Sonnet couldn’t wait for the hot chocolate and a long yack with her grandmother. She knocked at the door.
“Hello,” she called when there was no answer. “Anybody home?”
Nothing replied but the seagulls wheeling over the water. Sonnet went around the side of the house and opened the garage door. This was no ordinary garage. It was a custom-built shed housing Pegasus, her grandparents’ giant land yacht and the pride of their footloose little hearts.
Pegasus was gone.
Belatedly, Sonnet counted days on the calendar. Not only had she missed the rent, she’d forgotten that her snowbird grandparents left for the sunny south on Labor Day weekend every year, as regular as clockwork. They’d be on Lake Havasu by now, kicking back and drinking margaritas with the geriatric set… and having a much better social life than her own, if the truth be told.
Sonnet pulled the key down from its hiding place on a support beam, went around to the other side of the cabin, and let herself in the kitchen door.
She’d call their cellphone later tonight, and they’d answer from a beach party or a fifties nightclub she knew they liked in Havasu City. It was only courteous to let them know she was here. She’d better let Marty Swensson next door know the house wasn’t empty, too, before she decided it was being burgled and called the sheriff in Moonshell Bay, who kept a fast launch at the marina. Marty took her annual caretaking duties very seriously.
Meantime, she’d unpack the truck, then indulge in a long, hot shower from a water tank that wasn’t perpetually running cold like Mrs. Dempsey’s, and put the kettle on for that hot chocolate.
Sonnet glanced at the fridge, humming comfortably in the corner. It was a good bet she’d need to run to the tiny store that the island’s only marina shared with the ferry dock and stock up on groceries. Thank goodness Mac and Bonnie at the store still extended credit to old-timers, and the grands had an account.
She pulled open the refrigerator door, just to check the status, and stared.
It was chock full of food. Not just milk and bread, either. Vegetables, chicken, a six-pack of the latest brew from the Mussel Man microbrewery, and even a dainty little basket of imported strawberries.
Maybe the grands weren’t in Havasu after all. Maybe they’d diverged from a long-standing tradition and merely given Pegasus an oil change and taken her out for a spin.
In that case, she’d better hop in the shower and get cleaned up before they got back.
Sonnet ran outside and yanked the smaller of her suitcases out of the truck. She stashed it in the tiny guest room and closed herself in the bathroom. Gran, she noticed, had the company towels out.
How weird.
* * *
“Yes, Mr. Patricks, I’m sure you’re on the correct ferry,” his assistant said, her voice as cool and inscrutable as the Pacific Northwest weather.
“It said Moonshell Bay to Gabriela Island,” Hunter told her, “but it only holds half a dozen cars. How does the ferry service make any money?”
“Would you like me to research that, sir?”
Never ask Nancy a rhetorical question, Hunter reminded himself. “No. Just tell me what the deal is with these placards posted everywhere. Some kind of labor dispute? Is that going to strand me up here?”
“The articles on CNN say the Washington State ferry workers’ negotiations have been ongoing for months. Nothing has been said about a strike, sir.”
“Just my luck it’ll happen when I’m here. Now, where am I supposed to go?”
“I loaded your iPhone with all the information.”
“Nancy. Just give me the executive summary, would you?”
Nancy was good at that, as at most things. Ninety-nine percent of the time he thanked heaven he had her, and gave her a performance bonus. The other one percent he spent banging his head on the desk.
“The property management company has arranged for two weeks in a beachfront house at 1140 Clamshell Crescent.”
“Don’t tell anyone I’m spending any time in a place called Clamshell Crescent.”
“No, sir. I would never divulge confidential information.”
She wouldn’t, either. Her perfectly made-up lips were hermetically sealed, which was a good thing. His competitors in Silicon Valley had no qualms about romancing his assistant in hopes of seducing her over to work for them. But her loyalty was absolute. Her paycheck made sure of that.
“Your vacation is on doctor’s orders, sir. Nothing will be allowed to interrupt. To continue, this house is on Gabriela Island. The ferry only runs twice a day, so be sure not to miss it.”
Gabriela Island. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, sir. Are you thinking of Gabriola Island, up in Canada? If so, I assure you that—”
“No. I meant Gabriela Island. Are you sure that’s the place?”
“Yes, sir.” Her tone had become even more professional, and he realized he’d made a mistake in questioning her accuracy. “Is that a problem?”
He should have checked the itinerary instead of getting distracted with meetings and commitments and flying off to Seattle in a preoccupied daze. If he’d known she’d booked him for two weeks in a place he remembered as the doorstep of hell, he’d have changed his flights in Seattle and gone to Hawaii instead. Without a hotel reservation. He’d rather spend the night on a beach, wrapped in his camelhair coat, than go back to—
“Sir?”
Too late. He was trapped on the ferry to the doorstep of hell. “No, Nancy, no problem. What were you saying about the ferry?”
“You’re not to miss it, otherwise you’ll have to arrange accommodations in Moonshell Bay.”
Moonshell Bay—the town, not the geologic feature—hadn’t even existed back then. “Understood.”
“Do you want me to make reservations at a hotel there, just in case, sir?”
Her estimation of his ability to take a vacation correctly depressed him even further.
“No, thanks. Know what, Nancy? You should take a vacation yourself, while I’m gone. Get away for a while. I can’t remember the last time you had any time off.”
“It was November of 2007, sir, when my mother got married. I took a week.”
She hadn’t had a vacation in four years? Neither had he, then. No wonder his doctor was prescribing peace and the great outdoors. He rubbed at the tension in his neck, unsuccessfully.
“Then take two weeks now,” he suggested.
“I can’t, sir. Someone has to hold down the fort.”
“I have five vice presidents for that.”
“But someone has to tell them what to do. Get them into meetings. Pass on your instructions. That sort of thing.”
“You won’t be getting any instructions from me,” he said. “I’m on vacation.” Unfortunately.
“I give you two days.” Her voice thawed into the closest Nancy ever came to familiarity. “You won’t be able to stay out of your e-mail, you know that. I expect to be receiving instructions by Friday at the latest.”
Was he so predictable, so driven, that his assistant had him timed down to the day? Did that mean he was boring? Hunter frowned.
“I will not. Two weeks, the doc said. And two weeks of peaceful communion with nature it will be.” Peaceful avoidance of nature, more like. He hoped this house came stocked with a Jacuzzi and a lot of alcohol.
“I hope so, sir. I instructed your housekeeper to pack sunblock.”
He sighed and eyeballed the cloudy sky, where he supposed the sun to be. “Thank you, Nancy. As always, thanks for everything.”
He turned the cellphone off and regarded the horizon with a sense of gloom. Rising out of the heaving ocean was the ragged outline of the island he’d last seen as a boy of twelve. Even from this distance he could see the ferry dock like an awkward stick insect bending over the beach. As the ferry carried him closer, the beach resolved itself into a long stretch of featureless gray mud, overhung with trees.
Sunblock was the one thing he wouldn’t need.
He climbed into the rental car and, out of deeply buried habit, found himself bracing for the bump and jolt as the ferry nosed into the slip lined with old tires. When he passed the tiny marina and drove up the narrow road, he saw that twenty years had changed it as much as he supposed the years had changed him.
The grocery store was still there, where he’d bought handfuls of penny candy. They probably didn’t stock homemade candy any more, for fear of the liability.
His iPhone held a map of the island, but he only glanced at it to place Clamshell Crescent in his memory. He knew the roads. He’d walked them plenty of times. At one time he’d known the beaches and woods as well as the topography of his own face, but that didn’t make him like them any better.
Hunter pulled into the driveway of 1140 Clamshell Crescent, noting the pickup full of moving boxes tucked under the trees. Maybe the people who owned the place had cleared some of their personal stuff out before they rented it for the winter. Although why they hadn’t put it into storage was beyond him.
He shook the door key out of the envelope Nancy had given him on departure, and fit it into the lock.
The door let him into the kitchen, and he looked around in appreciation. The place was spotless. And it smelled like a home, with the scent of cedar siding and baking spices and … he sniffed. Perfume or shampoo or something like that. The view out the geometrically stacked front windows was breathtaking, with a wide sweep of ocean and beyond them, the snow-capped mountains of the coastal range.
There was some kind of hissing noise coming out of the bathroom. Water? Overflowing toilet? Flood?
That’s all he needed. Hunter put his garment bag and briefcase down, and pushed open the bathroom door.
A cloud of steam greeted him. He waved it away and locked eyes with the naked woman standing under the hot spray behind a smoked glass door.
His exclamation of horror was completely drowned by her bloodcurdling scream.
