Where Dreams Are Born E-Book

M. L. Buchman

• Herausgeber: Buchman Bookworks, Inc.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

“I became completely immersed in this story and it had me at page one.” – Fresh Fiction -a Where Dreams romance- One calendar. Twelve lighthouses. Two hearts. Cassidy Knowles, the nation’s fastest rising food-and-wine critic. Her father, a small-scale vintner, leaves a final gift: a calendar of Pacific Northwest lighthouses, a dozen thin letters, and a deathbed promise to visit one each month. She can handle that. Russell Morgan, #28 on the latest “most eligible” list and the last guy on the planet Cassidy wants. Fine with him. She’s an over-privileged little twit. He sets his own course by a friend’s calendar of lighthouses. A sailing voyage that guides him to the one woman in all Seattle who irritates him the most. Where can two hearts chart the same course? Where Dreams Are Born in the warmth around Angelo’s Hearth.

Leseprobe

Where Dreams Are Born

a Seattle romance

M. L. Buchman

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To my Lady Fair:

My thanks for the calendar,

And the journeys we shared

to explore the settings of this tale.

And to my sister:

A tintypist.

Who taught me the love of photography

in the darkroom we shared as teens.

Contents

A BEGINNING

West Point Lighthouse

JANUARY 1

Alki Lighthouse

FEBRUARY 1

Lime Kiln Lighthouse

MARCH 1

Slip Point Lighthouse

APRIL 1

Cape Flattery Lighthouse

MAY 1

New Dungeness Lighthouse

JUNE 1

Mukilteo Lighthouse

JULY 1

Patos Island Lighthouse

AUGUST 1

Admiralty Head Lighthouse

SEPTEMBER 1

Point Robinson Lighthouse

OCTOBER 1

Brown’s Point Lighthouse

NOVEMBER 1

END NOTES

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About the Author

Also by M. L. Buchman

A BEGINNING

Russell locked his studio’s door behind the last of the staff, leaned his back against it, and turned off his camera.

He knew it was good. The images were there; he’d really captured them.

But something was missing.

The groove ran so clean when he slid into it. First his Manhattan high-ceilinged loft would fade into the background, then the strobe lights, reflector umbrellas, and blue and green backdrops all became texture and tone.

Image, camera, and man then became one and they were all that mattered—a single flow of light, beginning before time was counted, and ending its journey in the printed image. One ray of primordial light traveling forever to glisten off the BMW roadster still parked in one corner of the rough-planked wood floor worn smooth by generations of use. Another ray lost in the dark blackness of the finest leather bucket seats. A hundred more picking out the supermodel’s perfect hand dangling a single shining and golden key—the image shot just slow enough that the key blurred as it spun, but the logo remained clear.

He couldn’t quite put his finger on it…

It would be another great ad by Russell Morgan, Inc. The client would be knocked dead—the ad leaving all others standing still as it roared down the passing lane. This one might get him another Clio, or even a second Mobius.

But…

There wasn’t usually a “but.”

And there definitely wasn’t supposed to be one.

The groove had definitely been there, but he hadn’t been in it.

That was the problem. It had slid along, sweeping his staff into their own orchestrated perfection, but he’d remained untouched. That ideal, seamless flow hadn’t included him at all.

“Be honest, boyo, that session sucked,” he told the empty studio. Everything had come together so perfectly for yet another ad for yet another high-end glossy. Man, the Magazine would launch spectacularly in a few weeks, a high-profile mid-December launch, and it would include a never before seen twelve-page spread by the great Russell Morgan. The rag would probably never pay off the lavish launch party of hope, ice sculptures, and chilled magnums of champagne before disappearing like a thousand before it.

He stowed the last camera he’d been using with the others piled by his computer. At the breaker box he shut off the umbrellas, spots, scoops, and washes. The studio shifted from a stark landscape in hard-edged relief to a nest of curious shadows and rounded forms. The tang of hot metal and deodorant were the only lasting result of the day’s efforts.

“Morose tonight, aren’t we?” he asked his reflection in the darkened window, stories above the streetlights of West 10th. His reflection was wise enough to not answer back. There was never a “down” after a shoot; there was always an “up.”

Not tonight.

He’d kept everyone late—even though it was Thanksgiving eve—hoping for that smooth slide of image-camera-man. It was only when he saw the power of the images he captured that he knew he wasn’t a part of the chain anymore and decided he’d paid enough triple-time expenses.

The next to last two-page spread was the killer—shot with the door open against a background as black as the sports car’s finish. The model’s single perfect leg wrapped in thigh-high red-leather boots was all that was visible in the driver’s seat. The sensual juxtaposition of woman and sleek machine served as an irresistible focus. It was an ad designed to wrap every person with even a hint of a Y-chromosome around its little finger. And those with only X-chromosomes would simply want to be her. He’d shot a perfect combo of sexuality for the guys and power for the women.

Even the final one-page image, a close-up of driver’s seat from exactly the same angle, revealing not the model but instead a single rose of precisely the same hue as the leather boot, hadn’t moved him despite its perfection.

Without him noticing, Russell had become no more than the observer, merely a technician behind the camera. Now that he faced it, months, maybe even a year had passed since he’d been yanked all the way into the light-image-camera-man slipstream. Tonight was a wakeup call and he didn’t like it one bit. Wakeup calls were supposed to happen to others, not him. But tonight he could no longer ignore it, he hadn’t even trailed in the churned-up wake.

“You’re just a creative cog in the advertising machine.” Ouch! That one stung, but it didn’t turn aside the relentless steamroller of his thoughts speeding down some empty, godforsaken autobahn.

His career was roaring ahead, his business’ growth running fast and smooth, but, now that he considered it, he really couldn’t bring himself to care.

His life looked perfect, but—“Don’t think it!”—his autobahn mind finished despite the command, it wasn’t.

Russell left his silent reflection to its own thoughts and went through the back door that led to his apartment—closing it tightly on the perfect BMW, the perfect rose, and somewhere, lost among a hundred other props from dozens of other shoots, the long pair of perfect red-leather Chanel boots that had been wrapped around the most expensive legs in Manhattan. He didn’t care if he never walked back through that door again. He’d been doing his art by rote; how pathetic was that?

And just to rub salt in the wound, he shot commercialart.

He’d never had the patience to do art for art’s sake. Delayed gratification was his idea of no fun at all. He left the apartment dark with only the city’s soft glow through the blind-covered windows revealing the vaguest outlines of the framed art on the wall. Even that almost overwhelmed him tonight.

He didn’t want to see the huge prints by the art artists: autographed Goldsworthy, Liebowitz, and Joseph Francis’ photomosaics for the moderns. A hundred and fifty rare, even one-of-a-kind prints adorned his walls—all the way back through Bourke-White to Russell’s prize, an original Daguerre. The Museum of Modern Art kept begging to borrow his collection for a show…and at the moment he was half tempted to dump the whole lot in their Dumpster if they didn’t want it.

Crossing the one-room loft apartment—as spacious as the studio—he bypassed the circle of avant-garde chairs that were almost as uncomfortable as they looked and avoided the lush black-leather wrap-around sectional sofa of such ludicrous scale that it could be a playpen for two or host a party for twenty. He cracked the fridge in the stainless-steel-and-black corner kitchen searching for something other than his usual beer.

A bottle of Krug.

Maybe he was just being grouchy after a long day’s work.

Juice.

No. He’d run his enthusiasm into the ground but good.

Milk even.

Would he miss the camera if he never picked it up again?

No reaction.

Nothing.

Not even a twinge.

That was an emptiness he did not want to face. Especially not alone, in his apartment, in the middle of the world’s most vibrant city.

Russell turned away, and just as the door swung closed, the last sliver of light—the relentless chilly blue-white of the refrigerator bulb—shone across his bed. A quick grab snagged the edge of the door and left the narrow beam illuminating a long pale form on his black bedspread.

The Chanel boots weren’t in the studio after all. They were still wrapped around those three thousand dollar-an-hour legs: the only clothing on a perfect body, five foot-eleven of intensely toned female anatomy, right down to her exquisitely stair-mastered behind. Her long, white-blond hair lay as a perfect Godiva over her tanned bosom—except for the too-exact symmetry, even the closest inspection didn’t reveal the work done there. She lay with one leg raised just ever so slightly to hide what was meant to be revealed later.

Melanie.

By the steady rise and fall of her flat stomach, he knew she’d fallen asleep while waiting for him to finish in the studio.

How long had they been an item? Two months? Three?

She’d made him feel alive…at least when he was actually with her. Melanie was the supermodel in his bed or on his arm at yet another SoHo gallery opening. Together they journeyed to sharp parties and trendy three-star restaurants where she dazzled and wooed yet another gathering of New York’s finest with her ever so soft, so sensual, and so studied French accent. Together they were wired into the heart of the in-crowd.

But that wasn’t him, was it? It didn’t sound like the Russell he once knew.

Perhaps “they” were about how he looked on herarm?

Did she know tomorrow was the annual Thanksgiving ordeal at his parents? The grand holiday gathering that he’d rather die than attend? Any number of eligible woman would be floating about his parents’ house out in Greenwich; anyone able to finagle an invitation would attend in hopes of snaring one of People Magazine’s “100 Most Eligible.” They all wanted to land the heir to a billion or some such; though he was wealthy enough on his own, by his own sweat, to draw anyone’s attention. He ranked number twenty-four on the list this year—up from forty-seven the year before despite Tom Cruise being available yet again.

But not Melanie. He knew that it wasn’t the money that drew her. Yes, she wanted him. But even more, she wanted the life that came with him—wrapped in the man-package. She wanted The Life. The one that People Magazine readers dreamed about between glossy pages.

His fingertips were growing cold where they held the refrigerator door cracked open.

If he woke her they’d have a great time heating up the sheets. Or a great party to go to. Or…

Did he want “Or”? What more did he want from her?

The supermodel in his bed. Companionship. An energy, a vivacity, a thirst he feared that he lacked. Yes.

But where was that smooth synchronicity hiding, like the light-image-camera-man of photography that he’d lost? Where lurked that perfect flow from one person to another? Did she feel it? Could he ever feel it?

“More?” he whispered into the darkness to test the sound.

The refrigerator door slid shut—escaping from his numbed fingers—which plunged the apartment back into darkness, taking Melanie along with it.

His breath echoed in the vast darkness. Proof that he was alive, if nothing more.

It was time to close the studio—time to be done with Russell Incorporated.

Then what?

Maybe Angelo would know what to do. He always claimed that he did. Maybe this time Russell would actually listen to his almost-brother, though he knew from the experience of being himself for the last thirty years that was unlikely.

Seattle.

No! He’d have to go to Seattle, of all ridiculous places, to find his best friend. There was a possible upside to such a trip—maybe there’d be a flight out before tomorrow’s mess at his parents’. He slapped his pocket, but once again he’d set his phone down in some unknown corner of the studio and it would take forever to find. He really needed two—one chained down so that he could always find it to call the other.

Russell considered the darkness. He could guarantee that Seattle wouldn’t be a big hit with Melanie.

Now if he only knew whether that was a good thing or bad.

West Point Lighthouse

Discovery Park, Seattle

First lit: 1881

Automated: 1985

47.6617 -122.43499

Chief Boatswain’s Mate Christian Fritz served as the lighthouse keeper for many years in the early 1900s. One of the reasons he chose the West Point lighthouse posting was that the terrain from the keeper’s cottage to the lighthouse was relatively level. This allowed his blind wife to freely stroll the station’s grounds accompanied by her guide dog, a boxer named Cookie.

In 1985, it was the last lighthouse in Washington State to be automated despite its close proximity to Seattle.

JANUARY 1

“If you were still alive, you’d pay for this one, Daddy.” The moment the words escaped her lips, Cassidy Knowles slapped a hand over her mouth to negate them, but it was too late.

The sharp wind took her words and threw them back into the pines, guilt and all. It might have stopped her, if it didn’t make this the hundredth time she’d cursed him this morning.

She leaned in and forged her way downhill until the muddy path broke free from the mossy smell of the forest. Her Stuart Weitzman boots were long since soaked through, and now her feet were freezing. In a last gasp effort before the chill trees would let her go, a root snagged two-inch heels again and tried to flip her into the mud.

Free at last, Cassidy stared at the lighthouse. It perched upon a point of rock: tall and white, with its red roof as straight and snug as a prim bonnet. A narrow trail traced along the top of the breakwater leading to the lighthouse. The parking lot, much to her chagrin, was empty; six, beautiful, empty spaces.

“Sorry, ma’am,” park rangers were always polite when telling you what you couldn’t do. “The parking lot by the light is for physically-challenged visitors only. You’ll have to park here. It is just a short walk to the lighthouse.”

The fact that she was dressed for an afternoon lunch at Pike Place Market safe in Seattle’s downtown rather than a blustery mile-long trek on the first day of the year didn’t faze the ranger in the slightest.

Cassidy should have gone home, would have if it hadn’t been for the letter stuffed deep in her pocket. So, instead of a tasty treat in a cozy deli, she’d buttoned the top button of her suede Bernardo jacket and headed out onto the trail. At least the promised rain had yet to arrive, so the jacket was only cold, not wet.

Finally free of the trees, a new problem arose. Beyond the lighthouse ranged a vast expanse of Puget Sound and it was being whipped into a frenzy like someone desperate to make a towering meringue rather than a smooth zabaglione custard. Whitecaps tore off the tops of waves, dark clouds scudded low over the water, and the far shore might as well have been the North Pole rather than Bainbridge Island for how inviting it looked. The towering heights of the Olympic Mountains scraped at the clouds with glacier-clad peaks.

Her jacket’s stylish cut had never been intended to fight off these bajillion mile-an-hour gusts that snapped it painfully against her hips. Her black leggings ranged about five layers short of tolerable and a far, far cry from warm.

Approaching the lighthouse across the exposed—and utterly vacant—parking lot, any part of her that had been merely numb slipped right over to quick frozen. Leaning into the wind to stay upright, tears streaming from her eyes, she could think of a thing or two to tell her father despite his recent demise and her general feelings about the usefulness of upbraiding a dead man.

“What a stupid present!” Her shout was torn word-by-word, syllable-by-syllable and sent flying back toward her nice warm car and the ever-so-polite park ranger.

A calendar. Her dad had given her a stupid calendar of stupid lighthouses and a stupid letter to open at each stupid one. He’d been very insistent, made her promise. One she couldn’t ignore. A deathbed promise.

Cassidy leaned grimly forward to walk through the onslaught only to have the wind abruptly cease. She staggered, nearly planting her face on the pavement before another gust rescued her but sent her crabbing sideways. With resolute force, she planted one foot in front of the other until she’d crossed the open pavement. There weren’t any handicapped people crazy enough to come here New Year’s morning. No people at all for that matter.

The empty lot and the lighthouse were separated by a short path along the top of a rocky breakwater. Boulders the size of her car had been piled up to resist the pounding of the sea. The top had been made into a solid path, so her footing was sure even if the wind continued to buffet her wildly.

The building’s wall was concrete, worn smooth by a thousand storms and a hundred coats of brilliant white paint. With the wind practically pinning her to the outside of the building, she peeked into one of the windows. Her hair blew about so that it beat on her eyes and mouth trying to simultaneously blind and choke her. With one hand, she smashed the unruly mass mostly to one side. With the other she shaded the dusty window.

The cobwebbed glass revealed an equally unkempt interior: no lightkeeper sitting in his rocking chair before a merry fire with his smoking pipe and a lighthouse cat curled in his lap. There was some sort of a rusty engine not attached to anything. A bucket of old tools. A couple of paint cans.

A high wave crashed into the rocks with a thundering shudder that ran up through the heels of her boots and whipped a chill spray into the wind. Salt water on suede—Daddy now owed her a new coat as well.

Cassidy edged along the foundation until she found a calmer spot, a little windshadow behind the lighthouse where the wind chill ranked merely miserable rather than horrific on the suck-o-meter. Squatting down behind one of the breakwater’s boulders helped a tiny bit more. She peeled off her thin leather gloves and blew against her fingertips to warm them enough so that they’d work. Once she’d regained some modicum of feeling, she pulled out the letter.

She couldn’t feel his actual writing, though she ran her fingertips over it again and again. His Christmas present: a five-dollar calendar of Washington lighthouses from the hospital gift store and a dozen thin envelopes wrapped in an old x-ray folder with no ribbon, no paper.

In the end he’d foiled her final Christmas hunt. It had been her great yearly quest—the ultimate grail of childhood—finding the key present before Christmas morning. There was no present he could hide that she couldn’t find. Not the Cabbage Patch Kid when she was six; the one she’d had to hold with her arm in a cast after falling off the kitchen stool she’d dragged into her father’s closet to aid the search. Not the used VW Rabbit he’d hidden out in the wine shed thinking that she never went there anymore. And she didn’t, except for some reason that day before her eighteenth Christmas.

A part of her wanted to crumple the letter up and throw it into the sea. It was too soon. She didn’t want to face the pain again.

Too soon.

She looked out at the crashing waves. With a sudden howl of wind, a slash of spray roared by mere feet from her face, barely averted by the staunch tower of the lighthouse. Clearly someone wasn’t happy about her desire to avoid the task at hand.

The rest of her body did what it supposed to do. The dutiful daughter opened the envelope and pinned the letter against her thigh so that she could read the slashing scrawl that was her father’s. Even as weak with sickness as he must have been, it looked scribed in stone. His bold-stroke writing gave the words a force and strength just as his deep voice had once sounded strong enough to keep the world at bay for a little girl.

Dearest Ice Sweet,

He’d always called her that. Icewine. The grapes for icewine were traditionally harvested on her birthday, December twenty-first. “The sweetest wine of all, my little ice sweet girl.” By the age of five she knew about the sugar content of icewine, Riesling, Chardonnay, and a dozen others. By eight she could identify scores of vintages just by the scent of the cork and hundreds by their logos though she’d yet to taste more than thimblefuls of watered wine at any one time.

Cassidy stared at the waves digging angrily at the rocks not far below her feet. The wind dragged tears from her eyes even as she struggled to blink them dry. She hadn’t cried in a long time and she was damned if she was going to start now simply because she was cold and there was a hole in her heart.

Just seven days. She’d looked away for a one moment seven days ago—and he was gone. Christmas morning. He’d hung on long enough to tell her of his last present, hidden in plain sight in the used x-ray folder on the bedside table. A long list of crossed-out names had shuttled films back and forth across Northwest Hospital.

I bought this calendar the day you moved back to Seattle. Marked in all the “dates.” Now I know that I won’t get to go with you. I’m sorry to leave you so young.

“I’m twenty-nine, Daddy.” But it felt young. Her birthday gone unremarked because he’d never woken that day so close to his last.

The hole in her heart was so broad that it would never be filled. He’d only been gone a week. Cremated, waked, and ashes spread on his beloved vineyard by the permission of the new owners. They’d owned his vineyard for five years, but still, they were the new ones. It wasn’t right—them living in the place where her father belonged. She could picture him so easily striding among the vines, rubbing the soil in his palm, showing his only child the wonders of the changing seasons, the lifecycle of a grapevine, and the nurturing of honeybees.

For our first “date” I will just tell you how proud I am of you. My daughter took a vintner’s education and turned herself into the best food-and-wine columnist ever.

He always believed in her. Always rooted for her. Her number one fan had always cheered her on. He’d been the same way with her boyfriends: welcoming them when they arrived, consoling her when they were gone, and offering no harsh judgment—not even about the boys she should have avoided like a bottle of rotgut Thunderbird.

The wind rattled the paper, drawing her attention back to the letter.

You are so like me. You figure out what feels right and you just go do it; damn the consequences. I could never fault you for leaving. I always did what I wanted, too. Saw it and went right for it, no discussion needed, always wearing perfect blinders that blocked out everything else. You got that from me. You come by your whimsical stubbornness honestly, Ice Sweet.

But he was wrong, she wasn’t stubborn. It had taken years of careful planning for her to reach this far. Even her move to Seattle to be with him had been calculated, though she never told him about that. She shifted on the hard rock that was in imminent danger of freezing her butt.

Her father kept apologizing for all the wrong things. Seattle had ended up being a great career move, or was finally becoming one as she’d hoped. In New York, she worked as one of a thousand food and wine reviewers. Okay one in fifty—maybe even one in twenty-five, she was damn good—but there were only three women at that level. The other twenty-two were members of longstanding in the old boys’ club.

“We’re looking for someone with a more refined palate.” Read that as someone who was “male.”

She’d let go of her sublet in Manhattan when she’d found out her father was sick. Bought a condo in Seattle to be near, but not too near him on Bainbridge Island. Helped him move into the elder-care by Northgate when he couldn’t care for himself any longer and from there to Northwest Hospital where she’d lived out his last two weeks in the chair by his bed.

The Village Voice dropped her the day she left Manhattan. That had hurt as they’d run her first-ever review, a short piece on Jim and Charlie’s Punk and Wine Bistro. Jim and Charlie’s was still there, partly thanks to that review that was still framed and hung in the center of bar’s mirror.

But in Seattle she was rapidly rising to the very upper crust of the apple pie. Her reviews ran in every local paper. The San Francisco Chronicle had picked her up for their Travel section the next week making it difficult to stay grumpy about the loss of The Voice. Then AAA took her national with a regular column for their magazines. From there, it hadn’t been a big step to national syndication. Six more months in New York and she’d have still been grinding her way up from the twentieth spot to the nineteenth. She was going to bypass the lot of them by skipping right past the “required” and sitting at the head table herself.

Her father’s cancer had brought at least that much good.

Now if only it hadn’t taken him with it.

And she wasn’t whimsical no matter what he thought. Her dad had always described her mother as the organized one. And Cassidy had done her best to be just like her. You didn’t become a top columnist by following the wind all willy-nilly.

If she didn’t hurry, she was going to freeze in place. She chafed at her legs with one hand and then the other, but it didn’t help. She was cold past any cure less than a piping hot bath. She peeked ahead in the letter, just two and a bit more pages. She turned to the second sheet, barely managing not to lose the first to the wind.

I started the vineyard after my tour in Vietnam. Got signed off the base and walked out of San Francisco right across the Golden Gate. No home, no job, and no one to go back to. I headed up into the hills; didn’t even know why or where I was. I walked and hitched ‘til dark, slept, woke with the light, and kept moving.

One morning, I woke up in a field close to a rotting, wooden fencepost, looking at the saddest little vineyard you could imagine. Poor vines dying of thirst. I found an old bucket and started watering them from a nearby stream. An old man came out to lean on the fence. Watched me quite a while, a couple hours maybe. I didn’t care about him. Those vines were the first thing I’d cared about in a long, long time.

“You want ‘em?” the old guy asked. “Five hundred bucks and they’re yours.”

I don’t even remember how it happened. One minute my final pay was in my pocket, then in his. Later on, other vets drifted in. I charged them fifty bucks to join. Five of us worked the land and recovered those vines. That was the start of the thirty acres of Knowles Valley Vineyard.

She’d never heard how his first vineyard started. Didn’t even really know where it was, somewhere in the hills of northern California. Though he might have ambled all the way to Oregon for how much she knew.

Walk the year with me. Let’s take our time. My past is mine, but your future is not. That’s only up to you. That I leave you to walk alone, though I’ll warn you that it’s a rough trail often over rocky soil. But keep your head high and you’ll go far.

Whatever happens, know that I love you. I’m so proud of you.

Love you Ice Sweet,

Vic

Vic. He always signed his letters “Vic.” Never what she’d always called him. “Daddy.”

I could never fault you for leaving.

Yet between the lines that’s just what he did. Nothing on the backs of any of the pages. She worked to refold the pages in the wind. The damp chill was now worse inside than outside her skin. The weather was a nasty, temperamental thing, clawing to reach her; this pain she felt right down to deep inside.

“No, you’re imagining things, Cass. You think too much. Get your head out of your own butt.” And she mostly did. One of the many gifts Vic Knowles had given her, the ability to be clear about her own actions and reactions.

He’d financed her dream of getting away from the rain capital of the Pacific Northwest. He’d paid for her college in full and cooking school after that. It was only while cleaning up his papers this last week that she saw how close it had come to breaking him. He’d just made it a natural assumption that she’d go to college and he’d pay. Just like her mom who had a degree in economics from Vassar. He’d always talked about how smart Cassidy’s mother was.

“Just look in the mirror, Ice Sweet, and you’ll see she was the most beautiful woman you can imagine. I miss her every day.”

She tried to see, but all she ever saw was herself. She did better without the mirror. Even now, looking north along the steep, conifer-clad shore and over the heavy waves she could imagine her father happy. A woman with soft brown hair who did and didn’t look like Cassidy at his side.

He hadn’t gone to college himself, not even high school. His past was little more than a few facts she’d winnowed over the years. His own dad had left before he could remember. He’d dropped out of third grade to help his mother run the grocery store. They were desperately poor when she died. Then he’d gone to Vietnam at eighteen as the only way to make a living wage. And walked to a vineyard. But he gave Cassidy that gift of education as if it was no hardship to him.

Did he now begrudge her that past? The future he never had.

No. That didn’t make any sense. He hadn’t thought about the money, he’d invested in his dreams for her. She was just going nuts from missing him so much and angry at him for being dead.

“Useful, Cass, real useful.”

To prove her sanity, she forced the rumpled letter back into the envelope, as neatly as possible in the midst of the maelstrom, and she forced that back into her leather pack.

Her father, the self-educated man, also the most well-read man she’d ever met. But she’d learned early on to do her math and science homework before he came home from the fields. His frustration at being unable to help her there had always been a strain.

Cassidy’s mother was a single solitary memory. It had been a night as foul-tempered as this day. Mama had been standing in the open doorway of the house, leaving to answer a call to the hospital. Odd, Daddy had never mentioned her nursing school days, but talking about her had always hurt him, so Cassidy had learned not to ask.

The wind at the door had blown her mother’s long hair across her face as she leaned on Daddy’s arm. That was Cassidy’s only memory of Adrianne Knowles, a woman with no face. Then Bea Clark had rushed in from next door to sit with her.

She and Daddy did talk about the many books though. He had sharpened her mind as they puzzled them out together. Ayn Rand piled next to Shakespeare, Heinlein beside Hugo, and Dickens leaning against a biography of Jimi Hendrix. Their house was always awash in books. And the massive collection of wine books, thumbed again and again by both of them, the only books to have a proper bookcase, had sat in the place of honor in the living room. Everything else jumbled into stacked wooden crates, mounded on tops of dressers, and enough on the dining table to make it a battle to find room for their two plates.

The chill spray of a particularly large wave spattered her with a few drops, and the next with a few more. The tide must be coming in.

She scrambled from her hiding place and rose back into the wind which threatened to topple her off the breakwater and down into the roaring waves. She forged her way back to the parking lot. The wind tore at her backpack and thumped it against her spine. The camera. Right.

She squatted to get out of the wind and pulled out her trusty point-and-shoot. The wind nearly blinded her when she turned back into it. Her hair swirled about her head, completely in the way.

A sailboat. Two lunatics in a sailboat were off the point of land. A cobalt-blue hull climbed out of one wave, pointing its bow to the sky, and then plunged down and buried its nose in the front of the next wave before rising again in a great arc of spray and green water. Huge, maroon sails snapped in the wind, loud enough to sound like a gunshot above the roaring surf.

Whoever the captain was, he and his buddy were crazy. They must both be male because no woman in her right mind would ever go out into a storm like this. But if they wanted to sail right into her picture, she wasn’t going to complain; it was a beautiful boat. At the perfect moment she snapped the photo then turned for the woods and the long trail home.

“Hey Angelo. Take the helm.” Russell had to shout to be heard above the sharp crack of the dark-red mainsail.

“Got it, Captain.” His friend grinned at him as he grabbed the tiller and they slid across the waves off the West Point lighthouse.

Russell let out a whoop as they rode high over a crest, paused, and went briefly weightless before they plunged into the next trough. The Lady Amalthea had been built for weather like this. At first Russell had been afraid of such heavy weather. His parents’ boat, Julia—a twenty-eight footer they kept at the summer place on Fire Island—would have had a very tough time in this sea. At fifty feet long, the Lady just ate it up; she practically flew over the wavetops.

He ducked below and grabbed his camera.

Belowdecks would definitely need some work. Okay, a lot of work. The only decent thing in the old gal was the forward stateroom. Russell could hardly wait. The marine surveyor had pronounced both the hull and mast sound and that was all he cared about. The interior just needed to be torn out and redone. He’d have to figure out a better system for diesel than that old beer keg strapped to the engine room wall. Get her plumbed for fresh water and wired with more than an old car battery charger. But she really had potential. Most importantly, the Lady sailed like there was no tomorrow.

He scrambled back on deck and started snapping pictures. Angelo posed in his foul weather gear, the yellow slicks and orange float jacket making him look as much like a clown as a sailor. He made some foolish faces to go with it and Russell captured them for posterity. He’d send the most ridiculous one to Angelo’s mother, Maria, just to shame him on his next visit home.

Then he aimed at the lighthouse and snapped off a couple dozen images. He didn’t even bother to check the LCD, they’d be good. The lighthouse perched on the rocky edge of Discovery Park was too photogenic a place for bad pictures. He bracketed the exposure and focus just to be sure. It was perfect. Steep, wooded cliff rising up behind the pristine white and red of the squat lighthouse. He’d crop the image to avoid the sprawl of the treatment plant just around the rocks to the north.

He tried to get the rhythm of the lighthouse’s flash: alternating white and red every ten seconds. He got them both then stowed the camera away.

“Ready about?” Angelo called from above.

Russell scrambled back on deck, checked the lines, and preset the port jib sheet next to the winch. The line felt oversized but solid in his hand, the rope was a half-inch thick just to handle the sail, the same size as the anchor line on his parents’ Julia.

“Ready.”

“Helm’s a lee!” Angelo threw over the tiller and the Lady lifted up her bow and spun like a dancer.

Russell waited until the very last second before releasing the starboard line and heaving in on the port one. Moments later the line snapped taught and would have flipped him overboard if he hadn’t let go, a rope burn creased his palms with searing heat.

Angelo was laughing his head off. “And you, Mister Great Sailor, are going to solo around the world?”

“Shaddup, Angelo. It was your idea.”

“I gave you a hundred ideas on Thanksgiving Day, I figured you wouldn’t listen to any of them like usual, especially not this one. What about being a scuba instructor off Fiji with all of the cute tourists?”

The boat slammed over another wave like she was skating on glass.

“Nah! Not for me. Don’t like getting my hair wet.”

He saw Angelo twitch the tiller, but he didn’t move fast enough. A wave plowed into his face, freezing rivulets of seawater running right past the tight collar of his float jacket and down his back underneath. He lost the line for the jib sheet again and the line whipped away. The jib sail luffing with sharp slaps and cracks.

He sputtered and spat as Angelo pointed the boat’s bow back into the wind.

Russell retrieved the sheet and hauled it back in, and leery of Angelo, passed it several times around the winch as he did so. Russell grabbed the winch handle and ratcheted in the last few feet of line.

”She’s bigger than Dad’s Julia.”

“Duh! That jib, the sail that’s so much smarter than you, has more area than both of hers.”

True. He’d bought a big boat. But she flew so sweet that he knew he’d made the right choice. And only a nut would try crossing an ocean in a twenty-eight footer. He’d looked at a sixty-five footer, but it was more boat than he wanted to wrestle with. That really would need two people and heaven knows you couldn’t count on two.

Melanie had been some serious kind of pissed. And that was before he’d decided to stay in Seattle past a few days to visit Angelo. Now she wasn’t even speaking to him; at least he didn’t think she was. He’d dropped his phone overboard and hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet.

Russell looked back at the lighthouse.

“You know they wanted to automate her in 1979. The lighthouse keeper begged them to let him keep running it, at least until her hundredth birthday. On her centenary in 1981, the keeper climbed up to the outside of the light and sprayed a bottle of champagne over her. Legend has it he also danced a hornpipe up there.”

“A good choice for the January lighthouse.” Angelo pointed ahead. “Where are we going?”

Russell ducked low to peek under the sail. The western shore of the Sound was a half-dozen miles off. Some rain was moving in, but they were dressed for that. It was too perfect a day to turn back for the marina yet. He waved ahead.

“Thatta way. The isle of Tortuga.”

“Aye, Mon Capitaine.” They both laughed. Nothing like a good pirate movie quote when you were off sailing. The crazed French accent made as much sense from his short, Italian friend as it had from a tall, English Basil Rathbone.

Russell let the main out a bit to get better air flow across the upper third of the sail and then headed forward to inspect the boat under way. The tail end of the jib halyard had slipped free and was snaked all over the deck. He checked aloft. The halyard ran clean up to the top of the mast, over a pulley at the top and down to the top of the jib sail. Damn that was a tall mast. Sixty-five feet from water to masthead, sixty from where he stood on the cabin roof. He looped the line into a neat hank and hung it back over the cleat. The lines would have to be routed back to the cockpit so that he could single-hand her in rougher weather. That meant longer lines. He glanced aloft again.

“Well, I’m gonna have to climb you someday. Just like a six-story walkup back in Manhattan, so I should be okay.” He didn’t feel so certain as he watched it whipping back and forth across the sky each time she leapt over the next wave.

He made an inventory as he walked forward. New hatches, these were old and leaking despite their layers of duct tape. Most of the rope rigging would have to go. Some of the wire too.

His heel found another of the squishy spots in the decking. He’d have to rip off the bubbled fiberglass covering from the whole deck and deal with any rot under there. And the bowsprit definitely needed safety lines—the sprit stuck six feet over the emptiness of heaving waves. That would take some thinking.

A thirty-five pound anchor rested in the split and worn mahogany of a deck chock. The Julia’s anchor weighed fifteen. When he’d unearthed the Lady’s sixty-pound storm anchor under the forward bunk with another twenty-five pounds of chain, he felt a little humbled.

Leaning against the taut jib sail for support, he edged out onto the slender bowsprit. He grabbed hold of the wire forestay that rose from the tip of the sprit and soared to the top of the mainmast—fine for Puget Sound, not up for an ocean crossing. He added, “make it a double stay,” to his mental list.

Then he got his face into the air ahead of the sail. The wind roared in his ears. The bow sliced the waves below his feet laying twin white curls of water to either side. The air was so fresh and so clean it was impossible that it was the same stuff that he’d breathed every day in New York. Here it was in his face, in his hair—in his soul.

It was the most alive he’d ever felt and he never wanted it to end.

Before Cassidy had felt even a little normal after yesterday’s outing, it had required a very long, very hot bath and most of an afternoon curled up in front of the gas fire. The drenching rain had caught her halfway back to the car. Her suede jacket was a ruin and her leggings had defended her for thirty seconds, at most.

This, at least, she knew how to solve. REI may have expanded into a national brand, but their flagship store was just a few blocks from the Seattle Times where Jack was an editor. She should have set up a lunch date, they hadn’t seen each other in a week, but she couldn’t find the energy. Not the best of signs, but she’d think about that later.

The underground parking garage was a collection of small, ratty cars that should never have seen the light of day and a fleet of Toyota and Honda hybrids. She parked her dad’s five-year-old Jetta and glanced around for the inevitable parking level reminders. “Evergreen.” She wasn’t on level “2,” she was parked on a tree. And there was no sign of an elevator anywhere.

The small exit sign indicated that the garage was in no way connected to the store.

She went back outside and clambered up the walkways and bridges over an artificial waterfall that was actually quite impressive. It roared and splashed, even had spray. She could smell the damp mist on the morning air as she hiked up concrete stairs spiraling through the trees.

The elevator, when she finally found it, was outdoors as well and wholly unused. Apparently everyone who came here was so damn outdoorsy that they took the stairs up above the waterfall. She stabbed the button for the top level. Rapped it twice more for good measure.

The glass elevator stopped on a wide concrete veranda that afforded a view out over downtown Seattle and the older buildings of the Denny Regrade. It was a magnificent view of the city. Though Puget Sound would soon be gone as Seattle continued its growth, Queen Anne Hill would be visible for decades to come.

A latte vendor tended his outdoor stall and a crowd clustered about pretending it wasn’t thirty-six degrees and drizzling on the second of January. They were clearly all certifiable. Being born and raised locally had not provided her with the die-hard, outdoorsman independent spirit that was still de rigueur in Seattle.

She raced through the foyer doors. A greeter smiled and asked if she needed any help. Cassidy assured her she was okay. It was warm inside and buying clothes was one thing she could handle.

A shout drew her attention upward. A twisted rock some forty feet high soared upward at the end of the lobby. A woman was falling—Cassidy let out a scream to match the climber’s just as a safety rope jerked tight and the climber swung brutally against the stone.

Then Cassidy heard the woman’s laughter over the pounding of her own heart.

A man clung to another face. “Quit goofing around, Teri. You fall on El Capitan and we’re going to let you go.”

“Gimme a break, Tom. I slipped is all.”

Cassidy hurried through the main door, resisting the hesitancy about grabbing the nasty ice axes that served as door handles.

Maybe she did need help, like help packing a moving van and getting back to New York. Or at least with the vast arrays of equipment that spread before her in every direction. To her left was a rack of backpacks big enough for her to climb into, each with a thousand straps. To her right were more sleeping bags than she’d seen since her one Girl Scouts’ camp-out.

“Keep moving, Cass.” Books, energy bars, silvery packets marked “stroganoff” and another “ice cream.” Even as she watched, someone selected a half dozen packets and put them into a basket. She moved on and entered a world of kayaks, with nothing but canoes and bicycles beyond. To her right, skis and snowboards. A bit farther, boots.

Boots!

She needed boots, good start. She’d work from the bottom up. A plan of attack, excellent. It still took her some exploring to discover these were all ski boots and that walking boots were up on the massive mezzanine level.

Once there, she moved across the plank flooring and entered the racks of boots, but it didn’t smell like it should. There was no canvas and fine leather of Nordstrom or Saks nor the mellower tang of Gucci, not even the smooth sweetness of Armani. There was a heaviness like saddles that had hung too long in a tack room. Manly boots doing manly things.

Reaching the end of the boot aisle, she faced the wall of individual boots waiting for their mates. There wasn’t a single manufacturer she recognized. Neither Anne Klein nor Kenneth Cole walked here. These all had tough, outdoorsy names: Vasque, Montrail, Ugg. Even the women’s boots were from these companies marinated in testosterone.

“Can I help you?” Cassidy turned, and an incredibly fit girl who looked no more than nineteen confronted her in a little green vest and a white turtleneck. This time she’d take the assistance.

“I need some new boots.” Her three-hundred dollar Weitzman’s had dissolved on the trail back to the car. She’d lost a heel when it got stuck between two rocks. As she prowled about the park in the driving rain seeking the right parking lot among the forest, the leather had actually separated from the sole. She’d done the last hundred yards with the broken boot in her hand, her sock-covered foot squishing with freezing mud, and the other leg two inches longer at the heel. It was amazing she hadn’t gotten frostbite or something.

“Do you know what kind you want?”

Again she faced the wall. They all looked the same, with brown tops and black rubber soles. But she knew how to handle that as well.

“The best.”

“What kind of hiking are you doing?”

“That matters?”

The girl was really polite. Not at a Nordstrom personal shopper level, but she managed to hide any disdain she was feeling from her perfect, teenage face.

“Oh, yes.” She pointed at the one pair with a four-hundred dollar price tag. “We just sold eight pairs of those to a women’s team who are taking on the seven summits challenge.”

“The seven summits?” Cassidy had entered not only another world, but they spoke a different language here.

“Kilimanjaro, Denali, Elbrus, Aconcagua, Carstenz Pyramid, and Everest. I’m forgetting one. Hold on. Don’t tell me.”

As if Cassidy might have a clue what she was talking about.

Her blue eyes searched about. “Oh, and Vinson. I always forget Vinson.”

“Vinson?” Kilimanjaro, Denali, and Everest were the only ones she’d ever heard of but she finally got the idea. The highest peaks on each continent. And a team of women were going to climb them in those boots. The ones perched smugly right there on the wall glaring down at her for daring to enter their presence.

“Antarctica. Nearly five thousand meters. I like to read about it, but I’d never be crazy enough to try it.” The girl was terribly cheerful, which would be irritating if it weren’t so genuine.

“I, uh, won’t be climbing Vinson.”

The girl laughed, “Everest either?”

“Nope.” She joined in the laugh and it felt good.

“Heavy backpack?” The girl inspected her from the black leather jacket down to her Josef Seibel heeled, leather loafers, but was nice enough to keep her thoughts to herself as Cassidy was demoted another level.

“Nope.”

“Walks around Greenlake?”

“A bit tougher than that.” Slogging uphill through the mud and the moss, definitely a bit tougher than the three-mile, paved jogging path.

“Light hiking, but the best?”

“Yes, that sounds good.”

The girl reached out and unerringly grabbed a boot that looked just like all the others. She excitedly launched into a long description, but after Cassidy heard the word “waterproof,” she tuned out the rest. That would teach the sticky mud to mess with a veteran shopper.

Most of the other items fell to similar tactics. She became better at it as item after item filled her basket. On the second floor “light hiking” linked with “cold weather” had gotten her a lecture about skipping polar fleece and going with the traditional layering of silk socks under wool. Including “year round” had added long underwear of Merino wool. “All weather” had added waterproof yet breathable pants from some company named by aliens, Arc’Teryx. Or maybe they were a dinosaur. But the price was the highest, over two hundred dollars, so they must be the best.

She threw in a black PolarTec fleece jacket with no one’s help at all. But the waterproof jackets were impossible. Even asking for help didn’t clarify the mess. The selection was larger than Saks designer racks and apparently each jacket had a different feature that made it particularly wonderful. She finally walked away when she learned that they all stopped at the waist.

Cassidy wanted something longer and warmer. Thankfully she knew right where to get that. Michael Kors had a beautiful, knee-length, down-filled coat in this year’s line. He didn’t make it in black, but there was a brilliant red one that would look great. That would make it easier to tolerate the massive damage she was doing to her shopping budget with clothing she’d wear only twelve times in her life. Eleven, she’d already been to the January lighthouse.

The basket was getting heavy. This was nuts. There was over a thousand dollars in there. Of course her agent had just e-mailed her about the London Times picking up her column in their Travel section with a query about a wine-only column in the Sunday edition; she was going international. Cassidy would justify this splurge as a proper celebration.

Back on the ground floor, she passed close to a counter covered in a nest of electronics. She was nearly attacked by an overeager boy who looked so healthy he’d probably climbed Vinson before his fifteenth birthday. With his eyes closed. Backwards.