Home at Last
by Margaret Watson

CHAPTER 1

     “That’s impossible.”  Fiona jumped up and paced into the hall as she listened to the woman, one of the wholesalers who supplied her with silver and gemstones, on the other end of the phone.  “There been a mistake, Shelby.”

     “Maybe, but the check bounced.  Sorry, Fiona.  I can’t send out this order until the bad check is cleared.  I called Barb, but I couldn’t get hold of her.”

     There was plenty of money in her business account to pay for the order of silver wire and lapis.  Irritation swept over Fiona, and she took a deep breath.  “Did you call Barb during the day?”  Barb Lockley, Fiona’s business manager, worked out of her apartment and she was meticulous about being available during business hours.

     “Of course I did. I called several times and she didn’t answer.”

     “There’s been a mix-up somewhere, Shelby,” Fiona answered, her mind flying in ten directions.  “Can I give you my personal credit card number until I straighten it out?”

     “Sure.”  Shelby cleared her throat.  “It’ll have to be for both orders, though.  When we have a bounced check, we need payment in advance for future orders.”

     “All right.”  It would put her perilously close to the limit of her credit card, but after she got hold of Barb, she’d go online and transfer the money to pay the bill.  “Hold on a second while I get the card.”

     A few minutes later, Fiona tucked her credit card back in her wallet and paced the office as she punched in the number for her business manager.  “Damn it!”  This was what happened when you let personal stuff interfere with your business.  She and her sisters had to finish dealing with this horrible house.  And they needed to do it right away.  She had to focus on her upcoming show.  The gallery where it would be held had a lot of influence in the art world.

     The phone rang and Fiona settled on the edge of the desk.  She got a recorded statement that the number had been disconnected and no further information was available.

     “What?”  She stared at the phone, unable to believe what she’d heard.  Maybe she’d pressed the wrong speed dial.  Scrolling through her contacts, she dialed Barb’s number.  Same message.

     Irritation morphed into alarm, and she phoned her agent.   As she waited for him to answer, she sank into the old desk chair and accessed her business account on line.  “David.  Thank God.  How come Barb’s phone number is disconnected?  What’s going on?”

     “I’ve been meaning to call you, Fiona,” he said.  “Barb seems to have disappeared.  And your accountant called yesterday because she couldn’t get hold of you.  It looks as if Barb emptied the business account before she took off.”

     “What?  Barb’s gone?  With my money?”  She stood so quickly that the chair banged into the desk.  “Why didn’t you call me right away?”

     “I’ve been trying to find her,” he said impatiently.  “I didn’t see any reason to worry you until I figured out what was going on.”

     “No reason to worry me?”  Alarm morphed into anger.  “This is my business, David.  Have you forgotten that?”

     “You haven’t been acting like you cared about it,” he shot back.  “You’ve been out there in Hicksville for the last five months.  I’ve begged you to come home and take care of your business, but you’ve always had an excuse.”

     “I have family obligations.”  She kicked her father’s desk.  “Apparently that means it’s all right for you to forget I exist and my business manager to steal my money and disappear.”

     “I got you the gig at the Clybourne Gallery, didn’t I?” he said.

     “I contacted Virna at the Clybourne,” Fiona said.

     “And I nailed it down,” he retorted.  “That’s a huge step for your career, Fiona.  But are you in New York, working on your pieces for the show?  No.  I haven’t seen anything new from you since you’ve been in that God-forsaken town.”  Fiona heard paper shuffling over the phone.  “Sorry, babe, but with no new designs, your stuff has become stale.  Orders are down.  There’s no buzz anymore.”

     “I’m working on pieces for the show,” Fiona said, clutching the phone so tightly that her hand hurt.  “And when I talked about trying some different things, you said, and I quote, ‘Don’t worry, babe.  Things are going great.  Don’t rock the boat’.”

     “Guess I was wrong,” David answered.

     He sounded distracted, and Fiona heard the faint clacking of a keyboard through the phone.  David often bragged about his multi-tasking.

     “Get off the computer,” she said sharply.  “You’re telling me my career is in the toilet and you’re emailing someone else at the same time?”

     “You’re not my only client, Fiona,” he said.  “And some of them actually care about their career.”

     His words terrified and enraged her.  “Did you call the police about Barb?”

     “Not yet.  I keep telling myself there’s an innocent explanation.”

     “David, the woman’s phone is disconnected and there’s no money in my business account.”  She’d wanted a well-known agent, someone with important clients in the art world.  But she was a small fish in David’s big pond.  Realization tasted bitter in her mouth.  “I thought you were on my side.  But you’re only on my side when the money is flowing your way.  Once there’s a problem, it’s another story, isn’t it?”

     “Barb works for you,” he said.  “Not me.  You should have been paying more attention to your career.  “You need to get your ass to New York, Fiona.”

     “I can’t come back right now.  I’m watching my nephew while my sister’s on her honeymoon.”

     “Aren’t you the little Suzy Homemaker?”

     “David, I expect you to do something about this. Call me by the end of the day, or you’re fired.”  She snapped her phone shut, cutting her agent off in mid-sentence.

     As she stared at her bank statement showing that the balance in her business account was zero, she opened the phone again and called the police in Philadelphia, where Barb lived.  “We’ll put someone on it, ma’am,” the bored-sounding officer said.  “Give me your phone number, and we’ll let you know if we find anything.”

     Translation – she wouldn’t be hearing from the police anytime soon.  “Thank you, Officer,” she said.

     Fiona stared out the window of the office, numb with disbelief.  The impatiens she’d planted in the spring were in full bloom, a thick row of orange, pink and purple blossoms across the front of the house.  The forsythia bushes she’d pruned were dense and bright green, clearly responding to her care.  It was beautiful outside.

     And her world was falling apart.

     She swiveled away from the window and caught sight of the massive picture of her father leaning against the wall.  They’d promised it to the college, but had stuck it in their father’s office to get it out of the way.  He seemed to be watching her with a knowing sneer in his eyes.

     A very familiar sneer.  The one he usually wore when he talked about her work.

     “Why are you bothering with those little trinkets, Fiona?  You’re wasting your time.”

     “You’ll never make a living designing jewelry.”

     “What are you doing out here?  Playing with your silly beads again? Leaving me alone to cope with everything?”

     “You’re happy now, aren’t you?” she said to the picture.  “I bet you wish you were here so you could say ‘I told you so’.  So you could tell me how stupid I’ve been, staying in Spruce Lake to take care of your business and neglecting my own.  Oh, but wait.  There was never any business more important than yours, was there?”

     A hidden place inside Fiona burst open, and rage, pain and fear spilled out in a toxic tide.  She spotted the Professor of the Year award sitting on her father’s desk, picked it up and hurled it at the painting.  It tore through the canvas, obliterating the bottom of her father’s head.  But his eyes still stared at her.

     “Damn you,” she cried.  “You’re dead and buried.  Rotting in the ground.  So why aren’t you out of my life?”  She picked up one of his other Professor of the Year awards and threw it at the picture, destroying the rest of her father’s head.  Then she smashed the other one on his desk, repeatedly, until it broke into splinters of glass that went flying across the room.

     “Professor of the year,” she cried.  “What did they know?  You were a selfish, horrible man.  We hated you.   We should have told you when you were alive.  You should have died in that car crash.  Not Mom.  You should have been going to the store for your own pipe tobacco.  You killed our mother.  And we were stuck with you.”

     Fiona kicked the last box of her father’s papers repeatedly, until it tipped over and yellowing sheets cascaded onto the floor.  “I’m going to burn your precious papers.  Your immortality.”

     She swept up an armful and stuffed them into the fireplace.  Falling to her knees on the cold tile in front of the hearth, she grabbed handful after handful, stuffing them in until the only ones left were out of her reach.

     A drop of moisture hit her hand, then another.  When she looked down at her hands, wondering where the water was coming from, another drop fell.  She was crying.

     She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes, trying to stop the tears, but they kept falling.  “I’m not crying for you, old man,” she spat at the now-faceless picture.  “I never cried when you died.  I was happy.  You want to know what I did?  I danced all night.”

     She staggered to her feet, looking for something else of her father’s.  Something she could destroy.  Instead, she saw a man leaning against the doorway of the office.

     Even through the blur of her tears she recognized him.  Jackson Grant.  How long had he been standing there?

     She froze, staring at his expressionless face for an agonizingly long moment.  Then she stumbled backward, grabbing for the edge of the desk.  “Jackson.  Where did you come from?  What are you doing here?”

     “Hello, Fiona.”  His voice was as unreadable as his face.  “Are you all right?  You sound upset.”

     “I’m fine.”  She knuckled away the last of her tears.

     He looked at the picture leaning against the wall, the rips in the canvas obliterating her father’s face.  “You sure?”

     “Yes, I’m sure.”  She couldn’t take her eyes off him.  His hair was darker blond and longer than she remembered.  It curled above his collar and looked shaggy, as if he’d cut it himself.  His shoulders were broad beneath the black tee shirt he wore, and his arms were ropy with muscle.  Not the scrawny twenty-two year old she remembered.

     Jackson Grant had grown up.

     And after she’d gone out of her way to avoid him in the five months she’d been in Spruce Lake, he’d walked in on her at the worst possible moment.  A witness to her humiliation.  “What can I do for you?”

     “Is that how you’re going to play it?  Pretending it didn’t happen?”  He nodded toward the papers in the fireplace, the broken glass on the floor, the ruined picture.  “That was always your style.”

     “This isn’t a good time for me, Jackson.”  He was the last person in the world she needed to see right now.  She was shaky and drained.  Empty.  She wanted to curl up in a ball, bury her head behind her arms and block out everything about this house.  This town.  Her life.

     “You’re bleeding,” he said, nodding at her arm.

     A smear of blood covered her lower left arm, and a wide trickle slid sluggishly toward her wrist, where it dripped onto the floor.  “I didn’t see that.”  As she stared at it, her arm began to sting.

     “Sit down.”  Jackson moved into the room and pushed her into the desk chair.   “Stay there.”

     He jogged up the stairs.  She heard him rummaging in the bathroom, and a few moments later he returned with bandages and gauze and a bottle of Betadyne.

     “Let me see it.”

     She kept her arm close to her body.  “I’ll take care of it.”

     “Easier for someone else to do it.”  He dropped onto the desk, grabbed her hand and pulled it toward him.  “I don’t have time to play games,” he said impatiently.

     “What are you doing here?” she asked, trying not to notice the touch of his hands on her arm.  And the memories they invoked.

     He cleaned the smeared blood with the Betadyne, leaving her arm stained yellow-brown, then examined the cut closely.  An inch long and still seeping blood, it wasn’t deep or dangerous.

     Just stupid.  Stupid to lose control like that, even more unwise to do it in front of an audience.

     Even if she hadn’t known she had one.

     That’s what happened when you lost control.  You ended up embarrassing yourself.

     As Jackson used gauze and the bandages to cover the wound, the memories from twelve years ago swirled and blended with the present.  The way his fingers felt on her skin.  The way he smelled when he bent his head close to hers.  The sound of his voice when he said her name.

     This time, his hands were impersonal and efficient.  Just the way he’d be if he was taking care of one of his animal patients.  “It doesn’t need stitches,” he said as he stood up and moved away.  Putting distance between them.  “Just keep it covered for a few days.”

     “Thank you,” she said.  She resisted putting her hand over the bandage.  Over the place he’d touched her.

     “You didn’t tell me why you’re here,” she managed to say in a level voice.

     “I’m looking for my kids,” he said.  “They’re supposed to be with Charlie, but I can’t find them.  This was the only other place I could think to look.”

     “Charlie told me he was hanging out at your clinic with Logan and Lindy.”  Saying their names hurt her heart.

     “They’re obviously not there,” he said impatiently.  “I called Charlie’s cell phone, but he didn’t answer.”

     It felt oddly intimate that Jackson knew her nephew’s cell phone number.  As if Jackson was part of Charlie’s life.  Part of his inner circle.  Like there was a connection between them.

     The way there used to be a connection between her and Jackson.  It had been the elephant in the living room since she’d been in Spruce lake, but she’d tried to ignore it.  She drove Charlie to Jackson’s clinic, picked him up there, ferried him to Jackson’s house and back.  All the while maintaining the fiction that she didn’t know the town vet.

     Unwilling to keep looking at him, she fumbled with her phone.  “Let’s try Charlie again.”

     Charlie’s phone went straight to voice mail.  “He’s either turned it off or the battery is dead,” she said, standing up.  “He forgets to charge it sometimes.”

     “Where would he take them?” Jackson demanded.

     “How do you know Charlie has taken them anywhere?”  She bristled at the suggestion that Charlie was leading Jackson’s kids astray.  “Maybe he was following your kids.”

     “Not likely,” Jackson said curtly.  “He’s older.  He’s smarter.  He’s the ringleader.”

     “My nephew is a great kid.  He doesn’t get other kids into trouble,” she began, but he cut her off.

     “I’m not going to waste time arguing with you, Fiona. Logan and Lindy aren’t where they’re supposed to be, and I’m damned worried.  Your nephew is with them.  I would have thought you’d be worried, too.”  He headed for the door.  “I’m going to look for them.  Are you going to help me or not?”

     “Of course I am,” she said, grabbing her purse.  “Maybe they went for a run.  Charlie has been talking about doing cross country at school this fall.”  She glanced at Jackson out of the corner of her eye.  “Logan and Lindy are the ones who got him interested in it.”

     “For Christ’s sake, Fiona,” he exploded.  “This isn’t a pissing contest over whose kids are at fault.  They’re all missing.  I’ll drive south of town.  You go north.  Here’s my cell phone number.”

     He looked around for a pen and paper, and Fiona grabbed one of the sheets left on the floor.  She ripped off two pieces, gave him her phone number and watched him write his.  Then she hurried out the door without waiting for Jackson.

     She was a mile or so out of town when she saw two kids ahead of her.  Logan and Lindy.  They were crouched over a third kid.

     Charlie.  She bit her lip, holding back a cry.

     He was lying on the road.

Close Window