Читать книгу Charlotte Moore - Judith Bowen - Страница 7

HARDWOODS, MOSTLY MAPLES, blazed on the hillsides, elbowing aside, if only for a few weeks, the darker tones of gnarly cedar, abundant spruce, towering white pine. At the turn of the road, poplar or birch gleamed—rags of flat gold, tatters of amber, set against the brilliance of the blue October sky.

Wood smoke from kitchen fires hung in the trees, in the dips and gullies. Every hour at least, before turning onto the highway that afternoon, Charlotte had to slow for a farmer drawing a cart loaded with firewood or turnips, sometimes late potatoes, behind his tractor.

This was the best time of year, still weeks away from the winds of winter blowing down from Labrador. It still offered picnicking weather on a good day and, a bonus, the peace and expectant quiet of a tourist area between seasons—the summer travelers, families seeking sun, sea and lobster suppers, had all gone home now, and the color “peepers,” the buses full of second-honeymooners and seniors up from Boston and New York or down from central Canada to gaze at all this autumnal glory, were only just beginning to arrive.

Charlotte loved everything about the Maritimes. She was a city girl through and through, but she always felt completely at home on her annual trips east to the Gaspe, to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, attending village auctions, winkling out estate sales, sometimes just plain exploring back roads and country lanes, as she’d done this time. She never tired of the scenery, but right now, fall colors and pastoral landscapes were far from her mind.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Liam. Liam Connery.

The first boy she’d ever had a crush on. She’d been in grade five at Snowden Elementary, and he’d been a friend of her sister’s, in grade eleven, at A.E. Dunwoody High in Toronto. He’d never even known Charlotte existed, of course, but that hadn’t stopped her young heart from going pitter-patter whenever he showed up at their house with Laurel and her gang, and happened to glance her way.

What a laugh. She hadn’t thought of him in years and years, just assumed he’d gone on and followed his dreams, as everyone tried to do after high school. As she had done. He’d talked of flying, so maybe he was Captain Connery now, piloting 747s for Air Canada, a handsome, sexy first officer married to a beautiful, sexy flight attendant.

Last spring, she’d started thinking about him again—and now, six months later, he was still on her mind. The idea of looking up first loves had arisen at last April’s reunion of the summer staff of Jasper Park Lodge. Her curiosity had been aroused by the challenge—what had happened to Liam Connery?

She’d said as much to Zoey Phillips and Lydia Lane, her best friends, whom she’d first met working at the lodge when they were all eighteen. The summer they met, they’d traveled east together in Lydia’s beat-up Toyota minivan and become partners for a few years in the now-defunct Call-a-Girl Company, the little odd-job and catering business they’d formed to earn money for college.

The three of them were still best friends. Both Zoey and Lydia were in Toronto now, but Zoey intended to head to British Columbia soon to attend a friend’s wedding—and, Charlotte suspected, to look for her first love in the wilds of the Cariboo-Chilcotin. Sure, Zoey had scoffed at the initial suggestion, but Charlotte knew her friend was as intrigued as she and Lydia had been. Zoey was the pragmatist of the group. Lydia was the world’s biggest romantic; maybe she was doing a little scouting of her own back home. Wouldn’t it be fun to find out, when she got back, that her two friends had done the same thing, looked up their first loves? Charlotte smiled at the thought. They could compare stories when they got together at New Years.

A definite doggy snore rose from the back seat of her ten-year-old Suburban and Charlotte glanced over her shoulder at Maggie, her sister’s Labrador retriever, snoozing on the back seat. Maggie. That was another piece of good fortune, the kind of luck she couldn’t help thinking was fate.

Naturally, when she’d decided to try and track down Liam Connery, she’d asked her sister. Pay dirt. Laurel, who’d always been the archetype of the annoying, superior, bossy big sister, had lit right up and told her that, yes, she knew exactly where Liam Connery was and just leave it to her, she’d make arrangements for Charlotte to meet him.

That had seemed a little…weird. Laurel had never been terribly helpful before, preoccupied as she was with her new second husband and the horses and dogs she raised at their farm north of Toronto. But Charlotte got a phone call from Laurel two weeks later, telling her that everything was arranged, she could take Maggie, one of Laurel’s three Labs, to Prince Edward Island to be bred at a retriever kennel owned by none other than the elusive Liam Connery. Charlotte’s immediate reaction had been hey, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth!

Everything had turned out perfectly. Of course, Charlotte was making the trip, anyway, not only to replenish the antiques, folk art and other stock for her one-woman decorative arts supply business, which served a small clientele in the design and decor trade, but to carry out a very special estate appraisal on Prince Edward Island. Now, thanks to her sister, she also had an excellent excuse to meet her first love again, face-to-face—she had a dog to deliver to his kennel. He raised and trained retrievers and hunting dogs, it turned out. So much for being a pilot.

Charlotte studied the highway signs. She was on Route 104, near the exit to Pictou, where she planned to get something to eat, and Caribou, Nova Scotia, the ferry terminal. She slowed as she entered the Pictou municipal limits, watching for a fast-food outlet, preferably with a strip of grass where she could let Maggie out for a pee. She’d miss Maggie. Maggie had been wonderful company on the long drive, plus a Labrador retriever was a dog with a very large bark and, well, you never knew what could happen, a woman traveling alone…

According to Laurel’s plan she’d leave Maggie at Connery’s kennel to be bred to one of his dogs, and then, when the deed was done, Maggie would be crated and put on a plane back to Toronto. Connery would take care of all that, while Charlotte went about the rest of her business on the island.

“Nearly there, Maggie, my girl,” Charlotte murmured, slowing to inspect a seedy-looking fish-and-chip joint on Water Street. It was well past the supper hour and a gang of teens hung around the door, hooting at cars that drove by. She drove on, finally stopping for take-out at Amy’s Pizzeria in a residential area on the way out of town—a medium, all-dressed, a can of Pepsi, a tin of Altoid mints, which she was addicted to and a liter of water.

There were six cars at the dock when she arrived, an hour before the ferry sailed at ten o’clock. Charlotte got out of the Suburban and pulled on a heavy wool sweater. She flipped her hair over the collar, stretched and shivered, clasping her arms around herself. It was dark already, just after nine in the evening and past the fall equinox by two weeks, but the causeway was well-lit.

She took a deep breath. It was good to smell the sea air again, to hear the surf sucking at the shoreline. The waves were never very high in the Northumberland Strait, protected as the waterway was by the large mass of Prince Edward Island to the north, and Cape Breton to the northeast, shielding the Gulf of St. Lawrence from the wilder action of the north Atlantic. But sea air was sea air.

She ate her pizza, which was cold by now, sitting on a log that marked the edge of the parking lot, while Maggie explored. Then she snapped on Maggie’s leash for a walk down by the water—and was glad she had, when a cocker spaniel, also leashed, practically pulled his owner over trying to get near them. He began sniffing avidly at Maggie’s back end. The leash was a precaution; Maggie wasn’t supposed to come into estrus for another couple of weeks, according to Laurel, who knew about these things. Charlotte, who knew nothing about these things, didn’t want to take any chances. Laurel would kill her if Maggie ended up having the wrong dog’s puppies.

“Just trying to make friends.” The older woman who owned the spaniel apologized. She seemed a little discomfited at her dog’s determination to try again, oblivious to Maggie’s low growl. “Come here, Freddy! Stop that now!”

“Yes,” Charlotte said noncommittally, smiling. They moved away, down the rocky beach. She’d come across the comment many times. It was true; dogs were more interested in checking out each other’s rear ends than anything else, it seemed. She’d gotten over the embarrassment long ago.

“Come on, Maggs.” Charlotte led her back to the vehicle, where she shared the last two pieces of pizza with her beside the truck. Charlotte rubbed the retriever’s ears and bent down to kiss the top of her glossy black head. “Good girl! What would I do without you?”

And she meant it.

THIS TRIP to Prince Edward Island was a lot more important than just trying to finagle a meeting with her lost first love, Charlotte mused as she gazed over the dark water the ferry ploughed through on its way across Northumberland Strait. Or doing her sister a favor. The bid she’d won—to appraise one of the country’s fabled and nearly unknown collections of Canadiana furniture and folk art—was a definite coup for Charlotte Moore FolkArt Specialties. The extra option to help oversee the dispersal sale, together with the representative from Busby’s, the Halifax auction firm in charge, was icing on the cake.

Good money and a three-or four-week job. Then she’d continue with her annual fall tour of small sales and estate auctions throughout the Maritimes and New England, during which she’d stuff the Suburban to the roof with lamps, quilts, baskets, mats and folk art treasures—spending maybe another leisurely three or four weeks. She’d enjoy the fall colors along with the tourists, and arrive back in Toronto in time for the pre-Christmas rush. Her buyers were always eager for anything she brought back, to supply decorators or to sell to the public in their own retail outlets. Charlotte’s shop, which wasn’t really a shop since she just rented warehouse space and ran her business from a home office with the occasional help of a part-time assistant, was basically closed until she returned.

As she drove off the boat at midnight, she decided taking the last ferry hadn’t been one of her better ideas. She’d seen nothing during the ninety-minute crossing in the dark, and here, at the other terminal, Wood Island, there was no hotel, no motel, no bed-and-breakfast, nothing. Which meant a drive to Montague, another half hour, where she’d have to try and find accommodations that would take both her and Maggie. After enquiring at two that didn’t allow dogs, no matter how well-behaved, she said the hell with it and checked into a rather shabby motel a few miles out of town, leaving Maggie in the Suburban overnight. She’d done it before.

By the time Charlotte drove back into Montague for breakfast the next day, deciding on a place called Mackenzie’s Lunch, it was nearly ten o’clock. The diner was typical of the sort you’d find in any small town—lino floors, a counter with eight or ten stools, and booths lining the opposite wall with several Formica-topped tables between. A motherly looking waitress with swollen ankles came over to take her order. There was only one other customer, a man wearing a Husqvarna cap at the counter, with a newspaper spread out in front of him.

“Clam rolls for breakfast?” Charlotte asked, after a quick glance at the typed, grease-spotted menu.

“Some like it,” the waitress replied. “What’ll you have, hon?”

“Two poached eggs, brown toast on the side and a glass of tomato juice.”

“Coffee?” The waitress held the pot high, over the cup.

Charlotte covered the top with an open hand. “Tea, please.”

“Comin’ up!” The waitress waddled cheerfully back to the counter and poised her pot of coffee over the other customer’s mug. “Refill, Sid?”

He nodded and glanced toward Charlotte. “Traveling through, miss?”

“Not really,” Charlotte admitted, clasping her hands in front of her. How did people know, no matter where she went, that she wasn’t a local? “I’m doing some work at the Rathbone estate at Cardigan River.”

The man whistled and exchanged a meaningful look with the waitress. “Old Man Rathbone’s dead. Couple months ago. I guess you heard?”

“Yes. Actually, I’m here to do an appraisal for the heirs. Furniture, art, that sort of thing.”

Sid whistled again. “Now, there’s a job and a half, ain’t it, Gladys?”

“I would say,” the waitress replied, pouring boiling water into a stainless steel teapot that Charlotte assumed was hers.

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“The old man wasn’t in his proper mind the last couple years. They say the place is a fearful mess.”

“Oh my, yes. Old fool, wouldn’t take no help from nobody.” The waitress brought her tea. “They say when he ran out of wood he busted up good furniture to put in the stove—”

“No!” Charlotte put her hand over her mouth. “He’s supposed to have a wonderful collection. Surely he didn’t put it in—in the fire?”

The waitress set Charlotte’s breakfast in front of her. “Just firewood to him. They say the place has been cleaned up some now. There’s a grandson there, I heard, lookin’ after things. One of Bertie’s boys, ain’t he, Sid?”

The man at the counter nodded. “Nick Deacon, Bertie’s youngest.”

“Anyways. Young fella from Massachusetts or Connecticut or somewheres down there in the Boston States— You want anything else, honey, you just holler.” The waitress clumped her way back toward the kitchen.

Charlotte poured the tea before it got too strong and added milk. The Rathbone collection—most of it dating back to the turn of the twentieth century—had been assembled mainly by the father and uncle of this Old Man Rathbone, brothers who’d settled the area just north of Montague, in Cardigan River, and accumulated a fortune from shipping and mercantile interests in the first half of the century. The late owner had been a widower for many years. Charlotte knew nothing about any family, but then, that wasn’t her area. The heirs, the estate, the will—lawyers took care of things like that. Her job was to catalog and estimate a fair price for the art and furniture collection.

“Anything else, dear?” The waitress called from behind the counter. Sid put his paper to one side and swung around, too.

Charlotte took a big breath. Why not? “You know of Petty Cove Retrievers?”

“You bet. That’s out there close by the estate you’re a-goin’ to.” Sid frowned.

“You know a Mr. Connery?”

“A Mr. Connery?” Sid and the waitress looked at each other again. “Which one, that’s the question,” he continued, smiling. “Connerys is thick as fleas on a dog’s back around here. Why Gladys here’s mother was a Connery, wasn’t she, Gladys. And there’s Connerys out at Princess Point and some west of town here and plenty up north, all the way to Bay Fortune, ain’t that right, Gladys? That’s where Amos Connery is, married to your cousin, ain’t he?”

Gladys topped up Sid’s coffee again. “That’s right. Amos married Ruthie, my second cousin.”

“I suppose you’d be lookin’ for a particular Connery, miss?” Sid’s face became suspicious, as though he’d remembered he was talking to an outsider, someone From Away, not an Islander.

Charlotte nodded and picked up her windbreaker, then moved toward the cash register. “Someone my sister went to school with years ago in Toronto.”

“Oh?” Sid shot another glance at the waitress.

Charlotte handed over a ten-dollar bill and received change, with the two of them regarding her curiously the whole time. “Liam Connery. You know him?” Charlotte left a two-dollar tip and pocketed her remaining change.

“Oh, we know him, all right—don’t we, Gladys?” The waitress nodded, her cheerful face suddenly worried looking. “Ah, no, miss,” Sid added, shaking his head. “You don’t want to look up that Mr. Connery. He’s an ornery bugger. Keeps to himself and he don’t like strangers snooping around.”

“But he has the kennel, right?” Charlotte persisted.

“That he does. Over to Petty Cove, next to Cardigan River, right near where you’re headed.” Sid rattled his newspaper loudly and snapped it against the counter, as though dismissing both her and her foolishness. “You might ask at Bristol’s Store. They’ll give you directions, if you’ve got your mind made up.”

“I do. I’m delivering a dog to him, you see.”

“Oh?” Sid’s expression was skeptical. “Well, I suppose that’s all right, then.”

“Thanks for the lovely breakfast,” Charlotte said, smiling at the waitress, who beamed back. “I’ll be on my way.”

Charlotte needed gas and then she had to find a place where she and Maggie could get out and stretch. Maggie had been patient with the limited exercise she’d had over the past four days. She was due for a good run; so was Charlotte. The gas attendant at the Irving station gave her directions to a beach usually deserted at this time of year, a few miles north of town.

Maggie whined as Charlotte put the vehicle into gear and turned onto the highway. The sign mentioned Georgetown and Cardigan River, as well as Annandale, Souris and East Point farther along.

Petty Cove, where Liam Connery had his kennel, was just a speck on the road map, but the beach she’d been directed to had to be pretty close to the cove. Maybe she’d run across him accidentally. What, sunning himself on the sand? Now, there was a ridiculous idea!

Sure, the place was small and everybody knew everybody—the entire island, Canada’s smallest province, had only 130,000 people—but how likely was it that she’d meet Liam Connery before she was ready to meet him? Not very. She had two free days until Monday, when she was due to deliver Maggie, according to her sister’s arrangements, and meet Mr. Busby from the Halifax auction house. Charlotte was looking forward to spending the weekend touring around with Maggie, maybe taking a drive up north, right to the end of the Island, at East Point. Or going to the province’s capital, Charlottetown, for the day.

She was in no real hurry to meet her first-ever crush again, now that she was actually here. Besides, what had they said at the diner? That Liam Connery was an ornery bugger who didn’t take to strangers?

Of course, she wasn’t really a stranger, was she? She was a—ta-dum! Charlotte imagined thirties’ radio music—“Voice from the Past.” Not that Liam Connery would give a tinker’s damn.

And what past? she reminded herself. She was the one who’d been in love with him, the lean, intense boy with the funny accent in her sister’s class. He might remember Laurel, but he sure wasn’t going to remember Laurel’s little sister, a scrawny kid with a pixie cut and a head full of dreams.

That didn’t matter; the idea back at the lodge reunion was just to see what had happened to the boy you’d had your first crush on. It was an exercise in curiosity, pure and simple. Had he turned out the way you’d imagined he would—wonderful, sexy, sensitive? Or was he paunchy and balding with a bad golf game and half-a-dozen kids? Was he the CEO of the local duct-cleaning service? Was he married? In jail? Dead?

That was all. Liam Connery, she remembered, had dreamed of flying. Turned out he’d become a dog breeder, of all things. C’est la vie.

No one, she was sure, not even her—and Charlotte knew she was definitely a romantic—expected this little exercise to be anything more than that. They’d have a coffee together, maybe, talk over old times—not that they had many in common—and move on. Their lives might have overlapped briefly once, but they didn’t overlap now.

She had to admit, though, she was genuinely curious. “Ornery bugger” didn’t scare her. Not unless it was shotgun-slinging ornery, and she doubted that.

Charlotte slowed, peering at the narrow road that had suddenly materialized to the left. Okay. This had to be the beach road—exactly one mile from the turnoff. That was what the man had said—exactly one mile, which meant 1.2 kilometers. Distance in Canada was measured in kilometers now, not that they seemed to have noticed that little detail on Prince Edward Island.

The rutted dirt lane led across an open field studded with frozen, rotted potatoes left after harvest, and wound downward toward the beach. Charlotte bumped along slowly. And happily.

The sun was high in the sky—it was noon—and there was no one, absolutely no one, on this deserted red sand beach. The scene before her was straight out of a travel brochure, except that there were no tourists here now and probably weren’t even in the summer. This was rural, isolated P.E.I., the way it had been a century before.

Several hundred yards from the hummocks of dune grass that edged the high tide line, waves broke, a line of white foam that spun smoothly, over and over, from one distant shore to the other, between the headlands. A flock of shore birds swooped and dived high above, their cries wild and beautiful.

How peaceful. How serene.

Charlotte sighed at the silence as she shut off the ignition. What could possibly be more wonderful?