Page 4 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
I hated that look.
“What?” I asked.
“That is literally the most you’ve ever told me about when you were a kid.”
Stung, I quelled my first instinct for defensiveness, but didn’t entirely succeed. “That’s not true. I’ve told you plenty.” Since we’d decided to come back—since I had realized coming back was the only viable option left to us—I felt like I’d talked of almost nothing but my past. Life had finally sunk low enough that talking about our present, or the nearer past, was the more urgent topic to be avoided.
“No,” he insisted. “You talk about your mom and why you left. You don’t ever talk about the other parts of your life when you were here.”
“Maybe. I think I forgot therewereother parts of my life.”
The light turned, and I got the U-Haul rolling again.
My son reached over the console and set his hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry it was so hard for you, Mom.”
Setting my hand on his, I squeezed. We needed to get back to a place where Wyatt could be a regular, goofy kid and I had my shit together enough to be the mother he deserved.
At the next corner, I saw a sign on a shop that was different from before. Back in the day, it had been a realtor’s office, run by Hilary Geller, the mother of one of my best friends from school. Now it was a studio called Coastal ArtWorks, and simply by the design of the sign painted on the picture window, I could guess who owned it. One of my best friends from school.
Jessie Geller, Erin O’Grady, and I had been close as sisters back in the day, but I hadn’t spoken to either of them in almost twenty years. When I’d left, I’d done it suddenly and secretly. I’d been so terrified that my mother would track me down, I’d decided there was no other choice but to cut every tie, to friends as well.
In the end, my mother hadn’t tracked me down. I’m not sure she ever tried. But about two years ago, Gerald Holt, Bluster’s mayor as well as the owner of Bluster Beach Putt-Putt & Bowl, had hired a private investigator to do so. Otherwise I would never have known the coast was clear to return.
“It wasn’t all so hard, bud,” I told my son as we drove past my old friend’s dream realized. “With my mom, yeah. That was always hard. But I’m remembering that I had good times, too.” I turned to him and slapped a smile on my face. “That’s the stuff I want to show you.”
“That’s the stuff I want to know.” Wyatt smiled. “This is gonna be good, Mom.”
Man, I hoped he was right.
TWO: Cobwebs & Dust
Afew miles past the edge of the town proper, just as the forest walls rose up again, I saw the painfully familiar sign on the side of the road and hit the turn signal.
“Is that it?” Wyatt asked.
“That’s it.” I slowed and prepared to turn into the narrow gravel lane just behind the sign.
“Sea-Mist Cottage Inn,” Wyatt read aloud, ignoring the smaller, newer sign attached, a vinyl banner that readCLOSED. “It looks like the sign was worn out for a lot longer than two years.”
I turned onto the lane; the old sign loomed over us like a cranky old ghost. “It does. It looks like I was around the last time it got a facelift. For all I know, she ran the whole place into the ground before it finally closed.”
I could feel Wyatt’s toothy grin. “Maybe it’s haunted. That would be so cool.”
Oh, it’s plenty haunted, I thought.Just not by moaning old souls in white sheets.
Aloud, I said, “Your ideas about what’s cool leave a lot to be desired, bud. Let’s hope for no ghosts.”
We cleared the lane and arrived on the gravel parking lot. I sucked in another of those deep, careful breaths and faced the main cabin of the Sea-Mist Cottage Inn. My childhood home.
The final tendrils of golden sunlight were fading back to the ocean. Redwoods hulked over the scene, and gloom began to fill the cracks between their barky trunks. Always the dark took the forest well before it claimed the town. I tried not to think of dusk descending here at just the moment of our arrival as anything more sinister than poor timing.
The property had stood empty, abandoned, for about two years, and it looked it. The cabin before us, both office and home, showed the accumulated damage of several storms as well as the wear of ‘delayed maintenance’ that had clearly gone on much longer than the place had been derelict. But it hadn’t run completely into the ground.
All the windows were boarded up, but bad weather had knocked the boards around, and the two at the front of the cabin, beside the door, were hanging on by about a nail apiece. I could see that the interior shutters were closed.
On the wooden steps leading to the porch, an old sign rested against a riser. The gloom was already too thick to see it clearly, but I didn’t need to see to know what it said.
Office, it read.Wipe yer BIGFOOTS good before you come in!There was a bare spot on the door’s face where that sign belonged. A decrepit fiberglass Sasquatch had once stood beside the door, its head grazing the ceiling. Now it lay in pieces on the porch floor.
