Page 4 of If She Only Knew (The Cahills 1)

What? Disfigurement? Oh, please, no. Disfigurement? For a second she was jolted out of her haze. Her throat, already parched, nearly closed in fear and her stomach felt as if it had been twisted and tied with rubber bands. She tried to remember what she looked like, but it didn’t matter . . . Her heart was racing with dread. Certainly someone somewhere watching her monitors could see that she was aware, that she was responding, but no loud footsteps pounded outside the door, no urgent voice yelled, “She’s stirring. Look, she’s waking up!”

“She has the best doctors in the state. She . . . she might not look like what we expect, but she’ll be fine, beautiful.” Alex sounded as if he was trying to convince himself.

“She always was. You know, Alexander,” the woman who called herself Nana said, “sometimes a woman’s beauty can be a curse.”

An uncomfortable laugh from this man who was her husband. “I don’t think she’d agree.”

“No, of course not. But she hasn’t lived long enough to understand.”

“I just wonder what she’ll remember when she wakes up.”

“Hopefully, everything,” the woman said, but there was an underlying tension to her words, a pronounced trepidation.

“Yes, well, time will tell.”

“We’re just lucky she wasn’t killed in the accident.”

There was the tiniest bit of hesitation before her husband replied, “Damned lucky. She should never have been driving in the first place. Hell, she’d just been released from the hospital.”

Another hospital? It was all getting fuzzy again, the words garbled. Had she heard it right?

“There are so many questions,” her mother-in-law whispered.

Yes, so many, but I’m too tired to think of them right now . . . so very tired.

Whistling sharply to his three-legged dog, Nick Cahill cut the engine of the Notorious and threw a line around a blackened post on the dock where he moored his fishing boat. “Come on, Tough Guy, let’s go home,” he called over his shoulder as the boat undulated with the tide of this backwater Oregon bay. Rain drizzled from a leaden sky and the wind picked up, lashing at his face. Whitecaps swirled and danced in counterpoint to the seagulls wheeling and crying overhead. The distinctive odors of diesel, rotting wood and brine mingled in the wintry air of Oregon in November.

Hiking the collar of his jacket around his neck, Nick grabbed his bucket of live crabs and stepped onto the pier just as his dog shot past in a black-and-white streak. A shepherd mix of indecipherable lineage, Tough Guy hurled his body onto the slippery planks and, paws clicking, scrambled up the stairs to the parking lot on the bluff. Nick followed more slowly, past sagging posts covered with barnacles and strangled by seaweed.

“There’s somebody here ta see ya,” grunted Ole Olsen, the old coot in the window of the bait shop located at the landing. He jerked his chin toward the top of the stairs but didn’t meet Nick’s eyes, just kept working at tying a fly, as he always did.

“To see me?” Nick asked. No one, in all the five years he’d been in these parts, had ever dropped by the marina looking for him.

“Ye-up. That’s what he said.” Seated on his stool, surrounded by lures and coolers holding bait and Royal Crown Cola, Ole was a fixture at the marina. A burned-out stub of a cigar was forever plugged into one corner of his mouth, a ring of red hair turning gray surrounded his bald pate, and folds of skin hid his eyes more effectively than the magnifying glasses perched on the end of his nose. “Told him you’d be out awhile, but he wanted to wait.” He clipped off a piece of thread with his teeth, turned over a bit of orange fuzz covering a hook that looked suspiciously as if it would soon resemble a salmon fly. “Figured if he wanted to, I couldn’t stop him.”

“Who?”

“Never gave his name. But you’ll spot him.” Ole finally looked up, focusing over the half glasses. Through the open window, his face framed by racks of cigarettes, tide tables and dozens of the colorful flies he’d tied himself, he added, “He ain’t from around here. I could tell that right off.”

Nick’s shoulders tightened. “Thanks.”

“Enny time,” Ole said, nodding curtly just as Tough Guy gave a sharp bark.

Nick mounted the stairs and walked across a gravel lot where trucks and trailers and campers were parked with haphazard abandon. In the midst of them, looking like the proverbial diamond sparkling in a pail of gravel, a silver Jaguar was parked, engine purring, California plates announcing an intruder from the south. The motor died suddenly. The driver’s door swung open and a tall man in a business suit, polished wingtips and raincoat emerged.

Alex Cahill in the flesh.

Great. Just . . . great.

He picked one helluva day to show up.

“About time,” Alex said as if he’d been waiting for hours. “I thought maybe you’d died out there.” He hitched his jaw west toward the sea.

“Not so lucky this time.”

“Maybe next.”

“Maybe.”

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