Safe Haven

  Saturday morning dawned with blue skies, but soon clouds began rolling in. Gray and thick, they swirled and twisted in the ever-rising wind. The temperature began to plummet, and by the time Katie left the house, she had to wear a sweatshirt. The store was a little shy of two miles from her house, maybe half an hour's walk at a steady pace, and she knew she'd have to hurry if she didn't want to get caught in a storm.

  She reached the main road just as she heard the thunder rumbling. She picked up the pace, feeling the air thickening around her. A truck sped past, leaving a blast of dust in its wake, and Katie moved onto the sandy median. The air smelled of salt carried from the ocean. Above her, a red-tailed hawk floated intermittently on updrafts, testing the force of the wind.

  The steady rhythm of her footfalls set her mind adrift and she found herself reflecting on her conversation with Jo. Not the stories she'd told, but some of the things Jo had said about Alex. Jo, she decided, didn't know what she was talking about. While she was simply trying to make conversation, Jo had twisted her words into something that wasn't quite true. Granted, Alex seemed like a nice guy, and as Jo said, Kristen was as sweet as could be, but she wasn't interested in him. She barely knew him. Since Josh had fallen in the river, they hadn't said more than a few words to each other, and the last thing she wanted was a relationship of any kind.

  So why had it felt like Jo was trying to bring them together?

  She wasn't sure, but honestly, it didn't matter. She was glad Jo was coming over tonight. Just a couple of friends, sharing some wine... it wasn't that special, she knew. Other people, other women, did things like that all the time. She wrinkled her brow. All right, maybe not all the time, but most of them probably felt like they could do it if they wanted to, and she supposed that was the difference between her and them. How long had it been since she'd done something that felt normal?

  Since her childhood, she admitted. Since those days when she'd put pennies on the track. But she hadn't been completely truthful with Jo. She hadn't told her that she often went to the railroad tracks to escape the sound of her parents arguing, their slurred voices raging at each other. She didn't tell Jo that more than once, she'd been caught in the crossfire, and that when she was twelve, she'd been hit with a snow globe that her father had thrown at her mother. It made a gash in her head that bled for hours, but neither her mom nor her dad had shown any inclination to bring her to the hospital. She didn't tell Jo that her dad was mean when he was drunk, or that she'd never invited anyone, even Emily, over to her house, or that college hadn't worked out because her parents thought it was a waste of time and money. Or that they'd kicked her out of the house on the day she graduated from high school.

  Maybe, she thought, she'd tell Jo about those things. Or maybe she wouldn't. It wasn't all that important. So what if she hadn't had the best childhood? Yes, her parents were alcoholics and often unemployed, but aside from the snow-globe incident, they'd never hurt her. No, she didn't get a car or have birthday parties, but she'd never gone to bed hungry, either, and in the fall, no matter how tight things were, she always got new clothes for school. Her dad might not have been the greatest, but he hadn't snuck into her bedroom at night to do awful things, things she knew had happened to her friends. At eighteen, she didn't consider herself scarred. A bit disappointed about college, maybe, and nervous about having to make her own way in the world, but not damaged beyond repair. And she'd made it. Atlantic City hadn't been all bad. She'd met a couple of nice guys, and she could remember more than one evening she spent laughing and talking with friends from work until the early hours of the morning.

  No, she reminded herself, her childhood hadn't defined her, or had anything to do with the real reason she'd come to Southport. Even though Jo was the closest thing to a friend that she had in Southport, Jo knew absolutely nothing about her. No one did.

  "Hi, Miss Katie," Kristen piped up from her little table. No dolls today. Instead, she was bent over a coloring book, holding crayons and working on a picture of unicorns and rainbows.

  "Hi, Kristen. How are you?"

  "I'm good." She looked up from her coloring book. "Why do you always walk here?"

  Katie paused, then came around the corner of the counter and squatted down to Kristen's level. "Because I don't have a car."

  "Why not?"

  Because I don't have a license, Katie thought. And even if I did, I can't afford a car. "I'll tell you what. I'll think about getting one, okay?"

  "Okay," she said. She held up the coloring book. "What do you think of my picture?"

  "It's pretty. You're doing a great job."

  "Thanks," she said. "I'll give it to you when I'm finished."

  "You don't have to do that."

  "I know," she said with charming self-assurance. "But I want to. You can hang it on your refrigerator."

  Katie smiled and stood up. "That's just what I was thinking."

  "Do you need help shopping?"

  "I think I can handle it today. And that way, you can finish coloring."

  "Okay," she agreed.

  Retrieving a basket, she saw Alex approaching. He waved at her, and though it made no sense she had the feeling that she was really seeing him for the first time. Though his hair was gray, there were only a few lines around the corners of his eyes, but they added to, rather than detracted from, an overall sense of vitality. His shoulders tapered to a trim waist, and she had the impression that he was a man who neither ate nor drank to excess.

  "Hey, Katie. How are you?"

  "I'm fine. And yourself?"

  "Can't complain." He grinned. "I'm glad you came in. I wanted to show you something." He pointed toward the monitor and she saw Josh sitting on the dock holding his fishing pole.

  "You let him go back out there?" she asked.

  "See the vest he's wearing?"

  She leaned closer, squinting. "A life jacket?"

  "It took me awhile to find one that wasn't too bulky, or too hot. But this one is perfect. And really, I had no choice. You have no idea how miserable he was, not being able to fish. I can't tell you how many times he begged me to change my mind. I couldn't take it anymore, and I thought this was a solution."

  "He's okay with wearing it?"

  "New rule--it's either wear it, or don't fish. But I don't think he minds."

  "Does he ever catch any fish?"

  "Not as many as he'd like, but, yes, he does."

  "Do you eat them?"

  "Sometimes." He nodded. "But Josh usually throws them back. He doesn't mind catching the same fish over and over."

  "I'm glad you found a solution."

  "A better father probably would have figured it out beforehand."

  For the first time, she looked up at him. "I get the sense you're a pretty good father."

  Their eyes held for a moment before she forced herself to turn away. Alex, sensing her discomfort, began rummaging around behind the counter.

  "I have something for you," he said, pulling out a bag and placing it on the counter. "There's a small farm I work with that has a hothouse, and they can grow things when other people can't. They just dropped off some fresh vegetables yesterday. Tomatoes, cucumbers, some different kinds of squash. You might want to try them out. My wife swore they were the best she'd ever tasted."

  "Your wife?"

  He shook his head. "I'm sorry. I still do that sometimes. I meant my late wife. She passed away a couple of years ago."

  "I'm sorry," she murmured, her mind flashing back to her conversation with Jo.

  What's his story?

  You should ask him, Jo had countered.

  Jo had obviously known that his wife had died, but hadn't said anything. Odd.

  Alex didn't notice that her mind had wandered. "Thank you," he said, his voice subdued. "She was a great person. You would have liked her." A wistful expression crossed his face. "But anyway," he finally added, "she swore by the place. It's organic, and the family still harvests by hand. Usually, the produce is gone with
in hours, but I set a little aside for you, in case you wanted to try some." He smiled. "Besides, you're a vegetarian, right? A vegetarian will appreciate these. I promise."

  She squinted up at him. "Why would you think I'm a vegetarian?"

  "You're not?"

  "No."

  "Oh," he said, pushing his hands into his pockets. "My mistake."

  "It's okay," she said. "I've been accused of worse."

  "I doubt that."

  Don't, she thought to herself. "Okay." She nodded. "I'll take the vegetables. And thank you."

  6

  As Katie shopped, Alex fiddled around the register, watching her from the corner of his eye. He straightened the counter, checked on Josh, examined Kristen's picture, and straightened the counter again, doing his best to seem busy.

  She'd changed in recent weeks. She had the beginnings of a summer tan and her skin had a glowing freshness to it. She was also growing less skittish around him, today being a prime example. No, they hadn't set the world on fire with their scintillating conversation, but it was a start, right?

  But the start of what?

  From the very beginning, he'd sensed she was in trouble, and his instinctive response had been to want to help. And of course she was pretty, despite the bad haircut and plain-Jane attire. But it was seeing the way Katie had comforted Kristen after Josh had fallen in the water that had really moved him. Even more affecting had been Kristen's response to Katie. She had reached for Katie like a child reaching for her mother.

  It had made his throat tighten, reminding him that as much as he missed having a wife, his children missed having a mother. He knew they were grieving, and he tried to make up for it as best he could, but it wasn't until he saw Katie and Kristen together that he realized that sadness was only part of what they were experiencing. Their loneliness mirrored his own.

  It troubled him that he hadn't realized it before.

  As for Katie, she was something of a mystery to him. There was a missing element somewhere, something that had been gnawing at him. He watched her, wondering who she really was and what had brought her to Southport.

  She was standing near one of the refrigerator cases, something she'd never done before, studying the items behind the glass. She frowned, and as she was debating what to buy, he noticed the fingers of her right hand twisting around her left ring finger, toying with a ring that wasn't there. The gesture triggered something both familiar and long forgotten.

  It was a habit, a tic he'd noticed during his years at CID and sometimes observed with women whose faces were bruised and disfigured. They used to sit across from him, compulsively touching their rings, as though they were shackles that bound them to their husbands. Usually, they denied that their husband had hit them, and in the rare instances they admitted the truth, they usually insisted it wasn't his fault; that they'd provoked him. They'd tell him that they'd burned dinner or hadn't done the wash or that he'd been drinking. And always, always, these same women would swear that it was the first time it had ever happened, and tell him that they didn't want to press charges because his career would be ruined. Everyone knew the army came down hard on abusive husbands.

  Some were different, though--at least in the beginning--and insisted that they wanted to press charges. He would start the report and listen as they questioned why paperwork was more important than making an arrest. Than enforcing the law. He would write up the report anyway and read their own words back to them before asking them to sign it. It was then, sometimes, that their bravado would fail, and he'd catch a glimpse of the terrified woman beneath the angry surface. Many would end up not signing it, and even those who did would quickly change their minds when their husbands were brought in. Those cases went forward, no matter what the woman decided. But later, when a wife wouldn't testify, little punishment was meted out. Alex came to understand that only those who pressed charges ever became truly free, because the life they were leading was a prison, even if most of them wouldn't admit it.

  Still, there was another way to escape the horror of their lives, though in all his years he'd come across only one who actually did it. He'd interviewed the woman once and she'd taken the usual route of denial and self-blame. But a couple of months later, he'd learned that she'd fled. Not to her family and not to her friends, but somewhere else, a place where even her husband couldn't find her. Her husband, lost in his fury that his wife had left, had exploded after a long night of drinking and had bloodied an MP. He ended up in Leavenworth, and Alex remembered grinning in satisfaction when he'd heard the news. And when thinking of the man's wife, he smiled, thinking, Good for you.

  Now, as he watched Katie toying with a ring that wasn't there, he felt his old investigative instincts kick in. There'd been a husband, he thought; her husband was the missing element. Either she was still married or she wasn't, but he had an undeniable hunch that Katie was still afraid of him.

  The sky exploded while she was reaching for a box of crackers. Lightning flashed, and a few seconds later thunder crackled before finally settling into a loud, angry rumble. Josh dashed inside right before the downpour started, clutching his tackle box and fishing reel as he entered the store. His face was red and he was panting like a runner crossing the finish line.

  "Hey, Dad."

  Alex looked up. "Catch anything?"

  "Just the catfish again. The same one I catch every time."

  "I'll see you in a little bit for lunch, okay?"

  Josh vanished back into the storeroom and Alex heard him padding up the steps to the house.

  Outside, the rain came down hard and the wind whipped sheets of water against the glass. Branches bent in the wind, bowing to a higher power. The dark sky flashed bright with lightning, and thunder boomed, loud enough to shake the windows. From across the store, Alex saw Katie flinch, her face a mask of surprise and terror, and he found himself wondering whether it was the same way her husband had once seen her.

  The door of the store opened and a man rushed in, trailing water on the old wood flooring. He shook rivulets of rain from his sleeves and nodded at Alex before finally moving toward the grill.

  Katie turned back to the shelf that held crackers. He didn't have a big selection, just Saltines and Ritz, the only two that sold regularly, and she reached for the Ritz.

  She selected her usual items as well and carried her basket to the register. When he finished ringing up and bagging her items, Alex tapped the bag he'd put on the counter earlier.

  "Don't forget the vegetables."

  She glanced at the total on the register. "Are you sure you rang them up?"

  "Of course."

  "Because the total isn't any more than it usually is."

  "I gave you the introductory price."

  She frowned, wondering whether to believe him, then finally reached into the bag. She pulled out a tomato and brought it to her nose.

  "It smells good."

  "I had some last night. They're great with a touch of salt, and the cucumbers don't need anything."

  She nodded but her gaze was focused on the door. The wind was driving rain against it in furious waves. The door creaked open, the water fighting to get inside. The world beyond the glass was blurry.

  People lingered in the grill. Alex could hear them mumbling to themselves about waiting for the storm to break.

  Katie drew a fortifying breath and reached for her bags.

  "Miss Katie!" Kristen cried, sounding almost panicked. She stood, brandishing the picture she'd colored. She'd already torn it from the book. "You almost forgot your picture."

  Katie reached for it, brightening as she examined the picture. Alex noted how--at least for an instant--everything else in the world seemed to be forgotten.

  "This is beautiful," she murmured. "I can't wait to hang it up."

  "I'll color another one for you the next time you come in."

  "I'd like that very much," she said.

  Kristen beamed before sitting at the table again. Katie rolled up the p
icture, making sure not to wrinkle it, and then tucked it into the bag. Lightning and thunder erupted, almost simultaneously this time. Rain hammered the ground and the parking lot was a sea of puddles. The sky was as dark as northern seas.

  "Do you know how long the storm is supposed to last?" she asked.

  "I heard it was supposed to last most of the day," Alex answered.

  She stared out the door. As she debated what to do, she toyed again with the nonexistent ring. In the silence, Kristen tugged at her dad's shirt.

  "You should drive Miss Katie home," she told him. "She doesn't have a car. And it's raining hard."

  Alex looked at Katie, knowing she'd overheard Kristen. "Would you like a ride home?"

  Katie shook her head. "No, that's okay."

  "But what about the picture?" Kristen said. "It might get wet."

  When Katie didn't answer immediately, Alex came out from behind the register. "Come on." He motioned with his head. "There's no reason to get soaked. My car's right out back."

  "I don't want to impose..."

  "You're not imposing." He patted his pocket and pulled out his car keys before reaching for the bags. "Let me get those for you," he said, taking them. "Kristen, sweetie? Will you run upstairs and tell Josh I'll be back in ten minutes?"

  "Sure, Daddy," she said.

  "Roger?" he called out. "Watch the store and the kids for a bit, would you?"

  "No problem." Roger waved.

  Alex nodded toward the rear of the store. "You ready?" he asked.

  They made a frantic dash for the jeep, wielding bent umbrellas against the gale-force winds and blankets of rain. Lightning continued to flash, making the clouds blink. Once they had settled into their seats, Katie used her hand to wipe the condensation from the window.

  "I didn't think it would be like this when I left the house."

  "No one ever does, until the storm hits, anyway. We get a lot of the sky is falling on the weather reports, so when something big does hit, people never expect it. If it's not as bad as the reports predicted, we complain. If it's worse than expected, we complain. If it's just as bad as predicted, we complain about that, too, because we'll say that the reports are wrong so often, there was no way to know they'd be right this time. It just gives people something to complain about."