Moondance Beach

  Just then Frasier let the mermaid’s hand slip from his, stepped back from the statue, and turned toward the group. His eyes held more than sentiment—Frasier looked stunned. His skin shimmered under the lights. Fountain spray had misted his hair and face, plastering the soggy paper streamer to the side of his neck. And for just a moment, Clancy wondered if his father had been crying.

  Of course he hadn’t. Clancy had never seen his da cry.

  “Let’s go.” Frasier swiped the back of his hand across his wet cheeks. “It’s late, and you made me drink too much. For God’s sake, I’m seventy years old.”

  At that instant, a large figure moved silently from the shadows toward the streetlamp. It was a man with two bags slung over his shoulder, and he seemed to be walking a bit unsteadily. Probably another inebriated tourist, Clancy thought, but until he was sure, he would keep his hand on his service weapon.

  Just then, a deep voice said, “That old sea hag’s not gonna help you, Da.”

  Frasier’s head snapped to attention. Clancy’s heart rose into his throat. And his brother stepped into the light.

  They all rushed toward Duncan, but he kept them at a straight-armed distance. “Hold up. I’m not very steady.” He dropped the duffel and a hanging bag to the bricks before he hugged them one at a time—Da first, then Clancy, Ash, and Nat.

  Ash reached out for both his bags. “Let me get these.” As Duncan handed over his duffel, he clearly favored his right leg over his left. It had been about six weeks since they last visited him at Walter Reed, and at that time he hadn’t even mastered using a walker. He had come a long way.

  “Damn, you’re doing great, son.” Frasier’s voice cracked.

  “Thanks, Da.”

  “You might want to use a cane,” Nat suggested. “You know, to be on the safe—”

  Duncan’s glare sliced off the rest of Nat’s sentence.

  “Except you don’t need a cane, right?”

  “Right,” Duncan said.

  Frasier made a quick call, and an island taxi swooped in to get them. They tossed Duncan’s bags in the trunk and watched him cautiously lower himself into the backseat with Frasier. Clancy and the others said they would continue walking home.

  As the taxi drove off toward Shoreline Road, Nat said, “I thought he was going to bite my head off.”

  “My God,” Ash said. “He dragged those heavy bags all the way from the ferry. That is one tough bastard.”

  Clancy sighed. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Chapter Two

  Duncan Flynn didn’t need to open his eyes to know where he was or how soon darkness would ease into dawn. His birthplace was many things, but subtle was not one of them.

  He heard the breath of the surf and the chime of sailboat halyards down at the new marina. He felt expensive cotton sheets cool against his skin. And right on schedule, nature’s alarm clock began to chime—the mellow baseline of their local horned owl combined with the never-ending twittering of a northern mockingbird perched on a turret outside the open window.

  After only a week, that little fucker was really starting to get on his nerves.

  With eyes still closed, from his fancy third-floor guest suite at the Safe Haven Bed and Breakfast, Duncan decided to deduce the time, right down to the minute. It was one of many contests he would have with himself that day, just one more measure of his progress. Was he getting quicker? Stronger? More observant? As it turned out, the game was too easy that morning. It had to be a Saturday between zero five fifty and zero five sixty, because Mellie’s freshly baked berry scones were about to come out of the oven the way they did every Saturday morning. The scent had already migrated up to his third-floor suite. He could almost feel the dense pastry dissolve in his mouth and taste the explosion of buttery sweetness on his tongue.

  He laughed at his own ridiculousness. Had all these months of recuperation turned him into a freakin’ poet? What was next—musing on how the scent of “sea spray” had slipped through the window curtains and filled his nostrils?

  Not hardly.

  He was no poet. He was a U.S. Navy lieutenant, a language and demolition specialist with SEAL Team 2, and he lived in the brutally real world, where exceptional men died and “sea spray” was just a flowery term for a mix of suspended salt particulates and microscopic organic matter so corrosive it would wreak havoc with planes, ships, aircraft carriers, and every other piece of equipment it touched. It was a time bomb that cost the Pentagon billions every year.

  But, oh boy, they sure loved that shit around here! Bayberry Island’s only local beer was made by the Sea Spray Microbrewery. There was a small, family-friendly state park on the South Shore called Sea Spray Beach, plus a “See” Spray Sunglass Boutique, a Sea Spray Day Spa, and, of course, a Sea Spray Automated Car Wash. The expression had just the right amount of fluffy delusion about it, Duncan thought, ranking right up there with “Great Mermaid,” and “true love.”

  Duncan stretched his arms toward the ceiling, clasped his fingers, and tucked them behind his head. He took a deep breath and focused on his lower body, cautiously stretching both legs beneath the sheets, judging how much stiffness he would be working with that day. He alternated pointing his toes and flexing his calves twenty-five times on each leg, a gentle warm-up that would please his newest physical therapist, no doubt. Then he lifted his left leg five inches off the bed, held it, and slowly set it down. He did it again. And again. And he’d do it a hundred times more by the end of the day.

  Pain radiated in all directions from his left hip. It cut across his abdomen, sliced down to his ankle, and shot up the side of his body to pierce his skull. No surprise there. He was used to it. In fact, some variety of pain had been his standard operating procedure since his first day of BUD/S training a decade ago. He understood physical pain. It was a no-nonsense function of cause and effect, and he’d learned that it could be contained and controlled—maybe not completely and maybe not every moment, but he could handle physical pain.

  Just by staying the course.

  But the guilt? That was something else entirely. It was a spiteful shape-shifter that lay in wait for him, crouched inside a dark cave in his brain, infinitely patient. Guilt lay coiled in silence, ready to strike the instant his eyes closed, or his guard dropped, or his breath deepened . . . and just like that, an explosion would crack open the sky, flaming debris would fly, and the jeep would pin him to the ground as his friends screamed in agony. There he would stay, facedown in grit, blood pooling in his mouth while he flailed, nails bleeding as he tried to get free, useless, trapped by the weight of his failure, unable to free himself until it was too late.

  By the time Duncan had reached them, they were dead. He’d failed them all. He had promised to have their backs and he had lied.

  He woke with a start, his throat raw and his hair wet with sweat. He scanned the overly bright room, and it took him a moment to piece it together. He wasn’t on board the MH-60 headed to the field hospital. He wasn’t on the C-17 taking him from Afghanistan to Germany. He wasn’t in the recovery room at Landstuhl or the rehab floor at Walter Reed. The light that hit his eyes also spilled over fancy upholstered furniture, an attached marble bathroom, fresh flowers on the fireplace mantel, a dining nook, expensive linens, and a huge painting of . . . that damn mermaid.

  Duncan groaned, propping himself against the fancy tufted headboard. He willed his pulse to slow. A quick check of his cell phone revealed it was almost seven thirty—hence the nightmare. He had fallen back asleep for at least two hours, which he should never do. Morning nightmares tended to be the most vicious.

  Duncan looked down at himself. His legs and arms trembled with weakness and fear. His T-shirt was soaked through with perspiration. He couldn’t let anyone see him like this and knew he had to pull himself together. After a few moments, he slowly draped his legs over the side of the king-sized bed.

  His eyes automatically flashed to the painting again. She called to him from above the
mantel. Like a well-sexed woman waiting for her lover to return to bed, she lay stretched out on her stomach, cheek resting on folded arms, making sure he noticed her. All that wild dark hair floating in a halo around her head. Those sleepy eyes. That sexy dip of the small of her back before it curved into her—mermaid tail.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Flynn,” he mumbled to himself. He steadied his feet on the shiny wood floor and was about to push himself to a stand when he froze.

  Duncan snatched the large feather from the nightstand and twirled the stiff vane between his fingers, examining his mother’s latest gift. The tail feather was that of an adult osprey, this particular specimen measuring about ten inches long and two inches at its widest, dominated by alternating black and white stripes. Duncan stroked his fingers upward along the downy softness. He’d seen many of these through the years, dropped on Bayberry Island beaches or snagged in the dune grass by winds. But this particular feather was obviously a product of one of the tourist shops on Main Street. Its natural beauty was accessorized with a strand of elaborately knotted black and white string dotted with multicolored glass beads, which trailed from the vane like the tail of a kite.

  It was pretty enough, he supposed, but his mother shouldn’t have spent her money on something like this. Duncan sighed, figuring he’d get around to putting it on the bookshelf, along with the rest of the week’s haul—a shellacked starfish, a necklace made of tiny shells and stones, and chunks of sea glass in blues and greens.

  Duncan stood. Slowly. Carefully. He focused on the even distribution of his weight and took the thirteen steps required to reach the head, intentionally keeping his eyes away from the painting. With unwavering concentration and one deliberate movement after the next, he managed to shower, shave, and throw on a clean pair of shorts and a T-shirt. He refused to dwell on the fact that it took forty minutes of precise concentration to perform basic tasks that once took no more than five mindless minutes of his time. He couldn’t go there. All he could do was push himself harder than he did yesterday. Work longer. Trust that tomorrow would be better than today and that it would be even better the day after that. If he wanted to get back to active duty, this thought process was his only option.

  And returning to duty was the only thing that mattered.

  Just as he set foot back in the bedroom, Duncan heard a knock at the door.

  “Are you decent?”

  The feather wasn’t enough?

  He shook his head as he went to the door. Apparently, it didn’t matter how many times he told his mother that he was injured, not the sick kid he used to be, and he was capable of going downstairs to feed himself. She hadn’t listened. In the week he’d been home, not once had he been allowed to go down to the kitchen and grab a bowl of Cheerios like the nonpatient he was. And if it wasn’t his mother at the door with a tray, it was his sister, Rowan, or Mellie, the family’s longtime housekeeper and cook. Even Clancy’s wife, Evelyn, felt compelled to fib about how she happened to be in the neighborhood during the lunch hour and thought he might enjoy some of her homemade black bean and quinoa salad, which, for the record, he hadn’t.

  Duncan was under siege, and his enemy was a legion of relentlessly fussy females.

  “Good morning!” His mother was a gray-haired, arthritic lady of sixty-nine years who barely came up to Duncan’s shoulders. Mona Flynn had no business carrying a loaded-down serving tray like a waitress at a Shriner’s convention.

  Duncan snatched it from her immediately. “Ma—”

  “Oh, now, hush. The exercise is good for me. Mellie made both blueberry and strawberry, and I know those are your favorites so I brought you one of each, along with three scrambled eggs, bacon, orange juice, fried potatoes . . .”

  While Mona recited the menu, Duncan placed the tray on the small round table by the windows. He pulled out a chair and motioned for her to sit. Though he hadn’t uttered another word of complaint, his mother continued to justify her visit.

  “I just want you to eat right. The next time you go to Boston for your follow-up, I want the surgeon to be shocked at your progress and call the bigwigs in Virginia with the good news.”

  Duncan prepared a cup of coffee for his mother, adding a swift pour of cream and one packet of sugar, the way she liked it. He handed it to her, then immediately poured himself a cup—black.

  “So don’t forget that tonight is your father’s birthday dinner.”

  It was a good thing Duncan had just chomped down on a crisp piece of bacon, because he was sorely tempted to blurt out a question along the lines of: You two aren’t going to be in the same room together, are you?

  His mother laughed, obviously seeing the unspoken question in her son’s eyes. “Go ahead. Eat. And yes, I’ll be there. Frasier is seventy. We’re having a family celebration. And though your father and I are separated, I’ve been married to the crusty old bastard for forty-five years, so by God I deserve a slice of roast beef and a piece of birthday cake.”

  “Good eggs, Ma.”

  “And while everyone is assembled in one place, we’ll go over the family’s plans for festival week, in particular divvying up jobs at the clambake and going over menu items for the annual barbecue. Since you happen to be home this year, you’ll be expected to help out.”

  “Really good eggs.”

  “I’ll tell Mellie. She sprinkled chives on them—did you notice?” Mona took a sip of her coffee and glanced around the suite. “Are you comfortable?”

  “I am.” And he was. Just as he had been comfortable the previous six mornings she’d asked him that question.

  “Dinner starts at seven in the main dining room. They aren’t serving to the public tonight, so it will be just us—Clancy, Evelyn, and little Christina; plus Rowan, Ash, and Serena. Then your father, me, Annie, and Nat, and of course Mellie, who might try to convince Adelena to join us.”

  Duncan stopped chewing. Almost unconsciously, he found himself turning toward the giant mermaid painting above the fireplace mantel, the work of Mellie’s daughter, Adelena. With its swirls of blues and greens, flashes of pinks and yellows, those mysterious mermaid eyes, the dark hair scattered with the current, and a boatload of soft, warm, bare female flesh, the painting was so powerful that it made him vaguely uncomfortable, almost as if she were insisting that he look at her, teasing him, pulling him in . . .

  Enough. Today was the day he got rid of that damn painting. He’d find a storage closet or throw it in the attic—anywhere but here.

  “You know she’s incredibly famous now.”

  “Huh?” He turned to his mother in surprise. He had forgotten she was even in the room with him. “Yeah. So I hear.”

  “She bought old Harry Rosterveen’s land a few years ago, sixteen acres on the North Shore. She named it Moondance Beach, which I think is very romantic. Did you know she’s a full-time island resident these days?”

  Moondance Beach? Why must everything on this island be turned into a fairy tale? Adelena must be as delusional as the rest of them. “Yep. Clancy told me.”

  “She lived in Harry’s old shack for a year or so, then built a glass and cedar fortress out there. It’s her painting studio, too. Beautiful, but too modern for my tastes. I’ve only caught a glimpse of him downstairs.”

  “I see.”

  “And heaven knows why she needs all that room. She’s all alone in that big house, quiet as a mouse. Doesn’t socialize much. Lena’s always been such an odd bird.”

  Duncan nodded, digging into the hash browns. He remembered her. Imelda Silva’s daughter had been a scrawny, black-haired little girl who used to follow him around the island during his high school years. He had a vague memory of how she would sometimes keep him company back when he was sick. They would play Chinese checkers. She would read him stories and draw him pictures. She’d been a harmless enough kid.

  “What do you have planned today?”

  Duncan glanced up from his rapidly clearing plate and dabbed his mouth with a cloth napkin. “Same ol?
??, same ol’, Ma. The physical therapist comes this afternoon. I’ve got some studying to do.”

  Mona produced a stiff smile and fiddled with her coffee cup. He couldn’t fool her. Though he was taking online Pashto, Persian, and Arabic refresher courses, Ma knew that his “studying” also included writing letters to the families of his dead teammates.

  “How many more do you have left?”

  “Two.”

  “Have you done Justin’s yet?”

  Duncan shook his head and gazed out toward Safe Haven Beach, already dotted with tourists. Justin’s would be the last. Though each of the men in that insertion team had been like brothers to him, Justin Jaramillo was the closest friend he’d ever had in his life. They’d met the first week of prep at Great Lakes and leaned on each other through the multiphase agony that was BUD/S training and the year that followed, eventually being assigned to SEAL Team 2 together.

  Each letter had been excruciating to write. In every instance, he took great care to describe the man who was their son, brother, husband, and even father, and how he had lived and died with the utmost courage and dedication. But with Justin’s family, what could he say that hadn’t already been said? Nestor and Beth Jaramillo had been Duncan’s West Coast family when he was training at Coronado. They’d treated him like he was one of their own. The day the grieving parents had flown all the way to DC to visit Duncan at the rehab unit of Walter Reed was the hardest day of his life. He’d held them as they’d cried for their boy.

  “I’m working my way up to that one, Ma,” Duncan said.

  “Son?”

  Duncan turned toward his mother. He saw worry carved into her face.

  “I was just wondering . . . Have you given any thought to . . . you know . . . ? There are so many things a man with your expertise and training could do. Maybe the foreign service. Or national security. I was watching this new TV show about CIA operatives the other night—”