Frank's Independence Day (The Night Stalkers) (12 page)

The building’s wall was concrete, worn smooth by a thousand storms and a hundred coats of brilliant white paint. With the wind practically pinning her to the outside of the building, she peeked into one of the windows. The wind blew her hair about so that it beat on her eyes and mouth trying to simultaneously blind and choke her. With one hand, she grabbed the unruly mass mostly to one side. With the other she shaded the dusty window. The cobwebbed glass revealed an equally unkempt interior.

No lightkeeper sitting in his rocking chair before a merry fire. No smoking pipe. No lighthouse cat curled in his lap. Some sort of a rusty
engine not attached to anything. A bucket of old tools. A couple of paint
cans.

A high wave crashed into the rocks with a thundering shudder that ran up through the heels of her boots and whipped a chill spray into the wind. Salt water on suede.

Daddy now owed her a new coat as well.

Cassidy edged along the foundation until she found a calmer spot, a bit of windshadow behind the lighthouse where the wind chill ranked merely miserable rather than horrific on the suck-o-meter. Squatting down behind one of the breakwater’s boulders helped a tiny bit more. She peeled off her thin leather gloves and blew against her fingertips to warm them enough so that they’d work. Once she’d regained some modicum of feeling, she pulled out the letter.

She couldn’t feel his writing, though she ran her fingertips over it again and again. His Christmas present. A five-dollar calendar of Washington lighthouses from the hospital gift store and a dozen thin envelopes wrapped in a old x-ray folder with no ribbon, no paper.

In the end he’d foiled her final Christmas hunt. It had been her great yearly quest. The ultimate grail of childhood, finding the key present before Christmas morning. There was no present he could hide that she couldn’t find. Not the Cabbage Patch Kid when she was six; the one she’d had to hold with her arm in a cast, from falling off the kitchen stool she’d dragged into her father’s closet. Not the used VW Rabbit he’d hidden out in the wine shed thinking that she never went there anymore. And she didn’t, except for some reason the day before her eighteenth Christmas.

A part of her wanted to crumple the letter up and throw it into the sea. It was too soon. She didn’t want to face the pain again.

Too soon.

The rest of her did what it supposed to do. The dutiful daughter opened the envelope and pinned the letter against her thigh so that she could read the slashing scrawl that was her father’s. Even as weak with sickness as he must have been, it looked scribed in stone. His bold-stroke writing gave the words a force and strength just as his deep voice had once sounded strong enough to keep the world at bay for his small girl.

Dearest Ice Sweet,

He’d always called her that.

Icewine. The grapes traditionally harvested on her birthday, December twenty-first. “The sweetest wine of all, my little ice sweet girl.” By the age of five she knew about the sugar content of icewine, Riesling, Chardonnay, and a dozen others. By eight she could identify scores of vintages just by the scent of the cork and hundreds by their logos though she’d yet to taste more than thimblefuls of watered wine at any one time.

Cassidy stared at the waves digging angrily at the rocks. Spray slashed sideways by the wind dragged tears from her eyes even as she struggled to blink them dry. She hadn’t cried in a long time and she was damned if she was going to start now simply because she was cold and there was a hole in her heart.

Seven days. She’d looked away for a one moment seven days ago and he was gone. Christmas morning. He’d hung on long enough to tell her of his last present, hidden in plain sight in the used X-ray folder on the side table. A long list of crossed-out names had shuttled films back and forth across Northwest Hospital. Last used by someone named Barash. No meaning for her whatsoever.

I bought this calendar the day you moved back to Seattle. Marked in all the “dates.” Now I know that I won’t get to go with you. I’m sorry to leave you so young.

“I’m twenty-nine, Daddy.” But it felt young. Her birthday gone unre
marked because he’d never woken that day so close to his last. The hole in her heart was so broad that it would never be filled.

He’d only been gone a week. Cremated, waked, and ashes spread on his beloved vineyard by the permission of the new owners. They’d owned his vineyard for five years, but still, they were the new ones. It still wasn’t right, them living in the place where her father belonged. She could still picture him striding among the vines, rubbing the soil in his palm, showing his only child the wonders of the changing seasons, the lifecycle of a grapevine, and the nurturing of honeybees.

For our first “date” I will just tell you how proud I am of you. My daughter took a vintner’s education and turned herself into the best food-and-wine columnist ever.

He always believed in her. Always rooted for her. Always cheered her on. He’d been the same way with her boyfriends. Always welcoming them when they arrived. Always consoling her when they were gone. No
judgment, not even on the ones she should have avoided like a bottle of
rotgut Thunderbird.

The wind rattled the paper sharply, drawing her attention back to the letter.

You are so like me. You figure out what feels right and you just go do it, damn the consequences. I could never fault you for leaving. I always did what I wanted, too. Saw it and went right for it, no discussion needed. All the while wearing perfect blinders that blocked out everything else.
You got that fro
m me. You come by your whimsical stubbornness honestly, Ice Sweet.

She wasn’t stubborn, years of careful planning had led her this far. Even her move to Seattle to be with him had been calculated, though she never told him about that. She shifted on the hard rock that was in imminent danger of freezing her butt.

Her father kept apologizing for all the wrong things. Seattle had end
ed up being a great career move, or was becoming one as she’d hoped. In New York, she had worked as one of a thousand food and wine reviewers. Okay one in fifty, maybe even one in twenty-five, she was damn good, but there were only three women at that level. The other twenty-two were members of longstanding in the old boys’ club.

“We’re looking for someone with a more refined palate.” Read as someone who was “male.”

She’d let go of her sublet in Manhattan when she’d found out he was sick. Bought a condo in Seattle to be near, but not too near him on Bainbridge Island. Helped him move into the elder-care by Northgate when he couldn’t care for himself any longer, and from there to Northwest Hospital where she’d lived out his last two weeks in the chair by his bed.

The
Village Voice
dropped her the day she left Manhattan. That had hurt as they’d run her first-ever review, a short piece on Jim and Charlie’s
Punk and Wine Bistro. Jim and Charlie’s was still there, partly thanks to that review that was still framed and hung in the center of the bar’s mirror.

But in Seattle she was rapidly rising to the very upper crust of the apple pie. Her reviews ran in every local paper. The
San Francisco
Chronicle
had picked her up for their Travel section the following week making it difficult to stay grumpy about the loss of The Voice. Then AAA took her national with their magazines. From there, it hadn’t been a big step to national syndication. Six more months in New York and she’d have still been grinding her way up from the twentieth spot to the nineteenth. She was going to bypass the lot of them by skipping right past the de rigueur hurdles and sitting at the head table herself.

Her father’s cancer had brought at least that much good. Now if only it hadn’t taken him with it.

And she wasn’t whimsical, no matter what he thought. Her dad had always described her mother as the organized one. And Cassidy had done
her best to be just like her. You didn’t become a topcolumnist by follow
ing the wind all willy-nilly.

If she didn’t hurry, she was going to freeze in place. She chafed at her legs with one hand and then the other, but it didn’t help. She was cold past any cure less than a piping-hot tub bath. She peeked ahead, just two and a bit pages. She turned to the second sheet.

I started the vineyard after my tour in Vietnam. Got signed off the base and walked out of San Francisco right across the Golden Gate. No home, no job, no one to go back to. Headed up into the hills, don’t even know why or where I was. Walked and hitched ‘til dark, slept, woke with the light, and kept moving.

One morning, I woke up in a field, leaning against a rotting, wooden fencepost, looking at the saddest little vineyard you could imagine. Poor vines dying of thirst. I found an old bucket and started watering them from a nearby stream. Old man came out to lean on the fence. Watched me quite a while, a couple hours maybe. I didn’t care about him. Those vines were the first thing I’d cared about in a long, long time.

“You want ‘em?” the old guy asked. “Five hundred bucks and they’re
yours.”

I don’t even remember how it happened. One minute my final pay was in my pocket, then his. Other vets drifted in. I charged them fifty bucks to join. Five of us worked the land, recovered the vines. That was the start of the thirty acres of Knowles Valley Vineyard.

She’d never heard how his first vineyard started. Didn’t even re
ally know where it was, somewhere in the hills of northern California.

Though he might have ambled all the way to Oregon for how much she knew.

Walk the year with me. Let’s take our time. My past is mine, but your future is not. That’s only up to you. I leave you to walk alone, it is a rough trail often over rocky soil. But keep your head high and you’ll go far.

Whatever happens, know that I love you. I’m so proud of you.

Love you Ice Sweet,

Vic

Vic. He always signed his letters “Vic.” Never what she’d always called him. “Daddy.”

“I could never fault you for leaving.” Yet between the lines that’s just what he did. Nothing on the backs of any of the pages. She worked to refold the pages in the wind.

“No, you’re imagining things, Cass. You think too much. Get your head out of your own butt.” And she mostly did. One of the many gifts Vic Knowles had given her, the ability to be clear about her own actions and reactions.

He’d financed her dreams of getting away from the rain capital of the Pacific Northwest. He’d paid for her college in full and cooking school after that. It was only cleaning up his papers this last week that she saw how close it had come to breaking him. He’d just made it a natural assumption that she’d go to college and he’d pay. Just like her Mom who had a degree in economics from Vassar. He’d always talked about how smart Cassidy’s mother was. How beautiful. How much he missed her.

He hadn’t gone to college himself, not even high school. His past was little more than a few facts she’d winnowed over the years. His dad had left before he could remember. He’d dropped out of third grade to help his mother run the grocery store. They were desperately poor when she died. Then he’d gone to Vietnam at eighteen as the only way to make a living wage. And walked to a vineyard. But he gave Cassidy that gift of education as if it was no sacrifice to him.

Did he now begrudge her that past? The future he never had.

No. That didn’t make any sense. He hadn’t thought about the money, he’d invested in his dreams for her. She was just going nuts from missing him so much and angry at him for being dead.

“Useful, Cass, real useful.”

To prove her sanity, she forced the rumpled letter back into the enve
lope, as neatly as possible in the midst of the maelstrom, and she forced that back into her leather pack.

Her father, the self-educated man, also the most well-read man she’d ever met. But she’d learned early on to do her math and science homework before he came home from the fields. His frustration at being unable to help her with them had always been a strain.

Cassidy’s mother was a single solitary memory. She’d been standing in the open doorway of the house, leaving on a stormy night to answer a call to the hospital. The wind at the door blew her hair across her face as she leaned on her father’s arm. Cassidy’s only memory of Adrianne Knowles, a woman with no face. Then Bea Clark rushing in from next door to sit with her.

She and Daddy did talk about the books though. He had sharpened her mind as they puzzled out the books together. Ayn Rand piled next to Shakespeare, Heinlein and Hugo, Dickens and a biography of Jimi
Hendrix. Their house was always awash in books. And the massive col
lection of wine books, thumbed again and again by both of them, the only books to have a proper bookcase, had sat in the place of honor in the living room. Everything else jumbled into stacked wooden crates, mounded on tops of dressers, and enough on the dining table to make it a battle to find room for two plates.

The chill spray of a particularly large wave spattered her with a few drops and the next with a few more.

The tide must be coming in.

She scrambled from her hiding place and rose back into the wind which threatened to topple her down into the roaring waves. She forged her way back up the hill. The wind tore at her backpack and thumped it against her spine. The camera. Right.

She squatted to get out of the wind and pulled out her trusty point-and-shoot. The wind nearly blinded her when she turned back into it. Her hair swirled about her head.

A sailboat.

Two lunatics in a sailboat were off the point of land. A cobalt-blue hull climbed out of one wave, pointing its bow to the sky, and then plunged down and buried its nose in the front of the next wave before rising again in a great arc of spray and green water. Huge, maroon sails snapped in the wind, loud enough to sound like a gunshot above the roaring surf.