Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One (41 page)

Jack nodded, “I’ve considered that
possibility, yes.”

Cassie ignored that. “They’re love poems,
you goof, remember, you were going to read her love poetry?” Jack
dropped the book like it was suddenly burning his fingers. “Oh
Cassie,” he said, “I don’t know—“

Cassie scowled, “You don’t
know
what
?”

Jack looked at her pathetically.

“
It’s been a really long
week," he said, "I don’t know if I’m up for this right now.”
Cassie’s scowl deepened, and as Jack saw that he was going to get
no sympathy for his condition, he switched tactics, his face
darkening in a glowering scowl of his own. “Now, you listen here
young lady—“

Cassie shook her head, interrupting
again.

“
Uh uh,” she said, “nice
try, but I’m not buying it. You’ve been shutting her out for years,
you said so yourself. Now that
that’s
behind you,
this
would be a good
second step in the right direction. You love my Aunt Beth, and she
loves you—“

“
How do you know
that?”

Another rolling of the eyes, “Maybe I’m not
doing her such a favor here…”

“
Hey!”

Cassie continued. “Beth and Bill are down in
the coffee shop,” she said, “they probably think I’ve forgotten
them by now, but Beth promised not to come up here until I came and
got her.” Cassie smiled her sweet smile. “So you’d better start
reading because I’m going to go get her now.”

“
Now wait a
minute…”

Cassie kissed him on the cheek and walked from the
room.

Summer was beginning to wane. The crowded
boardwalk of Main Street was seeing fewer visitors with each
passing day, though still plenty enough to keep the carousel at the
midway running from dawn to dusk. Even in the tiny, enclosed office
of the Sand Castle Bookstore, Cassie could still faintly catch the
summer smells: hot oil, popcorn and the sweet-hot scent of fresh
waffle cones.

She smiled, her fingers flying over the
ten-key machine as she tallied the month’s sales, a task that Jack
had always dreaded, and had happily passed on to her. It had been a
good spring and summer, on many levels, starting with Jack’s return
home from the hospital.

“
He’ll live,” The doctor had
replied dryly. “Keep him off the deep-fried foods and the
ice-cream, and he might still be a pain in our rear in another
forty years.”

Jack and Doctor Ottman had formed a grudging
acceptance of each other over the last several months, not a
friendship, per-se, but at least they weren’t shouting at each
other any longer. Cassie was staying with her Aunt, who had taken a
small bedroom in her Bed & Breakfast out of availability, and
moved Cassie into it, refusing to consider any arguments on her
niece's part. This would be “home” for her on her weekends and
holidays for the next four years.

Guy and Grace had come up for one wonderful
week in June and, as Cassie had suspected, they had become an
almost instant addition to the Long Beach family. Guy insisted,
however, that he would never allow Jack to take him deep-sea
fishing again.

“
I’m a desert-boy, I guess,”
he had said, still more than a little green around the edges when
Jack had brought him back from their day trip. “That was my first
time out on the ocean and, if it’s all the same to everyone, I
think I’ll stay on dry land from now on.”

Later, after poor Guy had been mercifully
sent to bed, Jack had laughed in sympathy with the others. “I felt
so awful for him,” he chuckled, “I don’t think he got an hour of
fishing in the whole day, by afternoon I was waiting for the poor
fella’s boots to come up!”

Despite the less than successful angling
experience, all parties had shed some tears when the Williams
family had been dropped off at the Portland Airport for their
flight home. Promises had been made for a trip to Bowie the
following year.

“
We’ll catch us a big ‘ol
bass down there,” Guy had laughed, slapping Jack on the shoulder,
“and from the
dock
.”

Cassie was teaching her father to read
again. It was slow going, and more than one person had told her it
couldn’t be done, but she persisted. Jack, however, had encouraged
her.

“
Don’t listen to them,
Cass,” he had told her firmly, as they were returning home from
Sunday services one late spring afternoon, “and don’t believe ‘em.
Love can accomplish anything; we know that, don’t we?”

Cassie smiled, remembering
his words.
Love can accomplish
anything
and the changes that it had
worked in Jack Leland since February were miracles in themselves.
Jack, she knew, was teetering on the brink of becoming an elder at
Long Beach Community, a title he was considering with great
trepidation.

“
You can say no,” Pastor
Edelstien had told him, more than once, “the title only officiates
what you’re already doing. You
are
an elder, Jack, to any
number of the young couples. A title, or lack of one, isn’t going
to change that.”

Still, Jack struggled with the idea, but it
was prayerful struggle and that, their pastor had assured them, was
the best kind.

That wasn’t the only issue on Jack’s heart,
either.

Cassie happened to know there was a small
velvet box hidden deep in the top drawer of his dresser, beneath a
jumble of mismatched socks. The box, of course, contained a
diamond-studded band of gold, just the right size to slip onto the
finger of a certain relative of hers.

Cassie had about lost
patience with Jack, and had told him, a day or two before, that
steps had better be taken
before
she left for school in
September.

“
Why couldn’t you have taken
summer courses?” Jack had grumbled.

Cassie had laughed, hiding her regret that she hadn’t, in
fact, been able to get her loan in time to start school in June.
Still, she had enjoyed a wonderful summer, and had earned enough to
attend fall classes with only a part-time job to supplement the
small loan she had already been approved for. She was awakened
abruptly, from her thoughts of school, as Jack and Beth came
through the door and into the office.

“
Hey guys!” she said,
hitting a final button on the ten-key, “looks like we had a better
summer than any of us thought, unless I added when I should have
subtracted!”

Jack laughed.

“
Why do you think I
have
you
on
the books?" he said. "That’s what
I
kept doing!”

Cassie handed him the small roll of paper
from the old adding machine and smiled as his eyes widened and he
whistled appreciatively. “Not bad…”

Elizabeth winked at her niece, “That’s what
happens when you staff the front desk with a pretty young girl
instead of a grouchy old man!” She laughed at Jack’s wounded
expression and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

“
Cass,” Beth said, taking
Jack’s hand in her own, “we have something we need to tell
you.”

Cassie’s gaze immediately shifted to the
third finger of her Aunt's left hand, but it was still bare. She
glanced at Jack in time to catch the barely perceivable shake of
his head. She frowned at him as he shrugged sheepishly.

“
What’s up?” she
asked.

Elizabeth took a seat on the edge of the
desk, Jack standing behind her.

He was already grinning, unable to contain
himself, as his soon-to-be fiancé handed the young woman a thick
manila envelope. Cassie took it suspiciously, glancing back and
forth between the two of them.

“
What’s this?” she asked,
slipping open the flap.

“
Well,” Jack said, “consider
it an early inheritance.”

Cassie removed the first thing that her
fingers touched and it was a small, plastic checkbook.
Check-register, actually, and she found that her name was written
boldly on the outside. Her hands begin to shake and, without
knowing why, Cassie was suddenly desperately thirsty. She opened
the register and read the amount of the first and only deposit into
the account that was in her name.

She read the line again, and
a third time, just to be sure her eyes weren’t deceiving her. The
amount, written in blue ink in the first small box beneath
the
deposits
column read One-Hundred-Forty-Three Thousand Dollars and Zero
cents.

“
Guys,” she whispered, when
she could breathe again, “what did you do?”

“
Oh don’t panic,” Jack
laughed, “I didn’t sell the store, and Beth didn’t sell her house.
That’s your inheritance, literally. It’s Bill’s half of the money
that I got for selling his parent's house. The rest is what I’ve
added as his weekly salary since I opened the store. He gets his
social security, so that money has barely been touched. Beth
invested it several years ago and, apparently, made some very good
choices!”

Cassie gazed wide-eyed at the number once
more, and then looked to her aunt.

“
It’s money we put away for
Bill,” she said, “Just in case something happened to us. Now that
you’re here, we know that you would take care of him in that very
unlikely event.”

Cassie nodded dumbly, of course she
would.

“
So,” Jack grinned, “Looks
like you’ll have plenty of time to hit the books this fall, without
having to worry about flipping burgers or delivering pizzas, or any
of that nonsense.”

"We called last week and canceled your
loan," Beth said, "I hope that was all right?"

“
Guys…” Cassie said again,
unable to find any other words.

“
Hey,” Jack said, “don’t
think that it comes without strings; I expect a big fat thank you
in the acknowledgments of your first book!”

Cassie laughed a bit distractedly, her mind
spinning, “You betcha,” she said, “and…and if it’s okay, I’d like
to send some of it to Guy and Grace…for Mom’s headstone. I
promised.”

“
Of course,” Beth smiled,
putting her arms around the younger woman.

Cassie clung to her aunt, her eyes
swimming.

“
It's your money,” Jack
agreed. “You can spend it however you like. I’ll tell you this
though, if you don’t have a degree and the better part of a book
written in four years," he shook his finger at her, growling, "I’m
dragging you back here and making you work it off in this office
with me!”

“
Ugh,” Cassie rolled her eyes, “anything but that! I think you
just guaranteed my grade point average.”

Jack laughed as she reached out and pulled
him into a three-way embrace, feeling two pairs of arms squeezing
her tight.

*

Later, as she locked up the office and
prepared to close the shop, Cassie found her father seated on the
store's worn leather couch. His brow was furrowed as he painfully
attempted to sound out the sentences in the colorful children’s
Bible that his daughter had given him.

As she smiled, sitting on the floor beside
him and pointing out the words, syllable by syllable, Cassie
realized that she had found what had been waiting for her just past
Oysterville.

“
I’m not an orphan," she
thought.

.

THE END

Be sure to read…

Shoalwater Book Two

_________________________

”
I saw a dream which
made me afraid, and the thoughts on my bed and the visions of my
head troubled me.” -
Daniel
4:5

Four years have passed and Cassie Belanger
finds herself plagued with nightmares, ghostly voices from the
past, and a compulsion to return to the sleepy fishing town of
Oysterville, Washington.

There, she meets two strangers who have also
followed a mysterious obsession that has brought them to the Long
Beach peninsula. Together they uncover a plot to track down a
long-forgotten treasure.

Cassie and her new friends must race against
time to solve the mysteries of cryptic letters, bizarre and
terrifying dreams, and a shadowy figure bent on finding the
treasure before they do, and more than willing to murder those who
get in his way.

Danger, mystery, love, and fortune all await
Cassie as she finds her way back to Oysterville once more.

Available now at -
www.perryperkinsbooks.com

Dearest Reader,

Thank you for joining me
on this journey. I pray that your joy in the reading equaled mine
in the telling, and that you may know and experience the miraculous
power of God’s forgiveness.

Cassie’s
adventures are far from over, and I hope you’ll join us again
in
Shoalwater
Voices: Shoalwater Book Two
.

Blessings,

Perry

John 9:25