Suspicion. Janice Macdonald
standing in the doorway. She looked different, though, her hair or something. It took him a moment to realize it wasn’t Ava. Actually, she looked like a less-vivid version of Ava. Same build, same fine bone structure, but her hair was short and choppy, and in contrast to Ava’s Snow White coloring, this woman had the tanned complexion of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. Her feet were clad in hiking boots and she wore jeans and a sleeveless cotton shirt.
She glanced around the cramped offices of the Catalina Island Argonaut, where undelivered stacks of last week’s newspaper vied for space with the mountain bike he’d just acquired, the small brown fridge where the previous publisher had kept her peppermint schnapps and a precarious mountain of boxes still to be unpacked.
“So you’re the new publisher, huh?” She stuck out her hand. “Ingrid Lynsky. You met my sister this morning. My father asked me to pass on a message to you. He’s supposed to give you a tour this afternoon?”
“At four,” Scott said.
“Don’t look for him before five,” Ingrid said. “My father overcommits. If he has enough time in the day to do four things, he’ll try to squeeze in six. Everybody is inconvenienced, but hey, that’s Dr. Sam for you.”
Scott scratched his ear. He could still hear Ellie telling him he sucked. “You’re not a member of the Dr. Sam fan club?” he asked Ingrid. “I thought everyone on Catalina subscribed to it.”
Ingrid laughed. “Oh, did I give you the wrong impression? I’m sorry. Dr. Sam’s a saint. Most people have to take a boat to the mainland. My father can walk.”
Scott looked at her.
Ingrid looked straight back at him, her gaze steady and unflinching. “Anyway,” she said, “just so you know, he’ll be late.”
“HOPE YOU’RE NOT expecting to make any money with that paper,” Sam Lynsky said as he pulled his Jeep back onto the road. He’d breezed into Scott’s office at five-thirty with a convoluted tale about being stopped a dozen times as he tried to get away from the hospital and everyone wanting a minute of his time. “The Argonaut’s never turned a profit in forty years. How come you bought it?”
“Escape,” Scott said before he had time to think about it. “Things on the mainland were getting ugly.”
Dr. Sam rounded the curve of Abalone Point and headed toward Pebbly Beach. “No family?”
“Divorced.” Scott glanced at the doctor, a youthful-looking sixty-year-old with white hair curling from under a red baseball cap, neat mustache and a clear blue steady-eyed gaze. “I have a fourteen-year-old daughter.”
“You going to make enough to get by?”
“I’m counting on the newspaper to provide some revenue.” He’d seen the publisher’s account books. Maybe not much by Lynsky’s standards, but he could get by. “And I’ve got some freelance assignments lined up.”
He rested an arm on the window ledge. If his head weren’t full of Ellie, he’d enjoy this tour, he thought as they turned onto Wrigley Terrace Road. Avalon Bay was behind them now, and the grey-green mountains that ringed Catalina filled the view through the windshield. The wind off the ocean felt bracing.
“That’s the old William Wrigley home up there on your left.” Lynsky waved his arm at a palatial white structure nestled in the hills. “Built in the 1920s as a summer home. Before that the Wrigleys would come over in June and stay at the St. Catherine’s Hotel. The story goes, Mrs. Wrigley woke up one morning and said, ‘I would like to live there.’ It’s a hotel these days, but when I was a boy… Hold on.”
Scott grabbed the Jeep’s roll bar as Lynsky executed a sudden hairpin curve. The doctor’s driving was a tad hair-raising.
Lynsky glanced at Scott and laughed. “You think that’s bad? In my great-grandfather’s days, before the Bannings started building real roads, they’d run stage coaches from Avalon over to the Isthmus. Six horses, galloping down the summit, hooves flying. Wooden wheels.” He shook his head. “We’re too soft these days. Want everything too easy. Where’s the challenge? Where’s the spirit? You said you’re divorced?”
“Right.”
“How long were you married?”
“Fifteen years.”
“I was married,” Dr. Sam said, “nearly forty years. Not a natural state, though, marriage. Society forces you into it, but it’s not natural. Used to have a collection of toilet paper until my wife got rid of it. Toilet paper from every country I ever visited and barf bags, empty, of course, from every flight I ever took. She threw them all out. Sorry I ever got married,” he said.
“Wouldn’t do it again, huh?”
“‘Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure…’” Lynsky steered the Jeep across a stretch of brush-filled terrain. “‘Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.’”
Lynsky careered around a bend, sending Scott slamming into the passenger door. He gave up on trying to take notes. Between the doctor’s driving, his nonstop monologue and conversational threads introduced, then left dangling, he felt disoriented. Now the harbor was a dizzying drop-off to his left and they were hurtling along a mountainous ridge road, then down a canyon and up again to a view of the Pacific spread out like a blue silk sheet far below.
“Congreve.” Lynsky stopped the Jeep and they both climbed out and stood at the edge of the cliff, looking out. “The Old Bachelor. He also wrote, ‘I could find it in my heart to marry thee, purely to be rid of thee.’”
Scott decided to mull that over later. The vista below him was one he’d seen in the postcard racks in town. The glittering ocean, the yellow wildflowers that dotted the steep slopes, the landmark red roof of the Casino and the familiar white bulk of the high-speed Catalina Express. What the postcards didn’t capture was the dusty sun-warmed smell of sage and eucalyptus, the subdued hush of waves, the cries of seabirds.
“Won’t find a more beautiful place anywhere else on earth,” Lynsky said after a while. “You look at the mainland over there—” he gestured at the faint bluish outline of the Southern California coastline “—and feel pretty damn lucky you’re over here.”
Scott nodded. He’d mailed a postcard to Ellie that morning. After he’d dropped it off at the post office, though, it had occurred to him that picturesque scenery was unlikely to be a selling point to a teenage girl whose notion of paradise right now was all about shopping malls and cosmetic counters.
“There’re a lot of good people on the island,” Lynsky said after they were back on the road again. “Most of them, in fact. We’re a fairly law-abiding lot. A tourist now and then who has a few too many Wicky Whackers or Margaritas and starts making a nuisance of himself, that’s about the worst of it.”
“Suits me,” Scott said.
“You’re daughter’s fourteen, you said?” The doctor turned to look at him. “Difficult age. Suddenly you’re not a hero anymore and you can’t do a thing that’s right.”
Scott watched palms and eucalyptus and other low scrubby trees he couldn’t name fly past as the Jeep tore down another canyon. Tell me about it, he thought.
“Of course, I say that and my daughters are thirty-four and we still don’t see eye to eye. Ava’s doing okay.” Lynsky wiggled a hand. “Lost her husband three years ago, but she’s engaged to a fine man now. Attorney here in town. Got a few things in her own life to work out, but Ed’s good for her.”
Scott recalled Ava’s telling him about stamping her foot to get what she wanted and felt a stab of sympathy for the fiancé.
“Ingrid, Ava’s twin, has taken a vow of poverty,” Lynsky was saying. “Doesn’t believe in working for a living. Dropped out of medical school with one year left to go. She’s quite content to live on whatever she grows—lettuce and beets, she tells me,