“ Can I go on deck and talk to the guys?” J.P. asked.
“ Sure, go ahead, we won’t be leaving right away. Take all the time you want.”
The boy scurried up the stairs to greet the fishermen on the deck above.
“ You’re not hanging around longer than usual on my account?” Ann asked the captain after J.P. was out of the galley.
“ You bet I am. It’s not everyday when a lady pretty as you, with a tale of murder on her lips and a pain in her eyes like I’ve never seen, takes the time to talk to old Wolfe Stewart.”
“ I’m glad my husband isn’t as perceptive as you.”
“ You want to tell me about it?”
“ I have cancer.”
“ How long?”
“ A few weeks, two months if I’m lucky.”
The captain rose from the table and shouted at the cook. “When J.P. comes back, feed him and tell him to wait, I’m taking the lady up on the bridge for a bit.”
For reasons Ann was unable to fathom, she felt a bond with the captain. He was loud, blusterous and lovable, all at the same time. She also couldn’t help notice that he was a man used to getting his way and, although he was a big man, he didn’t throw his weight around. People did what this man asked because they wanted to.
She followed him up to the bridge.
“ Careful going up,” he told her. “It can be slippery.” She felt him behind her as she went up the steep steps. When she reached the top, he showed her through a door that opened onto the bridge.
“ From up here you can see over the dunes.” She pointed. “That’s where Rick ran down the man that was after Judy.” She was able to see the spot down the beach where a small crowd surrounded the body, including two of the sheriff’s three deputies. “And that’s the store where that second wino attacked us.” She pointed to Singh’s Bait and Convenience Store.
They looked over the dunes for a few seconds, then she asked, “Why did you bring me up here?”
“ I wanted to show you this.” He showed her a framed photograph that was fixed to the bulkhead.
“ She’s very pretty.”
“ Was very pretty.”
“ I’m sorry.”
“ She’s been gone ten years now. She had cancer, like you, and like you she kept it from me. She wanted to spare me what she was going through and she managed to do it almost right up to the end.”
“ Why are you telling me this? You don’t even know me.”
“ I want to spare your husband the pain I suffered. I want to help you not to make the same mistake my wife made.”
“ I don’t understand,” she said, but she was beginning to.
“ It broke my heart when my wife died. It hurt more that she didn’t share it with me. We were a team, but she didn’t let me be there for her. It took me years to forgive her. Can you imagine that? She was dead and I couldn’t forgive her. If you love your husband and he loves you, tell him. Don’t let him waste time by going to a movie alone, or to a friend’s for a card game, or even out to buy a paper, when you should be spending what precious little time you have left together. That was the hardest to forgive, the time we missed, because she kept her illness from me.”
“ Captain Wolfe Stewart, you’re a perceptive man. You saw the pain in my eyes and knew I was hurting. How is it you didn’t see it in your wife?”
“ I don’t know. I suspect she worked very hard to conceal it from me, like you probably do to conceal it from your husband.”
“ That’s true. I don’t let down my guard for a second, for fear he’ll see through me.”
“ Tell him and you won’t have that problem.”
“ Thank you, Captain, I’ll think about it,” but she already knew she was going to tell Rick as soon as possible.
“ I like Rick. Why don’t you bring him fishing sometime, on me.”
“ Why thank you again, that would be nice, we’ll do it.”
After they left Wolfe Stewart and his boat, they came straight up the hill, even though Ann desperately wanted to go by the bait shop and find out what was going on, but she didn’t want to be responsible for dragging J.P. into any more unpleasantness than was necessary. He had already, in a space of a few hours, seen more than most see in a lifetime. If there was more evil afoot, she wanted to keep him out of it if she could.
Home, she shut off the Jeep, went over to Judy’s front porch and sat on the front steps. It seemed too nice a day to waste it away inside. J.P. sat beside her and was unusually quiet for about a minute.
“ Wanna watch television?” he said
“ Not really.”
“ Wanna take a walk?”
“ Yeah,” she said, “it’s a good day for it.”
She had to do something, she couldn’t just sit on the porch with a seven-year-old boy on a nice day and expect him to be still, though it amazed her how little he’d been affected by what had happened earlier.
“ Let’s walk down to the park and back,” J.P. said.
“ My brother and I had pigeons when I was a kid,” Ann said, making conversation as they walked side by side down the shady road.
“ What kind?”
“ Tumblers, rollers, fantails, helmets.”
“ Wuss birds!”
“ Wuss birds?”
“ Show birds are wuss birds, you know pussy birds, real men have racers, my dad said.”
“ Well, I didn’t know.”
The half mile walk to the park took about fifteen minutes with J.P. blasting rapid fire questions the whole way, as usual, and Ann doing her best, as usual, to field them.
He seemed to run out of questions as they reached the park and turned left to cross Seaview Avenue and just as Ann thought she was going to get a breather, a stab of white hot pain ricocheted through the back of her head. A pain that had nothing to do with the cancer that was ravaging her body.
“ There’s something bad over there.” She pointed toward the dunes.
“ How do you know?” J.P. said.
“ I don’t know, but I know.”
“ The park,” J.P. said.
“ Okay.”
They turned, sprinted to the park and dropped in front of the backstop, sharing their hiding place with two empty bottles of Red Dog wine. Ann felt a little better once J.P. was shielded from what or whoever was over there.
“ Wait here, I’m going over to take a look.”
“ Don’t leave me here by myself,” J.P. said.
“ Don’t worry, I won’t leave your sight and I’ll be right back.” She got up and jogged across the street to the beach. At the sand, she crawled on her belly up the dune and peered over the top and saw him. It was the man from the bait shop, only now he reminded her of the Ragged Man from the outback and he was headed in her direction. She slid down the dune and ran back to the backstop.
“ Just in time,” J.P. said with his eye to a knot hole.
“ Let me see,” Ann said, replacing his eye with hers. “It’s the man from the store.”
The man sat on the dune and studied the beach.
“ It doesn’t look like he’s gonna move for awhile,” Ann said. Then she added, “He reminds me of the Ragged Man.”
“ What’s the Ragged Man?”
“ I met him once in Australia.”
“ Are you afraid of him?”
