Riverstone Cottage
Riverstone Cottage
A Pajaro Bay Novel
Barbara Cool Lee
Pajaro Bay Publishing
Contents
Introduction
Newsletter
Copyright & Dedication
1. Prologue
2. Chapter One
3. Chapter Two
4. Chapter Three
5. Chapter Four
6. Chapter Five
7. Chapter Six
8. Chapter Seven
9. Chapter Eight
10. Chapter Nine
11. Chapter Ten
12. Chapter Eleven
13. Chapter Twelve
14. Chapter Thirteen
15. Chapter Fourteen
16. Chapter Fifteen
17. Chapter Sixteen
18. Chapter Seventeen
19. Chapter Eighteen
20. Chapter Nineteen
21. Chapter Twenty
22. Chapter Twenty-One
23. Chapter Twenty-Two
24. Chapter Twenty-Three
25. Chapter Twenty-Four
26. Chapter Twenty-Five
27. Epilogue
Booklist
Newsletter
Charities
Stay in Touch
Introduction
Heartwarming books with characters you'll love: Welcome to Pajaro Bay.
A lonely widow and widower are brought together by a twenty-year-old mystery.
When she was young, Lacy Jasperson had been horribly hurt by an unknown assailant. In the years since, she's found healing in the little beach town of Pajaro Bay. Now she's alone, a widow living in a lovely little cottage by the sea, trying to make peace with her grief and loss, and move forward.
But when a private detective comes to town, digging up the past and forcing her to face what she's kept so long hidden, she realizes she can't move forward until she finally deals with the trauma that drove her to the village all those years ago.
Rico Gallagher sees the same grief in Lacy's eyes that he feels in his own heart. She's lost someone just like he has. He can't imagine he'll ever find peace again, but when he's forced to spend time with the lonely widow, he feels a healing he's never felt before.
Can they figure out the truth about what happened all those years ago? Can they heal from their losses and find love again? Can they bring peace, not just to themselves, but to someone else whose loss is even greater than their own?
Get away to the little California beach town where the cottages are cute, the neighbors are nosy, and it's always possible to find your personal Happily Ever After. The Pajaro Bay novels can be read in any order. Collect them all:
* * *
Little Fox Cottage
Rum Cake Cottage
Songbird Cottage
Sunshine Cottage
Riverstone Cottage
Harbor View Cottage
Honeymoon Cottage
Boardwalk Cottage
Lighthouse Cottage
Copyright © 2021 by Barbara Cool Lee
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Neither the author nor the publisher claim responsibility for adverse effects resulting from the use of any recipes, projects, and/or information found within this book.
Originally published: May 27, 2021
2021-05-20-wA
First Edition
Prologue
Pajaro Bay, California
Twenty Years Ago
* * *
There was no road left. She had run as far as she could run.
No matter how far she went, no matter how much she tried to escape the thoughts hammering in her mind, she couldn't find peace.
She had shaved her head, wanting to rid herself of the memory of how the faceless man had touched her hair, running his fingers through it while she screamed. Silent screams, inside her head, that she wasn't even sure had been vocalized. It was all silent, the memory, filled with images, sensations, but none of it quite solid. Not quite real.
But still, the memory of being touched came back to her in her dreams, jolting her awake, making her cry and scream. Silent tears and silent screams even now, because it wasn't safe to share them with anyone.
No one listened. No one believed. Had it even happened at all? And if it had, why didn't she remember? What had she been wearing? Why had she been alone in the park? What had she done to bring this on herself?
Nothing had happened, probably. And if something had happened, it had been something she'd caused by her own behavior. Her own actions. Her own fault.
But how could she go on as if life was normal after? How could she pretend the thing that felt so real to her wasn't real?
So she walked away.
Walked away from everything and everyone. No one would notice, she was sure of that. No one would care.
So she walked and walked and walked until there was no road left.
Now here she stood, at the end of the road. Alone in the moonlight, like she had been that night a month earlier when her life had been taken from her.
So she decided to keep walking. She stood at the very edge of the continent, with the whole ocean in front of her. And there was nothing and no one to stop her from going on.
She carefully removed her clothes. It took a while, because her fingers shook and she couldn't unbutton her shirt, unlace her sneakers, unzip her jeans. Her fingers fought her, though her mind, for the first time in a month, felt clear. Empty.
She made a neat pile of her things right there on the wet sand. She put her keys and driver's license into her shoes, where someone might find them. She folded her socks and set them on top, tucking them into a ball the way her father had taught her when she was a child.
And then she stood, not even feeling the cold, bare in the night before the sea. Not thinking, not feeling, but only going through the motions.
And then she walked forward, into the ocean.
The shock of cold hit her as the salt water touched her knees, her hips, her chest, and then over her head. The shock tried to force her awake, force her to deal with what was happening. But she ignored the cold trying to penetrate her numbness.
She kept walking, though the water resisted, heavy, trying to push her back, telling her she was wrong. That this wasn't the answer. She yelled at the sea, argued with it, told it to stop fighting her. The water filled her mouth as she screamed her anger at it, but she refused to let it push her back. She would out-stubborn it if she had to. Anything to make the pain stop.
But some part of her was begging, begging for someone to hear her screaming. Someone to stop her. Someone to finally listen and tell her she was believed.
And then there was the feeling, not a dream this time, of arms grabbing her, pulling at her, yanking her away from her walk and forcing her to return to the shore.
The iron grip of this new man's large hands jolted her awake as he shook her, again and again.
"No!" his deep voice shouted at her. "No, you don't!"
And then there was the sensation of being wrapped in the heavy flannel shirt that smelled of wood smoke and him.
And then she was being lifted and carried, carried a long way, until she was finally set down on a nest of blankets in a little cottage that was da
rk and warm and very quiet, with only the distant hush of the sea somewhere far away, lulling her to sleep.
And she did sleep. She didn't know why at the time, but she slept. Soundly and deeply and with an incredible sense of relief. Somebody had heard her.
Somehow she wasn't afraid. Somehow she knew this man wasn't like the one who had hurt her. Had destroyed her. Had taken her life from her. This man wasn't that one. This man, though he'd left bruises on her arms when he'd shaken her awake after her plunge into the water, had no desire to harm her.
Several times she awoke during the night, to see him sitting there in a wooden chair on the other side of the room.
Just the glimmer of gray in his beard as it was lit by the firelight, and the green eyes glittering, reflecting the flames. And his silent watch over her, all night, until the sun finally rose and it was a new day.
And she was a new person.
Her driver's license had washed away, along with the woman she had been. The one who had been so terribly hurt by that other man. That unknown man who had discarded her unconscious body in a park hundreds of miles away.
She was someone new now. Washed clean.
Elizabeth Prescott was no more.
The man with the gray in his beard and the green eyes that reflected a sadness of his own made her blueberry pancakes for breakfast.
She had been awoken by the scent of fresh-brewed coffee, and now sat curled up in the man's flannel shirt, wrapped in a fluffy blanket on a big wooden bed with bedposts carved in the shape of dolphins, and watched him as he awkwardly mixed and poured and flipped the pancakes in the pan. "My Bonnie always did this," he said. "Time I learn how to do it myself."
He glanced over at her. "I'm Jack," he said. "Jack Jasperson."
The name meant nothing to her, and it would be months before she understood that when others heard the name they nodded in appreciation, in reverence even, acknowledging the brilliant magic this man could carve out of discarded chunks of wood.
That didn't matter. To her he would always be just Jack.
"What do I call you?" he mused when she said nothing.
She looked into those eyes of his, with the gentleness, the calm, steady patience there, something in them reminding her of her late father, who, had he still been alive, would have also been able to pull her back from the depths into which she had plunged.
"Lacy," she whispered, her throat raw from the salt water she'd swallowed. Her father had called her that, when she was little. When she was small, and safe, and whole. Before she'd been destroyed.
"Lacy," he said with a nod. "It's nice to meet you, Lacy."
Chapter One
Pajaro Bay, California
Present Day
* * *
Ricardo Gallagher pulled his dark blue BMW into the only open parking spot on Calle Principal and turned off the motor.
He sat there in the silence for a minute, trying to make sense of where he was.
Pajaro Bay was unreal. It had to be. Maybe he'd hit his head and was hallucinating. Maybe he'd finally lost his mind after too many late nights of cracking computer codes while scarfing down stale takeout food in a dim apartment lit only by the blue glow of a laptop screen.
After all the war-torn places he'd seen, how could Pajaro Bay be a real town? In a world where nightmares lurked around every corner, how could a pastel-flowered, ocean-breeze-washed place full of storybook cottages and cobblestoned streets truly exist?
He sat in the car with the windows up, sweating in the stuffy air, and watched happy people pass in front of him on the sidewalk. Tourists, mostly, with silly slogans on their T-shirts and their phones held high to capture pictures of the funny cottages and the sunshine and the other people all around them.
Two old men sat on a bench in front of him. They waved to every single person who went by, not seeming to care whether their greetings were returned or not.
There was a door next to where the men sat, and it was constantly opening and closing as the tourists went in and out of what looked to be a little bodega of some kind.
Santos' Market was etched on the big window behind the old guys. Fishing Licenses and Tamales was hand-lettered on a sign taped up beneath the name.
The window was plate glass, and Rico could see the backs of the old men's heads, their bald patches pale reflections on the mirrored surface behind them.
He could see himself reflected there, too, or at least his car, dark and menacing and opaque, with his form shadowy behind the wheel, distorted by the glass. He looked out of place, and that wasn't a good thing for someone in his line of work. He was still learning the fine art of blending in.
It was too late to change into vacation clothes now. So he just called in to the office to let his boss know where he was.
"How's it going, Dracula?" Gloria Montés said with the smile obvious in her voice.
Dracula, she called him. They all did, his coworkers at Gloria's little halfway house for recovering secret agents. Montés and Associates, it was called. Confidential Investigations, their business cards read, in embossed type on fine linen stationery. They handled cheating spouse surveillance, and financial records untangling, and pre-employment checks, and all sorts of mundane jobs that stayed firmly on the right side of the law. The assignments were child's play for people with his kind of background. But Montés and Associates served its purpose as a place where people like him, with no past and no future, could earn a legitimate paycheck and try to forget what had led them to this low point in life.
"I'm fine," he said to his boss. "Just doing my check-in, like a good boy."
The smile in her voice turned into a laugh. "I would never call you a good boy, but at least you're working on your sense of humor."
She was wrong about that. He wasn't seeing the humor in this at all. "This isn't really my thing," he mumbled into the phone as a man wearing a pink ball cap, and sporting plaid shorts that revealed pasty and quite zaftig thighs, wandered by about a foot in front of his car, the ice cream cone in his hand dripping precariously close to the BMW's hood emblem. The man dutifully waved back to the old men on the bench when they greeted him, and they nodded approval. The ice cream cone didn't survive this maneuver, and Rico watched it splat on the hood, then drip down out of sight, presumably into his car's vents.
He sighed.
"Did you hear me?" Gloria asked, and he realized he had missed whatever she'd been saying.
"Yeah," he lied, watching the ice cream wielding menace's mortified expression in equal horror. He was going to have to talk to the man. "This is only going to take a few minutes, I imagine," Rico said. "I'll be back in my cave by nightfall."
The man patted ineffectually at the slop on the hood with a napkin, and then gave up. He next pulled out a postcard and started frantically scribbling something on it.
Gloria was still laughing. "At least I've gotten you out into the sunshine."
"Yeah," Rico said dryly. "Sunlight. I've heard of it."
"The sun won't kill you," Gloria said placidly. "You can't stay holed up in your apartment, working on your computer until your eyes turn red, living on takeout and never seeing anyone."
"I don't see why not," he mumbled, annoyed that she was able to so flippantly—and accurately—summarize his daily life. The ice cream man was moving toward the windshield. He lifted one of the wipers to place the postcard on the glass, then jumped back when he finally realized there was a dark-suited man sitting behind the tinted windows inside.
Rico motioned that he was on the phone, and looked away. He could see the guy out of the corner of his eye, standing there, looking confused.
He out-waited the man though, who finally gave up with a shrug, placing the postcard under the wiper and walking away.
"You just need to relax," Gloria said in his ear.
"I don't do relaxed," he grumbled. He cut her off when she took a breath for another lecture with a quick, "gotta get back to work," and she stopped. He'd had enough of today's ad
vice about his lifestyle. Trying to rehabilitate people like him was her job, as she saw it. He didn't agree. But it wasn't worth arguing about. "The sooner you let me get off the phone, the sooner I can get out of the horrible daylight," he said, and she finally let him go, still chuckling when she hung up on him.
He got out of the car.
The ice cream had really done a number on the front of the Beemer. Cherry Garcia from the looks of it, and already drying hard on the hot metal in the bright sunlight. Nothing good came from sunshine.
He frowned, then pulled the postcard out from under the windshield wiper.
Sorry about your car, it read. I'll pay to have it washed. And a phone number. Honesty. Taking responsibility for a mistake without excuses. What was this place, some kind of fantasy land?
He started to drop the card on the ground, but the two old men on the bench shot him matching glares of disapproval and he reconsidered. Last thing he needed was a ticket for littering their picture-perfect little town.
He flipped the card over and saw a picture of a giant roller coaster on the back, all red and white against an idyllic blue sky. He felt a sudden pang as he remembered Amanda's fascination with amusement parks, and the crazy day they'd spent at Parc Astérix in Paris, with her dragging him around to ride every roller coaster twice, until he'd finally begged for mercy, and they'd sat on the grass and she'd laid her head in his lap and gazed up at him and he'd been suddenly struck by the realization that he was happier than he'd ever been in his life….