Susan Wiggs - Lakeside Cottage

Her throat felt full and tight with unshed tears. Really, she thought, she ought to feel grateful that her son was healthy, that he loved his family and most of the time was a great kid. But those other times … she didn’t always know how to deal with him.

Maybe that was why parents were supposed to come in pairs. When one reached her limit, the other could pick up and carry on.

Or so she thought. She didn’t know for certain because she’d never had a partner in parenting Aaron. She’d had a partner in making him, of course, but Nathan had disappeared faster than the Little Red Hen’s friends in the old bedtime story.

Kate went outside and grabbed another sack of groceries. “How about a hand here?” she called to Aaron.

He turned to her and applauded.

“Very funny,” she said. “I’m letting your Popsicles melt.”

He sped across the lawn, his face flushed. Already he smelled like new leaves and fresh air. “All right already,” he said.

Kate set the sack on the scrubbed pine counter. In the sink was a tumbler half-full of water. She dumped it into the drain. The cleaners had probably left it. She put things into the freezer, then opened the fridge and found a covered disposable container with a plastic fork.

“What the.?” Kate murmured. She removed the container and put it straight in the trash. Lord knew how long it had been there.

“What’s that?” Aaron asked.

“Nothing. The cleaners left a few things behind. I’ll have to speak to Mrs. Newman about it.” She finished putting away the perishables and let Aaron go outside again to toss a stick for Bandit.

Then she grabbed two suitcases, heading upstairs. Since it was just her and Aaron this summer, she decided to take the master bedroom. It faced the lake with a central dormer window projecting outward like the prow of a ship. She’d never occupied this room before. She’d never been the senior adult at the lake. This room was for couples. Her grandparents. Then her parents, then Phil and Barbara. Well, she’d have it all to herself, all summer long, she thought with a touch of defiance.

Juggling the suitcases, she pushed open the door. Another thing the maids had forgotten—to open the drapes in here. The room was dim and close, haunted by gloom.

With a frown of exasperation, Kate set down the luggage. Her eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the dimness. When she straightened up, she saw a shadow stir.

The shadow resolved itself into human form and surged toward her.

A single thought filled Kate’s mind: Aaron.

With that, she bolted down the stairs.

JD felt the woman’s eyes on him. His pulse sped up as he sensed her gaze lingering a few seconds too long.

“Is that all the information you need from me?” he asked, pushing the form across the counter to her.

“That’ll do.” She offered a smile he couldn’t quite figure out. These days he was suspicious of every look, every smile. “Thanks, Mr …” She glanced down at the form. “Harris.”

She was young, he observed. Pretty in a fresh-faced, college-girl way, probably volunteering at the wildlife rehab station for the summer. Darla T.—Volunteer, read the tag on her pocket.

He hoped like hell she wouldn’t volunteer any information about him to her friends. Even out here, in the farthest corner of the country, he was paranoid. Sam had assured him that in Port Angeles he could escape all the hoopla that had disrupted his life since the incident last Christmas, particularly if he changed his appearance and kept a low profile.

After being accosted in every possible way—and in ways he hadn’t even imagined—he was wary. When a tabloid photographer had popped out of his apartment complex Dumpster to get a shot of him in his pajama bottoms taking out the garbage, JD knew his life would never be the same. The notion was underscored by a woman so obsessed with him that she injured herself just to get him to rescue her. The day he’d received an important classified delivery containing a toy company’s prototype of the Jordan Donovan Harris Action Figure, garbed in battle-dress uniform and hefting a Special Forces weapon the real Harris had never even seen before, was the day he’d filed for a discharge. Then, on a rainy night in April, a call came in, a reporter asking him about his mother.

JD had ripped the phone from the wall that night. It was bad enough they hounded him. When they turned like a pack of wolves on his mother, something in JD had snapped, too.

Enough.

If he had to put up with any more attention, he’d end up as loony as the guy whose bomb he’d stopped.

JD needed to disappear for a while, let the furor die down. Once he fell off the public radar, he could slip quietly back into private life. Sam had offered his family’s summer cabin and wanted nothing in return. That was just the kind of friend he was.

So far, JD’s retreat seemed to be working. His mother, Janet, was getting the help she needed, and here in this remote spot, three thousand miles from D.C., no one seemed to recognize him. Though confident that he bore no resemblance to the clean-cut military man he’d once been, he had his moments of doubt. Like now, when a pretty girl batted her eyes at him. He no longer trusted a stranger’s smile. Maybe there used to be a time when a girl smiled because she liked him, but that seemed like another person’s life. Now every friendly greeting, every kind gesture or invitation was suspect. People no longer cared who he was, only that he’d stopped a suicide bomber in the presence of the President.

The media and security cameras at the hospital had recorded the entire incident. The drama lasted only minutes, but when it was over, so was life as he knew it. TV stations around the world ran and reran the footage, and it could still be seen in streaming video on the Internet. The press had instantly dubbed him “America’s Hero,” and to his mortification, it stuck.

“It’s you I should be thanking,” he said to Darla, picking up the ice chest. “Good to know there’s a place like this in the area.”

She nodded. “We can’t save them all, but we do our best.” She handed him a printed flyer. “We can always use volunteers, ages eight to eighty. Keep us in mind.”

Carrying the now-empty cooler, he went out to his truck. Sam’s truck. Everything had been borrowed from Sam—his truck, his vacation cabin, his privacy. JD glanced again at the volunteer form and stuffed it in his back pocket. Then he headed for the car wash. Best to clean out the woman’s cooler before giving it back.

As he was pulling out of the parking lot, he heard the quick yip of a siren and looked down the road. An ambulance rig glided past at a purposeful speed, heading for the county hospital. The cars that had pulled out of its way slipped back into the stream of traffic again, ordinary people, going about their ordinary lives. Anonymity was such a simple thing, taken for granted until it was taken away.

JD felt a thrum of familiarity as the vehicle passed. That was what he was supposed to be doing. Helping. Not hiding out like a fugitive, rescuing raccoons.

Of course, once his face was splashed on the front page of newspapers and magazines across the globe, he wasn’t much good on emergency calls. Sometimes he’d attract more rubberneckers and media than a five-car pileup, just for being on the scene.

There had been no time to adjust to having all his privacy stripped away. He’d awakened from a medically induced coma to discover that a) he was going to survive his injuries and b) everything had changed. Right after the incident, his image had been inflated to ten times larger than life on a lighted billboard in Times Square. While that was happening, JD had been mercifully unconscious. “Fighting for his life” was the way many media reports put it, though of course he had done no fighting at all. He’d just lain there like a heap of roadkill while the docs did their thing.