Lakeside Cottage

Kate inhaled the scent of lemon oil and Windex and went to the front window. Everyone who came here rediscovered the old place in his or her own way. Kate always started with the inside of the house, checking to see that the cupboards and drawers were in order, that the clocks were set, the range and oven working, the bed linens aired, the hot water heater turned on. Only after that would she venture outside to touch each plank of the dock, to admire the lawn, and to feel the water, shivering with delight at its glacial temperature.

Aaron headed straight outside, the dog at his heels. He ran along the boundaries of the property, from the blackberry bramble on one end to the growth of cattails on the other. Bandit raced behind him in hot pursuit.

When they pounded out to the end of the dock, Kate bit her tongue to keep from calling out a warning. It would only annoy Aaron. Besides, she didn’t need to caution him to stay out of the water. He would do that on his own, because the fact was, Aaron refused to learn to swim.

She didn’t know why. He’d never had an accident either boating or swimming. He didn’t mind a boat ride or even wading in the shallows. But he would not go in over his head no matter what.

Kate felt badly for him. As he got older, he suffered the stigma of his phobia. Whenever one of the boys at school celebrated a birthday at the community pool, Aaron always begged off with a stomachache. When invited to try out for the swim team, he managed to lose the forms sent home from school. Last summer, he spent hours sitting on the end of the dock while his cousins—even Isaac and Muriel, who were younger than him—flung themselves off the dock and played endless games of water tag and keep-away with the faded yellow water polo ball. Aaron had watched with wistfulness, but the yearning to join them was never enough to motivate him to give swimming a try. She could tell he wanted to in the worst way. He just couldn’t make himself do it. He had to be content standing on the dock or paddling around in the kayak.

Don’t settle, she wanted to tell him. If she did nothing else this summer, she would help Aaron learn to swim. She suspected, with a mother’s gut-deep instinct, that learning to overcome fear would open him up to a world of possibility. She wanted him to know he shouldn’t make do with less than his dreams.

There. The thought had pushed its way to the surface. Aaron had “problems.” According to his teachers, the school counselor and his pediatrician, he showed signs of inadequate anger management and impulse control. A battery of tests from a diagnostician had not revealed any sort of attention or learning disorders. This had not surprised Kate. She knew what Aaron wanted—a man. A father figure. It was no secret. He told her so all the time, never knowing that each time he mentioned the subject, it was a soft blow to her heart. “You have your uncle Phil,” she always told him. Now that Phil had moved away, Aaron’s behavior in school had worsened. She’d missed one too many deadlines, attending one too many parent-teacher conferences, and Sylvia had shown her the door.

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.

Four

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.

If he’d known what was going on, he probably would have stayed asleep for decades like Rip Van Winkle, hoping the world would have forgotten him when he woke up.

No such luck. Jordan Donovan Harris: The Nation Sits Vigil awakened to Jordan Donovan Harris: The Nation’s New Hero. It was insane, a feeding frenzy. The press always referred to him by all three names, the way they did mass murderers—John Wayne Gacy, Coral Eugene Watts, John Wilkes Booth—or JD’s own personal assassin, Terence Lee Muldoon.

No one had seen the attack coming. No one could have, which was why Muldoon had almost succeeded. A member of both the Blue Light Commando and Black Ops, he’d been decorated for bravery in battle during the first strike of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He had the perfect record of a career soldier. “He was a quiet, unassuming man who kept to himself …” Wasn’t that what was always said about loonies and mass murderers? No one ever said, “He was crazier than a shithouse rat, and you couldn’t trust him any farther than you could throw him.”

No. Like most crazies, he was always described as “a hard worker” and “model citizen.” The scariest part was, when Muldoon had hatched his plan, there had been no one to stop him. Except JD, who had literally blundered into the situation.

It was all behind him now, he thought, finishing up at the car wash. He didn’t exactly have his life back since he’d had to go underground, but at least he had some privacy. Some breathing room. Don’t blow it, he cautioned himself, thinking of Kate Livingston and her kid. They couldn’t know it, but today’s encounter was the longest conversation he’d had with anyone since moving into the Schroeders’ cabin.

For those few minutes, at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, he’d felt easy and natural, almost like himself again. Just a guy staying at the lake, taking some time off work, chatting with a woman who had red hair, sexy legs and a friendly kid. A woman who made him miss the things he’d never had.