Little Waves

It was hard to justify buying the lake house even if I had no reason to feel guilty about it. That’s the joy of coming up poor. You analyze every purchase, big or small, and even if, say, a late spring snowfall caved in half your damn rental, it’s hard to justify buying anything that isn’t strictly necessary.

Still, I needed a new home, and the books were doing astonishing numbers. Four years of peddling paperbacks at craft fairs and vendor shows on my days off finally netted me a conversation with the right person, a bigwig editor taking a break from visiting her father in a local hospital. I didn’t even try to sell her on the books. That was the amazing thing. We talked about the hospital, and my own experiences with my grandparents there. She picked up one of my books mostly as an idle gesture. The covers were crap, designed by yours truly to save me a few hundred bucks I couldn’t afford. I screamed “desperate indie author” and I knew it, so my expectations were nil and none.

But when she started reading the blurb on the back, she cracked the book open. That was a good sign. People usually bought and liked one of my books if I could get them to read a few paragraphs. That was always the tricky part though. I was not a salesman. I was a writer. In this day and age, you have to be both to be successful.

She liked what she read, and bought all five of the books in the series, along with my standalones. Her name was Clarice Portman, and meeting her that day changed my life forever.

Now I was a bona fide bestseller just two years after her company published one of my new novels. Two more since then kept me in good toilet paper and lunchmeat from the deli, not from a plastic sleeve. The real serious money, the lake house money, came from my back catalog. I used my first check from the publishing company to buy the old books new covers and sales skyrocketed and never came down. I was still amazed by that, and to be honest, I always thought the axe was going to fall. Someone at the publishing house was going to realize they made a mistake, or the lawyers were going to charge my house en masse and tell me I had to surrender half the zeroes in my bank account. But no, this was real, and when Mother Nature decided to take a wet cold number two on my rental and collapse the roof, I realized I didn’t have a landlord at all anymore.

Living near Overlark Lake had always been a dream of mine since I was a kid. A cousin of a cousin of a cousin owned a small cabin-style home up there and we used to go out sometimes on the weekend and fish from his dock. I loved it, even if the distant relative fifty times removed didn’t really like all us kids much and only tolerated us because my mom, though unlicensed at the time, helped him with his taxes.

In any case, I loved that lake. It’s about twenty or thirty miles long, with a half-dozen smaller lakes dotting the pine-laden landscape all around it along with streams chock full of brookies. It’s only started to become popular, a blessing in this day and age when real estate developers hear “water” and snap up the land, which I guess I contributed to, but I was something of a native in that I only lived half an hour away to start with, so I didn’t feel too guilty about it.

The real estate agent who showed me around told me I was making a “great investment,” and that I could flip any house I bought in just a few years for huge profits. I didn’t care about that. I cared about an office with a view of the woods or the water — or both, preferably — and a modern kitchen with plenty of counterspace. If you’ve never had counterpace, it’s orgasmic. I cared about walking paths and birds and squirrels and deer. I cared about quiet and solitude, and growing old somewhere my soul could rest easy.

There were three move-in ready houses. The first I dismissed out of hand because it was so big. Four bedrooms? I didn’t need that many. But it did have a killer view of the lake from one of them, and it was the house I kept thinking about when I was shown the others. The price tag was at the severe high end of my budget, and if there were other buyers interested who offered above the asking price, I was sunk. But in a few weeks, while I was talking to my agent, I got another call. The house was mine, if I was still interested.

I definitely was.

* * *

Move-in weekend was something else. I walked through that house a dozen times, a big stupid grin on my face. It would take time to fill it up with furniture but I didn’t mind that. I had a bed, a desk, a computer, and some odds and ends I picked up during my temporary stay in a one-bedroom apartment. It was enough for now.

That was about the end of May. Although I bought the place to get more work done in the peace and quiet of Overlark, I don’t think I wrote more than a hundred words a day that first month. I was too busy getting in touch with something I needed on a primal level, nature and woods and, yes, even the clouds of mosquitos and horseflies the lake attracted.

I walked everywhere, and I mean everywhere. There was an actual small town called Overlark too, a couple miles from my place. I walked there often for lunch at one of the few restaurants or for groceries. In the evening, when it cooled some, I would take a nice long walk down random dirt roads, getting to know my neighbors and the area. One evening, I walked way too far and my flashlight died, so I cheerily stumped down the highway back home until a deputy picked me up. After a chiding about being prepared and the dangers of wildlife even at that hour, we ended up cruising the back roads most of his shift so he could show me some prize walking paths I never would have known about.

A house relatively close to me stood empty until mid-to-late June. Then it filled with lively young women who, judging from their youthful looks and well-developed curves, must have been college-aged or so. When I say they were partiers, I don’t mean they had a bunch of people there at night. But the lights were frequently on there well past midnight, and music spilled from their place constantly.

You might think that annoyed me, but it didn’t. The houses were spread out far enough I could barely hear the noise over the lake, and to be honest, I didn’t exactly mind the thought of a bunch of young hot women living that close. I didn’t creep on them or anything, but seeing them on occasion through the trees made for nice idle fantasies and fuel for my books. It would have stayed that way had I not been out for a walk one day and one of them called my name.

Or a nickname, anyways, one I hadn’t heard for a long time.

* * *

I was back at the writing grindstone, chewing my way through the latest in a steamy suspense series. As always, I knew where I wanted the characters to go and a few critical scenes, but I was struggling with a too-perfect villain and a too-perfect scene where he trapped the leading couple in an abandoned toy store. The easy solution would be to knock down the number of bad guys in the scene, but it didn’t make a lot of sense given the build-up involved a big car chase scene. Half those numbers suddenly disappearing didn’t work. At worst, I could whittle down the car chase but every instinct in me told me that was the wrong move. I read and reread that scene a dozen times and I liked it the way it was. But the toy store… now that was the issue.

It was a problem I was chewing on as I went for one of my countless nature walks, the air pregnant with the threat of rain but me ignorant to it, lost in my thoughts and the notepad and pen I held loosely in one hand. This time, I was on a path that led all around the lake, one of the best maintained of the bunch. It was a favorite for joggers and bikers, and when I heard the unmistakable pounding of dirt behind me, I moved to one side.

“You’d better get out of the way, old man. Don’t want to knock you over.”

Old man? “Who the hell…?” I asked, and turned.

The young woman jogging stunned me into trailing off. Much as I’d love to say I noticed her face first, she was dressed to show off her curves in tight, ridiculously skimpy running shorts and a sports bra with straps crisscrossing her bouncy chest. She carried a comfortable amount of thickness that I loved in women, not fat, but with full hips and a soft stomach I would have loved to use as a pillow.

I couldn’t help staring, and then finally my eyes traveled up to her equally stunning face. Her long nose was its defining feature. It gave her character, a lovely flaw in a lovely face. It hit me. I knew that nose, and those dark eyes but I couldn’t put a name to the face, nor could I remember the context in which I’d seen her before. At one of the diners, maybe? I was friendly with a lot of people there but no one would have called me “old man” with such teasing familiarity.

Her sly smile widened at what must have been the most flustered expression of my entire life. That smile brought about a memory. Two, actually. A teenager five or six years who used to jog on my street, trying to lose weight at the same time I was trying to do the same. She used to babysit for friends of mine, and had glasses then, and braces, and her nose had been far too big for her face, but now she’d grown into it. God, how she’d grown into it.

“My God, Eva?” I asked.

“You got it!” she said and stopped just shy of me. Her hand went to her long, dark hair reflexively. I liked the stylish threads of dishwater blonde streaking one side but badly wanted to see it freed from her ponytail. What was I thinking? Eva was still at least ten or twelve years younger than me. “I thought maybe you didn’t remember.”

“Not at first.”

I was dumbstruck into silence again. Jesus, had so much time passed? I thought at first it was five years, but now that I thought about it, it had to be seven or so. She must be… twenty-one or twenty-two now. Far too young for my thirty-three, but my body was going to respond to her good looks whether she was taboo or not.