The Complete Eagle Cove

Chapter 2 -2

Greg set out the ingredients for a simple roulade sponge base of flour, milk, butter, and eggs. He separated and whisked the yolks and set the whites to beat in the mixer.

The Puffin Dinner was now closed and quiet for the day. He loved the peace of cooking, only one light over the stove and another over the prep table. The dining room was shielded from the midday sun by the deep porch and let him imagine its shadowed interior just waiting for the eager crowd to come.

Once he had the roux built, he folded in the egg whites, but the oven wasn’t up to temperature yet. He could afford to wait a few minutes.

For the filling he mixed together some Italian Parmesan cheese and a couple cups of the goat yogurt that Tiffany made on her farm up in the woods. Her boyfriend had dragged her to Eagle Cove a couple of years back. They’d bought a chunk of property back above Orca Head that no one in their right mind would want, including her boyfriend. He left her there in the teepee they’d erected together and driven off to parts unknown. Tiffany had stuck. She’d cleared land, planted a garden, and bought a pregnant goat and a pregnant sheep.

It always surprised him each time she showed up in town. She’d come walking in—because it was her truck the boyfriend had driven on his way out of town—wearing worn corduroys, a flannel shirt, and a big straw hat atop her waist-length soft brown hair. She’d also wear a backpack sometimes with little bottles of goat milk, sometimes with containers of huckleberries or perfect heads of lettuce.

Tiffany mostly talked to herself, but they were lively conversations. And at times when Greg had been buying some of her products which were always fresh and well made, he overheard enough to learn that she was quite funny, often laughing at her own jokes.

The one time he’d joined in on her laugh at a particularly funny observation about seagulls’ mentoring habits for their young, she’d stopped and studied him with dark eyes from beneath the wide hat. Then, she’d pocketed the money, not nodding her thanks this time (which was a fifty-fifty proposition at best), and wandered down the street to the hardware or grocery store before walking the two miles to the end of LBB Lane and then a mile or more back up into the forested hills behind Orca Head Lighthouse.

Greg dug parsley and scallions out of the walk-in fridge and began to chiffonade them on the maple chopping block. The only sounds were the quick snicking sound of his knife and the occasional ping from the oven’s warming metal.

There was a lot of speculation among the townsfolk about what they’d find if they went up to Tiffany’s farm. The few adventurous souls who had tried quickly learned that she was a c***k shot with a bow and arrow which discouraged any active interest, if not the idle speculation.

Nicky Vance had bought himself one of those high-end camera drones for himself last Christmas.

“I’ll do flyovers for Mrs. Baxter’s real estate listings, and adventure videos for the whale tours and fishing trips. This sucker will pay for itself in weeks,” he’d patted it proudly on the head.

On his first town flyover, he flew a circle around the Orca Head lighthouse. Then he decided to see just what was going on up on the cleared patch in the forest beyond. They’d all been huddled around him when he flew toward Tiffany’s place. There had only been two really clear images. The first was a wide open clearing with animal pens, though no sign of a teepee or other house. There had been no time to zoom in before the second clear image was captured and transmitted back to them from the small onboard camera. The last frame of video the drone ever captured was the head of an arrow the moment before it hit. That night, the remains of the three thousand dollar machine had been staked to Nicky’s front door with a second arrow through its heart—and most of the way through the thick wood.

Tiffany’s ability with a bow also explained the time she’d brought Greg a thirty-pound slab of fresh bear meat. When he’d later asked if she had any more bear meat she could bring down on the next trip, she’d answered “Too salty for you” and gone on her way. Six months later, after he’d forgotten the whole incident, she’d given him a single pound of bear jerky. He’d shared it with the Judge who decreed, “Girl has finally got it right.” It was the only bear jerky Greg had ever had, but it had been damn good.

He’d had a fantasy or two about Tiffany. She was pretty, at least everything that wasn’t hidden by that oversized sunhat and hippie-loose clothing, and she smelled of pine and fresh river water. Perhaps a little younger than his twenty-nine, perhaps a little older, it was hard to tell. But as she spoke no more to him than to anybody else in town, he didn’t see any point in trying to see if that fantasy led anywhere. But she was almost as intriguing an enigma as Jessica Baxt—

After a few trial sniffs, Greg sprinkled a little coriander into the yogurt and greens mixture and then poured it into the still uncooked sponge mixture.

“Crap!” His voice echoed about the silent kitchen.

He’d utterly ruined both.

Well, the oven now had plenty of time to reach temperature.

He scraped everything into the trash and started over on his second sponge base of the morning. He had plenty of eggs, but he was running low on yogurt and Tiffany’s was exceptional. It had a tang without being goaty that would make a fine match for the flavor profile he was after. He made a mental note to buy extra yogurt the next time she came down the mountain. And maybe this time he’d try chatting Jessica up.

Jessica?

He scorched the flour and butter roux that lay at the heart of the roulade past golden brown and well into molasses-brown.

How had Jessica gotten in there?

He poured in milk to try and rescue the roux and ended up scalding the milk. By the time he had dumped that out and scrubbed off the brown layer glued to the bottom of the pot, the air had come back out of the egg whites and the whole thing had to be scrapped again. He’d made hundreds of roulade sponges over the years; this was Chef 101.

All he’d been doing was having a happy little never-going-to-happen fantasy about the local mystery girl and Jessica Baxter had floated into the diner’s kitchen uninvited.

Greg glanced around, but there was just him and the second ruined roulade. With a sigh he started cleaning that one up as well.

Jessica had always been a knockout. He used to hide up on the dunes just to watch her run on the beach each afternoon along with the rest of the women’s high school track-and-field team—half a head taller than any others except her cousin and running as if born to it.

Out of goat yogurt, he substituted cottage cheese in the third roulade which completely ruined the balance of Parmesan and coriander. When he caught himself reaching for cumin, he knew he was losing his mind. With slow and methodical care, Greg scraped the third mess into the garbage. The smoked salmon that Ralph Baxter had sold him wouldn’t spoil. The scallops, still sitting in a bag in his seawater tank to keep them fresh, would live another day.

He needed air before he suffocated.

Out the back of the diner, he just started walking. It was early afternoon and his stomach growled to remind him that he’d missed lunch. He was almost to his destination before he figured out where he was going.

Greg was less than a hundred yards from Vincent’s place when he heard the shout.

“Your head is up your a*s, Vin. Go on! Keep it there!”

Greg hesitated for a moment and then kept walking forward, figuring he’d better go and see what was up.

Vincent McCall was standing like a cornered bull—or maybe a cornered bulldog…a puppy—in front of the rolled up door to his two-car garage turned woodworking shop. The space was so crammed with projects and lumber that Vincent had to pull his table and chop saws out under the eaves every time he wanted to make a new piece of furniture.

What had cornered him was Dawn McCall. She’d been hot since fifth grade when her body had decided she was done with being a kid. Now at twenty-nine the view of her back had gone from attention-grabbing to awesome. Two kids showed nowhere on her hips. It was the ultimate joke that the school’s soccer captain had become the stay-at-home dad and the girl that most had thought was the tramp of the school had become the most beloved science teacher at Puffin High. Of course it didn’t take much imagination to understand why the boys all loved her.

Vincent glanced in Greg’s direction in vain hope. No way was Greg dumb enough to take on Daw—

“And don’t think I don’t know you’re back there thinking thoughts, Gregory Slater!” Dawn didn’t even turn to glare at him.

Shit! He hadn’t meant to be thinking thoughts about his best friend’s wife; it was just hard not to. She was the antithesis to Jessica Baxter. Dawn’s curves just reached out and grabbed a man by his balls. He’d bet that her thick brunette ponytail, sparkling blue eyes, and killer figure dumbfounded every teenage boy trying to focus on the equations behind electron orbitals or celestial spectra, or any of the rest of that stuff that she’d distracted him from when they shared those classes over a decade ago. Her looks were a hard slap whereas Jessica’s were a soft caress.

The funny thing was that Dawn’s personality was normally soft and gentle whereas Jessica’s was clearly pure osprey—one of the biggest and most dangerous predators of the coastal bird community.

Not holding true at the moment. Vincent was looking at him wide-eyed and desperate. Dawn didn’t have much of a temper, but when it did cook off, it could be lethal. She was way smarter than either of them separately, but sometimes when they joined forces they could get around her. Vincent had pulled his butt out of scrapes often enough, so Greg took the risk and stepped forward.

“Sorry, Dawn. Sometimes I just forget what a lucky bastard Vincent is that he married you.”

“Remind him of that,” she pointed an accusing finger at her husband. “I’m going to pick up the girls at Mom’s and we’re out of here.” The twin girls were the perfect second-grade spitting image of their mother, who had been vivacious even before her body had developed. The town’s seven-year old boys were already in twice as much trouble as he and Vincent had gone through with Dawn. Good luck, little guys.

Dawn stalked over to her SUV and roared off in a flurry of dirt and gravel, which was particularly messy after last night’s rain storm. Greg ducked too late and was spattered with mud right along with Vincent. Her tires jumped from driveway to paved lane with a jerk and a sharp squeak of rubber that left a dark black stripe on the wet pavement and had old Mrs. Winslow checking out her window to stare at the two of them for a long moment. There was the other side of second grade, Dragon Winslow had been the terror of every seven-year old in town since before the dinosaurs had walked the earth.

Greg decided that he’d harassed Dawn and Vincent recently enough about living across the street from their old terror of a second-grade teacher to let it go this time. Besides, standing here beneath the Dragon’s evil eye, it felt as if she’d somehow know if he did.

Greg brushed at his clothes. Between Jessica and her syrup and ketchup plate down his pants and Dawn’s muddy departure, he’d definitely have to do a load of laundry sooner rather than later.

“What the hell, buddy?”

“Sorry, Greg. The woman works like a demon for nine months of the year and then once school lets out she expects me to take time off during my busy season to go to a movie and shopping up in Newport. No notice on a family outing…that she insists the girls told me all about last night. The two girls talk so fast when they get going in unison that I don’t catch half of what they’re saying no matter how I try. Dawn also wasn’t too pleased about the Kriegson’s place.”

“The Kriegson’s—” Greg had to do a real brain shift to navigate that turn in the conversation. “You got the contract?”

Vincent nodded sadly.

“But that’s huge! Shouldn’t be surprised, because you’re the best custom furniture guy around. You figured it would go to that those guys out of Portland. So why the sad-dog face, Dawg?”

“The timeline. These summerfolk want everything by yesterday. It’s enough money to carry me right through the winter and shove a chunk into the twin’s college fund, but…” he waved a hand at the stacks of lumber in the garage.

Greg finally focused on what was crowding the shop. It wasn’t local pine with a bit of oak trim. It was oak, maple, and cherry.

“The trim is all exotics and won’t be here for another week. It’s going to take the guts out of my summer with the girls and even worse, delivery is right when my folks are visiting and you know the Kriegsons are going to want a thousand little changes that they claim will only take a minute.”

“Okay,” Greg knew enough about Dawn and her mother-in-law to feel Vincent’s pain; without Vincent available to act as a buffer between the two women it was going to be ugly. “I’m already dirty. Let me give you a hand.”

“Oh, dude!” Vincent held up a fist in thanks.

“Dude!” Greg replied with a fist-to-fist punch hard enough that they were both shaking their hands in pain. It wouldn’t be his pal Vin if it didn’t hurt.

They picked up the first big board, Greg’s hand still zinging a little, but it made up for not teasing Vincent about Mrs. Winslow.

Vincent maneuvered his end over toward the sawhorses. “You know, I saw Jessica Baxter driving into town with her mom this morning.”

Greg dropped the board and barely managed to rescue his toe before it hit.

The end of the board bounced off a concrete block and the end of it split.

“Oh dude,” Vincent said sadly, clearly not referring to the dropped board. He was the only person Greg had ever told about his teenage crush. Though of course everything Vincent knew, Dawn knew as well. “You’re so goddamn pitiful.”

“Tell me about it.”

And like a true friend, Vincent ignored the wry tone and began to do exactly that, fully relishing every dumb detail Greg had ever admitted to.

Shit!