Lakeside Cottage

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.

Sam’s wife, Penny, a hopeless romantic, was constantly urging him to find someone who made him feel special, to settle down and start a family. Since Christmas, he’d learned that he didn’t want to feel special. He wanted to feel like himself.

At the time of the incident at Walter Reed, he’d had a woman in his life. Tina, a congressional aide, said she adored him. That was all well and good until he stumbled into fame. Then she went on national television and said she adored him. She repeated it in magazine interviews and on talk radio, and that wasn’t all. She didn’t hesitate to reveal some of the most private aspects of their relationship, including the first time he’d told her he loved her, the first gift he’d given her, his fondness for Chesapeake blue crab and his preference in sexual positions. Somehow, she had parlayed her professed adoration into a stupid self-help book called How to Date a Real Man.

He still remembered the feeling of lying helpless, propped in his hospital bed, hearing his girlfriend, dewy-eyed with sincerity, describe the intimate details of their life. The sense of betrayal was a dull reverberation that shuddered through him, awakening memories of other occasions, other betrayals.

Why was he surprised? he wondered. This was what people did. They took what they wanted from him and then they left.

After the shooting, even Janet had crawled out of the woodwork and had begun calling herself his mother again. She had wept at his hospital bedside. News photographs showed her, Madonna-like, praying for his recovery.

The irony was, he no longer needed this woman to love him and pray for him. He had needed that when he was a kid in school, desperate for affection and approval. He’d needed that when he was a teenager, crying out for reassurance and control. She hadn’t been there for him then, and when he turned eighteen he had mortgaged his future to get his mother into rehab. Everything he’d saved for college and—yes, he did dream big—medical school, he’d spent on the rehab clinic. The miracle was, his investment paid off. After ninety days at Serenity House in Silver Spring, Maryland, Janet Harris had emerged clean and sober, sincerely grateful to the son who had saved her from the overdose that would have made him an orphan.

She was a changed person. JD had seen that immediately and Janet was the first to admit it. “I need to make a fresh start,” she’d said. “I can’t be around anything—anyone—who was a part of my life when I was an addict.”

It took JD a little time to figure out that she meant him as well as all the dealers and pimps she’d run with while JD was growing up.

Her desertion that summer had been a gift, or so he told himself. Her sobriety had cost him his meager savings, but it had given him insight into what his future held. He was on his own, and that was fine with him.

Then, fame had happened to him, and suddenly Janet was back in his life, the ideal mother of an American hero. She should have known better. She should have understood that the reporters surrounding her were not her friends. They’d turned on her, of course, and the revelations they brought to light turned her back into the person she’d been all through JD’s childhood—an addict. Fortunately for Janet, he now had every resource at his disposal, and just before disappearing, he’d arranged for her to go to the best rehab facility in southern California. He hoped like hell they’d do their job—and that Janet would do hers, and get better. Years of sobriety shattered by a handful of press reports. God, he hated the media.

Growing up, JD always thought he wanted to be a family physician, caring for people from cradle to grave.

But he’d been wrong. His true calling was to be an EMT, like the men and women who had brought his mother back from that final overdose. JD had never learned their names, had never seen them again. And that seemed somehow appropriate. To JD, it was the ideal job—saving people and then setting them free. That was the best of both worlds. As an emergency-aid worker, he could savor the rush of satisfaction of keeping them from dying, yet he wouldn’t have to think about where they’d be the next day or the next month or even the next decade. An EMT spent an average of 13.5 minutes in the life of a victim, and in that blink of time, he made all the difference.

Works for me, JD had said to the army recruiter. After his mother had cleaned herself up, cleaned out the rest of JD’s savings and then ditched him for a better life in California, he’d enlisted in the U.S. Army. They promised him a great job, a steady income, a life of travel and adventure and money for his education.

Sometimes JD wished he had read the fine print better. Still, he’d gone through the toughest training the army offered and, after eighteen months of unbelievable hell, he was certified as a Special Forces Medic, the most qualified and elite trauma specialist in the military.

In Port Angeles, far from the rest of the world, he turned down First Street and found a parking spot. He went to the marine-supply store for a long list of supplies—tar and seam filler, varnish, epoxy, marine plywood, fiberglass glue. When Sam had offered the lakeside cabin for the summer, he had urged JD to use the cosine wherry, a wooden rowboat hand built by his late father. He’d gone on and on about the hours he and his dad had spent in the boat when Sam was a boy. He probably pictured it as something perfect from his boyhood. Well, it wasn’t perfect. Not even close. JD had found the boathouse draped in spiderwebs, the boat stored hull up and half-rotted. Some sort of rodent—maybe chipmunks or raccoons—had made a nest under it. Though he didn’t know the first thing about boat-building, JD had immediately decided to make the boat his project. He would restore the wherry so that when Sam brought his family to the lake at summer’s end, the boat would be ready for him.

After loading the supplies into the truck, he decided to check his post office box. Sam was diligent about forwarding his mail from D.C. Sam had carte blanche to open and throw away anything that looked weird, which was pretty much all of his mail these days. People came out of the woodwork to send him everything from invitations to prayer chains to unsolicited marriage proposals. He was flooded with photographs of women and the occasional man wanting to meet him, the images sometimes pathetic, sometimes lewd, sometimes downright scary. Early on during the ordeal, he had made a serious error in judgment, signing an agreement with Maurice Williams, LLD. The media agent had promised to represent and protect JD’s interests, to guide him through the quagmire of public life. Instead, he kept trying to persuade JD to agree to be a consultant for a feature film about his life and what had come to be called “the incident.” According to Sam, Williams was beside himself over JD’s absence. He’d even threatened to bring suit, which Sam and JD thought was hilarious.

As he walked along the tired-looking main street of Port Angeles, he contemplated crossing the road to avoid venturing too close to the Armed Forces recruiting office. He resisted the urge. Penny and Sam said he needed to have confidence that he wouldn’t be recognized. Still, it was weird and surreal to see his face plastered on brochures and recruiting posters. Without his permission—because the army didn’t need it—he had become one of this year’s model soldiers. In the shopfront window was a placard three feet high with his service portrait and the caption Real Heroes for the Real World.

Yeah, that was JD, all right. He was so real there was an unauthorized movie coming out about him, so real he kept getting offers to endorse a line of camping gear or sunglasses, even prophylactics. According to the unauthorized biography that had appeared just weeks after the attack, he was “America’s most appealing brand of hero—one who was ‘just doing his job.’ “

Tina had cooperated with the publisher of the instant book. So had Janet. Jessica Lynch had gotten a Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor, but not JD. His biographer was Ned Flagg, a failed journalist with a flair for invention and a fast Internet connection. The book was heavily promoted and just sensational enough to rocket briefly onto the bestseller list.

Feeling almost defiant, JD paused in front of the recruiting office. Through the open door he could see a round-cheeked boy talking to an earnest recruiter who was no doubt promising him the same action and adventure JD had been promised years ago.

He moved directly in front of the recruiting poster, studying it while the plate-glass window reflected his true image back at him.

The strange thing was, he hadn’t really gone to elaborate measures with some complicated disguise. Coached by Sam and Penny, JD had grown out his hair and was as surprised as the Schroeders when it came in a glossy dark blond. He’d worn it in a military-style buzz cut for so long he’d lost track of the color. He had shaved off his mustache, traded his contact lenses for an ancient pair of glasses and cultivated a beard stubble. “Backwoods chic” Penny Schroeder called his new look. “They’ll never guess America’s hero is under that.” With the John Deere cap to complete the outfit, he looked more like Elmer Fudd than Captain America.

“I could mess up your dental work,” Sam had offered. “Get rid of that toothpaste-ad smile.”

“I’ll take my chances,” JD said. “I just won’t smile.” That promise had been remarkably easy to keep. Until today. Until Kate Livingston and her boy. He didn’t recall actually smiling at them, but he might have. A little.

Two teenage girls wandered past, popping gum and window shopping. They slowed down to admire the poster.

“God, he is so hot,” one of them murmured. For a moment, JD felt her eyes flicker over him. Shit, he thought. He’d gotten cocky about his disguise and now he was busted.

“Excuse me,” the girl said and brushed past him.

JD let out the breath he’d been holding and headed the other direction. It was crazy, completely crazy. People projected all their yearning onto an oversize poster while looking through the actual person as if he wasn’t there.

Shaking his head, he headed into the post office and checked his box. Sam had sent on a batch of bills and notices. At the bottom of the stack was an item that had not been forwarded by Sam. JD had requested it on his own, with unsteady hands and a heart full of trepidation. It came in a flat white envelope, weighty and substantial in his hands.

He couldn’t believe how intimidating this felt. It was insane. After all he’d been through, nothing should intimidate him. But this was something he’d always wanted. Always.

He opened the envelope and took out a glossy booklet the size of a small-town phone directory.

He smoothed his hand over the logo: The David Geffen School of Medicine @ UCLA.

JD told himself that he still hadn’t decided whether or not to send in his MCAT scores and begin the application process to enroll the following year. But he sure as hell might. He had the entire summer to think about it.

For the time being, he turned his thoughts to other matters. On the drive to the lake, he felt an unaccustomed ripple of anticipation. For the time being, his mother was all right, and he was finally starting to feel human again.

Five

Kate slammed the bedroom door behind her just in time, because the intruder was lunging for her.

“Aaron,” she screamed, clattering down the wooden steps and out the back door. “Aaron! Get in the car! Now!”

He was outside, tossing a stick for Bandit. Instead of responding to her panic, he scowled at her. “Huh?”

“In the car, darn it, there’s an intruder in the house,” she said, whipping out her harshest epithet. “Bring Bandit. I mean it, Aaron.”

It felt as if their escape took hours, but it was probably only seconds. Aaron and the dog got in back as she leaped into the driver’s seat.

She reached for the ignition.

Oh, God.

“No keys,” she said in a panicked whisper. “Where are the keys?”

It was a nightmare, worse than the scariest horror movie ever made, the kind in which a character named Julie (it was always Julie, no last name) fumbled in the car, desperateto escape, but the car wouldn’t start and the next thing you knew, old Julie was chopped liver.

“I blew it,” Kate said, sinking back against the headrest as she remembered leaving her keys on the kitchen counter.

A hulking dark shape loomed at the driver’s-side window. Bandit went into a barking frenzy, baying at the glass.

“Don’t hurt us,” Kate babbled. “Please, I beg you, don’t—”

“Mom.” Aaron spoke up from the back seat. He quieted the dog.

“Hush,” she said. “I have to negotiate with—oh.”

The monster, she saw, was holding out the car keys. “Looking for these?” the monster asked.

Except it wasn’t a monster, Kate observed as the red haze of terror faded from her vision. It was … a girl. Cringing at the sight of the dog.

“For heaven’s sake,” Kate said, rolling down the window. Bandit inserted his muzzle into the gap, and the stranger moved back a few more steps. “What in the world is going on?”

The girl looked as embarrassed as Kate felt. Her face turned red and she stared down at her dirty bare feet. Her messy hair fell forward. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Well, you did.” Kate’s adrenaline had nowhere to go, so it crystallized into outrage. “What were you doing in my house?”

The girl straightened her shoulders, shook back her hair. “I was, um, like, cleaning the place. I’ve been working with Yolanda for Mrs. Newman, cleaning summerhouses.”

Judging by the sleep creases on one side of her face, the kid was cleaning the way Goldilocks had for the Three Bears. In fact, she even looked a bit like Goldilocks with her coils of yellow hair. She was older, though. Pudgier. She’d clearly helped herself to a bellyful of porridge.

But like Goldilocks, the girl appeared to be quite harmless and full of remorse. Kate felt her anger drain away. “What’s your name?”

“California Evans. Callie for short. Am I in trouble?” The girl snuffled and wiped her nose. She had bad skin and carried herself awkwardly.

Studying her, Kate felt a wave of compassion, though she tempered it with caution. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“Can we get out now?” Aaron asked.

Kate still felt a bit apprehensive. The cottage didn’t have phone service and her cell didn’t work here. Yet the girl truly seemed remorseful and embarrassed by the whole incident. Kate’s customary impulse to trust took over, and she nodded. “Okay.”

Callie gasped as Aaron and Bandit jumped out. When the dog wagged his tail and sneezed a greeting, she wrapped her arms around her middle and backed away. Her face changed from red to stark white. “I’m scared of dogs,” she said.

“Bandit won’t hurt you, honest,” Aaron said.

“Hold him anyway,” Kate advised, recognizing the terror in the girl’s face. “I’m Kate Livingston and this is my son, Aaron. And Bandit.”

“He’s mostly beagle,” Aaron said. “We call him Bandit because of the black mask on his eyes.” He pointed out the dog’s unusual markings but the girl withdrew even more.

“What are you doing here?” Aaron asked bluntly.

Callie looked a bit queasy. Beads of sweat formed on her forehead and upper lip.

Oh, heavens, thought Kate. Was she sick? An addict? This was not good.

On the other hand, she reflected, the situation was terribly interesting. Kate reminded herself that she was now a freelance journalist. She thought she’d have to go looking for stories. Maybe a story had come to her.

“Let’s go inside,” she suggested. “Bandit can stay out.” He had a bed on the porch, one of those overpriced orthopedic sling beds from a catalog. Spoiled thing. Callie regarded Kate through narrowed eyes, but she went along readily enough. In the kitchen, her eyes widened as she took in the wealth of groceries on the counter.

Kate poured glasses of ice water for everyone and put out a bowl of Rainier cherries, summer’s most fleeting delicacy.

“Have a seat,” she said. “Tell me about yourself, Callie. How long have you worked for Mrs. Newman?”