Elizabeth Lowell - A Woman Without Lies

“If you’re going out right away,” Angel said distinctly, “the fishing must be pretty good.”

“Not bad. I set aside a smiley to smoke for you and Derry.”

“What’s a smiley?” Hawk asked. “Or is that another taboo matter?”

Carlson gave Hawk a second black look.

Hawk didn’t budge.

Grudgingly, Carlson realized that Hawk wasn’t going to be intimidated short of a brawl, and probably not even then. Under other circumstances, Carlson would have enjoyed testing Hawk. But not today, with Angel fighting memories.

Carlson suspected that Hawk was more than a little interested in the woman who was curled so trustingly against his own chest. The thought made Carlson’s lips stretch into a smile that was neither welcoming nor cruel.

“A smiley,” said Carlson, his voice so deep that it rumbled like water over rocks, “is a salmon that weighs more than thirty pounds. When you pull one of them off the long line, you smile.”

The corner of Hawk’s mouth curled up almost unwillingly. “I see.”

“You will when you catch one,” Carlson said. “Or do you ever smile?”

“I’m smiling now.”

Carlson laughed.

“Come fishing with me, Hawk,” Carlson offered. “By the end of the trip we’ll be friends – or one of us will be dead.”

For a moment Hawk simply looked at the massive man standing so confidently on the dock. Then Hawk held out his hand, liking the big Indian in spite of himself.

“I’ll hold you to that, Carlson,” Hawk said.

Carlson took the offered hand. Just before he released it, he said easily, “One other thing, Hawk. If you touch Angie, I’ll cut you into thin strips and use you for bait.”

“Carlson -!” Angel said, angry and appalled.

Hawk was neither. “What if she wants me to touch her?”

Carlson looked from Angel’s flushed face to Hawk’s fiercely impassive expression.

“Then I’d say you were the luckiest man alive.” Carlson turned and kissed Angel’s forehead. “Don’s waving for you to get that fancy boat out of the way. See you in a few days, Angie. By then,” he added, smiling, “maybe you’ll be over your mad.”

Shaking her head helplessly, Angel stood on tiptoe to kiss Carlson’s black-stubbled cheek.

“I can’t ever stay mad at you,” she said. Then she added crisply, “Though God knows I should. You might consider apologizing to Hawk.”

Carlson’s black eyes were brilliant with suppressed laughter as he looked over Angel’s head at Hawk.

“I might, but I’m not going to. You understand, don’t you, Hawk?”

“Perfectly.”

Hawk’s mouth had a tiny sardonic curl at the left corner that said he understood very well indeed.

Angel went back down the dock, hurried on her way by a friendly swat from Carlson’s big hand. She glanced sideways at Hawk, still embarrassed by Carlson’s warning. The slight upward tilt of Hawk’s mouth told Angel that he was amused rather than angered.

But then, he had shown no signs of wanting to touch her. Not really.

Not the way she wanted to be touched.

Angel took the powerboat out of Brown’s Bay and across the channel to work her way up to Deepwater Bay. She watched the ocean carefully. It was Saturday, and the water was alive with small craft.

“Hang on,” Angel said to Hawk, spotting a slick ahead.

The slick’s deceptively smooth surface concealed an enormous shift in the current. Some of the slicks were upwellings of water from below, where the ocean was squeezed between invisible rocky barriers until water surged powerfully upward. Other slicks became whirlpools during the height of the tidal race. Small boats could be capsized and sucked down into the cold sea if the person at the helm was careless or inexperienced.

The helm bucked suddenly in Angel’s hands. She was braced, expecting it. The stern of the boat drifted like the back end of a car on a patch of icy road.

Angel turned the bow into the watery skid, controlling the motion of the boat. Within seconds they shot off the slick and back into the normally roiled water that came with changing tides.

Sensing Hawk’s eyes on her, Angel turned and smiled.

“Fun, wasn’t it?” she asked.

A black eyebrow lifted, rewarding Angel’s smile.

“Looked like a rather nasty piece of water to me,” said Hawk.

“That was just a baby. At some times of the year it gets rough, though.”

“Storms?”

Angel shrugged.

“Storms are bad any time of the year,” she said. “So are the tides, if you don’t know what to expect. The Inside Passage isn’t for amateurs. Ask him.”

Angel gestured toward a towboat and barge. The towboat was straining northward up the narrowing channel. The thick, braided steel cable that connected the towboat to the heavily loaded barge was taut, humming with energy.

Despite the obvious laboring of the heavy engines, the towboat was barely making one knot forward speed.

“Missed the tide,” Angel said succinctly.

“What will happen to him?”

“He’ll spend the next few hours like that, going flat out and getting nowhere. Then the race will stop and he’ll pop forward like a cork out of a bottle. Until then, though, he’s stuck, working like the devil just to stay even and keep the tow cable straight against corkscrew tidal rips.”

“Is that the voice of experience talking?” asked Hawk.

Even as Hawk asked the question, he realized that he wouldn’t be surprised if Angel had handled one of the tugboats that dotted the Inside Passage. She was supremely at home on the water.

But apparently it wasn’t something Angel wanted to talk about, for she didn’t answer his question.

“Have you worked on towboats?” Hawk asked.

The silence stretched as Angel struggled with memories welling like blood from a fresh wound. The summer she and Grant had fallen in love, he had piloted towboats up the Inside Passage. Even today the visceral, elemental pounding of diesel engines going flat out peeled away the years, leaving Angel naked and bleeding with memories.

“I’ve ridden on the towboats,” said Angel, her voice even and her eyes too dark.

“With a man.”

Angel didn’t answer. It hadn’t been a question.

“Wasn’t it, Angel? A man?”

Hawk’s persistence surprised her. She turned, only to find him very close.

“Yes,” she said.

“The salmon shaman?”

“No.”

Angel’s knuckles whitened as she clenched her hands around the wheel. She didn’t notice, though. She was impaled on Hawk’s dark glance.

“Who was it?” asked Hawk lazily, his eyes as intent as those of a bird of prey. “Maybe you could get me a ride.”

“Derry’s brother.”

Angel caught the flash of surprise on Hawk’s features. She knew what would come next. Turning away from Hawk, she prepared herself for it, calling up the dawn rose, pure color radiant with light, wholly serene; softness triumphant over the worst that bitter winter ice could do.

Hawk watched Angel intently. Her face gave away nothing. Whatever ghost had haunted her features for a moment had been chained again.

“Derry never mentioned a brother,” Hawk said. “It should make it easier to get a ride.”

“Grant Ramsey is dead.”

Hawk was silent for an instant, searching Angel’s face for the emotion he sensed locked away inside her.

“When?” he asked.

“A long time ago,” said Angel, her voice tired and calm.

“He must have been much older than Derry.”

“Yes.”

Angel turned her attention to the sea again. Just short of Deepwater Bay, a cloud of birds wheeled over the shifting water, gulls turning and crying like lost souls, hundreds of keening voices filling the air. Cormorants dived and gulls swooped down on them, filling their beaks with herring and then flapping off heavily as other gulls dodged and darted, trying to steal herring from the overflowing beaks of the successful gulls.

For a few minutes the water literally boiled with thousands upon thousands of herring, tiny fish hurling themselves into the air, shedding silver water drops that flashed brilliantly against the descending sun.

Automatically, Angel cut the speed of the powerboat.

“Salmon,” she said.

“Rather small,” Hawk said dryly.

“Not those,” Angel said, dismissing the frantic herring. “Beneath them, driving them to the surface. Salmon are feeding way down, where the sea is almost dark. The herring come up, trying to get away. Then the birds feed on them from above and the salmon from below.”

“Makes me glad I wasn’t born a herring.”

“To be alive is to eat,” Angel said, her shadowed eyes searching the vibrant, seething water. “And, sooner or later, to die. Some die sooner rather than later.”

“Not a very comforting philosophy,” Hawk said, watching Angel with eyes like very dark topaz, hard and clear.

“Sometimes comfort doesn’t get the job done.”

As Angel spoke, she remembered the people who had tried to comfort her after the accident. They had only made her more angry. Even Derry.

It had taken Carlson’s measured cruelty to shock Angel out of self-pity. Carlson, who had loved her as much as Grant had. But she hadn’t known until it was too late. It would always be too late now. They would never be lovers. They were friends, though, a friendship that was as deep and enduring as the sea itself.

“Where did they go?” Hawk asked.

“Same place they came from.”

Angel stared at the sea, where the herring had vanished as mysteriously as they had appeared. All that was left of the multitude of fish was a vague, metallic glitter deep within the green water, a glitter that faded as she watched.

Abruptly Angel decided that it was time and past time to go fishing. Several hours of light remained, plus a tide change, and at least a few salmon were in the vicinity. No fisherman could ask for more.

Hawk read the decision in Angel.

“Can I help?” he asked.

“I’ll let you know.”

Angel had already rigged trolling rods. It wasn’t her favorite method of fishing but it was better than being skunked. Besides, the salmon wouldn’t be feeding on the surface until well into September.

By then Hawk would be gone.

The thought went through Angel like a cutting wheel over glass. First just the thought itself, pressure and a faint trail of emotion behind it, followed by a spreading sadness. The idea that Hawk might leave Vancouver Island without catching a salmon, without knowing the island’s rugged magic, without smiling…

“Angel?” asked Hawk, wondering what new ghost had risen to trouble the blue-green depths of her eyes. “Is there something I can do?”

Angel blinked and focused on Hawk. He saw that the lashes fringing her eyes were long, surprisingly dark, untouched by mascara. They swept down suddenly, concealing her from his probing glance.

“Take the wheel,” Angel said, her voice tight. “Point the bow at the headland and keep us moving slowly.”

When she felt the motions of the boat change, she began letting out line into the water.

“How deep are you going?” called Hawk from the cockpit.

“Does the fish finder show anything?”

Hesitation, then, “Something at about four fathoms, maybe deeper. It shifts fast.”

“Then I’ll go down twenty-five feet on one line and about thirty-three on the other.”

The planer attached to the line took it down quickly. When enough line was out, Angel set the reel’s brake and slipped the butt of the rod into a holder along the side of the boat. For a moment she watched the tip of the rod. It moved subtly, rhythmically, responding to the boat sliding over the restless surface of the sea.

Within moments the second rod was set up on the starboard side. Angel paused, then shrugged.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and I’m damn tired of not fishing.

She grabbed one of the long, limber rods, dove into the tackle box, and came up with a bucktail fly half as big as her palm. She let the bucktail out over the stern, feeding line until the big, pale fly danced over the surface about thirty feet behind the boat.

Even though it was weeks too soon for salmon to be feeding on the surface, there was such a thing as luck.

“I’ll take it now,” Angel said, coming into the cockpit.

Hawk slid out of the seat and past Angel. As they switched places, she smelled again the compound of soap and subtle aftershave, heat and man, that had come to be indelibly associated in her mind with Hawk.

When she turned to lower herself into the seat, her body brushed over Hawk’s. Though it only lasted for an instant, the contact sent shards of awareness splintering through her. Unconsciously she held her breath, freezing in place, unwilling to end the racing sensations.