Blue Moon Bay by Lisa Wingate Read Free Book Online

late-afternoon sunlight, as if in punctuation.
    Gary’s wife looked up at it and said, “It’s a gorgeous day. Let’s take a drive around the lake before we head back home. We can do the anniversary dinner tomorrow night.”
    Gary agreed, and even the girls looked toward the lake, placid in its deep blue winter coat.
    â€œWhat a pretty little town,” Gary’s wife remarked, and I was startled by the chasm between their perspectives and mine. To me, this place would never again be beautiful.
    Even so, I took a moment to describe some of the sights they might see on their drive—the cliffs above Eagle Eye bridge; the historic marker that told the legend of the Wailing Woman, whose voice could be heard moaning through the cliffs; the spire-like rock formations north of the dam, where tourists pulled off at the scenic turnout to watch bald eagles nesting. I finished by telling them about Catfish Charley’s, my great-uncle’s floating fried food Mecca, where they could eat batter-crisp fish while being watched by Charley, the hundred-pound primordial catfish who’d been greeting diners from his tank for as long as I could remember.
    â€œI think they’re only open on weekends in the winter, come to think of it, but if you want some dinner before you head back, the food is good at the Waterbird, over by the dam,” I added, and then I realized that the Waterbird might not even be there anymore. It’s funny how the mind believes that the places of your childhood will always be waiting for you to come back to them. “I mean, I guess it’s still around. Anyway, the view of the lake is beautiful there, and it’s sort of a tradition—people go in and sign the back wall of the store, sometimes leave a favorite quote. The legend is that if you sign the wall of wisdom with someone, you’ll return to Moses Lake together again.”
    A lump rose in my throat. My father and I had signed the wall together when I was a girl. Every time we visited after that, we went by the Waterbird to look at our handiwork, touching the quote like a talisman. When we moved to Moses Lake that final year, I’d refused to visit the wall with Dad. I’d broken the chain. . . .
    As I told Gary’s family good-bye and watched them drive off, the blessing they’d pronounced over me seemed to fly away with them, rolling down the main street of Moses Lake, growing smaller, and smaller, until it drifted out of sight, and I was once again all alone, with no ID, no phone, and no money, in the last place I ever thought I’d find myself.

The man who troubles the water
    might soon enough drown in it.
    â€”Fisherman’s proverb
(via Catfish Charley, feeding lakesiders since 1946)
Chapter 4

    I ’d barely been in Moses Lake ten minutes, and I could already feel the place winding around me, quietly and efficiently, a spider twisting silken threads about an errant moth before it can break loose and fly away.
    The bells on the hardware store door jingled, and my mind tripped over itself. “May I help ye-ew?” The question traversed the parking lot in a long, sticky-sweet Southern drawl, and for an instant, I was like an astronaut being pulled into a black hole, lost in time and space. I turned to find Blaine Underhill’s stepmother, a ghost from yesteryear, standing in the hardware store doorway, wearing a peach-colored pantsuit, her puffy hair still the same brassy shade of blond, pulled back in a pearl-toned headband. “Do you need directions to someplace, hon?”
    The word hon took me by surprise. Even though some of the Moses Lake ladies had attempted to adopt me as a somewhat lost cause after my father’s death, I was never hon to Mrs. Underhill. She couldn’t quite forgive me for being the product of the unwelcome union of my father and the freewheeling out-of-towner who stole him away.
    Clearly, she didn’t recognize me now. I