Coast Road by Barbara Delinsky Read Free Book Online Page A

water on his right or the ghost of chaparral against rocks on his left, but an ashen pall lay as thick in his mind as in his eye. The world around him seemed dense, a heavy weight on shoulders that were tired and tense.
    It was twenty-four hours since he had last slept. Life had been a nightmare.
    And now he had to face the girls.
    Part of him still pictured his daughters as the towheaded little monkeys who had adored him before things fell apart. They were more blond now than towheaded, more adolescent than little, more female than monkey. Yet the same old something twisted deep in his chest whenever their names came up.
    They weren't babies. Hugs alone wouldn't be enough. But hugs hadn't done it for a while. They were more cautious than adoring with him now, strangers in many respects.
    Thinking about that as he drove through the fog, he had a sudden, brutal sense of the limits of his relationship with his daughters.
    Taking them to a movie, or to watch a wedding in Chinatown, or to breakfast in Sausalito at Fred's was one thing. Filling in for Rachel, dealing with heavy-duty stuff, was quite another. He faced a trial by fire.
    Thirty minutes south of the accident scene, Rachel's canyon rose from the sea. Its road was marked by an oak grove and a bank of mailboxes nine deep. Only one of the nine was painted, the fourth from the left.
    This year it was fire-engine red, Hope's choice. Last year it had been Rachel's butter yellow, the year before that, Samantha's purple.
    He turned off the highway, downshifted, and began the climb. The road was unpaved, narrow, and steep. It hugged the hillside and wound steadily upward, broken only by driveways that careened down and around into private homes. The higher he drove, the thinner the fog. Oak yielded to sycamore and madrone, which mixed farther on up with cedar.
    Redwood had replaced that by the time he reached Rachel's.
    Her home was a cabin of weathered cedar shingles. It meandered over a small space of the hillside, up a bit here, down a bit there. Pulling in on a rough gravel drive, he climbed from the car, and for a minute he stood there unable to move, breathing in something different, drawn to it. Fresh air, he decided, snapping to with an effort. He stretched and rubbed his face with his hands. He needed a shave, a shower, and some sleep. What he got when depended on what he found inside.
    Wide wood planks that the elements had blanched led to the front door.
    His loafers echoed in the silence, but he didn't need to rap on the door. It opened before he reached it. The man filling its frame was far older than Jack had expected�mid-sixties, he guessed, from the pure white of his hair and beard and his weathered skin�but neither detracted from his presence. He was a large man, taller than Jack's own six-two by several inches, but that wasn't what kept Jack from putting out a hand.
    It was the forbidding look that met his.
    "The girls are asleep, " Duncan Bligh said in the same hard voice he had used on the phone. That it was lower now did nothing to soften it.
    "How is she? " "Comatose, " Jack replied, low also. He didn't want the girls waking up and hearing him. "Her condition isn't critical.
    Her body is working okay. The bang on the head is the problem. " "Prognosis? " He shrugged and hitched his chin toward the inside of the cabin. "They calmed down, I take it? " "No." Duncan pushed beefy arms into a flannel vest. "They just wore themselves out." He strode past Jack, muttering, "I got work to do." Jack raised a hand in thanks and good-bye, but Duncan had already rounded the house and was striding up the forested hillside. "Nice meeting you, too, pal, " he muttered.
    Going inside, he quietly shut the door and leaned against it to get his bearings.
    It was the first time that he had been this far. Most often, when he picked up the girls for a visit, they met at a McDonald's just north of San Jose. In the instances when he drove all the way down, the three of them were