The Last Whistle Read online

  “Yes?” I asked him. I was very aware that, although I had put on clothes that were more appropriately fitting, I still hadn’t dealt with my hair. It bloomed out around my head in a curly, tangled cloud. Also, I had forgotten a bra. I pushed back some strands and crossed my arms over my chest.

  “Good morning,” the man said, and smiled at me. Oh, my. He had a very, very beautiful smile, and it looked just right on his face. He must smile a lot, I thought, because it suited him so perfectly.

  He raised two dark blonde eyebrows over those blue eyes, and I realized that he was waiting.

  “Oh. Good morning,” I said shortly. My hair blew into my face and I shoved it back again, and pushed my glasses up my nose for good measure. “May I help you?” I asked him. That was what I had said at the shop when customers came in, but in a much nicer way. I felt a little sick when I remembered that I wouldn’t be greeting customers anymore. A terrible frown settled on my features.

  This made the man stop smiling. “I understand you asked my surveyors to leave.”

  “They were on my property, yelling under my window at the crack of dawn,” I responded.

  He looked at his watch, an old-fashioned one with hands. “It’s nine-thirty.”

  It was? I winced. It was the scotch’s fault. “They were on my property,” I repeated.

  “Well, that’s what we’re trying to determine,” he responded evenly. “According to the paperwork I got from the title company when I bought my house, the boundary line is not where you said it is.” He gestured with the side of his hand, like he was slicing something. If that was where he thought his own property started, he was nuts. He would have almost sliced through the deck I was standing on.

  “No, it’s exactly where I think it is. There.” I pointed to behind him, on the other side of the grove of trees where he had been bumbling around the night before, and shook my head. “I never thought that I’d say this, but I miss those Feeneys. My great-grandparents bought this land and built this house and no one ever had a problem with the property line or anything else until you moved in and crashed around in the dark like a raccoon.”

  He held up his hands now, both of them, his palms facing me. Jesus God, they were the size of the cutting board I’d just used when hacking out a new coffee filter. “I don’t have a problem,” he told me. “Yet. I hired the surveyors to double check things. Can they finish their job?”

  I threw up my own hands, a mistake, since that released my boobs. The man’s eyes flew to them as they bounced gently, like the morning waves in the lake. “Sure, let them wander around and crunch the trillium under their feet!” I exclaimed. “Go ahead if that makes you feel better.”

  “Trillium?” he asked, his forehead creasing, but I just shook my head. Dumb summer people. Luckily, fall would come soon enough, and maybe he’d be up a few weekends to gawk at the beautiful leaves as they changed colors, but then he would be gone until next June or July. I turned and walked toward my back door.

  “I’m Gunnar,” he called after me. “Gunnar Christensen.”

  “Great,” I answered, and shut the door hard behind myself. Then I sighed, and cracked it open a little. “Hallie Holliday,” I told him. “It’s not a stage name. It’s real.” My family had always been into alliteration.

  “Uh, ok. Nice to meet you, Hallie.”

  This time when I closed the door, I left it that way, and I only ran to the window to watch him return to his house when I was sure that his back was turned. His broad, muscular back, that I could see through his t-shirt. I wondered what it would look like without that cotton cover, and sighed that I would never know. But then I considered that maybe he would go swimming…maybe I’d been alone for too long. I went back to using the knife to slash myself a coffee filter because I needed that nectar more than ever.

  A while later, my hair was neatly in its usual ponytail and I was working on applying for several positions in Chicago that I had researched while sitting in the library parking lot. My laptop kept flashing error messages that I nervously ignored. It was not going to break; I was going to will that fact to being true. Since I’d moved home, I had been searching everywhere for some kind of freelance, remote work related to what I had been doing in the financial services industry back in Chicago. Since that well had seemed dry, I had started to look for any kind of local job to tide me over until I could resume my former career, like how I had begged Martha for a job at her grocery store.

  Now the bookstore was gone, and I didn’t need to stay in Michigan. I gulped at the thought of picking up and leaving again, but I resolutely turned back to writing letters and tweaking my résumé to re-enter my career. After working on that for a while, I had to focus on my immediate need for cash, so I moved to applying for local jobs to bridge the gap until I could find something permanent in Chicago.

  Today, I completed the forms that I had downloaded in the library parking lot for a position as a waitress (which I didn’t think I’d be good at due to clumsiness issues) and a land use attorney (which I wasn’t, not at all). The phone on the wall rang as I pondered how quickly I could get a commercial license and thought probably not by five PM today, which was when this particular application for a truck driver was due. But I did have one possibility from my job search which gave me a small sliver of hope. I had called and gotten an interview, even.

  I grabbed the phone again now. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Hallie? Oh, hold on a second. No, sorry, there’s no pool at this property!” Gaby said, loudly and directed away from her glittery, magenta phone case. “But do you need a pool, when you have Lake Leelanau so close? Pools are a lot of work and expense, but you won’t have to worry about upkeep with the lake! Oh, if you’re going outside, please avoid the dog run.” She came back to the phone, now whispering. “I’m with a client but I had to call you.”

  “Do you already have an offer on the bookshop?” I should have been thrilled, but instead, a fresh round of tears sprang up in my eyes. No, this was good news, I reminded myself. I had to sell it.

  “No, no offer yet, but soon, I’m sure. But I heard from my friend Jackie—all the light fixtures are included,” she broke off again, speaking in her sales-pitch voice. “Yes, there’s a master suite. To some extent. Could you excuse me for a moment? I’m, um, I’m hearing from my assistant that there may already be an offer in on this house. He’s double-checking.”

  I could hear sounds of distress through the phone and also Gaby’s shoes as she clicked away from her clients. “That’s a bit of a stretch,” she whispered to me. “This place is never going to sell, not with the septic problems they’ve been having, and that dog run is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. More like a dog toilet. And speaking of toilets, the master suite bathroom is just a john in a closet. Also, I don’t have an assistant.” She sighed. “Ugh, I really don’t like the lying part of real estate! Like, I just listed a house and I called it a ‘remodeler’s dream’ but—”

  “Gaby, what did you need to tell me? What’s up?”

  “My friend Jackie works in the county offices in Suttons Bay and she just texted me that the Feeney place next to you sold off-market!”

  “Yes, I found that out...”

  But Gaby was still talking, much louder and very excited. “To Gunnar Christensen! I can’t believe it!”

  “I met him,” I said, confused. “But how do you know him?”

  “Oh, my gravy!” she squealed. “You met him? You met Gunnar Christensen? Is he really that cute in person? I’m dying!”

  “What? How do you know him?”

  There was total silence.

  “Gaby?” I asked doubtfully, and shook the ancient phone.

  But thankfully, I heard her voice again. “I’m just…I’m just stunned,” she said slowly. “Seriously? Have you been living under a rock? Gunnar Christensen is the starting right tackle for the Woodsmen! Hallie! I’m ashamed of you,” she told me, and she was serious.

  Because the Woodsmen, northern
Michigan’s professional football team, was like a religion around here. For me not to know the starting right tackle was like not knowing…something important about religion. Yes, my knowledge of that was also scanty.

  “Ok, he’s a football player, he plays for the Woodsmen,” I said placatingly. “Got it.”

  “I know you pretended not to like football in high school, but Hallie, really!” Gaby scolded. “Now that you’re back home, you have to start paying attention to the Woodsmen. What else will you talk to people about?”

  “I don’t know, anything and everything else in the world? I wasn’t pretending, Gab. I really don’t care about football. The Woodsmen, in particular.” I had never understood the hero worship of those players, not at all. To me, it had always seemed more than excessive. Ridiculous.

  Gaby sucked in a shocked breath. “Hallie, that’s not funny,” she said sharply, and I decided to give up.

  “I’m going to learn more,” I promised her. “I’m going to become a true Woodsmen fan.”

  “Good, because the preseason starts soon, and you don’t want to get behind. You can begin by learning everything you can about Gunnar Christensen! What was he wearing? What did he say? Are his eyes really totally gorge china blue like the sky, like beautiful porcelain, like—”

  “He does have blue eyes, that’s true,” I interrupted. And yes, they had been very interesting with his tan and blonde hair. Pretty or something. Sure, you could say they were gorge, or whatever.

  “And is he really just like a god? Not only his face, but his body, too? My friend Melanie spotted him sailing with a friend once, and he took off his life jacket to go swimming, and she said it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She had to put an icepack on the back of her neck. But she was looking through binoculars, so she couldn’t take pictures.”

  “Are you talking about Melanie Harmon?” I demanded. “Why would you ever listen to her opinion? She was the one who petitioned to rename our high school after that K-pop band. And why would she be using binoculars to spy on people out sailing?”

  “Because they were Woodsmen,” Gaby told me patiently. “And—hang on. My clients just saw the dog run outside and they’re running back to the Sterling Standard Realty car. I think the tour is over.” I heard her heels clicking and then a door opened. “Oh, gravy, I can smell it from here. Or maybe that’s the septic problem.”

  “Gaby, while I have you, Gunnar Christensen is saying that our property line is in a different place from where I know it has to be. He had surveyors out here this morning. Is that going to be a problem for me?” I asked her.

  She was silent for a moment. “I’m not an attorney, Hal, but maybe. Property line disputes can get heated, sometimes. If I were you, I’d try to nip that in the bud. Get to be friendly with him so you can work it out amicably.”

  Too late for that. Generally, people didn’t like you if you hit them with rocks. Plus, he had already seen my morning hair, which was frightening even to me, and as I mentally reviewed our conversations, they weren’t coming through as “amicable.”

  Darn. “Ok, thanks,” I told Gaby. “And if you hear anything about a job…”

  “I told you, talk to Carey! Last time I ran into him, he said that he could hook you up with something.”

  Hook me up. Now, that was ironic.

  “I know you two had issues but he—oh, no!” Gaby exclaimed. “Someone just stepped in—I have to go.” The call went dead.

  I frowned heavily at the receiver and absently tried to get my laptop powered back up while I thought. Well, that was gross. Not what her client might have stepped in, but Gaby’s suggestion that I talk to Carey Winslow, who was the lowest, most despicable human being in the world, and not even worthy of me thinking his name. If I was drowning and Carey had the only rope on Earth, I still wouldn’t have wanted him to pull me back up. Also, I thought I would have tried to take him down with me. I certainly didn’t want his help to get me a job, even if I did have two mortgages on the cottage and another on the bookstore building. Even if I had a thousand mortgages, I wouldn’t ask for anything from Carey Winslow.

  And speaking of drowning, I was sitting here dripping with the heat of the August afternoon, because no one in the three generations of my family who had lived in our cottage had ever thought to install air conditioning. A swim was definitely in order to wash this bad morning away before I had to head out. I took off the semi-respectable clothes I’d put on in case the surveyors or their boss came back to bother me, and I pulled on my bathing suit instead. I avoided the mirror and covered up with one of my grandpa’s old dress shirts, thin and soft with age and long enough to cover the offending parts of my body until I reached the sand.

  When I got there, I quickly dropped the shirt and walked into the cool water, and ahh…Lake Michigan always felt good. I dunked, and then floated on my back, my long hair spreading around me like a flaming cloud. I felt the tension ease out as I kicked slightly, moving out deeper. At least I had this. I could always come to the lake and let go for a while. Even in Chicago, when I’d been homesick and sad, I’d looked at the water to feel better, knowing that my dad was on the other side of it at home in Michigan.

  But thinking of him made the tears come again. I could let myself cry out here, with my face wet already, where no one would see. I knew that my dad wouldn’t be mad at me about losing the store, because he didn’t get like that; he rarely showed any anger at all. But what about disappointed? My chin trembled. The thought of him disappointed in me made me cry harder. “I’m sorry,” I said up to the sky. “I’m so sorry.”

  A bubble rose next to me and popped on the water’s surface. I looked at it, wondering idly about fish and wiping my nose. Then more bubbles rose, like a crescendo of air, and I turned to look. What—

  A disembodied head surfaced next to me, practically touching me, and I screamed, gulped water and choked, balled my fist, and gave it a right jab for all I was worth.

  Chapter 2

  “Jesus H. Christ! Ow!”

  “Ow!” I held my hand to my chest and more tears sprang to my eyes, this time from physical pain. “Ow, that hurt!”

  He yanked the big mask off his face and I saw the red mark where my blow had driven it into his skin. “Why would you do that? What is the matter with you?” Gunnar Christensen bellowed, his deep voice echoing across the water.

  “You scared the crap out of me!” I yelled back. “What in the heck are you doing?

  “I’m scuba diving!”

  My mouth fell open. “What?”

  “I’m scuba diving! I saw you swimming above me and I surfaced so I wouldn’t scare you.”

  “You surfaced like some kind of killer submarine inches from my face so you wouldn’t scare me? Great plan!” I shook my hand, which was throbbing with pain. “Ow! That hurts so much!”

  “Yeah, I bet it does!” he growled back, feeling the area around his orbital bones, which was already swelling. He looked into my eyes. “Are you crying? Is it that bad?”

  I swiped at my face with my left hand. Those were mostly my previous tears from when I had been thinking about my dad. “No, of course I’m not crying from pain!” My head ducked under a little, and Gunnar reached and grabbed my arm to hold me up. I jerked it away. “Swim in so we can fight standing,” I told him.

  “I’m already standing.”

  “Well, not everyone in this lake is ten feet tall,” I retorted. I kicked into shore, still holding my injured hand, and stumbled up onto the sand. I yanked on my grandpa’s shirt and turned to give Gunnar Christensen, the famous Woodsmen football player who had just almost made me drown in fear, another piece of my mind. “You…oh,” I trailed off, my voice losing its steam.

  Because he was walking out of the water toward me, and I was going to be able to report back to Gaby that yes, oh yes, the man might really have been a god. The sight of him actually caused a physical jolt in my body. His muscular calves and thighs, thick but not stocky because he was so t
all…his stomach and chest, carved out in ridges with a chisel and with the light blonde hair over his tan skin…his arms with the biceps and triceps and all those other ones that jumped a little as he picked up a gear bag. And I couldn’t see, but I was willing to bet my favorite flat iron that the view from behind as he bent down was nothing short of spectacular.

  And then, his handsome face…the one that was quickly developing a big shiner and was frowning at me. I shook myself out of my lascivious thoughts and primly fastened closed the top button of my grandpa’s old shirt. “You scared me, lurking around in the water like that,” I announced, before he could speak. “That’s the second time you’ve snuck up on me.”

  “I wasn’t lurking. I was diving. And it’s the second time you’ve bruised me,” he remarked, and he touched the puffy area circling his eye. It wasn’t going to be healing anytime soon, if I was any judge of injuries, and I did have plenty of experience. Gunnar next pointed to the large black and blue mark on his shoulder. Oh right, the rock.

  “Well, I got hurt too,” I told him, extending my hand to demonstrate. “I was injured defending myself. I can’t believe that you were spying on me!”

  “I was scuba diving!” he said loudly, as if that was something that people did in the Great Lakes, right at the shoreline.

  I shook my head. “Next time, don’t be a skulking underwater spy, and you won’t get popped in the face. But, well, I’m sorry that I hit you. You really did scare me.”

  “I’m sorry I scared you,” he answered. “I wasn’t trying to.”