Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One (14 page)

He was tall and broad shouldered with
closely cropped brown hair. Cassie cast an appreciative eye over
him, then noticed the shiny gold ring on his left hand.

Oh well,
she thought with a sigh
, I can’t afford to get distracted
anyway.

“
Can I help you?” he
asked.

“
I hope so,” Cassie smiled,
“I’m doing some research on my family…” Her voice trailed off,
unsure how to finish.

"Have you worked with the SSDI software
before?" he asked.

"No," she replied, shaking her head, "What
is it?"

"The Social Security Death Index." He
replied, "We use it to look up the death certificates of deceased
relatives, mostly for genealogy research.” A thought stuck Cassie,
and she turned quickly to peer at the glowing computer screen.

"Can you show me how it works?"

"Sure thing," he smiled,
"have a seat. I'm Jay, nice to meet you.” Cassie introduced
herself, then sat and, at Jay's prompting, clicked the button of
the mouse resting next to the keyboard. The blank screen
disappeared and a window came up offering links to several web
pages. Cassie clicked on the one that read
SSDI
and waited as the page
loaded. The screen that appeared read
Social Security Death Index Interactive
Search
and had boxes labeled for first,
last and middle name, as well as social security number. The tag
line below the page heading caught her eye.

"Sixty-seven million records?" she exclaimed
in awe.

"And some change," Jay laughed, "but don't
get too hopeful, there are a lot more than sixty-seven million dead
people, and more are joining the list everyday!"

"What a pleasant thought," she grimaced.

Cassie pulled the marriage
certificate from her pocket and had a sudden moment of
indecisiveness.
What if she put in her
father's information and found out that he'd been dead for ten
years? What would she do then?
As she
brought her trembling fingers to the keyboard, Cassie told herself
that it was better to know now, than to find out after who knew how
many weeks of searching. Quickly, she entered the first and last
name, as well as the social security number that was written on the
page. She paused, agonizing for a moment, before clicking on the
submit button and almost gasped with relief when the page came up
that read
Nothing Found
in bold text.

"That happens a lot," Jay replied, "you might try taking out
the middle name, or the social security number. Sometimes those get
entered into the system wrong and mess up the whole
process."

"Another thing you could try," he said,
reaching over her for the mouse, "is putting the name in a general
search engine, along with something else that might be connected to
the person. Like a hobby, job, or school they attended, anything
that they might have been associated with. There's a ton of
information on the web, you just have to figure out how to find
it."

Jay finished with the mouse as a small bell
rung softly from the other room. He stood. "Duty calls!" he said.
"Don't give up; I'll come back with some paper and a pen."

With that, Cassie was alone at the computer.
The search engine page came up and Cassie entered her father's
name. This resulted in several hundred finds, most of them sites
that had both Bill and Beckman on the same page but
unconnected.

Cassie added Oysterville to the search, but
the results were just as vague. On a whim, she erased her former
entry and typed in William Beckman, Long Beach Washington. This
time when the screen flashed that it had completed its search, the
first result showed four of the five words in a single
sentence.

“
William Beckman of Long
Beach.”

Cassie held her breath as the browser
searched and slowly brought up the page. It was a secondary screen
for the Long Beach volunteer fire department.

She quickly scanned the article and found it
was about a beach clean-up day following a local storm the year
before. There, listed among the volunteers being thanked, was a
Bill Beckman, age 51 from Long Beach.

Cassie stared at the screen for a long time,
breathing in the faint dusty aroma of new carpet and old books, her
heart beating loud in the tomb-like silence of the library.

The name
might
have been just an amazing
coincidence, but the chances of there being two
William Beckmans
, of the same
age, both from Long Beach, was a fluke that Cassie wasn’t willing
to accept. Her father was alive
and
still in Washington
, or had been a
little more than a year before. Resting on a low bookshelf was a
hulking printer, with dusty cables running to both computers.
Cassie took a chance and clicked the print button on the
screen.

The old dot-matrix machine groaned to life
and slowly filled two sheets of paper with text, as well as a
grainy black and white reproduction of the antique fire engine
shown on the webpage. These she folded up with the marriage
certificate and stuffed back into her pocket.

Cassie sat there several minutes longer,
staring at the computer, hypnotized by the dark text, the cluster
of black dots on the bright screen that spelled out her father’s
name.

Suddenly she was furious, clenching her
fists to overcome the raging desire to fling the screen off the
table, to smash the printer, to scream until the windows around her
shattered.

He was alive!

Living here the whole time, and in eighteen
years of his miserable, pathetic life he hadn’t ever bothered to
find them, to see her, talk to her, and learn who she was! Suddenly
the tiny spark that had been her wish for a relationship was
snuffed; she slammed the lid down on her fantasies and nailed it
closed with her fury.

She would find him all
right, and when she did, she would tell him exactly what she
thought of him and what her mother had thought of him and
then
she
would leave
him
! She would walk away and
never look back and he could live the rest of his worthless life
alone with the knowledge of what he had given up.

Somewhere, in a far back corner of her mind,
Pastor Guy’s voice whispered something about grace and mercy, but
Cassie tuned it out, slamming the door savagely on her
too-persistent conscience.

The anger that seethed within her drowned
any compassion she might have entertained and she walked stiffly
out of the library to wait for Jack, not even hearing when Jay said
good-bye.

The sound of squealing tires brought her
head up, and Cassie stiffened in surprise as the tail end of a
black pick-up disappeared around the far corner of the
building.

*

She didn’t have to wait long. When Jack
pulled up to the curb, his expression spoke plainly that his mood
wasn't much better than hers.

“
So,” he said, as he pulled
back onto the road, “who put the burr under your
saddle?”

Cassie came close to telling him the whole
story right there, but for some inexplicable reason she could not.
Even as her mouth formed the truth, she heard herself lie and say
the librarian had been rude. Jack grunted, saying that he had more
great news.

“
The
pinhead
owner of the bookstore
gave me the wrong date of delivery,” he glowered, “not only that,
he insists that he
told
me the books wouldn’t be in
until tomorrow. Here’s the topping on the cake though,” Jack said
with a growl, “he says he’s lost the invoice, so he can’t be sure
the books I need will be in the delivery!”

Outside the truck, a half-dozen seagulls
battled over the tattered remains of some child's discarded
hamburger, shrieking and screeching, feinting at one another with
their yellow, hooked beaks.

“
What are you going to do?”
Cassie asked.

“
Not much choice,” Jack
said, with a frustrated sigh, “I have to be here when that delivery
arrives. If I’m not, he can scoop the books I need and say that
they weren’t in with the rest. He must have found a buyer for
them…”

So saying, Jack muttered an oath that, had
she not been in the clutches of such black thoughts herself, would
have caused Cassie to blush. Instead, she only nodded, thinking
that with that one word, Jack had pretty much summed up the whole
world.

“
Now we have to stay and
wait,” Jack went on, “I booked us a couple of rooms at a cheapie
motel up the highway. It’s on me, since it’s my deal that’s keeping
us here.” Jack sighed. "That order is for about six hundred dollars
worth of books, except for the two I really need. Those two are
worth quite a bit more than that. I told
pinhead
before I left that if I
wasn’t there when the boxes were opened, I wasn’t paying." Jack's
frown deepened.

"He squawked a bit, but he doesn't really
care. If I don’t pay him for the rest of the books, he’ll still
more than break even just selling the two."

Cassie thought about this for a moment, “How
will you know when the books arrive?”

“
That’s the simple part,” he
replied, “I’m going to hang around his shop, like the shadow of
death, until the delivery arrives. I called UPS, and they estimated
delivery between noon and four tomorrow, but I'm going to be there
when his doors open and I’m not leaving until my books show
up!”

“
You’re going to just sit
there all day?” she asked.

“
Well,” Jack smiled
sardonically, “It
is
a bookstore, I’m sure I’ll
find something to do with my time. Hey, are you getting
hungry?”

“
Starved!” Cassie nodded,
her stomach rumbling in agreement.

“
Let’s find someplace that
serves seafood around here,” Jack laughed.

“
Yeah,
that
should be a challenge!”
Cassie snorted, “I suppose we’re looking for oysters.”

Jack looked shocked. “What else is there?”
he asked.

Chapter
Nine

They parked the van in
front of a sprawling, single level eatery called
The Sand Dollar Inn
. Once seated near the door of the bustling little café, they
sipped from their water glasses, waiting for menus to
arrive.

"Oh my gosh!" Cassie exclaimed, "I almost
forgot!"

"What's that?" Jack replied.

Cassie told him about the seeing the black
truck with the tinted windows, pulling out of the library, and the
same black truck in the parking lot of the Pismo Bowl.

"In fact," she went on, "wasn't there a
black pickup at that rest area we camped at the first night?"

"I think there was," Jack said. He was
scowling by now, his fingers drumming the table in nervous
concern.

"Do you think," Cassie asked, "that it's the
guy from the truck stop?"

"Mr. Wexler from Phoenix?" Jack asked,
"Could be, I suppose. It would be a long way to come for a little
payback. Besides, if he wanted to jump us, he's had plenty of
chances."

Cassie shuddered at the memory of the
malodorous, tattooed truck driver. "What if he’s following us to
find out where we live?"

"Or waiting to see where I drop you off…"
Jack muttered absently, and then cursed himself under his breath as
Cassie's face drained of color and her hands began to shake.

"Oh, Cassie," he said, half rising from his seat, "I'm sorry,
that was a stupid thing to say!" Jack's face grew as red as
Cassie's was white, and he chewed his lip in frustration at his
offhand comment.

"Don't worry," he assured her, "we'll get to
the bottom of this before I drop you off anywhere."

"It's…it's okay," Cassie whispered, her
heart pounding madly against her ribs. Suddenly the room seemed to
be filled with the acrid stink of stale smoke.

Looking around, Jack noticed the pay phone
in the entryway, just behind Cassie's seat.

"Hang on a second," he said, "I'm going to
make a quick phone call. I'll be right behind you.” Jack hurried
around to the back of the booth and Cassie heard the sound of
change dropping.

*

Sheriff Bryan Hallworth had just sat down at
his desk, balancing a cup of black coffee and a bran muffin in one
hand and a thick sheaf of Teletype pages in the other. For all the
jokes about cops and doughnuts, Long Beach’s head of law
enforcement liked to keep himself in top condition. Hallworth
prided himself on wearing the same size jeans that he had the day
he graduated from college. He’d heard too many stories about
potbellied cops ending up face down on the sidewalk after
vapor-locking in the middle of a chase.

No thank you.

Not much of that kind of thing in a small
town like Long Beach.

Still, Sheriff Hallworth might not be able
to stop a bullet, if one should have his name on it, but he’d be
darned if he were going to give some perp the pleasure of watching
him buy the farm just because he couldn’t keep his pipes clean.

So, bran muffins and black
coffee, as well as five mornings a week at the gym, kept him in
what his wife referred to as
fighting
form
.

Still
, Hallworth didn’t try to
fool himself,
the bran muffins tasted
like cardboard, fiber or no fiber.