Distant Shores Read Online Free PDF Page A

asked.
    â€œOf course. We’ll need to see if that woman filed any charges against him. We can’t run with campus gossip.”
    Sally flipped open a small notepad and started taking notes.
    â€œI’ll talk to the news director. You get to work on questions and leads. We’ll start with the campus police. Let’s meet in the lobby in …” He looked at his watch. It was twelve-forty-five. “Thirty minutes, okay?”
    â€œPerfect.”
    â€œAnd, Sally, thanks.”
    â€œWhat goes around comes around, Jack.”
    When she grinned up at him, he felt a flash of the old confidence.
    By the time Elizabeth got home, she was dog tired. The library meeting had run overtime, her book group had taken almost an hour to get started, and the carpenter she’d interviewed was too damned expensive to do her any good.
    Exhausted, she tossed her purse on the kitchen table and went back outside. On the porch, she settled into the rocking chair. The even, creaking motion of the chair—back and forth, back and forth—soothed her ragged nerves.
    The endless bronze ocean stretched out before her. The thick green lawn, still damp from an afternoon downpour, glittered in the fading sunlight. A pair of ancient Douglas firs, their boughs sagging tiredly downward, bracketed the view perfectly.
    A fleeting
if only
passed through her mind; she immediately discarded it. Her painting days were long behind her. But if they hadn’t been, if she hadn’t let that once-hot passion grow cold, this was what she would paint.
    Close by, a bird cawed loudly. A plump crow, berating her, no doubt, for daring to invade its space.
    But this was
her
place, her solace. From each of the three hundred bulbs she’d planted in the garden, to the picket fence she’d built and painted white, to every stick of furniture inside the house. Each square inch of this property reflected her dreams. No matter how unhappy or stressed-out she felt, she could come out to this quiet porch and stare at the ocean and feel at peace.
    She watched the golden sun sink slowly into the darkening sea, then got to her feet and went back inside.
    It was time to start dinner.
    She had just walked through the front door when the phone rang. She answered it. “Hello?”
    â€œHey, kiddo, are you done saving the Oregon coast for the day?”
    Elizabeth smiled in spite of her exhaustion. “Hey, Meg. It’s good to hear from you.” She collapsed into a Wedgwood-blue-and-yellow-striped chair and put her feet up on the matching ottoman. “What’s going on?”
    â€œToday’s Thursday. I wanted to remind you about that meeting.”
    The passionless women.
    Elizabeth’s smile faded. “Yeah,” she said, “I remembered,” although of course she hadn’t.
    â€œYou’re going?”
    Yeah, right.
Walk into a room full of strangers and admit that she had no passion? “No, actually, I’m not. It’s not my thing.”
    â€œAnd what exactly is your thing?”
    That stung. “You’re using your lawyer voice.”
    â€œWhat are you going to do tonight, alphabetize your spice drawer? Believe me, Birdie, you’re going to wake up one day and be sixty years old, and you won’t remember the last time you were happy.”
    Elizabeth had no answer to that. The same ugly scenario had occurred to her. Often. “If I went—and I’m not capitulating, mind you—but if I went, what would it be like?”
    â€œA bunch of girlfriends getting together. They’ll probably talk about how it feels to be lost in the middle of life.”
    That didn’t sound so bad; she’d imagined an Inquisition. Perhaps with torture aids. “Would I have to talk?”
    â€œNo, Marcel Marceau, you could sit there like a rock.”
    â€œYou really think it would help me?”
    â€œLet’s put it this way, if you don’t go this week,