That Summer Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

And when she would look at him in that way she had, as if he knew the answers to all the questions in the world, he felt real and alive, as if he could take on the world just for her. He learned that when you were young, nothing else mattered but the girl you loved.
    One day he oiled the hinges on the old screen door because it gave him an excuse to be near her. She slipped out of the old house for the first time that night and met him walking in the woods where he pinned her against a tree and kissed the hell out of her, unhooked her bra and felt her up.
    All he had to do was touch Catherine and both of them burned up. But they didn’t just touch and kiss and steam up the glass. Sometimes they would sit, hidden by those big old gray rocks near the cove, and watch the night drift by them.
    And they would talk. About her hometown. About the war. About the poetry she loved. About the music he loved. About how Bob Dylan and Paul Simon were both poets and musicians. They talked about life and death and dreams.
    She taught him the names of the stars because she said when he touched her and kissed her she always felt as if he took her clear up to those stars.
    He didn’t care that she was seventeen and he was almost twenty. He didn’t care that the world thought he was a man who was ready to go to war, while she had one more year of high school and was jailbait.
    He didn’t care because when he kissed Catherine Wardwell, nothing else in the whole goddamned screwed-up world mattered. Until the night they couldn’t stop and went all the way, the same night he’d carved their initials in the wood.
    The same night her father caught them in the boathouse.

Four
    San Francisco, 1997

    C atherine slipped off her glasses and sagged back in her chair, staring out at the pink Victorian across the street from her office. It was four o’clock and almost every ten minutes there had been an urgent call.
    She pinched the bridge of her nose and saw stars. When her vision cleared, she was looking at her desktop, where a cluster of silver-framed images of her daughters Alyson and Dana were grinning back at her.
    In a frame with delicate ballet shoes decorating the corners was a photograph of Dana, her oldest daughter, dressed in a pink tutu, her blonde hair scraped back off her small heart-shaped face. She had been six then and had no front teeth. Her gummy smile looked almost too big for her face. There was another shot next to it of her sitting on Santa’s knee, her eyes turned up to him in complete awe. And the last photo was taken only a few months ago when Dana went to the Sadie Hawkins dance.
    She turned to Alyson’s pictures. There was her second-grade photo taken the day after she’d tried to cut her own bangs; she looked like she’d had a fight with a lawnmower. Every time Catherine saw that photo she smiled.
    There was no picture of Aly on Santa’s knee. Aly had always preferred animals to humans. She had liked Disney’s Robin Hood better than Sleeping Beauty. She wouldn’t go near Santa because when she was three the older kids at her preschool had told her there was no such thing as Santa Claus. After that day, Santa meant nothing to her.
    Now the Easter Bunny, well, that was different. Those kids hadn’t said anything about the Easter Bunny. So instead of a Santa photo, there was one of Aly sitting on top of the Easter Bunny’s furry knee, her hands cupping his pink fuzzy cheeks while she demanded to know how he got around to all the houses in the world and managed to hide all those eggs in only one night. One of Aly’s typical questions—the kind that were hard to answer.
    Catherine glanced back at the stack of report folders in a jagged pile on her desk, then up at the smiling images of her daughters. She picked up the phone, punched in a series of numbers and got Seattle information.
    Fifteen minutes later she had rented the same quaint Victorian house in the same cove on the same secluded San Juan island where