The Coast Road Home (A Pelican Pointe Novel Book 13) Read online

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  THE COAST ROAD HOME

  A Pelican Pointe Novel

  Published by Beachdevils Press

  Copyright © 2019 Vickie McKeehan

  All rights reserved.

  The Coast Road Home

  A Pelican Pointe Novel

  Copyright © 2019 Vickie McKeehan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic format without written permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, locales, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, businesses or companies, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-10: 1086243703

  ISBN-13: 978-1086243703

  Published by

  Beachdevils Press

  Printed in the USA

  Titles Available at Amazon

  Cover art by Vanessa Mendozzi

  You can visit the author at:

  www.vickiemckeehan.com

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  http://vickiemckeehan.wordpress.com/

  www.twitter.com/VickieMcKeehan

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  Sometimes we lose our way,

  and sometimes that's what we need.

  ~ ANONYMOUS

  For all the people who’ve packed up and started over.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  Cast of Characters

  The Coast Road Home

  by

  VICKIE McKEEHAN

  Prologue

  First week of March

  New Glarus, Wisconsin

  The trial was over, had been for a week. The monster who’d ruined her life was locked up in Waupun Correctional and would never see the light of day again. But that was little comfort.

  She’d lost too much.

  Friends kept telling her that she needed to put the past behind her and move on. Maybe one day she could. But not here. And not now.

  Marley Lennox had already sold the family farm. Land her grandparents had owned and worked for decades. They’d passed it on to her parents. She didn’t take selling it lightly.

  But she’d signed the papers a week ago because she couldn’t live here anymore, couldn’t even go back inside the house.

  The place she’d once considered an idyllic childhood. Now everything about it had turned into a nightmare, a nightmare that had lasted three long years. She couldn’t bear the pain any longer, not of seeing those walls again and knowing she’d been the cause of it, a daily reminder of how she’d failed. No, she had to get out here. The idea that she might’ve been able to do something different and get a different outcome was there in her head every single day she stayed.

  It was time to see more of the country other than the state where she’d been born and raised. She wanted to experience life, needed to step outside her comfort zone if she was ever going to heal, and truly be able to start over.

  Deep down, she knew there was no fresh slate in her future. She knew it. But she had to try and salvage something if she wanted to move beyond the pain. Crying didn’t help. She’d cried enough tears to last a lifetime. Either she moved away from the depressing memories of that one horrific day, or she would check herself into a mental facility, curl up in a fetal position, and just give up. She needed to try and recover a portion of her sanity, get it back, and never let go.

  The cold wind had her shivering and huddling in her wool coat as she stood across the road and watched the new owners unpack their U-Haul. The family of four named Fairchild seemed to relish their newfound luck at buying a working farm that still had dairy cows and produced enough wheat and grain to make a profit. As the men took turns unloading the truck, she heard laughter. A good sign, she figured.

  But the five hundred acres was someone else’s problem now.

  Marley jumped back into her father’s 1980 Scout—a vehicle he’d driven off the showroom floor the same year her brother had been born. She’d learned to drive the Scout the day she turned fourteen. After cranking up the engine, she flipped up the heat and patted the dash, hoping the old car got her across as many states as it took to reach the West Coast. She had a deep abiding wish to see the ocean, to smell the sea, to do things she’d never done before. To experience something else besides the grief she’d lived with for three long years.

  But for now, she intended to start small and head to Minneapolis where she’d get a hotel room for the night, breathe air that didn’t smell like cows or chickens.

  As she drove down the familiar lane for the last time, she could only hope her parents would understand her decision. Saying goodbye to the farm meant leaving the pain here in this same spot where it had all imploded, maybe leaving it behind, buried in the dirt for good.

  She wished the Fairchild family better luck than she’d had. She needed to find a new place, a new town where they didn’t whisper behind her back or feel pity for the woman who’d lost everything.

  Marley adjusted the rearview mirror to get one last look at the farm and fought back tears all the way past the city limits.

  As I-90 dumped into I-94, she continued west, picking up speed and merging into heavier traffic. The radio was stuck on the same channel her father had listened to for most of his life. Talk radio didn’t suit her mood, so she reached over and turned the knob to a new station that played oldies. But the music reminded her too much of her pare
nts. The nostalgic mood tugged at her heartstrings. When tears begin to trickle down her cheeks, she switched it off and rolled down the window despite the frigid air. Cruising just over the speed limit, she let the cold snap of wind dry her tears and whip her hair into messy tangles.

  She didn’t care how she looked. She drove like someone chased her, like a monster nipped at her heels and was reaching out to grab her at any second and gobble her up.

  Stepping on the gas, she had to get away as fast as she could.

  It wasn’t until she spotted the Minnesota Welcome sign at the state line that she loosened her grip on the steering wheel and began to relax. She turned the radio back on and found a station that played rock coming out of the Twin Cities area.

  Rolling Stones, White Snake, and Springsteen tunes took her the rest of the way to the hotel where she intended to treat herself to room service and a hot shower.

  It had to be the beginning of the rest of her life. She had to find some new direction, a new reason to get up in the morning. She had to start over, or she would surely drown in the sorrow that her life had become.

  One

  Present Day

  Pelican Pointe, California

  After eight months, Gideon Nighthawk had finally settled into the little seaside town he now called home. He’d bought a house at the corner of Crescent and Ocean Streets, a granite stone cottage that had once been a tavern, built in 1918 before the era of Prohibition. The building had been abandoned when the last owner died sometime during the 1950s.

  He’d been told that before the renovation took place, the structure had been covered in ropes of twining yucca vines and creeping fig. The weeds had been allowed to cultivate to head-high proportions, a story he believed because he’d seen photos of the before and after.

  He’d never owned a place quite so peaceful or picturesque. That’s why he’d fallen in love with the charm and history, maybe even the vibe the house gave off every time he walked through the courtyard and under the arched portico to unlock the red double doors and go inside.

  He’d been told that his birthplace in Oregon had been just as scenic and picturesque. But his memories of growing up there were sketchy at best, maybe because he’d been plucked out of Eugene and sent to Illinois to live with an aunt after his mother died.

  He’d ended up in Madison, Illinois, a little town in the shadow of St. Louis where he’d spent his formative years. But at ten, his aunt had needed to find a better job, so they’d moved to the Windy City, and Chicago had been his home ever since, so it was hard for him to make an accurate assessment about anywhere else.

  After dealing with frigid winters and Chicago gridlock for most of his adult life, living across from the ocean was a unique experience. Here, if he needed to forget the pressures at the hospital, he could jog along the beach year-round. He could kayak out on Smuggler’s Bay anytime he wanted. And if there were emergencies, like tonight, he could run across the street and be at a patient’s bedside within five minutes or less.

  Before calling it a night, he looked in on the injured, still-unconscious female who’d been brought into the ER before nine that evening with a list of injuries. A single-car accident on the Coast Road had left her with a gash on the head, which he’d already stitched up, a case of hitting the steering wheel on impact. In addition to the head wound, she also had numerous facial lacerations and a broken rib.

  The MRI they’d taken showed slight bleeding and bruising on the brain. Not significant yet, but something to keep an eye on over the next forty-eight hours. The bruising was probably why, after three hours, their patient had yet to regain consciousness.

  “Woman was damn lucky she was wearing her seatbelt. The impact could’ve sent her right through the windshield,” Gideon muttered to the night nurse on duty. “I’ve seen it happen before.”

  Working the four to four shift, Gilly Bremmer nodded in agreement. “Me too. The paramedics who brought her in said her car didn’t have an airbag. They said she probably fell asleep. No signs of skid marks. Brent thinks she veered off the roadway, bounced off the guard rail, and then smacked right into a boulder. Could’ve been a lot worse if she hadn’t hit that rock. The area where it happened has a steep drop down on the right side of that railing if you’re traveling south, which she was. She’s lucky she didn’t go straight off the cliff. Has an out of state driver’s license from Wisconsin, which means she wasn’t that familiar with the curvy road.”

  “Or she’d been drinking,” Gideon tossed out. “The BAC will tell us that in the morning.”

  “Maybe she’s in the area to visit family. Although…”

  “Although what?”

  “Eastlyn Parker and Colt Del Rio were the first on the scene before the EMTs arrived. They said her car was packed with stuff, several suitcases in the back along with some personal items like maybe she was in the middle of moving. The tow truck brought her car into Wally’s garage, some old kind of thing from the 1980s. Anyway, Colt mentioned that the passenger side was caved in.”

  Small towns were a lot different from Chicago, Gideon mused as he listened to how much information Gilly had managed to collect about the situation in a short amount of time. But hospitals, he knew, were primed for wild rumors and plenty of real-life soap opera drama.

  Picking up the woman’s chart at the end of the bed, he scanned the admission data. “Marley Lennox is lucky she didn’t hit that rock head-on.”

  “I’d say she’s lucky to be alive. The information you see is from her driver’s license. The eye color and height match up, so we know it’s her. Date of birth says she’s thirty-four. I haven’t had a chance to use the Internet to find out anything about the small town listed on there yet. So far, I haven’t found any useful contact information in her purse, either.”

  “Hopefully, she’ll wake up by morning and be able to tell us herself who to contact. Keep me posted if there are any significant changes to her vitals. We could be looking at a Grade III concussion.”

  “Will do. Uh, Dr. Nighthawk, did you notice the two scars on her chest and upper arm?”

  “You mean the gunshot wounds? Yeah. I’d have to be blind not to notice those.”

  “Maybe that’s why she was, you know, in the process of relocating. She’s running from a case of domestic violence.”

  Gideon scowled, looking over at the perky blonde nurse. “Those scars happened three or four years ago. Let’s not jump to conclusions. With violence what it is today, there’s every reason to think she could’ve been a victim of a robbery or a mugging back then. How about we let her tell us when she wakes up?”

  He stood there several more minutes trying to figure out Marley Lennox. The woman was too thin. Her slender frame could’ve used another ten or twelve pounds. But maybe naturally lean ran in her genes. He studied her long hair, a mass of chestnut brown with ginger highlights. The hair tumbled out against the backdrop of the sterile white sheet, the contrast making her skin look deathly pale. Cuts and bruises almost hid the sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose. “What brought you all the way from Wisconsin, Marley Lennox? And why didn’t you just pull over and get off the road if you were sleepy?”

  Gilly eyed the doctor. Gideon Nighthawk never failed to show his caring side; a trait she admired but, in her experience, was rare in most doctors, let alone neurosurgeons. She knew Dowling Memorial Hospital had been lucky to steal him away from the Level I Trauma Center in downtown Chicago. She also thought she knew why he’d made the move. Nighthawk was best friends with Quentin Blackwood, the town’s general practitioner. The two men had met at medical school and went through tough years of internship and residency together. As the only two Native Americans in their class, they’d forged a bond.

  But while Blackwood had completed his training and headed back to his native California to become a surgeon near Lake Tahoe, Nighthawk had stuck it out and opted for a position at Chicago’s highly-rated trauma unit—Northwestern Memorial. That is until Quentin had needed his s
killed expertise.

  When Gideon noticed the intense study from the nurse, he cleared his throat. “Problem?”

  “I was just thinking, what happens when we let her go? She has nowhere to stay and recuperate. With her car totaled, she doesn’t even have transportation to get to family.”

  “Maybe her family will come to her. Let’s just get her through the night and then worry about the rest later, shall we?”

  “Of course. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

  “You’re worried about her.”

  “Well, yeah. I hung around all this time hoping she’d wake up. I’m concerned that she hasn’t. It makes me wonder what I missed.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s almost midnight. I’ll get some sleep and set my alarm, come back first thing in the morning and do another MRI.”

  “Maybe she’ll wake up by then,” Gilly suggested.

  Gideon took one long, last look at Marley. Something he couldn’t define pulled at him. “Unless she just doesn’t want to.”

  The seasoned doctor wasn’t that far off the mark.

  Marley felt like she was swimming in a sea of darkness. She wanted to drown in the black pool, let herself go, let herself sink, leave her misery behind once and for all, and just let go. But each time those thoughts would prevail, she kept hearing a man’s voice call to her, one she didn’t recognize. The annoying cadence of his words kept telling her to open her eyes, that it wasn’t her time to give up yet, not her time to go.

  “Leave me alone,” she muttered as she tried to drop into the abyss of oblivion, tried descending further down into the blackness. But the voice was persistent, like a murmur in her ear that wouldn’t go away.

  She imagined her eyes fluttering open, brief at first, then wider, so she could make out the man standing beside her bed, the man who kept irritating her, and refused to go away, the man who refused to shut up. He had a nice face, a smile that widened without effort, and a gentle touch.