Healing Stones by Stephen Arterburn, Nancy Rue Page B

name,” I said. “If I feel like I need to, I’ll call him.”
    â€œDr. Sullivan Crisp. He was a student of mine twenty years ago, when I taught at Vanderbilt. I thought he was going to be a theologian. He turned traitor and became a psychologist.”
    I folded the handkerchief into a tight square in my lap and pushed it into my purse. “I’ll wash this and get it back to you.” I pulled out a white envelope. “Here’s my letter.”
    I stood, and Ethan rose with me.
    â€œCall me if you change your mind about Dr. Crisp.”
    â€œI will.” It was a safe promise because I wouldn’t reconsider. A new resolve was taking shape in the space I’d sobbed free.
    I didn’t go to the yacht club until the next day. Since my last night there, I’d discovered that the key must have dropped out of my jacket pocket. I was going to have to get someone to let me in, and there would be a better chance of that on a day when it wasn’t freezing— outside my house or in it.
    I still clung to the hope that my family would thaw, given a little time. But the passing of moments only drove Rich further into his cave and carved Christopher’s disgust deeper into his face. Jayne couldn’t seem to bring herself to look at me.
    Rain or shine, I’d have to find Zach and put this behind me, before my entire life slipped away.
    Both the sun and Ned Traynor were out when I hurried up to the yacht club gate the next morning. He was the one with the lovelorn Yorkshire terrier. His wife—a chatty lady who hung a wreath on the door of their slip for every occasion including Groundhog Day— wasn’t with him, which was good. I didn’t have time for a long conversation about the Yorkie’s yearning to produce a litter.
    â€œHey, pretty lady!” Ned said. “I don’t usually see you here this time of day.”
    â€œWhich is probably why I walked off without my key,” I said. “Would you mind?”
    â€œSo sorry to hear about Zach’s boat.” He shook his head as he gallantly swung the gate open for me. “We’ll miss him around here.”
    I looked at him sharply, but he was busy shutting the gate with a flourish.
    â€œAny idea where he’s going
to live now?” he asked.
    â€œNot yet,” I said.
    Ned turned to me, hand jingling in his pocket. “You tell him he’d better swing by and at least say good-bye. You need me to jimmy the lock on the slip?”
    I told him I did have that key. I didn’t add that I planned to throw it into the inlet as soon as I was done.
    Hurrying down Dock C in daylight was strange. Sunset was the closest I’d come in a while to seeing light shimmer on the narrow strips of Sinclair Inlet that showed on either side of the narrow walkway, and even that had been a risk. The few times I’d come before dark were at Zach’s insistence that he wanted to see me with the “critters” again.
    The sea critters, he called them. He said he’d never noticed the secret life that existed under the dock until the day last June when he took the whole Costanas family for a day-long fishing trip. Before he and I were us.
    I’d confided in him that Rich had lost interest in everything, including me. Even the twenty-seven-foot Regal I’d bought him with my mother’s inheritance money sat on its trailer in our backyard, forgotten like the rest of him. Zach offered to try to wake him up with an outing. Rich and Christopher had indeed both been entranced with the cabin cruiser, built in 1941 and restored by Zach.
    Jayne, on the other hand, barely got two slips down Dock C before she was on her belly, pulling up a pregnant kelp crab. I plopped beside her, suddenly ten years old again, peering between the planks at the anemones waving like feather dusters and the sea stars groping with their suckered feet for something to hold onto.
    Then Zach was there too, as