Seasons' End Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2013 by Will North

  Originally published by Booktrope All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonEncore, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonEncore are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781503991972

  Cover Designer:Annie Brulé

  This title was previously published by Booktrope; this version has been reproduced from Booktrope archive files.

  For “Bates,” my daily burst of sunshine

  here in the rainy Pacific Northwest.

  contents

  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

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  thirty-two

  thirty-three

  epilogue

  a reader’s guide

  acknowledgments

  about the author

  more from will north

  one

  AT FIRST HE THOUGHT it was a deer.

  It was not quite morning on what promised to be yet another brilliant end-of-summer day. The pre-dawn fog was just beginning to lift. Not that it actually “lifted.” Not that it was fog, either, come to that. That’s just what islanders called the queer maritime phenomenon because “marine layer” was too fussy a phrase for an everyday event. In the wee hours it lay like a lid a hundred feet or so above the ground in late summer, and as the upper air warmed, plumes of mist descended and rose, twisting wraithlike through the feathered branches of the firs that cloaked the island. Then, at a certain but highly uncertain point later in the morning—the regulars at the Burton coffee stand sometimes bet on the precise moment—it simply disappeared, like steam from the manholes in Manhattan streets he remembered from his childhood. The fog didn’t move off, the way clouds do. Instead, in a sort of meteorological sleight of hand, it just vanished. You missed it entirely if you didn’t pay attention.

  Colin Ryan paid attention. Though it was only the first Monday of September, 2012, and the night had been warm, on this morning’s bike ride Colin could already sense the coming autumn chill. It was there in the sharper tang of the air that swept in from the Pacific and in the subtle shift in the quality of the light as the transit of the sun took a lower, more southerly route across the sky. It was there in the way the echoing honks of migrating geese began to replace the shrieks of laughter of the children who summered on the beach. It was there in the way the leaves of the alders and broad-leafed maples on this mostly evergreen island would, in a matter of a few weeks, not so much change color as slowly lighten as they died, reverting to the pale greens of spring, as if the movie of the seasons was playing backward. Summer didn’t flame out in the Pacific Northwest as it did in Colin’s native northeast, it slipped gracefully offstage. And here in the middle of Puget Sound, surrounded by the perpetually snowcapped Olympic Mountains to the west and the Cascades to the east, Colin thought this perfectly appropriate. Flash was unnecessary when grandeur was everywhere. But in the thin half-light of dawn he could tell the end was approaching, the gathering autumn already sucking the marrow from the fat bones of summer.

  There were still warm days, though, and he was taking full advantage. He was nearing the end of his pre-dawn ride, an eight–mile circumnavigation of the southern half of the island, something he did every morning before opening the clinic as long as the weather held. It had been nearly two decades since he’d moved to the island to take over the local veterinary practice.

  Colin was hunched over his handlebars and speeding down the steep, sinuous stretch of the Vashon Highway just south of the little hamlet called Burton, the tires of his touring bike hissing over the dew-damped asphalt like tape being ripped from a dispenser, when he saw the dark mass ahead in the middle of the road.

  Deer were a year-round menace on Vashon Island, but the danger worsened as fall approached, as if in their frenzy to pack on as much weight as possible to carry them through the winter, the beasts became senseless to danger whenever they saw an irresistible patch of grass. Given the dark canopy of the conifer forest, many of these irresistible patches were along the sunny margins of the island’s narrow roads.

  The “highway” was nothing more than a two-lane blacktop that stretched from the ferry dock at the north end of the island to its opposite number on the south end, some thirteen miles away. The rather grand title of “highway” dated from the time, not so long ago, when the south and north end ferries were finally joined by a continuous paved road, a measure of progress and a point of local pride requiring a suitably proud name. Whenever Colin looked at a road map of the island, which he did a lot when making farm calls, the pattern of perpendicular side roads branching off the Highway reminded him of the spine and ribs of a deboned salmon.

  Vashon’s deer population was something of a tourist draw. Placid as slender cows as they munched picturesquely in front lawns, in apple orchards, in family gardens, and along the roadside, graceful as ballet dancers on point when they moved; the deer were photo fodder, as if they’d been placed there for visitors’ viewing pleasure by the Chamber of Commerce. But the deer drove locals mad with frustration, since the cost of erecting and maintaining high, deer-proof fences around home vegetable gardens often outweighed any budgetary advantage they might have gained by growing their own produce. The two species—deer and residents—waged a sort of endless existential battle; the deer trying to get into the gardens, the residents trying to keep them out, scheming to a draw. It didn’t help any that the deer reproduced like rabbits and that their only apparent predator was the automobile—that and the occasional crazed urban hunter who took the ferry from Seattle in the fall and thought nothing of shooting across fields and yards at anything that moved.

  ***

  COLIN SQUEEZED HIS brake levers hard and slid to a stop on the slick pavement a point where the road leveled out along the north shore of Outer Quartermaster Harbor. In the dim light just pearling the sky in the east, he noticed a Great Blue Heron hunched on an arm of driftwood at the water’s edge, motionless as an undertaker. He unclipped from the pedals, leaned his bike against the guard rail, and crossed the road, his cycling shoes clicking on the pavement like a metronome.

  In another half hour, traffic for the morning’s first Tacoma-bound ferry at the south end of the island would pick up and, even though it was Labor Day, the now-deserted road would get busy. Colin knew he’d have to drag the deer to the side of the road so there wouldn’t be another accident. It wasn’t the first time he’d done it. He wondered what had happened to the car that hit the beast. At this hour, it would have been an old beater of a pickup belonging to an island laborer, the kind of fellow least likely to be able to afford repairs, the most economically vu
lnerable to any accident, whether personal or vehicular. They often had a well-loved old dog who rode with them; Colin took care of their animals when they were sick, often for nothing.

  As he came closer to the inert carcass on the asphalt, though, he realized, even in the dim pre-dawn light, that there was a problem with this particular deer. Instead of the usual flea-bitten russet coat, this one was wearing a short black cocktail dress. And silver high-heeled sandals. And wasn’t a deer.

  ***

  THE BODY LAY on its back but the head was turned away, the face curtained behind a swirl of sun-streaked ash blonde hair. The slender tanned limbs lay splayed like a child’s pick-up sticks.

  He didn’t need to see the face. He recognized the dress. He’d admired it, and the woman who wore it, only hours earlier at the annual beachside party the old summer families always held the night before Labor Day, the day before they all left the island for the winter.

  The body belonged to Martha Petersen Strong, known to everyone on the beach as “Pete.” He’d known her and loved her for more than twenty years.

  two

  COLIN RYAN MET TYLER STRONG at a flat-letting agency on Regent Street just off London’s Piccadilly Circus on a drizzly late Friday morning in September, 1984. The agency was on the floor directly above the street level Tourist Information Centre. The narrow stairs opened to an airy office with pearl gray walls and high Georgian windows that flooded in light from Regent’s Street. The floor was covered in tight charcoal commercial carpet and a long black counter much like a bank’s, with openings like tellers’ windows, ran across one end of the room. Colin was at one of the windows going over a list of cheap bed-sits, as the British called a studio with shared kitchen and bath, with a perky young leasing agent with big, deeply kohled brown eyes and an even more deeply scooped blouse, when a perfectly modulated voice behind him said,

  “I say, old man, here’s a thought: Why don’t we go in together on someplace more seemly?”

  Coming from someone who, by his accent, was most certainly American, the fogeyish British mannerism was ridiculous, but when Colin turned, he found himself facing a grinning young man about his own age who clearly was making fun of the fact that they were both, as the English would say, “from the colonies.” The guy had sandy hair, a long narrow nose that put Colin in mind of an Afghan hound, and was unusually tall, easily six inches taller than Colin.

  A hand shot out: “Tyler Strong,” the young man said, as if Colin should recognize the name, which he didn’t. The brown-eyed leasing agent’s attention shifted instantly.

  ***

  COLIN RYAN WAS in London to become a veterinarian. It was an admittedly strange way for an American to become a vet—strange, that is, unless you figured in the cost. The kind of kid who dragged home stray cats, he’d known he wanted to be a vet for years and he’d dreamed of getting his degree at Cornell. But his widowed mother didn’t have the money to send him there and, thanks in part to the chaos of his childhood, he hadn’t gained the grades in high school to earn a scholarship. But his school guidance counselor, who had also been his biology teacher, believed in him. With a little digging she discovered that with the British pound at an historic low against the dollar, Colin could enter London’s Royal Veterinary College for roughly half of what Cornell would cost. He got in, was halfway through his last year at the school, and had been living in a flat in Harrow, way out on the Metropolitan Line of the Underground. The disadvantage was a long commute to the city; the advantage was it was cheap. But his landlord, a fussy curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum with fantasies of becoming a real estate mogul, had jacked up the rent and Colin could no longer afford the place. He was looking for something smaller and closer.

  Colin and Tyler stepped out of the queue at the agency, crossed Regent Street, and walked a block up Brewer Street where they found a corner pub called The Crown.

  “Name your poison,” Tyler said as they approached the bar.

  “Pint of London Pride would suit,” Colin said, “but it’s my shout.”

  “Nonsense; I’m the one who hauled you here.”

  Colin shrugged. “Fair enough.”

  The pub was dense with a lunchtime crowd of office workers. Colin watched in amazement as the aging peroxide blonde behind the bar lifted her head above the punters lined three deep in front of her and yelled to Tyler, “What’ll it be, luv?”

  “Couple of pints of Pride, my dear lady!”

  “Right you are!”

  Colin wondered if it was Tyler’s height that caught the woman’s eye, but there were other tall men in the crowd as well. No; it was just something about the fellow, something that caught people’s attention and held it. Had Colin been the one ordering he’d still be standing at the bar, hand in the air, angling to get served.

  The pints appeared, the dimpled glass mugs brimful. The barmaid winked. Tyler paid, told her to keep the change, and they drifted away from the crowd.

  “Come here a lot?” Colin asked as they touched glasses.

  “Here? Never. Not my sort of place; no history, no atmosphere. That’s one thing I can say for Oxford—great old pubs. And younger barmaids!”

  They’d established where they were from and why they were in England before they’d reached the pub. Tyler was doing a term at Oxford before heading to law school.

  “So what’s your proposal?” Colin asked finally.

  “Simple. Oxford: great school, aforementioned great pubs, but otherwise deadly boring. The action’s all here. I need a London base.”

  “Someplace ‘seemly,’ you said…”

  “Exactly. And my thought is that, while two can’t live cheaply as one, they sure as hell can pool resources and get a better place to live than each of them could separately. Landlords rip off singles in this town.”

  Colin looked at Tyler. The fellow was wearing a Harris Tweed jacket in a herringbone weave of fall colors, a cream-colored rollneck sweater that looked to be cashmere, pleated gray flannel trousers, and cap-toed brown suede shoes that looked almost new. Colin had on jeans, sneakers, a faded black T-shirt, and a badly pilled black cardigan he’d picked up at an Oxfam charity shop in Harrow.

  Tyler read his eyes. “Look, I heard the price range you and that lovely agent were discussing. I’d go at least double that. And I’ll cover it for the extra few months longer you’re here than I’ll be.”

  “Why?”

  Tyler smiled. “Because I can.”

  “Fine. But why pick me out of the queue?”

  “Besides the fact you’re a fellow Yank?”

  “Besides that.”

  Tyler paused, pushed back an errant shock of hair, and smiled. “I have a few useful skills: I know which woman in a crowded room will sleep with me, and I know an honest man. You may sound like you’re a capo in the New York Mafia with that accent, but you were gracious and patient with that agent when everyone else was being pushy. And it wasn’t an act.”

  “All that and a shilling still won’t get you on the Tube,” Colin said.

  “The shilling’s extinct, and gentlemen nearly so, my friend.” Tyler’s smile was irresistible. “So, do have we an agreement?”

  Colin smiled, raised his glass to Tyler, and nodded.

  “Deal.”

  In short order, back at the agency, Tyler had negotiated a “seemly” furnished two-bedroom flat atop a carriage house just off the King’s Road in fashionable Chelsea, as well as the comely agent’s phone number. Colin watched him operate with quiet amazement. It was clear that Tyler Strong was used to getting his way, and to doing so without breaking a sweat. He combined a certain boyish charm with a languorous self-possession bordering on diffidence that, Colin would soon learn, drew women to him as if they were spellbound.

  And though a chasm of class difference yawned between them, Tyler and Colin turned out to be, for the most part, “best mates” that winter. It didn’t hurt that Tyler spent weekdays at Oxford and Colin had the flat mostly to himself.


  ***

  PETE ARRIVED A month after he and Tyler moved in.

  Early one Saturday morning in October, as the hand-sized, yellowing leaves of the plane trees outside his window began carpeting the cobbled pavement below, Colin was awakened by the downstairs doorbell. He assumed it was Strong, too hammered, as usual, to find his keys. He struggled into a shirt, padded downstairs in his undershorts, threw open the door, and was already turning back toward the stairs when it registered that the person at the door wasn’t, in fact, Tyler, but a wisp of a girl standing beside a massive knapsack. Her face, delicate and angular, was slightly elongated, as if it had been shaped by Modigliani. Her eyes were the color of seawater, shifting between blue and green in the morning light as if tidal and flecked with gold like sunshine on wavelets.

  “Hi, I’m Pete!”

  Colin stared. He wasn’t actually awake yet.

  “I’m Tyler’s girlfriend? From Seattle?”

  “Oh. Right…” he said, though he hadn’t a clue why. Tyler hadn’t mentioned a girlfriend in Seattle. “Um, I think he’s still up at Oxford.”

  He’d just realized he was standing at the open door, in front of a luminously beautiful young woman, without his trousers. This did not seem to faze the girl in the least.

  “May I come in?” the sylph asked.

  “Jeez, I’m sorry! Of course you can; I’m a little slow in the morning.” This was an understatement; Colin barely had a pulse in the morning, at least until he’d had his second cup of very strong tea.

  “Let me take your backpack; we’re just up the stairs.”

  He groaned as he lifted the pack, wondering what in heaven’s name she had in it and how so small a woman, only a couple of inches over five feet, had ever managed to get it here from Heathrow.

  “I’m sorry to be so early,” Pete chirped as she closed the door. The apartment was above a space that once had stabled horses and now cosseted a perfectly restored red MG-TC roadster, complete with wire wheels which belonged to their very rich, very spoiled landlord, a lesser Saudi prince.