Frank's Independence Day Read online

  “No, you’re imagining things, Cass. You think too much. Get your head out of your own butt.” And she mostly did. One of the many gifts Vic Knowles had given her, the ability to be clear about her own actions and reactions.

  He’d financed her dreams of getting away from the rain capital of the Pacific Northwest. He’d paid for her college in full and cooking school after that. It was only cleaning up his papers this last week that she saw how close it had come to breaking him. He’d just made it a natural assumption that she’d go to college and he’d pay. Just like her Mom who had a degree in economics from Vassar. He’d always talked about how smart Cassidy’s mother was. How beautiful. How much he missed her.

  He hadn’t gone to college himself, not even high school. His past was little more than a few facts she’d winnowed over the years. His dad had left before he could remember. He’d dropped out of third grade to help his mother run the grocery store. They were desperately poor when she died. Then he’d gone to Vietnam at eighteen as the only way to make a living wage. And walked to a vineyard. But he gave Cassidy that gift of education as if it was no sacrifice to him.

  Did he now begrudge her that past? The future he never had.

  No. That didn’t make any sense. He hadn’t thought about the money, he’d invested in his dreams for her. She was just going nuts from missing him so much and angry at him for being dead.

  “Useful, Cass, real useful.”

  To prove her sanity, she forced the rumpled letter back into the envelope, as neatly as possible in the midst of the maelstrom, and she forced that back into her leather pack.

  Her father, the self-educated man, also the most well-read man she’d ever met. But she’d learned early on to do her math and science homework before he came home from the fields. His frustration at being unable to help her with them had always been a strain.

  Cassidy’s mother was a single solitary memory. She’d been standing in the open doorway of the house, leaving on a stormy night to answer a call to the hospital. The wind at the door blew her hair across her face as she leaned on her father’s arm. Cassidy’s only memory of Adrianne Knowles, a woman with no face. Then Bea Clark rushing in from next door to sit with her.

  She and Daddy did talk about the books though. He had sharpened her mind as they puzzled out the books together. Ayn Rand piled next to Shakespeare, Heinlein and Hugo, Dickens and a biography of Jimi Hendrix. Their house was always awash in books. And the massive collection of wine books, thumbed again and again by both of them, the only books to have a proper bookcase, had sat in the place of honor in the living room. Everything else jumbled into stacked wooden crates, mounded on tops of dressers, and enough on the dining table to make it a battle to find room for two plates.

  The chill spray of a particularly large wave spattered her with a few drops and the next with a few more.

  The tide must be coming in.

  She scrambled from her hiding place and rose back into the wind which threatened to topple her down into the roaring waves. She forged her way back up the hill. The wind tore at her backpack and thumped it against her spine. The camera. Right.

  She squatted to get out of the wind and pulled out her trusty point-and-shoot. The wind nearly blinded her when she turned back into it. Her hair swirled about her head.

  A sailboat.

  Two lunatics in a sailboat were off the point of land. A cobalt-blue hull climbed out of one wave, pointing its bow to the sky, and then plunged down and buried its nose in the front of the next wave before rising again in a great arc of spray and green water. Huge, maroon sails snapped in the wind, loud enough to sound like a gunshot above the roaring surf.

  Whoever the captain was, he and his buddy were crazy. They must both be male because no woman in her right mind would ever go out into a storm like this. But if they wanted to sail right into her picture, she wasn’t going to complain; it was a beautiful boat. At the perfect moment she snapped the photo then turned for the woods and the long trail home.

  Copyright 2013 Matthew Lieber Buchman

  Published by Buchman Bookworks

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof,

  may not be reproduced in any form

  without permission from the author.

  Discover more by this author at: www.buchmanbookworks.com

  Cover images:

  Helicopter over Baghdad © U.S. Army | Flickr

  Washington D.C. Fireworks © Joe Calhoun | Flickr (cc)

  Casual Embrace © Bobby Deal | Dreamstime.com

  A young and sexy brunette woman on a foggy background

  © Maksim Shmeljov | Dreamstime.com

  Sparkler © Denys Prokofyev | Dreamstime.com (back cover)

  Other fine romances by this author

  Angelo’s Hearth

  Where Dreams are Born

  Where Dreams Reside

  Maria’s Christmas Table

  Where Dreams Unfold

  Where Dreams Are Written

  The Night Stalkers

  The Night Is Mine

  I Own the Dawn

  Daniel’s Christmas

  Wait Until Dark

  Frank’s Independence Day

  Peter’s Christmas

  Take Over at Midnight

  Light Up the Night

  Christmas at Steel Beach

  Bring On the Dusk

  Target of the Heart

  Target Lock on Love

  Christmas at Peleliu Cove

  Zachary’s Christmas

  Firehawks

  Pure Heat

  Wildfire at Dawn

  Full Blaze

  Wildfire at Larch Creek

  Wildfire on the Skagit

  Hot Point

  Delta Force

  Target Engaged

  Deities Anonymous

  Cookbook from Hell: Reheated

  Saviors 101

  Thrillers

  Swap Out!

  One Chef!

  Two Chef!

  SF/F Titles

  Nara

  Monk’s Maze