Love, Unexpected by Virginia McCullough

Author:Virginia McCullough [McCullough, Virginia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2018-02-01T13:16:51+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

ZEKE HEARD THE back door close and by process of elimination figured it had to be Andi. Nelson had already stopped by once and his dad had just gone home. That completed the list of people who used the back door. He came out of the office and met her at the counter. Holding a clear plastic bag with what looked like a green book inside, she seemed pleased with herself. Smug, actually.

“Good news?” he asked, glancing at the bag.

She held up the bag. “Very good. A notebook...well, I should call it a log. That’s what it is, sort of.”

“Was it hidden?”

She bobbed her head from side to side, as if considering her answer. “More or less. It was in the back of a chart drawer. I might have missed it if I didn’t have finding more information on my mind. Either way, they tell us a little more about people I’m assuming are Charles and Mary. The pages could be from the summer cruise Charles wrote about in the letter.”

Andi’s first find had fed his curiosity, which had started on the day the boat arrived. And now they had another hint about what happened to the yacht over the years. Zeke held out his hand. “Let’s have a look.”

“The notebook is kind of fragile,” she said, giving him the bag. “That’s why I stuck it in a plastic bag.”

Zeke went into the office and gently let the notebook slide out of the bag onto the desk. When he opened it, he was surprised to see the jagged edges of the pages, as if they’d been torn out. “Why would someone preserve these few pages, and throw away the rest?”

Andi lifted her hands, palms up. “I don’t know.” She pointed to slightly smeared lines, but the town name was clear—Grand Marais, a port town in Minnesota. “I couldn’t decipher it completely, but the date looks to be September 19, 1941.”

“Getting toward the end of the boating season up there,” Zeke said.

Andi tapped the date. “And three months later, we were at war.” She rested her palms on the desk. “It could be the log from the honeymoon cruise, assuming they had one. But why didn’t he leave in more about it?” She ran her finger over the ragged edges left behind. “The missing pages came before these. If it’s a log, it’s the end of the cruise.”

Zeke turned the remaining handful of pages until he reached the last one. He knew a to-do list when he saw one. “This list is about closing up the boat for the winter. Maybe they were headed home.”

Andi turned the page back and pointed to another entry. “Look at this one. ‘Worrying charcoal clouds passed by, no rain today. Heading back tomorrow. I can’t describe...’ And then nothing. The rest is water-smudged.”

Zeke groaned. “What a shame. We’ll never know what she can’t describe.”

“She? You think Mary wrote that?”

He couldn’t say. Why did he assume a woman had written these words? “It just seems like it somehow, maybe it’s the section about the clouds.

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