Beyond the Setting Sun (Raspberry Ridge #6)

Chapter 1

Wesley Moffat, hockey superstar and potential author, if his agent had anything to do with it, sat on the front porch of the lake house he’d bought not long ago. Staring at the water, and contemplating his future.

His agent had insisted that if he had any hope of repairing his reputation in the professional hockey league, he would need to get his autobiography finished by the time his suspension was over and he was allowed to join his teammates on the Virginia Icebreakers.

He couldn’t imagine a life without hockey, although he’d come close to losing everything. He needed to get this book done.

The publishing world worked slower than a tortoise, and the book wouldn’t come out until next summer, but hopefully by then, he would have helped his team win the championship cup, and the book would just be the icing on top. If anything else went wrong, it might help fans understand why he was the way he was, according to his agent, and perhaps save his reputation and career.

Wesley didn’t give a flip about his reputation, but his career was important to him.

And he was back to where he started. He couldn’t imagine his life without hockey.

He sat and stared at the computer in front of him. Lots of folks he knew had ghostwriters, and Wesley could get on board with it. The only problem with a ghostwriter was details of his memoir might be leaked, and that would ruin everything according to his agent, Jim .

Jim was good at what he did, but sometimes he could be a little bit paranoid, at least in Wesley’s opinion.

“It’s a little burnt, but it’s edible.” His grandfather lived with him so when Wesley went to the beach for the summer, he came with, came out of the screen door of the cabin—no air conditioning—and handed him a plate of...maybe chicken?

Neither one of them could cook worth anything, and they were close to being in danger of starving. There were no fast-food restaurants in Raspberry Ridge.

He’d picked the town out, not because of its beautiful views of the lake, but because of its seclusion and isolation. There shouldn’t be any paparazzi or anyone who would actually recognize him. Especially if he kept a low profile.

The downside was, when one of them burnt supper, there were no fast-food restaurants within thirty minutes.

Tonight, it was Gramps’s turn to burn supper. Last night, it had been him. Fish. Fish wasn’t his favorite anyway, and it almost tasted better burnt. Gramps didn’t think so, but people could have other opinions from him. They could be wrong.

“Thanks. This is a little better than the fish last night,” he said agreeably.

“The fish was terrible. At least this is only burnt on one side.”

He took the fork that Gramps handed him and lifted up the meat to see that indeed the side that was down on his plate was only partially burned.

“You’re definitely getting better. I think you probably ought to be the full-time chef.”

Gramps snorted. “If your grandmother could hear you now,” he started.

“She’d agree with me wholeheartedly. She always said you needed to learn.”

Gramps snorted again, but he knew he was right. Grandma passed away three months ago, and neither one of them had gotten over her passing yet. In fact, that might have had something to do with the fact that he had gotten suspended for the first month of the season.

He might have been a little sensitive about it at the time, flying off the handle when he shouldn’t have.

Unfortunately, he already had the reputation of a hothead, and what he had done had turned out worse than what he had intended.

No one was hurt any more than needing a few stitches, but still. He’d been suspended, and that was that .

Both of them were silent for a bit, and then he said, “Let’s pray.” Their agreement was whoever cooked, the other person prayed.

Gramps didn’t say anything, just bowed his head.

“Lord God, please bless the food and keep it from killing us. Amen.” That had been the gist of his prayer for the last week. So far, God had seen fit to answer with a yes.

Not that he was afraid to die, because he wasn’t, he just didn’t want to if it could be avoided for another half-century or so.

“Amen,” Gramps echoed, and without any more conversation, they both dug into their food, knowing that if they didn’t eat it, they were going to go to bed hungry.

The chicken was disgusting, dry on the inside and crispy/tough on the outside, but the view of the lake was beautiful, the breeze calming with the way it bent the grasses and rippled the water. It smelled fresh and clean and was just cool enough to be refreshing without being chilling.

Just ten yards or so from their cabin, there was a steep drop of about five feet to the shore. The cabin beside his had a slightly steeper drop, and on down the beach the shore rose up in bluffs that overlooked the lake.

Wesley and Gramps had only been there for five days, and he hadn’t made it to the little town that sat at the top of the bluffs, but he figured it was probably a pretty view. He had walked down along the lake to the pebble beach that was right beneath the bluffs, although he hadn’t gone the day he had arrived. It sounded like there was some kind of party going on, and he wondered if maybe he had made a bad choice. Perhaps teens hung out here since it was so isolated. Possibly even gangs. Not that he was afraid, he just didn’t want to be bothered. He was supposed to be working on his memoir.

He hadn’t expected to have someone in the cabin beside his either. When he’d bought it, he hadn’t even realized he was going to have a neighbor.

But she—he was pretty sure it was a woman—kept to herself, which was just fine by him.

“Why don’t you get over and introduce yourself to the neighbor? Be neighborly. You ought to bake a pie and take it over. That’s what your grandma would do.”

He was going to say if Gramps baked the pie, he would take it over, but he didn’t want to scare the neighbors away.

“I think the definition of being neighborly is to let people know if you like and appreciate them. If I were to bake a pie, they would get the exact wrong impression. ”

“Maybe I could get on that there computer thing and look up a video. That’s what everybody else does.”

“Then I would have to go to the store and buy all the ingredients, and that seems like an awful lot of work to put into something that probably isn’t going to turn out very well. Plus, I’m supposed to be writing a book. I don’t have time to bake pies.”

“You have time for what you make time for,” Gramps said, and if Wesley had heard that once growing up, he heard it a million times.

His mom hadn’t been married when she got pregnant with him, and she dropped her baby off with her parents before she split.

She calmed down from her wild ways and now had a nice family in Tulsa, and now that he was a big superstar hockey player, she wouldn’t mind having something to do with him, but she hadn’t been interested his entire growing-up years, and he wasn’t overly interested now.

“I think I better make time to write a book. If I want to keep playing hockey anyway.”

“Is that what you want?” Gramps said, with a change of voice that so often happened with him. He’d be gruff and tough one minute and tender and compassionate the next. Gramps really was a softy on the inside, but his edges were a little bit rough. Wesley could relate.

“Yes,” he promised, and then he continued, because it was Gramps. “I can’t imagine my life without hockey. I don’t want to imagine my life without hockey,” he said, shrugging one shoulder as he stuffed another bite of chicken in his mouth. He hadn’t intended to go on a diet and in fact probably shouldn’t. He could stand to gain a few pounds after losing weight after his grandma’s funeral. She was the one who had always fed them, made sure he was eating okay, and told him about the evils of fast food and take-out.

He smiled thinking about it. She had always cared about them. More than anything else in the world. They were her life.

It was...nice to have someone who truly cared and wanted the best for you, someone that you knew was always going to be on your team. That was Gram. Gramps too, but he was a little rougher about it. And he couldn’t cook.

“All right then, I guess you need to write the book, but I’m not going to be the full-time chef. You’d think a fellow would get some sympathy after he loses his wife of sixty-four years, but no, now the kid wants me to cook on top of me dealing with my grief.” Gramps used his fork to cut into one of the still-hard beans on his plate. “My dentures are never going to be the same.”

“Maybe we could hire a cook.”

“And where exactly would they stay?” Gramps asked reasonably.

There were two single beds in the cabin. One on one side of the room, one on the other. There was a bathroom in the back, a fairly large bathroom, which must have been a recent addition, since the siding in the back of the cabin didn’t match the rest of it. They’d done it well, with a large tile shower, tile floor, and a double sink. The bathroom was actually his favorite part of the cabin. The rest of it was kind of run down.

Gramps had been a carpenter by trade, but that had been years ago. Wesley had worked for him through high school, in the spring and early summer when he wasn’t playing hockey.

Still, he had a book to write first, and any cooking or carpentry had to wait.

“Did I ever mention that I failed composition in high school?”

“I was there, remember? You did take summer school, and I had to take time off work every day to drive you to the school for your classes, then go pick you up and take you back to work with me. Do you think I’d forget something as inconvenient as that?” Gramps gave up on the fork, set it on the banister, and picked the beans up with his fingers. Wesley could hear them crunching on the other side of the porch where he sat.

Or maybe that was just his dentures flapping. He wasn’t sure.

“How am I supposed to write a book when I couldn’t even pass high school composition?”

“You managed to pass in college.”

“That was because I had a girlfriend to write my papers for me.” Wesley looked across the porch at Gramps and lifted his shoulder.

“She didn’t write them for you; she helped you with them. There is a difference,” Gramps said. But he continued to look at Wesley, as though waiting for Wesley to confirm what he’d always said.

“All right. You’re right. I couldn’t cheat. Because that would have been wrong, but I needed a lot of help, and she wasn’t really my girlfriend.”

“I know. You were just doing her a favor, increasing her prestige or whatever on campus by supposedly dating the big up-and-coming hockey player, and she returned the favor by helping you with your composition class. ”

Wesley nodded, wondering how much more of the chicken he could shove down and taking a big swig of his lemon water.

He had actually been the one to proposition the girl. She had thought he was going to do something lascivious and had shut him down right away, and then, when he had gotten to the meat of the issue, she laughed and said that she never thought of doing anything like that, but it might be fun.

She was shy and a little quiet, and by the time they had amicably “broken up,” she had ended up being elected their college class president.

He was pretty sure she was having a fairly successful life in state politics, and it wouldn’t shock him if she ended up on the national stage at some point. She had been a good girl. Totally refusing to do any kind of cheating, which he’d never asked her to do anyway, but completely willing to tutor him.

And to pretend to be his girlfriend.

He couldn’t remember her name off the top of his head, but it had been one of the more fun memories he had of college.

“Maybe the girl over there knows how to cook,” Gramps said. “Maybe I could...offer to fix that squeaky screen door of hers in return for a meal.”

“Why don’t you just leave her alone? She probably wants privacy just as much as we do.” And he didn’t want to risk her recognizing him or her being interested in some kind of relationship. He didn’t have time for either one.

As he was thinking that, a sleek, shiny red sports car motored down the road, pulling in at the cabin beside theirs.

For a moment, Wesley had been afraid he’d been found out, but thankfully whoever was in the car was visiting the neighbors. Unless they had gotten the wrong cottage, which made Wesley want to jump up and run inside. But that would only bring more attention to him, so he sat still, like a rabbit trying not to be seen in the bushes.

“Maybe our neighbor got tired of trying to cook for herself and hired a chef. I wonder if she’d share?” Gramps said, looking curiously at the car as it pulled to a stop.

They waited for a few seconds, and then the driver’s door opened. Wesley was almost holding his breath, which was the first time that he realized that perhaps he was a little bit understimulated at the cabin since nothing exciting had happened since they had come, other than the thrice daily burning of a meal. Once, his pork chops had caught on fire and he’d been a little concerned that he might burn the cabin down, but it had quickly been extinguished and was hardly worth mentioning.

A lady, older sixties, early seventies perhaps, stepped out of the car, standing up and looking around, her gaze catching on their porch for just a second before she looked straight ahead at the cottage beside them.

She reached in the car, pulled out a purse, slung it over her shoulder, and then backed up enough to shut the door. She wasn’t dressed anything like his grandma, although she must have been about the same age.

“Yeah. I am definitely going to have to make a visit to the neighbor’s house now. Can you think of anything else other than the squeaky screen door I could use as an excuse?”

Wesley rolled his eyes. Gramps was just joking. He would never love anyone the way he’d loved Gram, but things had definitely gotten a lot more interesting around here in the last five minutes.