Taking a Chance on Love Read online

  TAKING A CHANCE ON LOVE

  OTHER BOOKS BY MARY RAZZELL

  Snow Apples, Groundwood, 1984; 2006

  The Secret Code of DNA, Penumbra, 1986

  Salmonberry Wine, Groundwood, 1987

  Night Fires, Groundwood, 1990

  White Wave, Groundwood, 1994

  Smuggler’s Moon, Groundwood, 1999

  Haida Quest, Harbour Publishing, 2002

  Runaway at Sea, Harbour Publishing, 2005

  Dreaming of Horses, Dragon Hill Publishing, 2013

  Taking a Chance on Love

  Mary Razzell

  RONSDALE PRESS

  TAKING A CHANCE ON LOVE

  Copyright © 2016 Mary Razzell

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency).

  RONSDALE PRESS

  3350 West 21st Avenue, Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6S 1G7

  www.ronsdalepress.com

  Typesetting: Julie Cochrane, in Minion 12 pt on 16

  Cover Art & Design: Elisa Gutiérrez

  Paper: Ancient Forest Friendly “Silva” (FSC)—100% post-consumer waste, totally chlorine-free and acid-free

  Ronsdale Press wishes to thank the following for their support of its publishing program: the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Book Publishing Tax Credit program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Razzell, Mary, 1930–, author

  Taking a chance on love / Mary Razzell. — First edition.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55380-455-0 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-55380-456-7 (ebook) / ISBN 978-1-55380-457-4 (pdf)

  I. Title.

  PS8585.A99T35 2016 jC813’.54 C2015-906728-6 C2015-906729-4

  At Ronsdale Press we are committed to protecting the environment. To this end we are working with Canopy and printers to phase out our use of paper produced from ancient forests. This book is one step towards that goal.

  Printed in Canada by Marquis Printing, Quebec

  for Nina Ruman, the best of friends

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With special thanks to Helen Shore, BScN, for her recollections of the burn ward at the Vancouver General Hospital in 1944–45. And to Joe Holmes of Richmond, B.C., collector and restorer of Easthope engines.

  This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is coincidental.

  Chapter One

  I was the one who found the first note. My friend Amy and I had just been dropped off from the school bus and were dawdling along the road to my house when I had to take a short trip into the woods to answer nature’s call. The sun shone on the new leaves of alder trees, and on the way back to Amy, I stopped to smell the freshness of the spring air.

  There it was, partially tucked under a flat rock, a small piece of white paper torn from a notepad and folded in half. It couldn’t have been there long because the paper wasn’t wet, and it had stopped raining only half an hour before.

  I read it quickly and called to Amy as I came out to the road.

  “You’ll never guess what I found!”

  Amy Miller and I were the only two girls living in the Landing. We went to high school by bus to the next village up the coast. Once school was out, and we were back home, we had only each other to rely on for company. Amy and I were both seventeen and in grade eleven.

  Amy knew all about clothes and makeup. She looked like Hedy Lamarr, except she was blonde. She had the same gorgeous figure: a small waist and high, rounded breasts that made all the men in the village stop and follow her with their eyes. The women frowned.

  Ever since the summer before, when Amy had moved to the Landing, we had seen each other every day. She was a good listener, and I could talk to her about anything. The very worst thing that I could imagine would be to lose Amy as my friend.

  I read aloud the note I’d found. “What happened to you yesterday? I waited as long as I could. R.”

  “Let me see, Meg,” said Amy, her face clouding. “It sounds like a love note.”

  “Could be.” I gave her the note. “Do you recognize the handwriting? I think it looks like a man’s. Heavy scrawl and messy, just like my brother, Sam’s.” Sam was my oldest brother and away in the war. He had joined the Air Force in 1940, soon after Canada had declared war on Germany.

  Amy’s face crumpled, and she looked ready to cry. She kept smoothing the note over and over with her right index finger, as if she were trying to erase the words. I couldn’t understand why she was upset.

  “It could be Rob Pryce,” she said. “He gave my mother a card on April Fool’s day. He wrote on it, ‘Just for fun.’ The writing looked like this.”

  “I don’t like him,” I said. “I hate the way he looks at me, as if he’s taking off all my clothes.”

  Robert Pryce. He and his family had moved to the Landing just after Christmas. We thought they must be rich. No one in their family seemed to work, and they had the nicest house in the village. A creek ran the length of the property, right down to the beach, and their view went all the way out to the Gap, and beyond, to Vancouver Island. Rob had a pretty wife, a little younger. She was from a prominent Toronto family. Some said that Rob was a writer, or an artist, or maybe both. Others said he was a Communist. He was the handsomest man on the peninsula in an Errol Flynn sort of way. He had brothers who visited occasionally, and they were all good-looking. There was a sister, too, but the good looks didn’t work as well on her. Everyone on the peninsula took note of the Pryce men.

  Robert Pryce reminded me of my own father, who was away in the Air Force on the East Coast. Dad had always had an eye for the women. Mild flirtations going on whenever a chance presented itself. I had long ago decided I didn’t like men like that.

  “I could check under the rock every time I go by here,” I said now to Amy. “It’s close to my house. And I’ll keep a lookout for whoever is walking this way.”

  “I wonder who it could be? But maybe it doesn’t mean anything.” Amy’s face relaxed at the thought.

  “Probably not.”

  “Let’s keep the note anyway, Meg. Just to see what happens.”

  “You keep it,” I said. “My mother’s always looking through my things, and she’d find this. She would throw a fit.”

  “No, you keep it.”

  I looked at her in surprise. “Why?”

  But she wouldn’t tell me, and I let it go.

  As soon as I got home, I put the note in my new hiding place, under a loose floorboard in my bedroom.

  Neither of us expected to find a second note the very next day. We’d missed the school bus because of basketball practice and had to walk home, so we were later than usual. Only a corner of white paper showed from under the rock.

  “It looks like it’s been torn from the same notebook,” said Amy.

  We read it out loud together. “S,
please get in touch.”

  “Maybe he knows someone took his first note,” I said.

  “No initial ‘R’ this time,” said Amy. “Is that an ‘S’ or a ‘5’?”

  “Who would start a note with a ‘5’? Can you think of a female within walking distance whose first name starts with ‘S’?”

  Amy shook her head.

  Ours was a small fishing village along the B.C. coast, and it didn’t take long to think of all the women under the age of fifty whose name started with “S.” We came up with three. All of them were married.

  “Let’s watch them,” said Amy. “See where they go out walking. Are they buying new clothes? Wearing more makeup than usual?”

  “Sylvia Ballard,” we both said.

  “Did I tell you that last week Mrs. Ballard was wearing Evening in Paris perfume in the store?” said Amy. “As if she were going on a date afterwards. Maybe it was a date with Robert Pryce.”

  “How was she dressed?”

  “You know that red angora sweater she has, the turtleneck?” Amy said. “Someone should tell her that she’s too old to wear that colour. Too bright. Makes her look haggard. She’d be better off with a soft coral. It’s more becoming to all ages.”

  “I think red’s okay for evening,” I said. “The last time I saw her wear it was when she went out to the movies with her husband, and I was babysitting. I thought she looked okay.”

  “If we take this note, he probably won’t leave any more,” Amy said. “Should we leave it?”

  “Leave it,” I said.

  “No, I have an idea,” said Amy. “This one I’ll keep.”

  The next morning on the school bus, Amy seemed upset. She was scowling and kept twisting her hair around her finger.

  “Guess who was at my house after I left you yesterday?” she said. “Robert Pryce. It seems he’s always there. Said he was helping my mother fill out some forms for the government. Why couldn’t she wait for my dad to help her? He’ll be up this weekend. Anyway, I checked out Robert Pryce’s handwriting on the forms, and it’s the very same handwriting that’s on the notes.”

  “Have you noticed how he’s always super helpful to all the women?” I said. “Anyway, when Robert Pryce sees your dad is home, he might back off. At least, you know that ‘S’ isn’t your mother, not with a name like Norma. Once we find out who ‘S’ is, maybe we can do something about it and show Robert Pryce up for the creep he is.”

  After school that day, I came home to find my mother sitting at the kitchen table reading the first note Amy and I had found.

  “What’s this all about?” she said. “It must be important for you to hide it away. I want to know every detail, don’t leave anything out. And by the way, it wouldn’t hurt you to mop under your bed.”

  “Mom!”

  “I would never have found it if the cat hadn’t been sneezing with all the dust under your bed. Thick as a blanket. The floorboard was loose.”

  “Amy and I found the note in the woods, and we’ve been trying to figure out who ‘S’ is.”

  “It’s nothing for you to involve yourself in, Meg. You or Amy.” She glanced at the note again. “But it does make you wonder.” Her eyes sharpened. “I have half a notion it has something to do with one of the Pryce men. I’ve never liked their looks. Half the women in the village are acting dotty because of them. I hope you’ll take this as a warning and not let yourself be one of them.”

  When the Lady Alexandra docked at the Landing that Friday night, crowded with the usual weekenders from the city, I spotted Amy’s father among them. I’d met him before — he came to the Landing about twice a month — and once again I was struck by how much alike he and Amy looked. They both had thick blonde hair, the same dark, arching eyebrows and eyes blue as the mountains on a September morning. As soon as Mr. Miller stepped off the gangplank, he hugged Amy. Amy’s mother wasn’t there to meet the boat, but that wasn’t surprising. Amy had told me the first time we met that her mother had high blood pressure and didn’t go out much.

  She’d said, “It’s really the reason we moved here. The doctors said she needed to be out of the stress of the city.”

  Amy’s face was bright with happiness as she and her father walked up the wharf together. I knew that she loved her father almost to the point of worship, but seeing her face now, so radiant with love, made me swallow hard. Even though I didn’t like the way my father acted around other women, I missed him. Most of the time, I was able to push the feeling down to a dull ache.

  Amy didn’t seem to see me, she was so taken up with her father. I wondered if I should call on her in the morning as I always did.

  Just when I had decided I wouldn’t, she turned around and called over her shoulder, “See you tomorrow, Meg.”

  “Sure,” I called back, happy again.

  The next day I took the shortcut from the main road up to the secondary road and then up the few steps over the drainage ditch to Amy’s cottage. I had been to her house so often, my feet knew every stone. Wild broom on either side of the path quivered with bees, dizzy with the scent of the red-streaked yellow blossoms.

  Amy answered the door. The house smelled of bacon and coffee, and Mr. Miller was still eating at the table in the living room. Mrs. Miller was all dressed up in a matching sweater set, a pale blue that made her red hair glow in contrast. Usually, I would find her lying on the living room couch wearing an old ratty sweater with pills of wool that my fingers longed to pick off. She would have a cup of tea beside her and a stack of magazines and books to read as she rested.

  “My mother has to lie down as much as possible,” Amy had once said. “That’s what old Doc Casey told her.”

  Mrs. Miller had a petite figure and giggled. She treated me as if I were a younger sister that she liked, and I couldn’t help liking her back. Amy didn’t like her mother, though.

  Once I asked her why, and she’d said, “I hate the way she treats my father.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She should be nicer to him. Not take him for granted.”

  I said to Amy now, “Let’s go down to the beach.”

  The tide was out when we got there, and the smell of seaweed mingled with the tang of salt water. A tugboat, its diesel engines throbbing, edged past Keats Island on its way to the pulp mill at Port Mellon. Amy and I scrunched down into the sand and leaned against one of the silvered logs. I closed my eyes against the sun.

  “You know what I’d like more than anything?” said Amy dreamily.

  “What? What would you like more than anything?” said a man’s deep voice.

  Robert Pryce. He had his dog, a young German shepherd, with him, and they both sat down beside us. That is, Robert Pryce sat next to Amy. I thought of what my mother had said about Amy soon after the Millers had moved to the Landing.

  “That young girl attracts too much male attention, in my opinion.”

  Robert shifted his weight until his leg touched Amy’s. I waited for her to pull hers away. She didn’t. I remembered my mother warning me once, “Don’t let any man get too familiar with you, or touch you. Trouble lies that way.” My tongue was dry and stuck to the roof of my mouth when I saw how Amy leaned in closer to Robert.

  Robert stayed with us for about fifteen minutes. He and Amy chatted away about nothing at all important, but it seemed charged with an undercurrent of excitement. I felt shut out, a hundred years old, ugly, unwanted: incredible feelings I’d never had before. How two people talking in the sun could make me feel that way, I would never have imagined. When Robert got up to leave, I was glad.

  Even though Amy and I spent the rest of the afternoon together, I couldn’t shake the disturbed feeling that I had watched my best friend begin a game whose rules I didn’t understand.

  Chapter Two

  I met Sylvia Ballard in the village store that Saturday morning. Smiling, she came over to me. “Are you free to babysit tonight at seven-thirty? My husband and I have decided at the last minute we’d like to
go to the dance at the Legion in Gibson’s.” Since Amy and I had put Mrs. Ballard at the top of our list of suspects, I was quick to say yes.

  That evening as soon as I had Joanie, the Ballards’ five-year-old, in bed — and it seemed to take hours with her wanting endless drinks of water, and “just one more story” — I began to look for clues. There weren’t any that I could find.

  I looked everywhere but the parents’ bedroom. All I discovered was that Sylvia Ballard liked True Confessions magazines and hid them in the deep kitchen drawer that also held a twenty-pound bag of white Five Roses flour. I learned, too, that Mr. Ballard liked to leave little love notes lying around for his wife and that he called her “Bunnykins.” It didn’t seem to fit with his bald head and long, gangly frame.

  Amy and I talked about it after school on Monday.

  “There was just the usual junk lying around the desk and kitchen counters,” I said. “Bills and stuff like that.”

  “Did you check her jacket pockets? She always wears that red plaid one when she goes for a walk.” Amy loved clothes.

  “I didn’t think of it,” I said. “Joanie was being a real brat. I was looking for something to eat, and she called out, ‘I heard you open the fridge door, and I’m going to tell my mother.’ She’s spoiled rotten. My mother says it’s because she’s an only child.”

  Amy looked at me, annoyance flickering in her eyes. Too late, I remembered that Amy was an only child. “I like being an only child,” she’d once said.

  “Your dad get away to the city all right?” I asked.

  “Yes. And the Lady Alexandra had barely pulled out when you-know-who came to visit. I answered the door, and you’ll never guess what he said to me. He said, ‘You’re even prettier than your mother.’” Amy looked pleased. “Of course, my dad thinks so, too.”

  I looked at her in surprise. “That’s stupid,” I said. “She’s your mother, not your rival.”