Page 27 of SEAL’S Baby Surprise (Lanes #2)

AUSTIN

It’s hard to believe that summer is almost over. I’ve got to decide whether to send Julia to regular school or to register her as homeschooled.

Maybe the easiest thing would be to support Mrs. Hubbard’s Homeschool and do some volunteering to help out as a teacher.

Do I have the credentials to teach? Depends on how you look at it.

I’ve got enough college credits to get a bachelors.

Problem is, I had taken classes online or correspondence classes, depending on what they were, so I’ve got all sorts of college credits, but they don’t exactly add up to a degree in any one thing.

Mrs. Hubbard had taught in elementary school for many years, but she might need to do some refresher courses. When I talked to her last week, she was thinking about it.

I’ve had to work so hard to get Julia, it’s hard to think of relinquishing her into formal schooling. Especially nowadays, what with school shootings, controversy over bathrooms, and who knows what all.

Lee could teach art, from the sounds of it. But she’d have to own up to her identity. Right now, she even hides her sketchbook when there’s anyone around but me and Julia.

I don’t know what she’s running from, but even though she doesn’t have those spazzed out panic attacks as often, she’s still hiding.

“You look like you are thinking hard,” Lee says, stepping outside the van. “Brrr! It’s kind of chilly this morning.”

“It will be plenty hot enough later,” I say. “But you are right. The weather is cooling off. We might need to move everyone up to the fairground before too long.”

Her eyes get big. “You can do that?”

“Well, yeah,” I say. “What’s the point of having a house on wheels if you can’t move it?”

“Even the tiny houses?” she asks.

“Yep,” I say. “Even the tiny houses. We need a transport truck to move them. But fortunately, we know one.”

“We do?” she asks, turning those wide, innocent baby blue eyes on me.

“Yep,” I explain. “Mr. Turner owns his rig. He’ll do the honors next time he’s in. We’d probably all be okay this high off the beach, but better safe than sorry. It’s going to be storm season soon.”

“What will we do when it is too cold and rainy to paddleboard?” she asks.

“Well,” I say thoughtfully, drawing out the suspense for her, “I could get wet suits for all of us.

She squinches up her face at me.

“But,” I say, ignoring her face, “I think I’m going to purchase bicycles for you and Julia. She’s old enough to learn to ride one. How about you?”

She looks uncertain. “I’ve been on a bicycle once or twice,” she says. “But it was a while ago.”

“It will come back,” I say with confidence, hoping to bolster hers. “It’s muscle memory. Once you learn, you never quite forget.”

“I don’t think I was that good at it in the first place,” Lee says in a small voice.

“You can always do a triple-back whatever off the bike,” I say encouragingly.

She shakes her head. “Two different skills. I was never a trick rider, even at my best.”

“Let’s go see what the bike shop has to offer,” I say. “That might determine what we do.”

The bike shop has a variety of two-wheeled conveyances, along with a few three wheelers and even a couple of pedal cars with electric backup.

I stop and look at those, thinking that they might be handy for hauling home groceries, or even some bigger items. But most of the things that would be too big to fit in my touring bike’s saddle bags would be too big for the pedal cars.

I find a basic, single speed Schwinn for Lee. It is a trifle tall at the straddle, but it is a woman’s bike. With the saddle at its lowest setting, it is just a tiny hop for her to be sitting on top.

She takes a couple of wobbly turns around the practice track outside the shop, getting better with each circuit. She manages to stop and then start again without falling off. Good enough, I think. All she needs is practice.

Julia is another matter. She’d not even had a tricycle in her life and is more than a little worried by the idea of balancing on two narrow wheels. The shop attendant grins, and he says, “No worries. Lots of kids have trouble with their first bike. That’s why we have training wheels.”

The training wheels are two long arms with small wheels. They attach to either side of the back wheel, bracing the bike in its upright position.

While it is possible to take a spill off a bike with training wheels, it is much more difficult. When the bike is in full motion, the training wheels are off the ground and the bike would go down the road on two wheels as was normal for a bicycle.

When the bikes are purchased, we stop at a food vendor and buy a gastronomic disaster of a lunch. We sit at the picnic tables in the square and watch other people trying out bikes. Some people buy one, others just walk away shaking their heads.

After lunch, we buy water bottles, place them in holders attached to the bike frames, and head off down the trail that runs parallel to the shore.

I’m so proud of Julia. She quickly gets the hang of pedaling fast enough for balance, but not too fast for control.

Lee manages. I don’t pay as much attention to her as I do to Julia. Lee is truly an adult, even if some of her responses to the world are childlike.

It is as if she really had lived under the sea, or perhaps in a sequestered school for girls run by nuns. From one or two chance comments, I suspect that the latter isn’t too far from truth.

I’d forgotten how free it feels to ride a bike down an open path. It is a dedicated bike trail, so there aren’t any motorized vehicles to worry about. The ocean trail is the perfect place for two novice bike riders to get the feel of their mechanical steeds.

Ark paces along beside us, his tongue lolling out in a doggie grin.

Then, suddenly, he shoots into overdrive, sprinting ahead of us to dive into the underbrush alongside the trail. His dive is followed by a falsetto scream. I nearly go into overdrive myself when he hauls out a skinny man carrying something on a long stick.

My discipline holds. Just in time, I recognize that the object is a microphone on a boom, and that the man carries a professional camera with a bulky zoom lens.

I brake to a sideways stop, raising a rooster tail of dust. Julia slams into my leg, and I catch her before she can topple over. Lee must have hit the brakes, because she sails over her handlebars and into the loose gravel along the edge of the road.

“Hold!” I tell Ark.

He holds, gripping the man by one arm, muttering growls under his breath. The man freezes, lying on the ground, one arm over his throat.

“Lie still, and you’ll be fine,” I tell the man.

Julia runs to Lee. “Are you all right?” she asks.

“I’m okay,” Lee mumbles, struggling to sit up. Blood is running over her lips from her nose. She has a scrape on her cheek, and it looks as if her right side is abraded and generally banged up.

She’s holding one hand to her face, while trying to use the other to push herself up. Julia is trying to help, but is mostly getting in the way.

I gently help Lee into sitting position. Nothing seems to be broken, but she’s scraped both hands, elbows, and knees, and it looks like she’s got a good bit of road rash on her right side.

“I’m okay,” she mumbles. Then, “Get rid of the guy, can you, Austin?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I can do that.”

I stalk over to the intruder. “Just what did you think you were doing?” I ask.

“Getting pictures,” he says. “I’m a P.I. Word is, there’s some guy hanging out with some fat cat’s girlfriend, and he wants to catch them in the act. I thought she might be the girl.”

My smart little girl, Julia, has a roll of gauze out of the first aid kit, and Lee is holding a big wad of it to her face. “Me?” she mumbles. “I’m nobody.”

“Lee’s my girlfriend,” I say. “She and I are riding bikes with my daughter. You don’t have permission to take pictures of any of us.”

“Public place,” the photographer snarks at me. “I can take all the pictures I want.”

“As it happens, this isn’t public property. It’s private, and I own it.” I take the camera off his neck, open it, and pop out the film.

“Hey! You’ll ruin . . .”

Ark adds a little pressure to his hold, not breaking the skin, just like a warning. The guy stops talking.

“That’s right,” I say. “Opening the camera will ruin the film. Sorry about that.” I frisk him, find the tape recorder, and pop the cartridge out of it, too.

“No one here has given permission for an interview. If you’d gone to the office and asked, this might have gone differently.

The other side of that road up there is public property.

I’m going to ask my dog to let you go. I’d strongly suggest you get to hiking in that direction and don’t come back! ” I look at Ark. “Release!” I say.

Ark let’s go, and the man scrambles up and legs it on out of there. He isn’t running, but he doesn’t let any grass grow under his feet, either. Ark takes it on himself to escort the man to the road, then stops at its edge snarling after him.

With the intruder disposed of, I turn back to Lee. I use water from my bottle and sluice off the worse of the gravel. “We should take you to the emergency room,” I say.

She gets that look in her eyes. “No! No doctors, no hospitals. I need to be nobody.”

“All right,” I say. “But let’s get you home where you can shower and lie down.”

“I’d like that,” she says, trying to smile. It’s a pitiful attempt because the right side of her face is starting to swell. I’m really wishing for some x-rays and a real doctor’s exam, but she’s an adult, and she has not given consent.

So I hide her bike in the bushes, tuck her into my sidecar, and then Julia and I slowly pedal back.

When we get to the van, Lee insists that she doesn’t need help with the shower. I make Julia a snack, keeping one eye on the door of the van.

“Can I use my read-to-me book?” Julia asks.

I’d gotten Julia a Leap Reader for her birthday. The reader has easy stories with sight words and digital pronunciation for words if the child is reading the book. Or it can be used as an audio book reader. Julia has a library of twenty-five books now, six of which she can read mostly by herself.

“Sure,” I say, hearing the shower shut off. I pick up a fluffy towel from the linen cupboard and meet Lee in the hallway. I can hear Julia outside, reading her book out loud to herself.

It could have been worse. She has a nasty road rash on her right side, and the bruising on the right side of her face looks ugly. But she can move her jaw, nothing seemed to be broken, and neither of her eyes have gotten damaged.

I get a bottle of Skin Repair from the kitchen first aid cabinet and spray all the raw places. “Would you like something to drink or eat?” I ask.

“Drink,” she says, “and maybe some crackers to go with some pain pills. Then I’d like to lie down. I don’t think I can stand to get dressed.”

I can certainly see why. Even a loose t-shirt is going to rub. “You can go lie down on my bed,” I say. “I’ll draw the curtain.”

I get her some Tylenol and a big bottle of water, along with a sleeve of saltine crackers. She takes the Tylenol, chasing it with water, then nibbles two crackers, leaning against the wall in the hallway.

Then she hangs onto me and eases down to lie on her left side. I give her scrapes another spritz with the pain-relieving gel, turn on some soft music I know she likes, and pull the curtain.

“Wanna go hide in your loft?” I ask Julia. “I’ll put the air conditioner on high.”

“Sure,” she says. “Want me to check on Lee?”

“Only if she hollers,” I say. “I’m going to leave Ark on guard duty and go get Lee’s bike. I shouldn’t be gone long.”

“Okay,” she says, like it’s the most natural thing in the world to be left in charge of a grown woman. Given her history, maybe it is.

“I’ll make it quick,” I say.

“Be careful, Daddy,” Julia says. “Come back safe.”

“I will,” I say.

As I walk back toward the bike trail, I see Pops McKinney out in his lawn chair. I stop to talk with him a minute. “Howdy,” I say.

“Howdy,” Pops says back. “You kids okay?”

I shake my head. “I had to run some sort of reporter feller off just a bit ago. You know anything about that?”

“Might could be,” he says. “Ark run someone off early this morning, an’ I thought I heard somebody out by the trash cans. But ya know, that big mama raccoon is hangin’ around with her babies again. Darned tourists think they’re cute an’ keep feedin’ ‘em.”

“They are cute,” I say. “Maybe we should make a garbage dump kind of feeding station away from the residences. Give them a good reason to be somewhere else.”

“That might could work,” Pops says, scratching at his scraggly chin whiskers. “Just might could. Too bad it won’t work for human varmints. You look sharp, hear? I don’t see your big dog with you.”

“Left him to guard the girls,” I say. “I ruined the guy’s film. He isn’t going to be happy with me.”

“Heh, heh, heh,” Pops laughs, the sound like matches on sandpaper. “Serves him right, pesterin’ decent folk. I’ll keep an eye out, don’t you worry.”

“Thanks, Pops,” I say. And I mean it. Ark is a good watchdog, but he’s got a limited understanding of humans. With Pops adding a human element, the girls should be fine.