The Sea Surrendered Her (Preacher Book 1) Read online

  THE SEA SURRENDERED HER

  A Preacher Serial Novella

  NOEL J. HADLEY

  Copyright © 2017 by Noel J. Hadley

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever

  Hadley, Noel J. 1980 –

  The Sea Surrendered Her

  For Sarah

  Walking home to you

  THE SEA SURRENDERED HER

  ELISE AND I WERE NOWHERE NEAR ready for dinner, despite empty stomachs or the creamy pesto with shrimp and the perfectly seared scallops with herb-infused brown butter that I’d slaved over, which had long been abandoned and forgotten about on the coffee table carved entirely of driftwood.

  Matching my age of twenty-six, she was a dame among women, in the longstanding Helen of Troy tradition. Blonde haired, blue-eyed, and with a French heritage seamlessly matching the skin tone of her people along the Mediterranean sea, I’d only ever seen her with a modest covering of fashionable fabric, and nothing less. But one didn’t need much of an imagination to know that view would dramatically improve with each split of a button. Marriage and mating was on my mind, strictly in that order, though seeing as how the only conversation we were dangerously dancing around was a conjugating one, specifically the after-marriage part, our stomachs could wait.

  I said: “We’ve only...” She kissed me. “…been dating…” She kissed me again. “…for two weeks.”

  “And your point is?” Elise spoke with both lips practically twisted and tangled with mine.

  “And we’re already….” I paused for a kiss, “…making out.”

  “We’re not making out,” she said, lips still knotted in the same predicament, as if this was in no way a contradiction. “We’re just seeing how long we can drag out…one….very long…kiss…goodnight.”

  “We both agreed….being flat as two pancakes on…the couch….is strictly off limits.”

  “Is that what they call going horizontal now?”

  “Elise, you need to take this more seriously.” My attempt to pull her away was barely heartfelt, as her breath poured like a warm whirlwind of hormonal breezes over my earlobe and neck, with another assortment of wild card draws from the stack to follow.

  “Mm-hmm, I’m glad you took that offer.”

  I said: “As Senior Pastor? Don’t keep your hopes up. The congregation hasn’t voted me in yet. I hope I’m not getting in over my head. And that’s exactly why we need to slow down.”

  “No, I was referring to letting me take you out on a date. And I hate to break the news…” More kissing, and then: “…But the church will select you and you’re already in over your head.”

  “If I recall, I asked you out a date.”

  Elise lifted her upper torso off my chest, likely in protest. “Preacher….Is it safe to call you Senior Pastor Preacher or is it just Preacher?”

  “Senior Pastor Preacher is my father. It’s Preacher, – just Preacher.”

  “Uh-huh. You forget that I’m on the church welcoming committee. It’s my job to give you a tour of the town. Get you settled in. Show you the ropes.”

  “Is that what we’re doing here?”

  “Um, this isn’t happening….” And to prove it, she kissed me with even more gusto. “….But I’ll have you know, Josephine’s fiancée, Charlie, he’s on the welcoming committee too. He baked you some sort of desert, and was planning on bringing it over. I convinced him to come in his stead.”

  “You forgot the desert.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Thank God you came then, instead of Charlie.” She delivered another heaping of that desert, which only added to my gratitude, and then: “You can tell the church welcoming committee that you’ve faithfully executed your duty and that I’ve been warmly welcomed and ministered to.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “But I think I’ll thank Charlie in person for the desert.”

  Elise slapped my arm. “You will not!”

  What may have been several more kisses followed, or perhaps two dozen, I wasn’t really counting. Except then there were some added sound effects, like the licking of one’s chops.

  Elise said: “Your dog is staring at me.”

  Indeed there was a dog sitting next to the couch, one of the largest I’d ever seen; a tri-colored hound dog with sails for ears, – nearly the size of a Great Dane, and its wet nose was only inches away from our face.

  “He’s not my dog.”

  “Then why is he in your house?”

  “I don’t know. He arrived this morning with The Sisters. He’ll probably be gone in an hour and I’ll never see him again. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s taking so long for the movers to unpack their things.”

  Elise sat up.

  “Wait, what time is it?” She narrowed in on her wrist watch (it was Swiss made), and sighed with disparity. “Darn, I’m late!”

  My better brain wasn’t functioning yet. I waited for another kiss to come, but when one didn’t, I sighed, slightly disoriented: “Late for what?”

  Elise was already straightening her blouse and adjusting a strand or two of hair when she said, as if our springtime frolic were already a passing thought: “My flight to JFK – where’s my keys?”

  “I thought you weren’t leaving until the morning.”

  “My meetings start tomorrow morning.”

  “Why the hurry?” I reached for her closest arm, but managed only to brush my fingers across her thigh. “Stay a little longer. It’s no problem. I can reheat dinner.”

  “And miss my flight?”

  “It’s not for another few hours.”

  “I’ve got to get home and pack my things.”

  “I’ll behave, I promise. From now on, I’ll be vertical.”

  She found her keys right where she’d left them, next to the creamy pesto. “You’ve been a perfect gentleman. Me, on the other hand...”

  She made it as far as the front door, combing the contents of her purse to make sure everything was accounted for, when I stood and said: “I’ll drive you. It’s only twelve hours.”

  “That’s sweet, and sounds terrible, so no.”

  She was halfway through the door when I said: “Well, as Frank McCormick’s most valued fashion buyer, I’ll hope next time he’ll consider my offer to wear all of your dresses on the catwalk. I’ve been practicing, you know.”

  “Oh, have you?” Elise bit her bottom lip. “They’ll make you shave your legs, you know.”

  “My offer stands.”

  “How about I bring you back a dress, maybe a mini-skirt, and make you wear it while you cook me dinner?”

  “Fine, just don’t expect me to do the dishes.”

  For what she had to say next, Elise whispered into my ear, even though we were the only two in the room (not including the dog): “How about I do you instead?”

  “Save it for the honeymoon,” I said as she swung the door closed behind her. It clicked shut as I asked: “Where’s my goodnight kiss?” But there came no reply, so I opened it in a hurry and called after: “Wait, take the dog with you!”

  c

  LOW COUNTRY MOVERS WERE EMPTYING the last remaining boxes of its twenty-six foot load when I saw Elise down the driveway, right past the big house that its hired-on hands were tasked with filling. Aunts Nancy and Patty were supervising on the lawn, keys to Grandfather’s Porsche dangling from Patty’s fingertips, and from their impatient stance I’d wager eager to drive it to their permanent home in Savannah.

  I stopped just short of the rose garden, where the walk up to the front door met with the driveway, and said (loud enough for both to hear): “Elise, b
efore you go, let me introduce you to my two aunts, Patty and Nancy. They’re known around these parts as The Sisters. They, uh, they’ll be staying in Ira and Adele’s estate periodically throughout the year, kind of as a vacation home, now that they’re….gone.”

  What I didn’t mention out loud, but what was clearly apparent, was the enormity of their size. To put it kindly, Nancy and Patty were obese. Wildly so. I’d always pondered if the term the Sisters had stuck around because they were practically adjoined at the hip. Basically, where one went, so went the other.

  Elise opened her mouth to announce hello, but the pronunciation never came. Patty obstinately interrupted (as if the woman I’d been seeing were not present at all): “I’ll have you know, we’re not exactly thrilled that you’re here to stay.”

  The Sisters were rarely kind to any woman who didn’t take on the look of feminism. Elise was not one of them.

  “I’m sorry about the confusion. Aunt Clarisse, I came by her invite. I thought it’s what everyone had agreed upon. All the siblings….Clarisse, you, Nancy, my father… I didn’t know hers was the only invite.”

  Nancy finally acknowledged me, for the first since she’d arrived that morning, and did so with the severity of a foghorn in a cold wind.

  She said: “You couldn’t even bother making Mom’s funeral. Everyone was there, including your father.”

  “I’m sorry. I was in New York. It was….in the news.”

  “You weren’t exactly easy to find.”

  “Give him a beak,” Patty told her sister, “Joe died too.”

  “And a lot of others as well,” Elise added, but neither Sister seemed to pay her mind.

  “Aunt Clarice was finally able to track me down by phone, and that wasn’t until the evening, I seem to recall, when Grandma’s last will and testament was read.”

  Whatever happened that evening, when all four siblings gathered before legal representation, the very recollection clouded Aunt Nancy with a monsoon of despair.

  “Well, it’s nothing personal,” she scowled. “It’s our brother….Your father. He wanted to sell Mom’s house. He insisted on it. And when the three of us inheritors who actually cared for our mother during her final months, weeks, and hours wouldn’t budge, he tried to swindle it away with that phony paperwork that we were wise not to sign. You can tell him that’s never going to happen. We’re not selling a multi-generational family heirloom. With that maneuver, I hope he loses sleep each night knowing he’s not getting a penny. And since we’re on that subject of you being here….”

  “You think I’m here to spy on you?”

  Nancy shrugged with indifference. “It’s what you do for a living.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Patty, who was always the humanitarian of the two, mustered whatever warmness remained in her heart for one of Ira and Adele’s grandchildren, – that would be me, and said: “Raymond and we aren’t exactly on speaking terms.”

  “My father and I haven’t spoken in a few years, either. I guarantee you Clarice had everything to do with it.”

  “Hopefully not everything.” Patty.

  I said: “No, my grandparents had something to do with it. I loved them very much, just as you did.” Nancy rolled her eyes. “Ira’s brothers practically raised me, as you well know. It’s not something that makes my father particularly proud. And nobody even told me that she was sick.”

  “Yes, I know.” Patty.

  “And this house – this place, means a lot to me.”

  Nearby, an unsound deliberation was brewing between two minds, what sounded to be a man and woman. We couldn’t make out their words but its tone reverberated outside of their house and clumped in the grand oaks that line our street, like the Spanish moss that hung in them. We were all uncomfortably aware of it, but more on that in a moment.

  “Well don’t get too accustomed to it. We’re letting you stay in the Stable outback because we need a caretaker while we’re splitting our time in Savannah, and as family the labor is free. You’re a guest until we say you aren’t, at which point, or any other point before, you’re welcome to leave.” Nothing I said could shake Nancy of her disgust from an uncalculated number of past transgressions that I had no part of.

  “Aunt Clarice said I could use the Porsche.”

  “Then the two of you are sadly mistaken,” Nancy screwed her lips together so tight I thought her mouth might be stripped, and Patty held the keys to the Porsche in such a manner that I was afraid they were endangered of being dropped, and possibly lost in her sagging melon-sized bosoms.

  Patty said: “It belonged to Dad.”

  Nancy added: “You can’t have it. We’re leaving the Ford.”

  I said: “The Country Squire? I’ve always wanted to drive one, but I could never get my hands on a time machine that was willing to revisit my childhood.”

  “Good, the repressed memories, along with that heap pile, will act as therapy to match your personality. Keys are in the ignition. If you’re the forgetful type, you might want to leave them in there. Nobody in their right mind would want to steal it anyhow.”

  Another spout of voices lifted from the house across the street, followed almost immediately after by the terrible sound of glass shattering upon the floor.

  Aunt Patty nudged the sagging skin from her chin in their general direction. “It’s David Holmes son. He’s that friend of yours. What was his name again?”

  “I assure you whatever just happened is completely out of Michael’s character.”

  “They’ve been at it for the last half hour.” Patty.

  Nancy added: “The whole neighborhood’s going downhill, ever since David died and you returned.”

  “It might be Desarae,” Elise spoke discreetly into my ear, quiet enough for me alone to hear. “He’s your friend. You should check up on them.”

  I said: “She’s your sister. Can’t you come along?”

  “You know I’ve got to go. I’m really late as it is. And Desarae may be my little sister, but she’s also the crazy one.”

  “Elise, that’s why I need you.”

  “Call me. Let me know what happens.” Elise made a phone gesture with a fist and two fingers on her cheek as she backed up towards the curb. “Really, I’m sorry.”

  “Speaking of which….” Aunt Nancy handed me the leash for the dog, which was currently lifting his leg in the rose garden. “Here, we’ve got to go.”

  I was confused. “You’re not taking the dog?”

  Elise froze, no doubt intertwined with fright and simultaneous amusement, both of which conflicted with her burden to leave.

  “He’s a tri-colored walker coonhound. They’re bred to hunt deer. And while you may be watching the house, as were Clarice’s invite instructions, you can be sure, and we can rest assured each night, that he’ll be watching you.”

  As if on cue, the hound sat down on the grass, near to the Sisters, and narrowed his eyes on me.

  “So, he’s staying then.”

  Nancy slugged her head back with the righteous indignation of womanly disgust and sighed. “Just don’t touch anything in the big house. And for the love of all that is holy, don’t ever use the bathroom, but if you must, lift the seat.” She thought about it longer. “In fact, just keep out of the house all together.”

  “Can’t I use the pool?”

  Nancy sighed. “Just please don’t pee in it.”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  Another wave of shouts emanated from the husband and wife team of Michael and Desarae. I recognized the voices this time. It was them alright.

  The Sisters waddled towards the convertible. Except then Aunt Nancy turned around again, one last time. “And don’t burn the house down while we’re gone, cah-peesh?”

  “You can count on me.” I saluted them.

  Nancy started the engine. It purred like a sexy kitten.

  “How often do I feed the dog?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it.” Patty called from Porsche,
halfway wedged between the seat and passenger-side door. “He’ll let you know. If you don’t feed him enough, he’ll feed on you!”

  The hound licked his chops.

  I turned to Elise: “Pray for me.”

  Elise smiled.

  “I will.”

  c

  ELISE DROVE OFF AND THEN The Sisters drove off, and then Low Country Movers drove off with that big clunky twenty-six foot van of theirs, all within seconds of each other, until I was left alone with the hound and a big unoccupied plantation-styled home that I apparently wasn’t allowed in, a sermon to write, and far more importantly to the direction of this narrative, there was the craftsman home directly across the oak-lined street.

  Another execrable draft of wind lifted the anger from within. I managed to pull the hound on its leash halfway across the street before the front screen cracked open on its hinges and Michael Holmes stormed across the porch.

  I said: “Hey, Michael, what’s going on?”

  He said: “I’m going for a brew, – you coming, Preacher?”

  c

  THE HOUND AND I ROUNDED the corner of our oak-lined street, appropriately called Oak Row, in a frantic rush to keep up with Michael’s heels. His entire wardrobe consisted mostly of uniform flannel, which he proudly wore now, and jeans that hugged a waistline which had noticeably expanded over the last year. Thick jet-back hair filled his head. An equally heavy mustache added to the texture and plush shadowy cheeks that always announced it was five o’clock somewhere.

  My wardrobe consisted of whatever my new girlfriend gave me to wear. Hip hugging jeans and a paisley button-up collar painted with probably every stroke of the rainbow, drivers-cap for the noggin and for boots the sort of Italian zip-ups with pointy tips and heels that the Beatles wore. I hadn’t yet decided if the look was me but I’d do jumping-jacks for her kisses, that and more, so I guess you could say the decision was made.

  Bay Street, much like adjacent Palmetto Drive, was a local destination for yuppies, hipsters, bikers, and well-to-do dog owners alike. Successions of blocks were lined with century-old adjoining buildings, some even pre-dating the Civil War, each seamlessly converted now into intimate bars and seafood restaurants, yoga studios, used books, second-hand boutiques, and health food stores. The Guide Dog was our personal go-to hangout as of late, and for a good reason. Michael was its owner, being its sole inheritor after his father’s recent but unexpected death. It was on the west side of the street (we were blazing the eastside), lights currently aglow in the minutes following dusk, and laughter spilled out from within. But we didn’t stop there.