Home to the Doctor

As a doctor, Morgan Kelly was more than familiar with the looked at a man as anything other than a patient or a curiosity. But as she walked alone on the hard sand of the beach on Shelter Island in Puget Sound and lifted her face into the cold December air, she stopped in her tracks. A naked man was standing thirty feet above her. At least she thought he was naked. He was on the decking of a guest house on an exclusive estate, and the wooden railing hit him just below his waist. From the distance and in the rapidly failing light of the day, she couldn't make out his features enough to know if she recognized him or not, but she definitely could tell his stomach, chest, broad shoulders and strong arms were bare. The temperature had to be in the fifties, but he didn't seem to notice at all. It was as if the bitter wind blowing over the choppy, dark waters of the sound didn't exist. He stared out across the sound to the mainland of Washington State before he glanced north, then south. For a fleeting moment she was certain as his gaze came toward her, that he saw her, a lone figure, all five feet three inches of her in her faded college sweatshirt, jeans and heavy boots, her flamered hair pulled into a ponytail. But he didn't react to her presence if he did. Instead he looked back across the waters playing around her boots. He cupped his hands at his eyes, and she thought she saw a dark mark on his left shoulder, then thunder sounded and she looked away to the heavy gray of the sky above. A few centuries ago, the noise would have been the roar of a cannon that famed pirate Bartholomew Grace would have fired at his enemies who dared to disturb the peace of his Shelter Island refuge. The original owner of most of the island, old Bartholomew had come here every fall, staying until spring, either to celebrate his victories if he'd had a successful campaign in the south, or to recoup from his losses if fate had turned against him on the high seas. But this wasn't where Bartholomew would have been scanning the horizon; he would have been in one of the turrets of the main house. She'd only seen the house from her father's boat when they'd been on the sound, and from a distance it looked for all the world like a castle. Its multiple turrets towering in the air, the home was built out of rock, stone and dark wood. This stranger had to be staying in the guest house she'd been told was on the property. Instead of pirates occupying the house and land now, Bartholomew's descendants, Anthony and Celia Grace, did, along with their only child, Ethan. They'd lived on the island for as long as Morgan could remember. But since she'd left ten years ago, things had changed. She'd heard that Ethan's parents had taken off to Europe about five years ago and had been back only once or twice. Their son seemed to have inherited the estate, but he returned sporadically, too. The thought that he was the man at the railing came and went; Ethan Grace wouldn't be staying in the guest house. Most of the year he lived on the mainland and, depending on who you asked among the locals, that meant Seattle, or Los Angeles, or San Francisco or New York. Maybe he had residences in all those places; he certainly had the finances to live wherever he wanted. He'd taken over as head of the corporation his grandfather, then his father, had run, and according to her own father, that company "ate up and spit out everything in its path." He'd made a comment about the pirate's occupation being revisited on his descendants, and that Ethan used money and the law as his weapons while Bartholomew had used gunpowder and swords. She'd walked these beaches all of her life before she'd left for college, but this was her first exploration since her father had asked her to come home. She'd arrived a week ago and loved to be finally doing what she called "beach wandering." She paid no attention to the Private Beach signs she'd passed before seeing the man.Wilson, Mary Anne is the author of 'Home to the Doctor ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780373751754 and ISBN 0373751753.