Jack's Place

By Phoebe Otis

JACK'S PLACE is a story about people taking care of each other. In Provincetown, community is everything, and it's all brand new to Diana Rice, who has come there for the first time, to find a cousin she's never met. She soon finds new and unexpected friends, including a very special dog, and the beautiful little town enchants her. However, she discovers a darker side, a side the tourists never see...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514402085

Phoebe Otis

Formerly an actress and singer, Phoebe Otis loves writing about life on Cape Cod, where she lives with her wife, four dogs, three cats and three birds.

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JACK’S PLACE

PHOEBE OTIS

Copyright © 2015 by Phoebe Otis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/29/2015

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

A tribute to Black Jack,

A true gentleman dog

PROLOGUE

T he dog kept chewing on the rope. He knew he wasn’t supposed to chew anything except his own toys, but there were no toys now, and he was hungry and thirsty, so he kept chewing on the rope, trying to get free so he could go find food and water. The rope was made of something tough and slippery, and it resisted his efforts, sometimes cutting painfully into his gums, but he didn’t give up. He kept chewing on the rope.

Eight days had passed since his owner had tied him to a tree in Beech Forest, leaving a bag of dry food and a large bowl of water before hiking back to the parking lot and driving away, the last piece of his Cape Cod summer disposed of, as far as he was concerned. It wasn’t what the guy had planned when he picked the fluffy black ball of fur from the basket of squirming puppies on display in front of the library one morning last April. That day he’d thought he would live in Provincetown for the rest of his life. He was sure of it, so why not get a dog, a perfect companion to roam the dunes with, someone to come home to after a hard day’s work? He even gave the kid $25 just to make it official: I just bought a puppy.

But things changed over the summer. He fell in love.

Come and live with me in San Francisco, proposed his new love.

Oh yes! I love you!

I love you too, but you can’t bring the dog. The building where I live doesn’t allow them.

Silence. Then he said, Okay, I’ll find someone to take him.

But by this time, the fluffy black ball of fur was a gangling adolescent who looked like while at least one parent was clearly some kind of large black dog, the other was distinctly, well, wolfish. Not true but unfortunate as it turned out.

He’s a little scary-looking. I really wanted something smaller, observed one potential adopter.

Oh no, I can’t take him. I’m afraid he’d hurt my cats, said another.

No, man, I’m going away myself. I couldn’t take a dog came from a third.

And a fourth and a fifth and so on, all unable or unwilling to give his dog a home until there was no more time and he wound up tying the dog to a tree and leaving him.

You’ll be okay, he told the dog. The rangers will find you, and I’m leaving food and water for you.

As he walked away, the dog barked just once.

The rangers didn’t find him, and now it was raining again, a real downpour that soaked through his thick coat. He began to shake from the cold wetness. He was down to skin and bones after eight days. The dry food was gone by the end of the second day, and he’d had nothing since. On shaking legs, he made his way to the water dish and drank. All around him, he could hear the sounds of life in the forest, small animals and birds, and he thought of hunting them, but he was tied to the tree. So he chewed the rope, but even that seemed pointless after a while. Finally, he lay down on his side, put his head on the ground, and drifted off.

CHAPTER 1

Friday, November 5, 1999

C harlie Mutters watched the end of the wet November day as he walked through the woods. He liked watching the day. There was so much to see, and in his shattered mind, Charlie was keeping careful track of all of it. Keeping track was what Charlie did. His days were spent taking note, making connections, examining, watching, walking, all the while keeping up the soft monologue that gave him his name.

Three robins today, Friday, November 5 … Yesterday, Thursday, November 4, there were only two robins. Rain, no wind … no snow … three robins today, Friday, November 5 …

He lived in an old camper cap on the last of his family’s land in Provincetown. Charlie’s grandfather, Warren Rice, had once owned over twenty acres along the edge of the outer beach, but between the National Seashore and hard times, the original property had dwindled to its present size. Then last year, those last two acres had gone for back taxes. The new owners were planning to build thirty townhouse units on the tract. The plans were being drawn up in Chicago and construction was scheduled for May. The new owners didn’t know anything about Charlie, and he certainly didn’t know anything about them.

His dwelling, once bolted to the bed of a pickup truck, was now propped on two small boulders and a pair of stumps. Scrub pine and oak saplings had grown up around it so a person would have to know just where to look to see it at all. Charlie slept inside, in an old sleeping bag and blankets he had found at the swap shop by the dump. Even the coldest weather was bearable when he was wrapped in his sleeping bag and blankets.

Charlie’s eclectic wardrobe was completely donated. He favored tee shirts with humorous messages: I’m not fat! I’m short for my weight! Someone had given him a pair of tuxedo pants, complete with suspenders, which he wore over layers in the winter and rolled up to the knee for summer. He did not shave, his beard falling in soft, brown waves on his chest, while his hair hung down his back in a long braid. He was always neat about his person, and it wasn’t until you looked into his large brown eyes that you became aware of the soft, desperate pleading, as if he knew a great truth but no one would believe him.

It hadn’t always been like that. Charles Anthony Rice had had a fairly routine childhood, passing into adolescence over the usual bumpy road, seemingly no worse or better than any other kid. He’d been popular in high school and after graduation in 1963, had gone proudly into the Marines. Six months later, he was on his way to Vietnam.

And that was the last anyone in Provincetown ever saw of him. Somewhere within the horrific endeavors of that dirty adventure, Charles Anthony Rice died, and Charlie Mutters was born.

The bus dropped Diana near MacMillan Wharf at five-thirty that afternoon. It was raining, and as soon as he took her duffel from under the bus and gave it to her,