Read Online Walking into the Ocean by David Whellams - Free Book Online

in the shed and she hoped to catch sight of one or more of them out back as she fussed with her plants.
    Phone in hand, she walked to the far end of the shed. The last owner had moved from flowers to chickens and had invested in this huge building as a coop. Like all his ventures, that operation never made money, but the building was solid and Joan and Peter had each had visions of ways to use it. After days of washing out the chicken droppings and repairing the cracked windows, they had sat down and negotiated. She wanted a potting shed and he wanted a hobby room and sanctuary. The shed was big enough to accommodate both. Her gardening gear now took up two-thirds of the length of the structure. His smaller domain became a sort of study-workroom, complete with teak shelving for his books, indoor-outdoor carpeting and a workbench for his projects.
    She had dubbed it Hispaniola: his portion was Haiti and hers the Dominican Republic, with the wall between serving as the border. They agreed not to cut a door through the wall; one had to go outside to get to the other’s space. She used her portion of the shed every day, but Peter, since beginning his semi-retirement three years ago, had been busier than they had expected and, in Joan’s summation, had used his part of the shed only sporadically. But Peter evolved slowly and she sensed that more and more he regarded it as an important place to ruminate on cases, old and new — a sanctum. The question in her mind was: what had happened to retirement? At first he had claimed he was bored and cynical after so many years of police work, yet he had taken multiple assignments each year since.
    She entered the potting room by its only door and went to one of the small, square windows that looked out on the unmowed section of the yard. She was pleased to see a female pheasant stick her head up and look around, retreating after only a few seconds. Joan inspected the stacks of pots and the pegboard of tools. Her gardening season was winding down. The flowers were flourishing in late summer glory but everything was overripe, almost ready to drop petals and wither, though it was too soon to cap the old blooms or dig anything up. There was work she could do but, perhaps because Peter had just left, she felt the need to take a moment and settle into her day of solitude. She paused to appreciate the absolute silence.
    She told herself she wasn’t worried about him.
    Joan left the hut and walked around to Peter’s side, entering the unlocked door. He wouldn’t mind her going in; this was not a marriage where either spouse would accuse the other of snooping. The room had burgeoned into an Englishman’s study, lacking the wood panelling but replete with dozens of books (they would have to be moved inside for the extreme part of the winter) and two green-globed reading lamps. A rocking chair added to the atmosphere and a wood-burning stove, an iron potbelly, completed it, although the stove hadn’t been lit in months. Along one wall they had installed a low table, where Peter worked on his projects.
    A tilting stack of old peach crates leaned out from the same wall; several more lay on the table. About two years ago, Peter had started making shadow boxes. Yet another scheme of the previous owner, his most misguided, had been the planting of peach trees. This was an unprecedented agricultural venture — unprecedented for a reason, the brutal cycle of English weather — and it had failed quickly. The trees had rotted out and he had left behind the stained, often rancid peach crates. At that point, Peter, still not knowing what he would do with the crates, hosed them down and set them to drying in the summer sun. He salvaged two hundred of them and by the time they were dried out, they no longer stank. It would take another twenty-five years for him to find a use for them.
    â€œI have no evident talent,” he had confessed to her, “but does assembling