by Sonya Blake
Kaia was all but squirming. She gripped the edge of the table as he made his way to the door. What a fine man he was, so tall and lean, his hair thick and dark, eyes always holding some hidden light. And, maybe, just maybe, he’d be her man. The mere thought was enough to make her want to squeal with glee.
“See you later,” she said, just managing to contain herself as she waved him off.
Once he was out the door she ran to the windows in the living room and watched him make his way down the wooden steps to the raised dock on the southern side of the point, making certain he didn’t go overboard in the short journey between there and where the Angeline was moored.
Chapter Eleven
Violet Wilde stood at her kitchen window with a cup of tea going cold in her hands as she gazed at the icy harbor. The Angeline was there, moving away from Foley’s Point, where she’d been moored at dawn when Violet had gotten up to practice yoga.
Kaia Foley.
Kaia Foley.
Kaia Foley.
The name rang in her head like a tolling bell. Violet knew that in addition to Sam taking care of the house and property on Foley’s Point during the summers when it was rented to vacationing families, he occasionally went there to paint in the mornings.
Best view of the sunrise in the whole country, he’d say.
Was that what he’d been doing at Foley’s Point this morning? Working on something new for his show? Maybe. But that wouldn’t explain why she’d seen Angeline moored at the Point yesterday morning, too. Or why Kaia Foley was driving Sam’s truck around Quolobit Harbor.
“Don’t jump to conclusions.”
Emory’s voice gave Violet a start. Her tall, blonde twin sauntered up to the coffee machine and began making her morning latte. Violet let her gaze drift back to Sam’s boat, coursing toward Thursday Island. She felt him slipping away from her.
Chapter Twelve
When Sam was safely on his way back to Thursday Island, Kaia turned and set her hands on her hips. There was plenty yet to be explored in the house, plenty that needed a little TLC, and she had the time. As she started straightening the living room, patting the striped pillows on the couch and folding the fluffy knitted blanket, it hit her with a pang—she hadn’t realized just how hard it would be to sell the place.
Foley’s Point was more beautiful than she had remembered. On top of that, she now felt that the ocean might become an integral part of her future. And, she had to admit to herself, meeting Sam had also made her want to change her plans.
She released a long sigh as she crouched to sweep ash and wood particles from the granite hearth. She’d be crazy if she let a man she’d only met two days ago have that kind of power over her. Maybe it was good that he had left early this morning. She needed time to cool off, to think. Maybe when she saw him again later she wouldn’t be so taken with him. There had to be something about him that would turn her off—a nasty habit, a personality dysfunction of one kind of another (hey, everyone had them). Or maybe it would be something else. Like she’d realize she didn’t like his smell. She would realize how silly she’d been to think of herself as falling for the fisherman whose life she had saved.
It was understandable that they might think they had some kind of connection, considering their near-death experience, along with the fact that they had shared a strange truth with each other. They had let themselves get caught up in it. Understandable, yes. Reasonable, no.
She moved on to the second story. A mess of vines covered the windows in one of the spare bedrooms overlooking the northern edge of the property. Peering through the tangle of leafless, thorny vegetation that looked to be roses, she took in the breathtaking view of rugged rock and the wall of towering pines buffering the land from the ocean’s wild winds. The gray-blue waves came in choppy, sweeping shapes fringed with lacy white, hitting the rocks with a never-ending show of froth.
Kaia’s skin tingled at the sight. Her mouth watered. She pressed her fingers to the cold, frost-rimed glass. She wanted to go out there again.
Was she nuts? It couldn’t be more than twenty degrees outside. Yet there it was, the undeniable urge to get out there and swim.
Maybe later, she told herself, not wanting to risk another encounter with her white-haired friend.
After making up the bed in the master bedroom, she took a bath—perfect with a pile of bubbles filling the big old claw-footed tub and an orange-blossom-scented candle from Wilde’s apothecary—then made a list of things to get in town.
*
Kaia gazed in the mirror of the thrift store as she held up a big Irish cable-knit sweater. Her clothes weren’t meant for Maine winters, and she was frankly tired of feeling cold. Staring now at her mass of red curls, her freckled cheeks, her wide blue eyes, she told herself, I am a siren.
In some way she felt her body had kept a secret from her, a kind of betrayal. Tears of anger stung her eyes. The tiny, twin scars on her lower belly tingled suddenly, reminding her that she’d been angry at her body before.
I am whole, she reminded herself.
Angry or not, she had to take care of her body and keep it warm. She bought the big sweater and a pair of flannel-lined boots the lady behind the counter called ‘Bean Boots’, along with an oversized green wool hat and a pair of mittens to match.
After donning her new acquisitions awkwardly in the parking lot beside Sam’s rusty truck, she drove to the hardware store feeling a sense of self-satisfaction that at least now she looked like a proper Mainer. One sentence out of her Southern mouth and anybody’d know otherwise, of course.
Brushing past a drooping Christmas wreath, she walked into the hardware store, and a handmade sign taped to the side of the front counter caught her attention. Purple marker depicted a wind turbine in the ocean; the word PROTEST was scrawled in giant letters at the top. Scratchy ballpoint pen at the bottom of the page gave details for some kind of meeting. Though the poster looked like it had been drawn by a kid, the words seemed serious.
Save Our Water, it read. Don’t let big corporations take Wapomeq Bay away from us.
“Good morning,” the woman behind the counter said. Her rich, dark skin gleamed beneath intricately braided hair piled high on the top of her head like a crown. “Looking for something particular?”
“What’s this about?” Kaia asked, tapping the handmade poster.
The woman sighed. “My daughters made that. There’s some big corporation saying they’re going to build a wind farm out there in Wapomeq Bay,” she explained. “Claudette and Tessa want to fight it.”
“And you?”
“Me?” The woman let out a short hoot of a laugh. “I’m fighting to get their laundry done, their bellies fed, and trying to keep this store up and running. I haven’t put a thought to it. Doesn’t seem serious yet, anyway. Town hasn’t voted yet.”
“Oh.” Kaia frowned at the drawing of the wind turbine with several bloodied birds hacked to pieces strewn around it. “When’s the vote happening?”
“End of the month, I think,” the woman said.
Kaia turned to look at the store’s quaint, cluttered interior. The space was narrow with ancient wooden floorboards, every inch packed with goods ranging from building tools to good-luck charms. A fat white cat appeared from an aisle. It rubbed its face on Kaia’s ankle and then tumbled to the floor at her feet, trying to seduce her into petting it.
“Do you have cellphones?” Kaia asked.
The proprietress shook her head and sighed. “No, sorry. You’d have to drive to Rockport or Camden. You need to call someone? You want to use my phone, honey?”
“Oh, no. That’s all right.” Kaia knelt to rub the cat behind its head. “What a sweet kitty you’ve got.”
The woman’s amber eyes held Kaia’s for a long moment. She seemed to be considering something that had nothing whatsoever to do with cellphones. Or friendly felines.
“Well… how about house paint?” Kaia asked as the woman continued staring. “I’ve got some floor
moldings that are pretty scuffed up.”
She blinked, then pointed a finger adorned with a gigantic garnet ring. “First aisle to the left, halfway down, middle shelf. Under the romance novels and next to the rabbit feet.”
The cat mewed in protest as Kaia stood. She skirted a container of floating noodle toys, went past an array of incense and burners, and found the paint supplies exactly where the woman had said they’d be, next to a bin of rabbit feet. She picked up two small cans of paint, a brush, and some tape.
“I see you,” the woman said, lifting one arched brow as Kaia set her items on the counter.
Kaia turned to look behind her at the cat, slinking around a container of live bait fish.
“No, no. I see you.” The woman pointed her finger at Kaia. “Siren.”
“What…?”
“Siren. Descendant of the ancient deity Atargatis, I think, by the looks of you.” She eyed Kaia. “The siren clan out there in Wapomeq Bay will want to know why you’re up here walking around on land.”
“Excuse me?” Kaia took a step back from the counter.
A clan of sirens… that would explain my stalker.
“Oh, come on now. Don’t look at me like I’m off my rocker, because we both know you’re not straight-up human.” She cast a discriminating eye at the screen of her register. “That’ll be fourteen dollars and seventy-two cents, sweet pea.”
Kaia fumbled with the zipper of her jacket pocket, digging to find the cash while her mouth chewed on a number of responses. Just then, a tall willow-branch of a girl with swinging braids appeared from a side door and leaned against the counter, dressed in fashionably ripped-up jeans and a soft, gray, cropped sweater that showed just an inch of tawny skin. The girl gave Kaia a longer-than-polite look before addressing the woman at the counter.
“Mama, can I go get hot cocoa with Justin now, puh-lease?” she whined dramatically. “I washed the dishes, I put Tessa’s peepee sheets in the machine, and I’m done studying for my chem test.”
“I’m grilling you tomorrow,” her mother responded sternly. “Be back by three o’clock this afternoon or you’re not doing doodly-squat next weekend. You understand, Miss Claudette?”
“Yes, Mama.” The girl grabbed a jacket from behind the stairwell door and exploded out of the store.
“Goodness me. I’m thirty-four and that girl has me feeling like forty-eight.” She took the money Kaia offered and put it in the register. “You got kids?”
“Ah, no,” Kaia said, and glanced at the beautiful girl running down the sidewalk, away from the store.
“Name’s Felicia Dunne, by the way.”
Kaia uncertainly shook Felicia Dunne’s offered hand. “I’m… Kaia Foley.”
“Foley, of Foley’s Point, I assume.” Felicia walked around the counter, examining Kaia over the rims of cat-eye tortoise-shell glasses. “Your people haven’t been up this way since at least the mid-nineties, as the local lip-flappers tell it. Oh, now, don’t look at me like that. It’s just that that old house on Foley’s Point is a landmark. People always ask about it. So, don’t you know yourself, siren?”
Kaia could only open her mouth and close it again.
Felicia shrugged. “It’s all right; you don’t know what to say. You’re scared, but you don’t need to be afraid of me, and there’s no one else in here to hear what we’re talking about. I’m able to see things other people don’t, or won’t. Seeing the other side is in my blood.”
“So, when you say you see me, you mean…”
“I mean I feel you, I get a sense about you,” Felicia explained. She lifted a shoulder. “Like gaydar.”
“Oh.” Kaia felt light-headed.
Felicia frowned and put a hand on Kaia’s shoulder. She clucked gently. “As a siren, you’re an elemental. You’re precious and rare, like Mami Wata—the water spirit—and dangerous, some say.” Felicia grinned, and shrugged again. “Dangerous to men, at least.”
Siren. Kaia felt the world collapsing in on her as tears gathered in her eyes. I am a siren. It somehow felt more real now that she and Sam weren’t the only two people who knew.
“I, um, I only just found out,” she murmured to Felicia, gripping the edge of the polished wood counter. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been to the ocean.”
Felicia nodded, her dark, sculpted face shining with sympathy. “It’s been with you all this time, though, hasn’t it?”
When she had been little, and when she had been a teenager, and actually, always—Kaia had dreamed of the ocean. Felicia Dunne was right. The ocean and this siren thing had been waiting under her skin, asleep inside her all along.
You’re just homesick, her father had whispered when she’d woken in the night as a kid, talking about the waves. He’d tell her maybe they’d take a trip to the Carolinas someday, when he got the money. Maybe Florida. They’d take a swim in the deep blue sea. They’d snorkel and scuba and find a sunken ship full of treasure. He’d tell her a story of his own childhood in Maine until she fell asleep again, and went back to dreaming about weightlessness in the blue…
They never did go to the ocean. Even when her dad had had the time off, they’d go set up camp somewhere out in the country and fish their way up a river. Kaia had always loved the water then, but not like she did now.
“Yes, I guess you’re right,” she said.“This, um, thing… about me… it has been with me all this time.”
“You come by any time you need to.” Felicia gave a gentle smile as she rubbed Kaia’s arm. “I’m always here. Me and my girls live upstairs. You come by anytime you need anything—I mean it.”
Shaken by being called out and reminded of her new self-discovery, Kaia thanked Felicia in a daze and walked out of the store, wondering if her father had known about her all along and, if he had, why he’d kept her away from the ocean all this time.
Chapter Thirteen
It was ten minutes after five when Sam walked into the apothecary to find Violet dressed in a navy blue sweater dress with leather knee-high boots that looked like they had been hand-polished by a team of seventh-generation Italian leatherworkers. She was vigorously wiping down the glass countertop with a white cloth, her hair and silver bangle earrings swinging.
“Oh, hey,” she said, off-handedly, like she had forgotten he was coming.
“You said five.” Sam stopped at the edge of the mat at the door, not wanting to track the floor with the salty slush encrusting his galoshes.
Violet scowled down at his footwear. “Did I?”
“I’m a few minutes late,” he admitted, shoving his hands into his coat pockets. Sometimes he’d take his coat off and hang it on the rack and she’d flip the sign on the front door to Closed and they’d lock themselves in the back room for half an hour. Today he kept it zipped and buttoned, the cold still lingering around his shoulders like a heavy cloak.
“I, ah, need to talk to you, Violet.”
Her bright green eyes shot to his. She stopped wiping the counter.
Sam had been prepared to feel anxious entering this conversation, but for some reason he didn’t feel nervous now. Maybe it was the fact that he knew he’d be eating dinner in Kaia Foley’s kitchen tonight, and the deep sense of peace and simple happiness that gave him was more valuable than any quick thrill he’d ever had with Violet.
“I can’t do our date today,” he said.
“Okay, whatever.” She moved like a dancer as she went to wipe down a table in the center of the shop. “Why don’t you kick off those boots,” she said, without looking at him.
“No, I gotta head out.” He stepped in and took hold of her shoulder.
She scoffed at his feet leaving scummy tracks across the newly cleaned wood floor.
“Sam, come on!” she scolded.
He stepped back onto the mat, mumbling an apology. He wanted to say: It’s over between us and I wanted to tell you, officially, even though it was never that serious. But he couldn’t. It wasn’t the right time. Or the right place. He had
n’t really thought it through.
“So are you going to move to Tennessee with her once she’s sold the house on Foley’s Point?” Violet asked, not pausing in her work, tidying a jar of bath bombs. “Think you can live in a landlocked state, Sam Lowell?”
He gaped at her, unnerved by the triumphant smugness on her face. She crossed her arms over her chest and shook her long, dark hair over her shoulders.
“Where are you getting all of this?” he asked.
The sound of her laughter made him cringe. “Quolobit Harbor is a small town, Sam. There’s a jalopy with Tennessee plates parked at Murphy’s shop, the Angeline was moored at Foley’s Point this morning and yesterday morning, and if that wasn’t enough, a perky little redhead bumbled in here yesterday after pulling up in your truck.” Violet lifted her brows victoriously. “I’m guessing she doesn’t know about me.”
Sam flinched. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. Deferring to absolute denial was his first course of defense, though probably not the smartest in the long run. “She’s a friend,” he said. That was a lie, sort of. Friends didn’t kiss and leave each other panting like he and Kaia had.
“You and I did start things out very casually.” Violet shrugged as she walked closer. “Treated it like it wasn’t serious. At least half of that was my own fault, wasn’t it?” All of her glib acceptance evaporated. Her lips trembled, eyes brimming.“Please give me a chance?”
Sam rested his hands on her shoulders. “Violet.” He wanted to tell her it was too late, that he’d already let someone else into his heart, but he couldn’t speak the words. He didn’t want to give her that knowledge. Not yet, anyway.
“I used to think I wanted to get out of this town, you know,” she went on, at the edge of tears. “I wanted something bigger, better for myself. I never imagined that I could have this business and that it would do so well here and online, or that I’d actually come to love Quolobit as much as I do, or… meet someone like you.”