by Nora Roberts
As if she’d conjured him, a man walked across the sand toward her. Ginny cocked a hip, aimed a grin. “Well, hey there, handsome. Whatcha doing out here by yourself?”
“Looking for you, beautiful.”
She shook her hair back. “Ain’t that a coincidence?”
“Not really. I prefer to think of it as fate.” He held out a hand and, thinking it was her lucky night, she took it.
Just drunk enough to make it easy, he thought as he led her farther into the dark. And sober enough to make it ... fun.
PART TWO
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
—Shakespeare
ELEVEN
FOR the first time in weeks, Jo woke rested and with an appetite. She felt settled, she realized, and very nearly happy. Kate had been right, Jo decided as she gave her hair a quick finger-comb. She’d needed the evening out, the companionship, the music, the night. And a few hours in the company of a man who apparently found her attractive hadn’t hurt a thing. In fact, Jo was beginning to think it wouldn’t hurt a thing to spend a bit more time in Nathan’s company.
She passed her darkroom on the way downstairs and for once didn’t think of the envelope filled with pictures that she’d hidden deep in a file drawer. For once, she didn’t think of Annabelle.
Instead she thought of wandering down to the river again and the possibility of bumping into Nathan. Accidentally. Casually. She was getting as bad as Ginny, she decided with a laugh. Plotting ways to make a man notice her. But if it worked for Ginny, maybe it would work for her. What was wrong with a little flirtation with a man who interested her? Excited her.
There now. She paused on the stairs, curious enough to take stock. It wasn’t so hard to admit that he excited her—the attention paid, the breezy way he would take her hand, the deliberate way his eyes would meet and hold hers. The cool and confident way he’d kissed her. Just moved in, she recalled, sampled, approved, and backed off. As if he’d known there would be ample opportunity for more at a time and place of his choosing.
It should have infuriated her, she mused. The cocky and blatantly male arrogance of it. And yet she found it appealed to her on the most primitive of levels. She wondered how she would play the game, and if she would show any skill at it.
She smiled, continued downstairs. She had a feeling she might just surprise Nathan Delaney. And herself.
“I’d go, Sam, but I have quite a few turnovers here this morning.” Kate glanced over as Jo stepped into the kitchen. Raking a hand through her hair, she sent Jo a distracted smile. “Morning, honey. You’re up early.”
“So’s everyone, it seems.” Jo glanced at her father as she headed to the coffeepot. He stood by the door, all but leaning out of it. The desire to escape was obvious. “Problem?” Jo asked lightly.
“Just a little one. We’ve got some campers coming in on the morning ferry, and some going out on the return. I just got a call from a family who’s packed up and ready to go, and there’s no one to check them out.”
“Ginny’s not at the station?”
“She doesn’t answer there, or at home. I imagine she overslept.” Kate smiled wanly. “Somewhere. I’m sure the bonfire went on quite late.”
“It was still going strong when I left, about midnight.” Jo sipped her coffee, frowning as she tried to remember if she’d seen Ginny around before she headed back home.
“Girl got a decent night’s sleep, in her own bed,” Sam added, “she wouldn’t have any trouble getting herself to work.”
“Sam, you know very well this isn’t like Ginny. She’s as dependable as the sunrise.” With a worried frown, Kate glanced at the clock. “Maybe she isn’t feeling well.”
“Hung over, you mean.”
“As some human beings are occasionally in their lives,” Kate snapped back. “And that’s neither here nor there. The point is, we have people waiting to check out of camp and others coming in. I can’t leave here this morning, and even if I could I don’t know anything about pitching tents or Porta-Johns. You’ll just have to give up a couple of hours of your valuable time and handle it.”
Sam blinked at her. It was a rare thing for her voice to take on that scathing tone with him. And it seemed he’d been hearing it quite a bit lately. Because he wanted peace more than anything else, he shrugged. “I’ll head over.”
“Jo will go with you,” Kate said abruptly, which caused them both to stare. “You might need a hand.” She spoke quickly now, her mind made up. If she could force them into each other’s company for a morning, maybe the two of them would hold an actual conversation. “Jo, you can walk over from the campground and check on Ginny. Maybe her phone’s just out, or she’s really not feeling well. I’ll worry about her until we get in touch.”
Jo shifted the camera on her shoulder, watched her tentative morning plans evaporate. “Sure. Fine.”
“Let me know when you get it straightened out.” Kate shooed them to the door and out. “And don’t worry about housekeeping detail. Lexy and I will manage well enough.”
Because their backs were turned, Kate smiled broadly, brushed her hands together. There, she thought. Deal with each other.
Jo climbed in the passenger seat of her father’s aged Blazer, snapped her seat belt on. It smelled of him, she realized. Sand and sea and forest. The engine turned over smoothly and purred. He’d never let anything that belonged to him suffer from neglect, she mused. Except his children.
Annoyed with herself, she pulled her sunglasses out of the breast pocket of her camp shirt, slid them on. “Nice bonfire last night,” she began.
“Have to see if that boy policed the beach area.”
That boy would be Giff, Jo noted, and was aware they both knew Giff wouldn’t have left a single food wrapper to mar the sand. “The inn’s doing well. Lots of business for this time of year.”
“Advertising,” Sam said shortly. “Kate does it.”
Jo struggled against heaving a sigh. “I’d think word of mouth would be strong as well. And the restaurant’s quite a draw with Brian’s cooking.”
Sam only grunted. Never in his life would he understand how a man could want to tie himself to a stove. Not that he understood his daughters any better than he understood his son. One of them flitting off to New York wanting to get famous washing her hair on TV commercials, and the other flitting everywhere and back again snapping photographs. There were times he thought the biggest puzzle in the world was how they had come from him.
But then, they’d come from Annabelle as well.
Jo jerked a shoulder and gave up. Rolling down her window, she let the air caress her cheeks, listened to the sound of the tires crunching on the road, then the quick splashing through the maze of duckweed that was life in the slough.
“Wait.” Without thinking, she reached out to touch Sam’s arm. When he braked, she hopped out quickly, leaving him frowning after her.
There on a hummock a turtle sunned himself, his head raised so that the pretty pattern on his neck reflected almost perfectly in the dark water. He paid no attention to her as she crouched to set her shot.
Then there was a rustle, and the turtle’s head recoiled with a snap. Jo’s breath caught as a heron rose up like a ghost, an effortless vertical soar of white. Then the wings spread, stirring wind. It flew over the chain of small lakes and tiny islands and dipped beyond into the trees.
“I used to wonder what it would be like to do that, to fly up into the sky like magic, with only the sound of wing against air.”
“I recollect you always liked the birds best,” Sam said from behind her. “Didn’t know you were thinking about flying off, though.”
Jo smiled a little. “I used to imagine it. Mama told me the story of the Swan Princess, the beautiful young girl turned into a swan by a witch. I always thought that was the best.”
“She had a lot of stories.”
“Yes.” Jo turned, studied her father’s face. Did it still hurt him, she wondered, to remember
his wife? Would it hurt less if she could tell him she believed Annabelle was dead? “I wish I could remember all of them,” she murmured.
And she wished she could remember her mother clearly enough to know what to do.
She took a breath to brace herself. “Daddy, did she ever let you know where she’d gone, or why she left?”
“No.” The warmth that had come into his eyes as he watched the heron’s flight with Jo iced over. “She didn’t need to. She wasn’t here and she left because she wanted to. We’d best be going and getting this done.”
He turned and walked back to the Blazer. They drove the rest of the way in silence.
JO had done some duty at the campground during her youth. Learning the family business, Kate had called it. The procedure had changed little over the years. The large map tacked to the wall inside the little station detailed the campsites, the paths, the toilet facilities. Blue-headed pins were stuck in the sites that were already occupied, red was for reserved sites, and green was for those where campers had checked out. Green sites needed to be checked, the area policed.
The rest room and shower facilities were also policed twice daily, scrubbed out, the supplies renewed. Since it was unlikely that Ginny had done her duty there since before the bonfire, Jo resigned herself to janitorial work.
“I’ll deal with the bathrooms,” she told Sam as he carefully filled out the paperwork needed to check a group of impatient campers out. “Then I’ll walk over to Ginny’s cabin and see what’s up.”
“Go to her cabin first,” Sam said without looking up. “The facilities are her job.”
“All right. Shouldn’t take more than an hour. I’ll meet you back here.”
She took the path heading east. If she’d been a heron, she thought with a little smile, she’d have been knocking on Ginny’s door in a blink. But the way the path wound and twisted, sliding between ponds and around the high duck grass, it was a good quarter mile hike.
She passed a site with a neat little pop-up camper. Obviously no early risers there, she mused. The flaps were zipped tight. A pair of raccoons waddled across the path, eyed her shrewdly, then continued on toward breakfast.
Ginny’s cabin was a tiny box of cedar tucked into the trees. It was livened up with two big, bright-red pots filled with wildly colored plastic flowers. They stood by the door, guarded by an old and weathered pair of pink flamingos. Ginny was fond of saying she dearly loved flowers and pets, but the plastic sort suited her best.
Jo knocked once, waited a beat, then let herself in. The single main room was hardly thirty square feet, with the kitchen area separated from the living area by a narrow service bar. The lack of space hadn’t kept Ginny from collecting. Knickknacks crowded every flat surface. Water globes, souvenir ashtrays, china ladies in frilly dresses, crystal poodles.
The walls were painted bright pink and covered with really bad prints—still lifes, for the most part, of flowers and fruit. Jo was both touched and amused to see one of her own black-and-white photos crammed in with them. It was a silly shot of Ginny sleeping in the rope hammock at Sanctuary, taken when they were teenagers.
Jo smiled over it as she turned toward the bedroom. “Ginny, if you’re not alone in there, cover up. I’m coming in.”
But the bedroom was empty. The bed was unmade and it, as well as a good deal of the floor, was covered with clothes. From the looks of it, Jo decided, Ginny had had a hard time picking out the right outfit for the bonfire.
She looked in the bathroom just to be sure the cabin was empty. The plastic shelf over the tiny pedestal sink was crammed with cosmetics. The bowl of the sink was still dusted with face powder. Three bottles of shampoo stood on the lip of the tub, one of them still uncapped. A doll smiled from the top of the toilet tank, her pink and white crocheted gown spread full over an extra roll of toilet paper.
It was so Ginny.
“Whose bed are you sleeping in this morning, Ginny?” Jo murmured, and with a little sigh, left the cabin and prepared to scrub public rest rooms.
When she reached the facilities, Jo took keys out of her back pocket and opened the small storage area. Inside, cleaning paraphernalia and bathroom supplies were ruthlessly organized. It was always a surprise to realize how disciplined Ginny could be about her work when the rest of her life appeared to be an unpredictable and often messy lark.
Armed with mop and bucket, commercial cleaners, rags, and rubber gloves, Jo went into the women’s shower. A woman of about fifty was busily brushing her teeth at one of the sinks. Jo sent her an absentminded smile and began to fill her bucket.
The woman rinsed, spat. “Where’s Ginny this morning?”
“Oh.” Jo blinked her eyes against the strong fumes of the cleaner as it bubbled up. “Apparently among the missing.”
“Overpartied,” the woman said with a friendly laugh. “It was a great bonfire. My husband and I enjoyed it—so much that we’re getting a very late start this morning.”
“That’s what vacations are for. Enjoyment and late starts.”
“It’s hard to convince him of the second part.” The woman took a small tube out of her travel kit and, squirting moisturizing lotion on her fingers, began to slather it on. “Dick’s a real bear about time schedules. We’re nearly an hour late for our morning hike.”
“The island’s not going anywhere.”
“Tell that to Dick.” She laughed again, then greeted a young woman and a girl of about three who came in. “Morning, Meg. And how’s pretty Lisa today?”
The little girl raced over and began to chatter.
Jo used the voices for background music as she went about her chores. The older woman was Joan, and it seemed she and Dick had the campsite adjoining the one Meg and her husband, Mick, had claimed. They’d formed that oddly intimate vacationers’ friendship over the past two days. They made a date to have a fish fry that night, then Meg slipped into one of the shower stalls with her little girl.
Jo listened to the water drum and the child’s voice echo as she mopped up the floor. This was what Ginny liked, she realized, collecting these small pieces of other people’s lives. But she was able to join in with them, be a part of them. People remembered her. They took snapshots with her in them and slipped them into their family vacation albums. They called her by name, and repeaters always asked after Ginny.
Because she didn’t hide from things, Jo thought, leaning on her mop. She didn’t let herself fade into the background. She was just like her brightly colored plastic flowers. Cheerful and bold.
Maybe it was time she herself took a few steps forward, Jo thought. Out of the background. Into the light.
She gathered her supplies and walked out of the ladies’ section, rounding the building to the door of the men’s facilities. She used the side of her fist to knock, giving the wooden door three hard beats, waited a few seconds and repeated.
Wincing a little, she eased the door open and shouted. “Cleaning crew. Anyone inside?”
Years before when she’d been helping Ginny, Jo had walked in on an elderly man in a skimpy towel who’d left his hearing aid back at his campsite. She didn’t want to repeat the experience. She heard nothing from inside—no sound of water running, urinals whooshing, but she made as much noise as possible herself as she clamored in.
As a final precaution, she propped the door open and hung the large plastic KEEPING YOUR REST ROOMS CLEAN sign in plain sight. Satisfied, she hauled her bucket to the sinks and dumped in cleaner. Twenty minutes, thirty tops, and she’d be done, she told herself. To get through it she began to plan the rest of her day.
She thought she might drive up to the north shore. There were ruins there from an old Spanish mission, built in the sixteenth century and abandoned in the seventeenth. The Spaniards hadn’t had much luck converting the transient Indians to Christianity, and the settlement that historians suspected had been planned had never come to pass.
It was a nice day for a drive to the north tip, the light would be excellent by
mid-morning for photographing the ruins and the terraces of shells accumulated and left by the Indians. She wondered if Nathan would like to go along with her. Wouldn’t an architect be interested in the ruins of an old Spanish mission? She could ask Brian to put together a picnic lunch, and they could spend a few hours with the ghosts of Spanish monks.
And who was she fooling? Jo demanded. She didn’t give a hang about the monks or the ruins. It was the picnic she wanted, the afternoon with no responsibility, no agenda, no deadline. It was Nathan she wanted. She straightened and pressed a hand to her stomach as it fluttered hard and fast. She wanted the time alone with him, perhaps to test them both. To see what would happen if she found the courage to just let herself go. To be with him. To be Jo.
And why not? she thought. She would call his cottage when she got back home. She’d make it very casual. Impromptu. Unplanned. And whatever happened, happened.
When the lights switched off, she yelped, splashed water all over her feet. She spun around, leading with her mop like a lance, and heard the echo of the heavy door closing.
“Hello?” The sound of her own voice, too thin and too shaky, made her shiver. “Who’s there?” she demanded, and in the dim light filtering through the single high and frosted window, she edged toward the door.
It resisted her first shove. Panic reared up toothily and snapped at her throat. She shoved again, then pounded. Then she whirled, heart booming in her ears. She was certain that someone had slipped in and stood behind her.
She saw nothing—just empty stalls, the dull gleam of the wet floor. Heard nothing but her own racing breath. Still, she leaned against the door, terrified to turn her back on the room, and her eyes wheeled left and right, searching for movement in the shadows.
Sweat began to run down her back, icy panic sweat. She couldn’t draw enough air, no matter how fast and hard she tried to gulp it in. Part of her mind held firm, lecturing her: You know the signs, Jo Ellen, don’t let it win, don’t let go. If you break down, you’ll be back in the hospital again. Just get a grip. Get a grip.