Places by the Sea

by Jean Stone

  Jill blinked. She rubbed the wetness from her eyes. She frowned. Trouble? Quickly she scanned the page. Then she forced herself to begin again, to start at the top. She forced herself to read the words slowly, carefully. Because she couldn’t believe what she had just read.

  I’m sure George never expected me to find out. How often do I go to the tavern? But I needed money to pay the window cleaner, and he had forgotten …

  I don’t think anything has hurt this much since my Robbie was killed. I would never have believed it, but I saw it with my own two eyes, and heard it with my own two ears.

  They were inside the secret room, but he’d left the door from the kitchen open.

  “If you’re going to have a baby, you’re going to need some money,” he said, clear as day. “Two thousand dollars should be enough.”

  My heart stopped beating. Two thousand dollars? Why was he giving away two thousand dollars? And who was going to have a baby?

  I was glad no one else was in the kitchen. I would have been so humiliated if anyone else heard.

  Then I heard a small, familiar voice say, “Thank you,” then I stepped back into the pantry so I wouldn’t be seen.

  That’s when she came out. The one who is going to have the baby. The one who my George just gave two thousand dollars to. Rita Blair. With the horrible hair and the trailer-park laugh. Rita Blair has taken two thousand dollars from my husband. Because she is going to have his baby.

  I hope she dies.

  Jill slammed the diary closed. Her pulse raced. Her father? Rita? No, she thought, it couldn’t be true. She opened the book again and looked at the date. July, 1970.

  The summer of 1970. The summer after high school graduation.

  Nausea flooded through her. Her hands grew damp, her heart numbed. That was why Rita had lef the island! She had been pregnant, pregnant with … Kyle?

  The boy who had just had sex with Amy? The boy who, apparently, had been conceived by Jill’s own father?

  Conceived by Jill’s father.

  White heat of reality flashed on her cheeks.

  Her mouth dropped open.

  She tipped her head back and wailed.

  Then she leaped from the floor, grabbed a half-filled trash bag, and vomited into it, retching out the sour bile, heaving up the sickening betrayal that meant Kyle Blair was her half-brother.

  Chapter 20

  She had to get to work.

  She could not stay in the house a minute longer, a second longer.

  Jill quickly brushed her teeth, scrubbing the truth from her soul, erasing the disgust.

  With shaking hands, she tried to put on makeup. Blush smeared pink across her face: she slammed the brush into the sink and rubbed the color off.

  She looked at herself in the full-length mirror. Linen crop top and capri pants, was all her mind could deal with among her tossed and disoriented thoughts.

  Quickly she changed her clothes. If she was going to see Sam Wilkins, she had to look her best.

  She grabbed her sandals. Her heart pounded so hard she had to sit on the edge of the bed to lace them.

  Suddenly she stopped.

  I can’t do this, she thought. I will have a nervous breakdown at his front door. I will explode into tears. I cannot go on as though everything is all right.

  MY BEST FRIEND SLEPT WITH MY FATHER.

  She closed her eyes and panted, trying not to picture her father and Rita … where? She jumped from the bed and stared at the mattress. There? There, on the bed where he and Florence slept?

  MAYBE IT WAS IN THE SECRET ROOM.

  “No!” she shouted, burying her hands in her face. “No, I will not think about it. I can’t. I can’t.”

  She tore her hands away. Her eyes darted around the room. Her notebook was downstairs. At the rolltop desk. In the living room.

  She hurried into the hall, raced down the stairs, and flew into the living room.

  She stopped. Jeff stood there, on a ladder, helping a man she’d never seen before hoist a beam into place.

  “Jill,” Ben asked, from where he stood beneath them. “Is everything all right?”

  She nodded quickly and bent to finish lacing her sandal. “I’ll be at Sam Wilkins’s,” she announced without looking up.

  Then she grabbed for her notebook. “I’m going to do some work.”

  The ride to Gay Head was erratic as Jill alternated between frenzied accelerating and hypnotic steering. Somewhere along West Tisbury Road, her thoughts began to settle. She looked off toward the beach and noticed a magnificent osprey nest: a home of twigs atop a high pole, alone in its quest for life, alone, but surviving.

  It was then that Jill realized she no longer was alone, the way she had been as a child. She had Christopher, she had the children. She had a wonderful career ahead of her—as long as she didn’t fight it, as long as she didn’t let the past become her trap.

  She decided now that it shouldn’t matter what had happened, or what was going to happen. She had trusted her father, she had trusted Amy, she had trusted Rita. In less than twenty-four hours, all that trust had been shattered. Florence had felt that nowhere was safe. No matter how much she had tried to protect Jill—had tried to protect herself—nowhere had been safe.

  But Jill was luckier than that. She knew what was safe.

  As she gripped the wheel and kept going straight, she vowed to herself that nothing would screw up her life, that no one—not her daughter, her best friend, or her father’s memory—was going to change that.

  And if it meant getting the best damned story that would spin Maurice Fischer’s head and blow Lizette French off her four-inch heels, then that was exactly what Jill was going to do.

  “Jill McPhearson,” Sam said as he greeted her at the door. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  She forced her muscles to ooze with her audience smile, her camera glow. “Hello, Sam. I’m sorry to stop by without calling, but I need your help.” Your daughter’s boyfriend violated my daughter, and you owe me, she’d wanted to say. But Jill had decided there would be time for that later, if Sam didn’t comply … time for the media to twist his comeback into a scandal wracked with illicit adventures and statutory rape—a scandal in which Jill would find a way to dump Sam squarely in the middle.

  The media has power, she reminded herself. And I am the media.

  “In fact,” she added as she shook back her hair and looked directly into his rock-star blue eyes, “I think we can help each other.”

  He leaned against the door frame and folded his burly arms across his still-taut stomach. “Tell me more,” he said with a grin.

  She cleared her throat and held up her notebook. “I want to do a story on you. If you’re serious about making a comeback, you’ll see this as your golden opportunity.”

  “I don’t give interviews anymore.”

  “I understand that. I also think we both know enough about the business to know that without some positive publicity, you can kiss your chances good-bye.” If she’d learned one thing from Addie, surely it was that.

  “Not necessarily. I used to have an agent who said, ‘It doesn’t matter what they’re saying about you, as long as they’re talking about you.’ ”

  “And has that theory helped you over the past few years?”

  His slow smile broadened. “Touché. But I really don’t think that exposure in the Boston market will exactly make my star soar again.”

  “What if it’s more than Boston? What if it’s national?”

  His eyebrows raised. “Are you making a career move?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And my story will help you get there?”

  “As I said, I think we can help each other.”

  He studied her face. His eyes drifted over her body. Jill was determined to stay relaxed, to not flinch. She arched her back slightly, in a not-so-innocent flirtation. If that’s what it would take, she’d let him think it would work.

  “You’re a persistent woman, Jill,” Sam
said. “Doing my story must be important to you.”

  “It is.”

  “Perhaps it wouldn’t have to be strictly business.”

  “It would.”

  “For sure?”

  “For sure.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Too bad.”

  “I’m sure that’s my loss,” she replied, carefully blinking her eyes, tossing another lure.

  He laughed, then stepped out of the doorway. “Okay, Jill, we might as well get started.”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “We can walk down to the beach. I don’t want to disturb my guests.”

  Jill remembered Isham and wondered if he was still here with his entourage of strangely attired friends.

  “Do you have an angle in mind?” he asked as they crossed the dune toward the narrow wood stairs that led down to the beach.

  “Absolutely,” Jill answered. “I want to start by exposing the truth. Did you kill your wife?”

  Sam didn’t respond until they reached the base of the long stairs, until they stepped onto the beach. “Do you have a conscience, Jill? Or have your edges been sharpened by your career?”

  Of course I have a conscience, she wanted to reply. It’s Rita who doesn’t seem to have one. She shook out the sand that sifted into her sandals. “What kind of a question is that?”

  “A straightforward one. Like the one you asked.”

  “I’m the reporter. I’m the one who’s supposed to ask the questions.”

  They stood for a moment, Sam looking at the sea, Jill looking at him, wondering if there was any way that this was going to work. “Let’s go to the left,” she said. “Toward the cliffs.”

  “It’s rocky there.”

  “But there aren’t many people.” She started to move ahead, then stopped. “Have you ever been there?”

  “I’ve always said, why walk on rocks when you can glide on sand?”

  She laughed and urged him to follow. “Come on. It’s beautiful there. I haven’t done this in years.” But as she started moving toward the cliffs, Jill wished she could change her mind. This was, after all, a favorite place that once she and Rita had. She squeezed her eyes against the sun, against her pain. She stumbled on a rock.

  Sam’s arm quickly righted her. “See?” he said. “It’s too rocky. Let’s go the other way.”

  Jill looked at the water’s edge: it was far enough out. There would be plenty of time to walk to the point, before the tide came in. She loved the cliffs; the view of the lighthouse from below. She was not going to let memories of Rita ruin it for her. She was not going to let Rita ruin her future, the way it had ruined her mother’s.

  And right now, Sam Wilkins was her future. In order to get his story, she needed to show strength. She needed to prove she could take risks.

  “I thought you were a risk taker,” she said with a smile.

  He returned her grin, then stepped forward. She fell into stride beside him, navigating the rocks.

  “Have you ever lost everything, Jill?” he asked suddenly.

  She looked down at her feet, hugging each rock around her toes. “I thought I did when my ex-husband left. Then I realized I had my children. And I had myself.”

  “Ah,” Sam said as he reached down and picked up a small dark stone. A perfect band of white was ringed around the top. Jill wanted to tell him it was a “lucky stone”—an ancient Indian omen. But she didn’t want to interrupt his thoughts. He studied the stone, then drew back his arm and tossed it into the waves. It skipped across the water, then disappeared from sight.

  “When my wife had the accident,” he said, his eyes fixed on the spot where the stone had sunk, “Carrie tried to kill herself.”

  Jill was glad she was walking beside him, so he couldn’t see the stunned expression on her face. Her instincts told her she should open her notebook and take out her pen. Instead, she kept walking.

  “My daughter was a crack addict,” Sam continued.

  Again, Jill hesitated. “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

  He stretched his arms, to equalize his weight among the rocks. “She’d run away. I hired an investigator to find her. He called late one night to say that Carrie was in a crack house outside of L.A.”

  The breeze grew stronger as they neared the point. Jill paused a moment, and reclipped the hair at the nape of her neck.

  “My wife didn’t know anything until she took the call. She jumped in her car and sped down the highway.”

  Jill caught up to him again. “So your wife wasn’t tearing off after an argument with you, as the tabloids reported.” She didn’t add that they’d also said there was a chance that Sam had tampered with her brakes.

  “There had been no argument. I wasn’t home.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Almost seven years,” his voice said with the slightest break. “Carrie was twelve.”

  She stopped. Even the image of Sam’s reckless daughter and the hurt that she had caused did not make this right, did not make this fair. She had been twelve. Just a little girl. “Oh, God, Sam, how awful.”

  He slipped his hands in the pockets of his jeans and continued moving forward.

  “Why didn’t you tell the truth?” she asked. “Surely it would have ended the speculation. Your career wouldn’t have collapsed …”

  “I had to protect my daughter.”

  As Florence had tried to protect her. As she had tried to protect Amy. “So you lost everything.”

  “Nearly.”

  “But now you’re planning a comeback … a world tour. That will cost millions, won’t it?”

  “Of course. I have backers for that. But I’m not talking about money. What I really lost, Jill, was something inside myself. Something in here.” He clutched his fist to his chest. “I’ve written many songs about it. We’ll go into the studio when I return to L.A. The tour will begin after the first of the year.” He bent and picked up a piece of shell, then tossed it into the sea.

  Jill cleared her throat, trying to hold back her enthusiasm, trying to hold back the excitement that she, indeed, had herself one hell of a story. “You just threw out a perfectly good piece of wampum, Mr. Wilkins.”

  He turned to her and smiled. “Excuse me?”

  “Wampum. The Indians used it as money. The purple and white shred of the inside of an oyster shell.”

  “Would it have bought back my career?”

  She grinned. “Maybe. On the island, maybe.”

  They rounded a curve. Ahead loomed the cliffs, as tall as a three-, maybe four-story building, majestic with their striations of black and white and rust, their marbleized facade staring across the water, as they had done for centuries.

  “Incredible, aren’t they?” Jill asked.

  Sam shrugged. “You’ve seen one rock, you’ve seen them all.”

  She laughed. “The Gay Head cliffs aren’t rock, Sam. They’re soft. They’re clay.”

  He scowled.

  “Come on. I’m an old hand at this.” She climbed over several boulders, gingerly stepping from one rock to another, not caring about the demise of her two-hundred-dollar sandals. And then, she touched the cliff. “Look,” she said, bending down to touch the red clay. “Have you ever seen anything more magnificent?”

  “No,” Sam replied into the wind. But he wasn’t looking at the cliff before him; he was looking at Jill.

  She ran her finger over the smooth, supple finish of the clay, trying to ignore his look. “The Wampanoags own the face of the cliffs,” she said. “It is their heritage.”

  He reached out and touched her arm. “Did we come here for a history lesson or an interview?”

  She kept her eyes fixed on the clay. “We are all products of history, Sam. This is a part of mine.” Then she turned to him abruptly. “Why are you willing to tell the world about Carrie now? Do you no longer need to protect her?”

  He touched the cliff where her hand had been. “Carrie wants this for me.”

  Jill susp
ected Carrie wanted it for herself. She suspected his daughter would forever love the publicity. She watched his hand as it probed the clay, as it unearthed a sparkling vein.

  “Fool’s gold,” she said. “The cliffs are loaded with it.”

  “All that glitters?” Sam asked.

  She smiled, then looked to the top. “There’s the lighthouse,” she said. The deep rust-colored lighthouse blended with the shades of the clay, standing, as it had for nearly two centuries, overlooking the water, a watchtower for those at sea, flashing one red beacon, one white.

  “And around the next bend the tourists are lined up at the telescopes.”

  “So you are an islander.”

  “Enough. Do you think they can see us?”

  “No. It’s too steep.”

  “Look,” he said, “more fool’s gold.” He stepped over the rocks to a hollow in the cliffs, a shallow cave sculpted by nature within the clay.

  Jill followed. When she reached him, he pulled her inside, his face close to hers, hers, to his. “You haven’t asked where I was that night,” he whispered. “You haven’t asked why I wasn’t home.”

  “Does the world need to know?”

  “I need to tell it. I had been at the studio. A late-night session. About the time my wife’s car went off the road, I was making love to a beautiful young girl. Since then, the guilt has been overwhelming. Until now.”

  He leaned down. His mouth found hers. She tasted his lips—their fullness, the salt, the sea air. His hand rested cool against the warmth of her midriff, beneath her top. Suddenly she ducked from his grasp and held up her hand.

  “Do you see this diamond, Sam? Don’t be confused. This is not fool’s gold.”

  Sam smiled. “You are a beautiful woman, Jill.”

  She looked toward the waves. They moved closer against the rocks. “Tide’s coming in,” she said. “We’d better head back. Let’s take the long way, up through the dunes. If you’re lucky, I’ll treat you to some sassafras root.”

  As she traversed the rocks and headed toward the dunes, Jill’s excitement was difficult to restrain. She had all the makings of a dynamic story—the kind Maurice Fischer would love, the kind that would seal the RueCom deal.