Anyone who didn’t know the overhang was there would never have seen it.
With her goal in sight, Olivia paused and considered. Approaching Chloe, either with sympathy or a lecture, was destined to meet with failure. Chloe was clearly in a mood to wreak havoc on all comers.
Olivia, therefore, wouldn’t approach.
Working quickly, listening to sobs all the while, she gathered a small pile of sticks and rocks, then squatted just off the path opposite the overhang and began arranging her trove into a structure.
She also started to sing.
Olivia was not a singer. She knew it, had known it since she had tried out for St. Theresa’s annual musical in seventh grade and been laughed out of the auditorium. But then, this particular application didn’t require that she be able to carry a tune. It just required her to attract the attention of one very unhappy little girl without it being obvious that that was what she was trying to do.
‘‘Jimmy crack corn . . .’’ she began softly. She had worked her way from that song through a half dozen others and was on a lusty chorus of ‘‘Zip-a-dee-doodah’’ when a hand smacked against her shoulder. Rather harder than a polite can-I-have-your-attention-please tap, but still within the outer realms of acceptability.
Olivia stopped singing, and glanced over her shoulder in feigned surprise.
‘‘Oh, hi, Chloe,’’ she said, just as if she did not notice the child’s swollen eyes, tear-wet cheeks, and still-trembling lower lip, and had no idea what had gone on in the house earlier.
‘‘What are you doing?’’ The question was petulant, hostile even, but curious. Chloe’s gaze was focused on the small, four-walled rock and mud structure that Olivia had constructed beside the path.
‘‘Putting on the roof,’’ Olivia replied, and began to lay on twigs, working sideways and placing them so that their tips crossed over the larger one she had positioned lengthwise over what would be the peak of the roof.
‘‘What is it?’’
Olivia scooped up a good-size glob of mud and patted it down on top of the twigs. Her hands were already caked with mud, and from the feel of it she had at least one streak across her cheek, but it was all for a good cause, she thought, risking another glance back at Chloe. The child was still sniffling, but she looked intrigued.
‘‘A fairy house.’’
‘‘A fairy house?’’ There was a wealth of scorn in the question.
‘‘Mmm-hmmm. When I was a little girl I used to build them all the time. After it rains is the best time. Mud makes the house easier to build, and there seem to be more fairies out when it’s damp.’’
‘‘There’s no such thing as fairies.’’ This time, if Chloe’s scorn had had weight, Olivia would have been crushed beneath it.
Olivia shrugged. ‘‘How do you know?’’
‘‘I know, that’s all. Everybody knows.’’
Olivia shrugged again, her hands still busy patting mud down over the roof.
‘‘When I was eight, like you, I used to feel bad sometimes, and when I felt bad I would build a fairy house, and then I would lie in my bed—I always built the fairy house where I could see it from my bed—and watch for the fairies to come. They always came.’’
‘‘Fairies?’’ The single word brimmed with skepticism.
‘‘Well,’’ Olivia temporized, ‘‘something came, with little lights. I could see little lights flying all around my house, and going in and out the windows.’’
‘‘Lightning bugs!’’ Chloe pronounced scathingly.
‘‘Maybe,’’ Olivia agreed, finishing the roof and wiping her hands as well as she could on the damp leaves beside the path. ‘‘But I liked to pretend they were fairies.’’
‘‘It’s stupid to pretend.’’
Olivia shook her head and stood up, surveying her handiwork with pride. A neat little stone, twig, and mud house stood beside the path. It was about a foot tall. ‘‘Pretending is wonderful, Chloe. If you can pretend, you can do anything, or be anything, or have anything. I used to pretend I could fly. I would lie on my back on the grass behind the house and look up at the clouds and pretend I could fly up there where they were. . . .’’ Suddenly Olivia hesitated, shaken, as she realized that she really was unearthing a memory; her voice softened. ‘‘So I could visit my mother in heaven.’’
How she had wished that pretend game would come true!
‘‘How old were you when your mother died?’’ Chloe was looking up at her, her tears and anger momentarily forgotten. She seemed genuinely interested.
‘‘Six,’’ Olivia answered, trying to ignore the sudden disorienting feeling of seeing things through the eyes of the child she had once been. It was important right now to concentrate on Chloe and nothing else.
‘‘I was six when my mom got married again,’’ Chloe said, and all of a sudden her lower lip started to tremble. ‘‘That’s how I got to be here. She didn’t want me after that.’’
Tears swam in Chloe’s eyes. Responding instinctively, Olivia wrapped her arms around the child, hugging her close. Bad move. Chloe jerked free, glaring at her.
‘‘Pretending’s stupid!’’ she said, her face contorting. Before Olivia realized what she meant to do, she lifted a foot and stomped through the roof of the fairy house. Then she turned and ran back up the path.
At least, Olivia thought, ruefully surveying the ruins of her creation, Chloe was headed in the direction of the house.
It was only when she looked up again that Olivia realized she was alone in the one place on earth she least wished to be: not twenty feet from the edge of the lake where her mother had drowned. Her throat tightened even as she told herself that it was absurd to feel afraid.
Run away. Its origins were unclear, but the whisper was not, and Olivia blinked as she absorbed what she was hearing. Run. Run away.
Olivia stared wide-eyed at the lake for a solid minute before she realized the truth. Of course the words were in her mind. Yes, she had heard the voices before, when she and Sara had walked through the woods on her first night back. But there was no ghostly presence calling out to her from the smooth surface of the water. There were no specters talking to her from the trees, or the clouds, or the earth.
Her fear was speaking, and when Olivia realized that she made up her mind: It was time to silence that fear once and for all.
Standing stock-still, she forced herself to take a long look at the lake. It was a big lake, covering perhaps twenty acres, and deep. As the sun moved farther down in the western sky, the surface of the water turned almost purple, rather than the silver it had been earlier. The water hyacinths formed an outer ring around the tattered shoreline, their bobbing heads a deeper purple than the water, their foliage the same deep green as the duckweed that grew between them, giving the appearance that the flowers grew on solid ground. The twisted shapes of live oaks and bald cypresses looked like living sculptures when viewed from across the expanse of water. Their branches, like the branches of the sylvan canopy above her head, were adorned with Spanish moss that draped and hung from bent limbs like ratty silver-green feather boas.
Run. Run away. A breeze had come up, bearing with it the slightly fetid smell that Olivia had always associated with the lake. Involuntarily she shivered, suddenly cold. With the best will in the world, she could not help being afraid. The lake . . . It had always been the stuff of her most terrible nightmares.
She would not run away from it anymore. Earlier today she had come face-to-face with the memory of her mother, and the experience had been healing. Now she would face her fear of the lake.
Run away, Olivia! Run away! The voices seemed stronger, more urgent, their warning underlined by creaking branches and rustling leaves and swells of water slapping at the shoreline. The towering purple thunderheads that had brought the afternoon’s showers had gentled into an early evening sky of pink-tinged clouds against a background of pale amethyst. Dipping low on the distant horizon, the sun was the color and shape of a scoop of o
range sherbet.
Taking a deep breath, ignoring the voices, Olivia took one step off the path, then another. Then she was walking determinedly toward the lake, weaving among trees, dodging cypress knees, wading through tangled undergrowth. She meant to stand on the shore, right at the very edge where the water could lap at the toes of her Keds, face her fear, and, by facing it, conquer it. She refused any longer to feel a shiver of dread every time the lake came within her view.
Olivia! The voice from the lake was shouting at her now, warning her to stay back, afraid of her assault on its sovereignty. Olivia reached the edge of the trees, set foot on the sliver of rocky, muddy beach, and took the final step needed to bring her to the edge of the water.
To her surprise, she immediately sank up to her ankles in ooze. As the brackish water rose, lapping at her calves instead of her toes, she looked down in dismay.
Without warning a hand caught her arm from behind, yanking her violently backward.
CHAPTER 25
OLIVIA SCREAMED, FLAILED, STUMBLED, AND would have fallen bottom-first into the muck if someone had not caught her under the arms in the nick of time.
‘‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’’ It was Seth, she discovered, bending her head back to look at him from the ignoble position in which she found herself. He was scowling, his thick, straight brows nearly meeting over his nose as his eyes collided with hers. He looked, and sounded, equal parts angry, amazed, and alarmed.
‘‘What am I doing?’’ Olivia felt the panic that had exploded into life when she was grabbed from behind dissipate as quickly as it had come. ‘‘What are you doing, grabbing me like that? You scared the life out of me!’’
It was hard to project the true degree of her indignation, she discovered, when her bottom was approximately six inches above the muck and his hands under her arms were all that kept her out of it.
‘‘Didn’t you hear me calling you? I yelled, but you kept going like you were in some kind of trance. You walked straight into the damned lake, just like you were trying to . . . What the hell were you trying to do?’’
His face was flushed beneath its usual sun-bronze, and he seemed to be short of breath, as if he’d been running. He was handsome from any angle, Olivia discovered, still looking up at him from a position that made her practically supine. Though he frowned ferociously at her with his mouth set hard and his blue eyes snapping, her body responded with an instant quickening. She couldn’t believe her reaction to him under the circumstances, which were laughable, and after all her self-talk explaining away what she had lately felt when in his presence, and she wouldn’t allow it. This was Seth, for God’s sake. She simply would not think of him that way.
‘‘I said, what the hell were you trying to do?’’ His tone was so fierce that her eyes widened. It occurred to Olivia that she had frightened him, and that, in turn, was what had made him angry.
‘‘I was just trying to get over being afraid of the lake,’’ Olivia confessed in a milder tone than any she had used with him so far. ‘‘What did you think I was trying to do, drown myself?’’
She’d meant that last question to be humorous, but from the uneasy flicker in his eyes she divined the truth.
‘‘You did think that, didn’t you?’’ She hooted, grinning, and for a minute she thought he was going to drop her into the goo. His mouth tightened, his eyes darkened, and then she was being thrust back into an upright position, his hands leaving her just as soon as he saw that she could stand alone.
‘‘Next time you plan to go wading, take somebody with you. It’s stupid as hell to go walking into the lake alone.’’ He looked down, and his expression became one of angry disgust. ‘‘You always were more trouble than anybody I ever knew.’’
She followed the direction of his gaze. Like herself, she discovered, he was some eight inches deep in slimy mud and water. Unlike herself, he was dressed for work in a navy suit, white shirt, red tie, and, Olivia presumed, expensive dress shoes just now hidden from sight because they were sunk deep into the ooze.
‘‘Oh, dear,’’ she said, her eyes meeting his, and then, because she just couldn’t help it, she grinned. ‘‘I appreciate you coming in after me. I really do.’’
‘‘Next time I’ll let you drown yourself.’’ His tone was so sour that Olivia had to laugh. He looked at her, his expression grim, and then the beginnings of a smile began to tug at the corners of his mouth. ‘‘Olivia, you are a pain in the ass.’’
‘‘Why, thank you, sir.’’
Moving carefully as the ooze bubbled and sank around him, Seth turned, lifted a dripping, slime-covered foot from the mud to the accompaniment of a sound like a vacuum seal being broken and the smell of rotten eggs, and set it down again halfway to shore. He repeated the operation with his other foot. Another step saw his right foot planted on the firmer ground of the muddy strip of beach. With his left foot, he was not as fortunate. Lifting it free of the goo one last time he swore, and Olivia saw as his foot came into view that it was minus its shoe.
‘‘Oh, dear,’’ she said again, knowing the response was inadequate but unable to come up with anything less inflammatory on the spur of the moment. As his gaze met hers for a pregnant instant, she began to giggle helplessly. He stared at her without saying anything at all, his expression thunderous. Then, swearing every inch of the way, he waded back in, bent, thrust an arm into the muck, and felt around for his shoe. Olivia, meanwhile, squelched toward shore. Her shoes stayed on her feet. Clambering onto solid ground, ooze coating her bare legs to midcalf, she turned to observe his efforts. A mosquito landed on her thigh just below the fringe of her cutoffs, and she slapped at it absently. Her gaze was on Seth. She watched as he straightened, shoe in hand, moving with an easy, athletic grace despite the impediment of being mired in over-the-ankle mud. He really had a great body. . . . Not that it interested her at all, she reminded herself firmly. She was watching him only because she was amused.
Mud covered the arm of his suit coat to the elbow, water poured from his recovered shoe, and a swarm of bugs—gnats or mosquitoes, she couldn’t be sure which—enveloped his head. As he turned for shore, swatting at the insects with his free hand and swearing under his breath, she saw that he looked extremely put out, to say the least.
She grinned at him.
‘‘I came down here looking for Chloe,’’ he said, fixing her with a look that dared her to laugh again as he took two long, squelching strides onto solid ground. ‘‘Have you seen her?’’
Olivia nodded cautiously, uncertain of how much he knew of his daughter’s transgression. Probably quite a bit, if he had come down to the lake in search of her. ‘‘I talked to her for a few minutes, but then she ran—I think she ran back to the house.’’
Seth made a disgusted noise, dropped his shoe on the ground, and worked his foot back into it. The shoe was muddy, slimy, stinky, and soaking wet, but no more so than both his pant legs from the knee down and his right arm from the elbow. ‘‘Apparently she threw a vase full of flowers at Mallory.’’
‘‘I know.’’
The look he sent her did not bode well for Chloe. ‘‘I don’t know whether to tan her backside until she can’t sit down or take her to see a psychiatrist. Mallory votes for the psychiatrist.’’ Against the bronze of his skin, his teeth flashed white suddenly in a quick, humorless grin. ‘‘At least, that’s what she says. Given the choice, though, I think she’d really go for the spanking.’’
‘‘Oh, Seth, you wouldn’t.’’
‘‘Wouldn’t I?’’ He sounded grim.
They turned toward the path, and as they made their way through the undergrowth Seth automatically reached out to cup Olivia’s elbow for support. As his hand was still slimy wet, Olivia jumped, startled, and looked down at it wide-eyed.
‘‘Oh, sorry,’’ he said, withdrawing the offending hand. A touch of real humor lit his eyes. ‘‘We’ve got a full house for supper tonight, by the way. Mallory, her mother, David and Keith,
Charlie and Belinda, Phillip and Connie—Connie’s Phillip’s wife, I don’t think you’ve met her yet—and their kids, and Carl. Oh, yes, and Ira, I’m sure. No doubt I’m leaving someone out.’’
‘‘Good God,’’ Olivia said, appalled.
‘‘My feelings exactly. So of course I’m thrilled out of my mind to get home and find that my daughter has disgraced the pair of us again. The fact that I’m now going to have to face my future mother-in-law and explain how I ended up looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon just adds an extra element of interest to what has been an already very interesting day.’’
They were almost to the path, and once again Seth reached automatically to support Olivia as they stepped out of the tangle of vegetation onto the well-trodden trail. This time, Olivia glanced down before he touched her. At her glance he remembered, grimaced apologetically, and withdrew his muddy hand. Olivia started walking with Seth behind her.
‘‘Why so many?’’ she asked over her shoulder, noting the ruined fairy house with a sideways glance as they passed it but not saying anything to draw his attention to it. He was already angry enough at Chloe as it was.
‘‘Charlie wanted to have a family meeting to discuss possible treatment options for Big John. And Mallory’s mother apparently went school shopping with Chloe and Mallory. Mallory needed her for moral support, she said, in dealing with my spoiled, capricious, totally undisciplined child. Of course, Mallory was kind of mad when she said all that. I’m pretty sure she only meant about two-thirds of it.’’
‘‘Seth.’’ Olivia turned abruptly to face him, one hand coming up to flatten against his shirtfront, stopping him in his tracks. He looked down at the dirt-streaked hand splayed out over his red silk tie, and then up into her eyes. His expression changed in that instant, becoming impossible to read. The anger seemed to have disappeared, but she couldn’t be sure what had replaced it. His eyes were narrowed and almost hard as Olivia looked up at him earnestly. ‘‘Does Chloe remind you of anyone?’’
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