Stargazey Point

by Shelley Noble

  Cab smiled. He just couldn’t see Beau basking in the limelight of a gallery show, but that was probably because he’d only really known Beau the last year. When he was a kid, he just accepted Beau, with his block of wood, as a man who was kind to children, but a man unto himself.

  Cab tried to imagine him as young and dreaming of becoming a painter. It wasn’t easy. But he could imagine old Beau Crispin Senior putting an end to that dream and shipping him off to a military academy. It was no secret that even though the old man was generous toward the town, he had a mean streak when it came to his children.

  Ned had once told him that right before Beau had left for the merchant marines, he’d come to his house, bloody and beaten.

  “I think I killed my father,” he said before he passed out in Ned’s kitchen.

  But Beau hadn’t killed him, just fought back when old Beau had threatened to smash his hands. All over some portrait no one had ever seen. Cab wondered if it was among the ones hidden in the Crispin House attic. And whether it would finally be displayed.

  Chapter 24

  JuJu Jenny’s grandmother, Momo, arrived at three o’clock for her interview.

  “She’s been pesterin’ me and pesterin’ me to come down here and tell y’all about that old carousel. So here I am.”

  “Thanks for coming.” Abbie explained a little about the documentary and showed her to the interview area where she’d set up the tripod in front of a straight-backed chair.

  Momo sat down on the edge of the seat, clearly nervous. “What’chu want me to do?” she asked.

  “Just tell us what you remember about the old Stargazey carousel. But first let us get a test and a sound check. Okay, crew, are we ready?”

  Kyle, with Jerome’s help, adjusted the light for Momo’s diminutive size. Jenny stood at Abbie’s side with her questions written in large letters. Dani stood on a chair behind the camera.

  Kyle moved away, and Abbie lifted her hand. “In three, in two, in one.” She dropped her hand, Dani pressed record like they had been practicing. Abbie nudged Jenny.

  “Momo, what’chu ’member about that merry-go-round?”

  Momo straightened her skirt with both hands.

  Abbie leaned over to Jenny and prompted. “First ask her her name and who she is.”

  “She’s my grandma.”

  Momo shook her head. “My name’s Momo. And I’m Jenny’s grandma. Her mama was too little to remember that carousel, but I do. It was a mighty fine carousel. Mr. Ned always gave the local boys and girls a ride. Afore that it was owned by a Mr. Clayton. In those days nobody round here could afford to ride that carousel. Just the summer folks. Only cost about a nickel, but none a us had a nickel.

  “But then Mr. Ned bought it and gave everybody a ride. All’s you had to do was bring him a piece of garbage.”

  “Garbage?” Abbie asked.

  “Yes’m. Like Coke bottles and candy wrappers and such. Mister Ned just took whatever we had, didn’t make no matter to him. He’d just take it and toss it in this big old barrel, then let’chu go up and choose your animal. That was a fine thing to do on a summer’s night. Mighty fine.”

  Abbie nudged Jenny and pointed to the next question.

  “What was your favorite thing to ride?”

  “Oh, I liked them all, but the ones that went up and down were the best. I was little then myself, but the older kids would sit in the Neptune chariot or one of the other seats with their sweethearts.

  “And now young Mister Cabot’s gonna bring it all back like it was.”

  Abbie thanked her and waited for Kyle’s mother to take her place and for Kyle, and the twins, to go through the routine of setting up the shot.

  “The carousel wasn’t the only thing to do on a Friday night,” Kyle’s mother said into the camera. “But it sure was the most fun. The lights and the music just made you feel all fizzy inside. And if you didn’t have your nickel, Mr. Ned wouldn’t turn you away.

  “Sometimes, he’d just give you the loan of the nickel. He didn’t expect you to pay him back. Not in money ’cause none of us had much. We’d just pass that same old nickel back and forth all summer long. And our mamas would make him jam and corn bread and fried okra and all sorts of things ’cause he was so nice to us.”

  “What else was there to do on the boardwalk?” Kyle asked.

  “Oh, there was an arcade, where you could throw things for prizes and guess the number of marbles in this big old bowl. And a machine that you could move around this claw thing and snag yourself a prize. And dancin’ at the end of the pier, and car’mel corn. A guy with one leg shot off in the war sold cotton candy. And another one sold foot-long hot dogs out of a cart.

  “And across the street there were shops with souvenirs. This building right here was a store that sold local crafts and such. But they all cost money. So we mostly hung out at the carousel.”

  Next up was Pauli’s grandfather. “Yessiree,” he said. “I proposed to your grandma on that carousel. It was in the Neptune car. Ya see, his tail sorta came over you so nobody could see. I thought that would be real romantic. Mr. Ned said he’d make sure nobody else got to it before I did.” He winked. “Neptune was mighty popular with the young folks.

  “Miss Sally Gentry she was in those days. And I knelt down right there beside the seat and asked her to be my wife. We been married goin’ on fifty years now. I used to tell everybody if they wanted to ensure themselves a long, happy marriage, propose under Neptune’s tail.

  “We sure were sad when Ned closed it down for the last time. Glad it’s coming back. It belongs down here.”

  An hour later, Abbie transferred the last of the interviews to her computer and closed up for the night. All the kids were gone. Several more family members had added their names to the list to be interviewed. There was a good bit of ambient noise on the footage, because they had no soundproof place to use for filming, but it gave the filming a sense of energy, like something exciting was going on just out of frame.

  She added stills of the four interviewees to the pictures that were already posted to the “board thing.”

  She looked out the window at the carousel. All the lights were blazing. Cab and Beau were still working. They’d be working late for the next few weeks in order to finish in time for the opening. This might be a perfect time to take some of her own footage for a publicity trailer without the children underfoot. Besides, she wasn’t really looking forward to facing Millie after that scene earlier.

  She checked the camera battery and headed for the carousel, where she met Silas, Hadley, and two other men coming out the door.

  They nodded. Silas stopped for a second. “They still in there. Working like they were possessed. We’ve finished for tonight.” He tipped his head and joined the others as they made their way across the darkening street.

  She stepped inside. Cab was at the workbench. He looked up, stood, started to cross to meet her.

  She felt a little flushed. She hadn’t seen him since that unexpected kiss, and the repeat performance. She was suddenly embarrassed to face him, and just a little giddy at being near him.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Looks like things are really coming together,” she said, looking around instead of at him.

  “Yeah. We might just make it. The storm windows are in. The painters are coming tomorrow, the exterior should be finished by next week.” He took a deep breath. “And then we replace the animals.”

  “I can’t wait,” she said. “Everybody is really excited. We have a long list of people wanting to be interviewed.”

  He nodded.

  “I know you’re busy, but I do need to get some footage of you and Beau working, if that’s okay. I’ll take some for the carousel documentary, and then I can take some that you can use for advertisement. Free of charge as a thank-you.”

  “That would be g
reat. I’ve been sending out some Facebook stuff, took a few stills.” He heaved a sigh. “I really didn’t want to have to do all that myself. Maybe I can hire someone down the road.”

  “So go back to work and I’ll just roam around. I’ll try not to bother you too much.”

  Light flickered in his eyes as he looked at her. “You can bother me anytime you want. I think I made that clear.”

  She laughed. “I’ll keep you to that,” she said purposely misunderstanding his meaning.

  She set up some handheld shots, filming different aspects of the carousel from various angles. She moved in behind Cabot and zoomed in on the miniature carousel that sat on a block of wood on the workbench. He glanced up and smiled at her; she concentrated on the viewfinder and holding the camera steady. She moved away, and she felt Cab’s eyes follow her as she moved to her next shot. It was an effort to concentrate on her work.

  She didn’t like how her body was betraying her. Her mind might not like it, but the rest of her . . . She was surprised and a little excited that she could actually feel that way again. And she felt the ties that held her to the past loosen just a bit more.

  She went into the workroom, panned across the finished panels and the partially restored animals. Moved in to capture details. She hit her stride, entered that place where the work practically created itself—and was surprised when the sound of her own name rang as if from a deep well. She pulled herself away from her subject matter to see Beau standing next to her.

  “We’re closing up. Cabot and I think you’ve done enough work for one day.”

  She laughed and rolled stiff shoulders. “Is that a polite way of telling me to get lost?”

  “No. You’ve been working at the center all day and now here. Time for you to take some time for yourself. Now let’s go get Cabot before he gets involved in something else.”

  Cab was waiting for them by the front door. Abbie and Beau waited while he locked up, and then they walked across the tarmac together.

  Beau stopped them. “I told Silas I’d meet him over at Hadley’s, if you wouldn’t mind walking Abbie home.”

  “I can walk—”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Then I’ll say good night.” Beau ambled away.

  “You really don’t—”

  “I’d like to. Besides, Beau won’t let you walk alone and I don’t think he’s ready to go home and have to deal with Millie. I heard there was a dustup this morning over the miniature and painting.”

  “I can’t say that I’m looking forward to it either. I just don’t understand why she was so upset. Cab, they’re brilliant. And they’ve been hidden away for decades. Why?”

  “There’s no understanding some things, and this may be one of them. Families are full of secrets and animosities that no one ever learns.”

  Abbie looked at him. Were they? It always seemed to Abbie that her family was too open about what they were feeling.

  She and Cab walked down the road without speaking. It was a comfortable silence, which neither seemed eager to interrupt. They were halfway through the arbor of trees before Cab asked, “So when do you think you’ll finish the documentary?”

  “Hopefully for the opening of the carousel. I was thinking of having a guest viewing the day before, though the number of people the center can hold is prohibitive. Once the carousel opens, we could run a continuous loop, maybe at the inn or the art gallery.”

  “Then what?”

  She looked up at him. “I haven’t really thought. I may enter it into a few contests. There are organizations that accept student films.”

  “I meant with you. What’s next for you?”

  She looked into the darkness between the trees. Shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet.” She hadn’t even thought about what she would do after she left Stargazey Point. She only knew that she wouldn’t go back to being the weathergirl.

  They fell silent again, and Abbie became very conscious of the space between them. What had begun as a calculated safe distance began to change, seemed to vibrate with energy, drawing them closer. Which was ridiculous. She was just feeling their mutual attraction.

  She glanced at Cab to see if he was feeling the same pull. From the corner of her eye she saw a shadow move silently through the trees.

  “Did you see that?”

  “What?”

  “Something or someone in the trees. I think they were watching us.”

  “Probably just a trick of the light.” But he slipped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, and in another minute they stepped into the clearing before Crispin House.

  Cab stayed only long enough for Marnie to answer the door. Abbie watched from the window until he crossed the clearing and started down the drive, watched until he melted into the shadows of the arbor and disappeared from her view.

  When she turned, Marnie was watching her. “I saved you a plate; it’s in the kitchen. And don’t worry, the coast is clear. Millie has taken to her room . . . again.”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve caused a rift between you and Millie and Beau. It just seemed like such a waste to leave Beau’s paintings hidden away. And I didn’t coerce him into agreeing to show one to Dom.”

  Marnie poured out two glasses of wine she kept in the mudroom. “You’re right. It is a waste. I had no idea the paintings were there. And you didn’t cause a rift. Whatever the big bugaboo is, it’s between Beau and our father. Millie adores Beau, ordinarily. She wouldn’t have reacted that way if Daddy hadn’t planted it in her mind.”

  “But that had to be decades ago.”

  “For most of us. Not for Millie. Now don’t give it another thought; she always does this, whenever she’s upset or doesn’t get her way, or if things are happening that frighten her or that she doesn’t understand.

  “You look dead tired. Go to bed. I’ll worry about the dishes. And Millie.”

  Abbie trudged up the stairs wondering how long it would take for Millie to come out of the sulks this time. Or if Abbie’s actions had pushed them into a permanent family rift. Whatever had happened all those years ago—it had to be fifty or more—it wasn’t over yet. And she realized as she climbed into bed that she’d been watching it play out day after day after night since the first day she arrived at Crispin House.

  She fell asleep almost as soon as she climbed into bed. And she dreamed not of Werner, or Cab, but of Millie and Marnie as young women, dancing beneath the stars.

  A crew of painters were already at work when Abbie passed the carousel the next day. She had to consciously make herself keep walking. Her destination was the ramshackle community center, not Cab Reynolds or his carousel. Not today anyway.

  She spent the morning leaning over her laptop, scanning the Internet, and was still there when the kids arrived, bringing several parents, some of whom weren’t signed up for an interview. Word had traveled quickly about the carousel project. They seemed more interested in cooperating with carousel interviews than they had been with the family histories. Abbie wondered if Ervina had anything to do with that.

  The first interviewee was an old man who had known Ned Reynolds personally. “Me and Ned used to come down to the carousel when we was boys. Never had a nickel. Hell, nobody much had a nickel in those days. We’d just go down and lie on the grass and watch them horses go round and round. We could stay there for hours watchin’ the summer people bring their chil’run to ride. Ned said someday he was gonna make some money and buy that carousel and he wouldn’t never turn nobody away.” He slapped his bony knee. “And damn if he didn’t do it.

  “He ran that carousel every day, even in the winter. ’Course times were better then. People came here all year-round, even for Christmas. Ned would dress up those animals in red ribbons, put that cotton snow all over the center drum, and play carols. One year he got a touch of bronchitis so I went down to spell him. Don’t know ho
w he did it day after day. Nearly drove me crazy listening to that music all day long. If Ned hadn’t gotten better fast, I mighta had to rip that music right clear out of the player machine.”

  “What you saying, Micah Jones?” A plump woman in a purple running suit hurried into the frame before Abbie could stop her. She turned to the camera and said, “You keep that thing runnin’, Dani. That music saved our bacon back in ’84. Hell of a year, what with the hurricane sweeping half the town away.

  “And the economy going down the drain. Folks were hurtin’ I don’t mind tellin’ you. One night in the middle of the coldest night I can remember—it was a couple days after Christmas, I think—carousel music comes blaring out of the dark. It keeps playing and playing. Lordy, we were afraid it was judgment day.

  “So my man gets up and gets dressed to go see what’s up. He comes back a few minutes later. ‘Get up,’ he says. ‘Get the kids up.’ I’m scared outta my wits but I do and we all go down to the boardwalk and there’s the carousel all lit up and there’s Ned in a Santa hat standing in front of the old craft shop, this building right here, and the door is open and the lights are on and heat is blastin’ and there’s a long old table with a spread of food the likes of which you’ve never seen.

  “We crowded inside and had us a feast. Ned said that food fell off the truck. But we knew better. Ned Reynolds never stole a thing in his life. So it’s the least we can do to help young Cabot get the carousel up and running again. Maybe it’ll bring prosperity back.”

  “That’s right, Ivy Lee. You tell it like it is,” came a voice behind Abbie.

  “Amen,” said another. Then another “Amen” and another. Several women had crowded into the doorway and stopped to hear Ivy’s story.

  “Those were good days.”

  “Gone forever,” someone said.