by White, Karen
Linc placed his empty plate and glass on the ground by his chair. “Don’t worry about the basket. I’m only going to be a temporary resident until the house is completely refurbished and sold. With me doing so much of the work, it made sense to be closer. I’ll still have my town house in Charleston, but this will work for the time being.”
His gaze stole over to the neighboring house, at the raw wood and empty windows, and he felt its aloneness as if he, too, were standing naked and alone on the edge of the dune, waiting for the next strong wind.
“Well, it will be good to have you in our community. I don’t think we’ve ever had an architect living among us before. Unless you count the summer people. I’m sure there must have been one or two over the years.” Lessie smiled, then rose to start gathering plates. “I’m really surprised, though, William, that you didn’t move into this house instead of selling it to Jillian. I would think that would have been easier than living in a house that’s being renovated around your ears.”
He felt Jillian’s gaze on him and he turned to meet her eyes.
“I wasn’t aware you owned this house, William. I don’t remember seeing your name on the papers. And I’m pretty sure you never mentioned it.”
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Yes, well, my firm owned it, actually. And I never thought it was important enough to mention.” Avoiding her eyes, he stood and handed his dirty plate to Lessie.
“I guess we’d better get started with our tour, Jillian, before we overstay our welcome.” Lessie stacked the dirty plates on a tray and headed inside, followed by Grace and Janie.
Linc moved to follow, but Jillian called him back. For a moment, their gazes locked and he waited for what she would say to him.
“I need help. I can’t get off the swing.”
Relief flooded through him, and he felt angry with himself for even feeling relief. He had nothing to hide, no guilty feelings. He moved toward her and took her arm and helped her off the swing.
He held the door open for her and she walked past him but stopped, leveling her cool brown eyes at him. “Don’t think this conversation is over, Linc. I may be fat and have as much grace as a hippo, but I’m not stupid.” She moved past him and into the house.
He watched her walk away as he shut the door behind him, and wondered why he had to force down a smile.
They walked through Jillian’s house first, with Linc leading the way and Lessie close on his heels with a notepad, busily scribbling. Linc made a great show of opening up all doors—most newly painted or stained—except for the downstairs coat closet. He turned the knob and yanked on it, but it didn’t open. “I think the house has shifted, because this door is firmly wedged inside the frame and I can’t budge it. We’ll figure something out.” He slapped his palm against the surface, then moved on.
Because her back was hurting, Jillian stayed downstairs when the entourage climbed to the second level, and Janie and Grace stayed with her. Jillian wasn’t sure what to make of Janie. When she watched her talking with Grace, it was as if Janie were just another seven-year-old. It was there in the way she held herself, with the loose-limbed poise of a child who is blissfully ignorant of the world’s perception of her. But when she caught Janie’s gaze on her, there was a depth in her eyes that reminded Jillian of her daughter and of something Martha Weber had said about Gracie, about her being an old soul.
Jillian sat down on the bottom step and watched Janie and Grace sitting cross-legged on the parlor floor, facing each other and playing with Spot. They both looked up as if on cue, and Jillian stared. The faces were different, as was their coloring, but the light in their eyes, light that seemed to shine beyond their years and through a person’s heart, was the same.
Lessie’s voice drifted down from upstairs, along with knocking against plaster. “I was so hoping to find a secret passage or at least a secret room. It would make my assignment so much more interesting.”
“Sorry to disappoint.” Linc’s voice sounded bored and strained with impatience. “Like I mentioned before, there’s nothing on any of the blueprints that show anything like that. Besides, both of the houses were completely remodeled in the ’twenties, and if there had been something before then, it would have been discovered.”
Lessie let out a heavy sigh. “Well, maybe we’ll find something at your house.”
Jillian pulled herself to a stand when she heard their footsteps approaching the stairs.
Lessie spoke again. “Then again, what if the people who did the re-modeling were bootleggers or something? I mean, that was Prohibition, right? Maybe they found something and just kept it quiet for a reason.”
They came into view at the top of the stairs, and Jillian saw Linc roll his eyes. “I guess anything’s possible, but I know every inch of these two houses, and I haven’t found a thing.”
As they passed by her, Jillian said, “I know there are hidden nooks and crannies at the other house. William can show them to you. Not big enough to hide a person, I don’t think, but certainly interesting enough to include in your paper. I believe they were original to the house.”
Lessie’s brows raised with interest. “Thank you. I’ll definitely check it out. But it’s odd, isn’t it, that these two identical houses wouldn’t have the same hiding places?”
Linc gently pressed on Lessie’s back as if to propel her more quickly to the door, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Maybe they were added later by one of the owners. That would explain it.”
Lessie paused in the doorway and looked back at Jillian. “Are you coming with us?”
She shook her head. “No, I’ll stay here with Grace and Janie. Take your time. I know William’s just dying to show you every square inch of his house.”
“That’s right. Just dying to.” Linc narrowed his eyes at Jillian before closing the door in her face.
Jillian waited until Gracie was asleep and all the lights were turned on in the house before leaving it just before sunset to go find Linc. She could hear his radio and the music of the Tams dancing with the sand across the dunes. Gingerly, she picked her way toward the house next door, a flashlight in one hand and a peace offering of the remaining pecan tarts in the other.
She stood for a long time watching him before he noticed her. He had a sawhorse on level ground, and he seemed to be turning small sections of lumber into a saw blade. He had removed his shirt and wore only jeans and work boots, revealing more male skin than she’d seen in a very long time. She couldn’t help but notice that he was no longer the skinny, gangly boy she remembered. Oh, Lord, not at all.
He looked up at that moment and she felt hot blood flood her cheeks. Damn these pregnancy hormones. “I brought you a tart . . . um . . . some tarts. I figured my waistline didn’t need them, and you seemed to enjoy the three you had this afternoon.”
After flipping off the saw and the radio, he moved to the porch steps and put on his shirt. She watched as long, tanned fingers moved over the buttons, the movement flicking off some of the wood chips that had stuck to the sweat of his hands and forearms. They were artist’s hands, hands meant to create things of beauty from solid blocks of nothing special. Just, she supposed, like he had done with his own life. His hands dropped to his sides, and she remembered the carved box with the intertwining Ls, and met his eyes again.
“Thanks.” He took the plate from her hands and put it on the porch.
She faced him, trying again to find the boy she’d once known, the boy she could talk to about anything, but couldn’t. Somewhere on his journey into manhood, he’d found the need to hide behind William Rising—a man she wouldn’t have recognized except for his hands.
“I’d like to know why you took a loss on this house to sell it to me when you could have made a decent profit by selling it to somebody else.”
He looked out behind her to where the sun had begun its long descent. “I was just trying to help you out. I knew how much you loved your grandmother’s house, and when Lessie told me you were l
ooking at it, I made a quick decision.”
Her eyes narrowed as she considered him. “That’s a bunch of crap and you know it.”
Half of his mouth turned up, but there was no humor reflected in his eyes. “Come on, Jillian. Tell me what you really think.”
She placed her hands on her hips, as she remembered her grandmother doing when Jillian was a child and had done something wrong. It seemed to give her strength. “Okay. I will. I’ve been thinking about this all day—ever since Lessie dropped her little bombshell about you selling me the house for under market value.” She dug her toe into the sand with a hard thrust. “I think you wanted me nearby for something. Did you think you’d check my mail every day to see if Lauren was writing to me? Or visiting me? Do you think I’ve kept her existence a secret all these years just to punish you for a crime we both know you didn’t commit? What is it, Linc? What made you do something underhanded when all you really ever needed to do was just to ask me?”
His jaw worked as he clenched his teeth, and she knew she had pushed him too far. It didn’t matter, though. Nothing mattered except for her and Grace and the new baby, and their ability to find whatever peace they could in their new home. Dealing with Linc was just a detour—something that needed to be taken care of before the peace could come.
Linc took a step toward her, but she didn’t back away. His voice was quiet when he finally spoke. “I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with the way I remember your father accusing me of murdering Lauren and making sure I was hauled into jail. And then the way that you disappeared right after that, and I never saw you again. Maybe I was thinking that after all these years I might finally get some answers if I could have you nearby long enough to figure out what I needed to know.”
Her fingers lightly touched his arm before falling away. “All you had to do was ask, Linc.”
“You never wrote. You never tried to contact me. Why would I think that you would want to answer any of my questions?”
“My parents sent me back to Atlanta, and I didn’t know how to reach you. You had left the island and nobody knew where you’d gone. I did try, Linc. I did.”
He finally stepped away, as if making sure she was more than touching distance from him. “Well, obviously not hard enough. And he was your father, Jillian. That makes you guilty by association.”
A tight ball formed in her throat. “I never doubted your innocence, Linc. Please don’t put me in the same corner as my daddy. There’s a lot of things I can forgive, but that’s not one of them.”
“It was pretty easy for me to do, Jillian. Your father said that you never wanted to see me again. That you blamed me for Lauren’s disappearance.” He stuck his fists into his pockets and stared up at the sky for a brief moment. “He tried to give me the star I had made for you—said you didn’t want it anymore. I didn’t take it back.”
Jillian felt stunned for a moment, as if all the breath in her body had been beaten out of her. “I never gave that to him. It meant too much to me—you know that. He must have taken it from my drawer and put it back without my ever knowing about it.” She swallowed, fighting tears. “But you didn’t even try to contact me to make sure!”
“He was pretty convincing, and when you never showed up to tell me different, it made it easier for me to believe that you thought the worst of me, along with everybody else.”
They faced each other in the fading light, listening to their own hard breathing and the crash of the waves below on the beach. Finally, Jillian said, “Good night, Linc.” Grasping her flashlight, she carefully began her slow, lumbering journey back into the circle of light around her house.
She heard the note of belligerence in his voice and wondered if he did, too. “Why did your husband leave you?”
She didn’t expect his words to hurt as much as they did. She took a deep breath and faced him again. “What makes you think it wasn’t the other way around?”
There was a long pause, and for a minute she thought that he wasn’t going to answer her. Then he spoke. “Because you would never give up. In all those years I knew you, if there was a speck of hope to hold on to, you’d find a death grip and wouldn’t let go. I don’t imagine you’ve changed all that much.”
She looked away, noting with dread that darkness was falling, and curious that he would remember that about her. “No. I don’t guess I have.” A wave of exhaustion hit her, as if she’d just run for miles, and she found it difficult to hold back her shoulders. She managed to suck in a breath before speaking again. “Good night, Linc.” Clutching her flashlight, she again began to make her clumsy way across the dunes.
“Grace said you have something I’m looking for.”
She stopped again and turned around. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure. She said Lauren told her that you have whatever it is I’m supposed to be looking for.”
She managed to keep the trembling out of her voice. “My daughter has a vivid imagination. She talks to imaginary people like they were real.”
“But why Lauren? Why would this one be called Lauren?”
“I don’t know. Before we came here, she’d never heard me say the name.” She watched as he took something out of his shirt pocket and slid it over his head. It was the sand dollar necklace Grace had made for him.
He turned as if to walk away, then faced her again. After several deep breaths he said, “I feel her here. I feel her presence whenever I’m in this house. And I can’t help but wonder if that means she’s really dead.”
A lump formed in her throat. “Don’t say it, Linc. I have lived all these years with the hope that she’s alive—somewhere. And that one day she’ll come back. I can’t stand to consider anything else.”
Total darkness had fallen now, and she turned to face the vast blackness that separated the two houses. She turned on the feeble glow of the flashlight. A light touch brushed her elbow. “I’ll walk you across.”
Grateful, she nodded. When they had stopped in front of her house, Linc asked, “Are you going to look for your new star tonight?”
“I’m only going as far as the boardwalk, and I’m not bringing my telescope. I can see what I need to see with my naked eye. So you don’t need to worry about me.”
He looked at her for a long moment without speaking. “I wasn’t worrying. I just don’t want any dead bodies on the beach. It’s bad for resale value.”
She gave him a shaky smile. “Thanks for your concern. But I’ll be fine.”
“I know. You’ve always been like a cat, haven’t you? Always landing on your feet.”
Before she could ask him what he meant, he had started walking home. It was then that she recognized the old Linc; it was in the way he walked, with his shoulders thrown back and his hands clenched in fists of bright energy. It was the walk of a boy who always pictured himself alone in the world, someone who always had to fight his own battles. And to some extent, he always had.
He flicked on his radio, and she heard the music again, dredging up memories of long-past summer nights. With a sigh, she looked up at the ribbon of stars above, marveling how such objects of light and beauty could be tethered to nothing, but still find the strength to shine with brilliance night after night, showing lost souls the way through the darkness.
She hummed to herself as she made her way up the steps and into the house, the music following her until she closed the door behind her.
CHAPTER 9
JILLIAN DIDN’T FEEL FIFTEEN AS SHE WIPED THE TEARS OFF HER FACE with the back of her hand and lay back in the sand, staring up at the darkening sky and at the stars that had begun to blink. Her birthday had slipped by completely unremarked, but she had thought she’d at least feel older.
She could feel the rhythm of the surf under her head, and beyond that the heavy tread of someone running. Turning, she spotted Linc running toward her, long, tanned legs spinning in her direction under short cutoff jeans. As usual, his hair was too long and too wild, but Jillian thought it suit
ed the spirit of the boy underneath it.
He skidded to a stop in front of her, spraying her with sand, and she threw her arm over her eyes so he couldn’t tell she’d been crying.
His voice sounded out of breath. “Where’s Lauren?”
She kept her arm over her eyes. “I haven’t seen her. She said she’d meet me here before sunset.” She bit her lower lip to stop it from trembling. “She knows I don’t like the dark.”
“Why are you crying?”
She moved her arm away and stared at him, wondering not for the first time how he always knew everything about her. “It’s not been much of a birthday.”
“Sorry.” He sat down next to her, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a small object before poking her in the arm with it. “This is for you.”
“For me—really?”
He gave her a halfhearted shove on her shoulder. “It’s your birthday, right? Happy birthday.”
She sat up with her palm out, and he laid a beautiful wooden star in her hand. “I carved it myself.”
Jillian examined the five-pointed object, marveling at the rounded edges and smooth curves. It was as if he had pulled a shining star from the sky and transformed it into a material she could hold next to her heart. “It’s beautiful,” she said, and then began to cry.
Awkwardly, he put his arm around her. “Don’t cry, Jillian. I don’t want you to cry anymore.”
Sniffling, she said, “I’m not crying.”
“Right. So stop moisturizing your eyes.”
She kept her eyes focused on the star. “My mother said she’s not celebrating my birthdays anymore because they make her feel old. Grandma was baking me a cake, but it won’t be ready by the time we leave.”
She felt Linc stiffen beside her. “You’re leaving? You’ve only been here a week. Aren’t you supposed to stay all summer?”