READ THESE SUPERB ROMANCES
FROM BESTSELLING AND
AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR
MARIAH STEWART
BROWN-EYED GIRL
PRICELESS
MOON DANCE
WONDERFUL YOU
Look for her delightful tale “Swept Away”
in the bestselling story collection
UNDER THE BOARDWALK
All available from Pocket Books
Don’t miss Mariah Stewart in the thrilling
romantic suspense anthology
WAIT UNTIL DARK
Coming soon from Pocket Books
“So, India Devlin”—he reached
out to touch her hair — “what
do we talk about now?”
She tried not to act like the wide-eyed girl she was beginning to feel like as he inched closer.
“Let’s see, we’ve talked about Corri. And August. Darla’s business. How we will proceed to investigate Ry’s death. Horseshoe crabs … bird migrations. Have we missed anything?”
His hand was on her elbow and he guided her toward him even as he moved toward her, bridging the slight distance between them with his body until his face was inches away from hers.
“I didn’t think so,” he murmured.
Praise for
Carolina Mist
“A wonderful, tender novel with romance of a period past and love with a little mystery and adventure woven in.”
—Rendezvous
“An inspiring tale of love, life and friendship that will live on in readers’ hearts long after the last word is read. Make sure you have plenty of time when you pick this one up because you will not want to put it down. …”
—Gina Gomez, America Online Romance Review Bulletin Board
“Contemporary romance lovers will find a lot to appreciate in this new offering from Mariah Stewart. All the good stuff is here….”
—Cathy Sova, Romantic Reader Web-Site
“An entertaining read. … As with Mariah Stewart’s other books, atmosphere abounds. …”
—Annette Carney, The Literary Times
“First-rate. … Mariah Stewart provides her fans with an extremely interesting novel.”
—Harriet Klausner, Affaire de Coeur
“As she has proved in the past, talented author Mariah Stewart excels at creating emotionally complex novels that are sure to touch your heart.”
—Jill M. Smith, Romantic Times
“Ms. Stewart has written a touching and compassionate story of life and love that wrapped around me like a cozy quilt. …”
—Tanzey Cutter, Old Book Barn Gazette
Praise for Mariah Stewart’s
Award-Winning Debut Novel
Moments in Time
“A sensational debut… [an] unforgettable first contemporary release. … a truly engrossing read.”
—Jill M. Smith, Romantic Times
“Cleverly and excellently done—Ms. Stewart is an author to watch. Her star is on the rise.”
— Rendezvous
“I loved it! A powerhouse of a book. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Gail Link, author of Encantadora and Forsaking All Others
“A fast-paced, page-turning tale of love’s discoveries, trials and triumphs.”
—Kasey Michaels, author of The Promise
Praise for the Award-Winning
A Different Light
“Engrossing from beginning to end! A wonderful story. … compelling, touching and romantic!”
—Kristina Wright, The Literary Times
“An excellent read.”
— Rendezvous
“A book of personal growth and triumph. … terrific. …”
— The Paperback Forum
“Warm, compassionate, and fulfilling. Great reading.”
—Jill M. Smith, Romantic Times
Books by Mariah Stewart
Moments in Time
A Different Light
Carolina Mist
Devlin’s Light
Wonderful You
Moon Dance
Priceless
Brown-Eyed Girl
Voices Carry
Published by POCKET BOOKS
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 1997 by Marti Robb
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 0-671-00415-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-6710-0415-6
eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-3301-6
First Pocket Books printing August 1997
POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.
Dedicated with love to Carol Gimbel Loder,
whose courage and faith humble me.
Chapter 1
With cool impartiality, India Devlin regarded the face of each and every mourner who stood at her brother’s open grave, wondering if perhaps she were, at that moment, looking into the deceptive eyes of a killer who hid a terrible secret while at the same time offering well-rehearsed condolences.
Everyone who was anyone in Devlin’s Light—and many who were not—had come to pay their last respects to Robert Forman Devlin. India, the only sibling of the deceased, shifted her sights first to the group gathered on the opposite side of the waiting grave, then to the large coffin, still draped and flower strewn, which rested almost at her feet. She tucked a strand of unruly blond hair behind her ear and shifted her weight, one foot to the other, all the while watching, watching, praying that someone would do something to give themselves away.
Ludicrous, she chided herself. As if Ry’s killer would step forward and announce that he—or she—was the guilty one.
But who?
Ry Devlin had been the last of the male line of those same Devlins who had come south from the New England colonies in the mid-1600s and whose name was borne by both the lighthouse they had built and the settlement they had founded on the uncertain coast just west of the point where the Atlantic Ocean met the Delaware Bay. Handsome, affable, full of the Devlin charm, Ry had been well liked, admired, respected by all who knew him, and he had seemed to be without an enemy in this world.
Well, he’d had at least one.
India shook her head, incredulous that she should find herself here, in this centuries-old burying place, at so unlikely an event. Once, as a child, India had unsuccessfully attempted to count the number of Devlins whose final resting spots lay behind the small, whitewashed church that had served many generations of the town’s residents. The weathered structure had gone unused for years, since long before India’s birth, though it was faithfully maintained through the efforts of the Devlin Trust; for the country church, like the ancient cemetery and much of the coastal boundary of Devlin’s Light, was on Devlin land.
Beyond Ry’s grave, in this corner of the churchyard, lay the remains of their father, Robert Sr., their mother, Nancy, and their paternal grandparents, Benjamin and Sarah. A little farther down a well-worn path, side by side and for all eternity, lay Benjamin’s parents and, a bit farther more, their parents. And so on, through more generations of Devlins all the way back to Eli, Samuel and Jonathan, the first Devlins to stand on the shores of the Delaware Bay.
And there, about six feet to the left of Ry’s intended e
ternal home, was the marker erected but two years earlier for Maris Steele Devlin. Ry’s wife of eight months, Maris had taken a rowboat out into the bay to go crabbing one summer morning and had been caught in a sudden squall. Now Maris was memorialized here, amidst the remains of a family she had never belonged to, had never really been part of.
Unconsciously India sought and found the hand of her late brother’s stepdaughter and gave it a squeeze, then gathered the little girl to her in an embrace meant to comfort, all the while wondering if this child would ever know comfort again. As dismayed as India had been over Ry’s choice of a wife, India had adored Maris’s daughter, Corrine. Sweet, shy Corri, who had dealt with loss far too often for one so young and who now, at six, believed she faced the world alone.
Not while I have life, India promised silently, her fingers gently untangling one of Corri’s strawberry-blond curls. She knew exactly how deep the little girl’s grief would be, and she sought, in whatever way she could, to absorb some of it.
India bowed her head and squeezed her eyes closed against the tears welling up behind them and tried once again to swallow the lump that would not be swallowed away as the Reverend Corson cleared his throat and began the final prayers over the heavy bronze coffin. It was long and wide—“oversized,” the funeral director had noted absently—to hold the body of the deceased. Ry had been a big man, tall and broad-shouldered. Agile as a cat, though, and gentle as the wishes they made when, as children, they had sat upon the rocks overlooking the inlet, waiting for the first of the evening stars to appear in the night sky.
“Go ’head, Indy, you first,” Ry would coax his little sister. “And make it a good wish. Good wishes always come true. …
Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight …
“But you can’t tell anybody what you wish for. Or it won’t come true,” he would caution her.
I wish I may, I wish I might …
“’cept you, Ry, right? I can tell you?” she would ask, wanting to share the secrets of her child’s heart with her much loved big brother.
Have this wish I wish tonight.
“’fraid not, Indy. Got to be a secret, even from me …”
Many years later, Indy could still hear Ry’s voice, see the twinkle in his blue eyes as he searched the heavens for her very own wishing star and guided her eyes to it, encouraging her to dream.
Who could have done this to so good a soul as Ry?
“We gather together today in memory of our friend and brother, Robert …” Reverend Corson’s soft voice floated with the ease of a mist across the tranquil bay even as India’s eyes continued to skip from one face to another.
Surely not you, Peter Mason. You who knew Ry since nursery school, who fished the bay with him and shared the treasures of the marshes with him.
“… and to commend his loving spirit to its everlasting rest…”
Nor you, Ely Townsend, who spent so many summer days on the front porch of our house on Darien Road, watching the girls saunter by in their short shorts and halter tops on their way to the small stretch of beach at the end of the street.
“and so we ask you, Father, to have mercy on his soul…”
Or you, Nat Tomlin, who, with Ry, built that old playhouse in the oak tree behind our garage, where you used to sneak cigarettes and girls. The playhouse Ry fell out of when he was fourteen and broke both his legs. No football, no baseball, for all his freshman year.
“… to open the gates of heaven to your servant…”
The cry of a solitary gull echoed across the dunes and over the bay to her left, and India turned toward the sound. From behind an ancient stand of scrub pine, Devlin’s Light rose toward a cloudless sky. Though a storm was in the forecast for later in the afternoon, no sign of it could be seen at eleven in the morning. The shadow of the lighthouse reached almost to the jetty that stretched into the deep blue-green calm of the bay. Here and there a fish leaped out of the water as if to tease the ever-present gulls. But it was the lighthouse, always, that drew the eye and held the gaze.
A three-story clapboard, Queen Anne-style house, shaped like an L, with a six-story tower at the juncture of the two parts of the structure, Devlin’s Light had weathered many storms and had always survived intact. A few of the slate shingles had blown off in this storm or that, its red shutters had faded some and it sorely needed a good painting, but the lighthouse had stood on its present site since the year of its construction, 1876.
The irony of Ry being laid to rest almost in the shadow of the lighthouse that had so dominated his life was not lost on India. As a boy he had played in it. As a man he had devoted much time and energy to its restoration. There was no one spot on this earth he had loved more than he had loved the lighthouse.
The fact that someone had chosen to attack Ry in that place he loved above all others struck India as nothing less than obscene. It was merely an act of fate that he had not actually died there, but in the back of the ambulance that had sped off through the early morning hours, sirens shrieking, though they’d not pass more than five cars between Devlin’s Light and Cape Hospital Emergency Room some twenty miles away.
“… and to grant him everlasting rest and peace in the harbor of your love, O Lord …”
An act of fate, she recalled, and of Nicholas Enright, who, from the deck of the old crabbers cabin he had purchased from Ry, watched as the lantern’s light had ascended the stairwell, then flashed a sudden and erratic descent before being extinguished at the bottom of the steep steps. It was Nicholas Enright who had called both the police and the ambulance, before setting off by rowboat across the small inlet to the lighthouse; Nicholas Enright who had found Ry at the foot of the winding stairs, who had ridden with him in the ambulance to the hospital, who had held Ry’s head and heard his last words and been the last human contact her brother had known on this earth.
India’s eyes wandered across the faces of the strangers in the crowd, wondering which one was Nicholas Enright, certain that he stood among them; since she’d never met the man who had moved to Devlin’s Light the summer before, she could not pick him out. Ry had had so many friends— most of whom she had never met—from Bayview State College, where he had taught for the past few years, from the environmental group that had worked with him to preserve the marshes, from the historic preservation group he had joined some years before to encourage renovation of the town’s many ancient structures.—Nicholas Enright could be any one of the men, young or old, who had come to pay their respects.
“… as we commend our brother Robert unto You …”
Nicholas Enright had shared her brother’s last breath and, from the accounts of the ambulance attendants with whom she had spoken, had done so with gentle affection and the greatest of care. She needed to meet him, to thank him. And, she reminded herself, she had questions to ask that only he, as close a witness to the events of that night as had come forward, could answer.
“… in His name. Amen.”
“Amen.”
“What else can I do for you, Aunt August?” India asked, placing a stack of bone-china cups and saucers on the sideboard in the dining room.
“There are more plates in the kitchen, on the counter there.” Augustina Devlin waved a small, deeply tanned hand in the direction of the tidy kitchen that had served generations of Devlins. “I expect half the town or better will be coming to call at any minute. Weddings and funerals. It’s the same all over. Brings ’em all out. There now, what’d I tell you?”
August adjusted large round tortoise-shell eyeglasses on her no-nonsense face, which was framed by a cap of short-cropped, straight salt-and-pepper hair, and nodded toward the front window, past which seemed to drift a goodly percentage of the population of Devlin’s Light. It was only a matter of seconds before the screen door opened and the first of the townsfolk appeared in the front hallway.
Come to share our grief, Indy thought as she moved with open arms toward Liddy Osborn, who had gone through school with Au
nt August in the one-room brick schoolhouse at the foot of Peck’s Lane. Liddy, it seemed, had been there to share all the Devlins’ sorrows. She had been there to hold a weeping Indy the day they’d found Robert Sr., Indy’s father and August’s brother, dead of a heart attack out on the dunes off Lighthouse Road. And Liddy had been there when Nancy died, though India was just a baby when she’d lost her mother and had no firsthand recollection of that. Liddy had been August’s best friend, always. A dear, giving woman, Liddy had seen her own share of sorrow but had refused to let it destroy her loving heart.
And Grant Richardson, there in the hallway, behind Liddy. A county judge, as Indy’s father had been, and a friend of the Devlin family for as long as Indy could remember. Al Carpenter, the chief of police, and his wife, Patsy. Mrs. Spicer, the librarian, and Mrs. Donaldson, Indy’s third-grade teacher. Todd and Wanda Fisher, who ran the general store, and Ed Beggins, Ry’s first piano teacher. Bill Scott, who used to take Ry surf fishing off of Cape May. And Liz Porter, who, as owner of the local paper, the Beacon, knew everything about everyone. All come to share the memories and the pain. All part of Devlin’s Light, as much as she was.
India had not, until this moment, realized how much she missed it, this sense of connecting, though each time she came home the past few years, it took her a little longer to shake off the city and the ugliness that came from having to prosecute its dregs. As an assistant district attorney in Paloma, Pennsylvania, she had seen enough crudeness and pain and evil over the past five years to last a lifetime. Every time she returned to Devlin’s Light, it became harder and harder to remember what drew her back to Paloma. Obligation, she told herself. Certainly it wasn’t Ron Stillwell, the fellow assistant district attorney she had, up until about six months ago, dated pretty regularly. At one time—it embarrassed her now to recall—she had actually toyed with the idea of marrying Ron, until someone had left an anonymous note on her desk tipping her off to the fact that he was also seeing a young law clerk on a lot more regular basis than he’d been seeing her.
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