It was wonderful inside. The heavy, dark furniture and scratchy woolen carpets were gone. Oak tables and bookcases filled the downstairs rooms. Ceiling fans whirred softly, fluttering the edges of a magazine left open on a chair.
In the kitchen, a jar of yellow poppies wilted in a blue mason jar on a white-tiled table. A pot of chicken flavored with tarragon and swimming with noodles and carrots bubbled on the stove. He put back the burning-hot lid he’d lifted without a potholder and raced up the stairs laughing, taking two steps at a time.
The bedrooms were beautiful, filled with brass-and-enameled beds covered with handmade quilts. There were only four instead of six. Two were bathrooms now. He rushed into one of the bedrooms, then outside through another set of French doors onto the widow’s walk.
The railing was new, waist high and painted white. Last time he was here, the old one had been broken and rotted. He remembered that now, but he didn’t remember if the chaise longue padded with yellow cushions had been there or not. Why couldn’t he remember?
His joy fading, he went back inside and sat on the foot of a bed made with pink sheets and a double-wedding-ring quilt. The iron spring beneath the mattress didn’t squeak. He clasped his hands between his knees and looked at himself in the mirror bolted to the wall above a cherry dresser.
His hair was wind tousled and too long, the ends curling just below the collar of his full-sleeved white shirt. The top buttons were missing, the gaped front exposed his throat and a fair portion of his chest. Rusty red stains splashed the front of his shirt. Dirt streaked his brown leather vest and buff-colored breeches. Sand caked his knee-high boots.
He didn’t like boots. He remembered that now. They were too damned hot, but they protected him from snakes. Only slightly more than he hated boots, he hated snakes, so he wore them. But not here. He never wore them here. He didn’t need them. There were crabs and starfish in the tidal pools, but not a single cobra or homed viper within two thousand miles of Stonebridge, Massachusetts.
He crossed his right leg over his left knee, reached for his boot and caught another glimpse of himself in the mirror. Disgraceful. He’d find a barber who spoke English when next he trekked the three days by mule cart to Cairo for supplies. He’d get a haircut. Or buy a ribbon in the bazaar.
A shiver laced through him and his hands froze on the heel and toe of his boot. What the hell was he doing in Egypt? How had he gotten here? It was a three-month trip by clipper ship from Nantucket, but he couldn’t remember a boat. He couldn’t remember anything but snakes.
And cold. But the desert wasn’t cold. It was vicious and merciless and filled with terrors far greater than cobras or sand vipers. He knew that better than anyone, but he couldn’t remember how he knew.
He didn’t remember the girl who came humming out of the bathroom wrapped in a yellow towel, either, her collarbones dewy and gleaming above the tuck between her breasts, her bare feet leaving wet prints on the pegged-pine floor. He leapt off the bed, catching the white-enameled frame in his hand as he backed hastily away from it. He expected her to scream, but she didn’t.
She didn’t so much as glance at him standing by the foot of her bed. She just kept humming, a song he didn’t know, or one he couldn’t remember, as she opened a dresser drawer and wiped a trickle of water from the hollow of her throat with an end of the towel.
Her hair was auburn and damp, pinned to the top of her head in rich, dark red curls. He could just see her full mouth and short, upturned nose in the corner of the mirror. He couldn’t see that her eyes were brown until she lifted them as she shut the drawer and turned around.
He expected her to scream then—she was looking right at him—but she didn’t. She simply walked through him, still dabbing at her throat, still humming. He felt her voice in every atom of his being, felt every hair in every follicle on his body stand on end, and realized with a jolt, and an anguished cry she couldn’t hear, that he was dead.
Chapter 2
The chill that shot through Willie Evans was as cold as a November no’theaster. It made her shiver and remember Granma Boyle’s caution against cool baths in summer.
“Warm all year round, no matter what the temperature,” she’d say in her starched Yankee accent. “Otherwise, you’ll give yourself the ague.”
Willie had always thought it was one of Granma’s wacky old wives’ tales. She’d never given herself the ague—whatever that was—and she’d been taking cool baths in the summer, in the house her grandmother had named Beaches, for most of her life.
She preferred showers now, rather than soaks in the claw-footed tub in the bathroom she’d turned into a combination bath and laundry room. Best money she’d ever spent, even though it had taken every dime she’d inherited from Granma along with Beaches last August, as well as a good chunk of her trust fund from Grandfather Evans.
Her father had thrown a fit. First that she hadn’t sold “the old wreck,” his term for both Beaches and Granma, and second that she’d sunk a bloody blue fortune into the house. Behind his back, her mother had rolled her eyes.
So did Willie, remembering, as she put on her underwear, rubbed the chill off her arms and opened the louvered doors of the walk-in closet she’d happily sacrificed twelve feet of space for. Her father had thrown a fit about the closet, too, but he’d done it long-distance, since by mid-January Willie was firmly entrenched at Beaches.
Three weeks before, on December 24, right after the public relations department Christmas party, Material Girl magazine had handed her a pink slip. When she’d called her mother in tears, Amelia Boyle Evans had slogged her way across Manhattan’s upper west side in a blizzard to comfort her. Two weeks later when her father left for Paris to attend a banking seminar, her mother had pleaded the flu to stay home and help Willie sublet her apartment, pack and get out of town. Not quite in a New York minute, but close.
Whitaker Evans hated Beaches—he said the old wreck gave him the creeps—and he’d come straight from Kennedy to drag his only daughter back to New York. By her hair if necessary, he’d warned, as he’d come through the door. It had been close, but Willie had held firm. She still had her independence and still had Beaches, too. And she was determined to keep both.
The house was her haven and always had been, just as Granma had been a warm-fuzzy extension of her mother, a much-needed second buffer between Willie and her well-intentioned but autocratic father. So was Zen, short for Zenobia Greene, her best friend from college and a certifiable New Age wacko. She’d come up to “get in tune” on the spring solstice and announced that Beaches had good vibes. Willie agreed. She felt safe here, watched over almost, which hadn’t made a lick of sense to her father.
Whitaker Evans hadn’t been able to budge her out of the house, and Dr. Jonathan Raven wasn’t going to, either. He could take the last will and testament of his great-uncle, Horace Raven, from whose estate Granma Boyle had bought Beaches, and shove it sideways. It wasn’t Willie’s fault the probate clerk dropped the will behind a filing cabinet in 1947 and forgot to fish it out and register it.
She had money enough to keep her fledgling public relations firm afloat and Dr. Raven’s claim to Beaches tied up in court for a good long time if it came to that. Willie hoped it wouldn’t, hoped her attorney-brother Whit Junior knew what he was talking about and wasn’t merely doing Whit Senior’s bidding when he’d suggested this evening’s meeting to try to work out an equitable settlement.
“If this is business,” she’d demanded, “why do I have to invite him to dinner?”
“Because you’re a damn good cook and it’ll soften him up. Make fried chicken. It’s my favorite.”
“You’re coming?” Willie had been amazed, since Whit shared their father’s distaste for Beaches.
“‘Course I am. You’re my sister and this Raven character could be an ax murderer for all we know.”
Willie doubted it, since he was a doctor. She’d agreed to the meeting, even though she hadn’t liked the idea of inviting in
to her house a man who was trying to take it away from her. She still didn’t, but she trusted Whit. Loved him, too, and was always glad to see him, which wasn’t often, even though he lived in Boston. He was like their father, a workaholic. Willie was a Boyle, and that said it all.
She put on a sundress with tiny yellow flowers printed on sage green cotton, tied the sash below her breasts, unpinned her hair and brushed it out to dry around her shoulders in its usual thick curls. It was too hot to do anything else but slip her feet into yellow sandals.
As she sat down on the bed to buckle them, Willie noticed a gray blur in the bottom left corner of the mirror. She’d paid a pretty penny to have it resilvered, because it was Granma’s and used to hang above the dressing table where she’d sat every night and brushed her snow-white hair. She retrieved her towel from the pull on the closet door where she’d left it, but by then the smudge was gone.
Must be the light, Willie decided, bending over the dresser to rub a finger across the glass. The long summer twilight filled the bedroom with lavender shadows. She could see her bedside clock and the time in the mirror: six-fifty.
Dr. Raven wouldn’t be here until eight-thirty, but Whit would be along any minute. She’d mix the dumplings, put them in the fridge and make the daiquiris. Strawberry, her favorite and Whit’s. It was cooling off some, she thought as she headed downstairs. Surely by eight-thirty she’d be able to cook the dumplings without fainting from heat prostration. Or hunger.
When Dr. Raven had called to accept the invitation she’d extended through Whit, he’d chosen the time. She’d wondered about the late hour until he’d said he worked the graveyard shift in the emergency room at Stonebridge General. He usually slept until six and had to be on the floor by eleven.
Sweat popped on Willie’s upper lip as she turned the chicken down and tried to decide if she should install central air conditioning. The ceiling fans were usually enough, but on days like this the sun porch she’d converted into an office was like a blast furnace. She weighed the pros and cons while she stirred the dumplings, dumped ice into the blender and answered the yellow wall phone when it rang.
“Don’t hold supper for me,” Whit said, his voice dipped with annoyance. “My goddamn car shot craps on the turnpike.”
“Your brand-new Beemer?” Willie tucked the receiver between her shoulder and jaw, stretching the long cord across the kitchen to the refrigerator. “What happened?”
“The warranty expired. I’m waiting for a tow truck. Do you want to change the meeting with Raven?”
“And cook tarragon chicken again in this heat?” Willie plucked a pint of cleaned and hulled strawberries off a shelf and pushed the door shut with her hip. “No way.”
“I thought you were making fried chicken.”
“I was until I found Granma’s recipe.”
“Where? She never wrote down a recipe in her life.”
“She lied,” Willie said with a grin. “I found it in one of her quilt-pattern notebooks, along with a birthday card you made her in fourth grade and a letter to the editor of The Stoneridge Chronicle I don’t think she ever mailed.”
“Sneaky old woman,” Whit said with an affectionate chuckle. “How many of those quilt notebooks did you and Mother find?”
“The official count is twenty-two, but I keep finding more tucked away here and there.”
“Keep looking until you find her chocolate cake recipe. You sure you don’t want to reschedule?”
“Positive. I want this over with.”
“Okay. Your choice. You’re the big three-oh now. Just be careful. Call me tomorrow and let me know how it went.”
“Yes, Whit.” Willie rolled her eyes and dropped strawberries into the blender. “First thing.”
“Okay, Will. Love you.”
“You, too. Bye.”
Willie hung up the phone and turned on the blender, humming “Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffett. With a daiquiri in one hand and a bowl of salad in the other, she went outside to light the candles in the luminarias, small pastel bags weighted with sand that edged the low terrace wall.
It was nearly dark. The sky was plowed with long furrows of pink cloud, and the sea murmured faintly beyond the dunes. She ate her salad sans dressing with her fingers, watched the windows in her friend Frank Chou’s little blue saltbox house begin to glow, and figured she ought to turn on the porch light.
She did, plus a lamp in the living room, the carriage lamps flanking the dining room French doors, and the floodlight above the kitchen sink as she rinsed her bowl. Over the hiss of the water she heard the thrum of a powerful engine, the crunch of tires on the gravel driveway. She grabbed a dishtowel and hurried to the front door in time to see Dr. Jonathan Raven stretch out of a red Corvette convertible.
He was much younger than Willie had expected, mid-thirties, tops, and the handsomest man she’d laid eyes on since Hugh Jackman’s last movie. His hair was dark and long, curling just below the collar of his white oxford-cloth shirt. The sleeves were rolled and his shirttails were tucked into jeans that were nicely faded and snug in all the best places. In the second before the headlights shut off automatically, she noticed his top three shirt buttons were undone. She also noticed the determination in the set of his jaw and the gleam of covetousness in his narrowed gaze.
None of which showed on his face when Willie flipped the towel over her shoulder and pushed through the screen door. He smiled as he came up the steps and stopped in front of her. He was very tall. Six-two, maybe six-three. He couldn’t help his height, or her lack of it. Still, at five foot four, maybe four and a half if she stretched on her toes, Willie could jolly well keep him the hell out of her house.
“Hello, Miss Evans. Nice of you to invite me.”
“Thank you for coming. Dr. Raven.” She lifted her hand toward the corner where the porch turned around the house. “Hot as it is, I thought we’d have dinner on the terrace.”
“Fine. I like the heat.” He smiled as she led him down the steps onto the terrace and shot him a what-are-you-nuts look over her shoulder. “Hospitals are cold as morgues.”
“And just about as pleasant,” Willie replied.
He laughed. He had a great voice, a deep, rich baritone that made Willie’s stomach flutter.
“Would you like a drink?”
“Just water, thanks. But please, you go ahead.”
When she came back with another daiquiri and ice water with a twist of lemon, he was sitting in one of the padded white iron chairs at the table, elbows on the arms, fingers laced across his midriff. He wore a large, heavy-looking ring on his left hand. Willie thought the stone was an opal, set in silver and flanked by two small diamonds. An interesting ring for a man, she thought, watching it shimmer and his hair gleam blue as a raven’s wing in the soft glow of the luminarias.
Very punny, Willie, she thought, smiling as she put the glass down in front of him. He murmured thanks and sipped.
“Your brother hasn’t arrived yet?”
“He had to cancel. After I sweated off five pounds making enough tarragon chicken to feed an army.”
“Good.” He smiled. “More for me.”
“Shall I serve now?”
“Finish your drink. I’m not ravenous. Not yet.” His smile widened. “I haven’t been awake long enough.”
A snatch of warm breeze rustled the luminarias. The candle wicks and Jonathan Raven’s dark eyes flickered. So did Willie’s pulse.
“Let’s start with the salad, shall we?”
“If you wish.”
Willie wished, all right. She wished she’d held her ground with Whit and nixed this meeting. She’d had men to dinner before. Doctors, lawyers, even a couple of real Indian chiefs, but her hands shook as she spooned the dumplings on top of the chicken. Maybe because this was personal, not business.
She tried to put a professional spin on the meal, serving it in brisk, well-timed stages, making pleasant, impersonal small talk in between courses. It worked well until Raven f
inished his coffee and key lime pie, leaned back in his chair and said in his rich, lush voice, “You have a beautiful first name. May I call you Willow?”
Willie could think of better choices. Like darling or sweetheart, but she said, “I’d prefer Miss Evans.”
“All right.” He laid his napkin next to his plate and laced his fingers across his midriff again. “How much?”
“You don’t have enough money to buy Beaches, Dr. Raven.”
“You’re wrong. Miss Evans. How about two million dollars, for starters?”
“Good heavens.” Willie blinked at him, stunned. “The assessed value is only two hundred and thirty thousand.”
“It’s worth far more than that to me. Shall we say—four million?”
“Beaches is not for sale. Dr. Raven.” Willie rose to her feet. “At any price.”
He didn’t take her hint that dinner and the negotiations were over. He just sat looking at her, his head tilted at a curious angle, a bemused half smile lifting one corner of his mouth. What a mouth. As lush and sexy as his voice.
“Everyone has a price, Miss Evans. Name yours.”
“You’re not listening, Dr. Raven. I just said—”
Only Willie hadn’t a clue what she’d just said. Perplexed, she blinked at her half-finished daiquiri and pushed it away. Another of Granma’s cautions was no cold drinks in summer, though she’d swilled iced coffee on the qt when she thought Willie wasn’t looking. Especially when she ironed.
“My last offer,” Raven said, “was five million.”
Think what you could do with all that money, whispered a voice in Willie’s head. Move the Evans Agency to Manhattan … lease a whole floor on Madison Avenue… prove to your father you’re not a little girl anymore… find a stylist with skill enough to tame that wild Irish mop—
“No fair, Willie!” Frank Chou called out of the darkness beyond the terrace. “I can smell key lime pie a mile away.”
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