Claire’s heart kicked in her chest as it always did at the mention of Jo’s name. She sniffed. “I’m sure you’ve heard by now that we don’t speak,” she said, glaring at Ethan. “If you want to get along here again, Ethan Stone,” she added, her lips cold, “you’d best remember how to navigate between the Gillys and the Turners, and you’d best do it quick.”
Ethan leaned so close to her that she could smell the faint wintergreen of his breath. “Which one are you these days?” he asked, and Claire hesitated.
“Turner, I suppose. At least according to my marriage license.” An awkward pause fell between them. It was maddening to have Ethan standing in front of her in robes, so near and yet marked so fully by his vocation that just thinking of him in carnal terms was a sin, she was sure. She wondered if his faith was really his own or something he simply pulled on when it suited him, like his cassock. She licked her lips, turned her back, and walked away, winding a stray piece of hair in between her fingers. Was all of this really worth leaving me for? she wanted to ask.
All that week Claire attended her committee meetings with fury—even ones to which she didn’t belong.
“But you’re not on the Garden Auxiliary,” Agnes Greene pointed out when she showed up for the annual tea.
“I am now,” Claire said, stealing the chair she guessed Agnes normally sat in and fixing her with her best lady-who-lunches smile.
Agnes took a seat beside Claire and ground her teeth. “Of course, we’re just thrilled to have you,” she simpered, and then turned to the woman on her left for the rest of the time.
When civic duties didn’t calm Claire’s nerves, she rode poor Icicle harder than she ever had, driving him through a punishing series of gallops and jumping him in the ring. He did everything she asked without complaint, which made her feel even worse. To compensate she spent extra time rubbing him down and gave him extra feed. She thought about going to confession but skipped it. Nevertheless, Sunday—and her excited dread of facing Ethan again—loomed ahead of her, not to mention all the questions she had about that earring she’d found in Whit’s car. Should she confront him? she wondered. Should she wait to unearth further evidence? She was more than sure there would be some.
Before she could decide, a hard wind woke her. It was Friday night, and she and Whit had been to a function at the club, where Claire had had too much wine. She startled up in bed, the covers puddling around her hips, and instinctively reached out for Whit, but her hand found nothing. He was gone. For a moment she was afraid, and then she was pedal-to-the-metal furious. No doubt he’d snuck out to meet the strumpet he was seeing. She pictured a busty woman with long, supple legs, or maybe a woman who was always a little dirty-looking, like she needed to wash her hair. Certainly someone who rolled her ass when she walked, though, and smiled too slowly on purpose.
Claire leaned back on the pillows and tried to fall asleep again, but it was useless. A full moon was spilling iodized light across the floor, and the wind was making a symphony out of all the loose ends in the world. An owl wailed in the distance and then once again, and Claire listened harder. No, not an owl, she surmised, but definitely something animal and in pain. Icicle, she thought, her heart quickening.
She got up and felt her way down the stairs, not bothering with the lights. After twelve years she knew her way around Turner House as well as she knew any place, and anyway, the moon was so bright. She threw on a duffel coat, stuffed her feet into a pair of rubber boots, and then flung open the mudroom door, straining to hear the noise again, and there it was—an off-key wailing like a wounded fox.
“Whit?” she called into the darkness, but there was no answer. She cursed him as she shuffled toward the paddock to check on Icicle. What kind of man left his sleeping wife for another woman? Was he roaming because of the babies Claire had lost? When she found Whit, she planned on asking him all that and more, and then she would tell him some things of her own.
She neared the stable and was about to step out of the shadows when she noticed two things. First, the floodlights outside were on. And second, the top of the split stable door was hinged back like a penny tossed without a care. She scanned the dark paddock for Icicle but didn’t see anything, and so she started forward to close up the door. Before she reached it, a pair of rising voices stopped her. One of them was Whit’s.
“You have to!” he urged. “You’re in no position—” A panicked female voice answered him, breathy with alarm.
“We could leave! We could go somewhere else and start all over. Please, I didn’t plan this. I have nowhere else to go. My father just threw me out.”
“Shut up,” Whit said, his voice a furious rasp. “I’m not going anywhere with you. And I’m not about to let a little slut like you tarnish my good name. It’s the only thing of value I have left. If you ruin that, you ruin everything. I’m not giving you the chance, do you hear me?”
“I thought you wanted…” the girl tried to say, but he didn’t let her finish.
“Not like this. Not with someone like you…” Whit replied, and then his words trailed off, and Claire didn’t hear anything, just scuffling and a terrible heavy silence.
She tiptoed closer to the open threshold and peered into the darkness, squinting, and then she saw Whit embracing a young woman. Only something was wrong. The girl wasn’t moving. Claire crept closer and saw one of the girl’s feet sliding out from under her. Claire realized she was choking. And it was Whit who was choking her.
Claire couldn’t explain what happened to her next except to say that she finally felt what Jo must have when she pulled Claire from the fire. It was like she was burning all over, her skin so hot she was shivering, and there was nothing in her ears but a smoky roar. She flexed her arms, and her muscles quivered. From somewhere deep inside herself, the real Claire crouched and watched to see what this new version would do.
She did it without thinking—grabbed the shovel in the corner and wheeled straight at Whit, her arms upraised, a scream she didn’t recognize tearing her lips. At that moment she was pure Gilly again: red-haired, with fury for blood, perfect aim, and nothing left to lose.
Startled, Whit let go of the girl, who fell in a heap at his feet. He spun around to face Claire, dodging left just as she brought the edge of the shovel down on his skull. There was a sickening crack of metal on bone and then a second thump as Whit collapsed, a trickle of blood oozing along his ear. Claire stood over him, debating whether or not to keep going, but the girl suddenly gasped and flailed her legs, and only then did Claire see that it was Dee Pitman from the Lighthouse Diner. Cutt’s daughter. Barely eighteen if she was a day.
“Thank God,” the girl said, hitching herself onto one elbow, and then she closed her eyes and sank back down again on the boards.
Icicle nickered and shifted in his stall, agitated by the commotion. At the sound, Claire returned to herself, becoming Claire Turner again, as coolheaded as she’d been on the morning of her wedding when she’d written the Turner name front and center in her heart and soul. And from that moment until this one, she’d checked everything against it. Now, however, she was glad for it. It made it so much easier to stand over the slumped bodies of her husband and his mistress, one of whom she wanted to murder and the other of whom she thought she already might have.
She squatted down and pressed her fingers to Whit’s neck, relieved to feel his pulse beating, and then she turned her attention to Dee, who was still unmoving. Her eyes looked bruised, and her lip was a swollen plum. Claire stepped over Whit and knelt down in front of Dee.
Dee looked up at Claire, her nose filmed with snot, her eyes confused as a child’s. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t even know what to do.” Well, she was a child, Claire thought. “I can’t go home,” Dee blubbered. “Not now.”
Claire sighed. She knew everything one person could about not going home, and frankly, it was a story she was sick of. In the darkness Icicle stamped a foot and whinnied, as if to get her attention.
/> “Stay here,” she whispered, settling Dee against the stable wall. “Don’t move,” she added. She led Icicle out of his stall. She gathered a blanket, his bridle, and a saddle, and then she fed the bit into his mouth and cinched the saddle tight.
“Put your foot in here,” she told Dee, guiding her toes into the stirrup. “Lean against me and throw your leg up. Now sit tight.” Dee did, wide-eyed but obedient as Claire also swung onto Icicle’s back.
“Hang on,” Claire said, nudging Icicle out of the barn. They started down Plover Hill, picking up speed once they got to the bottom. It was much later than Claire had realized. Very soon the sun would come up. Already the sky had the hazy, undecided look it always got right before it burst into full morning.
She dug her heels into Icicle’s flanks, and he broke into a canter. She felt Dee tighten her legs so she wouldn’t fall. The girl didn’t ask where they were going, and Claire didn’t tell her, but the salt ponds would be waiting, Claire knew, glowing in the dawn like the thick lace veil she’d worn pulled across her face on her wedding day and which she’d been tangled up in ever since, for richer or poorer, for better or worse, Whit’s chattel until death did one of them part, and please God, she prayed as she streaked through the last of the darkness, let it not be her.
Chapter Fifteen
It was the strangled call of one of those damn marsh cats that woke Jo, but it was the added noise of horse’s hooves on clay that got her out of bed. It was barely dawn, but already the spring gulls were out fierce and fast. The wind had shifted direction overnight, and whenever it did that, Jo knew, the birds were always the first to say anything about it.
She couldn’t claim she was surprised when she spied the spare shape of a white horse drifting into the marsh. She was used to seeing Claire ride out here at daybreak. About six years back, Claire had started coming by the graves. Jo knew all about her sister’s visits and the little piles of salt she sometimes left on Henry’s grave, just the way their mother had taught them. Jo didn’t like it, but she also didn’t think she could stop Claire. There were some things that were beyond human contention.
But Claire didn’t rein in her horse at the edge of the marsh that morning the way she normally did, and there wasn’t just one silhouette on the beast’s back—there were two. The light was misty and weak, true, and the farmhouse glass was old and blurred, but Jo didn’t think she was wrong to believe what she was seeing. She watched as the horse slowed and neared the house and two women got off, one followed by the other, arms looped around each other’s waist, beloved from the looks of it, but Jo knew that couldn’t be, because Claire was a woman who loved only herself.
Jo pulled back from the window and held her breath, hoping that the vision of Claire would fade away, but she kept coming. Jo could hear feet dragging out of kilter up the porch steps, and she sighed. If trouble came in the shape of a stranger, as Mama had always said, then the appearance of long-absent loved ones was even worse. True calamity was always stuck to them like the stripe on a skunk.
Claire’s fist sounded on the door, and Jo weighed the option of hiding. She glanced at the closet in the far corner of the room and then considered the nook between the grandfather clock and the sofa downstairs, but Claire was like the damn weather. You couldn’t outrun her, you couldn’t change her, and it would be just plain stupid to try to avoid her. With Claire a body was always better off battening down the hatches and waiting to see what would happen. Jo heard a heavy stumbling inside the house and then a heavier thump.
“Goddamn it, Joanna!” Claire called. After twelve years her voice was sharper than Jo remembered. “I know you’re standing on the stairs,” she said. “I can see you. Get down here and help me!”
Jo took a deep breath, filling herself like a sail, and descended, thinking she had the situation more or less under control. But when she got downstairs, she wasn’t the least bit prepared for what she found. In the front hallway, she saw Claire crouched in a ball over the unconscious blob of Dee Pitman.
Jo cocked her head. The stairs were dark, and her vision was one-sided, but Claire didn’t look like someone who had chosen to lop herself off at the roots and blow away free. She was wearing a duffel coat over a white cotton nightgown and rubber boots, and with her braid sprung loose down her back she appeared to be all of eighteen again.
“Help me,” she demanded, and Jo crept closer, already regretting getting involved, but what else could she do? When life dumped a mess on your doorstep, you had to get out the mop and start wiping it up.
“Let me,” she said, kneeling to scoop her good arm under Dee’s neck, loosening the girl’s scarf a little. She blew on Dee’s cheeks until her eyelids fluttered, and then she laid Dee’s head back down and stepped away before the girl regained full consciousness. Jo didn’t know what Dee was doing here in her house, but that wasn’t her concern. Let Claire deal with her.
“Fuck,” Dee moaned. “Holy fuck.” Charming, Jo thought. Dee hitched herself onto an elbow and looked at her without comprehension. “Where am I?”
Claire stepped forward, her nightdress billowing under her coat. “My sister will get you some water if you want.”
Perfect, Jo thought. Here was Claire back for all of five minutes, and already she was giving orders.
Dee sucked in a breath, and her eyes went wide with terror. “You brought me to Salt Creek Farm?”
Claire sighed. “I didn’t know what else to do with you. You said you couldn’t go home. You said your father had thrown you out, remember?”
Dee rolled onto her side for a moment, then flipped herself onto her hands and knees like a cat. She sat back on her knees and blinked. “So you brought me here?”
Claire sniffed. “Here’s as good a place as any. And besides, beggars can’t be choosers.”
Jo interceded. “But what are you doing here, Claire?” If they were going to play twenty questions, Jo didn’t think it was fair that Dee should be the only one in the hot seat. Claire just chewed on a piece of her hair and said nothing, so Jo turned to Dee. She had a stubborn stare, Jo saw, and the way her mouth pinched at the corners told Jo that Dee knew more about hard times than her age suggested. “How old are you anyway?” she asked. She thought she remembered Dee’s father telling her she was quite young.
Dee’s lip trembled. “Eighteen last week.”
A babe, Jo thought. “Why can’t you go home?” She pictured Cutt’s tattooed forearms and military-shorn hair. He seemed to move only in straight lines. Jo couldn’t think of one soft thing about him. She didn’t know what Dee’s trouble was, but Jo wouldn’t want to go home to him either, she decided.
Dee rubbed the side of her neck, pulling her scarf open, and Jo saw that a row of purple ghost prints was starting to bloom on her skin. She was a girl who stumbled over her words, flattening one down more than the last like she was closing a fan in her throat, but it didn’t matter. Her tongue could have been oiled with the honey of heaven and there wouldn’t have been any good way for her to say what she did next. She rolled her hands together in a little ball, the only tidy thing about her. “I’m pregnant. It’s Whit’s. Only”—she wiped away a tear—“he doesn’t want me, and he doesn’t want the baby like I thought he would. He wants to get rid of us both.”
Jo supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised, but Claire let out a shriek. At first Jo thought it was surprise at the news, but then she followed Claire’s eyes and spied the necklace around Dee’s throat. It was a heart-shaped locket hung on a silver chain and embossed with a large and florid W—a bauble Jo knew very well. Before Jo could stop her, Claire reached out and snatched it clean off Dee’s neck, shoving it in the pocket of her coat. Whoever said that memory carried no weight was wrong, Jo thought. Clearly it did, especially when it was nestled in the palm of your hand.
Claire settled her face inches away from Dee’s. She shook her head so furiously that Jo wouldn’t have been surprised to see sparks fly off her hair. “This is Whit’s initial! He mono
grams everything with this exact script. You’re a little thief! You have no right—to any of it!” She sat back on her heels, covered her eyes with the white stems of her fingers, and began to cry.
Jo wrapped Dee in one of the scratchy blankets she found in the hall closet and left her to shiver on the sofa in the parlor. “Not like this,” she told Claire. “Come with me.” She led her to the kitchen. “This isn’t the time or the place. It’s just a cheap old necklace, after all.” She thought it prudent to stay silent on the fact that before any of the mess now unfolding in her hall, the locket on that chain was supposed to be hers.
“What happened?” Jo poured out two cups of peppermint tea and sat Claire at the table in the center of the kitchen.
Claire rubbed her eyes. “I woke up and heard a noise, and Whit was gone. He wasn’t in bed, and he wasn’t anywhere in the house. That’s been happening a lot lately, him coming home late or leaving before dawn. I figured something was going on, but I didn’t know with whom.
“The noise was coming from the stable. The moon was so bright I decided to check on Icicle. I thought it was him. But, when I got there, I saw Whit and Dee, having an argument. She was saying they could go away, and he was saying he wouldn’t let her tarnish his name, and then, without any warning, Whit started choking her.” Claire shuddered and tipped the teacup to her mouth, then wiped her fingers across her lips. “I stopped him.”
Jo’s heart skipped a beat. “Claire,” she said carefully. “What did you do?”
“He’s fine.” Claire put down the cup. “I just hit him with a shovel, is all. He’ll most definitely have a headache in the morning, but he still had a pulse. I checked before I saddled up Icicle.” She shifted in her chair and lowered her voice. “I don’t care if Dee’s father does skin her alive and place her in a vat of boiling blood. She has to go.” She took the necklace from her pocket and laid it out on the table. “What the hell is this? Clearly it’s from him, but it’s not his style.”