It was fitting, she thought, picking up her old hairbrush and smoothing the stray tendrils at her temples, that a man who was so privately entrenched would be so eager to eradicate Prospect’s history. Whit would love to keep only the stage-prop bits of Prospect, she knew—the weathered patina on the town’s shingles, the graceful arched windows of the library, the picturesque sailboats, but not the half-rotten wharf or the fishing vessels belching in their slips, and certainly not Salt Creek Farm.
Claire put down the brush and tugged open the vanity’s drawers. The first one still held Ida’s old makeup and combs, and the middle one stuck, as always. Claire remembered when Whit had given her the pearl in this spot, and the memory made her tug on the drawer with a savage wrench. It flew open. She looked inside and saw the usual jumble of junk, and then, maybe because the light was different or maybe because she was different, she spied something she never had before. There was some kind of letter taped flat at the very back of the drawer cavity. A corner of the rich cream envelope had come unstuck, calling attention to itself. Claire snaked her hand inside the drawer and, with some difficulty, pulled the letter out.
It was Ida’s stationery, monogrammed like everything else she owned, as if her own words put on paper weren’t enough. Someone had opened it once, however, for the seal was broken. Claire slid it open and drew out the paper, scanning Ida’s armored-looking handwriting and taking shorter and shorter breaths.
When she was finished, she sat back stunned, grappling with the fallout that a revision of any history creates, but especially a personal history. All this time Claire had thought of herself as the one who didn’t belong on Salt Creek Farm, but it turned out she was wrong, and Ida had known this about her. Whether she liked it or not, Claire really was a girl with roots deep in the salt. Jo, on the other hand, was quite a different story.
Claire slipped the letter into her pocket and picked up the silver brush off the top of the vanity, eyeing herself in the mirror. Frankly, she was tired of being haunted by the past, she decided. She’d had enough of virgins, pearls, and letters written by dead women. The time had come, she decided, to break free and create a future of her own.
Once, when they were first married, Whit had out of the blue compared her to a hummingbird. Delicate, he called her, but deceptively strong. They’d been in bed, and he’d had his hands twined in her hair, his fingers cupping her scalp like the protective twigs of a nest. Claire hadn’t known she’d still be feeling them over a decade later, tighter every day and not like twigs at all anymore, for she could snap those if she needed to.
She remembered when Whit had presented her with his mother’s pearl necklace, how he’d clasped the chain around her neck. If you ever try to break the strings between us, you’ll fail, he’d said to her as they’d made love that evening. You know that, right?
She would see about that. She went into the closet and found a canvas bag and shoved as much of her riding clothing into it as she could. Then she paused. In the very back of the wardrobe, entombed in plastic, her wedding gown hung. She shoved her clothes aside and unzipped the bag, inhaling the fragrance of powder mixed with something earthier. She ran a finger down the satin and then pulled out her veil. Age had brittled it and turned it yellow. Claire sighed and zipped the bag up again. On the other side of the wardrobe, the suit that Whit had worn was pressed neatly and hung with a matching tie. He must have had it on recently. What else had Whit donned that day? Claire mused. A boutonniere to match her bouquet and oh, yes, his father’s watch. Where was that? She opened the mahogany box that Whit kept in his top drawer and found it. A place for everything and everything in its place, Ida had always insisted, and even now, more than a decade after her death, no one in Prospect had the courage to defy that edict.
Well, there’s a first time for everything, Claire thought, slipping the watch into her pocket along with the cream-colored envelope engraved with Ida’s spiky initials. She closed the closet door and then let herself out through the house’s front door, whistling as she passed, leaving it wide open to whatever kind of ghouls Whit wanted to send her way.
Chapter Twenty-three
Dee was making toast in the kitchen when Claire came into the house, and she was so quiet that Dee almost didn’t hear her. Claire could be like a cat when she wanted, all velvet steps and slinky moves, but Dee had gotten good at tracking her. She was getting kind of catlike, too.
Normally Claire made so much noise that Dee could hear her coming three days off. She’d throw her shoes into the corner of the front hall and bang on the old piano’s keys as she walked by, as if she wanted even the air of this place to know she was back. But today there was none of that. Just the suspicious creak of a floorboard and then a heavy silence.
Dee peeked around the kitchen door, but the hall was empty, so she tiptoed down the hall and peeked in around the parlor door, where Claire was standing over the desk in the corner, riffling through some papers. Before she was caught, Dee scurried back to the kitchen, and a second later Claire loped in, scowling so heavily that Dee half thought she might curdle the milk. Claire could be moodier than a three-year-old, but that wasn’t the reason Dee was staring at her. For the first time since Dee had known her, Claire was wearing her hair hanging down her back.
“What did you do to your hair?” Dee said.
Claire reached up and stroked the long red waves, as if she’d already forgotten about them. “I made a change,” she answered breezily.
“I’ll say.” With her hair free like that, Claire looked like a different person—a nicer one, perhaps. Dee examined her more closely. Now that she was looking, she could see that Claire’s hands were trembling slightly—unusual given how steady she could hold Icicle on a lead. “What’s in the bag?” Dee asked.
Claire sank into a chair and stared straight ahead of her—at what, Dee couldn’t tell, but that was worrisome, too, because Claire usually focused on things as if she had sabers hidden behind her eyes. “Riding gear,” she answered.
The back of Dee’s neck began tingling, and she eased herself into a chair across from Claire at the table. “Wait, you went back to Turner House? Are you crazy? Was Whit there?”
Claire shook her head and took a sip of milk. “It’s his tennis morning.”
Dee bit her lip and tried to hide her disappointment. Dee had been as meek as a lamb about not contacting Whit, not even once. She knew a good thing when she had it. In spite of the creepy stories about all the little dead boys around this place, she didn’t want to get thrown ass over heels off Salt Creek Farm in her current condition. She needed Jo’s and Claire’s help—for now at least. In fact, aside from her appointments at the clinic, Dee hadn’t even left the place at all, content enough to read the trashy magazines Jo bought her at the supermarket, helping with the salt as much as she could, and getting ready for the baby, not that there was much to do there either. Jo had found a secondhand crib and changing table in the paper and set them up in Dee’s room, and Claire had brought home a pastel assortment of tiny pajama sets and about a month’s worth of diapers, and she’d amassed a bewildering collection of bottles, brushes, pacifiers, bibs, and a rubber bulb.
“For when the baby has a cold,” Claire said, laying it in the drawer of the changing table, as if that explained everything. After she’d left the room, Dee had opened the drawer and squeezed the bulb, wondering if she was supposed to suction the baby’s ears, nose, or mouth, and for how long. Jo wouldn’t have the foggiest idea, and Dee didn’t want to ask Claire. Who was to say the baby would get sick anyhow, and why was Claire already appointing herself as nurse? She should stick to fussing over her horse, Dee thought. It was the one thing that seemed to love her.
Dee put a hand on the side of her belly while the baby writhed. It might happen anytime now, the midwives in Hyannis had told her. If she felt regular pains, they’d instructed, she should come in. She shouldn’t wait—not when they had to drive from Prospect. Claire, who’d driven Dee to her last prenata
l visit, had insisted on accompanying her into the examination room, and she’d immediately reassured the midwife. “Someone will be with her right up through the birth and after.” She’d squeezed Dee’s hand. “Right, Dee?”
Dee hadn’t returned her smile. The midwife let her wriggle back into her maternity pants while the midwife and Claire had a discussion about pain medications during labor.
“Of course it’s up to Dee,” Claire had said, putting her hand on Dee’s knee once she was dressed, “but obviously my sister and I want her to be as comfortable as can be.”
My sister and I. It was like having a pair of overprotective fairy godmothers as bodyguards. They meant well, Dee knew, but she was still wary of pissing the two of them off. A life with Cutt had taught her that a person’s mood could curdle like cream in vinegar, and now that she’d seen how nice Jo and Claire could be, Dee had no desire to discover what happened when they got mad. If they wanted to sit next to her while she sweated, moaned, and pushed this kid out, she would more than welcome the company. There’d be time to figure everything else out later—like how she was going to get in touch with Whit.
Surely he’d want to see the baby when she had it, and once he did, once he saw her holding his child, wouldn’t what he’d liked about her in the first place come rushing back to him? She hoped so. Besides, the man was a professed Catholic. Wasn’t he virtually programmed to revere mothers cradling their infants? On the other hand, the mothers exalted in the Bible weren’t scorned hussies living with scorned former wives on land their lover wanted to own.
She drummed her fingers on the kitchen table and reassessed Claire. She still hadn’t moved, but now she was staring into space with a soft gaze, rounded cheeks, and her lips parted. Was that actual contentment on her face? Dee wondered. Before she could decide, Claire wiped her expression clean and readjusted her features into her original scowl. Dee sighed. Claire made it impossible to get a grip on her mood, and Dee couldn’t figure why she cared, but she did. She jutted her chin toward the bag of riding gear. “So… did you get what you were after?”
Claire chewed a cuticle. Her scowl deepened. “No.”
“Oh, that’s too bad.” Dee wasn’t sure why, but she was getting the impression that they were talking about two different things. “So it wasn’t worth the visit?”
Claire blinked, the fog parting before her once again. “What? Oh, you mean my expedition to Turner House.”
“Where else did you go?” But Claire stood up and paced over the counter, ruffling her already messy hair. She took out the electric mixer and a huge enamel bowl.
“I’ve got four hours before I have to go scrape the evening salt crust. What do you think? Lemon meringues? And maybe a baked chicken for dinner?” The morning was heating up something awful, and the idea of rich food nauseated Dee, but she forced herself to smile and nod.
She piled her own lank hair up on top of her head, wishing she had the nerve to hack it off, but that wasn’t her style. She wasn’t good when it came to cutting things out of her life. She let down her hair again and blew on the pulse points on her wrists. “It sure is salt weather, isn’t it? Hot, sticky, and still.”
Claire paused, an egg poised on the edge of the bowl, ready for cracking. “What did you just say?”
Dee put her arms down. Great. What had she done now? Sometimes being around Claire was like trying to drive a car with terrible alignment. Dee had no idea where she was going or what she might hit. Jo, on the other hand, while a terror to look at with all her scars, was full of solid, no-bullshit phrases. When Dee did a crappy job pulling in salt, Jo told her so, and then she immediately told Dee how to fix the problem. “I just meant it’s real hot, is all.” Dee was relieved when Claire broke the egg and separated the yolk from the white. That little evil smile that Dee didn’t trust was filling out Claire’s bottom lip again.
“Do you realize what you just did? You’re marking the weather with salt now. You’ll be a real Gilly before you know it.” She discarded the last yolk and turned on the mixer, frothing the whites into foam and then stiff peaks, and then she whipped in lemon zest, cream of tartar, and sugar until the substance in the bowl transformed into something entirely new. Dee felt a bit like that herself, like she was turning into something else. Was it really a Gilly? She wasn’t sure. But she wasn’t her old self either. What with the baby and living out here, she was definitely becoming something she didn’t recognize. Unlike the meringues, however, she wasn’t sure that that something was making her any sweeter.
If the summer days made Dee irritable and anxious, the nights were a sight better. She knew she wasn’t the only one awake in the house (sometimes a line of light glowed underneath Jo’s door), but between the three of them, Dee was the only one who did anything about it. She roamed.
It was a habit she’d developed in Vermont after her mother had died and she was trying to come to grips with being stuck with her father. She missed him less with each passing day. Once in a while, if she was eating a fried egg or something, she wondered how he was getting on without her at the diner, but that speculation was more from the point of view of a bitter former employee and less as a bereft daughter. Now that she was near the end of her pregnancy, in fact, she was tempted to belly up to the Lighthouse counter one morning and order every breakfast item off the menu, taking a single bite out of each one before sending it all back. It was just the kind of thing that would drive Cutt nuts. He loathed waste of any kind and had no room in his life for excess, and Dee guessed that included her.
Cutt’s military heart had never adapted very well to the patter of her footsteps running riot through his life, Dee realized. He’d passed plates to her over the diner counter and she’d brought them back empty, and that had mostly been the sum of things between them. By the time she’d started hooking up with Whit, Cutt had long since quit trying to map the coordinates of her comings and goings, and Dee had learned that while mouthwash and a shower covered up certain sins, silence concealed them even better.
But if she was able to scoot under the radar at her father’s place, it wasn’t so easy to do so on Salt Creek Farm. Even when Claire and Jo weren’t physically with her in the same room, the evidence of them was. Claire constantly left coffee cups unwashed in the sink, and Jo forgot to pull the shower curtain closed and clean out the drain when she was done in the bathroom. Someone’s socks were always wadded up on the bottom step, along with muddy boots in the hall, and Claire set used tea bags to weep on the counter. For Dee, who was used to a house as blank as a slate, the clutter was like having to listen to around-the-clock chatter.
And then there was the junk. Everywhere she looked—in every closet, on every shelf—odd collections of books, maps, machine parts, dismembered toys, and bits and bobs she couldn’t even begin to identify lurked. When the baby was born, she thought, she’d have to be careful or she’d put the kid down and lose him in a morass of scraps.
At least at night, the house quieted. Initially she stuck to the upstairs in her wanderings, plodding back and forth between the bathroom and her room, but then, as she grew more comfortable, she started heading downstairs, first for a glass of milk and a cracker and then for more informative purposes.
Tonight Dee uncovered Claire’s senior yearbook tucked high up on a parlor shelf and flipped through the pages until she found the one where Claire and Ethan had been voted Most in Love. And they really did look it—their heads tilted together, a pair of matching grins plastered across their faces. Ethan’s cheeks were much rounder, and Claire’s eyes had a twinkle dancing in them instead of murderous sparks, but her face held all the same dangerous angles. Dee wondered what she might have been voted if she’d stayed in school. Sluttiest, probably, or Most Likely to Drop Out, but then she’d gone and done exactly that, so she guessed that was prophecy fulfilled right there. She slammed the yearbook closed and put it back. Behind her the room’s stone hearth took up most of the wall. Then came a pair of sagging sofas, a battered coffee ta
ble, and an ancient, shiplike desk shoved into the corner. Dee wandered over to it, opened its vast lid, and aimlessly began scuffling through the detritus within. There was a man’s watch that looked expensive. Dee fingered it, tempted, then laid it aside. Bills lay snarled in nests of old tidal charts, almanacs with their covers torn were tossed pell-mell, and a single cream-colored envelope with gilt script on its flap languished innocently under everything.
Frankly, it didn’t look that interesting, but Dee plucked it out anyway and squinted to read the fancy initials. It wasn’t easy. The script was faded and too full of spikes and loops. But that was Salt Creek Farm for you. Dee never knew what she was going to find. Something junky and boring-looking on the outside might really be a treasure. She started to open the flap of the envelope, but a pain squeezed her belly and she gasped and rocked back on her heels. It was shocking sometimes, how fiercely the baby could punch. She hoped it would stop doing that once it got born, or otherwise she was going to end up with a pair of black eyes when she went to change diapers. The baby twisted and gouged at her with as many of its sharp little extremities as it could manage, sending shocks all the way down through her bladder. Dee sighed in misery and slid the letter into her dressing gown’s pocket.
She’d just reached the bottom of the steps when the pains began—not rolling Tahitian waves like the midwife had described, full of ukulele music and sunsets, but really bad ones that stole Dee’s breath and pinched something awful. She staggered sideways and grabbed onto the banister, but before she could catch her breath, another contraction slammed into her, knocking her to her knees.
This so better be worth it, she thought, letting her head fall onto the lowest step. It occurred to her that when this was over, she just might kill someone, but just as she was deciding on the appropriate victim, something warm and sticky began running down the insides of her legs, a violent squeezing started low in her belly, and everything in front of her went mercifully black.