Icicle was collapsed on the floor, his hooves stilled in the hay, his flanks rigid and his nostrils dry. Already the flies were gathering. In disbelief, Claire sank to her knees and put her hand on his loyal chest. There was no life in him, as she knew there wouldn’t be. She sat gasping for a moment, as if she’d just taken a fist to the stomach, and then she bent her head over him and wailed.
Sniffling, she closed Icicle’s great solemn eyes and rubbed her cheek against his, wishing she’d been with him for his final moments, wishing she could have saved him, for Icicle hadn’t been just a horse to her. He was the nobler part of her soul. Without him Claire wasn’t sure what would happen to her better instincts. She ran her hand over his ears and down his forelock, then up under his neck. She searched the straw around his body, and her eye caught on a tiny slip of paper. A wrapper for a brand of cinnamon gum Whit loved. Claire plucked it up and inspected it. There was no code hidden inside, no secret signal to her. But then such subterfuge wasn’t Whit’s style. His message was clear enough. The only thing left to save now, Claire knew, was her own self.
Chapter Twenty-six
Things died on Salt Creek Farm all the time, Jo was perfectly aware—stray birds, the annual clutch of cats she had to drown, insects by the score, little boys. Some of those creatures left the world by the power of her hands and some as the result of a higher law, but Jo grieved them all. Some days she got to thinking the marsh was nothing more than an open wound sunk in the flesh of the earth, a festering raw place where the here and now met the great beyond. She had lived in it so long that she was immune to its harsh ways, but she couldn’t say the same for Claire, who never did love the land the way Jo did. Icicle’s death reminded Jo all over again that her sister had come home to a place where she couldn’t turn her back on the intricacies of the world.
Jo had found Claire wandering in the salt ponds in the prime of the evening, when the marsh’s packs of flies disappeared and gave way to the first of the night’s bats. Normally Claire was skittish of them, but that night she didn’t notice. Her face was the color of sand, and her eyes were two blank buttons, the way they’d been right before she’d set the barn on fire all those years ago. When something really distressed Claire, she turned into a living doll. You couldn’t do anything with her.
“What happened?” Jo cried. “Is Jordy okay?” At the thought of him—round-bellied, sweet as a duckling—her heart fluttered, but Claire simply shook her head, grabbed Jo’s good hand, and pulled her toward the barn, the red strands of her hair loud as any alarm. Mercifully, Jo saw, the building was still intact.
“Open the doors,” Claire told her, putting her hands over her face. “I can’t do it.”
Jo obeyed, blinking to adjust her sight to the dimness. At first she didn’t understood what she was seeing. She thought Icicle had fallen from some kind of attack or was sick, but Claire started sobbing, the noise cracking out of her throat. “He’s dead,” she sobbed. “Oh, Jo, he’s dead.”
Jo stepped farther into the barn. Just that morning Icicle had been perfectly healthy, stamping his feet and nickering when he heard her arrive. She knelt down over his inert body, a bad feeling starting to grow in the pit of her stomach. “What happened?” she asked. Even she knew that horses in their prime didn’t just fall over dead for no reason.
Claire took her hands from her face. Some of her color was starting to return, Jo saw. “Don’t be thick, Jo. Whit did it, of course.”
Jo crouched over Icicle. He was such a beautiful beast. It made her heart hurt to see him lying so still. She rubbed his flank.
Claire sniffed. “What do you think he used?” she asked, but Jo was just a salt farmer, not a detective. She shrugged, and Claire nodded. “I guess you’re right. I guess it doesn’t matter. Whatever it was, it worked—and fast. Jo,” Claire looked up at her, that doll-like glaze beginning to smear across her eyes again. “We have to do something. He wants us all off this land worse than Ida ever did, and you and I both know he’ll do anything to make that happen.” Claire’s face paled from the color of sand to the whispery gray of ashes. “Can’t we get some kind of restraining order?” she whispered.
Jo chewed her thumbnail. “But we don’t have any proof that he’s the one doing any of this.”
Claire nodded. “That’s true. Besides, Whit’s got every local politician up and down the Cape in his back pocket, and that includes law enforcement.” She blushed, remembering how she’d taken advantage of that fact to stop the bonfire salt.
Jo snorted. “When did Whit ever care about following the letter of the law? If he thinks he can get away with something—and he usually can—he goes ahead and does it.”
“So what should we do?”
Jo looked at Icicle’s lifeless body and shuddered. “I don’t know.” There were any number of strange accidents that could befall three women and a child on a remote farm alone. She turned her face away from Claire, sweat gathering under her ribs. Let it out, a voice inside her urged. Enough was enough. She and Claire had blamed each other for too many things for too long. Jo took a shaky breath.
“I know this isn’t a good time, but I have to tell you something awful. I got a call from our friend Mr. Monaghy at the bank today. We’ve got thirty-six hours, and then they’re taking the place off our hands. They have an ‘interested buyer,’ they say, which you and I both know is code for Whit Turner.”
Claire blew out a breath. “Well,” she said, sounding exactly like Jo. Suddenly her face brightened, and a foxlike grin spread across her face. “Don’t worry,” she said. “That’s not going to happen.”
Jo shook her head. “Claire, you’re not listening. They’re coming the day after tomorrow. Whit’s won. It’s over.”
Claire rubbed her fingers together. “Not quite.”
Jo pinched the bridge of her nose. “Unless you’ve got a golden egg stashed under your mattress, I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
Claire’s grin got bigger. “I’ve got something better,” she said. “I’ve got Ida’s diamond wedding band.”
A corner of Jo’s mouth twitched as she let out a low whistle. She bet that ring was worth a bundle. Maybe not enough to get them all the way out of hock, but possibly enough to placate the bank. And business had been better lately. Those crazy salts of Claire’s were flying off the shelves in Hyannis. If they could keep it up, Jo thought, they might just be able to turn things around. She sank down into the straw, and Claire sank next to her. “Ida will roll over in her grave. It’s perfect,” Jo conceded.
But Claire’s face darkened. “What if the money’s not enough?”
Jo shrugged. “Some is better than none.” They were silent a moment, and then Jo said, “You know that locket you were so het up about the night you and Dee arrived here? Well, you should know that Whit tried to give it to me first.”
Claire sucked in her breath, and Jo worried that her temper was about to start spilling over. She put up a palm to stop Claire’s outburst.
“I never accepted it,” she explained. “I gave it back. Then, the next day, I saw that Ida had left the pearl out in front of Our Lady, along with a letter. I don’t know why, but I took them. I read the letter, then put it back in Ida’s mailbox, along with the necklace. After that, things weren’t ever the same for me with Whit. They just couldn’t be, not after I knew that Ida was my mother.”
Claire swallowed. When it came to confessions, she was about as rusty as Jo. “That day when I went back to the house,” she forced herself to say, “I went looking in Ida’s vanity. That’s where she’d put it. I read it there, on the spot. I’m sorry.”
The air of the barn was so heavy it was almost a comfort. That made it easier for Jo to say the things she knew she had to. “After the fire, when Whit didn’t come see me in the hospital, I thought maybe he’d finally given up the idea of owning the marsh.”
Claire blushed. “I should have known better. He only wanted to marry me because he thought I’d inherit half of S
alt Creek Farm. I was too damn young, and besides, I was still so heartbroken over Ethan. I was a fool.” She wiped a tear from her cheek.
“I don’t know about that. Whit can be very charming when he wants.” Jo remembered all the carefree afternoons she and Whit had spent chasing each other on Drake’s Beach, the warmth in his voice the evening he tried to give her the locket. She liked to think that some things stayed true. On the other hand, Whit was his mother’s son, just as she was her daughter.
Claire hesitated, her brow furrowed. “So if Ida was your mother, who was your father?”
Jo took another, deeper breath. Let it out, the voice told her again. She licked her lips. “Father Flynn.”
Claire sat up. “What? What on earth gave you that idea? The letter just said ‘dearest.’ That could be anyone.”
“Or someone in particular she didn’t want to name. Someone she couldn’t name. I think it was Father Flynn.”
Claire grew thoughtful. “So that’s why Ida really left the letter in church. It wasn’t for Our Lady at all.”
“Exactly.”
They fell silent for a moment, and then Claire scuffed her boots in the dust of the barn. She’d saved the worst for last. “All this time,” she said, “all I could think was how much you must have hated me for marrying Whit. I thought you blamed me for starting the fire and robbing you of the future you should have had with him. But that wasn’t it at all. Maybe you’ve despised me because we aren’t real sisters.” She sniffed and wiped away another tear, and Jo surprised herself by reaching out and embracing Claire, feeling how sturdy her arms and shoulders had grown over the course of the summer. She smoothed Claire’s river of red hair. While they’d been talking, the stars had come out, along with a dainty crescent moon complicated by wisps of clouds. A woman’s moon, Mama had always called it, and now Jo realized why. It was a moon for conspiracy, a moon for spinning plots.
“You’re as real a sister to me as could ever be, Claire. You have to know that. I’ve been stubborn and foolish, but I never hated you. Not really.”
Claire blew her nose. “Not as foolish as me. There’s three of us out here all snarled up with Whit, but I was the only one dumb enough to marry him. How smart does that make me?” She took a small breath, on the verge of saying something else, but she bit her lip instead, and Jo could tell she was thinking about Ethan. “Maybe good sense is overrated,” she said. “Maybe Dee is wiser than the two of us put together for knowing that. After all, she’s the one who has Whit’s child.”
Jo snorted. “That girl doesn’t have a wise organ in her body.”
Claire chuckled at that, but she looked so wan and bleary-eyed that Jo had an urge to sit her down in the kitchen and force her to eat a big slice of pound cake sprinkled with honey and salt, the way she used to after school. They hadn’t done that together in years, but the salted and the sugared, the past and the present, no longer seemed quite that far apart. So what if they weren’t real sisters? So what if Jo wasn’t a Gilly by blood? Time and tenacity had made her one, and for the first time in her life, Jo was truly glad.
“How do you tell the difference between carelessness and passion?” Claire asked as they paced back along the edge of the marsh. “Is there one? I mean, really, is there any way to love a person without getting the hell beat out of you for it?” She rubbed at the skin under her eyes, where dark circles would bloom in the morning. She’s not talking about Whit, Jo realized. She’s trying to let Ethan out of her veins.
Jo shook her head. She wished she had an answer for Claire, but as far as she knew, love would leave its marks. Sometimes it even took the skin right off you. She looped her good arm around Claire’s shoulders and matched her steps. “I’m afraid not,” she said, squeezing Claire so hard she could feel her skinny ribs under her fingers, and she wished she had better tidings to give. “At least not if you’re a Gilly.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Whenever Dee started thinking that maybe life on Salt Creek Farm didn’t suck so much after all, something else freaky went down and changed her mind, and burying Claire’s horse was in that category for sure. Dee had been sitting in the parlor, peaceful as pie, when Jo stumped in with the grimmest look Dee had ever seen and told her to fetch a pair of boots, a shovel, and a flashlight, and get her ass out into the marsh.
Wide-eyed, Dee followed Jo and Claire out to the cluster of graves. By now she recognized all the names on them, even in the dark. She frowned and cast a nervous eye over to Jordy, who was sleeping in his salt bowl a few steps away, not bothered by the fact that it was sitting in the dirt, but what else was Dee supposed to do with him? Minute to minute—that’s how she was living life these days, and frankly, she was getting a little tired of it. She adjusted the lantern near him so the glow wouldn’t wake him.
Now that Jordy was out of her and in the world and everything, Dee had started thinking about the future in a whole new way—namely, that it had an unsettling habit of turning into the present quicker than seemed reasonable. And while it was A-OK to plop Jordy down in the dirt here like a watermelon while she helped bury a horse that wasn’t hers, Dee knew the meter on that reality was running down fast.
Jo and Claire had been nice to her. She wasn’t denying that. But in the middle of the night, when she was feeding Jordy his bottle, her mind got to wondering what they were getting out of it. She might have cut her ties with her father, but she was still his daughter, and Cutt had taught her that life worked on a bait-and-reward system. If Dee wanted something, she’d better be prepared to pay for it, he’d instructed, even for the stuff she thought was free. Lately she was starting to get the feeling that Claire and Jo weren’t keeping her on Salt Creek Farm just out of the goodness of their hearts. If she left, she realized, the two of them would be stuck with each other, yowling and snarling like those damn barn cats she now understood why Jo drowned.
She paused in her digging and leaned on her shovel, not so much wiping sweat off her forehead as just smearing it around more. If it were light out, the ponds would be all different colors. Jo had tried to explain why the basins were going bananas, but Dee never understood a thing Jo said. She never would have expected salt to be both so plain and so complicated at the same time.
“Dee? Dee!” Claire was leaning on her shovel handle, too, and scowling at her. “Are you sure you didn’t see or hear anything? Think hard. It’s important.”
Dee shook her head. “No, nothing. And I already told you. I was upstairs, sleeping with Jordy, and then I was in the parlor watching TV.” The TV was new. Dee had made them get it for her. Some salt and solitude she could deal with, but she needed some connection to the real world or she knew she was going to lose what little she had left of her mind. “I gave Jordy a bottle, then took him into the kitchen and gave him a bath in the sink, and then you came home.”
But she was lying. She knew full well what had happened to Icicle, even if she hadn’t actually witnessed anything go down in the barn. She didn’t have to. She’d been pouring water over Jordy’s tummy when she’d spied Whit through the kitchen window, high-stepping his way along the salt levees.
Suddenly he’d stopped dead in his tracks and looked straight across the marsh toward the window and Dee. Her heart had started thumping, and she’d almost drowned poor Jordy, but she couldn’t look away either. Everything about Whit came rushing back to her in that moment—the way the back of his neck felt so smooth under her palm, the ridges of his collarbones, and yes, even the squeeze of his hands around her throat.
Jordy had squawked just then, and Dee had glanced down to rearrange him in the sink. When she looked up again, Whit was slipping into the barn. She took Jordy out of the water and wrapped him in a white towel, squinting out the window. Whit paused and then turned toward the kitchen again. Very slowly, he drew his finger across his throat and then put his hand to his lips. Dee gasped and stepped away from the window. When she’d peered out of it once more, Whit was gone.
Jordy woke now a
nd began to fuss in his patch of dirt. Claire sighed and gave the blade of her shovel a kick. “Take him back to the house. It’s too late for him to be out here. After Jo and I finish, we’re going to haul Icicle from the barn with the truck. You don’t need to see that.”
For once in her life, Dee wasn’t inclined to argue. Jo and Claire were going to be a good few hours yet, so she picked Jordy up in his bowl and began making her way back down the lane toward the house. To her left, the silhouette of the barn loomed out of the darkness like a bad memory, and next to it the lane stretched straight ahead, daring her to go on and make an escape.
She shivered as she let herself into the house, even though it was a humid night. Was Whit still out there, watching the three of them? Probably not, Dee thought. He was a man of action and not observation. She sighed. Maybe this was the sign she needed to tell her that she was never the one for Whit Turner. She had thought that by tangling herself up with Jo and Claire, by becoming one of them, who were so much of his past, she might find the way into his future. Instead here she was—one of three—and trouble, her father had always told her, came in triples. But sometimes so did luck. As she leaned down and lifted Jordy to her shoulder, kissing his sweet head, breathing in the grassy baby smell of him, she found herself wishing she were better at telling the difference.
After Icicle was gone, Dee couldn’t seem to make her bones easy around Salt Creek Farm anymore. It seemed like everywhere she looked, there was some kind of danger she hadn’t been clued into. The barn lurked all empty and spooky, the main channel that led to the sea looked like nothing so much as a giant throat waiting to swallow her alive, and everywhere she stepped, it seemed like there were unlovely creatures seething in the grasses and shadows. She started finding spiders in her sheets, crushed snails smeared on the bottoms of her rubber boots, and once, after she’d skimmed a pond, she had to pick tens of tiny blue moth wings off her blouse collar.