Freefall (4 page)

Three weeks later

Although the sun had long ago set, the air remained hot and dripping with humidity. Just another summer night in the Deep South. The salt-tinged breeze coming off the ocean lifted the hair off the back of Sabrina's neck, creating a bit of welcome natural air-conditioning.

A full moon floated across the sky, turning the water of Somersett Harbor to beaten silver. Gulls squawked, whirled, and dove for fish churned up by the wake of the ferry. Sabrina stood at the railing as they left the dock, passing by the towering statue of Admiral James Somersett, the privateer who'd settled the coastal southern city.

The crescent beach where she used to go beachcombing for shells and where she'd often witnessed dolphins hunting schools of fish by driving them onto the sand, began on the south side of the island, then wrapped around the eastern coast that faced out to the Atlantic.

A panorama of wheat-colored marsh made up the west and north coasts and between them, on a long peninsula, Swannsea stood like a beacon, gleaming alabaster in the moonlight.

Sabrina hitched in a breath at the sight of the Swann family home. For a moment she pictured her grandmother, standing on the upper veranda, her hand shielding her eyes as she looked toward the mainland, awaiting Sabrina's arrival.

The image in her mind was so clear, so vivid, it was hard to believe Lucie wasn't standing there. Sabrina blinked. Then looked again.

Both verandas were empty.

As empty as she felt.

She tried, as she'd been doing for weeks, to console herself with the idea that no one could've expected Lucie Swarm to die before her sixty-fifth birthday. Her grandmother had, after all, made the Energizer Bunny look like a slacker. Sabrina had traveled the world, met a lot of important, powerful people. Yet she'd never met anyone who possessed half the energy of her grandmother.

"Okay." She shook off the depression that always seemed to be lurking nearby lately. "You can do this." She took a deep breath before heading back to the parked car she'd rented at the Somersett airport. "One day at a time."

Things hadn't changed.

Sabrina hadn't expected them to.

That, after all, was the appeal of Swarm Island. Once a home base for pirates, including the infamous Blackbeard—whose feud with fellow privateer James Somersett had filled the pages of dozens of books and was celebrated annually during Buccaneer Days with a mock battle in the harbor—the island had become known for both its bred-in-the-bone resistance to change and, even more than its neighbor on the mainland, its parties.

It was at such a party, the story went, that Margaret Mitchell had impulsively decided to use Swannsea as a model for Tara, in what would become her blockbuster novel. Of course, Lucie Swann had always been quick to point out when tourists would mention the similarity, there were more homeowners all over the South making the same claim than you could shake a hickory stick at. So who was to know, really?

What Lucie did remember was her own mama telling her that the beautiful, vibrant Margaret, who could've been a role model for her rebellious fictional Scarlett, had cut quite a figure with her scandalous Apache Dance, had enjoyed her Madeira, and had entered into a flirtation—and, it was rumored, a sizzling affair—with Junior Honeycutt, the island's dashing, and twice-married, physician.

Sabrina opened the sunroof as she drove off the ferry. The heat flooded in, turning the rental car into a subtropical terrarium, but ever since the terrorist bombing of the hotel, when she was buried alive, she'd been claustrophobic.

Even with the Xanax her Italian doctor had prescribed, the flight back to the States had proven horribly nerve-racking.

Now, she felt a bit of tension release as she followed the white shell road ribboning through the marsh.

After Eve Bouvier, CEO of the Wingate chain, had encouraged her to take all the time she needed to get back to full strength, it had only made sense to come back to the island.

Not for any permanent move. Just long enough to work out the kinks, get her sea legs back, toughen up, and get back on that horse she'd been blown off of.

"Got any more raggedy old metaphors you want to toss in there?" she asked herself as she turned onto the narrow, winding road leading to Swannsea.

She'd also made the right decision to buy coffee, milk, yogurt, and fruit at the Somersett Piggly Wiggly before continuing on to the ferry terminal. She'd always been a bit of a curiosity—Miss Lucie's Yankee granddaughter from New York City—but now, after the bombing, she suspected the whispers and murmurs she'd grown up accustomed to hearing would become a deafening clamor of questions.

Questions she was reluctantly prepared to answer.

"But not tonight."

Tonight she wanted to settle in.

Driving through the mile-long tunnel of towering oaks, Sabrina thought back to the first time she'd seen the ethereal Spanish moss dripping from the broad tree limbs. She'd just finished reading
Gone with the Wind
, and to her vivid imagination, the moss had reminded her of feathery boas discarded by Southern belles.

Years later, it still did.

As she turned the last corner to the house, her headlights flashed on the ancient scar on the bark of one of the oaks. According to family lore, twenty-year-old Jedidiah Swann had been racing off to join the Confederate army when his horse, spooked by a nest of copperheads in a pile of rotting leaves at the roots of the tree, threw him, dragging him to his death and leaving his bride of two weeks a grieving widow.

The wound to the tree, the story went, had been created by the saber he'd strapped on to take into battle against the Yankees. The same saber his granddaddy Thomas had wielded against the British in the War of 1812.

Unbeknownst to either of the newlyweds, he'd left Anne Swann with child, thus ensuring that the Swann lineage would continue. Because their funds, earned from their lucrative tea trading business, had remained tied up in English banks during the War Between the States, the family had escaped ending up as impoverished as most of their neighbors once Lee surrendered his sword to Grant at Appomattox Court House.

That was the good news.

The sad news was that Anne never married again.

"Yet more proof that Swann women are unlucky in marriage," Sabrina said as she reached the magnificent house.

Not only had her grandfather deserted Lucie, but her own parents had married and divorced each other five times before their BMW roadster had gone over that seaside cliff in Monaco. Afterward, witnesses at a Monte Carlo cafe had reported that they were shouting at each other as they drove away.

As tragic as their death had been, Sabrina had often thought her jet-setting mother would have at least enjoyed the idea of dying in the exact same place where Princess Grace had lost her life.

A single yellow light gleamed a warm welcome from an upstairs window.

Lucie's former housekeeper, who'd been with her since Lucie came to the house as a bride, had moved to Savannah to live with her daughter, but when Sabrina had called Lincoln Davis, who had taken over the day-to-day operation of the farm from his father, to let him know she was arriving early, he'd told her he would leave the lights on.

She hadn't realized he meant that literally.

The old carriage house had been turned into a garage in the nineteen thirties; the doors opened with a rusty, unused squeak. Sabrina parked her rental car next to her grandmother's battleship-sized, purple-finned Cadillac.

She would have to sell the car. Which, unless all those Elvis-conspiracy folks were right and the King turned out to be not only alive but hiding out on Swann Island, probably wasn't going to be all that easy.

One good thing about having her life blown up from beneath her was that she was traveling light. Even after she bought a few basic pieces of clothing and some cosmetics, everything she owned fit into two overnight cases.

Although she suspected the bouquet of perky purple heliotrope in a white teapot in the center of the kitchen table was another of Line's welcome-home gestures, the familiar summer flowers made it seem as if Lucie would come walking into the room at any minute.

Not that her grandmother had ever merely walked anywhere. She always swept through life, like those cruise ships that were always steaming out of Somersett Harbor on their way to grand adventures.

Sabrina's eyes filled.

"Dammit, Gram. This wasn't the way things were supposed to happen."

Sabrina would be the first to admit that she was a control freak. Lucie, who had tried to loosen her up during her visits to the island, said that it was an understandable reaction to growing up with a father whose picture would no doubt be in the dictionary next to "Peter Pan" and a mother too wrapped up in her art gallery to even notice that she'd given birth to a daughter.

With Sabrina's parents traveling the world, Lucie had been the only real family she had ever known. And now, proving yet again that control was merely an illusion, her grandmother, like her parents, was gone.

Swiping at hot tears, Sabrina managed to put the yogurt and milk in the refrigerator before the jet lag that had been chasing her since she'd boarded her flight in Milan finally caught up, crashing down like a four-hundred-year-old oak.

She left the bag of coffee on a counter cluttered with a collection of antique teapots and dragged herself—and her overnight case—up the curving staircase and down the hall.

She paused in front of her grandmother's room—which was where the welcoming light had been coming from. It looked just the same—as if a crate of grapes had exploded in a overcluttered antique shop.

Everything, from the walls sprigged with lilacs to the fluffy violet satin comforter, matching drapes, and array of crystal perfume bottles in various shades of purple from palest lavender to plum, was just as she'd last seen it. The scent of lavender potpourri caused another flood of emotions as a mental picture of sitting out on the veranda with Lucie, stuffing dried purple flowers into pillows, flashed through Sabrina's mind.

She realized that along with selling the Caddy that the locals had always called Miss Lucie's Grapemobile, she was also going to have to do something with the rest of her grandmother's belongings.

However, like Scarlett, Lucie's all-time favorite heroine, Sabrina decided she would think about that tomorrow.

Her old bedroom also hadn't changed since that summer her grandmother had it redone it as a surprise for her sixteenth birthday.

The walls were still what the paint chip had called ballet-slipper pink, while the canopy arching over the bed was the darker pink of a peony.

Photos pinned to a white-framed bulletin board shared space with a
Titanic
movie poster. One strip of photos taken in a harborside booth during Somersett Buccaneer Days made her smile. She and her best friend were sticking their tongues out at the camera, and two fingers appeared to be coming out of her head.

Although Sabrina and Titania Davis, Line's sister, had kept up with occasional e-mails and phone calls, they hadn't gotten together for… what?

Six years?

Too long.

But she'd been so busy. At least that was what Sabrina kept telling herself over all those days and months and years.

Too busy for family.

Too busy for friends.

She'd never been all that introspective. But fatigue and jet lag seemed to have tumbled emotional barricades already lowered by the bombing. Although only three weeks ago she would have vehemently argued against the idea, it now occurred to Sabrina that perhaps she'd grown up to be more like her parents than she could ever have imagined.

She wasn't one to whine about being disadvantaged—she'd certainly always had a roof over her head (even if the roof in question belonged to either a hotel or a boarding school), and she'd been granted anything material she'd ever asked for.

Gifts, she'd learned early, came easily for her parents. So long as they were the material kind you could buy in a store. Or, better yet, have a personal assistant pick up on a lunch hour.

But it had been Lucie who had always given Sabrina the gift of time.

As she stripped off her clothes and pulled the oversized La Fiorentina football jersey she used as a nightshirt over her head, guilt returned to weigh heavily on her shoulders, like a wet wool blanket.

Going into the adjoining pink and white bathroom, she brushed her teeth and washed the travel grunge off her face, then returned to the bedroom, where she opened the plantation shutters and threw up the window sash.

Night dampness and salt air, perfumed by the scent of Confederate jasmine trailing up the trellis below the window, rushed into the room, stirring the lacy white curtains.

Sabrina didn't take the time to remove the menagerie of stuffed animals she'd left behind before she collapsed on the mattress. After too many hours alone in the dark, she'd taken to leaving a bedside lamp on.

Nevertheless, every muscle in her body suddenly tightened as she heard a faint scraping sound from the attic over the four-poster bed.

Instantly, every woman-in-jeopardy-alone-in-a-scary-old-house slasher movie she'd ever seen flashed through her mind.

It's only mice
, she assured herself, attempting to shake off the odd, tense feeling. Or, more likely, it was her jet-lagged mind playing tricks on her.

Whichever. Although she'd always hated even stepping on a spider, she would have to buy some traps when she went into the village in the morning.