Keepsake (53 page)

And darned if she didn't pick up faint echoes of her sister talking.

Seeing Laura's face, Miss Widdich smiled. "Corinne has a very pretty voice," she explained. "I'm very attuned to it."

"I
guess,"
said Laura, blinking. Miss Widdich might not have the best knees in town, but her hearing was downright preternatural.

Laura invited her to have a seat while she found out how long Corinne would be, but Miss Widdich waved Laura's invitation away with a flutter of a gnarled hand. "This is a bad time, bad time," she said darkly, and off she toddled, as fast as her knees would let her, leaving Laura mystified.

Curious about the voices, Laura tracked them down and was surprised to find that they weren't coming from the house at all but from the back porch, a small, utilitarian affair with a wasted view of the
Atlantic
.

Built off a summer kitchen that was no longer used, the back porch was merely a place to slough off muddy shoes or hang a wet oil slicker. It was the porch on the front of the house—overlooking the nursery and facing away from the sea—that was large enough to hold their assortment of half-broken beach chairs
and the punched-in wicker love
seat.

Boy, someone had had their priorities
so
reversed, Laura thought, not for the first time. From the inside of the screen door, she caught her breath all over again at the grand expanse of bright blue ocean. It was the one thing her charmer cottage in
Portland
lacked, that view of the sea.

Unwilling to disrupt the conversation between Corinne and her visitor, who together were now strolling away from the house, Laura opened the screen door quietly and let it close gently behind her. She wanted to eavesdrop: it wasn't every day that they had a visitor who came in a suit.

He was no one she knew. Someone from the funeral home, maybe, asking if they were satisfied with the new headstone? It couldn't be the director. This man was much younger, with thicker hair, broader shoulders, and a more relaxed style, despite his spiffy threads. He was standing with his hands in his pockets, apparently willing to let Corinne do the talking.

He was nodding, as though he'd heard it all before. They definitely knew one another. Laura couldn't imagine who the guy was; Corinne had never spoken to her about anybody who could have afforded a suit like that.

Corinne pointed to her right and he followed her direction, partly revealing himself in profile to Laura. She realized that he did look familiar, after all, and yet she wasn't able to place him. Her sense was that he was—and yet was anything but—a local.

Before Laura could analyze the vaguely negative reaction she was having to him, he turned and gave her a sharp look, as though she'd beaned him on the back of the head with a spitball. Embarrassed to be caught staring, she shifted her gaze to Corinne, who was still blithely chattering away.

"Sorry to interrupt," Laura said, yanking her sister out of her monologue. "Rinnie, Miss Widdich just stopped by to see you. She was behaving a little oddly, and—"

She saw the visitor barely suppress a smile; obviously he, too, was familiar with the odd Miss Widdich. Who the hell
was
he? She marched up to him and, over Corinne's belated effort, began to introduce herself. "I'm Corinne's sister—"

"Laura. Of course. I'd know you anywhere," he said, his smile broadening.

When she looked blank, the visitor added quickly, "Ken. Ken Barclay? We went to the same grade school?"

Laura was speechless. She blinked and stared and finally said,
"
Kendall
?"

"One and the same. How are you?"

Skinny, geeky, brainy, rich, and haughty
Kendall
?

"You're him?"

He laughed and said, "Last time I looked at my driver's license, anyway."

She wanted to see that license. The man standing in front of her was six-foot-something, solidly built, and knockdown, drag-out sexy. Not to mention devoid of braces and a bumpy forehead. Those fierce blue eyes: something about them looked vaguely the same, but even there
...
.

Kendall Barclay.

The effect he had on her was dizzying, almost violent. Laura's cheeks went hot with the recollection of their fateful encounter. Suddenly she was thirteen and ill-dressed, with dirt under her fingernails and surrounded by a group of cruel, taunting boys grabbing and pawing and tearing her shirt.

No wonder he'd been able to recognize her so easily. Damn it, she still looked the same!

Her cheeks fired up even hotter with embarrassment when he extended his hand and she was forced to extend her own, with its bloody, bruised knuckles and dirty fingernails. She kept the handshake firm, though, as she explained, "I'm working the greenhouse detail today."

"So I see. Nice to have you back. Corinne tells me that you're working like gangbusters on the West Coast as a computer consultant?"

It was that question mark, coupled with a furtive glance at her clown-sized pants and her belt of rope, that instantly got under Laura's skin. It was so obvious that he found the idea of her success a hard one to swallow.

"Well, you kno
w what they say about the self-
employed," she said, recovering enough to give him a very dry smile. She gestured with both hands toward her pants. "Every day is casual Friday."

He followed her gesture, looking blank for a second. "Oh. You mean—" He dipped his head in a nod at her getup. "I never even noticed."

"Well, thank you for
that."

Even worse. To someone like Kendall Barclay, she would always be one of the Shore urchins, beneath notice. It didn't help that his neck was turning red. Clearly he felt that she was putting him on the spot, taking everything to a personal level.

Which she was. For God's sake, she hadn't actually talked to him in, what, twenty years? Surely she could handle a chance encounter better than this!

But she couldn't. All she could see was a blurry circle of boys around her, taking turns grabbing at her breasts and at her crotch.

"Laura? What, um, was it that you were saying about Miss Widdich?" Corinne's voice was faint with fear, as if she were watching her sister standing in a pit with a cobra and poking it with a stick.
You are messing with the man who holds the key to our survival.

Maybe yes, maybe no. In an almost wrenching act of self-control, Laura swept away the memory of the circle of cruel boys and said to Corinne, "I think Miss Widdich would like to talk to you whenever you have time, Rinnie."

And then, still feeling fierce about the cruel note she'd got from
Kendall
all those years ago, she said in a fiercely pleasant voice, "Miss Widdich brought us a huge casserole for lunch. Cheese and noodles. You're welcome to join us in our peasant fare."

He backpedaled from the invitation as fast as politeness allowed. Shooting an arm through the sleeve of his jacket, he glanced at his watch. "Ah-h, thanks very much, but I have another appointment. I'm running a little late as it is, so I'd better get going."

With a friendly smile to Corinne, he said, "I'll see you on Wednesday, then."

When he shifted his attention back to Laura, his manner changed. He cleared his throat. Compressed his lips in a tight smile. Gazed doggedly at her chin. "Well. Good seeing you again after all—"

He had to clear his throat again. "These years."

It was obvious to Laura: he remembered. He remembered, and he was embarrassed about it. He
should
be, damn it. If she had not been a Shore, would he have been so arrogant and unfeeling in his note back to her?
 

You shouldn't be writing to me.

Don't do it again.

And don't ever try to see me.
 

Laura was a big girl now, but those scribbled words still cut like razorblades acros
s the thin surface of her self-
esteem.

"Good to see you, too—after all these years. But I'm sure I'll be seeing you again," she said coolly.

Not only that, but she was already planning what she'd be wearing when she did.

****

As he walked back to his car, Ken pulled irritatedly at his tie: he felt too buttoned up by half. The way his blood was pumping, he was ready to burst a blood vessel.

And it wasn't because of the heat of the day. Seeing Laura so unexpectedly had set his pulse roaring along, trying to keep up with his libido. Even now, he was at a loss why: she had just done everything but cross her forearms at him.

Maybe he shouldn't have been surprised. Maybe he should have been willing to let old ghosts lie. But he wasn't. Damn it, he was not willing. One look into her gray eyes—as dark and as threatening as a squall in July—and he was ready to take her on. There were issues here, issues between them that were unresolved.

One way or another, he planned to resolve them.

A Month at the Shore, available for your Nook April 2012.

Antoinette Stockenberg

"
Complex … fast-moving …humorous … tender"

--
Publishers Weekly
 

SAFE
HARBOR
.
 
That's what
Martha's Vineyard
has always been for Holly Anderson, folk artist, dreamer and eternal optimist.
 
If she could just afford to buy the house and barn she's renting, fall in love, marry the guy and then have children as sweet as her nieces, life would be pretty much perfect.
Poor Holly.
 
She has so much to learn.

Chapter 1

H
olly Anderson's birthday surprise turned out to be a two-by-four over the head.

She had been expecting, oh, a cake and candles in her studio; maybe a singing telegram; possibly to be dragged out to dinner at one of the island's fancier restaurants. She had not expected to spend the last half of the first day of her thirty-first year at the bottom, emotionally speaking, of a ditch.

Her summer birthday had begun routinely enough, with Holly devoting the morning to cleaning and sanding the wide drawerfronts of a sweet old pine dresser that she'd snatched up at a yard sale on the Vineyard just two days earlier. Then came the
fun part, sketching a whimsical
farmstead across the faces of the three drawers. After erasing a cow and two geese and adding more chickens, Holly was ready to mix her paints and make folk art magic.

She loved what she was doing, loved the way she was connecting in some mystical way with the generations before her who had used and loved and worn out the workaday set of drawers. She would have loved it even without being paid; but her folk art was in wild demand, and that continued to amaze her.

Holly had filled in a few brushstrokes of sky when her mother's white Volvo
pulled up in front of the red-
shingled barn that was serving so well as a summer studio. Good
. A
ll signs pointed to a quiet dinner with her parents at the Black Dog this year, with maybe some cake and hopefully no telegram.

"Hi, Mom," she called over her shoulder through the clutter of broken furniture, handmade birdhouses, and charming whirligigs that filled the ground floor of the building. She laid down another stroke of impossible blue. "Come see my latest."

The hum of her creativity was so strong that it drowned out the sound of her mother's silence. It took a moment for Holly to emerge from her trance and turn around.

"He's having an affair with
Eden
," said Charlotte Anderson, skipping right past any birthday greeting. Her lip began to quiver. Tears welled but did not fall.

"Who is?"

"Who do you
think!"
Outrage boiled, not quite over.

"I'm sorry," said Holly, forcing herself to abandon her work. "I wasn't paying attention. Who's having an affair with
Eden
?" She began wiping her paint-stained fingers on a soft cloth. Her mother could have been talking about almost any male on the island.
Eden
was gorgeous, twenty-nine, not shy.
Eden
was an enchantress.

Charlotte Anderson closed her eyes and bit her lip, then gave up the struggle. Her face contorted with pain, and then she broke down. "Your fathe
r
... your father
... your
father,
damn him to hell," she moaned between racking sobs.

Holly simply stared. "Are you crazy?
Da
d!
Are you crazy?"

"My God—would I make it up?" her mother cried. Suddenly she turned all of her pain and fury on Holly. "Take
his
side, why don't you!" she said, and she staggered, newly wounded, to a rickety
Windsor
chair that was awaiting glue and a folk art treatment.