On Folly Beach (2 page)

Thanks also for all of the lighthouse information provided by Carl Hitchcock of Save the Light, Inc., the organization working to restore and preserve the historic Morris Island Lighthouse for future generations. For more information or to learn how you can help, visit
www.savethelight.org
.

Great appreciation also goes to my readers, especially Sandra Popham and Mary Kelly, whose enthusiasm for my books is as flattering as it is inspiring. Thanks for all the kind words—I couldn’t do what I do without you!

And thanks, as always, to my friend and fellow author, Wendy Wax, and my family—Tim, Meghan, and Connor—for enduring yet another deadline and ending up relatively unscathed. You make all of this possible!

The ocean is the same ocean as it has been of old; the events of today are its waves and its rivers.

—Sayyid Haydar Amuli FOURTEENTH CENTURY

PROLOGUE

NOBLESVILLE, INDIANA

January 2009

Emmy awoke to the song of the wind in the bottle tree, to the black night and the winter chill, and knew Ben was gone from her the way the moon knows the ocean’s tides. She’d been born with what her mother called the knowing, and until this night Emmy had never been afraid of it. But now the keening of the wind through the colored bottles bled through her bones and flashed behind her eyes like a newsreel, illuminating the one thing she’d never wanted to know.

Lying awake in the stillness, Emmy began her grieving, missing already the way Ben’s laugh started as a rumble in this throat, and the warmth of his hand on her hip as he slept while she stayed awake to count her firsts and her lasts.

She’d started this on the night Ben had kissed her for the first time all those years ago, tilting her face to his as a sunflower turns toward the sun, and as he lowered his head toward hers she remembered thinking that this was the last time he’d kiss her for the first time. Emmy had assumed that everything with Ben would always be a litany of firsts, and for the most part, they had been. Except for saying good-bye. Since that first night, they’d made it a game between them, promising never to say good-bye to the other. It was insurance, Ben told her, that they would see each other again.

Slowly, Emmy rose from her bed and walked out of her childhood bedroom, where she’d moved when Ben left her for his second tour of duty. Then she went through the living room and the kitchen door to the backyard, ignoring the snow against her feet and the way the wind penetrated Ben’s flannel shirt. The shirt was a poor substitute for his arms, and wearing it in Ben’s absence was something her mother had told her was like swimming with a raincoat. But it was the one thing Emmy could hold on to.

She flitted like a ghost past her mother’s sleeping herb garden, to the back of the picket fence to where the bottle tree stretched itself out through a dusting of snow, howling its unease to the brutal climate. The tree was the only thing her mother had brought from her South Carolina home, as if to bring more would make her exodus too permanent. Although it had been. Except for the funerals of both of Emmy’s grandparents, her mother had never been back.

The tree itself was an artist’s rendition in metal of a tree trunk and multiple branches, upon which each end had been topped with a glass bottle in various rainbow hues. Slaves from the Congo had brought the tradition of the bottle trees from their homeland to the American South, their intent to catch evil spirits inside the bottles before they could make it into their homes.

The bottle tree had stood in the backyard since before Emmy was born, and she’d asked only once why after so many miscarriages her mother had still believed in its power to turn away bad spirits, and never given up and taken it down for good. The obvious answer—because then you were born—had never formed on her mother’s lips, and Emmy had stopped asking.

Still, the tree had become a point of refuge for her—a tie to a place she knew only in old photographs of her mother as a young girl, a place with an entirely different color palette from the flat Indiana farmlands of her home. Emmy had never seen the ocean, but as a child she’d liked to pretend that it was the sound of the ocean that lay trapped within the bottles, and if Emmy ever found the courage to lift a bottle from its branch, she’d finally learn what it was that made her mother miss a place so much.

A new moon bathed the frozen yard with a veil of blue light as Emmy closed her eyes and tried to block out the sound of the wind and the truth it wrapped around her head. Ben is gone. She closed her eyes tighter, trying to feel him again, to see him as she had the last time at the airport, when he was wearing army-issue fatigues with the name HAMILTON stamped on the pocket and saying everything but good-bye. But even her gift failed her, answering her only with bitter cold and utter blackness.

The screen door slammed shut, like a shout in the dark, but Emmy didn’t turn around. “Mama?”

Her mother’s voice came out as a sob. “Is it Ben?”

Emmy nodded, her words frozen. She turned in time to see her mother’s knees begin to buckle. It was Paige’s prerogative; she knew grief. She’d never allowed the birds of sorrow to hover above her, but instead had invited them inside to nest.

Emmy reached her mother before Paige fell into the snow, and found herself again being the comforter, the adult. She welcomed it. If Paige fell apart, Emmy wouldn’t have to think about her own grief, of how she was barely thirty and already a widow. Or how she’d have to find a way to say good-bye to her husband for the last first time.

CHAPTER 1

FOLLY BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA

January 1942

The buzzing from the B-24 bomber approaching Center Street started like nothing more than that of a sand gnat, but soon the noise filled Maggie’s ears to the exclusion of everything else. She ran out onto the front porch as Jack McDonough buzzed his hometown on one of his regular flybys. She waved, not sure if he could see her, then ran back inside and up the stairs to her sister’s bedroom, recently relinquished to their widowed cousin, Catherine.

“Damn that Jack!” came a woman’s voice from inside the bedroom.

Maggie opened the door without knocking and fixed a reproving look at her cousin. “Watch your language, Cat. There are young ears in this house.”

Catherine stood on a chair while Maggie’s nine-year-old sister, Lulu, used an eyeliner pencil to draw a line on the back of Cat’s long tan legs. Lulu sent a worried glance toward Maggie. Lulu never liked to take sides, but usually ended up with Cat, anyway, whether she wanted to or not. It was hard to say no to Cat, no matter who you were.

Catherine waved her left hand with the gold band winking on the third finger. “I’m an adult now, and I can say what I want. And look, he’s made Lulu mess up, and now she’s going to have to start all over.” She wiped her forearm across her forehead. “Damn, it’s hot in here, considering that it’s January. I need to open this window right now.”

She stepped off the stool and perched herself on the wide windowsill of the casement window. Squatting, she lifted the lever while pushing into the window with her hip.

Maggie bit her lip but when she couldn’t stand it anymore, she said, “You’re going to get yourself killed, Cat, if you lean on the window while you open it. Why don’t we just wait so I can call somebody to get it fixed?”

“And die of heat prostration first? I’d rather not, but thank you very much. Besides, I’ve been practicing, and I know how to do it now.” As if even mechanical things couldn’t argue with her, the window gave way at the same moment Cat leaned in to prevent herself from toppling out of the second-story window. “See?” she said, grinning as she stepped from the sill and back to the stool.

Maggie sat on the edge of the white chenille-draped bed in front of the open window and shrugged out of her sweater. “It’s only sixty degrees, Cat. Hardly what anybody would qualify as hot and certainly not enough to warrant putting your life in danger to open a window.” A cool ocean breeze flipped the eyelet curtains into the room as if to accentuate her point. She noticed for the first time the tight white blouse and red skirt her cousin wore. “Are you going somewhere?”

“Out. I don’t care where, just as long as I’m out. Because of all the soldiers coming in, they’re having dancing on the pier, even though it’s not summer. I swear I can hear the music, and I don’t see why I can’t have fun just like all the other girls.” Cat sent her a petulant look that only made her look more dangerous. Before her death, Cat’s mother had always hoped some Hollywood producer would discover Cat and make her a star. With blond hair, green eyes, and a body with curves in all the right places, she was sometimes mistaken for Lana Turner—a mistake Cat rarely corrected.

Maggie bit her lip, not wanting another row. But a promise made on her own mother’s deathbed dictated that she had to try to rein Cat in, if such a thing were possible. After a deep breath she said, “It’s too soon, Cat. What will people say? We only just buried Jim, and his death deserves his widow’s respect.”

Cat remained where she was like a golden statue, eerily silent. Lulu, sensing the upcoming battle, scooted away into a corner, hugging her knees to her chest.

In a deep voice that didn’t even sound like hers, Cat said, “Jim’s dead, Maggie. Not me. I’m only nineteen years old, for God’s sake! I’ve got my whole life ahead of me, and I’m much too young to be buried next to a man I was only married to for three months.”

Lulu began to cry, the sound like a whimpering puppy. She’d loved Jim as only a nine-year-old girl could. It was because of her that Jim had come into their lives. She’d fallen at the roller rink and hurt her leg, and Jim had carried her home like a knight in shining armor. Maggie had thought so, too, warming to his easy grin and gray eyes, touched by stories of his own little sister he’d left behind in Louisiana. He’d taken her dancing twice, and had kissed her once. But then he’d met Cat, and there had been no more dances or kisses.

She stared at her cousin now, the old promise rubbing her like a new shoe. They’d been raised together, their mothers being sisters and Cat’s father having deserted his family long before Cat was even born. Maybe it was because only Maggie saw the desperation in Cat, the hunger and loneliness that dogged her as she hunted for love. And it would have bothered Cat greatly to know that most of the time Maggie only pitied her beautiful cousin.

“You don’t mean that, Cat. I know that you don’t.”

Cat stared out the window. “I want to live. I want to dance.” She turned around, her eyes hopeful. “Come with me, Maggie. You can be my chaperone, although it should be the other way around since you’re single and I’m the widow. It’ll be fun. Just like old times.”

Maggie looked down at her freshly dyed black dress, and her frayed fingernails and stockingless pale legs. Going dancing with Cat was never fun. Maggie would slide into orbit around Cat’s sun, cast in shadow from her light. She wondered sometimes if Cat needed her to go so Maggie could witness that Cat was desirable and wanted, as if to prove that her father’s leaving and her mother’s death had nothing to do with them not wanting her enough.

Cat stepped down off the chair, taking off the high-heeled pumps that she’d badgered Jim into buying for her instead of paying rent. She stood in front of Maggie, her green eyes pleading. “Come on, Maggie. I can’t go by myself—what would the neighbors say?”

Maggie turned away, shaking her head at Cat’s use of Maggie’s own argument. “You’re a recent widow, Cat. You’re not supposed to want to dance. Or be in the company of other men.” Her heart tightened a little as it always did when she thought of Jim, of the way his eyes crinkled in the corners when he smiled, or the way he looked at you when you were speaking as if there was nothing more important in this world than what you had to say.

Cat turned slightly to catch her profile in the cheval mirror in the corner, smoothing her blouse and skirt to accentuate her figure. “In case you hadn’t noticed, Maggie, there’s a war going on. All bets are off. Things that weren’t okay before are perfectly acceptable now.” She lifted her left eyebrow in the way she’d perfected after she’d seen Gone With the Wind. “I’ll let you borrow my blue dress—the one with the pretty collar—and my mother’s brooch. I’ll do your makeup, too. I can make you look like Bette Davis in that movie you like so much. You’re just as pretty, you know, if you just put some effort into it. Don’t you want a husband? There’re men everywhere now. And it’s up to us women to do our duty before they head off to do theirs.”