On Folly Beach (41 page)

Maggie shook her head, wondering if she was dreaming. “No. I . . . I had to sit down, that’s all.”

“What’s wrong?” He looked at her the old way, and she felt herself beginning to thaw.

She stared at his beloved face, remembering each line, each crease, the way his hair swept his forehead. “You said . . . you said before that you needed to talk to me. I’m ready. I’m ready to listen now.”

He glanced toward the top of the stairs, then looked back at her. He shook his head. Whispering, he said, “I’ll write you another note.”

Frowning she whispered back, “Another?”

A look of realization swept over his face.

“Peter? Is that you?”

They both looked up. Shaking his head again, Peter stood with the tray. “Yes, Cat. I’m back.”

“Could you please ask Maggie to hurry with my breakfast? I’m hungry.”

The book, which had fallen from the tray and had been leaning against the step, fell over, its back cover opened to one of Lulu’s ink drawings of her bottle tree.

“There,” he said quietly.

Their eyes met and it was as if the intervening months hadn’t happened, as if there were no Cat and no baby and Peter belonged to Maggie again. Peter called upstairs, “I’ll bring it.” Without another word, Peter headed upstairs with the tray, looking back only once as he entered the bedroom.

LULU WATCHED FROM THE DARKENED kitchen window as Peter left the house from the back door and quickly crossed the backyard to her tree. She hadn’t been to it since the morning Peter had given her his note to put in the tree because looking at it made her feel sick with guilt. As Maggie would have told her, keeping the note had been the sin of omission, and seeing her tree only reminded her of it.

Two of the bottles were missing, and the whole tree leaned to the side, like it was tired of holding up all that guilt. And now Peter was heading right toward it, and she sat up and squinted, glad for the full moon. He’d been sleeping on the downstairs sofa for a while now because of Cat being so sick, and Lulu might not have heard him except that she had gotten up to go to the bathroom and heard the creek of the sofa springs.

She watched as he took something out of his pants pocket and stuck it into the neck of the amber root-beer bottle on the bottom limb. When he turned around, she ducked back, but not before she’d seen his face clearly in the moonlight. He was smiling, and his eyes glittered like sea glass in the sun, scaring her a little. Even though she knew he couldn’t see her, she would have sworn he was looking right at her, and the thought sent goose bumps all over her.

Peering out again, she saw that he wasn’t heading back to the house at all, but was turning up the side yard. Rushing to the front window, she very carefully moved the blackout curtain aside and peered out, watching as Peter emerged into the front yard and continued walking to the street. Even though he wasn’t supposed to because of the blackout, Peter pulled what looked like a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. A few seconds later a match flared, and Lulu ducked, waiting for a German torpedo to find that one source of light in all of Folly Beach.

When nothing happened, Lulu peered out of the curtain again and watched Peter head down the street, keeping to shadows made by fences and trees, and heading toward the beach. She watched the orange circle of his lit cigarette until it grew too small to see. Lulu remembered the handkerchief Maggie had found in Cat’s jacket. She’d flattened it out and found three initials that didn’t make any sense because they weren’t Peter’s. It had taken Lulu a while to figure it out, but she still needed proof. The handkerchief was hidden in her box with her other treasures, and she had no intention of showing it to anyone. Yet.

As soon as Peter was out of sight, she rushed to the back door and quietly let herself outside. The note almost glowed in the moonlight, making it easy to see. She slid it from the bottle’s neck and brought it inside to the kitchen, where she found Maggie’s flashlight in a drawer and flipped it on. After waiting a moment to hear if anybody else was awake, she slowly opened the note with one hand and began to read: Our picnic spot. Two o’clock a.m. The horse patrol comes at one and three, so be careful.

Lulu shut off the flashlight and replaced it in the drawer, then held the note in the palm of her hand until the clock struck the hour. She wished Amy was there to talk to, to remind Lulu that she had hidden the first note only because she didn’t want Maggie to leave her. Even though now it seemed it didn’t matter what she did—Maggie was going away with Peter and leaving her behind. It was just like Jim had said to her—no bad deed ever went unpunished. He was right, she knew. She only wished that the punishment didn’t hurt so bad.

Quietly, she let herself out of the house again and made her way through the moonlight to the tree. Very carefully, she placed the note exactly where Peter had left it for Maggie to find.

Then she headed to the street to follow Peter, thinking she knew where he was heading and half hoping that she was wrong.

CHAPTER 22

FOLLY BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA

October 2009

Emmy looked down at her new jogger’s watch, which sprouted buttons she still didn’t know what to do with, and picked up her pace from a walk to a slow jog. Her new running shoes slapped at the pavement, the sound insulated by the low-lying clouds, muffling her progress as if they, too, wanted to keep her secret.

She had parked her car at the store around five thirty, and gone over Heath’s final plans for the attic while she waited for the sun to rise. Then she’d headed down the west end of the island, hoping to make it all the way to the gates of the county park and back without stopping.

Emmy chose the streets this time instead of the beach, deciding it was time to explore her new home. She ran up Center Street and passed the pink city hall building, where the indomitable Marlene Estridge worked as the city clerk. Emmy had quickly found that if she needed an answer to any question about Folly, or about permits, or about anything, Marlene would either know the answer or know who would.

As she slowed back down to a walk, she passed larger, newer houses with manicured lawns and professional landscaping tucked between the older Folly cottages that Emmy had overheard a tourist at Taco Boy calling fraternity houses. She’d almost turned around to tell them to go to Kiawah or Seabrook if they wanted a different beach scene, but had held back when she realized that she’d thought the same thing when she first arrived.

But now, after living here for just a few short months, she’d begun to appreciate the charm of the town, and how different it was from the other sea islands that surrounded Charleston. It would never give airs of pretension or exclusion: what you saw was what you got, and there was something reassuring about that, especially for a person who wasn’t really sure who she was in the first place.

She made it down West Arctic and passed the house where George Gershwin had lived while writing Porgy and Bess, the house now completely surrounded by a high wooden fence. Marlene had told Emmy it was because of all the tourists who kept knocking on the front door looking for a tour.

Breathing deeply, Emmy smelled the salt of the ocean and the pluff mud of the marsh, and neither seemed so foreign to her. The air in Indiana at the beginning of October was full of the promise of the coming harvest, crisp and yellow with waiting corn. But here the air carried with it the weight of water filled with teeming life that lay hidden until you looked close enough to see.

Emmy made it all the way to the county park, walking more than she jogged, but she figured it was at least a start. Without pausing, she turned around in front of the park’s gate and headed east, crossing back over Center Street to East Ashley, passing Bert’s twenty-four-hour market with the handwritten sign that read “We might doze, but we never close!” on the door, then finally turning left to return to Folly’s Finds. She circled her truck several times, trying to catch her breath and feeling a lot older than she was. The old Emmy, Ben’s wife, wouldn’t have exerted herself like that. She wasn’t sure why; Ben would have loved her regardless. It had more to do with the roles they’d played for each other, and how she still felt lost, like an actress without a script.

Her gaze rested on the box of books in the back of her truck. They’d been in there for a week, yet she hadn’t done anything with them. Nor had she asked Lulu about the sketch of the bottle tree in the back of one of the books. She knew she was close to the end now, but the closer she came, the more she backed away. Maybe she was a lot like Heath and his unfinished projects, avoiding finishing something because he was too afraid to face what came next in his life. But Emmy wasn’t afraid; she was simply lost.

With determination, she unlocked the car, fished for the store’s keys from under the seat, and pulled them out. After opening the door, she grabbed the box and brought it back into Folly’s Finds, dumping it on the floor with a loud thump. It was Sunday and the store was closed, so she could spend as much time as she needed to get through this final box.

She didn’t have her laptop, so she grabbed a pad of paper and a pencil, then sat down next to the box with her back against the checkout counter and began the familiar ritual of pulling books from the box, then methodically scanning each page from cover to cover.

These books were similar to the rest inasmuch as they were an eclectic grouping like one might find in a person’s home book collection. Except most of the books appeared new, without any creasing of the spines. And several of them were duplicates, as if purchased without much thought; or as if reading them hadn’t been the intended use.

Emmy’s head throbbed with anticipation, scaring her with its sudden intensity. There was something important here, something she couldn’t miss. It was only after she’d opened the first five books that she realized the biggest difference in this box of books. Every single one of them had at least one notation in the margins, like these books had been collected and put together in a box for just that reason. But these notes weren’t love poems; these notes had taken on a completely different tone. Pulling her notebook onto her lap, she copied: I have a plan. That one had been written in the man’s handwriting.

She finished thumbing through that book, and picked up the next one, a late edition of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Peering into the box, she spotted at least two more identical copies and her head throbbed with renewed intensity.

The next seven books held similarly cryptic messages from both the man and the woman. Staring down at her notepad, she studied what she’d written, then scrambled them around until she’d arranged them in some kind of order, alternating between the man and woman like a fluid dialog.

I can’t. She’s in a bad way tonight and I must stay with her.

Where were you?

It’s too soon. She’s still so weak.

I can’t wait much longer. Things are changing that I can’t control.

She’s too young to be left behind—even for just a few short months. She needs me.

Now, darling. It must be now. You’ll understand later, I promise.

I don’t know if she’ll believe me if I tell her I’ll be back for her.

I have a plan.

Emmy felt as if she were eavesdropping on a conversation she could only hear part of, reminding her of the game she’d played as a child in which a secret was whispered around the circle of children until the secret had been distorted so much it barely resembled the original.

After pulling off the fifteen books on top, she saw that the rest of the box was filled with old atlases and maps. On closer inspection she saw that they all showed the world as it had been prior to World War II. The boundaries of Western Europe looked strange to her, and she imagined she could see the Germans standing eagerly at Poland’s borders, ready to march.

The atlases and travel guides were like new, just like the books, without any sign that they’d been read more than once or at all. And after thumbing through the first layer and not finding a single note, she began to feel discouraged. Her neck tingled as she stared at the assortment of travel books, remembering how Abigail had told her that the travel section in Folly’s Finds had been Maggie’s favorite.