The Gilly Salt Sisters (51 page)

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 and 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.

A
fter 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.

“It’s more important than ever that you don’t even think about contacting Whit,” Claire warned her in the kitchen a few days after they’d put Icicle in the ground. “Not for Jordy’s sake. Not for your own. Not for anything. You’ve seen for yourself what he can do.” Claire had sold her wedding rings to save Salt Creek Farm from the bank, Dee knew, and Whit was sure to be hopping mad about that. She remembered how sternly he’d ordered her never to lose that junky locket he’d given her. She could only imagine what he would do at the loss of a diamond.

“Well?” Claire said, snapping Dee back to the present. Claire was baking for her new stand in the farmers’ market, and she had flour dusted in her hair and sugar spread on her hands. She looked sweet, but Dee was starting to suspect that that was all on the surface, like one of the crusts on her pies.

“Fine,” she said, getting a glass of milk. “You already told me this about a thousand times. I won’t go near Whit.”

“I just want to be sure you got that message,” Claire said, eyeing Jordy in his wooden bowl. “Now that you’re a mother and all, we can’t be too careful.” She started to reach down to the baby, but before she could get her mucky hands on him, Dee scooped
him up and pressed him to her chest. Claire pretended she’d been reaching for something else near the bowl—a whisk. She turned back to the distraction of her baking.

“Don’t you worry,” she said, more to herself than to Dee. “Once Jo and I are through with Whit, he’ll never want to set foot in this place again.” Dee remembered the strange vision of Whit stepping out of the salt barn and drawing his finger across his throat. The loyal half of her wanted to throw her hat in with Claire and Jo, whatever they were cooking up, but the more depraved half still wanted to follow Whit down the empty lane and take her chances. “What are you planning on doing?” she asked, taking a sip from her glass.

Claire started whipping a bowl of cream. Her arm moved in faster and faster circles. “That’s for us to know and you not to find out.” She stopped and smiled sweetly. “I’m sure you understand.” She pushed a wisp of loose hair out of her green eyes. “After all, when it comes to a man like Whit, you can’t be too careful. And careful”—she regarded Dee—“isn’t really your strong suit, is it?”

A
s the last of the autumn heat settled back into the earth and cold air began crystallizing on the horizon, Dee began to feel as if she’d been given a set of sharper eyes. For the first time, she started worrying for real about the future. She was coming to realize that the salt worked differently for everybody. Jo seemed happiest when she was toiling away in the stuff, and it seemed to drive Claire to the kitchen, but as far as Dee could tell, she herself was having a negative reaction. To date, the taste of the salt hadn’t provided her with anything tangible. In fact, it had done the opposite. It summoned up everything she was missing—namely, living among people. She missed going to the movies and the shops, and she even craved the threads of gossip floating around the booths in her father’s diner. But most of all she still ached for Whit.

She started dreaming about the apartment she’d like to have for
her and Jordy one day—something on a high floor, maybe even a converted attic with cozy sloping eaves and a view over water. She thought about going to beauty school and opening up a little salon somewhere plain on the coast like Gloucester—a place where the women weren’t glam but wanted to be—and when Jordy was old enough, she’d buy him a little shaggy dog, and the three of them would be a just-big-enough family.

But dreams cost dollars. Everything did, down to the cartons of formula Jordy could empty in the blink of an eye. Dee gently eased the bottle teat from his mouth and put him over her shoulder to rub his back, nuzzling him with her cheek. It was remarkable how much he looked like Whit, from his slanting eyebrows to the squared-off tips of his fingers. Inside, though, Dee hoped he was filled only with her.

Jordy let out a burp, and she shifted him to the crook of her elbow. In three months he’d gotten so big. He could hold up his head, smile, laugh, and push himself up onto his forearms like a miniature strong man. Sometimes when he slept, Dee leaned down and kissed his perfect bowed mouth, licking her own lips afterward, amazed by the way her baby’s breath could cleanse her.

She’d quit wanting to share him with anyone. In the first few weeks after she’d come home from the hospital, she’d been grateful for the way Jo and Claire doted on Jordy. Her incision ached, and she’d had a difficult time doing the most basic things—climbing stairs, sitting up in bed, lowering her ass into the bathtub. And Jordy had seemed so frail. Dee had been worried she’d drop him, or accidentally break him or something, but that didn’t happen, and she began to see that she was the one who’d be broken without him. She especially didn’t like Claire’s habit of scooping him into her arms at every available opportunity and running her index finger down his forehead and the bridge of his tiny nose.

“He’s not an arcade game,” Dee would snap, and rush to retrieve him. “You don’t press a button on him and get a prize.” It bothered her even more when Jordy started smiling at the diversion.

“See, he likes it,” Claire crowed, and kept on doing it.

Dee would ban Claire from her attic apartment, she decided. And if she ever came into Dee’s salon in the future, Dee would shave all that pretty red hair off her.

She didn’t even want to share Jordy with Whit anymore. Ever since Icicle’s death, she just wanted to get as far away from him and this marsh as she could. Her plan was simple. All she needed was a little bit of money and even less time.

Whit wasn’t as rich as he seemed—she’d overheard that from Jo and Claire—but surely he could sell off something in that big house of his—a painting, or how about that fancy car he still drove around in? Even if it was a few years old, it had to be worth something. She’d get Whit alone somehow and ask him.
You can make me go away
, she’d say, drawing her finger across her throat to remind him of what she saw that day when he’d slipped into the barn.
I’ll never set foot in this town again. Just write me a check and there will be one less female on Salt Creek Farm you have to worry about.

Not to mention one less male.

He’d do it, too, Dee thought. A lifetime of child support for a kid he was ashamed of versus a quick lump sum wasn’t hard math. Even she could add that total up in her head, and she hadn’t finished out her junior year of high school.

Or maybe he’d just kill them both. There was no way to know. For all his hustle and smooth talk, Whit wasn’t a betting man. He went after only what he was sure he’d win—first Joanna, then Claire, and then Dee.
He had us all
, Dee thought.
I’m not going to wait around until he decides he wants Jordy.

She tiptoed back indoors. Around her the house was dark and still, lit only by the moon, and the household clutter seemed even more unmanageable. Once she’d wanted to get to the bottoms of these heaps. Now she didn’t care enough. There were the bedrooms with their crammed closets, a collection of dented canisters and tins in the kitchen, and a decade’s worth of papers in the writing desk, and none of it had anything to do with Dee.

Without any forethought, she wandered into the parlor and
opened the desk, staring at the morass of papers inside. Just as before, ancient catalogs hawked their outmoded goods. Forgotten coupons advertised their specials. And a letter from the bank thanked Jo for her recent payments and reminded her that she wasn’t all the way done yet. Dee squinted at the numbers and then pocketed that correspondence. Whit might be interested in something like that, for a price. He sure seemed to want Salt Creek Farm. If Dee had to help him get it, then okay. She would.