Читать книгу Lucy And The Stone - Dixie Browning, Dixie Browning - Страница 6

The first day belonged to Stone, and he was determined not to waste a single salt-cured, sun-soaked minute of it. By tomorrow the Dooley woman would probably be here. Which meant his baby-sitting duties would begin. But for now there was nothing to keep him from lying on an inflated inner tube, his naked feet dangling in the cool waters of Pamlico Sound, while a half-empty beer bottle rested on the bright pink scar on his belly.

Coronoke. Translated, it had to mean paradise. Stone had never heard of the place. It wasn’t even on the map! But now that he’d discovered it, he fully intended to spend some serious downtime here. Inhaling, exhaling—quietly growing moss on his north side.

Not to mention keeping the Dooley woman from embarrassing his aunt and bleeding her dry. As far as Stone was concerned, Billy could clean up his own messes, but Billy wasn’t the only one who stood to get hurt this time. Women of his aunt’s generation were poorly equipped to deal with the tabloid press and sleaze TV. It would kill her to have the Hardisson name dragged through that kind of mire. If it was in his power to prevent it, he would.

Saltwater dried on his shoulders, and he flexed them, liking the contrast between the sun’s heat and the water’s coolness. Liking the feeling of utter and complete relaxation that had begun seeping into his bones even before he’d checked into his cottage, stashed his gear and stepped out of his shoes.

Stone was an accredited journalist. Affiliated for the past nine years with IPA, he had covered most of the major conflicts and natural disasters around the globe. Although he tried to avoid political campaigns—most of which were natural disasters of major proportions. A guy had to draw the line somewhere.

He’d been covering a humanitarian aid convoy in East Africa when a stray bullet from a sniper’s gun had struck the gas tank of the vehicle he was riding in. His photographer had been killed outright in the explosion. His driver, who’d been thrown clear, had broken his little finger. Stone ended up with a severe concussion, several broken ribs, a torn lung and an assortment of scrap steel embedded in various parts of his anatomy.

He’d been incredibly lucky. He could have ended up spread over several acres of desert. Instead, here he was a few months later, armed with nothing more lethal than a pair of binoculars and a birding guide, floating around on an inner tube, soaking up Carolina sunshine and watching a squadron of pelicans flap past.

At least, he thought they were pelicans. He was going to have to bone up on his Audubon if he didn’t want to blow his cover. He’d considered bringing along his laptop to work on the series of articles he’d been doing on spec. One of the major syndicates had put out a few feelers after his series on archaeological piracy, and he’d been flattered...and interested.

At the last minute he’d decided against it. He wasn’t ready to go back to work. His brain was still lagging about two beats behind his body, possibly because he hadn’t had a real vacation in more years than he could remember.

Or possibly because he’d come so damned close to checking out permanently, he’d been forced to face up to what his life had become.

Which was empty. No ties, no commitments, nothing to show for his thirty-seven years other than a few yellowed scrapbooks and a few awards packed away in storage with his old tennis racquet.

In that frame of mind, he had impulsively put a call through to a guy he hadn’t heard from in over a year. Reece was the brother of the woman Stone had almost married once upon a time. A woman who’d finally had the good sense to marry some decent nine-to-fiver who had offered her the home and kids she wanted. Stone had lost touch with Shirley Stocks, but from time to time he still heard from her brother. The kid had thought Stone was some kind of hero, always flying off to the world’s hot spots at a moment’s notice.

Reece was currently studying journalism at UNC. As it appeared that Stone would soon be headed south to the Old North State, it had seemed like a good opportunity to get together.

Bird-watching! Thank God Reece didn’t know the depths to which his hero had sunk. It had been his aunt’s idea, the bird-watching cover. Evidently she’d mentioned it when she’d reserved the cottage for the summer, and the real estate agent had mailed him a bundle of birding data along with directions for finding the place. Rather than bother to explain that he didn’t know a hummingbird from a hammerlock, and couldn’t care less, he’d let it stand. But this whole drill was beginning to strike him as slightly bizarre. Not to mention slightly distasteful.

Reluctantly, Stone began paddling himself back to shore. His shoulders, his thighs and his belly were starting to tingle. Sun had never been a particular problem before, but a few months of holding down a hospital bed had a way of thinning a guy’s skin right down to the nerve endings.

The cottage wasn’t luxurious, but it was comfortable. Better yet, it was quiet. Best of all, it was his alone for the next two months—books on the shelf, cigarette burn on the pine table, rust-stained bathtub and all.

All it lacked was a Home Sweet Home sampler nailed to the wall. He’d already taken the liberty of rearranging some of the furniture and was considering dragging a cedar chaise longue into the living room from the deck, just because he liked the way it smelled.

Home sweet home. Maybe it was time he thought about getting himself something more permanent than a mail drop, a storage shed and a series of hotel rooms. The last real home he could remember—and the memory was fading like a cheap postcard—was a white frame house with a wraparound porch and three pecan trees in the backyard that were home to several platoons of squirrels.

Decatur, Georgia. They had moved there when his father had gotten a promotion, just in time for Stone to enter the first grade. Before the year was out, that portion of his life had come to an abrupt end.

As for the Hardissons’ Buckhead mansion, the only time he had felt at home there had been when his aunt was off on one of her jaunts and Mellie had let him eat in the kitchen with the help. He could still remember sitting on an overturned dishpan in a chair and stuffing himself with her Brunswick stew and blackberry dumplings.

Jeez! When was the last time he’d thought of all that? This was what happened when a guy had too much time on his hands, Stone told himself. Ancient history had never been his bag.

After making himself a couple of sardine sandwiches and forking his fingers around a cold beer, he wandered out onto the screened deck. Still wearing his trunks, he took a hefty bite of sandwich and turned his thoughts to his unlikely assignment. He’d been in the hospital when Billy had won the primary last month, else he might have heard something. Not that Georgia politicians were of any great interest at IPA. At least, not since the Carter days.

Senator Billy?

God, the mind boggled. Stone hadn’t seen his cousin since their great-uncle Chauncey Stone’s funeral in Calhoun, several years ago. Billy had been flushed and smelling of bourbon at eleven in the morning. He had escorted his mother into the church, but Stone had seen the bimbo waiting in his red Corvette farther down the street.

Family. Funny how it could influence you in ways you never even suspected. He didn’t particularly like his cousin. He didn’t know if he loved his aunt or not, but he’d always recognized her strength, and strength was something Stone had been taught to admire. Strength of character. Strength of purpose. His aunt had both. And when he thought about her at all, he admired her for what she was, and didn’t dwell too long on what she wasn’t.

Sipping his beer, Stone let his mind wander unfettered across the tapestry of the past thirty-seven years. After a while the empty bottle slipped to the floor and he began to snore softly in counterpoint to the cheerful sound of screeching gulls, scolding crows and gently lapping water.

* * *

Lucy watched the odometer roll over a major milestone. She flexed her arms one at a time, then flexed her tired back and wondered how far it was to the next rest area. She’d been driving for eight solid hours, stopping only for gas and junk food, and to wolf down a bacon cheeseburger and a large diet drink for lunch. By the time she’d gotten as far as Kernersville, she was already having second thoughts, but it was too late to turn back, even if she’d wanted to. Her gas was turned off, her mail and paper deliveries stopped.

Alice Hardisson didn’t owe her a thing. Lucy knew she should have had more pride than to accept the offer, but one didn’t argue with a Hardisson. Not argue and win, at any rate. Fortunately, she had learned early on to be a gracious loser. Or, at the very least, to know when the game was lost.

And the game was lost. Alice had won. Surrendering to the inevitable, Lucy vowed to enjoy every minute of her unexpected free vacation, and if that made her a parasite, she’d just have to grin and bear it. She couldn’t even remember the last vacation she had taken. Her honeymoon trip with Billy didn’t count. That had been a revelation, not a vacation.

Guiltily, she knew she was looking forward to it, too. A whole summer of swimming, sleeping late, staying up all night to read all those juicy escapist books she never had time to read during the school year.

And no more frozen dinners. No more school cafeteria! She was going to eat fried corned-beef hash with catsup and onions for breakfast and fried banana sandwiches for supper, and work off all the calories by walking and swimming.

Who said you can’t have it all?

What’s more, she was going to play her guitar until she built up a set of calluses that would shatter bricks. And she’d sing along, even if she couldn’t carry a tune. Which she couldn’t.

The night Alice had called, Lucy had been feeling mildewy. Rain always depressed her, and it had been raining for over a week. Studying the help-wanted ads for a summer job hadn’t improved her mood, either.

When she’d picked up the phone, expecting to hear Frank’s familiar voice, and heard Alice Hardisson’s instead, she’d been so shocked she inhaled a piece of popcorn. It was minutes before she could speak coherently. Even now she wasn’t sure she’d been thinking coherently. “Goodness, you’re the last person in the world I ever expected to hear from,” she’d managed to say.

They had been friends while Lucy was married to Billy, or at least as much as two women of different generations and totally different backgrounds could ever be friends. Alice had been quietly furious about the marriage, but she’d covered it well. Every inch the gracious lady, she had never let on by so much as a single cross word. Instead, she’d had her secretary mail out announcements and then hustled Lucy off to do some serious shopping, tactfully avoiding comment on the flowing shirts and tight pants she’d favored back then.

Alice always wore dresses. Gradually Lucy had begun to notice that her clothes never looked quite new—never looked quite fashionable, either—yet they never looked really unfashionable. Understatement, she came to learn, was a fashion statement all its own.

She also learned that Alice’s particular brand of understatement could cost a mint.

She had learned much more than that from Mother Hardisson. Gradually she had come to admire the woman, emulating the way she dressed, the way she expressed herself—even the way she smiled.

Grins were vulgar, loud laughter quite beyond the pale.

Lucy hadn’t even known what a pale was.

But by the time she had learned to cover her five-foot-eleven, one-hundred-forty-pound frame in suitably understated fashions, to wear modest pearl buttons in her ears instead of three-inch gold-plated hoops with dangles and to drink watery iced tea instead of diet cola with her meals, her marriage was already foundering.

By the time Alice had left for Scotland, Lucy had been wondering how long she could go on hiding the truth about the wretched state of affairs at 11 Tennis Court Road. Billy began drinking soon after breakfast, and when he drank, he was mean. Lucy had tried repeatedly to make him seek help, which had only made him meaner.

Alice had gone from Scotland to France and then directly back to Scotland, almost as if she didn’t want to come home. Lucy could have used her support at the time—particularly after she lost the baby. But Alice would have been devastated, and Lucy couldn’t wish that for her. Alice had still been visiting friends abroad when the divorce had become final.

It had been a quick one. At least Billy had agreed to that much, paying for her requisite six weeks’ residency. Afterwards, Lucy had sold her wedding and engagement rings, and the diamond and sapphire guard ring Billy had given her for her birthday, a week after their wedding, for enough to relocate. She’d been intending to try Richmond, but she’d missed a turnoff and ended up taking I-40 through Winston-Salem. Just north of town, her car had broken down, and by the time she’d had it repaired, she had only enough money left to rent a cheap room and look for a job. It was a way of life which was all too familiar. Unscheduled moves, unscheduled stops.

But the job had turned out to be a good one, waitressing at a popular restaurant. She’d attended night school, finished her teaching degree and was now in her second year of teaching sixth grade. Not half bad under the circumstances, she thought proudly.

“Lucy, my dear,” Alice had said that rainy night nearly two weeks ago. “Why didn’t you ever write? You knew I’d be concerned.”

“I’m sorry, Mother Hardisson” was all Lucy could think of to say. Sorry your son turned out to be such a bastard, sorry he robbed you of your grandchild and sorry you can’t divorce him, too. You’d be better off, believe me!

“Oh, please, my dear. I’m the one who’s sorry I wasn’t here when you needed me. I’m sure if I’d been able to reason with you both, we could have worked things out. Now I reckon it’s too late.”

It had been too late the first time Billy had struck her. It had been too late the first time he’d brought one of his floozies home and she had found them in the hot tub together, jaybird-naked.

It had been over the day she found his private stash in the celadon vase on the mantel. She had flushed it down the john and threatened to tell his mother if he didn’t straighten out. Wild with anger, he had struck her on the side of the head, knocking her halfway down the stairs. A few hours later she had miscarried.

But Lucy hadn’t said any of that. It wasn’t the sort of thing one said to a woman like Alice Hardisson. Billy’s mother had always been kind to her, even though Lucy knew she’d been shocked right down to her patrician toenails when her precious son had run off and married a nobody who’d been migrating north from Mobile, Alabama—a part-time student, part-time lifeguard, with no more background than a swamp rat.

Alice had graciously refrained from offering to buy her off. Instead, she had made the best of her son’s unfortunate marriage, and Lucy would always love her for that. Her father hadn’t left her much—a battered old twelve-string and a lot of wonderful memories—but he had left her a legacy of pride.

When, after three years, her ex-mother-in-law had called to tell her about the cottage she had leased for her companion, Ella Louise, to vacation in while Alice went on a two-month cruise with friends, Lucy’s first impulse had been to hang up.

But then Alice had gone on to tell her about Ella Louise’s tripping over a dog and breaking her hip. “Naturally, a place like that would be out of the question. She’s gone to stay with her sister down in some little town in Florida. So you see, if you don’t take the cottage, it will just go to waste. It was too late to cancel by the time I thought about it.”

“But why me? My goodness, surely you know someone else who would like to use it.”

“My dear child, you must allow me to soothe my conscience by providin’ you with a little vacation, else I’ll never forgive myself for bein’ away when you needed me most.”

And so Lucy, having been taught by the grande dame herself, had graciously allowed herself to be persuaded. There was no real reason why she shouldn’t accept a gift from a friend, she rationalized. The friend could afford it, and obviously wanted to do it. Why else had she gone to the trouble of tracking her down after all this time?

Come to think of it, how had she tracked her down? A forwarding address? Medical records?

Lucy was too tired even to wonder about it now. And too hot. Her backside was permanently bonded to the vinyl seat cover of her car. At least she was a whole lot closer to the end of her journey than when she had set out this morning shortly after daybreak.

Frank had risen early and come over to help her load the car. He’d promised to water her plants and air her apartment when and if the rain ever stopped. She had hugged his two daughters, one of whom was her student, and then hugged Frank, avoiding the question in his eyes the same way she had been avoiding it all year.

She didn’t love Frank Beane. Liked him enormously, adored his motherless children, but as much as she longed for a home and a family, she wasn’t about to take another chance. She had excellent taste in friends, lousy taste in husbands, but at least she had sense enough to learn from her mistakes.

Reaching over, Lucy patted the scuffed hard-shell case that held Pawpaw’s old twelve-string. She had strapped it into the passenger seat with the seat belt, having filled the back seat with books, linens, clothes and groceries.

“One of these days, Pawpaw, I’ll have music on my own back porch and a garden full of okra and tomatoes for gumbo, and maybe even a few cats. One of these days...”

She sighed. Lucy had no use for nostalgia. It was a nonproductive exercise, brought on, no doubt, by smelling salt air again after all these years. This was different from the Gulf Coast, but salt air was salt air, and Lucy was tired.

Pawpaw had been a roughneck. He had worked the oil fields, moving from place to place, but never too far from the Gulf Coast. Lucy, motherless for as long as she could recall, could remember piling into what they used to call the Dooley Trolley, an old camper truck held together with duct tape and baling wire, and setting out in the middle of the night for a new job, a new town—new friends.

Lucy could barely remember her mother, but there’d always been women in her life. Pawpaw—tanned and handsome, with his black-dyed hair and his broad grin, the metallic scent of crude oil that clung to his clothes, usually tempered by a mixture of sweat, bourbon and bay rum—had been like a magnet to women. A good-looking, good-natured man, Clarence Dooley’s only weakness had been an itchy foot and a deep-seated aversion to long-term commitment.

Nearing the tall, spiral-striped lighthouse, where the highway turned west, Lucy squinted against the glare of afternoon sun and thought about Pawpaw and Ollie Mae, one of Pawpaw’s lady friends, sitting on the back stoop after supper, Pawpaw playing his guitar and singing, and Ollie Mae sawing away at her fiddle, the sagging flesh of her upper arm swaying in time with each stroke. Pawpaw had been dead nearly eighteen years now, and Lucy had long since lost track of Ollie Mae and Lillian and the rest of Clarence Dooley’s mistresses.

For one isolated moment she felt utterly alone. And then she shrugged and put it down to no more than being in a strange place, among strangers. Something she should be used to by now.

It would pass. Everything passed, good and bad.

* * *

“You’ll like Maudie and Rich,” said Jerry, the boy from the marina where Lucy had been instructed to leave her car and take a boat out to Coronoke. “Maudie—she’s my cousin on my mother’s side. Well, I reckon if you go back a little ways, on my daddy’s side, too. She used to be—Maudie, that is—she used to caretake over to Coronoke, but then this guy—”

Lucy clutched her guitar case in both arms, wondering if there was going to be much spray. She’d brought her raincoat, but like an idiot, she’d left it in the trunk of her car.

Watch where you’re going! she wanted to say, but didn’t because he was only a boy. Still, she’d feel a whole lot safer if he would keep his mind on what he was doing instead of staring at her as if she were some kind of freak and filling her in on the pedigree of people she had never heard of and would probably never meet.

There was no spray. In fact, they were barely making a wake. Lucy could have swum faster than this if she hadn’t been so blessed tired. The boy—he couldn’t be more than sixteen or so—was looking at her in a certain way that made her feel like the butterfat champion at the county fair.

After thirty-four years she ought to be used to it. Towering over everyone in sight, having men make lewd propositions without even getting to know her first. It was all part of the curse that had befallen her at the age of twelve, when she’d shot up to five feet eight and her breasts had burst out of her training bra.

“Sugar, there’s not a blessed thing you can do about it, less’n you was to get fat as a sausage all over,” her father’s lady friend, Lillian, had told her. “Even then, it prob’ly wouldn’t do you no good. Girls with your looks’s got a hard row to hoe, and being big just makes you stand out more.” Lillian had been one of Lucy’s favorites. A blowsy redhead, she’d been kind enough to take a motherly interest in Lucy at a time when Lucy was undergoing a lot of frightening changes in her body and in her emotions.

“Don’t you never let a boy lay a hand on you, you hear me? They’ll try. Lord knows they’ll try to make you think they’re a-hurtin’ somethin’ fierce and you’re their only hope o’ salvation. But you tell ‘em you got the curse real bad, and your Pawpaw just sent you out to get some gun oil, ‘cause he’s a-cleaning up his shotgun. If that don’t shrivel up what ails ‘em, you use your knee where it’ll do the most good, y’hear?”

Lucy sighed. Nostalgia. It had to be the smell of all this salt air. She’d never been one for looking back. “Big adventures ahead, li’l sugar,” Pawpaw always used to say when they’d load up the trolley and light out in the middle of the night for a new town, a new job. “That ol’ highway’s unrollin’ right in front of your pretty brown eyes. You just keep on a-lookin’ straight ahead.”

The narrow beach was striped with coral sunlight and lavender shadows when Jerry pulled up to the pier on Coronoke. He clanged the tarnished brass bell that was attached to the side of a shed and within minutes, a woman came jogging down through the woods.

“Hi, you must be Mrs. Dooley. I’m Maudie Keegan.”

“It’s Ms. That is, I was married, but I took back my own name so—”

“I know what you mean. Neither fish nor fowl. Me, either, until I solved my problem by becoming Mrs. Keegan.”

By which Lucy concluded that Maudie Keegan had been married before and had shed her first husband’s name at the same time she’d shed him.

Lucy had gone from Dooley to Hardisson and back to Dooley so fast, even the IRS had trouble keeping up with her. She only hoped her social security would make it through the maze by the time she was old enough to need it.

“I see you stocked up on canned things. Good.” Maudie reached for the box of groceries Jerry was lifting out, and the three of them relayed everything up from the pier, along a winding path through shadowy, fragrant woods, to a small cottage perched a hundred-odd feet from the edge of the sound.

“Is that it?” Maudie Keegan asked when the last of the load was transported. “Okay, then here’s the rundown. Your closest neighbor is a birder named McCloud. He’ll be here all summer. There’s a novelist installed in Blackbeard’s Hole, but you won’t see much of him. He comes every year and holes up until Labor Day, working on the Great American Novel. There’s a couple from Michigan due in tomorrow and two family groups coming the next weekend. Eventually you’ll probably meet everybody, but no one’s obliged to socialize. Rich and I are on the other side of the island in the old lodge.”

Her small hands moved constantly while she spoke, and Lucy watched, mesmerized, murmuring an appropriate response when necessary.

“One of us will pick up mail and messages every day or so, and we have a radio for emergencies. The boats at the pier are for the guests. When we’re full up, we sign up a day in advance so everyone can make plans accordingly, but when there’re only a few people in residence, feel free to take one out. Rich keeps them fueled up. Meanwhile, if you need anything at all, one of us is usually available. Just follow the trail around the island until you come to a place that looks as if it ought to be condemned. That’s ours.”

Bemused, Lucy watched the woman jog through the woods until the lengthening shadows swallowed her up. Turning, she met an all-too-familiar look in the eyes of the young man from the marina.

Evidently, Jerry appreciated king-size blondes with brown eyes, wild hair and big mouths.

She sighed, knowing she would have to make certain things clear to avoid any future misunderstanding. Lucy got along well with people of all ages and sexes, but with the male variety, she had long since learned to get across a subtle message right from the first.

Accessible she was; available she was not.