Stargazey Point (8 page)

“That’s awful.” Abbie’s head began to pound. She ripped out the elastic that held her ponytail and rubbed her scalp.

Sarah narrowed her eyes at Abbie. “But it seems to me, Bethanne wasn’t the only one tearing up at this table. You got any business, Abbie Sinclair?”

No way was she going to talk about her personal life to Sarah, not to anyone.

“Actually I do, and I’d better get going or I’ll be late,” Abbie said, purposely misunderstanding Sarah’s question. She stood up, shoved her hand into her jeans pocket, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, and placed it on the table. “Nice to have met you. Thank Bethanne for me.”

She grabbed her gift shop bag and went out the door without looking back. Once out on the sidewalk, she hesitated. A braver woman would go back, thank Bethanne for the tea, maybe even tell her they had something in common.

But Abbie wasn’t brave. If she were, she might have saved something from their last story, even though she couldn’t save Werner. She didn’t think she could be any help to Bethanne, and she knew for certain no one could help her.

Chapter 5

A
bbie was nearly to the Crispin driveway when she saw Beau and another man walking down the middle of the street, coming her way. Beau was carrying fishing poles and a thermos. His companion held a large red-and-white cooler in each hand.

Her first inclination was to pretend she hadn’t seen them. She was still a little rattled from the Bethanne breakdown. But they saw her, so she waited at the driveway entrance until they reached her.

“Abbie, my dear. This is Silas Cook. My old friend and fishing buddy.”

“Ma’am.” Silas dipped his chin at her. He was an older African American man, much smaller than Beau, wiry with grizzled white hair and an easy smile.

“Nice to meet you, Silas. Did you guys catch anything today?”

“We might be able to eke a bite or two out of them,” said Beau. “If we’re lucky.”

Great,
thought Abbie. Millie was hoping he’d catch enough for dinner. He hadn’t caught enough for the three of them much less an extra mouth to feed. Maybe she should get a room at the inn. They were too polite to say so, but she had to be a strain on the Crispin budget.

“You go on now, Beau,” Silas said. “These here coolers are full up.” He raised the two coolers to demonstrate their weight. He put one of them on the ground at Beau’s feet.

“Just about did catch our limit.” Beau handed the fishing poles off to Silas.

“Nice to meet you, ma’am. See you tomorrah, Beau.” Silas hoisted his fishing gear and cooler and cut across the street to a dirt path that led through the trees.

Beau picked up the cooler Silas had left. “Shall we?”

They walked up the drive, cool and dark beneath the trees. “Did you have a nice time in town?” he asked.

She had except for making Bethanne cry. “I met Bethanne, Penny, and Sarah.”

“Three lovely ladies.”

They lapsed into silence, and Abbie was glad she didn’t have to think of small talk to fill the walk to Crispin House. Being with Beau was soothing. She’d never seen him make an abrupt gesture, hurry with anything. Of course she hadn’t seen much of him. But she had a feeling he was that way all the time. What could make a person so placid? Was he content?

Or was it that he just accepted life for what it was?

They were almost to the house when a creature darted out of the trees. The cat she’d seen the night before. It was huge with short black fur and a white bib. It glided straight to Beau, raising its rusty meow as it ran.

Beau laughed. “Old Moses knows he’s gettin’ a treat tonight.”

“His name is Moses?”

“Yep. Found him in the marsh across the bay yonder. A feral litter, most likely. He was the only one I could find; guess the gators got the rest. Don’t know why they didn’t get him.”

“Gators?”

“Oh, don’t you worry; they’re way on the other side of the bay. Don’t cross salt water if they can help it. And when they do come out, they head for the golf courses.” Beau grinned.

Abbie smiled back.

“Don’t get too many snakes, either. A few garden ones maybe. But you won’t see them much unless you go in the woods. Don’t fret.”

“I won’t,” Abbie said. Amphibians and reptiles she could handle. God knows she’d dealt with their human counterparts often enough.

Moses meowed and raced a few yards ahead before looking back.

Beau shook his head. “Hard to believe he used to be a tiny little thing. That was oh, goin’ on twelve, thirteen years ago. And he hasn’t slowed down one bit. Maybe I shoulda named him Methuselah.”

They went around to the side door, where Beau stopped and pulled out a folded paper from the cooler. He opened it up and put it on the ground. Moses pounced on the fish heads and offal inside.

“Got all the bones out. Millie don’t like to have fish cleaned near her kitchen so Silas and I always gut them ’fore we come home.”

“Beau Crispin, is that you?” Millie’s voice echoed from the kitchen.

Beau smiled at Abbie.

Millie appeared in the doorway, a white apron over her dress.

“Got us a mess of bream. Marnie has a way with fish,” he told Abbie. He winked at her. “But Millie here makes a doggone good hush puppy.”

“I’ll hush puppy you if you bring any of that fish smell into my kitchen.”

“I’ll just go round back and clean up. Nice walking with you, Abbie.” He deposited the cooler on the steps and picked up the paper that had been picked clean. Moses was nowhere to be seen.

“Did you have a nice time in town?” Millie asked.

“Yes, thanks. I’ll just take my purchases upstairs, then come back and help with dinner.”

“Oh, Lord no. You just go and enjoy yourself.”

Enjoy herself. She was trying. She trudged up the stairs to her bedroom and tossed her gift shop bag and purse on the bed. Then tossed herself after them. Someone had opened the French doors, and a breeze floated in and ruffled the sheer curtains. She would make an entry in her new journal. Maybe describe her trip into town and meeting Bethanne, Penny, and Sarah. Get started on exorcizing her demons.

She dumped the bag onto the bed, chose a pen, and took it and the journal out to the veranda. It was shaded from the afternoon sun, which would be heaven in the summer but made it a little too cool for comfort.

But the beach was still sunny, and if she sat below the dunes, she’d be sheltered from the wind. She went back inside and down the stairs, thinking she was being absurd to worry about a few degrees of temperature, considering the life she’d led in the last few years.

She stopped in the kitchen to let Millie know that she was going out. The kitchen was empty, though there was evidence of food preparations on the counters. She backtracked into the foyer in search of one of the sisters and heard voices from the library whose door was behind the staircase.

She meant to stick her head in just long enough to tell them where she was going, but just as she reached the open door of the library, Marnie’s voice rose in exasperation. “Just when were you going to tell me about this?”

“It just slipped my mind. I don’t see why they keep botherin’ us.”

“Oh, Millie. You were supposed to give them a partial payment. Do I have to do everything myself? No, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. But what happened to the money?”

Abbie knew she should creep away. This was family business she had no business listening to.

“Well, Rowena Thompkins’s baby had a turn for the worse. I ran into her at the pharmacy. Rod’s out of work still. They have no insurance. She couldn’t even pay for her prescription. I just gave her a little something to tide her over.”

“Two hundred dollars? Millie, there are agencies to help her.”

“It’s our duty to help out the less fortunate. Daddy always helped others.”

Marnie barked out a laugh. “
We
are the less fortunate. Daddy should have seen to his own family.”

“For shame, Sister. We are still leaders in this town. People look to us for guidance.”

Marnie groaned. “And money.”

“It was an emergency.”

“This is an emergency.” More rattling of paper. It must be a letter.

“I don’t know why they just don’t leave us alone; we’ve paid our taxes faithfully for years, and Daddy before us. They should be able to wait a little while.”

“Not with beachfront real estate as profitable as this. They’ll take the house and sell it to a developer and make a bundle off it, who will in turn make a bundle off it, while we walk away with nothing. How are we going to live then?”

Millie mumbled something that Abbie couldn’t hear.

“And do you know what will happen to the other residents in town once we cave?”

“But she was in such dire need.”

Marnie sighed. “We’ll have to sell more silver. It won’t fetch what it’s worth, but it will keep the hyenas from the door for another year maybe.”

“You can’t. That’s the last set, and it was Momma’s favorite.”

“Would you rather sell the house and grounds?”

“It isn’t fair.”

“No, but life isn’t fair.”

Millie began to cry.

Abbie tiptoed away. They were as generous as they could be. They’d taken in Abbie even though it was obviously putting a strain on their limited resources. She wondered if she should call Celeste. But what good would that do? Just worry Celeste because somehow Abbie doubted that the three would take money from their niece even if Celeste could come up with it.

Abbie left a note on the kitchen table saying she was at the beach and would be back in time to help with dinner.

She wouldn’t impose on the Crispins any longer. She had some money, plus a life insurance policy Werner had not told her about. It wasn’t much, but it would keep her afloat long enough to figure out what to do with her life. She wouldn’t use the insurance money on herself unless she had to. She’d find a good cause and donate it all. And then she’d figure out what to do.

And that’s where she began her journal.
What to do with my life
. She sat cross-legged on the sand, the wind rippling off the water and the late-afternoon sun warming her back. She stared at the first sentence and the subsequent empty page. Sort of like her future, a blank slate, a tabula rasa, a barren desert? It could be anything she wanted it to be, she thought. She could stay right where she was. Get a job. Maybe Bethanne would need help in the summer. She would work cheap if it included room and board.

Or she could travel. She could buy a car. Not a jeep or Humvee, but something girly, small and low to the ground, electric blue or silver.

She squeezed her eyes shut against the thought. The truth was she had nothing to look forward to. But she wouldn’t write that down. Everything that was important about her had happened in her past, which would be okay if she was still on track. But she’d been derailed, and she didn’t know how the hell she was going to carry on.

She didn’t write that down either.

She wrote about Werner.

S
he’d just graduated from Ann Arbor and had gone down to Guatemala to help build Habitat houses. The trip was a graduation gift from her parents. She knew a little about construction, electrical work, plumbing. All the Sinclair children did. You never knew when you’d be called on to help your neighbor repair his roof or fix a burned-out fuse. And since she was the only Sinclair who hadn’t known from childhood which area of selfless service she would make her life’s work, she learned a little bit of everything.

She studied communications in college. A degree that landed her a job as a weathergirl at a Chicago television station, which if you had a really good imagination—and all the Sinclairs did—you could count as a service job.

But she was ahead of herself. She was in Guatemala. Werner was part of a Dutch filming crew who were making a documentary in a nearby village.

They camped along with the Habitat people because the Habitat people had edible food, hot water, and decent living quarters. She and Werner started talking over mess and talked far into the night. He was older, wiser, so full of life, so determined to effect change, and so handsome.

In the early hours of morning, they went back to his room and made love. They were together for another week, then the documentary crew left for another location. The Habitat group left two weeks later. Abbie settled into her job as weathergirl for the same station Celeste worked for. They became friends. Celeste was the person Abbie ran to when her world fell apart.

A
bbie looked down at what she’d written.
What to do with my life.
Guatemala.
The rest of the page was blank. It seems that Werner refused to be put on the page. It was so like him. Her throat burned.

She closed the book, brushed the sand off her pants, and went back to the house to help with dinner and try not to think about Werner or how she had failed at the end.

Supper, as Millie called it, was served early that night. There was fish fried in cornmeal, sliced tomatoes and onions, coleslaw, and stewed greens that Marnie said were collards. And the famed hush puppies that were balls of deep-fried corn bread filled with succulent pieces of onion.