The Gilly Salt Sisters (45 page)

In spite of the warmth of Ethan’s skin, Claire felt a chill needle her spine. “What’s that?”

His eyes bored into hers. “It burns. He said if you weren’t careful, you were going to end up like Jo. Totally burned.”

A gull screamed overhead, and Claire’s heart started hammering. She broke free of Ethan and searched for her shoes. She tried to make her voice light. “Let me take care of it.”

Ethan eyed her with suspicion, as if he were suddenly remembering the streak of temper that ran through the Gilly women.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.” He paused. “You’re not going to do anything reckless, are you?”

Is he worried for my sake or his?
Claire thought. She tied her loose hair back again and faced him. “No, of course not. But this is between me and Whit.” That was a lie, of course. When it came to the Gillys and Turners, nothing was ever that clear-cut, which was a good thing, Claire vowed, because if Whit wanted to see her burn, he was going to have to come and dance in the fire right alongside her.

U
nderneath the pear tree, she glanced at her watch. It was only nine in the morning, and it was Thursday. Whit would be out at his weekly tennis match in Wellfleet and wouldn’t be home for at least an hour. Above her, Turner House loomed with its confusing garble of porches and balconies. She took a breath, stepping out from the tree’s leafy shadow into the sun, and began pacing slowly up Plover Hill, trying to shrug off the feeling that she was being watched. It wasn’t a sensation peculiar to her. Everyone felt that way around Turner House. It was part of the total Turner experience.

The spare key was still hidden under a Chinese pot of hydrangeas by the kitchen door—not very original, but keys were a mere formality for Whit. All the doors in Prospect were open to him all the time.

She let herself into the kitchen, inhaling the familiar odors of freshly ground coffee, the lemon wax she’d used to polish the counters with, and another smell—something clean and almost like ozone—that she’d never been able to identify. Bleach, maybe, or laundry starch? It was almost the same odor as a dollar bill, except Turner money was plenty dirty.

She paused a moment to let her heart quit hammering. If Whit caught her here, there was no telling what he would do. Call the constable? Choke her the way he had Dee? On the other hand, if
he thought she’d crumple under threats, he was dead wrong. Over the past three months, the mud of Salt Creek Farm had fused to Claire as tightly as the patchwork of scars that covered Jo’s right side, giving her a new strength. Unlike Jo’s, Claire’s wounds festered on the inside of her heart, where no one could see them. She took several deep breaths and moved from the kitchen through the dining room. The china cupboard in the corner was almost empty, save for a gravy pitcher and a lone dented candlestick. Claire shook her head and paced into the living room, where she saw more empty squares on the walls where paintings had hung and noticed the absence of the piano. She scooted up the main stairs past the pristine guest rooms, the upstairs den, and then pushed her way into the master suite.

Here, too, things were missing. The silver clock that used to sit on the mantel of the fireplace. A finely threaded tapestry that had decorated half a wall. The empty bed was still unmade. Whit had apparently migrated to the center of the mattress in his sleep now, banishing all but a solitary pillow to the window seat, as if he would spurn even that comfort. The covers were neatly folded back, the sheets barely mussed. The man slept like a vampire, Claire thought, shoving away the contrasting image of Ethan sprawled half dressed in the dunes, his eyes closed in passion as she ran her hands over his ribs, lower and lower. She swallowed and returned her focus to the room. She didn’t have much time.

On her nightstand her alarm clock and a few books were still stacked. They looked so strange just sitting there. The filigreed hands of her antique clock read 9:25. Across the room a flicker of movement caught Claire’s eye, and the sight drew her up short. Blood rushed to her ears and eyes, paralyzing her. Then she realized that she was simply confronting her own reflection in the vanity’s mirror. She sighed and relaxed, then examined her image.

She was rosy from the sun for the first time in thirteen years, her nose freckled, her hair lightened to a strawberry crimson. She had a bruise at the bottom of her throat from Ethan’s lips, and if she wasn’t wrong, she was starting to get a slight double chin from
all the baking she’d been doing. She crossed the room and leaned close to the mirror.

There was nothing like Turner glass for showing you what you were and what you were not. This wasn’t farmhouse glass, blurred by too many generations of women and too many years of use. Turner glass was harder stuff than that. It was made for show, glittering in the cases in the library, where rows of Whit’s football and hockey trophies from high school squatted, or gleaming in the etched frame that held his diploma from Harvard.

As if to further underscore familial dominance, all the drinking vessels in the house were monogrammed—cut-glass tumblers for whiskey and taller, thinner glasses for juice in the morning, everything etched with either Ida’s or Whit’s spiky, vertical initials. Not a rounded letter between them.

The Turners had a mania for initialing their belongings, gouging either their letters or the family crest into objects as if the family were in danger of forgetting its own identity. Claire had never understood it and over the years had resisted having anything embroidered or engraved if she could help it. It seemed too permanent, as if by fixing her name in metal or weaving it into cotton or silk she were somehow unthreading part of her soul for a collective she wasn’t sure she wanted to join.

It was fitting, she thought, picking up her old hairbrush and smoothing the stray tendrils at her temples, that a man who was so privately entrenched would be so eager to eradicate Prospect’s history. Whit would love to keep only the stage-prop bits of Prospect, she knew—the weathered patina on the town’s shingles, the graceful arched windows of the library, the picturesque sailboats, but not the half-rotten wharf or the fishing vessels belching in their slips, and certainly not Salt Creek Farm.

Claire put down the brush and tugged open the vanity’s drawers. The first one still held Ida’s old makeup and combs, and the middle one stuck, as always. Claire remembered when Whit had given her the pearl in this spot, and the memory made her tug on the drawer with a savage wrench. It flew open. She looked inside
and saw the usual jumble of junk, and then, maybe because the light was different or maybe because
she
was different, she spied something she never had before. There was some kind of letter taped flat at the very back of the drawer cavity. A corner of the rich cream envelope had come unstuck, calling attention to itself. Claire snaked her hand inside the drawer and, with some difficulty, pulled the letter out.

It was Ida’s stationery, monogrammed like everything else she owned, as if her own words put on paper weren’t enough. Someone had opened it once, however, for the seal was broken. Claire slid it open and drew out the paper, scanning Ida’s armored-looking handwriting and taking shorter and shorter breaths.

When she was finished, she sat back stunned, grappling with the fallout that a revision of any history creates, but especially a personal history. All this time Claire had thought of herself as the one who didn’t belong on Salt Creek Farm, but it turned out she was wrong, and Ida had known this about her. Whether she liked it or not, Claire really was a girl with roots deep in the salt. Jo, on the other hand, was quite a different story.

Claire slipped the letter into her pocket and picked up the silver brush off the top of the vanity, eyeing herself in the mirror. Frankly, she was tired of being haunted by the past, she decided. She’d had enough of virgins, pearls, and letters written by dead women. The time had come, she decided, to break free and create a future of her own.

Once, when they were first married, Whit had out of the blue compared her to a hummingbird. Delicate, he called her, but deceptively strong. They’d been in bed, and he’d had his hands twined in her hair, his fingers cupping her scalp like the protective twigs of a nest. Claire hadn’t known she’d still be feeling them over a decade later, tighter every day and not like twigs at all anymore, for she could snap those if she needed to.

She remembered when Whit had presented her with his mother’s pearl necklace, how he’d clasped the chain around her neck.
If
you ever try to break the strings between us, you’ll fail
, he’d said to her as they’d made love that evening.
You know that, right?

She would see about that. She went into the closet and found a canvas bag and shoved as much of her riding clothing into it as she could. Then she paused. In the very back of the wardrobe, entombed in plastic, her wedding gown hung. She shoved her clothes aside and unzipped the bag, inhaling the fragrance of powder mixed with something earthier. She ran a finger down the satin and then pulled out her veil. Age had brittled it and turned it yellow. Claire sighed and zipped the bag up again. On the other side of the wardrobe, the suit that Whit had worn was pressed neatly and hung with a matching tie. He must have had it on recently. What else had Whit donned that day? Claire mused. A boutonniere to match her bouquet and oh, yes, his father’s watch. Where was that? She opened the mahogany box that Whit kept in his top drawer and found it.
A place for everything and everything in its place
, Ida had always insisted, and even now, more than a decade after her death, no one in Prospect had the courage to defy that edict.

Well, there’s a first time for everything
, Claire thought, slipping the watch into her pocket along with the cream-colored envelope engraved with Ida’s spiky initials. She closed the closet door and then let herself out through the house’s front door, whistling as she passed, leaving it wide open to whatever kind of ghouls Whit wanted to send her way.

D
ee was making toast in the kitchen when Claire came into the house, and she was so quiet that Dee almost didn’t hear her. Claire could be like a cat when she wanted, all velvet steps and slinky moves, but Dee had gotten good at tracking her.
She
was getting kind of catlike, too.

Normally Claire made so much noise that Dee could hear her coming three days off. She’d throw her shoes into the corner of the front hall and bang on the old piano’s keys as she walked by, as if she wanted even the air of this place to know she was back. But today there was none of that. Just the suspicious creak of a floorboard and then a heavy silence.

Dee peeked around the kitchen door, but the hall was empty, so she tiptoed down the hall and peeked in around the parlor door, where Claire was standing over the desk in the corner, riffling through some papers. Before she was caught, Dee scurried back to the kitchen, and a second later Claire loped in, scowling so heavily that Dee half thought she might curdle the milk. Claire could be moodier than a three-year-old, but that wasn’t the reason Dee was staring at her. For the first time since Dee had known her, Claire was wearing her hair hanging down her back.

“What did you do to your hair?” Dee said.

Claire reached up and stroked the long red waves, as if she’d
already forgotten about them. “I made a change,” she answered breezily.

“I’ll say.” With her hair free like that, Claire looked like a different person—a nicer one, perhaps. Dee examined her more closely. Now that she was looking, she could see that Claire’s hands were trembling slightly—unusual given how steady she could hold Icicle on a lead. “What’s in the bag?” Dee asked.

Claire sank into a chair and stared straight ahead of her—at what, Dee couldn’t tell, but that was worrisome, too, because Claire usually focused on things as if she had sabers hidden behind her eyes. “Riding gear,” she answered.

The back of Dee’s neck began tingling, and she eased herself into a chair across from Claire at the table. “Wait, you went back to Turner House? Are you crazy? Was Whit there?”