A Charmed Place (57 page)

In—as Snack would say—fricking Chepaquit.

"I'm sorry," she said stiffly. "When I'm here, I guess I revert. Anyway, let's talk about something more productive, lik
e
today's work list."

Because for God's sake—she was the most well-adjusted of the bunch!

Snack, who had been watching her in uncharacteristic silence, turned from her to Corinne. "Where's the Deere, by the way? Please don't tell me Dad sold it."

"No, no, it's in the garage. Something's wrong with it, though; it overheats. In fact, that's where Dad was, about to check it out, when he
... um
..."

Tears began to roll down her cheeks, and she began biting her lip, trying to stop them. It sent Laura into a panic: the one thing she was not prepared to deal with was an uncontrolled outflow of emotion.

She put down her fork. "Honey, don't," she said softly, reaching over to stroke her sister's hair. "This will sound heartless, but—we don't have the
time.
If we start traveling down the road you're going, we'll all become paralyzed with emotion, all kinds of emotion. If that's what you want, then
... fine. We can sit around and try to come to terms with what Dad's death means to each of us. It won't be pretty. But if you're serious about turning this place around, and if sales this spring are really off to such a miserable start—"

"Then we have to get going," Corinne said through her sniffles. "I know." She blew her nose in her napkin and threw her shoulders back. "Everyone, eat. You'll need your strength."

Laura's borrowed pants kept sliding down, and she considered going back to the house to change. But she was spending most of her time in the main greenhouse on her knees, groping under long tables for forgotten pots of perennials. Corinne's roomy, thick Levi's were a lot more suited to the task than her own clingy designer jeans.

Baggy Levi's it would have to be. She snugged the makeshift rope belt a little more tightly around her waist and got back to work.

The work list had chores enough for a year and a month, but its top two priorities were obvious: in order to try to survive, they had to have something to sell, and in order to have something to sell, they had to have a tractor to schlep it around in.

So Snack was in the garage, tinkering with the overheating John Deere, and Corinne was in the greenhouse down by the shop, pri
mping the annuals for the fast-
approaching Founders Week sale.

As for Laura, she had spent the morning crawling around in the oldest, most decrepit of the greenhouses, sorting out the perennials, most of which were dead. With so many glass panes broken or missing, all it had taken was one vicious cold spell to blast and then wither the more tender plants.

"Of course, it would
help
if some of these things had labels," she muttered, pulling out pot after pot from under the bottom shelf of one of the nicked and worn tables.

She studied several one-gallon pots that held—what? Who knew? The delicate, pale green shoots sprouting in them were undoubtedly weeds that had taken seed there. She poked through the pots gingerly, looking for established roots or rhizomes of some sort, but she came up empty. Into the wheelbarrow they went, headed with the others for the compost pile.

Cross off three more sales of something or other.

She felt as if she were working in a parallel universe. Back in
Portland
, she liked nothing more than to escape for a couple of hours in her garden, a vibrant, thriving world of color and fragrance. A single dandelion had her pouncing. But this! The sense of neglect and decay was not only wide but deep. Laura could smell it, she could practically feel it in her bones as she crawled around on the dirt floor of the greenhouse, searching for living things.

Could
she have made the difference?

It was a question she'd asked herself a dozen times since her arrival on the
Cape
the day before. Assuming that she had remained in Chepaquit and had thrown herself into
Shore
Gardens
the way she'd immersed herself in her career as a software consultant—would the nursery now be as successful as her garden?

Truthfully, she couldn't see how.
Oliver
Shore
had been stubborn and tyrannical in the extreme, clinging to the old ways of doing business, ignoring the evidence all around him that some of those ways were obsolete. He had listened to no one's advice; in fact, he'd taken every suggestion as a personal affront. In his mind, "change" was a dirty word, and he'd been willing and able to wash out the mouth of anyone who dared use it in a sentence.

Basically, Laura had had the choice of staying and having her tongue taste like Lava soap for the rest of her
days, or of following her own star. She had no regrets.

Almost no regrets, anyway. She had removed herself from a life of which her mot
her and her sister were a well-
loved part, and nothing would give her those missing years back. That realization would hurt forever.

But as for leaving the rest of Chepaquit behind? No. No regrets at all.

She plunged through some sticky cobwebs and pulled out half a dozen more pots from their hiding places.

Labels! Hooray! And growth!

"Ah, nuts." The plants were penstemon, short-lived and a tender variety in any case. And forget about the cupid's dart. Goners for sure. The growth was simply more weeds.

Discouraged, she sat back on her calves and calculated the absurd amount of time she was taking to salvage maybe twenty percent of the greenhouse's contents. Cost-effective, it wasn't.

She was about to crawl on when she caught a glimpse of a small, glimmering object lying in the dirt behind where the pots had been, a bracelet of some sort. She reached far under and pulled it out: it was a plain Timex wristwatch with an expandable and now rusted band. One of the band's pins had pulled out of the watch.

She shook it for no real reason... maybe to see if it would work.
Takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin',
isn't that how the ads used to go? But the second hand wasn't interested in waking up from what had to have been a pretty long nap, judging from the rust.

Hers? Her sister's? They'd both owned Timexes in their days. It didn't look familiar, although it was definitely the kind of rugged watch, a man's watch, that either one of them would wear at work. It wasn't her mother's:
Alice
Shore
had never cared to keep track of how fast her life was ticking out from under her.

Laura knocked the timepiece against her thigh to free it of dirt and then tucked it in her pocket to show to Snack and Corinne. Getting to her feet a little stiffly, she stretched her now-aching back. With an effort, she began pushing the laden wheelbarrow through the greenhouse, emerging outside at a compost pile that was filled with years of the nursery's failures and becoming more mountainous with every trip. By the time she finished emptying all of the pots onto the side of the dirt mountain, it was noon.

Thank God.

In bright sunshine, she retraced the worn, familiar path from greenhouse to the main house. The pleasant warmth of the morning was less pleasant now, with a salty, sticky edge to it that was nothing like
Portland
's somehow more bearable dampness.

Gonna be a hot one,
she found herself thinking.

Too hot, surely, for the neighbor she saw approaching the house carrying a large casserole in her hands and walking with halting steps.

"Miss Widdich, let me," said Laura, rushing to help.

"It's just that my cane is in the car," said the gray-haired spinster, turning carefully and nodding toward the big black Ford that she'd parked in front of the house. "So I'm a little unsteady on my pins."

"Please—wait right there and I'll get you your cane and then carry that inside for you."

"
I
can carry it; but, yes, if you would just fetch my stick," she said politely.

The arthritic woman, whose unfortunate last name sounded so much like "witch"—and who was regarded by the town kids accordingly—had been one of the few to attend the funeral of Oliver Shore. She came, not because of Oliver (who more or less agreed with the kids and had always considered Miss Widdich a little "off
"
), but because she had formed a quiet but enduring friendship with Corinne.

It was a natural fit: Miss Widdich was an herbalist, and Laura's sister sold herbs. The affection between the two was so obvious that Laura had felt a little wistful when she witnessed it at the wake. In Laura's line of work, she had little contact with anyone over her own age.

Laura managed to coax the casserole out of Miss Widdich's grip, after all, and the two women walked into the house together, exchanging chat about the weather.

"I had hoped to do something about that fog yesterday," Miss Widdich announced. "It can be so gloomy, and I didn't want you children to feel any sadder than you did."

Do
something? As in, control the weather?

"Well, that's awfully nice of you, Miss Widdich," Laura said vaguely. "But at least we all have one another."

"For now," said the elderly woman, her smile wistfully sweet.

An unexpected chill passed over Laura, as it often did when she was in the other woman's presence. She chalked it up to childhood memories and concentrated instead on the woman's kindness. Setting the glass dish on the kitchen counter, she said, "Still warm, and it smells wonderful. Thank you so much; we'll have it for lunch. What's in it?"

"Cheese; noodles," said Miss Widdich. "A little of this, a dab of that."

What, like eye of newt and heart of toad?

"Yum, a secret recipe," Laura said, quailing inwardly. "I can hardly wait to dig in. Speaking of which, I really ought to wash my hands; look at them!"

She walked over to the sink, mostly to avoid having to make eye contact, and began a hearty scrubdown.

Although herbs were not her field of expertise, Laura knew enough about them to understand that they could be powerful influences, on personalities as well as in stews. Many herbs were drugs, pure and simple. It was an unnerving and entirely unwished-for thought.

And a silly one. At her father's wake, Laura had overheard Miss Widdich and Corinne making small talk about tarragon, of all things. Surely their shared interest in herbs was no more than culinary.

And yet, Corinne seemed
so
fond,
so
attached to Miss Widdich
...
.

But surely not because of drugs. More likely, Corinne had simply transferred her longing for their mother to Miss Widdich after their mother's death. After all, it couldn't have been easy, living in a house with only
Oliver
Shore
for company. A surrogate mother might have filled a real need in Laura's shy and lonely sister.

"Corinne should be back here any minute, if you'd like to wait for her," Laura ventured as she dried her hands.

"But
... don't you hear her?" Miss Widdich cocked her head and fixed her penetrating blue eyes on Laura; the expression in them was intense. "She's talking with someone—somewhere in the house."

"I don't hear a thing," said Laura, shaking her head.

"Of course you do, dear. She's talking to a man."

To humor her visitor, Laura walked out of the kitchen and into the adjacent sitting room of the high-ceilinged, rambling Victorian house and made a pretense of straining to listen in the direction in which Miss Widdich was jabbing her bamboo cane.

And darned if she didn't pick up faint echoes of her sister talking.

Seeing Laura's face, Miss Widdich smiled. "Corinne has a very pretty voice," she explained. "I'm very attuned to it."

"I
guess,"
said Laura, blinking. Miss Widdich might not have the best knees in town, but her hearing was downright preternatural.

Laura invited her to have a seat while she found out how long Corinne would be, but Miss Widdich waved Laura's invitation away with a flutter of a gnarled hand. "This is a bad time, bad time," she said darkly, and off she toddled, as fast as her knees would let her, leaving Laura mystified.

Curious about the voices, Laura tracked them down and was surprised to find that they weren't coming from the house at all but from the back porch, a small, utilitarian affair with a wasted view of the
Atlantic
.

Built off a summer kitchen that was no longer used, the back porch was merely a place to slough off muddy shoes or hang a wet oil slicker. It was the porch on the front of the house—overlooking the nursery and facing away from the sea—that was large enough to hold their assortment of half-broken beach chairs
and the punched-in wicker love
seat.

Boy, someone had had their priorities
so
reversed, Laura thought, not for the first time. From the inside of the screen door, she caught her breath all over again at the grand expanse of bright blue ocean. It was the one thing her charmer cottage in
Portland
lacked, that view of the sea.