She studied Savannah’s palm in greater detail. “I see someone.”
“Here it comes,” Savannah couldn’t resist telling Raine. “My tall, dark stranger.”
“I know you’re joking. But this is a woman.” Raven Moonsilver’s eyes narrowed. Her fingers, gleaming with silver rings, tightened around Savannah’s. “A woman caught between the realms.”
“Surely you’re not talking about a ghost?” Raine asked with interest, earning a sharp, warning look from Savannah. There was no point in encouraging the woman.
“A spirit,” the fortune-teller corrected. She was crushing Savannah’s hand now. “A lost soul who needs your help to free herself from the bonds that are holding her to this mortal coil.”
Savannah tugged her hand free. “How am I supposed to do that?”
“It’s not for me to tell you. Open your heart and the answer will come to you.”
“Open your heart,” Savannah was still muttering five minutes later as they followed the high-pitched, wasp-like drone toward the timed chainsaw art competition where Raine had arranged to meet Jack. “The answer will come to you.
“Gee, talk about wasting money. Even if Mother hadn’t told her, which Lilith undoubtedly did, everyone in the county knows I bought the Far Harbor lighthouse. It’s also no secret that the lighthouse is supposed to be haunted. The woman is obviously a fraud.”
“It’s not impossible that she could be in touch with Lucy.”
“Then she should be the one to help her. I have enough to do trying to fix up Lucy’s house.”
“Are you sure you haven’t sensed anything? Nothing out of the ordinary has happened there?”
Savannah decided that Dan’s kiss momentarily tilting her world wasn’t what Raine was referring to. “Nothing worth mentioning. Perhaps there have been a few occasions…”
Her voice drifted off as she thought of the slamming door, the times she’d been working alone late at night and heard soft, breathy sounds that resembled sighs but were undoubtedly only the wind in the tops of the trees.
“What kind of occasions?”
“Nothing. Just shutters banging in the wind, rafters creaking, glass rattling. You know how spooky old houses can be late at night.”
She thought of the journal but decided that didn’t count, either. People were constantly finding all sorts of things hidden in old houses. Whatever her reasons for hiding her journal, Savannah refused to believe that Lucy was attempting to send her some sort of secret message from beyond the grave.
They’d reached the sawdust ring where the competition was to take place. Savannah stood with Raine and Jack, watching as a man turned a log into a wooden statue of a bear holding up a fish, in a record time of six minutes. Deciding that chainsaw art really wasn’t her thing, Savannah wandered on, pausing to observe the women’s ax-throwing contest.
“Now there’s a frightening sight,” said a familiar deep voice behind her as one ax landed right in the middle of the red bull’s-eye with a loud thud. “A female with a double-headed axe.”
She turned and didn’t even try to hide her smile. “Hi.”
“Hi, yourself.” Dan skimmed a look over her. “You’re still the most gorgeous Sawdust Queen ever.”
She glanced across the lawn to the fir-draped royal arbor where fifteen-year-old Becky Brennan stood laughing with friends and flirting with a group of star-struck teenage males. The boys were wearing jeans so new they looked as if they’d stand up by themselves, Garth Brooks-style shirts, boots, and Stetsons. The numbers pinned to the back of those colorful western-cut shirts revealed they were contestants in the battle of the country band competition.
“Becky’s lovely.” The memory of being impossibly young and carefree, feeling for at least one night that she’d been the most special girl on earth, was bittersweet.
“Adorable,” he agreed. “But she can’t hold a candle to you. You take a man’s breath away.”
She shrugged. “Luck of the genes.”
“Perhaps that has something to do with it.” He reached behind his back and pulled out a bouquet wrapped in green tissue. “But as my mom always used to remind Karyn, beauty is as beauty does. And you, sweetheart, do real well.”
“Oh, they’re lovely.” Savannah murmured as she lifted the bouquet to her nose and breathed in its delicate scent.
A man who excelled at outward romantic gestures, Kevin had gifted her with a dozen long-stemmed roses at every holiday during their marriage. She’d finally realized that it hadn’t taken any effort to have his secretary place a call to the florist.
Other men, most particularly wealthy resort guests who, arrogantly overlooking the fact that she was married, seemed to believe that she could be seduced by a gift of long-stemmed red roses. They had, of course, been wrong.
No man had ever given her wildflowers.
“They’re growing all around my house,” Dan said. “Whenever I look at them, I think of you. Of course, that’s not unusual, since thinking about you seems to be what I’ve been doing most of the time lately.”
When his remark reminded her of his comment about wanting to make love to her in a field of wildflowers, her mutinous hormones spiked.
“How do you feel about roller coasters?” Dan asked suddenly.
“I used to love them—until my life became one.”
“The Ferris wheel, then. What would you say to coming for a ride in the sky with me, Savannah?”
Torn between prudence and pleasure, Savannah looked up at the revolving double wheel that was lit up like a gigantic Christmas tree.
“If that suggestion doesn’t tickle your fancy, we’ve got just enough time to make the greased pole climb.”
“It’s a tough choice.” She laughed and made her decision. “But the Ferris wheel it is.”
“Terrific.” Dan linked his fingers with hers as they strolled hand-in-hand beneath the fairy lights twinkling like stars amid the leaves of the huge red-leaf oaks.
The festival was turning out to be a grand success. As she made her way toward the pie-judging tent, Ida decided that this year’s event would go down as the best on record.
“Whoever takes over next year will have a helluvan act to follow,” Henry said. He munched on a hot dog loaded with the works as he and Ida watched the teams of loggers trying to climb the towering greased pole.
“I was thinking pretty much the same thing. But I didn’t say it because I didn’t want to sound like I was bragging on myself.”
His salty curse was learned during a decade spent in the merchant marines before he’d returned home to take over the lighthouse duties from his father. “It isn’t bragging if it’s the truth.”
Ida glanced over at him in surprise. “You keep handing out compliments like that and I’m going to think that you’ve been taken over by one of those pod people or something.”
He shrugged. Then his eyes narrowed as he watched her dig into her pocketbook and pull out a plastic bottle of aspirin. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” She swallowed two white tablets with a sip of her iced tea. “It’s just a little noisy, what with all the chainsaws whining away and those drums. Whose idea was it to have a battle of the bands, anyway?”
“Lilith said it was yours.”
“Oh. Well, like I said, it’s a great idea. Brought more young people in.”
Strangely, the pounding behind her eyes seemed to have synchronized itself with the throbbing sound of the drums coming from the Victorian bandstand. She glanced around at the crowds of teenagers with satisfaction. There must be a third more in the park than Florence Heron had managed to pull in last year.
Of course, to give Florence her due, it had probably been thirty years since the woman had spoken with any teenager other than the boy who delivered her morning
Coldwater Cove Chronicle
. And then she was likely to scold him for tossing the paper in the rhododendron bush.
What had begun as an act of altruism—bringing foster kids into her home—had turned out to benefit her, as well. Ida had quickly discovered that being around the younger generation helped her stay young. They’d admittedly been a challenge, but she’d always thrived on challenges.
She was thinking that they were also good company when the park, and everyone in it, suddenly went all fuzzy, as if she were looking through a camera lens that had suddenly gone out of focus. Ida blinked.
“Henry.” She reached out to steady herself, her fingers digging into his arm.
His brows drew together as he looked down at her. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.” She was struggling to focus when she heard someone call her name. Ida was vastly relieved when her vision cleared, allowing her to view the teenager standing at the other side of the sawdust horseshoe pit.
“Why, it’s Gwen.” The momentary blurriness was immediately forgotten.
Henry followed her surprised gaze. “You talking about that little girl who looks like she stuck a wet finger in a light socket?”
“That’s her.” The bright red Little Orphan Annie curls were longer than they’d been when Gwen had left Coldwater Cove two months ago, and even more unruly. “She wasn’t due home from science camp for another three days. I guess she came early so she could attend the festival.”
The problem was, Ida thought, the serious expression on the teenager’s face as she approached didn’t give the impression that she’d come here tonight to have a good time. Ida cast a glance upward toward the heavens and said a quick, silent prayer.
Please don’t let her be in trouble with the law again
.
Never having known a stable home until she’d landed in Coldwater Cove, in the past Gwen’s chosen response to unpleasant experiences—of which she’d had more than her share—had been to shoplift. Ida dearly hoped she’d put such self-destructive behavior behind her.
“Hello, darling.” Tamping down her concerns, Ida hugged the foster child she’d grown so fond of.
“Hi, Mama Ida.” Gwen hugged her back. Her youthful body had lost all its pregnancy weight. The jeans clinging to her hips were so baggy, Ida figured there was room for a second teenage girl inside them.
“You’re home early.”
“I know.” She’d matured, Ida realized, looking up into the sober face that was more woman than child. Of course that wasn’t very surprising. Carrying a baby for nine long months, only to give it up the day after it was born, was bound to make any girl grow up a bit faster than most.
“There’s something I need to talk with you about,” Gwen said. “Something I’ve been thinking a lot about while I was in Texas. Something that wouldn’t wait three more days.”
Ida felt a sharp, tension-caused twinge behind her eye. She ignored it.
“This might not be the best time or place to be talking about this,” Henry warned. Ida sensed he was trying to forestall the conversation out of concern for her.
“Nonsense, Henry,” she argued. “If Gwen skipped science camp graduation, it must be important.” The weekly reports from the counselors had been unanimously glowing.
“What is it, dear?” Ida asked with feigned calm, even as she feared she knew exactly what Gwen was about to say.
The teenager drew in a deep breath, then slowly let it out. “It’s about my baby.”
Her words echoed in Ida’s ears as if she were speaking from the bottom of the cove. Slender teenage hands raked through bright curls, but Ida didn’t notice their tremor. Every atom of her attention was riveted on Gwen’s lips, which now seemed to be moving in slow motion. Her voice had the odd, drawn-out sound of an old 45 record played at 33 1/3 speed. “I think I want her back.”
T
hey were riding up backwards, higher and higher, until the people on the ground resembled toy action figures.
“Oh, look,” Savannah pointed out. “There’s John.” She was surprised to see the teenager holding hands with a tall blond girl who was wearing a plastic lei over her sweater and carrying a stuffed animal nearly as big as she was. “I didn’t realize he had a girlfriend.”
“They sort of tumbled into puppy love this past spring when they met at the Special Olympics,” Dan said. “Cindy fell into Coldwater Cove when she was two. By the time they pulled her out, she’d already been brain-damaged.”
The Ferris wheel jerked to a halt. Down below, people were getting off, others getting on. “If the scuttlebutt is to be believed, her father never quite forgave her mother for what he considered her carelessness. Plus, the burdens of taking care of a toddler are tough enough without tossing a mental handicap into the mix.”
The wheel began to move again, picking up speed.
“The guy left Mrs. Kellstrom with the chore of teaching their daughter how to walk and talk and do all that other basic stuff again from scratch.”
“That must have been horribly difficult.”
“I suppose it may help that she’s a nurse. Even so, it would have to be a helluva test of strength. But she obviously did a great job, because Cindy Kellstrom’s one of the nicest, most hardworking kids I’ve ever met.”
She sounds a lot like John
, Savannah thought. “They look sweet together,” she said as the wheel stopped again, leaving them at the very top, with a bird’s-eye view of John buying his girlfriend a cone of fluffy pink cotton candy.
“They are kind of cute,” he agreed. “Of course I’m not looking forward to dealing with his wounded heart when they break up, which they’re bound to do at their age, but I suppose we all have to learn from experience.”
“I suppose so.” Savannah heard the laughter and shrieks from the Tilt-a-Wheel and watched as it dipped and spun, the riders pressed hard against the side by centrifugal force.
“That’s exactly how I felt when my marriage broke up,” she murmured, surprised when she realized she’d said the words out loud.
He followed her gaze. “Dizzy and sick to your stomach?”
“No.” She watched the floor drop away. The wheel spun faster. The people shrieked louder. Savannah’s hands tightened on the metal bar in front of them as the wheel began its rapid descent.
“Well, the sick-to-the-stomach description pretty much fits.” Or at least it had the morning after she’d left Kevin when she’d awakened at the Beverly Wilshire with a killer hangover. “But mostly I felt as if the bottom had dropped out of my life.”
“Perhaps that’s not so bad.” He pried her hands off the bar and held them between his as they swooshed past the ticket taker and headed back up again. “Maybe the bottom should drop out of all our lives every so often, if for no other reason than to let some fresh air in.”
“That’s a nice philosophy. But the next time I feel my life getting a little stuffy, I believe I’ll just open a window.”
She’d lost track of John and Cindy. But looking out over the park, Savannah could make out her grandmother and Henry. Miracle of miracles, they seemed to be actually getting along as they ate hot dogs and watched men trying to scale towering greased poles. Not far away, Lilith and Amy had moved on to the spinning teacup ride.
“Want to talk about it?” he asked mildly.
“Not particularly.”
“He hurt you.” It was not a question.
“Yes.” So much for fun, Savannah thought.
“Did he hit you?”
“Of course not.” She glanced at Dan in su$$$prise. She was even more surprised to see something new in his eyes. Something da$$$ and dangerous. “It’s not that big a deal.” She shrugged. “Divorce hurts. However it happens.”
“Mine didn’t.”
“Really?”
“I suspected I was making a mistake the day I got married. I think Amanda did, too.”
“Then why did you go through with it?”
“Beats me. Because five hundred of her father’s closest friends were coming to dinner?”
“Don’t joke. Since you brought it up, I’d really like to know.” Surely he couldn’t take what was supposed to be a lifetime commitment so casually?
“Okay.” His expression turned pensive. Unreadable. “I suppose the simplest way to put it is that Amanda and I were unlucky enough to meet at a time when we were both asking ourselves that old song lyric, ‘Is that all there is?’ There was a brief chemical flash, but we were adults who’d admittedly been around the block a few times. Neither of us would have gotten married just for lust.”
Savannah worried when the idea of Dan lusting after some society blond named Amanda caused a stir of something that felt uncomfortably like jealousy.
“The bottom line was that she thought I had something she wanted. And I thought she had something I wanted. By the time we finally called it quits, the only thing either of us wanted from the other was freedom.”
“That’s sad.”
“I’m certainly not a proponent of divorce. But in some cases, like ours, where both parties are financially independent, with no kids, and seemingly unable to do anything but make each other miserable, it might be the best solution all around.”
“I suppose I can understand that.” But she couldn’t really identify. “I was never miserable.”
They’d reached the bottom again. When the ticket taker leaned forward to open the bar, Dan shoved a bill into his hand.
“We’ll be staying a bit longer.” The man looked inclined to argue. He glanced over at the ticket booth, then back toward Dan again. Massive shoulders that appeared to have been carved from oak shrugged. He jammed the money into the pocket of his black T-shirt. “Suit yourself.”
“Now then.” Dan put his arm around Savannah and drew her closer as they slowly climbed back up to the top of the double wheel. “You were saying? About not being miserable?”
“I wasn’t. Really,” she insisted, meeting his openly skeptical look. “In fact, for a long time, I thought I was blissfully happy.”
“Women who are blissful in their marriages don’t usually get divorced.”
“True.” She sighed and wondered how she could possibly explain her behavior to Dan since she was just beginning to understand it herself. “You’d have to know Kevin to understand.”
Dan decided that it would probably be best if he never met the weasel.
Neither of them said anything for an entire revolution. Dan was a patient man. Years of interrogating individuals on the witness stand had taught him to use silence well.
“I met him right after I’d graduated from culinary school. I’d gotten a job as an assistant to the assistant pastry chef at the Whitfield Palace hotel in Paris.”
Dan whistled softly. “When deluxe will no longer do,” he murmured the slogan of the worldwide luxury hotel. “I’m impressed.” He didn’t mention that he and Amanda had stayed at that same hotel on their honeymoon.
Had Savannah been working there then?
he wondered.
“Kevin had just been hired as assistant manager of customer services. Before that he’d been night manager at the Hôtel de Paris in Monaco. The day he arrived, I ran into him at the end of my shift. He was sitting at a corner table, all alone in the deserted dining room, poring over a tourist guide of popular Paris sights, trying to figure out the way to the Eiffel Tower.”
“Which you promptly offered to show him.”
She looked surprised. “Yes. How did you know that?”
“Lucky guess,” he said dryly.
“Well, anyway,” she forged on, “it was Paris in the spring, I was horribly homesick and lonely, and he was just enough years older to seem so much more worldly than most of the boys I knew. He was also suave and sophisticated and looked incredibly handsome in his Italian suits.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d just as soon skip the roll call of attributes.”
“But that’s just my point,” Savannah said earnestly. “He seemed like every young girl’s romantic fantasy. Like Prince Charming. He even shared my dream of someday owning a little inn together, and he made it seem so wonderfully romantic….
“Even after we eloped, whenever I thought I sensed cracks in the facade of what I wanted to believe was our perfect marriage, he convinced me that I was only imagining things. The hotel business gets a lot of women—about-to-be-divorced women, lonely women, career women on business trips who want a fling away from home. He told me that some of those women may occasionally come on to him, but I didn’t need to worry because I was the special one. I was the only woman he could ever want.”
She managed a sad smile. “Unfortunately, I discovered that I wasn’t the only woman he was telling all those pretty words to.
“My ex-husband was manipulative, seductive, and unfortunately without any moral core. After I came home, Ida described his charm as being the oily kind that washes off in the shower.”
“That’s probably one of the few things your grandmother has ever said that I understand.” Dan skimmed his fingers over her shoulder to toy with the ends of her hair. “I’m sorry.”
He honestly
was
sorry she’d been hurt. But Dan couldn’t really regret her marriage breaking up, because if the husband had been the paragon she’d mistaken him for, Savannah would still be happily whipping up soufflés in Malibu instead of sitting here at the top of Coldwater Cove with him.
“So was I. I was sorry, hurt, and angry, and I’ve recently realized exactly how much of my self-confidence and self-respect he stole while I wasn’t looking.” She fell silent and looked out over the midnight-dark waters of the cove.
The carousel’s cheery calliope drifted up from the midway. The twangy sounds of a country guitar and fiddle band rode on air scented with popcorn, peanuts, fir, and sawdust. Once again Dan waited.
“You know about Lilith,” she said, turning back toward him. “About her life before Cooper. Her marriages.”
“I’ve heard a few stories.”
“I love my mother…. Really,” she insisted when he didn’t immediately respond.
“I believe you.”
“I’ve always loved her. And I was never as angry about her behavior as Raine seemed to be.”
“Perhaps you were too busy bottling your anger up.”
That suggestion hit a little too close for comfort. “All right. I have to admit to wondering recently, now that we’re all home again, if in my need to avoid confrontation, I’d managed to convince myself that Lilith’s behavior didn’t disturb me as much as it did Raine.
“Maybe one of these days I’ll work that out. But what I have realized, since I discovered Kevin making love—”
“Not love.”
“What?” His quiet comment sidetracked her.
“I’ve never met the guy, but from the little you’ve said, and what I’ve inferred from Jack and Raine, I’m guessing the weasel doesn’t know the first thing about love.”
She wondered if becoming an attorney had made him so perceptive, or if he’d chosen the law because of what appeared to be a natural talent for reading people.
“It’s difficult to love someone else when you’re so enamored with yourself,” she responded dryly. “When I discovered he’d been having an affair with the head of the resort’s legal department, I think what really hurt, more than his infidelity, was that deep down inside, I’d known it all along.
“It was as if we had this secret, unspoken contract. Kevin screwed around, and I knew it, and he knew that I knew it. So by overlooking his lapses in monogamy, on some level, so long as he remained discreet and we could both continue to lie about his behavior, I believed that I was keeping my marriage intact.”
“Then he breached the contract by bringing the affair out into the open,” Dan suggested.
“I think I was the last person at Las Casitas to know.” She shook her head. “No, that’s not exactly right. I was the last person to
acknowledge
it.”
Except for a few general comments to her family, and telling Raine whatever details her sister needed to handle the legal aspects of her divorce, Savannah really hadn’t talked about the breakup of her marriage.
She’d been too embarrassed. Too ashamed. Now she realized that Kevin was the one who should be ashamed.
“The entire time I was growing up, I swore that I wouldn’t make the same mistakes regarding men that Lilith did. I promised myself that when I got married it would be for keeps.”
“Given Lilith’s marital history, I suppose it makes a certain cockeyed sense that you’d stick out a bad relationship longer than you should have. But I still can’t understand why you married a jerk like that in the first place.”
“Neither can I, now. I suppose I read too many fairy tales growing up. I was waiting to get swept off my feet, so when Kevin proposed eloping to Monte Carlo a week after we met, I thought it was what love was supposed to feel like.”
She was looking out over the park again in a way that had Dan suspecting that she was seeing that long-ago day she’d exchanged vows with a guy that was so very wrong for her. Even though he could see how she’d gotten herself in such an impossible situation, he was still surprised that a girl who’d always seemed like the princess of Coldwater Cove could have ended up playing the role of Cinderella.