She wasn't beaten, she decided. She was taking a sabbatical. One day she would stand onstage and feel all that love and admiration from the audience roll over her. Then she would be someone.
Someone other than Annabelle's younger daughter.
She carried the last of the plates into the kitchen. Brian was already putting the place back into shape. No dirty pots and pans cluttered his sink, no spills and smears spoiled his counter. Knowing it was nasty, Lexy turned her wrist so that the cup stacked on top of the plates tipped, spilling the dregs of coffee before it shattered on the tile.
“Oops,” she said and grinned wickedly when Brian turned his head.
“You must enjoy being a fool, Lex,” he said coolly. “You're so good at it.”
“Really?” Before she could stop herself, she let the rest of the dishes drop. They hit with a crash, scattering food and fragments of stoneware all over. “How's that?”
“Goddamn it, what are you trying to prove? That you're as destructive as ever? That somebody will always come behind you to clean up your mess?” He stomped to a closet, pulled out a broom. “Do it yourself.” He shoved the broom at her.
“I won't.” Though she already regretted the impulsive act, she shoved the broom back at him. The colorful Fiestaware was like a ruined carnival at their feet. “They're your precious dishes. You clean them up.”
“You're going to clean it up, or I swear I'll use this broom on your backside.”
“Just try it, Bri.” She went toe-to-toe with him. Knowing she'd been wrong was only a catalyst for standing her ground. “Just try it and I'll scratch your damn eyes out. I'm sick to death of you telling me what to do. This is my house as much as it is yours.”
“Well, I see nothing's changed around here.”
Their faces still dark with temper, both Brian and Lexy turnedâand stared. Jo stood at the back door, her two suitcases at her feet and exhaustion in her eyes.
“I knew I was home when I heard the crash followed by the happy voices.”
In an abrupt and deliberate shift of mood, Lexy slid her arm through Brian's, uniting them. “Look here, Brian, another prodigal's returned. I hope we have some of that fatted calf left.”
“I'll settle for coffee,” Jo said, and closed the door behind her.
THREE
J
O stood at the window in the bedroom of her childhood. The view was the same. Pretty gardens patiently waiting to be weeded and fed. Mounds of alyssum were already golden and bluebells were waving. Violas were sunning their sassy little faces, guarded by the tall spears of purple iris and cheerful yellow tulips. Impatiens and dianthus bloomed reliably.
There were the palms, cabbage and saw, and beyond them the shady oaks where lacy ferns and indifferent wildflowers thrived.
The light was so lovely, gilded and pearly as the clouds drifted, casting soft shadows. The image was one of peace, solitude, and storybook perfection. If she'd had the energy, she'd have gone out now, captured it on film and made it her own.
She'd missed it. How odd, she thought, to realize only now that she'd missed the view from the window of the room where she'd spent nearly every night of the first eighteen years of her life.
She'd whiled away many hours gardening with her mother, learning the names of the flowers, their needs and habits, enjoying the feel of soil under her fingers and the sun on her back. Birds and butterflies, the tinkle of wind chimes, the drift of puffy clouds overhead in a soft blue sky were treasured memories from her early childhood.
Apparently she'd forgotten to hold on to them, Jo decided, as she turned wearily from the window. Any pictures she'd taken of the scene, with her mind or with her camera, had been tucked away for a very long time.
Her room had changed little as well. The family wing in Sanctuary still glowed with Annabelle's style and taste. For her older daughter she'd chosen a gleaming brass half-tester bed with a lacy canopy and a complex and fluid design of cornices and knobs. The spread was antique Irish lace, a Pendleton heirloom that Jo had always loved because of its pattern and texture. And because it seemed so sturdy and ageless.
On the wallpaper, bluebells bloomed in cheerful riot over the ivory background, and the trim was honey-toned and warm.
Annabelle had selected the antiquesâthe globe lamps and maple tables, the dainty chairs and vases that had always held fresh flowers. She'd wanted her children to learn early to live with the precious and care for it. On the mantel over the little marble fireplace were candles and seashells. On the shelves on the opposite wall were books rather than dolls.
Even as a child, Jo had had little use for dolls.
Annabelle was dead. No matter how much of her stubbornly remained in this room, in this house, on this island, she was dead. Sometime in the last twenty years she had died, made her desertion complete and irrevocable.
Dear God, why had someone immortalized that death on film? Jo wondered, as she buried her face in her hands. And why had they sent that immortalization to Annabelle's daughter?
Those words had been printed on the back of the photograph. Jo remembered them vividly. Now she rubbed the heel of her hand hard between her breasts to try to calm her heart. What kind of sickness was that? she asked herself. What kind of threat? And how much of it was aimed at herself?
It had been there, it had been real. It didn't matter that when she got out of the hospital and returned to her apartment, the print was gone. She couldn't let it matter. If she admitted she'd imagined it, that she'd been hallucinating, she would have to admit that she'd lost her mind.
How could she face that?
But the print hadn't been there when she returned. All the others were, all those everyday images of herself, still scattered on the darkroom floor where she'd dropped them in shock and panic.
But though she searched, spent hours going over every inch of the apartment, she didn't find the print that had broken her.
If it had never been there ... Closing her eyes, she rested her forehead on the window glass. If she'd fabricated it, if she'd somehow wanted that terrible image to be fact, for her mother to be exposed that way, and deadâwhat did that make her?
Which could she accept? Her own mental instability, or her mother's death?
Don't think about it now. She pressed a hand to her mouth as her breath began to catch in her throat. Put it away, just like you put the photographs away. Lock it up until you're stronger. Don't break down again, Jo Ellen, she ordered herself. You'll end up back in the hospital, with doctors poking into both body and mind.
Handle it. She drew a deep, steadying breath. Handle it until you can ask whatever questions have to be asked, find whatever answers there are to be found.
She would do something practical, she decided, something ordinary, attempt the pretense, at least, of a normal visit home.
She'd already lowered the front of the slant-top desk and set one of her cameras on it. But as she stared at it she realized that was as much unpacking as she could handle. Jo looked at the suitcases lying on the lovely bedspread. The thought of opening them, of taking clothes out and hanging them in the armoire, folding them into drawers was simply overwhelming. Instead she sat down in a chair and closed her eyes.
What she needed to do was think and plan. She worked best with a list of goals and tasks, recorded in the order that would be the most practical and efficient. Coming home had been the only solution, so it was practical and efficient. It was, she promised herself, the first step. She just had to clear her mind, somehowâclear it and latch on to the next step.
But she drifted, nearly dreaming.
It seemed like only seconds had passed when someone knocked, but Jo found herself jerked awake and disoriented. She sprang to her feet, feeling ridiculously embarrassed to have nearly been caught napping in the middle of the day. Before she could reach the door, it opened and Cousin Kate poked her head in.
“Well, there you are. Goodness, Jo, you look like three days of death. Sit down and drink this tea and tell me what's going on with you.”
It was so Kate, Jo thought, that frank, no-nonsense, bossy attitude. She found herself smiling as she watched Kate march in with the tea tray. “You look wonderful.”
“I take care of myself.” Kate set the tray on the low table in the sitting area and waved one hand at a chair. “Which, from the looks of you, you haven't been doing. You're too thin, too pale, and your hair's a disaster of major proportions. But we'll fix that.”
Briskly she poured tea from a porcelain teapot decked with sprigs of ivy into two matching cups. “Now, then.” She sat back, sipped, then angled her head.
“I'm taking some time off,” Jo told her. She'd driven down from Charlotte for the express purpose of giving herself time to rehearse her reasons and excuses for coming home. “A few weeks.”
“Jo Ellen, you can't snow me.”
They'd never been able to, Jo thought, not any of them, not from the moment Kate had set foot in Sanctuary. She'd come days after Annabelle's desertion to spend a week and was still there twenty years later.
They'd needed her, God knew, Jo thought, as she tried to calculate just how little she could get away with telling Katherine Pendleton. She sipped her tea, stalling.
Kate was Annabelle's cousin, and the family resemblance was marked in the eyes, the coloring, the physical build. But where Annabelle, in Jo's memory, had always seemed soft and innately feminine, Kate was sharp-angled and precise.
Yes, Kate did take care of herself, Jo agreed. She wore her hair boyishly short, a russet cap that suited her fox-at-alert face and practical style. Her wardrobe leaned toward the casual but never the sloppy. Jeans were always pressed, cotton shirts crisp. Her nails were neat and short and never without three coats of clear polish. Though she was fifty, she kept herself trim and from the back could have been mistaken for a teenage boy.
She had come into their lives at their lowest ebb and had never faltered. Had simply been there, managing details, pushing each of them to do whatever needed to be done next, and, in her no-nonsense way, bullying and loving them into at least an illusion of normality.
“I've missed you, Kate,” Jo murmured. “I really have.”
Kate stared at her a moment, and something flickered over her face. “You won't soften me up, Jo Ellen. You're in trouble, and you can choose to tell me or you can make me pry it out of you. Either way, I'll have it.”
“I needed some time off.”
That, Kate mused, was undoubtedly true; she could tell just from the looks of the girl. Knowing Jo, she doubted very much if it was a man who'd put that wounded look in her eyes. So that left work. Work that took Jo to strange and faraway places, Kate thought. Often dangerous places of war and disaster. Work that she knew her young cousin had deliberately put ahead of a life and a family.
Little girl
, Kate thought,
my poor, sweet little girl. What have you done to yourself?
Kate tightened her fingers on the handle of her cup to keep them from trembling. “Were you hurt?”
“No. No,” Jo repeated and set her tea down to press her fingers to her aching eyes. “Just overwork, stress. I guess I overextended myself in the last couple of months. The pressure, that's all.”
The photographs. Mama.
Kate drew her brows together. The line that formed between them was known, not so affectionately, as the Pendleton Fault Line. “What kind of pressure eats the weight off of you, Jo Ellen, and makes your hands shake?”
Defensively, Jo clasped those unsteady hands together in her lap. “I guess you could say I haven't been taking care of myself.” Jo smiled a little. “I'm going to do better.”
Tapping her fingers on the arm of the chair, Kate studied Jo's face. The trouble there went too deep to be only professional concerns. “Have you been sick?”
“No.” The lie slid off her tongue nearly as smoothly as planned. Very deliberately she blocked out the thought of a hospital room, almost certain that Kate would be able to see it in her mind. “Just a little run-down. I haven't been sleeping well lately.” Edgy under Kate's steady gaze, Jo rose to dig cigarettes out of the pocket of the jacket she'd tossed over a chair. “I've got that book dealâI wrote you about it. I guess it's got me stressed out.” She flicked on her lighter. “It's new territory for me.”
“You should be proud of yourself, not making yourself sick over it.”
“You're right. Absolutely.” Jo blew out smoke and fought back the image of Annabelle, the photographs. “I'm taking some time off.”
It wasn't all, Kate calculated, but it was enough for now. “It's good you've come home. A couple of weeks of Brian's cooking will put some meat on you again. And God knows we could use some help around here. Most of the rooms, and the cottages, are booked straight through the summer.”
“So business is good?” Jo asked without much interest.
“People need to get away from their own routines and pick up someone else's. Most that come here are looking for quiet and solitude or they'd be in Hilton Head or on Jekyll. Still, they want clean linen and fresh towels.”
Kate tapped her fingers, thinking briefly of the work stretched out before her that afternoon. “Lexy's been lending a hand,” she continued, “but she's no more dependable than she ever was. Just as likely to run off for the day as to do what chores need doing. She's dealing with some disappointments herself, and some growing-up pains.”