The Wishing Tide

“Everything I love in a novel: a coastal setting so rich you can practically taste the salt in the air and feel the sand underfoot, an old inn, and a deeply felt and explored love story with a smart, relatable heroine and a handsome hero with a mysterious past. Atmospheric, suspenseful, and very romantic.”

—Erika Marks, author of
It Comes in Waves

“Beautiful and haunting. The mystery sucked me in from the first page and I was swept up in Lane and Michael’s story. . . . I could not read it fast enough!”

—Anita Hughes, author of
Lake Como

“Set on a desolate, storm-tossed North Carolina barrier island lush with family secrets, madness, and ghost stories, this lyrical novel will haunt you from the first page to the last.”

—Barbara Claypole White, award-winning author of
The In-Between Hour

Praise for
The Secrets She Carried

“Barbara Davis wowed me with her flawless blending of past and present in
The Secrets She Carried
. Her compassion for her characters made me care and her haunting tale kept the pages flying. A poignant, mysterious, and heartfelt story.”

—Diane Chamberlain, author of
Necessary Lies
and
The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes

“I was swept into Adele’s heartbreaking life and her devotion to those she loved.”

—Susan Crandall, author of
Whistling Past the Graveyard

“I read Barbara Davis’s debut novel,
The Secrets She Carried
, deep into the night—one minute rushing to discover how the mysteries resolved, the next slowing. . . . Adele Laveau’s haunting voice and Leslie Nichols’s journey toward understanding lingered long after I read the final page of this engrossing tale.”

—Julie Kibler, author of
Calling Me Home

“
The Secrets She Carried
is a beautifully crafted page-turner with many twists but a simple theme: No matter how far you run, you can’t escape your past. Part contemporary women’s fiction, part historical novel, the plot moves seamlessly back and forth in time to unlock family secrets that bind four generations of women. Add a mysterious death, love that defies the grave, and the legacy of redemption, and this novel has it all.”

—Barbara Claypole White, author of
The Unfinished Garden

“This beautifully written novel tells a tale of epic romance, one that lasts through the decades and centuries. All centered on a plantation home in small-town North Carolina, love stories unfold as the novel progresses through both past and present, and hidden secrets, once thought long buried, slowly reveal themselves. It’s a beautiful story, and Davis does an amazing job telling it.”

—
Romantic Times
(4
¹
/
₂
stars)

“Davis’s writing is heartfelt and effective.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“Davis has a gift for developing flawed characters and their
emotionally wrenching dilemmas. The small-town setting, full of gossip and prejudice in the Depression years, feels realistic . . . a very satisfying tale.”

—Historical Novel Society

The Secrets She Carried

NAL Accent

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published by NAL Accent, an imprint of New American Library,

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Copyright © Barbara Davis, 2014

Conversation Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

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REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REG
ISTRADA

LIBRARY OF C
ONGRESS CATALOGING-I
N-PUBLICATION DATA:

Davis, Barbara, 1961–

The wishing tide / Barbara Davis.

p. cm

ISBN 978-1-101-61475-4

I. Title.

PS3604.A95554W57 2014

813'.6—dc23 2014016209

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Tommy, my absolute everything . . . for helping me find my wings

To my lovely agent, Nalini Akolekar—thanks for making it all so easy. Every writer should be so lucky! To my editor, Sandra Harding, who is never too busy to be a cheerleader. Words can’t express what a privilege it is to work with such a pro.

To Lisa Rosen, Matt King, and Doug Simpson, wonderful authors all, who week after week provide fresh eyes and invaluable feedback. I couldn’t have done any of this without you.

To Barbara Claypole White, Diane Chamberlain, Susan Crandall, Julie Kibler, Anita Hughes, Laura Drake, Barbara Longley, Normandie Fischer, and all the amazing writers of woman’s fiction who have been so very gracious in their support of a struggling new voice. I’m blessed to know you, and grateful beyond words.

And finally, to Debbie Threlkeld Wittstein, and my friends from Tradewinds and Changing Tides, Pompano Beach High School classes 1976–79, who’ve been faithful supporters from the very first page of my very first novel. I love you guys. We may be scattered to the four corners of the earth, but we’re never out of reach.

They say the people you need appear in your life just when you need them, and I must say this has been especially true for me. I’ve been blessed with such an amazing team of supporters, family, friends, and professionals, whom I can never repay for their kindness and generosity. The writer’s journey is said to be a lonely one, but I have never felt
alone.

Mary

T
hrough my fault.

Through my fault.

Through my most grievous fault.

The sea, it seems, has become my priest, the punishing, faceless thing to which I confess my sins, silent witness to my self-inflicted wounds. We’re alike in many ways, a restless beating of water and salt, a shifting and seething of secrets, of treacheries. Reckless. Dangerous.

The tide, you see, is a fickle thing: stealing in, sliding away, always, always turning. She comes while you’re not looking, a silent, liquid thief, only to rush away again, retreating from the shore like a coward. She gives sometimes, too, though, in fleeting, unexpected moments, yielding up her treasures and her dead—but never, ever her secrets.

And so here I sit on the dunes in my carefully mismatched clothes, hour after hour, day after day, frozen in my looking back.
Do not look behind you . . . lest you be swept away.
That is what scripture says. Only there is nowhere for me to look
but
back. No future. No redemption. Like Lot’s wife, I am turned to salt, my tired eyes trained on the
blue-gray horizon, where sea meets sky, where my yesterdays meet my tomorrows, a ragtag eccentric, watching and waiting for something that never comes.

Oh, I’m quite aware of how ridiculous I am. I’m called Dirty Mary by the locals, though Crazy Mary would be more appropriate. I’m not dirty, but I am crazy. I have the pills and the scars to prove it. I don’t mind the name. It keeps people at a distance, which is exactly how I like them—the more distant, the better. I have no wish to share myself with anyone, you see, to unwrap either the then or the now, the before or the after. I move alone through the world. It’s better that way—safer.

There are more like me—many, in fact—who hide behind masks and write their own fairy tales. Bright or dark, it makes no difference. We would not have our true selves stripped bare, would not have cold eyes peering between our emotional blinds. Our sins and follies are ours alone, to mourn or rewrite as we choose.

I have chosen the latter.

I pay no attention to the buffeting wind, or to the sand gusting up from the dunes. Mother Nature, it seems, is bent on pitching a bit of a blow. Penny. They’re calling her Penny. High time, too, I’d say, for that good lady to show what she’s made of. We should all do that now and again, unleash a bit of ourselves—a flash of lightning, a growl of thunder—just to prove to the world and the White Coats that we haven’t been beaten, that beneath our cool, glassy surfaces we are still forces to be reckoned with.

I know about reckoning. I have lived through the reckoning.

I think of that time now, that other time, that other storm, and the day my life took its final, irrevocable turn toward disaster. I let my eyes wander briefly down the narrow strip of beach, down to Starry Point Light, hazy and chalk white in the windy distance, startled, as
I always am, by how little things have changed since that awful day. And I wonder how this can be—after all that has happened, after all I have lost. It matters little now, I suppose. And so I say let the storm come, with its wind and whipping sea. Let it take what it will. For me, the sea has already done her worst.