A Month at the Shore (16 page)

Ken was waiting for her to go on. When she hesitated, he decided to fill the silence himself. "I'm sorry for that," he said. His face was the picture of painful remorse.

"You are?" She was oddly thrilled to hear it.

"Of course I am." He sounded offended that she was surprised. "When I saw them surrounding you, all I could think of—" He stopped himself and said, "You probably won't appreciate the comparison."

"Tell me anyway."

"You looked like a terrified fox, cornered in a hunt."

He had it about right. Laura had no doubt that the group was getting ready to pin her to the ground and take it from there.

"I
was
terrified."

She saw the muscles in his jaw working in anger. "I know it. I wish
I'd been able to do
something."

"But
... you did! You came at them swinging and howling. Who knows what would have happened if you hadn't seen us?"

He shrugged off the idea that he'd behaved heroically, and she asked out of curiosity, "Why were you in the woods, anyway? I've always wanted to know."

His groan was almost comical. "Hell. Are you going to make me say it?"

"Yes," she said, smiling now.

"I was bird-watching. There was a report of a snowy owl in the area. Not that I'd know. The assholes took my binoculars after they used them to knock me out before they ran."

With the pain of remembrance, she said, "They did beat you up pretty bad."

"Mere flesh wounds," he said lightly. "I was easy pickings for that bunch. I doubt that I weighed a hundred pounds back then."

"But look at you now."

Again he shrugged off the compliment. "After that debacle, I started lifting weights—well, not real weights. I was forced to improvise. I stole a few ten-pound ballast pigs from the bilge of my dad's boat, and I worked out with them on the sly in my room. My dad wouldn't have approved of bodybuilding," he explained. "Back then it was still considered vulgar."

He said softly, "Why were
you
in the woods, Laura? I've always wondered, as well."

She could understand that. She searched his face, under its tumble of thick hair, and wondered whether she could be candid with him.

"Will Burton," she said. "For whatever reason, he suddenly began paying attention to me. I was so flattered. When he asked me to go with him on a walk in the woods—"

"You actually said yes?" Ken asked.

Mistake. "You think it was a slutty thing to do," she said with an edge in her voice.

"Come on; you were thirteen. But
... Will Burton!
God
. Everyone knew he was a bully and a pig."

"I didn't. He was a doctor's son."

"And that impressed you?"

"It did back then."

"I hope you've learned a little since that time," he said, incredulous.

"Obviously," she answered in a strained voice. But she was thinking,
And yet here I am with a banker's son.

Was she still just a sucker for flattery?

Ken shifted his weight, and with it, the position of his hand. Instantly she felt the loss of its warmth.

"So," he said quietly. "Three cheers, I guess, for the snowy owl."

The hideous episode in the woods was a huge chapter of Laura's life. Ken Barclay had finally filled in some of the missing pages from it.

But not all of them. "I was so grateful to you," she said, studying one of the opened buttons of his shirt. "You'll never know. Or maybe you do.
Lord
knows, I poured it all out in that letter to you. I'm surprised that I didn't write it in my own blood. You were such a hero to me. My knight in shining armor, I believe I called you."

She was sure he had picked up on the disappointment, even disillusionment, in her voice, because for a long moment he said nothing.

And then: "What letter?"

Surprised, she looked up into his eyes. She was searching for truth there, and she found it: he certainly didn't remember.

Painful as the effort was, she felt obliged to jog his memory. "
You
know. The letter to which you wrote the three-sentence response?"

He sat up. "What response?"

"You honestly still can't remember?"

She was humiliated by that. She had let his adolescent rejection of her define who she was in life, and he couldn't even remember writing it. Well, why would he? He probably had got tons of letters from girls that he felt he had to answer. It had to have been hard to keep them all straight.

She kept her gaze steady and tried to keep the emotion out of her voice as she said, "The response that went, and I quote: 'You shouldn't be writing to me. Don't do it again. And don't ever try to see me.' "

"You have got to be kidding me. Why would I do that?"

"I don't know. Why did you do that?"

"I
didn't
do that. I never wrote you a letter. I never got a letter to respond to in the first place."

"That you can remember."

"Laura. I'd remember a letter from you. My God. And can you honestly believe that I'd send something so unfeeling? After what I saw in the woods, can you?"

"You were fourteen," she reminded him. "It's a weird age."

"Oh, come on," he said, dismissing her theory.

"I suppose it was coincidence that after that, you suddenly disappeared?" She was more than a little put off by his condescending tone.

He was obviously still trying to puzzle it out. She could see it in the look on his face, far more focused than it was at the bank, when the mere granting of money
had been
involved.

He got up from the bed, too agitated to sit, and began pacing the tonal carpet that covered most of the floor. He said, "Right after the episode in the woods, my parents shipped me, shiner and all, to Switzerland for the summer to stay with my aunt and uncle."

"Just for fighting?" she asked, awed that there were parents around who would resort to such an extreme.

"It had already been arranged," he said, without the slightest smile at her cluelessness. "Although I did, in fact, catch big-time hell for fighting."

He added, "I got back from Switzerland at summer's end, just in time to be sent off to Winton Academy in the Berkshires." Mid-pace, he stopped to look her in the eye and say, "During all that time, there was no letter."

"There was. I sent it." She sat up with her legs over the side of the bed and smoothed her wrinkled yellow dress, painfully aware that her panties were still looped around one ankle. She reached down to slip them off and then stuffed them in a pocket of her dress. It seemed more discreet than trying to put them on again.

Obviously he saw her do it. How he interpreted the gesture, she had no idea.

"There was no reply from me," he insisted.

"There was. I have it."

That stopped him in his tracks. "You
have
the letter? Where?"

"Not on me, I'm afraid," she said dryly. Or he would by now have found it on his own, given the way things had just gone between them.

"I'd like to see this letter." He rubbed his hand across his jaw, pulling skin on the return stroke. "Damn, but I'd like to see it."

"And so you shall, since it's so important to you." She stood up, feeling emotionally raw after this second dramatic encounter under the trees with Kendall Barclay III.

She glanced around the bedroom with its subtle, neutral tones and thought,
Heck, I'd rather see more color when I open my eyes, anyway.
"Well," she said with a rueful smile, "I think we can assume that my work here is done."

She began to leave the same way she'd entered, but Ken got to the door before she did.

"Laura," he said, blocking her way. "I promise you I'll get to the bottom of t
h
is. I'm wondering now whether my dad—damn, it's way too possible. I remember that my
father was all over the principal, what was his name?"

"Smith." He'd come and gone in a year.

"Yeah. Smith. At the time, I assumed that my dad did everything he could to make sure Will and the others were punished—humiliating as it was for me to have my father fight my battles. Now I'm wondering whether he wasn't even busier than I was aware. He could easily have intercepted your letter and then answered it—although it burns my gut to think it."

His father had been dead six years. They would never know.

Laura said wearily, "I have to go."

He was inclined not to let her; she could see it in the way he got hold of the door lever before she did.

The surprise was passing now, and in its place a surge of ridiculous self-pity overtook her. The insult of that letter, heaped on top of the injury of the assault, had been the work of an arrogant grown-up, not an arrogant juvenile. She didn't even
know
Kendall Barclay's father; she'd been rejected by him merely on principle.

Ken stroked his fingers across her cheek, as if he'd seen tears there. "I'll get to the bottom. I promise," he repeated. He lowered his head to hers and brushed her lips in a gentle kiss.

After that, he opened the door for her and she made a break for the rusty pickup parked at the end of his drive. Into it she scrambled, but not before catching her new yellow dress on one of the truck's rusted edges, tearing a triangular rip in the skirt.

Perfect.

In a mood as glum and confused as any she'd felt in her life, she took the long way back to Shore Gardens through Chepaquit. She wanted to face Snack and Corinne with something like normalcy, and she needed more than five minutes to pull herself back together.

So she meandered through the quaint village, parking in front of the ice-cream shop that had gone up in place of the old pharmacy with its granite-countered soda fountain, and on a whim she went inside and ordered a Sprite to go.

Only she didn't go. She
sat at one of the tiny Formica-
topped bistro tables in a daze, wondering what, exactly, had sparked that wildfire back at Triple Oaks. What had happened there was not only sudden but
... well, suspect. Obviously she had been acting out some teenage fantasy, seducing the knight who had spurned her.

Except that he hadn't spurned her.

But he
had
been a knight.

But a young one: fourteen.

But he wasn't fourteen anymore. He was a grown-up, filled-out, full-fledged, totally sexy hunk.

Which obviously had been the problem.

Her mind bounced between Ken in the bedroom and Kenny in the woods until she couldn't separate the two events anymore; she was numb from the effort to sort out her emotions. So she decided not to try, but simply to place all of them on a shelf until she was ready to take them down again, and look them over carefully, and decide which ones to keep and which ones to toss. She had got through life using that system; it was the one sure way to reach her goals.

Don't get emotional.

She had eased that rule exactly three times in her life. The first was with Will Burton, and look where it had got her. The second was with Max: she hadn't fared any better. And now, Ken. Did she really need to go out on that ledge again? She already knew the view from there: down, down, down.

Making a success of Shore Gardens was her current goal. There was only one way to achieve it.

Do not get emotional.

Feeling finally calm enough to face Snack and Corinne, Laura drove at last to the nursery. She was greeted by the wildly upbeat sale banner which now hung triumphantly above the long window boxes spilling over with bright red geraniums. The tidy graveled parking area, the stile fence tumbled over with beach roses, the outdoor carts filled with flowering strawberries and loaded with spring-blooming perennials—what a difference two hard weeks and an infusion of cash had made.

The irresistible sight helped steady Laura and set her firmly back on course. She honked a greeting to Snack, who was attacking the compost pile with the tractor, and got a preoccupied wave from him in return. Gabe's big hound Baskerville was running back and forth alongside the mound, urging Snack on with noisy barks. Maybe Gabe was around. Hopefully he and Snack had buried the hatchet.

Laura was impressed: at the rate he was going, Snack was going to have the pile out of there in time for the sale. She felt like giving him a hip, hip, and a big hooray for being as good as his word.

She parked the truck in front of the kitchen, where she caught a glimpse through parted curtains of Corinne as she moved with ease from sink to stove to fridge, preparing supper. Despite her workload, Corinne had been cooking better and better suppers for them; they had become the highlight of the day. Tonight she had promised to make old-fashioned stew with dumplings, just the way their mother had.

Laura's heart lifted a little. She felt good to be in this new and improved version of home. With a lighter step, she went directly into the kitchen, where her sister was laboring over a pastry board.