Firefly Beach (33 page)

You were there. My dad died in your kitchen. I know the whole stupid story now. Your family’s not the only one with a gun. Did you hear the shot, C? Did you watch him die?

It sucks, you knowing all along. Did you just think I was a jerk? Were you and your sisters laughing at me? Or did you just think I wouldn’t find out?

Well, I found out.

Don’t write back. I hate you, your father, that house of hell you call Firefly Hill.

Joe Connor

May 12, 1980

Dear Joe,

Please don’t hate me. I kept it secret because I didn’t want to hurt you. Your father came here, it’s true, you knew that already. I knew, but believe me, Joe: I never, never wanted to hurt you. The opposite.

I’m so sorry. If I could take it back—all of it, any of it—I would. Please, please don’t hate me. You don’t know what your friendship means to me. If you can’t love me anymore, I understand. But don’t hate me. I’m only sixteen, and you’re only seventeen. I can’t stand thinking of all that life waiting for me if you hate me.

Love,

Caroline

P.S. Please write back, Joe. Anything you want to know, I’ll tell you. I’m here, and I always will be.

E
VERY YEAR
S
KYE AND
C
LEA HELPED
C
AROLINE CLEAN
up after the ball. It was a tradition, something neither of them ever missed. Skye was half dreading it; she didn’t want to face Caroline after the scene on the beach the day before. But when Skye walked into the inn, Michele said Caroline had called in sick. She had asked not to be disturbed. Skye was on her way over, to knock on the door of her cottage, when Clea intercepted her.

“Hello, my little storm cloud,” Clea said, kissing her.

“Is she really upset?” Skye asked.

“She’s really tired.”

“I want to talk to her—”

“She’s sleeping late. Just let her rest,” Clea said.

“Is it because of me—?”

“Even if it is, just leave her alone right now.”

With guidance from Michele, Clea and Skye went straight to the task of cleaning up the ball. Every year it was the same thing. All the planning, the arranging, the anticipation, the decoration, had lasted for months. All year, everyone at the Renwick Inn looked forward to the Firefly Ball. And when it was over, Caroline and her sisters pulled the whole thing apart. But this year Caroline wasn’t around to help.

Taking down the paper lanterns reminded Skye of taking the lights off a Christmas tree. She stood on the ladder, looping the electrical cord over her arm. Swallows swooped in and out of the barn, brushing by her hair. She felt dizzy with a hangover and shame for what she had said to Caroline. Her mad twin had been in command.

When the telephone rang in the inn, she heard it jingle through the trees and almost fell off the ladder. She had left word with her mother that she was there, and she hoped it was Simon, looking for her. He hadn’t surfaced since last night. But it was just someone calling for a dinner reservation.

“Hey, Michele,” Skye asked when the manager walked by, taking another loop of wire. “Are the
Meteor
guys on the books?”

“No,” Michele called.

Skye watched her walk across the wide porch, through the big door with its fanlight window. She knew better than to be surprised. But she felt an ache anyway, deep inside. She had worried all along that Joe’s reentry into Caroline’s life had been temporary.

“Hear that?” Skye asked Clea.

“Yes,” Clea said.

“Shit,” Skye said sadly.

“He’ll be back,” Clea replied with quiet confidence.

When they finally brushed the dirt off their hands and went inside the inn, Skye’s back ached and her legs felt tired. She went into the bar for a beer but took a glass of ice water instead. There, pausing for a minute, her gaze fell upon one of her father’s pictures. Very tiny, just four inches square, it showed a marsh.

Skye gazed at the watercolor, its greens and golds flowing into each other, just as they did in the salt flats themselves. She recognized the scene: It was the Black Hall marshes, with the Wickland Light shimmering in the background. When Skye looked at his pictures, she knew she was seeing one very specific moment in time. The cloud would pass, or the sun would move, and everything would change.

“He was a wonderful painter,” Clea said.

“Amazing,” Skye agreed.

“You inherited his talent.”

“Thank you,” Skye said.

“You heard what we were saying yesterday, didn’t you?” Clea asked, gesturing at Skye’s glass of water.

“Maybe a little,” Skye said, sipping the water.

“You can’t make beautiful sculptures if you’re…”

Skye smiled, grateful that Clea had spared her the end of the sentence. Caroline would have said “dead” or “drunk.”

“I know,” Skye said.

On the other wall were the three portraits of Skye and her sisters Hugh had done after the hunts. Skye stared at the image of Caroline holding the dead fox. The winter light was cold and blue. The snow was deep, the stream black ice. The fox hanging limp with a line of blood drizzling from its mouth.

“Clea, look.”

Staring at Caroline’s portrait, Skye saw something she had never noticed before: Her father had painted a tear. It might have been a shadow, but from a certain perspective it was definitely a tear.

“Was that always there?” Skye asked.

“Yes,” Clea said.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive. I used to wonder why Caroline had one and we didn’t.”

Looking at the picture, Skye had always felt sad, but she had never seen the tear before. Had Caroline actually cried the day she killed the fox? Had their father guessed that the hunts were laced with tragedy, that they would doom his family, not save it? Or had Caroline?

“Dad didn’t usually make statements like that in his work. He’d leave everything to the imagination of the viewer. He must have felt pretty strongly about showing Caroline crying.”

“She carries the weight of the world, Skye,” Clea said gently, making Skye feel twice as guilty as she did already. “Dad just painted what he saw.”

Joe Connor climbed out of the sea and let the dark water stream off his body. It ran down the deck into the scupper. He felt cold and clean. Night had fallen while he was down in the wreck. The fog had closed in; it wrapped the Meteor, heavy and gray, and sonorous tones of bell buoys and the foghorn at Moonstone Point carried across the water. He looked for Sam, but he wasn’t on deck.

Operations were shutting down for the night. The compressor was off. Divers were slipping out of wetsuits, heading below for dinner. Joe was glad. Let them celebrate; today they had reached the mother lode.

The chests were buried under tons of mud and wreckage. Based on measurements taken of the keel, Joe estimated the vessel to be about two hundred and twenty tons, most of it corrugated aft, when the ship rammed the reef. The site was a nightmare of broken spars, splintered planks, mountains of ballast stones. But through careful tunneling, scientific estimation, and blind luck, that morning Dan had located the first chest.

Joe was the second man on the scene. They had swum down with lights, passing the bones of Elisabeth Randall. Joe’s thoughts went straight to Clarissa, to the cameo he had found, to Caroline. Reminding himself that controlled emotions were key to breathing steadily underwater, he forced the thoughts from his mind.

Dan signaled from up ahead. Joe followed. Zigzagging through an obstacle course of jagged rocks and smashed wood, they shined their lamps into what looked like a devil’s cave. Pitch-black, it was guarded by notched and pointed shards of wreckage. But just inside, nestled in the sandy sea bottom, was the chest.

Black wood encircled by bronze bands, it lay on its side. Two hasps had snapped free. Some of the gold had spilled out, creating a barnacle-encrusted trail of treasure. The divers followed it to the source, then hovered outside the possibly precarious “cave,” trying to determine how many other chests were inside and how safe it would be to proceed.

“What do you think, captain?” asked Dan, coming up behind him on deck.

“It was an exciting day. You did good.”

“Thanks,” Dan said, grinning. He took a long drink of beer from a bottle. From down below came the sounds of the crew celebrating, retelling the triumphant moments.

“Seen Sam?” Joe asked.

“He’s eating,” Dan said.

Joe nodded. Sam had packed his bags. Walking past his cabin, Joe had noticed the knapsack and duffel bag full and stowed in the corner, ready to go. But since the other night, when they’d had their conversation about Yale, Sam hadn’t said anything about leaving.

“We’ll shore up those timbers tomorrow, just to be safe,” Joe said.

“I say we go in with the hoist tonight, secure the chest right away. We can dive tonight, Joe. Let’s—”

“We go tomorrow, Danny,” Joe said. He spoke curtly, but with respect. He didn’t like being second-guessed by his men. He was the captain, and he proceeded with a scientist’s caution. Dan was a salvage man out of Miami, one of the professional pirates. He knew his stuff, but he was at odds with the oceanographers. Pirates were greedy by trade and by nature.

“Come on, Joe. The whole thing could shift—” Dan exploded.

“Tomorrow,” Joe said, walking away.

He stood at the rail, trying to control his anger. He’d been on plenty of treasure operations where impatience had killed the whole enterprise. Wrecks had collapsed, the gold had been lost. Crewmates had died. So you had to move with care, one step at a time. On the other hand, he knew Dan was right: Just because you had found the gold today didn’t mean it would be there tomorrow. The sea never stood still.

Joe was as impatient as the next man. He wanted to get out of there, finish his mission, get away from Black Hall as fast as he could; if the wreck weren’t so unstable, he’d go down right then, yank the treasure chest up with the hydraulic winch, have his money counted by sunup, and be ready to go. The temptation was strong.

“Hey, aren’t you gonna eat?” Sam asked, coming up with a plate of peach pie.

“Yeah, I was checking the charts.”

Sam’s brow was furrowed. He tried to straighten his cockeyed glasses, and the fork balanced on his plate clattered to the deck. “Here, this is for you,” he said.

“Thanks,” Joe said. He took the plate, watched Sam wipe the fork on his shirttail. The brothers’ eyes met, and they grinned. On holidays, when Joe was home from school, they had always fought over washing dishes. They both hated the chore and they had both perfected ways of getting out of it.

“It’s good pie,” Sam said, handing him the fork.

“Hmmm,” Joe said, taking a bite. “So. Were you gonna tell me you’re planning to leave? Or were you just going to go?”

“I was going to tell you,” Sam said, trying to use his thumbnail to tighten the tiny screw holding the earpiece on his glasses.

Joe waited. Watching the awkward kid trying to get hold of that minuscule screw was putting his stomach in a knot. He had to hold himself back to keep from grabbing the glasses out of Sam’s hand.

“I was planning to leave tomorrow,” Sam said, fiddling with the screw.

“Hmmm,” Joe said.

“Thinking about it anyway.”

“Yeah?”

Sam looked up. He was waiting for Joe to talk him into staying. Joe could feel it in the pit of his stomach. He dug into the pie again, just for a diversion. He could barely eat the stuff. His appetite was gone, and he hadn’t slept right in days, since the night of the ball. He was a mess of contradictions, and he knew it.

Joe wanted Sam to stay, but he couldn’t wait for him to leave either. His few moments of sleep last night, he had dreamed of Caroline, of putting his arms around her and kissing her soft mouth, but when he was awake he thought of their parents, of all the history, of the scene her mother had caused.