Blood Kin (11 page)

She wanted to run, to put distance between her, the dogs, and Will Tawes with his big ax, but she couldn't. She'd started this, and she had to finish it. “If you're Elizabeth's brother, you're my uncle.” Her voice sounded feeble, even childish, but it was the best she could summon.

For what seemed forever he said nothing, merely studied her with an unwavering gaze. She'd been told that he was older than his sister, but he didn't appear to be a man in his mid-sixties. Despite the graying hair, he was lean and muscular, and he moved with the ease of a man in his prime.

“Leave the past be. Get off my land. Go home, and don't come back.”

She glanced at the dogs to make certain they hadn't moved closer. “You're the only relative . . . the only blood relative I have,” she managed. “I have the right to
know what happened to my mother. Why, after three months, you decided to put me up for adoption.”

He shook his head. “You'll get nothing from me but heartache. Get out of here while you can.” He rested the blade of his ax beside the toe of his heavy work boot and leaned on the handle.

“My mother was your niece. You must have cared something for her. And if Aunt Elizabeth left me her farm, that makes us neighbors. All I want—”

“Are you deaf, girl, or just stupid?”

“I'm not stupid! And I suspect that you aren't either. Why won't you have the decency to answer a few questions about my family?”

A third dog, a tricolored mongrel with long hair and one pale blue eye ringed in black, crept out of the tall grass and sidled up to push his nose into the back of Will's knee.

Eyeing the dog, Bailey said, “Don't I have the right to know about my family? About how my mother—”

“Let her rest.”The blue eyes that glared out of her uncle's rough-hewn face were hard.

“I can't.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself.” Turning, he strode away down the path toward his house.

“Wait! Uncle Will.”

The three dogs trotted after him.

“Uncle Will!” She ran after him into the yard, but before she could catch up, man and animals crossed the wraparound porch and entered the house. “Please!” The oak door slammed shut, and she heard the solid click of a metal bolt.

Bailey banged on the door with her fist. “All I want is to know how she died.”

Silence.

She pounded again. “I'm not going away. You might as well open up, or I'll stay here all day!”

Minutes passed. She knocked again without results.

Frustrated, she sat down on the top step. “I can be just as stubborn as you can!”

A dog woofed.

Her heart skipped a beat, and she summoned her courage to shout, “I mean it!”

In the distance, a boat motor coughed, caught, and roared.

Bailey ran around the corner of the house in time to see a skiff leaving the dock with her great-uncle and the three dogs on board. “Damn it! Coward! Come back here!”

She kicked at the oyster-shell path. “Double damn it!” It wasn't fair. First she had no one of her own, and then she had a great-aunt and -uncle and the possibility of answers. And now she was as clueless as she'd ever been.

No, she told herself. That wasn't true. She'd discovered where she was born, who her mother was, and where she'd been christened. Or had she? Was it all some perverse game?

She sat on the edge of the porch and looked around. She was hot, thirsty, and a long way from town. She scoffed. Town? Tawes wasn't a town; it hardly qualified as a village. More like an asylum. No wonder she was such a basket case. With so much inbreeding on the island, she was fortunate she hadn't been born with two heads.

Grudgingly, she had to admit that this wasn't what she'd expected. The outbuildings and yard were well kept, the house trim, and the barn freshly painted. In an open area, trees had been cleared for a garden.
Neat rows of vegetables mulched with straw radiated from a scarecrow in a red hunter's vest and cap. Hummingbird feeders hung from the porch rafters; there was even a birdbath under a peach tree.

It seemed that Will Tawes was an enigma.

Now what? She felt foolish, but not foolish enough to give up.

On a whim, she rose, went to the nearest window, and peered in. The shadowy room was orderly, with comfortable furniture, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and paintings on the wall. No stacks of old newspapers or bales of discarded clothes. No giant balls of string. It was becoming very clear that her uncle Will was not the backwoods crackpot she'd expected. She moved along the porch to look into the next room, but there inside shutters were closed, blocking her view.

At the end of the porch, a modern addition with floor-to-ceiling windows appeared to have been added on to the story-and-a-half brick residence. Here, a wide cedar deck looked out over the dock and bay. The first window was obscured by drawn blinds, but the second was unobstructed. Bailey shaded her eyes from the bright sunlight and gazed into a spacious room with a high cathedral ceiling and skylights.

“Ohhh,” she gasped. Tables. Chairs. Easels with partially drawn sketches of birds of prey. Lifelike carvings of ducks and geese in various stages of completion. An otter that looked real enough to breathe lay on its back with a fish between its front paws, and just inside the window stood an exquisite replica of a raccoon with two babies, her paws against the glass, black nose pressed against the glass, staring out.

“You old scoundrel. I know an artist's studio when I see one.”

Excitement made her giddy. This wasn't a case of mistaken identity. She'd found where her love of sketching and watercolor had come from. And crazy or not, she'd found her identity. She wasn't Bailey Elliott—she was Bailey Tawes of Tawes Island. For the first time in her life, she had roots and a family history.

The implications of what she'd seen made Bailey's walk back to the village seem insignificant. Far from discouraging her from attempting to talk with her uncle, the visit made her want to know him more. She wanted to inspect his work closely and find out if her mother had possessed a talent for drawing or sculpting. She was eager to question Emma about Will's skill at carving, but when she got back to the house, she found it overflowing with women.

“Don't tell me that I forgot to mention it this morning?” Emma hurried past with a basket of eggs, a box of tea bags, and two bottles of concentrated of lemon juice. “Today is Mama's eighty-fifth birthday party. Half the island will be here by evening.”

“Please don't think you have to include me,” Bailey began. “I can—”

“Nonsense, girl. Grab an apron and a knife and start peeling potatoes. Grace has it in her head that we'll need fifty pounds of potato salad.”

“But I don't have anything for a birthday gift for—”

“No gifts. Cousin Harry Parks's youngest had to have heart surgery just after he was born. We're all chipping in what we can to help with what insurance didn't cover. Mama insisted on it. You can donate or not. No one will know or care a dot.”

“I'll be glad to help out. If you'll just let me change my clothes—”

“Bailey! Out here!” Cathy, the young teacher she'd met at the dock, motioned to her from the open kitchen door. “I've got a dishpan full of steamed crabs to pick for crab cakes. Can you give us a hand? We're on the back porch.”

Helping Cathy sounded better than being trapped in the hot kitchen on potato-salad detail with Grace Catlin and two gray-haired women in Mother Hubbard aprons. Bailey hurried upstairs, washed, and changed into a clean T-shirt and shorts. Taking the path of least resistance, she exited the B and B by the front door. Rounding the house, she joined her new friend, who immediately introduced her shy sister-in-law Maria, a chubby brunette in her early thirties, and a neighbor, Amy, who also taught at the school.

“Maria's my husband's sister,” Cathy explained as she pointed out her nephew Eric, seven, wandering along the water's edge with a crab net, and her niece, Julie, a toddler who was being carried around the yard, being “spoiled rotten by Maggie and the other girls.”

“And this is Joel.” Amy shifted her newborn to her right shoulder and patted his back. “Come on, little man, I know you have a burp in that tummy somewhere.”

Joel expelled a small burst of air, and Cathy laughed. “Isn't he precious? I can't wait for my baby to get here.”

“When he starts crying in the middle of the night, you'll wish he was still inside,” Amy teased, tucking Joel back into his infant seat and popping a pacifier in his mouth.

“Not a chance.”

Bailey looked at the pile of steamed crabs heaped on the table. “I warn you, I'm a novice at this,” she said as she accepted a tall glass of iced tea.

“You'll catch on fast enough,” Amy assured her. “If you're a Tawes, it's born in you.”

Cathy handed her a wooden mallet. “This is to crack the claws.”

“Don't smash the crabs with it,” Amy said.

“You break them apart like this,” Cathy explained, demonstrating. “And don't break the claws until last, because they're better than a knife to extract the white meat, here and here.”

Amy nodded. “Easy as catching frogs in a rain barrel.”

“We don't eat these things.” Maria indicated a yellowish glob. “They're eggs. And these are lungs,” Maria said. “We throw them away.”

“When we're finished picking these, we'll show you how Amy's mother makes crab cakes.” Cathy put a finger to her lips. “And not a word to Emma.”

Amy giggled. “She thinks we're using her recipe.”

Within a few minutes Bailey not only felt at ease with the group but thought she had the knack of crab picking. And although she was a lot slower than the others, she soon was adding a respectable amount of crabmeat to the large mixing bowl.

Soon more women and children arrived, most carrying pitchers of tea or lemonade, platters of baked ham, roast turkey, salads, pies, biscuits, and cooked vegetables. Two teenagers staggered under the weight of a glorious four-layer cake crowned with a spray of yellow confectionary roses, a cake so large and professionally done that it could easily have served two hundred wedding guests.

“Inside with that cake,” Emma ordered. “Put that on the dining room table. If we set it up on the outside table, we'll have more flies than roses.”

“I don't know why that would bother you.” Amy chuckled. “It's what happened to my anniversary cake.”

“Yes, and who ate it?” Emma propped fisted hands on her hips and struck a pose. “My hens. We're not taking that chance with Mama's birthday cake. She'd have our heads in a bushel basket.” She pointed toward the kitchen door, and the cake transporters cheerfully obeyed her instructions.

Children ran in and out of the house. The baby fussed; Amy fed him, and he dropped off to sleep amid all the chaos. Old men wandered by with frosty tall glasses. Women rescued toddlers from certain disaster, soothed them, and pushed them into waiting arms. And through it all, Emma remained calm and cheerful.

Bailey was both amazed and content. Here on Emma's porch, she found a completely different reception from the one she'd received earlier on Tawes. Cathy, Maria, Amy, and Emma's easy acceptance seemed to bridge the gap between her and the islanders. Soon she found herself laughing and talking as freely as if she'd known them all for months.

Once the crabs were picked, the women fashioned them into crab cakes, secretly adding spices other than the ones Emma had ordered. Then Maria and Amy took control of the kitchen range, heating cast-iron frying pans, adding oil, and frying half of the crab cakes while putting others in the oven to broil.

Cathy motioned Bailey toward the kitchen door, but Emma wasn't to be fooled a second time. “It doesn't take four of you to do up crab cakes,” she pronounced, pressing both Cathy and Bailey into Grace's service. The pastor's wife gave them a huge bowl of macaroni
salad to finish and containers of raw vegetables to be washed and cut for serving with dip.

By five o'clock the working men began to arrive: Matthew, Forest McCready, and Creed appeared first. Forest and Matthew brought extra chairs and tables from the church social hall, and Creed was weighed down with a violin and two buckets of oysters in their shells. Daniel appeared with Emma's mother, the guest of honor.

“Mama, I think you know everybody here but Bailey,” Emma said as she settled the white-haired lady in the blue-striped cotton dress into a comfortable rocking chair on the porch. “Bailey, this is my mama. Her name is Maude Ellen McCready Parks, but most folks call her Aunt Birdy. She used to be the best fisherman on Tawes Island, but now she just tells other people how to fish.”

“Somebody has to,” Maude said. The elderly woman stood just under five feet tall in her black lace-up shoes and weighed no more than a ten-year-old girl. Her childish voice was high and sweetly thin, like a small bird, the exact opposite of Emma's low rasp.

“I'm pleased to meet you, Mrs. Parks,” Bailey said.

Maude turned her head and Bailey saw that her eyes were white with cataracts. “Come here, child,” she said. “Let me touch your face.”

“Go on,” Emma urged. “She won't rest until she sees what you look like.”

Cathy gave Bailey a little push.

Feeling self-conscious, Bailey did as she was instructed. She took Maude's bony hand, closed her eyes, and brought the woman's fingertips to her cheek. “Ah,” Maude crooned. “You're little but mighty. Pretty as your mother.” Her touch was surprisingly light as she skimmed cheekbone, brow, the line of Bailey's nose,
and her lips. “She's a Tawes, all right. No mistake. Got her aunt Elizabeth's stubborn mouth.” She drew her hand back. “Welcome, child. Welcome home.”

“Thank you,” Bailey murmured. Oddly, the old woman's touch had been comforting, almost a caress. Satisfaction that she had been officially pronounced a Tawes gave her a curious but happy warm feeling in the pit of her stomach.