Skin Deep (9 page)

She shook out the cotton lengths—mostly the tone-on-tone batiks she loved, in rich, vibrant colors—and folded them quickly and neatly. They’d have to be ironed again before she worked with them, of course. It had driven Derek crazy when she ironed. “That’s what the housekeeper’s for, you silly darling,” he’d always said when he found her pressing fabric lengths. The words “silly darling” had never sounded as loving and patient as they should have. “Why do you think we’re paying her?”

A piece of fabric ripped as she shook it out. She stared at it gripped in her fists, then relaxed her tensed shoulders and smiled ruefully at herself. She wasn’t married to him anymore—at least, she wouldn’t be come May when the divorce would be final. It was high time she put him out of her mind and picked up the pieces of her life, just like the fabric the movers had dropped. Picked them up and ironed them smooth, so that she could rearrange them into a new pattern. Look at this turquoise, printed with waves and swirls like the grain of wood from a fairy tale tree. It had made her think of a summer storm when she bought it, the color rich and beautiful but electric with energy. And this dark blue batik, printed in a spatter pattern that reminded her of raindrops on a quiet pond. The truer blue made the greenish turquoise sing when she set them side-by-side. Could it be that after a year of barely touching fabric she was feeling the urge to create again?

Something touched her shoulder. She whirled. Alasdair stood there in his robe, looking pale but very determined.

“What—?” She stared up at him. God, he was tall. She’d been so distracted yesterday on the beach that she hadn’t noticed. The top of her head would probably just tickle his chin. He’d have to bend to kiss her properly, and she’d have to lean back, far back, to meet his lips, her body stretching and open to him—

“I wanted to see your—this,” he said, reaching a tentative hand toward the pile of fabric.

Garland tore her gaze away from his mouth and hoped he couldn’t read minds. “You could have asked. What if you’d fainted or something? Back into bed with you. And don’t do that again till the doctor says you can.”

“One moment, please.” He touched the topmost piece of fabric with the tip of a finger as if he were afraid it would burn him. Then he stroked it, and finally ran his hand down the whole pile, touching each piece. He frowned at them for a few seconds then ran his fingers down the front of his robe, over the appliquéd symbols.

“It’s not the same,” he murmured, then looked at her keenly. “So it must be you.”

What must be her? “You mean the kanji on the robe? Yes, I sewed them on—they’re not part of the fabric.”

“You made the…the—” He seemed to be groping for words. “What are they? Do they have…are they—?”

“
Kanji
—Japanese ideograms. They have—or had—meaning. This one”—she pointed at a symbol on the left side of his chest—“is love. This one is longevity. These are protection, devotion, and companionship. And here are honesty and fidelity.” Ha. Maybe that was why Derek never wore the robe. Even if he couldn’t read the symbols, maybe their meaning still came through. Honesty and fidelity were definitely concepts he’d struggled with.

Alasdair looked solemn. “I can feel them.”

“Oops, did I leave a pin or two in there?” She couldn’t help smiling at his seriousness. He was looking at her again with that strange expression, as if he wanted to say something further but didn’t quite know how. It was disconcerting. “Come on,” she said. “You shouldn’t be on those feet.”

“One moment,” he said again, and lurched toward the window.

“Is he always this stubborn?” she asked Conn, who stared up at them from his chair.

“Not stubborn. Persistent,” Alasdair said. But he let her take his arm and put it over her shoulders, and leaned on her heavily as they went to the window. He was warm, even under just the thin cotton robe. But he didn’t smell rank or sweaty. Salty, yes. If she were to touch her tongue to his skin she knew exactly how he’d taste—like a still summer evening just before a fog swept in off the ocean, damp and briny and mysterious—

Oh, stop it, Garland!
Why did she keep getting these thoughts about him? He was a temporary guest, someone who would figure in her life for no more than another day or two. If she were going to think about anyone in that way, it should be Rob. And honestly, even Rob was probably too much just yet. She needed more time to let Derek air out of her psyche, like a bad smell.

At the window Alasdair clung to the sill and stared out through the glass at the scene below. She followed his gaze along the horizon, where Monomoyick sat just offshore. The winter-dead lawn and the sand below it made a dramatic contrast with sparkling dark-blue water beyond, tinged with purple this morning. Just then a vibrant red cardinal flew past, followed a second later by its more sober-hued mate.

An idea nudged at the back of Garland’s mind. She stepped back, not taking her eyes off the scene, and groped on the table behind her for the pad of graph paper she’d been doodling on the day before yesterday. Those colors, in that landscape arrangement, but pieced with a traditional block design, one with a lot of smaller components so that the colors could be shaded to follow the landscape—a sort of hybrid between a traditional and an art quilt. Small—a wall quilt, so that it could be viewed from a distance, where color would make the first impact… She scribbled notes, nodding to herself as she wrote, then looked up and saw that Alasdair was watching her with a look of great concentration.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

A shutter seemed to come down over his eyes. “Nothing. I—I am sorry if I was intruding.”

“Intruding? No, I just got an idea for a quilt and wanted to get it down before I forgot it—oh God, you’re exhausted, aren’t you? I’m sorry—let me help you back to bed.”

He sighed and shifted on his feet. “Thank you.”

Slowly and carefully, she led him back to bed. He lay against the pillows looking white and tired, his robe open over his chest. It was a good thing she’d remembered it hanging on her door—helping a gorgeous naked man in and out of bed several times a day would have been difficult. Even with the yards of gauze bandage on him and the scrapes and bruises he was beautiful. She tried to picture him in jeans, or in a jacket and tie, and couldn’t. A body that beautifully formed shouldn’t have to wear clothes. She tore her gaze away and pulled the sheet up over him, chastising herself for ogling a sick man. “Do your wounds hurt?”

He shrugged, then looked at her and nodded.

“Are you sure you don’t want something to stop the pain?”

He shook his head.

Persistent, hell. He was just plain stubborn. “All right.” She hesitated, and looked back at her quilt table. “Would it bother you if I did a little work? If you want to nap I can do it later—”

“No.” He sat up again “I want to see your work.”

“Fine. But stay there, okay?”

She felt Alasdair watching her as she took the pictures off the wall closest to the window and tacked a king-size flannel sheet to it in their place, stretched it taut, then set up spot lamps to shine on it.

“What is that for?” he asked, pulling himself up to sit a little higher against his pillows.

“It’s my design wall. Small pieces of fabric will stick to the flannel so that I can lay out quilt designs and look at them from different distances to see if they work. The lights have full spectrum bulbs in them.”

“What are full spec—what you said?”

“They mimic sunlight so that you can see colors as they truly are. Most indoor lights are limited spectrum, so you get a distorted view of color.”

“Like little suns,” he said, looking impressed, “trapped in glass.”

Garland smiled at this image, but her heart sank. She wanted to jump right into this quilt idea now, while the picture in her mind was fresh. Was he going to ask what she was doing every time she picked up a tool or sewed together two pieces of fabric?

She went to her box of blue fabrics—one of three, actually, because she was unable to pass up blue fabric—and started pulling out pieces for the water. Conn had drifted back to sleep curled in the chair; Alasdair remained silent, though she knew that he still watched her. After a few moments, she felt herself slide into her “color trance”—the slightly altered state she entered in the beginning stages of a quilt, a universe where only color existed, and where it occupied its own form of dimensional space. Usually the floor would be paved with fabric by the time she came blinking back into reality.

Oh, it felt good to be working again!

* * *

Somewhat to her surprise, Garland finished laying out most of her new quilt that afternoon and got all the pieces cut. Alasdair didn’t ask more questions, but whenever she came out of her color trance long enough to notice him he was always watching her closely. Nor did he interrupt her to ask for anything, which made her feel guilty when she happened to glance at her watch and saw that it was after three.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was so late?” she asked him, clicking her rotary cutter shut and stretching. Even with her cutting table made to her height, cutting still made her shoulders ache.

“Late for what?” Alasdair replied, looking honestly puzzled.

“Lunch, for one thing.”

He shrugged. “You were busy, and I wanted to watch you do your—your—” He gestured at the fabric on the floor. “What are the words you say to yourself as you are working? Are they the same for each thing that you make, or do they change depending on the purpose?”

She stopped and stared up at him. “What are you talking about?”

To her surprise, he flushed. “I’m sorry. I should not have asked that. Your—you speak quietly as you work. I thought perhaps it was a ritual to give what you make its power. It was rude of me to—”

Garland wasn’t sure whether to laugh or blush. “No, it’s all right. I guess I do talk to myself as I’m working. I’d never noticed before. It’s not a ritual or anything. It’s just thinking out loud.”

He looked relieved but not convinced. She went downstairs to make lunch, shaking her head. Power? A ritual? What an odd conclusion to have drawn.

Chapter 6

O
n Tuesday afternoon Garland emerged from her creative fog long enough to remember that Captain Howe hadn’t called yet. Contrary to her fears, Alasdair and Conn’s presence hadn’t kept her from working—in fact, most of the time she forgot they were there. But when she’d look up, they’d be watching her: Conn eagerly, waiting for her to come and snuggle him on her lap, and Alasdair—well, she’d yet to decipher what his expression meant.

But surely the police must have found out something about them by now. She waited until they’d had lunch—both of them seemed to find tomato soup as entrancing as toast had been—then went downstairs into Derek’s old office to call the captain.

“Mattaquason Police Department,” said a bored-sounding voice.

“May I speak with Captain Howe, please?” She used her best Junior League manner. “This is Garland Durrell, on Eldredge Point. He—” She stopped. Had she just heard a muffled hiss of indrawn breath on the other end of the line?

“I’ll, um…I’m not sure if he’s at his desk, Mrs. Durrell. I think I might have seen him leave earlier, but…but it’s been a little…that is, he’s—” The voice sounded anything but bored now. Instead, it sounded disconcerted. Scared, almost. “It might take me a few minutes to track him down. Wouldn’t you rather have him call you back?”

The way he was supposed to have yesterday? “That’s very considerate of you, but I think I’ll wait,” she said firmly.

There was a click, and then the low hum of on-hold limbo. She leaned back in Derek’s tufted leather chair and got through nine quietly whistled repetitions of the theme from “Jeopardy” before someone finally picked up the line again.

“Howe here.” The captain’s voice was clipped and wary.

Garland switched to the soothing tone once reserved for Derek’s former boss, who chewed through two rolls of antacid tablets daily. “Captain Howe, it’s Garland Durrell. I promise I won’t take more than a minute of your time. I was just wondering if you’d found any leads on Alasdair and Conn.”

There was a silence. Then, “Who?”

She mentally hummed a few more bars while fighting down the urge to shriek. “The people I found on my beach on Saturday?”

A faint sound of shuffling paper could be heard on the other end of the line. “Er, no, I’m afraid we haven’t. No Coast Guard reports of lost vessels or persons, and no matches for missing person reports. I’m sorry, Mrs. Durrell.” He sounded like he was about to hang up.

“So that’s it? There are no other channels for us to pursue? Isn’t there somewhere we can report a found person or something?”

“This isn’t the Rescue League, ma’am.”

She took a couple of deep, centering breaths. “I apologize, captain. I thought that since Alasdair’s feeling a little stronger, someone from the police department might want to talk to him. I’m sure you’d be able to do a much better job questioning him than I would.”

“We’re not the Gestapo, either, Mrs. Durrell.”

Was he going to twist everything she said? She turned back on the Junior League Steel Magnolia. “I assumed—perhaps wrongly—that you would want to speak with him yourself to complete any formal reporting requirements that you might have, or to satisfy yourself that he’s not a possible fugitive from justice. And if it does turn out that he has a family searching for him, it would not reflect well on the town if the utmost had not been done to identify him.”