The Wishing Tide (10 page)

Lane leaned against the passenger door of Michael’s SUV. Her head came up at the sound of his voice. She wasn’t sure which was worse: the fact that she had blurted such an outrageous lie in front of dozens of strangers or that she had lacked the courage to return to the table, choosing instead to slink out to the parking lot and sulk.

“Is . . . everything okay?” The question was a tentative one, as if he were addressing a child who’d just pitched an enormous tantrum.

“Everything’s just peachy,” she muttered, folding her arms tight to her chest. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason, really.”

He wasn’t being snarky, just comically low-key. That made it worse somehow.

Reaching around her, he opened the car door and waited for her to slide in. They rode home in silence. For Lane, it was torture. She’d been prepared for the outburst, the angry looks, the
what the hell was that about?
grilling, not this unsettling, unreadable quiet. She supposed he’d pack up his papers and books now and hightail it out of town. And who could blame him? She’d acted like some stalker nut job, and just that afternoon he’d been crystal clear about how he felt about nut jobs.

She should try to explain, she knew, but every time she attempted to string the words together in her head she realized how absurd they would sound. What could she possibly say that would explain lying to her mother about a nonexistent romance with one of her guests, particularly one who’d barely glanced in her direction? Anything she said would only make her look more pathetic.

She was out of the SUV almost before it rolled to a stop in the
driveway, wanting only to get inside and up to her apartment. Michael trailed a few paces behind, pausing at the door to kick off his shoes and hang up his jacket. Instead of following her to the stairs, he hovered in the doorway of the library.

“I’ve got a little reading to finish before I go up,” he said evenly. “Thanks for . . . an interesting evening.”

Lane couldn’t stand it anymore. “Aren’t you going to ask me about what happened back there?”

He shrugged, then shook his head. “I don’t have to. Your mother was making you crazy and you wanted her to back off. No biggie. The band finishing up when they did, though—that was a bit unfortunate.”

He was letting her off the hook, and she was more grateful than she could say, but she had to say something. “I’m not . . . I mean, I don’t usually—”

“Forget about it. Seriously. I’ll see you in the morning.” She had just turned to mount the stairs when he spoke again. “There is one thing I need to know.”

Lane turned back, steeling herself for whatever was coming.

“You told your mother we were having quite a lot of sex. You never said whether or not the sex was good.”

The remark was so unexpected that Lane actually managed a grin. For the first time since her phone had gone off in the middle of “Hotel California,” she felt the knot of embarrassment in her gut loosen. “What can I say?” she said, with a wink and a shrug. “There are some things a girl doesn’t even share with her mother.”

Michael

M
ichael stood quietly in the kitchen doorway watching Lane fix breakfast. She wore gray sweats with a hole in the thigh and a faded Northwestern T-shirt, the same outfit she’d been wearing the night he arrived. Only then, he’d been too exhausted to notice how beautiful she was. He wasn’t too tired now. And he hadn’t been too tired last night. In fact, he couldn’t help wondering where the evening might have ended up if Lane’s cell hadn’t gone off when it did. Just as well, really. He wasn’t in the market for anything serious, and unless he missed his guess, Lane wasn’t the hit-and-run type.

As if sensing his presence, she turned. There were smudges beneath her eyes, he saw now, as if she hadn’t slept well, or at all. She poured him a mug of coffee and mutely handed it to him, hiding behind her bangs in a way he now recognized as avoidance.

“Good morning,” he ventured, stepping into her line of sight so that she had no choice but to meet his eyes. Her cheeks went a lovely shade of pink.

“Good morning,” she answered thickly, before sidling back to the stove. “Breakfast is almost ready. The paper’s there if you want it.”

Michael dropped into the kitchen chair he’d come to think of as
his and opened the Thursday edition of the
Islander Dispatch
to scan the headlines
.
The last remaining section of Highway 12 damaged by Penny was scheduled to reopen. Manteo residents were making a stink about historical preservation in the wake of storm rebuilding. Two new break-ins had been reported last week on Starry Point’s sound side, leaving residents up in arms and demanding action from local authorities.

“Two new break-ins last week,” he said, to make conversation. “Sounds like the natives are getting restless.”

Lane set a plate in front of him—a mushroom omelet, melon slices, and a muffin of some sort—then settled across from him with her own.

“I don’t blame them. It’s been going on for months now, and the police don’t seem to be taking it very seriously. At least not the ones I dealt with.”

Michael peered over the corner of the paper. “You were broken into?”

Lane’s face was thoughtful as she nibbled a slice of melon. “Not broken into, no. But there was definitely some suspicious activity. When I called them to check it out they acted like I was imagining things.”

He pointed to the article. “According to this the incidents have all been on the other side of the island.”

“They were quick to point that out. But does that mean whoever it is hasn’t been here, too?”

“I didn’t realize you were worried about this.”

“Not worried, exactly. But it’s annoying. You could tell they didn’t want to be bothered. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.”

“No, I don’t guess it would. If you want I’ll check all the windows, make sure they’re secure. It says here that that’s how they’re going in—through the window.”

Lane smiled gratefully. “That would be great. I was going to ask
Sam, my handyman, to come take a look, but Dally says he’s up to his ears since the storm. I’d be happy to pay you.”

“It’s a favor, Lane. I don’t let people pay me for favors.”

“Well, thank you.” She took another forkful of omelet, then checked her watch. “Wow, I need to get a move on. If I don’t get some writing done today I’m going to miss my deadline. And I do not miss deadlines.”

Michael glanced up from his plate. “Never?”

“Never.” The word came with a firm shake of the head. She stood with her plate and drained her mug. When Michael stood, too, she motioned for him to sit back down. “You’re a paying guest. I’ll let you check my windows, but that’s where I draw the line. I never let guests wash their own dishes.”

“Never?”

She grinned at him. “Never.”

“You seem to have a lot of rules. Do you always follow them?”

Her eyes clouded briefly, as if the question had thrown her. “It makes life simpler, don’t you think?”

“I think too many rules make life boring. I also think sometimes you just have to toss the rules and go a little crazy.”

“Last night wasn’t crazy enough for you?”

It was Michael’s turn to grin. “I’ll have you know I enjoyed last night very much. Do you know the crowd actually clapped for me when I got up to come after you?”

Lane hid her face with both hands. “Oh God . . . I’m so sorry.”

“I thought we got past all that last night. No apology necessary. Now, seriously, what can I do to help? I’m looking for an excuse not to get to work.”

Her cheeks were a deep shade of pink when she dropped her hands. “I guess you could wash up the breakfast plates while I brew the tea for the thermos.”

Michael brought his plate to the sink and turned on the tap. “You’re off on another mission of mercy, then, I take it?”

The look she shot him was part warning, part exasperation. “I thought we got past that, too. It’s just tea, Michael.”

“It’s just tea
now
. Soon it’ll be more. It always turns into more.”

He saw her hands go still in the tea tin, eyes closed as if mentally counting to ten.

“Michael,” she said eventually. “Is there something—? Did something happen to make you feel the way you do? I mean, you’ve never laid eyes on the poor woman, yet you have her pegged as some sort of monster. I guess what I’m saying is, you don’t seem like a guy who’d be so, well, judgmental.”

Michael shrugged his shoulders, feeling the old familiar tightening, the unseen puppeteer tugging at the strings of his past. “I told you once to chalk it up to experience.”

“Yes, but you didn’t say what kind of experience.”

Picking up the sponge, he went to work on a plate. He wasn’t going there. There wasn’t any point. She’d made up her mind about this Mary woman. His story wasn’t going to change that, and it really wasn’t any of his business.

“What do you say we just leave it there, okay?”

Lane’s gaze lingered briefly, plumbing his expression for clues. After a few moments she seemed to give up. “I will if you will,” she said, and turned back to her tea.

With the kitchen chores complete, Lane stepped into her duck boots and zipped on her jacket. Michael waited a few minutes after hearing the back door close. It wouldn’t do to be caught prowling about in Lane’s rooms. The last thing he wanted was to have to explain himself. For starters, who the hell would believe him?

When he was convinced she wasn’t coming back, he made his way upstairs to the third floor. No need to creep, he reminded
himself. She was out on the dunes and would be gone at least an hour. Still, he tiptoed like a thief, pausing before the door to her apartment to fight down a prickle of conscience. It was probably locked anyway. Then again, anyone naive enough to let a homeless woman into her life probably wasn’t cautious by nature. When the mercury glass knob turned in his fist he honestly didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

The third-floor apartment was clean and spare, like its owner, but soft, too, decorated in hues that echoed the sea and sky. Sunlight spilled in through the open curtains, puddling brightly on the softly washed floorboards. He’d need to stay clear of the windows, he reminded himself, though he briefly stepped close enough to steal a glimpse of Lane’s penny-bright head on the dunes below. The bag lady was beside her, hunched and lumpy in an oversize coat, her chopped white hair standing on end like some kind of mad halo.

The sight of her, a complete stranger, and yet familiar in some bone-deep way, made him take a step back, assailed by a sudden wave of vertigo, a clammy sense of his past unspooling, reaching for him. He wanted desperately to look away, to erase the woman’s image from his mind, too terrible, too similar, a flesh-and-bone symbol of what and where he’d come from, but somehow he couldn’t drag his eyes free.

Lane thought him hard. She was right about that, but he had his reasons. Good ones. He’d done his best to warn her, but she refused to listen. She didn’t know what he did, that women like this new friend of hers could be unstable, even dangerous. And when they finally came apart—and they always did—they latched onto whatever, or whoever, was closest. But then, maybe he was glad she didn’t know. No one should have to know the things he did.

More shaken than he liked to admit, he forced himself away from the window, stepping to the doorway of what he knew to be Lane’s writing room—round with plenty of windows and a knockout view
of the Atlantic. He had one just like it in his own room, though he never used it.

Like everything else about her, Lane’s workspace was impeccably ordered, her desktop cleared of everything but a pencil cup, a stack of color-coded folders, and a handful of sticky notes, carefully arranged. Even the wastebasket was empty, he noted, thinking of his own overflowing receptacle in the den. A place for everything, and everything in its place, right down to the artfully arranged jars of sea glass she had lined up along the windowsill.

His eyes strayed beyond the thick, wavy panes. It was hard to ignore the view, the stark white column of Starry Point Light standing against a blinding blue sky, gull wings flashing over silver-tipped waves, like something from a calendar—if only he could see it that way. Instead, he envisioned himself with his face pressed against that same glass, watching boys scramble along the beach and out onto the jetty, boys who wanted no part of new inmates, especially one with tassels on his shoes and initials on his sleeve. And then when the sun disappeared and all was dark beyond the glass, the light would come, scouring blue-white over cold plaster walls at precise six-second intervals, glancing, here and gone, off the blue-veined lids of boys sleeping row upon row.

He shoved the memory down as he backed out of the doorway and crossed to the narrow set of bookshelves in the sitting room—the real reason he’d come. In his day they’d been crammed with children’s adventure books, well-thumbed copies of
Treasure Island
and
The Swiss Family Robinson
. Now they were artfully arranged with slick-jacketed contemporary fiction. Pushing several aside, he groped blindly until he located the tiny latch. He had to admit he was surprised as his fingers closed around it. He had known before climbing the stairs that there was a good chance the bookshelves had been torn out during renovation, that the hidden passage had been discovered and sealed. But here it was, just as it was the day he left.

He felt the gratifying snick of metal against metal when the latch finally gave, then held his breath as he leaned on the heavy wood panel until it slowly creaked inward to reveal a narrow passage not much wider than his shoulders. A whiff of damp wafted up out of the dark, along with a barrage of memories. Dragging a flashlight from his back pocket, he ducked into the opening. The bare tread squealed beneath his weight, with just enough give to make him wonder if he should abandon the expedition altogether.

Thirty years ago these stairs had held his weight, no problem. But he wasn’t a boy anymore, and while he was no expert, he suspected termites could do a lot of damage in thirty years. For a moment he imagined Lane returning from the dunes to find the passage door open and him lying at the bottom, neck twisted at an unnatural angle. He closed his eyes, chasing away the image, then forced his feet to move, following the flashlight beam down the century-old staircase.

The air in the passage was wet and cold, thick with mildew and God only knew what else. Michael felt his way with the flats of his hands, hugging the wall of cool, crumbling stone as he crabbed his way down one painstaking step at a time. To this day he had no idea why the passage existed, though there had been plenty of theories. The most salacious was that the stairs had been built so the good sisters could slip out now and then, to keep clandestine assignations with the priests from St. Mark’s, and then, nine months later, to smuggle out the babies that resulted from those assignations.

Another theory, equally ridiculous, was that when the weather was warm the sisters used the passage to slip down to the beach to cavort and skinny-dip by the light of the moon. And of course there was his personal favorite—and one not completely out of the realm of possibility—the stairs were used to dispose of the bodies of boys who crossed Sister Mary Constantine one too many times.

His legs were good and wobbly by the time he reached the bottom
and located the slender doorway that had once opened up onto the library, sealed now with a frame of rusty bolts and a padlock that clearly hadn’t been opened in years. The door was the reason he’d asked to use the library in the first place. Unfortunately, he’d found the downstairs passage paneled over, which left sneaking into Lane’s apartment his only option.

Kneeling on one knee at the bottom of the stairs, he groped about until he found what he was looking for, a small recess beneath the last step—the ideal place for a boy to hide cherished possessions from prying eyes. For just a moment he felt a twinge of the old dread, the fear that at any moment Sister Mary Constantine would throw open the door to the passage and catch him sneaking around where he didn’t belong. But he wasn’t that boy anymore, and in all likelihood, Sister Mary Constantine had met her maker years ago.

Ignoring the knot of anticipation in his gut, he cut through the maze of sticky cobwebs with his flashlight, then aimed the beam into the narrow space.

Nothing.

He wasn’t sure why he was surprised, really. There was no telling over the course of thirty years how many of the Cloister occupants might have discovered the hidden passage, any one of whom could have stumbled onto his carefully concealed treasure and tossed it like so much old junk.

It wasn’t junk, though. In fact, the book had been his lifeline, the last vestige of the life that had been torn away from him, and a refuge from the older boys who’d beaten him because they didn’t like his clothes and his last name. They had taunted him brutally about the book, threatening to wait until he was asleep and then burn it. And they would have, too, if he hadn’t come across the passage one day and secreted it beneath the stairs for safekeeping. After that, no one ever saw him with the book, but every day for nearly two years he would creep down those plunging stairs with his pocket flashlight
and turn the pages, pretending that someday everything would be normal again. It wasn’t, though. And now the book was gone.