Carolina Isle (Edenton 2)

“I know. All the girls at the office talked about you endlessly. Sometimes I listened.”

“What else did … they … say about … me?” He was pushing against the rock so hard that he could hardly talk.

“Just that you were rich and unmarried and that they wanted you.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No,” Sara said. “I want …” She trailed off. At the moment, she couldn’t think what it was that she wanted in life.

“To be a great actress?” he asked, standing and staring at the rock. “You have talent.”

“How do you know that?”

“I saw your play three times, remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, smiling. “You told that to Ariel.”

“I told it to you, and I knew it was you.” He was looking up at the tree lying across the opening. “Too bad your leg is busted or I could hoist you onto my shoulders and maybe you could grab a branch.”

“If I drink any more of this, I’ll be able to do it on one leg. Did you really think I was good on the stage?”

“Excellent, but then I’m prejudiced. The question is whether or not you liked being up there onstage. Did you? Or did you like being your cousin more?”

Sara closed her eyes for a moment. The pain was a dull ache and she thought that if she didn’t ever move again she’d be able to stand it. “I wasn’t Ariel long enough to know. I think I want …”

“What?” R.J. asked, looking through both their packs and seeing what he could use.

“I don’t know. Or maybe I do. I think I want what everyone wants: a home, a family.”

“With a jock like David,” R.J. said flatly. “Look, if you’ll stop talking about him right now, when we get out of here, I’ll get him for you. I’ll get him a job and you can work with him. Once he spends time with you, he’ll forget all about Ariel.”

“I must be very drunk,” she said, her head lolling back against the rock, “because I keep hearing

you say good things about me. That couldn’t be.”

R.J. stopped searching the bags and looked at her as her head fell forward onto her chest in sleep. Good things about you, he thought. Was being in love with her from the first moment he saw her a “good thing”?

At the moment, his objective was to keep her from seeing how really frightened he was. He too had seen young Gideon following them. Was the boy skulking about in an attempt to protect them? Or was there something else? When Nezbit’s body was found, someone was going to take the fall for it. Was Gideon making sure that it was the tourists who were blamed?

In the next second a light shone into the cave. Looking up, R.J. saw Gideon hanging over the edge, a flashlight in one hand and a rifle in the other.

Chapter Seventeen

“I HATE THAT MAN,” ARIEL SAID UNDER her breath. “Deeply and truly hate him. He has kidnapped my cousin and left us here alone.”

It wasn’t even daylight, Saturday morning, and she was holding the note R.J. had left behind. David turned away to hide his smile. The note was curt and to the point, saying that he, Brompton, and Sara wouldn’t be returning to the house. He told Ariel and David to stay in Phyllis Vancurren’s house and wait for their return.

“Wait for him?” Ariel said. “Should I knit while I wait? Or would he rather I just take some laudanum and prostrate myself on the bed? I thought Sara was exaggerating about him, but I can see that she wasn’t.”

David was stretched out on the couch and pretending to yawn. In spite of the fact that last night had been harrowing, he was very pleased by Ariel’s reaction to R.J. He’d never believed she was in love with him, but oh! the satisfaction of hearing her say she hated him.

Last night he and Ariel had taken one of Sara’s dummies through the outskirts of town, having no idea where they were going or what they were supposed to do with the fake body. Brompton had said, “Dispose of it so no one can find it,” then left them. He was too eager to get back to Sara to say anything else.

It was after David and Ariel were outside alone that he again began to wonder who had put Brompton in charge. Was it his age? Or his selfmade status? Whatever he thought it was, Brompton had taken over and David didn’t like it at all.

When Brompton had disappeared with Sara and their dummy into the woods, David realized that the old man knew a great deal more about the layout of King’s Isle than he’d let on. He has secrets, David thought. Yeah, well, David had a few of his own, secrets that not even Ariel knew. David had spent a month on King’s Isle when he was nine years old. That had been a difficult summer for his mother, and, as always, she’d dumped all her troubles onto her son. Never mind that he was just a child, his mother expected David to fix whatever was ailing her. That summer, her problem had been loneliness, so she’d taken a cruise— and David had been sent to a camp on King’s Isle. The camp had been a bust, run by a hippie couple that just wanted to sit around and smoke grass. The good part was that the children in their care had been left on their own, so David had done some exploring—and some thinking. Even though he was only nine, he knew he needed to figure out his life. His mother had no husband to speak of. She had one on paper, but on their honeymoon they’d found out two things about each other. One was that he’d married her for her money, and two, that her money was tied up so he couldn’t touch it unless she said so—and she rarely said so. When it came to money, Inez Tredwell resembled her father, which was why David had been sent to a very inexpensive camp. After a year of hell, David’s parents came to an agreement. If he’d give her a baby, she’d pay him to live elsewhere. It had worked perfectly.

Inez had often said that what saved her sanity was Ariel’s mother. To the rest of the world, Pomberton Weatherly was a snob without equal, but to Inez Tredwell, she was kind and loving. They were two women alone, raising children alone, fighting the snickers of a gossipy small town by themselves. Whereas Miss Pommy was a bulwark of strength, Inez Tredwell seemed to be a portrait of feminine helplessness. Of course no one knew about her rule of the purse strings, or how she’d stood up to her bully of a husband and the deal she’d made with him. To the outside world, Inez seemed to be the neediest, weepiest woman on earth. She certainly used her tears often enough on her son.