Carolina Isle (Edenton 2)

She was going home.

Epilogue

“TO US!” R.J. SAID, RAISING HIS CHAMpagne glass high.

The four of them were in the pub on King’s Isle, which was empty except for them. But then R.J. now owned the place so they could do what they wanted. It was over a year since they’d first arrived on King’s Isle and many things had changed since then.

“To my brilliant wife,” R.J. said, looking at Sara with loving eyes. “And here’s to winning an Emmy.”

“Thank you,” Sara said, lifting her glass of orange juice. She was six weeks pregnant.

“And to mine,” David said, lifting his glass to Ariel. “Who would have known you could write?”

“No one believed I could do anything,” Ariel said, “including me.”

“Your script was brilliant,” Sara said, “and I thank you very much for it. I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I enjoyed every minute of working on our movie.”

David again lifted his drink to Ariel. “To my wife, a woman I thought I knew but didn’t.”

R.J. looked at Sara. “And to my wife, who never had an idea that I hired her because I loved her.”

Ariel looked at R.J. “Thank you for taking my script to an agent.”

“Wait a minute!” David said. “I was the one who read it and I was the one who took it to R.J.”

“And I was the one who took it from him,” Sara said.

“And changed it,” Ariel said.

“Tweaked it,” Sara answered.

Four weeks after they’d left King’s Isle, Ariel found out she was pregnant with David’s baby. A wedding was rushed through, but thanks to her mother’s years of planning, it was not going to be a small affair. Between Southern society and R.J.’s contacts, it would be the wedding of the year. Three days before the wedding, Sara asked if Ariel would mind very much making it a double. A gown was bought, more champagne purchased, and there was a wedding that Arundel wouldn’t soon forget.

For the next eight months, Ariel was hovered over by her mother and David and his mother. Bored, Ariel began to write about what happened to them on King’s Isle. Somehow, the story seemed to gradually evolve into a script. She ordered a book on script writing, followed the format as best she could, and put their adventure onto paper.

She loved dramatizing how Lassiter and Fenny had quarreled, then the lawyer had shot Fenny through the head. It had been Eula who’d helped him carry the body up Phyllis’s creaking stairs, hiding it in the bathtub. “Let those fancy folk from Arundel take the blame,” Eula had said.

“Except the kid that wrote the paper,” Lassiter had said. After he and Fenny had pulled their usual trick of having the rich tourists arrested, Lassiter had found David Tredwell’s prizewinning essay and realized the boy had seen Fenny slipping into where his treasure was hidden.

For years, Fenny had dangled his treasure—“an endless horde,” he’d said it was—in front of everyone, but no one had been able to find it. The night R.J. had been arrested, Fenny, drunk as always, had nearly fallen on the targets, and Lassiter, fed up, had told him that someone else knew where the treasure was. Lassiter had only half believed it, but he liked, for once, having the upper hand. When Lassiter quoted some of the essay, Fenny had gone berserk. He ran to his truck, pulled out a pistol from under the seat, and threatened to kill Lassiter. That’s when the attorney realized that maybe the kid’s essay was true. There was a scuffle, the gun went off, and Fenny lay dead. Lassiter would have gone to the police, but Eula raised up from where she’d been sleeping in the back of the truck. She’d heard it all. Larry Lassiter had been nervous, afraid, but Eula was as cool as ice. She was thrilled to get rid of a husband she’d hated. She came up with a plan instantly. They carried Fenny’s body up Phyllis’s stairs, dumped the body in the tub, and hid in the dark living r

oom while Phyllis opened the door to her paying guests.

Eula and Lassiter ran outside and waited for the screams and chaos that would soon come. Lassiter stood at the edge of the woods and smoked one cigarette after another, but no screams came.

In the wee hours, the four city slickers carried what looked to be two bodies outside.

“They think they’re clever,” Eula said when the two couples separated. “But I’ll get them. I’ll wait two days, then I’ll start worryin’ about what’s happened to my beloved husband.” She turned to Lassiter. “You find the gold. Do whatever you have to, but find that gold.”

But their plan had backfired, and Eula and Lassiter were taken away in handcuffs. Fenny’s body had been retrieved from the freezer by the coroner. Later, R.J. had had to do a lot of talking to explain why Phyllis Vancurren’s hair was on the body, even though she was innocent. She had been exonerated.

When Ariel finished the script, she was shy about showing it to David. In the end, she’d shown it first to her mother. “David and I will live in this house with you, but the regime will change,” Ariel had said when she returned. She had at last come to understand how much her mother loved her. Her mother’s fear had been that if Ariel didn’t marry someone from Arundel, she might leave and live somewhere else.

Not that Ariel’s mother softened overnight, but she did learn that she could no longer bully her daughter into submission. As Ariel told David, “When you’ve found a dead body in a bathtub, it puts your mother’s bad temper into perspective.”

So her mother read the script first. “It’s not to my taste,” she said, “but I would imagine some people would like it.”

That was the highest praise Ariel had ever received from her mother. The next day she showed the script to David, who loved it, and he took it to R.J. Sara saw it before R.J. could read it. She finished it that night and told R.J. that if he had to buy a studio, she wanted him to have it made into a movie and she wanted to play both Ariel and herself.