“I need a dress.”
Dress. The very thing that Charlotte and her sisters, Alex and Freesia, sold. During normal business hours. Not the hour when Charlotte’s marriage hung in the balance on Nash’s ultimatum: no more empty promises, Char, or I’ll rethink that very first one I made to you. She glanced at her watch. Her heart slipped out of rhythm.
“Well, now, that’s hardly cause to be upset. I know wedding dresses can be a bit pricey—”
“That’s not it.” The woman shook her head. Fat tears materialized and hung up on her cheeks. “I’m loaded. Well, my parents are.”
Charlotte frowned and led her to the bawlin’ and stonewallin’ armchair and encouraged her to sit. Faster than the young woman could unzip her purse, Charlotte produced a tissue box and crouched before her. “I don’t understand.”
“I thought I had time, you know? Perfect wedding, planned to the smallest detail. Perfect month, in time to get Matt—that’s my fiancé—out of school. Perfect season for peonies and cornflowers to be in bloom. Not too hot or sticky to dance out under the stars.”
Charlotte’s awareness snagged on the word time. As in, time had run out. Coupled with tears, she knew the time they were talking about wasn’t the kind that could be snatched back. Ever. Bride, groom, or parents, Charlotte couldn’t say. And she didn’t. Sometimes a woman just needed someone to listen.
“Part of me thinks he didn’t want me to worry. The other part thinks he just ignored the signs because he didn’t want to accept what was happening. He took responsibility for waiting so long to see about it, but I can’t spend one moment mad at him. Not when we have so few left.”
Dear God in heaven, don’t be the groom.
“So a few days ago, there was a break in the rain. Daddy and I walked up to the highest point on the land where I grew up and buried a sealed bottle of bourbon—you know, for good weather when Mark and I exchange our vows—but all I could think of…”
True to form, the chair lived up to its name. The velvety softness seemed to catch people unaware and conjure up all the ugly stuff from deep inside. Charlotte pulled the young woman into an embrace, her voice rollicking on hiccupping waves of sound until the final three words might have been another language.
“…was…bur-rr—ee—ing...hi-hi-himmmm.”
The language of grief. Filled with extra syllables and emphasis in all the wrong places. Over the past few years, Charlotte had become fluent in that language—first Daddy, then Mama. Only Nash knew how crippling her grief became at times. If there was one thing he’d done right, amidst all that had gone wrong in their sixteen-year marriage, it was skirting clear around her when the darkness rolled through her. A notable exception was when he stood beside her on Sunday mornings with his hushed responses to well-meaning folks. Then he’d send the kids off, to run home and change out of their best clothes and be gone by the time he pulled the truck in front of the house. Several Sundays, Charlotte considered tumbling out of her car door when they got up to some speed, the possibility of being reunited—even for a minute—with her parents tempting, but Nash always kept a hold of her left hand, like he knew her thoughts. They’d reach the farm and Charlotte would take to the fields barefoot, like she was on fire. After, he’d wash her feet in the basin on the porch, not a word spoken between them.
“A friend told me this place was special.” She mopped the delicate skin beneath her eyes with a heavy hand, then blew her nose. “That you could help me.”
The young woman needed a now-dress, not the one she had ordered from some high-end boutique in Jackson for a wedding that would no longer happen when the cornflowers bloomed and all the days would rain gray, bourbon be damned. Charlotte took a breath to consider Nash—the same tired words he would use when she broke another promise, the same loaded stare through the shaggy slant of his hair, the same ripe flush at his forehead, no sign of the laugh lines that marked his features like parentheses, cleft chin to once-warm eyes. All it took—one breath—for her to decide that there were moments in every woman’s life that had the capacity to tumble her out the door of a moving truck and all that was needed to keep that from happening was taking hold of a hand. Nash, of all people, would understand.
Charlotte dialed up the chandelier lights, turned on some new country music, and courted at least a dozen gowns before the woman landed on the one that would help her daddy to see the woman she’d grow into during the years he would miss. By the time Charlotte saw her out the door with a garment bag, an extended hug, and the best advice she had for the special day—to make sure the photographer captured her daddy’s first look at her all gussied up—the winter winds had stirred up a hornet’s nest of stinging cold, and darkness had made itself comfortable.
Outside, too.
One look at her phone confirmed it. After a message that explained why she’d be delayed—the shop, bride, emergency—a good ten from Nash.
The last one: I’m done.
The Butterfly Dream
will be out February 6th 2019
www.DanielleBlairBooks.com
BLURB
When her child’s life is at stake, a mother will do anything to save him.
Clara McNair is running out of time to save her son, James. When the two-year-old is diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer, only an experimental treatment can save his life. She desperately needs money to pay for the surgery, but she’ll have to travel back to the site of her darkest memories to get it.
Clara has escaped the demons of her youth—or so she thinks. It’s been ten years since the mysterious disappearance of her parents. Widely suspected of murdering her mother and father, Clara fled west to start a new life. Now, a documentary film crew is offering cold, hard cash—enough to pay for James’s treatment—in exchange for the sordid secrets of her past.
With no other choice but to delve into a long-ago tragedy, Clara must unravel the lies surrounding that terrible night. Facing hostile gossip, Clara is fighting to clear her name and learn the truth about what really happened. But how far will she go into the dark to save her son—and herself?
Get your copy of A Mother’s Lie at
www.JoCrow.com
* * *
EXTRACT
Chapter One
Dense red clay was pushing between the teeth. Pond mist drifted across the manicured lawns, wisping through the dark eye sockets. Parts of the cranium were shaded a vile yellow-brown, where decomposing leaves clung to its surface like bile expressed from a liver. The jawbone was separated from the skull, its curved row of teeth pointing skyward to greet the rising sun.
Two feet away, closer to the oak tree, other bones were piled haphazardly: a pelvis, high iliac crests and subpubic angle; a femur, caked with dirt, jammed into his empty skull. Sunlight decorated the brittle bones in long, lazy strips and darkened hairline fractures till they blended with the shed behind them.
It was peaceful here, mostly. The pond no longer bubbled, its aerator decayed by time; weed-clogged flowerbeds no longer bloomed—hands that once worked the land long ago dismissed. Fog blanketed the area, as if drawn by silence.. Once, a startled shriek woke the mourning doves and set them all into flight.
It was the first time in ten years the mammoth magnificence of the Blue Ridge Mountains had scrutinized these bones; the first song in a decade the mourning doves chorused to them from their high perch.
A clatter split apart the dawn; the skull toppled over as it was struck with another bone.
In a clearing, tucked safely behind the McNair estate, someone was whistling as they worked at the earth. The notes were disjointed and haphazard, like they were an afterthought. They pierced the stillness and, overhead, one of the mourning doves spooked and took flight, rustling leaves as it rose through the mist.
A shovel struck the wet ground, digging up clay and mulch, tossing it onto the growing mound to their left. The whistling stopped, mid note, and a contemplative hum took its place.
Light glinted on the silvery
band in the exposed clay—the digger pocketed it—the shovel struck the ground again; this time, it clinked as it hit something solid.
Bone.
A hand dusted off decayed vegetative matter and wrested the bone from its tomb. Launching it into the air, it flew in a smooth arc, and crashed into the skull like a bowling pin, scattering the remains across the grass. With a grunt of satisfaction, the digger rose and started to refill the hole from the clay mound.
When it was filled and smoothed, and the sod was replaced over the disrupted ground, the digger lifted the shovel and strolled into the woods, one hand tucked in a pocket as they whistled a cheery tune lost to the morning fog.
For two days, the bones rested on the grass by the shed, until they were placed, carefully, into forensic evidence bags in a flurry of urgent activity: flashing police cameras, and gawking, small-town rookie officers who’d never seen their like before.
Silence blanketed the McNair estate once more, and the looming, distant mountains stood watch over a town that had seen too little so long ago, and now knew too much.
Get your copy of A Mother’s Lie at
www.JoCrow.com
Our Bridal Shop: Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book One Page 22
