On Folly Beach

by Karen White

  He nodded as if contemplating her words. “Interesting. But you work in your mother’s bookstore instead.”

  Anger, lingering loss, and the unnerving thought that he’d struck a chord she didn’t want to hear bombarded her simultaneously so that no words came from her open mouth as she stared at him, unable to reply.

  As if sensing he’d stepped into forbidden territory, he turned his attention to the winding shelves. “These came from my grandmother’s store.”

  Emmy swallowed, searching for her voice. “Your grandmother’s store?” she repeated, confused. She held up her hand, her mind clearing. “Wait. Abigail’s mother-in-law, right? She left Folly’s Finds to your mother when she died. What was her name?”

  “Maggie. Maggie O’Shea Reynolds. Lulu’s sister, and my grandmother.”

  Emmy nodded, wanting to move out of the small space, but Heath blocked her exit. She was stuck staring up at him, unable to move unless she touched him. “Right. It makes sense now. So Maggie was the one who was lost in Hurricane Hugo.”

  He looked upwards, the light from the turret window turning his brown eyes white. “Yep. And this was her personal book collection, which Lulu and my mom rescued before the storm. We stored them in my parents’ attic, which, by some miracle, retained its roof. Their house is farther from the ocean than Maggie’s, so they figured the books would be safer there. We moved as many as we could here when this house was built, but they didn’t all fit, so the rest stayed at my parents’. My mom started selling some of the boxes on eBay when she decided to retire and put the store up for sale until Lulu found out and made her stop.”

  “Why didn’t Lulu keep them?”

  He looked down at her, then took a step back as if realizing how close he was standing. “She lives with my parents. She used to live with Aunt Maggie, but after Hugo, she moved in with my parents and has lived with them ever since.”

  “Doesn’t she have any other family?” She couldn’t imagine any person putting up with the old woman for any length of time, but the thought of her being alone nipped at Emmy’s conscience.

  He shook his head. “She never married. But she was always close to my father, so it made sense.”

  “Your poor mother,” Emmy said under her breath as she squeezed past Heath and back into the bedroom. She stood in the middle of the room with her hands on her hips, noticing the dog had found a spot in the middle of the bed.

  “She works at Folly Finds, you know.”

  Emmy turned back to Heath. “You mean she used to. I own the store now—or will as soon as all of the papers are signed. I’m assuming that means I get to hire who I want.”

  Heath raised his eyebrows, but didn’t comment. “Let me show you the rest of the house.” He slapped his hand against the side of his hip again, and Frank jumped from the bed and followed them out of the room.

  The kitchen, dining area, and remaining bedrooms were as meticulously designed and as full of light as the rest of the house, but just as devoid of furnishings. The only evidence of any interior design was the large black-and-white photographs that had been framed and hung on every wall surface or that sat on the few occasional tables in the various rooms.

  Emmy walked toward one of the larger ones hung on the wall behind the dining table. It was a photograph of two women and a small boy about two years old. They sat on the front steps of a weather-beaten clapboard house four windows wide, with a covered front porch and two dormers on the second floor. They were all dressed in styles from the nineteen forties, the women wearing skirts below the knees and fitted blouses buttoned up to the neck and the boy in a short sailor suit complete with a sailor’s hat. All three stared into the camera, squinting into the bright sun.

  The boy sat on the lap of the slimmer woman, who had a face that, Emmy decided after regarding it for a long moment, wasn’t exactly pretty, but was what people probably once referred to as handsome. She had medium brown hair and light eyes with regular features that might be forgotten as soon as you walked by, except for something about her that made Emmy do a double take. Was it the eyes? Emmy leaned forward to get a better look. No, it was something else, something that had to do with her expression. There was sorrow there, sewn into the lines between her brows; but her eyes held so much hope and possibility that it was impossible to look at her and not believe that something better was around the corner.

  Emmy’s gaze moved to the shorter, younger woman sitting next to the woman holding the boy. On second glance Emmy realized that it wasn’t really a woman, but a girl of about thirteen or fourteen years old. She had bad skin and wore her hair in two braids with a severe and unflattering part down the middle. She neither frowned nor smiled into the camera, as if she were still deciding what her take on life should be. She wore saddle shoes with ankle socks over thick legs in contrast to the slim legs of the woman next to her. The towheaded boy held a small American flag, its stars blurry from rapid movement as if held in strong wind.

  “That’s my grandmother Maggie and Aunt Lulu with my father. It was taken on D-day, 1944. That’s why he’s holding the flag. That was their house on Second Avenue, the one that was destroyed by Hugo. I own the lot, but it’s still vacant.”

  Emmy focused on the little flag, her throat constricting. It did that every time she saw an American flag, remembering the tightly folded one she’d been given at Ben’s funeral, now carefully packed in her suitcase.

  Clearing her throat, she said, “It’s a great picture. Was your grandfather in the war?”

  He squinted at the photograph. “Yes. In the navy. He died before I was born, but I don’t know exactly when. Nobody really talks about him, so that’s about all I know.”

  She blinked her eyes, horrified that she might start to cry. Since Ben’s death, she’d been subject to periods of irrationality, and even near strangers were fair game. Turning to Heath, she said, “I would think that if you had a war veteran in your family, everyone should know about it and celebrate it. It’s a little ungrateful not to, don’t you think?”

  His eyes widened as he stared at her for a long moment. Then, to Emmy’s surprise, he said, “You’re probably right. My mom would know. When you meet with her to sign the papers, you can ask her about him.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “Has she gone over all the stipulations regarding the purchase of the store?”

  A cool chill settled into Emmy’s spine, making her shiver. “Most of them. I’m sure she’ll go over all the details with me.”

  Heath just nodded, although it looked like he wanted to say something but thought better of it after regarding her militant stance with her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Which was fine with her. His abrupt arrival had made her forget about returning her suitcases to her car and leaving immediately, but she still wasn’t sure she was going to stay. The purchase of the store wouldn’t be finalized until the closing, after all, and maybe all she really needed was a vacation at the beach.

  Still, the feeling she had when Heath mentioned the store had her intrigued. It was the same feeling she’d had when she’d opened the box of books and found the notes in the margins. She needed to see Folly’s Finds. And maybe, after that, she’d be ready to leave.

  She spotted another photograph, this one about eight by ten inches, in a frame on a table behind an overstuffed sofa. It was another black-and-white photograph, but there was only one subject in this one. A tall and slim woman in a nineteen-forties-era bathing suit stood in a Hollywood pose facing away from the camera with her hands on her hips and her head turned back over her shoulders toward the photographer with a demure smile.

  Unlike the two women in the other photograph, this woman was beautiful by anybody’s standards. Her blond hair shone like spun gold in the sunlight, her facial features perfectly proportioned and her left brow doing an excellent Scarlett O’Hara impression in arched surprise. Her legs were long and lean with trim ankles, and she had slim hips tapering up to a tiny waist. A glimpse of an ample bust could be seen peeking through the tri
angle of her arm, her skin nearly pearlescent against the sandy beach of the background.

  Emmy’s curiosity made her reach for the frame to get a better look. This time she noticed the espadrilles tied at the ankles and the slim bracelet with a sand-dollar drop the woman wore on her left wrist. Emmy held the photograph up to Heath. “Who’s this?”

  “That would be my grandmother’s cousin, Catherine. That’s all I know. All of these photos used to be in one of my grandmother’s photo albums that my mother took with her when they evacuated before Hugo. It was her idea to have them blown up and framed for my house. Said every house needs a personal touch.”

  Emmy wanted to ask him where the rest of the furniture was, or why the only personal touch came from the framed family photographs that his mother had given him. Except for those, the house definitely lacked the feminine touch, and if he’d built the house for his fiancée, why was there no sign of her ever being here? Regardless, she was glad to have the photographs. She’d left all of hers, including her wedding photos, at home. Her mother had suggested that, but had also told her that she’d send them as soon as Emmy was ready for them.

  Heath interrupted her thoughts. “I’ll go and bring everything else in. You stay here and get acquainted with the place and don’t argue. The neighbors will call my mother if they see you hauling anything inside.”

  Without waiting for her to argue, he opened the front door and, with Frank offering encouragement, brought the rest of her belongings in from the car.

  After piling everything up in the middle of the living room, he said, “Look, I’ll wait to work on the dock so you can get settled in without listening to the hammering. But feel free to call me if you need anything.” He handed her a business card, and she took it.

  “Thanks, although it looks like your mother has pretty much covered all of the bases.” Emmy offered him a tentative smile, and tried not to feel too eager to see him leave. But there was something about him that irked her—something that felt as out of place as a biography shelved in the fiction section.

  “Yeah, except for not telling me I had a tenant.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Well, then, I’d better get going and let you unpack.”

  After Emmy thanked him again and they said their good-byes, she let him out of the front door. She watched him through the window as he took a bike leaning against the tall palmetto tree in the front yard and rode away with Frank jogging next to him, and wondered absently if his fiancée was now his wife and if she’d come with him to Folly Beach.

  Emmy turned away from the door and realized she still held his business card in her hand. Holding it up, she looked at it, seeing for the first time the embossed drawing of a bottle tree, an identical replica of the ones etched into the front-door windows. Bottle Tree Building and Design. Heath Reynolds, FAIA LEED AP. There were an Atlanta address and two phone numbers, both starting with area code 404, which wasn’t South Carolina.

  Emmy stuck the card into her back pocket, knowing she wouldn’t call him. He irritated her in the way sand in a shoe did, not overtly annoying until you realized you’d created a blister by ignoring it. She pushed aside thoughts of the bottle tree in the backyard, and the note inside, and of his grandmother Maggie, who’d been lost in a hurricane because she’d been waiting for somebody who never came, and she tried very hard not to think how much she and Maggie had in common.

  IN THE YARD BEHIND FOLLY’S Finds, Lulu clutched her pruning shears in one hand as she straightened from the cherry laurel bush she’d been grooming. She stood back and admired the way the dark green leaves were a perfect backdrop for the scarlet-colored bottles on the tree next to it. She loved this garden, loved tending it as if it were a child, and in many ways, it was. John was long since grown, and so was his son. But her garden remained. The living plants came and went, but her bottle trees were always there. Tourists and locals alike came to see her garden, and quite unexpectedly, she’d created a flourishing business in custom orders, ultimately shipping her trees up and down the Eastern seaboard.

  Jim’s tree was long gone, taken like so many other things by Hugo, but she still remembered the spot on the vacant lot where it had stood. She still visited it, leaving a handful of sand each time she went, just so he’d know she’d been there. Prickly blackberry vines had consumed the back and side fences of the old lot, claiming more and more ground each year, no matter how much Heath tried to beat it back. She liked the vines and the sweet dark berries, remembering how Jim had liked the blackberry jam she and Maggie had made.

  Lulu touched a bloodred bottle on a low branch of a tree, feeling the hum of air inside of it as if it were a living, breathing thing. It gratified her to be doing something useful that allowed her to stay on Folly Beach, where the cycle of the tides and the influx of summer people came and went, leaving things pretty much the way they’d always been after they were gone. Lulu didn’t like change; it messed with the natural order of things.

  She thought about the woman in Heath’s house and pursed her lips. She didn’t like her. She was an intruder just like all the summer visitors, except that this one wasn’t planning on going away again. Lulu wanted to think that it wasn’t personal, that she’d dislike any newcomer threatening to stay longer than the summer season. But this Emmy Hamilton was different. There was something familiar about her. Not familiar in the way one would recognize an old friend, but familiar in the way a person recognizes the scent of the air before a storm. Maybe it was the haunted look that bracketed the woman’s eyes that made Lulu think of Maggie. Or maybe it was the prodding inquisitiveness that reminded Lulu too much of herself.

  She remembered how excited Abigail was to have found someone to buy the store so she wouldn’t have to dismantle it and sell it piece by piece. But, Lulu knew, memories couldn’t be dismantled like a jigsaw puzzle. Memories were like pilings on a house; once you started sawing away at one of them, the house would fall.

  She turned back to the cherry laurel bush she’d been trimming, admiring the dark blue fruits that suddenly seemed as precarious as her past. Yes, most memories were meant to be kept intact. And, she thought as she lopped off a thick stem, the bright green leaves and cluster of fruit falling at her feet into the sandy grass, some secrets were never meant to be shared.

  CHAPTER 7

  FOLLY BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA

  February 1942

  Maggie rested her elbows on the front counter at Folly’s Finds and watched Lulu finish her after-school snack and drain the last drop from her Coca-Cola bottle. She knew it would find its way to the box in the storeroom, where Lulu’s growing collection of empty clear and colored bottles was kept. She’d made a tree for Mrs. Bailey, her friend Amy’s mother, and two other people who’d seen it had asked Lulu for one, too. Lulu hadn’t thought about charging for them yet, except in Coca-Colas and other bottles, but Maggie would have to step in if she thought that people were taking advantage of her sister’s generosity and artistic bent.

  The bell over the shop door rang, and Maggie looked up with a smile, expecting to see the deliveryman who brought their gallon jugs of drinking water every week. There was no drinking water on the island, which was one of the reasons why her father had never stayed more than a week at a time while her mother had been alive and the main reason he cited why he rarely returned following her death.

  Maggie’s heart lurched as she recognized Peter’s broad shoulders in a herringbone swagger coat, the slicked-down brown hair as he took off his hat.

  “Margaret, it’s good to see you again.” He held his hat in his hands, his eyes piercing.

  “Peter,” she said, trying not to sound as overjoyed as she felt—one of Cat’s rules. But he’d gone for two weeks back to Iowa and his father’s factory, as well as too many other places for her to remember, according to Peter, and she’d missed him. She could even admit that she was so happy to see him that she forgot to be angry that he hadn’t written to her, nor given her an address to be able to write to him. He’d lef
t suddenly, with only a short note telling her he’d gone tucked into her front door.

  He placed his hat and gloves on the counter and took both of her hands in his before squeezing gently. “How are you?”

  Ignoring all of Cat’s advice, she blurted out, “Better—now that you’re here.” They’d been out exactly four times, yet his absence had made her feel as if she’d known him forever.

  His eyes warmed, and for a moment, Maggie was sure that he was going to lean across the counter and kiss her. But then he spotted Lulu sitting on her stool and watching him carefully, and he dropped Maggie’s hands as he focused his attention on Lulu.

  “Just the young lady I was looking for.” Reaching inside his overcoat, he said, “I’ve been to New York and found something I thought you might like.” He removed a brown-paper-wrapped package and handed it to her.

  Lulu slid from the stool and hesitantly took a step forward. “What is it?” she asked without smiling.

  “Lulu, your manners.” Maggie frowned at her little sister, wondering when Lulu’s reticence had turned into rudeness.

  “Thank you,” Lulu added quickly. “What is it?”

  Peter laughed, apparently charmed by her youthful honesty. “Open it and see.”

  Lulu accepted the package and, after contemplating it for just a second, ripped at the paper, letting it fall to the floor. When she’d unwrapped the package completely, Lulu’s habitual frown gave way to a lopsided smile. “The Quest of the Missing Map,” she read out loud. Then, holding it up to Maggie, she said in a much louder voice, “Golly, Mags. It’s the brand-new Nancy Drew—I haven’t even seen it yet! Can I go show it to Amy?” She looked up at Maggie with an expression of unbridled joy, a look that Maggie hadn’t seen on Lulu’s face since Jim died, and all of Maggie’s reasons for not being left alone with Peter fled.

  Forgetting to remind Lulu of her manners, Maggie said, “Sure. Come back before four so you can do your chores before closing.”