by Nora Roberts
He needed those things now. Miracles, beauty, peace. Cupping a hand over the camera, Nathan walked down the incline to the soft, moist sand of the beach. He crouched now and then to examine a shell, to trace the shape of a starfish with a fingertip.
But he left them where he found them, collecting them only on film.
The air and the exercise helped settle the nerves that had jangled before he’d left Sanctuary. She was a photographer, Nathan thought, as he studied a pretty, weather-silvered cottage peeking out from behind the dunes. Had his father known that the little girl he’d played mentor to one summer had gone on to follow in his footsteps? Would he have cared? Been proud, amused?
He could remember when his father had first shown him the workings of a camera. The big hands had covered his small ones, gently, patiently guiding. The smell of aftershave on his father’s cheeks, a sharp tang. Brut. Yes, Brut. Mom had liked that best. His father’s cheek had been smoothly shaven, pressed against his. His dark hair would have been neatly combed, smooth bumps of waves back from the forehead, his clear gray eyes soft and serious.
Always respect your equipment, Nate. You may want to make a living from the camera one day. Travel the world on it and see everything there is to see. Learn how to look and you’ll see more than anyone else. Or you’ll be something else, do something else, and just use it to take moments away with you. Vacations, family. They’ll be your moments, so they’ll be important. Respect your equipment, learn to use it right, and you’ll never lose those moments.
“How many did we lose, anyway?” Nathan wondered aloud. “And how many do we have tucked away that we’d be better off losing?”
“Excuse me?”
Nathan jerked when the voice cut through the memory, when a hand touched his arm. “What?” He took a quick step in retreat, half expecting one of his own ghosts. But he saw a pretty, delicately built blonde staring up at him through amber-tinted lenses.
“Sorry. I startled you.” She tilted her head, and her eyes stayed focused, unblinking, on his face. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” Nathan dragged a hand through his hair, ignored the uncomfortably loose sensation in his knees. Less easily ignored was the acute embarrassment as the woman continued to study him as if he were some alien smear on a microscope slide. “I didn’t know anyone else was around.”
“Just finishing up my morning run,” she told him, and he noted for the first time that she wore a sweat-dampened gray T-shirt over snug red bike shorts. “That’s my cottage you were staring at. Or through.”
“Oh.” Nathan ordered himself to focus on it again, the silvered cedar shakes, the sloping brown roof with its jut of open deck for sunning. “You’ve got a hell of a view.”
“The sunrises are the best. You’re sure you’re all right?” she asked again. “I’m sorry to poke, but when I see a guy standing alone on the beach looking as if he’d just been slapped with a two-by-four and talking to himself, I’ve got to wonder. It’s my job,” she added.
“Beach police?” he said dryly.
“No.” She smiled, held out a friendly hand. “Doctor. Doctor Fitzsimmons. Kirby. I run a clinic out of the cottage.”
“Nathan Delaney. Medically sound. Didn’t an old woman used to live there? A tiny woman with white hair up in a bun.”
“My grandmother. Did you know her? You’re not a native.”
“No, no, I remember, or have this impression of her. I spent a summer here as a kid. Memories keep popping out at me. You just walked into one.”
“Oh.” The eyes behind the amber lenses lost their clinical shrewdness and warmed. “That explains it. I know just what you mean. I spent several summers here growing up, and memories wing up at me all the time. That’s why I decided to relocate here when Granny died. I always loved it here.”
Absently, she grabbed her toe, bending her leg back, heel to butt, to stretch out. “You’d be the Yankee who’s taken Little Desire Cottage for half a year.”
“Word travels.”
“Doesn’t it just? Especially when it doesn’t have far to go. We don’t get many single men renting for six months. A number of the ladies are intrigued.” Kirby repeated the process on the other leg. “You know, I think I might remember you. Wasn’t it you and your brother who palled around with Brian Hathaway? I remember Granny saying how those Delaney boys and young Brian stuck together like a dirt clod.”
“Good memory. You were here that summer?”
“Yes, it was my first summer on Desire. I suppose that’s why I remember it best. Have you seen Brian yet?” she asked casually.
“He just fixed me breakfast.”
“Magic in an egg.” It was Kirby’s turn to look past the cottage, beyond it. “I heard Jo’s back. I’m going to try to get up to the house after the clinic closes today.” She glanced at her watch. “And since it opens in twenty minutes, I’d better go get cleaned up. It was nice seeing you again, Nathan.”
“Nice seeing you. Doc,” he added as she began to jog toward the dunes.
With a laugh, she turned, jogged backward. “General practice,” she called out. “Everything from birth to earth. Come in for what ails you.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.” He smiled and watched her ponytail swing sassily as she ran through the valley between the dunes.
Nineteen minutes later, Kirby put on a white lab coat over her Levi’s. She considered the coat a kind of costume, designed to reassure the reluctant patient that she was indeed a doctor. That and the stethoscope tucked in its pocket gave the islanders the visual nudge many of them needed to let Granny Fitzsimmons’s little girl poke into their orifices.
She stepped into her office, formerly her grandmother’s well-stocked pantry off the kitchen. Kirby had left one wall of shelves intact, to hold books and papers and the clever little combo fax and copy machine that kept her linked with the mainland. She’d removed the other shelves, since she had no plans to follow her grandmother’s example and put by everything from stewed tomatoes to watermelon pickles.
She’d muscled the small, lovingly polished cherrywood desk into the room herself. It had traveled with her from Connecticut, one of the few pieces she’d brought south. It was outfitted with a leatherframed blotter and appointment book that had been a parting gift from her baffled parents.
Her father had grown up on Desire and considered himself fortunate to have escaped.
She knew both of her parents had been thrilled when she’d decided to follow in her father’s footsteps and go into medicine. And they had assumed she would continue to follow, into his cardiac surgery specialty, into his thriving practice, and right along to the platinum-edged lifestyle both of them so enjoyed.
Instead she’d chosen family practice, her grandmother’s weather-beaten cottage, and the simplicity of island life.
She couldn’t have been happier.
Tidily arranged with the appointment book that bore her initials in gold leaf were a snazzy phone system with intercom—in the unlikely event that she should ever need an assistant—and a Lucite container of well-sharpened Ticonderoga pencils.
Kirby had spent her first few weeks of practice doing little more than sharpening pencils and wearing them down again by doodling on the blotter.
But she’d stuck, and gradually she’d begun to use those pencils to note down appointments. A baby with the croup, an old woman with arthritis, a child spiking a fever with roseola.
It had been the very young or the very old who’d trusted her first. Then others had come to have their stitches sewn, the aches tended, their stomachs soothed. Now she was Doc Kirby, and the clinic was holding its own.
Kirby scanned her appointment book. An annual gyn, a follow-up on a nasty sinus infection, the Matthews boy had another earache, and the Simmons baby was due in for his next immunizations. Well, her waiting room wasn’t going to be crowded, but at least she’d keep busy through the morning. And who knew, she thought with a chuckle, there could be a couple of emergencies to liven
up the day.
Since Ginny Pendleton was her gyn at ten o’clock, Kirby calculated she had at least another ten minutes. Ginny was invariably late for everything. Pulling the necessary chart, she stepped back into the kitchen, poured the last of the coffee from the pot she’d made early that morning, and took it with her to the examining room.
The room where she’d once dreamed away summer nights was now crisp and clean. She had posters of wildflowers on the white walls rather than the pictures of nervous systems and ear canals that some doctors decorated with. Kirby thought they made patients jumpy.
After sliding the chart into the holder inside the door, she took out one of the backless cotton gowns—she thought paper gowns humiliating—and laid it out on the foot of the examining table. She hummed along with the quiet Mozart sonata from the stereo she’d switched on. Even those who eschewed classical would invariably relax to it, she’d found.
She’d arranged everything she’d need for the basic yearly exam and had finished off her coffee when she heard the little chime that meant the door at the clinic entrance had opened.
“Sorry, sorry,” Ginny came in on the run as Kirby stepped into the living room that served as the waiting area. “The phone rang just as I was leaving.”
She was in her middle twenties, and Kirby was continually telling her that her fondness for the sun was going to haunt her in another ten years. Her hair was white-blond, shoulder-length, frizzed mercilessly, and crying out for a root job.
Ginny came from a family of fishermen, and though she could pilot a boat like a grinning pirate, clean a fish like a surgeon, and shuck oysters with dizzying speed and precision, she preferred working at the Heron Campground, helping the novice pitch a tent, assigning sites, keeping the books.
For her doctor’s appointment, she’d spruced herself up with one of her favored western shirts in wild-plum purple with white fringe. Kirby wondered with idle curiosity how many internal organs were gasping for oxygen beneath the girdle-tight jeans.
“I’m always late.” Ginny sent her a sunny, baffled smile that made Kirby laugh.
“And everyone knows it. Go ahead in and pee in the bottle first. You know the routine. Then go into the exam room. Take everything off, put the gown on opening to the front. Just give a holler when you’re ready.”
“Okay. It was Lexy on the phone,” she called out as she scurried down the hall in her cowboy boots and shut the door. “She’s feeling restless.”
“Usually is,” Kirby replied.
Ginny continued chatting as she left the bathroom and turned into the exam room.
“Anyway, Lexy’s going to come down to the campground tonight about nine o’clock.” There was a thud as the first boot hit the floor. “Number twelve is free. It’s one of my favorites. We thought we’d build us a nice fire, knock off a couple of six-packs. Wanna come?”
“I appreciate the offer.” There was another thud. “I’ll think about it. If I decide to come by, I’ll bring another six-pack.”
“I wanted her to ask Jo, but you know how huffy Lex gets. Hope she will, though.” Ginny’s voice was breathless, leading Kirby to imagine she was peeling herself out of the jeans. “You seen her yet? Jo?”
“No. I’m going to try to catch her sometime today.”
“Do them good to sit down and tie one on together. Don’t know why Lexy’s so pissed off at Jo. Seems to be pissed off at everybody, though. She went on about Giff too. If I had a man who looked like Giff eyeing me up one side and down the other the way he does her, I wouldn’t be pissed off at anything. And I’m not saying that because we’re cousins. Fact is, if we weren’t blood-related, I’d jump his bones in a New York minute. All set in here.”
“I’d give odds Giff will wear her down,” Kirby commented, taking out the chart as she came in. “He’s got a stubborn streak as wide as hers. Let’s check your weight. Any problems, Ginny?”
“Nope, been feeling fine.” Ginny stepped on the scale and firmly shut her eyes. “Don’t tell me what it is.”
Chuckling, Kirby tapped the weight up the line. One thirty. One thirty-five. Whoops, she thought. One forty-two.
“Have you been exercising regularly, Ginny?”
Eyes still tightly shut, Ginny shifted from side to side. “Sort of.”
“Aerobics, twenty minutes, three times a week. And cut back on the candy bars.” Because she was female as well as a doctor, Kirby obligingly zeroed out the scale before Ginny opened her eyes. “Hop up on the table, we’ll check your blood pressure.”
“I keep meaning to watch that Jane Fonda tape. What do you think about lipo?”
Kirby snugged on the BP cuff. “I think you should take a brisk walk on the beach a few times a week and imagine carrot sticks are Hershey bars for a while. You’ll lose that extra five pounds without the Hoover routine. BP’s good. When was your last period?”
“Two weeks ago. It was almost a week late, though. Scared the shit out of me.”
“You’re using your diaphragm, right?”
Ginny folded her arms over her middle, tapped her fingers. “Well, most of the time. It’s not always convenient, you know.”
“Neither is pregnancy.”
“I always make the guy condomize. No exceptions. There’s a couple of really cute ones camped at number six right now.”
Sighing, Kirby snapped on her gloves. “Casual sex equals dangerous complications.”
“Yeah, but it’s so damn much fun.” Ginny smiled up at the dreamy Monet poster Kirby had tacked to the ceiling. “And I always fall in love with them a little. Sooner or later, I’m going to come across the big one. The right one. Meantime, I might as well sample the field.”
“Minefield,” Kirby muttered. “You’re selling yourself short.”
“I don’t know.” Trying to imagine herself walking through those misty flowers in the poster, Ginny tapped her many-ringed fingers on her midriff. “Haven’t you ever seen a guy and just wanted him so bad everything inside you curled up and shivered?”
Kirby thought of Brian, caught herself before she sighed again. “Yeah.”
“I just love when that happens, don’t you? I mean it’s so ... primal, right?”
“I suppose. But primal and inconvenience aside, I want you using that diaphragm.”
Ginny rolled her eyes. “Yes, doctor. Oh, hey, speaking of men and sex, Lexy says she got a load of the Yankee and he is prime beef.”
“I got a load of him myself,” Kirby replied.
“Was she right?”
“He’s very attractive.” Gently, Kirby lifted one of Ginny’s arms over her head and began the breast exam.
“Turns out he’s an old friend of Bri’s—spent a summer here with his parents. His father was that photographer who did the picture book on the Sea Islands way back. My mother’s still got a copy.”
“The photographer. Of course. I’d forgotten that. He took pictures of Granny. He made a print and matted it, sent it to her after he left. I still have it in my bedroom.”
“Ma got the book out this morning when I told her. It’s really nice,” Ginny added as Kirby helped her sit up. “There’s one of Annabelle Hathaway and Jo gardening at Sanctuary. Ma remembered he took the pictures the summer Annabelle ran off. So I said maybe she ran off with the photographer, but Ma said he and his wife and kids were still on the island after she left.”
“It was twenty years ago. You’d think people would forget and leave it alone.”
“The Pendletons are Desire,” Ginny pointed out. “Annabelle was a Pendleton. And nobody ever forgets anything on the island. She was really beautiful,” she added, scooting off the table. “I don’t remember her very well, but seeing the picture brought it back some. Jo would look like that if she put some effort into it.”
“I imagine Jo prefers to look like Jo. You’re healthy, Ginny, go ahead and get dressed. I’ll meet you outside when you’re done.”
“Thanks. Oh, and Kirby, try to make it by the campground. We’ll mak
e it a real girls’ night out. Number twelve.”
“We’ll see.”
AT four, Kirby closed the clinic. Her only emergency walk-in had been a nasty case of sunburn on a vacationer who’d fallen asleep on the beach. She’d spent fifteen minutes after her last patient sprucing up her makeup, brushing her hair, dabbing on fresh perfume.
She told herself it was for her own personal pleasure, but as she was heading over to Sanctuary, she knew that was a lie. She was hoping she looked fresh enough, smelled good enough, to make Brian Hathaway suffer.
She took the beach door. Kirby loved that quick, shocking thrill of seeing the ocean so near her own home. She watched a family of four playing in the shallows and caught the high music of the children’s laughter over the hum of the sea.
She slipped on her sunglasses and trotted down the steps. The narrow boardwalk she’d had Giff build led her around the house, away from the dunes. Rising out of the sand was a stand of cypress, bent and crippled by the wind that even now blew sand around her ankles. Bushes of bayberry and beach elder grew in the trough. She added her own tracks to those that crisscrossed the sand.
She circled the edges of the dune swale, islander enough to know and respect its fragility. In moments, she had left the hot brilliance of sand and sea for the cool, dim cave of the forest.
She walked quickly, not hurrying, but simply with her mind set on her destination. She was used to the rustles and clicks of the woods, the shifts of sound and light. So she was baffled when she found herself stopping, straining her ears and hearing her own heart beating fast and high in her throat.
Slowly, she turned in a circle, searching the shadows. She’d heard something, she thought. Felt something. She could feel it now, that crawling sensation of being watched.
“Hello?” She hated herself for trembling at the empty echo of her own voice. “Is someone there?”
