“You like that, don’t you?” he said, his fingers tracing light circles over her breasts.
And she did. Whit was nothing like any of the doltish boys she’d been with before, with all their panting and jerky impatience. He knew exactly what he was doing and why. In fact, Dee thought, he probably knew her better than she knew her own self.
They twined around each other further, navigating the clumsy console between them, Dee’s skirt riding higher as Whit’s hands went exploring, and just when she was ready to lean back and let him have his way with her, he cleared his throat and sat up.
“The rain’s stopped,” he said, lifting his head from her neck. “It’s clearing up.” He rearranged his wet shirt and combed a hand through his hair. “You are young,” he said, cocking an eyebrow at Dee, “but not so innocent, I think.” She blushed and tried to look wicked, then stopped, worried that she just looked pinched instead.
Whit circled her wrist with his fingers, pressing hard on the tendons. “We can’t be seen like this,” he said. “You’d better get out of here.” Dee pouted, and he chuckled. “Don’t worry. I’ll tell you when and where we can meet.” He watched her slide out of the car into the freezing wet. “I’ll come into the diner tomorrow—after my wife, of course. You can give it to me hot.”
And with a delicious grin, he slammed the door and rounded the final bend into town, leaving Dee to stumble back to Bank Street alone, thoughts of Claire’s red hair and white skin mingling with the press of Whit’s lips on her throat until everything was a twist of confusion for her. Was she hungry for Claire’s husband or just Claire? she wondered. Which Turner would she really be serving tomorrow at the Lighthouse anyway—man or wife—and where was the dividing line between them?
She reached the diner and glanced into one of the front windows, darkened in the late afternoon, and her reflection caught her off guard. She stared at her face—leaner in the window than in real life, dotted with water droplets—and it occurred to her that maybe she was the line. Before she could think too hard about that, however, she moved, breaking the image into pieces and scattering the doubtful part of her back into the rain, leaving behind only a solitary pane of glass, unreflective in the autumn gloom.
Chapter Eleven
Shovel fast on a Sunday, Jo’s mother used to say when Jo was growing up and the year got cold enough for the salt to be hauled from the ponds to the barn. Lucifer’s got time on his hands, but we don’t. This would be just when the first threat of the season’s rain was shimmering on the horizon, when neat V’s of geese were streaking the sky with their plaintive honking and frantic wings.
This particular year Jo had ended up with salt heaped only to her hip. It would barely be enough to keep her in good with the fishermen through the winter, and certainly not enough to keep the bank at bay. Come spring, she knew, Harbor Bank was going to want to skim more fat off the land than she had to give.
She’d cleaned out her life’s savings and been dismayed to discover that it amounted to only the three months of back mortgage payments plus two extra months. She tried to do the math on all of it and failed. Somehow the bank had won the round. She presented them with a lifetime of work, and they reciprocated with five meager months in return. Oh, well, Jo thought, trying to push the worry out of her head the way she was shoving around the piles of salt. I got one more season to make it all last. Winter. The longest months with the shortest days. A time when the marsh froze and everything hung suspended. From down the lane, she could hear the tarnished bell of St. Agnes clanging out a dented version of a song. In a few more weeks, she knew, even that would freeze, plunging the marsh into an icy and profound silence.
She tugged open the barn doors and shoved the barrow across the threshold just as the first fat drops of rain started to plop, noisy as gulls on the wing. She huddled inside the doorway, watching the changing sky, and then she went on with her business: upending the barrow, unloading the salt into an empty wooden box, sweeping up the scattered grains that had fallen to the wayside.
She pulled the cover into place over the storage box and brushed her hands together, wrinkled palm to smooth one. Usually she wore gloves, but she’d forgotten about them today, and now it was too late. If she wasn’t careful, she knew, dust and dirt would settle into the whorls of her scars and stain her hands mocha. A scuffling noise outside the barn interrupted her thoughts, and then, cutting through the noise of the rain and the wind, Whit Turner’s voice flew up to the rafters, where it hovered and hung in judgment.
“I know you’re in there, Joanna,” he called through the crack of the barn door, scraping his shoes on the wet clay. “Open up.”
What could he want? She hesitated, her heart pounding for six, and then she took the biggest breath she could and flung open the door, squinting in the rain. “Don’t you take a single step closer,” she said. She’d grabbed an old scythe left behind by one of her doomed male ancestors, but the blade was rusted and unreliable-looking, and Whit just flicked his eyes over it. She lowered the tool and leaned against the splintered threshold, hoping the backs of her knees would harden from the jelly they’d turned to. “To what do I owe the honor?” she asked.
Every time she got close to Whit these days, she was always surprised to see how the years were crimping the skin around his eyes and jaw and how his hair was starting to silver at the temples. He must have just come from Mass, Jo realized, for he was wearing a fine woolen blazer and pressed trousers—clothes her sister had no doubt chosen for him with care. She looked for any sign of the boy who’d taught her to whistle a hornpipe, who could palm the ace of hearts and make it reappear from her sleeve, but failed to find even a glimmer of him. Instead she saw Ida taking on a second life in the features of her only son, and for a quick heartbeat Jo was almost grateful for the scar tissue dimpled across her cheek, forehead, and chin. No one would ever be able to invade her face, she realized. She would always simply be herself, whether she liked it or not.
“Are you the one behind the nonsense I’m hearing about Ethan Stone’s return?” Whit asked, his lips white with rage.
She let out a careful breath, trying not to show her surprise. To be honest, she wasn’t sure how to answer that question. It was true that two weeks ago Father Flynn had sat in her front parlor and told her that his soul was heavy. She’d poured him a cup of tea. “Then you should lighten it,” she’d replied, and handed him the drink.
Father Flynn had sipped and then sipped again, his face growing ever more thoughtful. “What’s the only way to fix a hole, my dear?” he’d asked.
Jo had taken her own taste of tea. “Why, fill it in, I guess.” Her answer had seemed to please the father.
“Exactly,” he’d replied, nodding. “That’s just what I was thinking.” He leaned over and gave her a quick peck on her smooth cheek. “Thank you. You always say the right thing.”
At the time Jo had just chalked his behavior up to the ramblings of a lonely old man, but the penny was falling through the slot for her now, and she was starting to see that maybe Father Flynn was cagier than she gave him credit for. He must have been plotting how to bring Ethan Stone home, Jo realized. Not that it would do to let Whit know that. She worked her tongue along the roof of her mouth. “I wish I could take credit,” she said, staring into his eyes, “but the Lord’s work is beyond me.”
Whit didn’t blink, and Jo remembered that about him, how he’d always won every staring contest they’d ever had, every card game, and always, without fail, all the best marbles. “But you knew.”
She looked down at her boots. “Yes,” she admitted. “I guess I did.”
Whit extracted a pair of gloves from the inner pocket of his jacket and began pulling them on, and Jo saw how the skin on the backs of his hands was still flecked with faint freckles, the way hers used to be. She wondered what Ethan Stone was going to look like after all this time. He’d come back to Prospect only once for his mother’s funeral, but that was ten years ago, and he’d been so s
wamped with grief he hadn’t been quite himself. When his father died, he’d stayed away, and no one blamed him for that, given the man’s foul temperament. Merrett always seemed to have had one foot planted in the great beyond anyway.
Whit’s lips curled into a sneer. He leaned forward, and Jo caught a whiff of his cologne—a curious aroma that reminded her of wet ink. He glanced around the dusty barn at her pitiful heaps of salt. “Doesn’t look like you’re doing too well,” he said.
Jo didn’t reply, just tipped her chin higher.
“You know,” Whit continued, folding his fingers, his gloves sodden now, “nothing’s changed. Let me take this place off your hands. You’re just fighting a losing battle out here, Jo.”
This was true. Claire’s insinuations and rumors about the salt had shriveled almost all of Jo’s customary accounts over the years. To make a sale, she was having to drive farther and farther away—not always a certain endeavor in her truck. In fact, if it weren’t for the likes of Chet Stone and the rest of the fishermen’s steady business, she thought, she might have had no choice but to take Whit’s money.
In the beginning the drop in business had been bearable, but then Claire had gone and done the worst thing imaginable. She’d banned the salt from the December’s Eve bonfire. Something about violating a municipal order of burning chemicals in public, the constable told Jo, but she knew it was all just a bunch of puffed-up nonsense. Claire had always hated the whole ritual, and now that she was Mrs. Whittington Turner, she’d decided she was free to live without it, the rest of Prospect be damned.
“But what will you tell the townspeople?” Jo had asked the constable as he’d stood shuffling his shiny black boots on her porch, cradling his hat in his beefy hands. “How are you going to break the news that this year the town won’t have a future?”
He’d just shaken his head. “Guess you’ll just have to keep what you know to yourself this year,” he said, and he didn’t look all the way sorry about it either.
Whit was standing in the doorway of the barn much as the constable had taken possession of her porch, Jo thought—ready to spit bad news in her direction. The thing was, she wasn’t ready to let him. She took a step into the open air, braving the weather.
“What are you still fighting your mother’s battles for?” she said, oddly tempted to reach out and stroke Whit on the cheek even as she scolded him. “When are you finally going to be your own man, Whit? This place isn’t going to help you build up your business again.” She gestured at the ruins of the autumn ponds. “Look at it. It’s a cursed bog. And my sister doesn’t want it either. You should have buried whatever beef your mother had with this land along with her.” Besides, she wanted to add, you’ve already won, and you know it. You took Claire.
Whit slowly buttoned his jacket. Even in the rain, he managed to stay perfectly groomed, and Jo remembered how when they’d split from a day of playing as children, all the muck and mud would have stuck fast to her and he’d be spotless as a dish of baking soda. It had never bothered Jo, though. In fact, she’d been happy to have some visible proof of their friendship worked into the knees and elbows of her clothes. She didn’t know then that some stains don’t wash out.
“Claire wants what I want,” he said. “She’s a Turner. And what we want is to finish the work my mother started. My only regret is that she won’t see it come to light.” He leaned down closer to Jo, and for the first time that day she felt the air’s chill. “But you will,” he said. “I’ll make sure of that.” He dropped his voice almost to a croon. “I know people at Harbor Bank, Jo. You haven’t got too long left out here. I’m coming here friendly. Sell it to me now for a decent price and we’ll both be happy. If you want to go belly-up, that’s your business. I’ll just wait and buy from the bank. One way or another, this place will be mine.”
Jo watched him walk out into the wet, wandering off to the same spot where he always parked on the lane—the place where he’d waited for Claire before speeding her off into her new future as a Turner. Back then Whit had been all about the future. Jo wondered when he’d gotten so caught up in the past.
It didn’t matter. Claire wasn’t coming back—and Ethan Stone was, and Whit couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Nor would he get his hands on her land. But what if he did? Her stomach clenched. Where would she go?
It irked Jo that Whit set foot in the marsh only when he wanted to steal something—the title to the land, the secret of the salt, her sister. Jo never knew what until it was too late. Take the day he’d come to get Claire, for instance.
It had been an early-June evening and lovely, if Jo remembered right, except for the sight of Whit lurking out by the barn. As Jo stumped across the marsh to see what he wanted, a miniature blue butterfly had risen up from the mud and fluttered against her arm. She batted it away. Most people would have said they were pretty, but Jo saw them as a plague. Mama always said they were bad luck, but then Mama thought lots of things were bad luck. Jo neared the barn, but she stopped when she realized that Whit wasn’t standing alone. She caught her breath, trying to understand what she was seeing.
It was Claire, her russet hair pulled back, her bones so delicate they looked like they would buckle in a hard wind, except Jo knew that they were really lined with iron for marrow. Claire seemed to be wrapped in Whit’s canvas jacket. There was a movement between them, a rearrangement of arms and limbs, and Jo’s blood ran cold. Claire and Whit had twined their arms together, she saw, and had tilted their heads to touching—a breathless posture they couldn’t sustain for long, but they didn’t have to, because before Jo could let herself think twice, she charged toward them to save Claire from making a terrible mistake. Just as she arrived, Whit dislodged one of his hands and put it up to Claire’s flushed cheeks, staring into her eyes. He opened his lips as if to say something, and that’s when Claire spotted her and made an ugly little noise of surprise.
Whit half turned, as if he’d suspected all along that Jo was there, but couldn’t be bothered to face her. He folded Claire into him, tucking her under his arm like a bird to the wing, and then he said the worst thing Jo could imagine: “Meet my future wife.”
Jo waited for Claire to do something—anything. Slap Whit, maybe, or run away, or fall to her knees. But she didn’t. Instead she smiled. Not a large smile, just the corners of her mouth readjusting a little, getting used to her new position in the world, seeing what it was going to feel like to be a Turner. A butterfly landed on the crown of Claire’s head, and though Jo had the urge to brush it away, she didn’t. She’d saved Claire enough, she decided. She took a step backward. Whit’s eyes combed the ruin of her face, a barely concealed expression of disgust on his.
“Claire,” he said, his eyes riveted on Jo. “Go get your things.” Without looking at Jo, Claire scurried off, and Jo waited until she was a little ways across the marsh before she spoke. Even in a whirl of fury, she still had the urge to protect Claire.
“It won’t work,” she said. “You won’t get your hands on our land like this. Gilly women don’t thrive out of the salt.”
Whit took a step toward her. With implacable logic he replied, “Then I suppose it’s lucky for all of us that Claire’s decided to become a Turner.” He smirked. “My mother’s will only stipulated that I couldn’t marry you, Jo. It never said anything about Claire.”
“How are you going to support her?” Jo asked. “Claire thinks you’re richer than Midas, but I know better. What are you going to do when she discovers that the Turner coffers aren’t quite as full as she thought?”
Whit looked bored. “Claire will think she’s in Shangri-la,” he replied, running his eyes across the marsh. “Especially compared to this place. A girl like her deserves better, and I can give it to her. I can at least do that.”
What could Jo say to that? One way or another, Claire had always meant to leave. If she couldn’t do it with Ethan, then she would take Whit, the only man in town brazen enough to have a Gilly woman. Jo wondered if Claire�
�s future would be a happy one or if, after a few years of living in Ida’s house and sleeping in her bed, she, too, would start wearing too much makeup, too many jewels, and thinking only of the things she didn’t have.
She tried to imagine Claire rambling around in that big house up on Plover Hill, locked away behind the iron gates, the taste of salt a memory on her lips, but she couldn’t make the picture fit. She sighed. “Claire doesn’t love you,” she said. “And I doubt she ever will.”
Whit’s face slammed shut at that, like a door pushed by the wind. Still, he didn’t like anyone to have the last word. He regarded her with sorrow, and for a moment Jo saw the boy trapped in the glass tank of Whit’s body. “I guess love comes and goes,” he finally said. “Tell Claire I’m waiting for her with the car down the lane. Tell her I won’t wait forever.” And with that he sauntered away, the mud from the marsh darkening the fine soles of his shoes, making the going rough.
Claire and Whit didn’t waste time on a long engagement. A few weeks after her departure, Claire sent a gold-engraved invitation to the marsh, and Jo peeled back the tissue and linen layers of it, opening cards and envelopes, trying—and failing—to find one scrap of Claire in all of it.
“Look, Mama.” Jo brandished the invitation. Since Claire’s quick departure, Mama’s health had worsened, and she was often in bed. “They’re getting married in St. Agnes. I’d have thought they would have picked something fancier.” But Mama just turned her head and said nothing, so Jo sent the return envelope back empty of words and filled with salt. Just because she wasn’t planning on attending Claire’s nuptials, that didn’t mean she was going to ignore them. Not hardly. She had a special gift planned for Claire.
The morning of the wedding, Jo snuck out of the marsh and over to the church early, long before the sun was up and long before even Father Flynn would have risen for prayer. She carried, hidden in a burlap sack, a jar of ashes, a pot of paint, and a paintbrush.
The Gilly Salt Sisters Page 18
