The Gilly Salt Sisters

by Tiffany Baker

  “It’s more important than ever that you don’t even think about contacting Whit,” Claire warned her in the kitchen a few days after they’d put Icicle in the ground. “Not for Jordy’s sake. Not for your own. Not for anything. You’ve seen for yourself what he can do.” Claire had sold her wedding rings to save Salt Creek Farm from the bank, Dee knew, and Whit was sure to be hopping mad about that. She remembered how sternly he’d ordered her never to lose that junky locket he’d given her. She could only imagine what he would do at the loss of a diamond.

  “Well?” Claire said, snapping Dee back to the present. Claire was baking for her new stand in the farmers’ market, and she had flour dusted in her hair and sugar spread on her hands. She looked sweet, but Dee was starting to suspect that that was all on the surface, like one of the crusts on her pies.

  “Fine,” she said, getting a glass of milk. “You already told me this about a thousand times. I won’t go near Whit.”

  “I just want to be sure you got that message,” Claire said, eyeing Jordy in his wooden bowl. “Now that you’re a mother and all, we can’t be too careful.” She started to reach down to the baby, but before she could get her mucky hands on him, Dee scooped him up and pressed him to her chest. Claire pretended she’d been reaching for something else near the bowl—a whisk. She turned back to the distraction of her baking.

  “Don’t you worry,” she said, more to herself than to Dee. “Once Jo and I are through with Whit, he’ll never want to set foot in this place again.” Dee remembered the strange vision of Whit stepping out of the salt barn and drawing his finger across his throat. The loyal half of her wanted to throw her hat in with Claire and Jo, whatever they were cooking up, but the more depraved half still wanted to follow Whit down the empty lane and take her chances. “What are you planning on doing?” she asked, taking a sip from her glass.

  Claire started whipping a bowl of cream. Her arm moved in faster and faster circles. “That’s for us to know and you not to find out.” She stopped and smiled sweetly. “I’m sure you understand.” She pushed a wisp of loose hair out of her green eyes. “After all, when it comes to a man like Whit, you can’t be too careful. And careful”—she regarded Dee—“isn’t really your strong suit, is it?”

  As the last of the autumn heat settled back into the earth and cold air began crystallizing on the horizon, Dee began to feel as if she’d been given a set of sharper eyes. For the first time, she started worrying for real about the future. She was coming to realize that the salt worked differently for everybody. Jo seemed happiest when she was toiling away in the stuff, and it seemed to drive Claire to the kitchen, but as far as Dee could tell, she herself was having a negative reaction. To date, the taste of the salt hadn’t provided her with anything tangible. In fact, it had done the opposite. It summoned up everything she was missing—namely, living among people. She missed going to the movies and the shops, and she even craved the threads of gossip floating around the booths in her father’s diner. But most of all she still ached for Whit.

  She started dreaming about the apartment she’d like to have for her and Jordy one day—something on a high floor, maybe even a converted attic with cozy sloping eaves and a view over water. She thought about going to beauty school and opening up a little salon somewhere plain on the coast like Gloucester—a place where the women weren’t glam but wanted to be—and when Jordy was old enough, she’d buy him a little shaggy dog, and the three of them would be a just-big-enough family.

  But dreams cost dollars. Everything did, down to the cartons of formula Jordy could empty in the blink of an eye. Dee gently eased the bottle teat from his mouth and put him over her shoulder to rub his back, nuzzling him with her cheek. It was remarkable how much he looked like Whit, from his slanting eyebrows to the squared-off tips of his fingers. Inside, though, Dee hoped he was filled only with her.

  Jordy let out a burp, and she shifted him to the crook of her elbow. In three months he’d gotten so big. He could hold up his head, smile, laugh, and push himself up onto his forearms like a miniature strong man. Sometimes when he slept, Dee leaned down and kissed his perfect bowed mouth, licking her own lips afterward, amazed by the way her baby’s breath could cleanse her.

  She’d quit wanting to share him with anyone. In the first few weeks after she’d come home from the hospital, she’d been grateful for the way Jo and Claire doted on Jordy. Her incision ached, and she’d had a difficult time doing the most basic things—climbing stairs, sitting up in bed, lowering her ass into the bathtub. And Jordy had seemed so frail. Dee had been worried she’d drop him, or accidentally break him or something, but that didn’t happen, and she began to see that she was the one who’d be broken without him. She especially didn’t like Claire’s habit of scooping him into her arms at every available opportunity and running her index finger down his forehead and the bridge of his tiny nose.

  “He’s not an arcade game,” Dee would snap, and rush to retrieve him. “You don’t press a button on him and get a prize.” It bothered her even more when Jordy started smiling at the diversion.

  “See, he likes it,” Claire crowed, and kept on doing it.

  Dee would ban Claire from her attic apartment, she decided. And if she ever came into Dee’s salon in the future, Dee would shave all that pretty red hair off her.

  She didn’t even want to share Jordy with Whit anymore. Ever since Icicle’s death, she just wanted to get as far away from him and this marsh as she could. Her plan was simple. All she needed was a little bit of money and even less time.

  Whit wasn’t as rich as he seemed—she’d overheard that from Jo and Claire—but surely he could sell off something in that big house of his—a painting, or how about that fancy car he still drove around in? Even if it was a few years old, it had to be worth something. She’d get Whit alone somehow and ask him. You can make me go away, she’d say, drawing her finger across her throat to remind him of what she saw that day when he’d slipped into the barn. I’ll never set foot in this town again. Just write me a check and there will be one less female on Salt Creek Farm you have to worry about.

  Not to mention one less male.

  He’d do it, too, Dee thought. A lifetime of child support for a kid he was ashamed of versus a quick lump sum wasn’t hard math. Even she could add that total up in her head, and she hadn’t finished out her junior year of high school.

  Or maybe he’d just kill them both. There was no way to know. For all his hustle and smooth talk, Whit wasn’t a betting man. He went after only what he was sure he’d win—first Joanna, then Claire, and then Dee. He had us all, Dee thought. I’m not going to wait around until he decides he wants Jordy.

  She tiptoed back indoors. Around her the house was dark and still, lit only by the moon, and the household clutter seemed even more unmanageable. Once she’d wanted to get to the bottoms of these heaps. Now she didn’t care enough. There were the bedrooms with their crammed closets, a collection of dented canisters and tins in the kitchen, and a decade’s worth of papers in the writing desk, and none of it had anything to do with Dee.

  Without any forethought, she wandered into the parlor and opened the desk, staring at the morass of papers inside. Just as before, ancient catalogs hawked their outmoded goods. Forgotten coupons advertised their specials. And a letter from the bank thanked Jo for her recent payments and reminded her that she wasn’t all the way done yet. Dee squinted at the numbers and then pocketed that correspondence. Whit might be interested in something like that, for a price. He sure seemed to want Salt Creek Farm. If Dee had to help him get it, then okay. She would.

  She was about to let the lid of the desk drop when a page of script bearing her name caught her eye in the faint moonlight. Puzzled, she picked it up and examined it. It appeared to be a letter to Whit from her, asking him to meet her in the barn on December’s Eve, but the handwriting wasn’t quite correct and Dee would never sign her name with a stupid heart next to it. At least not when it came to Whit. She squinted, think
ing hard. Jo and Claire were definitely up to something, but what? There was only one way to find out. She’d have to beat them at their own game. She would go to meet Whit herself.

  She left the forged letter with her name on it alone and then walked into the hall, where she saw that one of the red pears from the tree in town was propped on top of the piano. It was an ugly thing, speckled, hardly worth taking, but she grabbed it anyway, scooping it into the pocket of her dressing gown, where it rolled against her hip bone. It was getting late in the year for fruit. This might very well be the last specimen of the season. And when someone handed you the last of something, Dee knew, you should reach out and take it, always. I can do this, she told herself, climbing the stairs. And if everything worked out, she’d never have to accept the last of anything again.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Claire had forgotten how the end of a summer happened in a rush out on Salt Creek Farm, the season tumbling forward so swiftly she practically had to run to catch it. Thanks to the money from Ida’s rings, she and Jo had bought themselves a little reprieve from the bank, but they still owed more on the loan. If they didn’t come up with another lump sum soon, Claire knew all too well, Whit would buy the property in foreclosure.

  Day after day she and Jo scooped dry salt from the big piles at the edges of the marsh into barrows and wheeled the loads to the barn for storage, even as they still raced to skim the ponds. And then, without warning, autumn fell upon them, hard and fast. The few trees in town began to yellow, and the milkweed went brittle and pale. The cranberry bog up the coast turned brilliant red, and the morning air grew confused with intersections of birds—those heading south versus the pipers and gulls, who toughed it out over the hard Cape winter. The last strands of summer grasses died back, and the humid haze burned off the ponds, a chill sharpening everything.

  Claire had switched from making cobblers to baking spice cake, and instead of squeezing lemonade she’d started mulling cider, but no matter how many apple pies she pulled from the oven, no matter how many bacon-and-squash turnovers she folded, she couldn’t figure out what to do about Whit or, for that matter, Ethan. One man still had her heart cupped in his open hands, and the other was determined to tear it to shreds, and Claire was left with a hole gaping in the center of her: an empty spot that was dangerous not because of what was missing but because of what it invited.

  To her utter surprise, it turned out to be the salt.

  By the time she and Jo had gotten it all moved into the barn, it was clear they had so much of it on their hands they were going to have trouble getting rid of it. “I’ve never seen a season quite like this,” Jo admitted, dumping the last barrow of gray salt into a trough. “You better fire up the oven, Claire, and get cooking. That’s the only way we’re going to use it all up. Not even the fishermen need all of this. Chet Stone’s generous, but not this generous.”

  An uncomfortable silence spread between them. Claire cleared her throat. “About that,” she said, a blush creeping over her cheeks. “I’ve been thinking. Maybe it’s time to bring the salt back to Prospect.”

  Jo peered at her. “What are you saying, Claire?”

  Claire took a deep breath. “What if we reinstate the salt for the December’s Eve bonfire this year?”

  Jo dusted off her hands and considered the idea. “Folks would like that, I bet. And, even better, it would sure rile up Whit. If everyone starts eating our salt again, he’ll have a harder time getting rid of us.”

  At the mention of Whit, an idea started spinning in Claire’s mind. She narrowed her eyes and weighed it for a moment. “Jo,” she said at last, stretching herself out on a heap of dusty packing crates and trying to keep her voice casual, “what if we told Whit the truth about who you are? He probably deserves to know.”

  Jo stuck her hands on her hips. “He doesn’t deserve to have his head attached to his neck.” She was silent for a moment and then frowned. “I don’t see what good telling Whit any of this would do.”

  “Think about it. We could warn Whit that if he doesn’t leave us alone, we’ll go public with some nasty truths about his mother. We can prove it if we have to. We have Ida’s letter. And I bet we could find Father Flynn.”

  Jo frowned. “I have his address. I got it from Ethan. But I don’t know what I’d say after all this time, Claire. I haven’t worked that out.”

  Claire stretched out her open hands, as if weighing the thick barn air. Jo always was a hard sell. “We’ll make a trade,” Claire said. “If Whit leaves Salt Creek Farm alone, we won’t go any further with our story. But if he wants to keep fighting with us, then we’ll go public with what we know. Tit for tat. You can worry about Father Flynn later.” She folded her fingers back in her lap and waited.

  “I don’t know, Claire,” Jo said. “I reckon we might need more proof than an unsigned letter.”

  Claire grinned. “I know, but the local papers would enjoy chewing on the story in the meantime, and Whit would sure hate having to share his noble lineage with the likes of us. Not to mention what it would do to Ida’s reputation.”

  Jo snorted. “It wasn’t that good to begin with.” Then she paused, thinking the plan over. It was crazy, but it was all they had. “Okay,” she finally conceded. “Maybe it could work. But how do we get Whit to listen? It’s not like we can have our secretary call his secretary to arrange a meeting.”

  Claire tried not to look triumphant. “I’ve thought of that, too. We can have Dee do it.”

  Jo frowned. “What?”

  Claire waved her hands, still spectacularly white in spite of the summer’s labor. “We’ll write something ourselves but say it’s from her. I know what her handwriting looks like. It wouldn’t be hard to copy. Think about it,” she continued. “If I ask Whit to meet us, he’ll just ignore me. If you do it, he’ll just laugh, but if he thinks it’s Dee—especially if we mention Jordy—he’ll think she wants to come crawling back to him, and for Whit the prospect of someone groveling is like sugar set out for a fly. We’ll say she wants him to meet her in the barn, but we’ll be waiting instead.”

  Jo scowled. “I’m still not sure.”

  Claire smacked her hands on her knees. “Do you have a better idea?”

  Jo admitted she didn’t. And so they planned it. They’d deliver a letter to Whit forged in Dee’s hand, telling him to meet her in the barn on the night of the December’s Eve bonfire.

  “It’s perfect,” Claire said, narrowing her eyes. “The entire town will be in one spot, and in the confusion no one will notice if Whit’s not there. And we never stay. If anything unpleasant happens, everyone will be busy.” She thought about the town huddled around the flames, distracted with the return of the salt, their attention focused on what it would say about their futures. Jo eyeballed her.

  “What will happen that’s unpleasant, Claire?” she asked, as if she knew that Claire hadn’t told her the whole plan.

  Claire looked back at her with flat eyes. “I have no idea.” She stood up, pushed the barrow into a corner, and hung her tools on the wall. “Well, then,” she said. “It’s all settled.” They began walking back to the house. In the distance the ocean seethed. Behind Claire the barn loomed, and as she cast a final glance back at it, she pictured the salt piled inside, coarse and gray, brittle as bone and twice as dry, a heap of possibility waiting for the spark of her touch.

  Claire wrote the note to Whit that evening while Dee was upstairs feeding Jordy and Jo was busy fiddling with some old nuts and bolts on the front porch. The only way Whit would come to the salt barn, she knew, was if he believed he was going to get something really good out of it. But what did Dee have to give him? Money? None of them had that—not after paying the bank. Undying love? Claire snorted and chewed on the end of the pen. That’s what had led to their all being stuck out here in the first place. That left only Jordy.

  Claire wasn’t sure how Whit felt about his son. On the one hand, Jordy was definitely an embarrassment for him, a physical mani
festation of his moral weakness, no better in his eyes than one of the lowly children he’d refused to consider adopting. On the other hand, Jordy was the son and heir that Claire had never been able to produce, and now that she was gone, wouldn’t Whit be desperate for some kind of child to carry on his family name, especially on land he was convinced should be his? Claire would just have to find out.

  “Meet me in the salt barn at eight-thirty on December’s Eve,” Claire scribbled in an approximation of Dee’s round, childish hand. “I’m begging you. Come and see your son for one time. At least give me that.” She picked up the page and scanned her work. The loops of the G’s and F’s were wrong, but Claire was betting that Whit wouldn’t notice. She wasn’t even sure he knew what Dee’s handwriting looked like. Claire signed Dee’s name with a heart next to it.

  Without telling Jo, Claire had changed the meeting time slightly. On December’s Eve, when Prospect was looking to its future, Claire would be settling the scores of her past. It wouldn’t take long. Just an extra half hour. That would be plenty for her purposes. She folded the letter and sealed it into a fresh envelope. Now all she had to do was wait.

  The day before the December’s Eve festival, Claire headed to Turner House bearing two envelopes—one full of salt, one of deceit.

  Jo and Dee were handing out the rest of the salt packets, going from mailbox to mailbox across town. Claire and Jo had agreed that, going forward, maybe it was better if everyone got to throw his or her own packet of salt to the flames. Claire would toss the first packet in, of course, per tradition, but after that, the sisters decided, it was best to let people take their futures into their own hands.

  They even had plans to deliver a salt envelope to Cutt at the Lighthouse, and secretly Claire wondered how that would go, if Cutt would receive his daughter and grandson with open arms or, as Claire rather suspected, he would shut the door in their faces. Dee had wondered why Claire insisted on delivering the salt envelope to Whit personally, and Claire had had to think fast to distract her. “Because I want the last thing I give him to be the first thing he knew about me,” she said.