Sandcastles

by April Hill

  “I’ll do that, Mr. Ludlow. I’ve got to be going now. Good bye.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Gwen rushed down the walkway and leaped into the car, constructing a plausible story to tell Josh as she drove. If he found out she was poking around, of course there would be hell to pay, assuming he didn’t simply tell her to pack up and get out. Gwen swore and pounded the steering wheel in anger and frustration, wondering what it was about her that brought disaster down on her head with such regularity. By the time she pulled in the driveway, she had decided on using the closest version of the truth she could get away with.

  He was raking the small front yard, and as he walked over to greet her, the lie spilled from her lips before he had the car door completely open.

  “Oh, by the way, Josh, first I had my hair cut and then guess what!”

  He smiled at the illogical question, but then glanced in the back of the car. “Okay, let me try a wild guess. You forgot the groceries?”

  Gwen dropped her head onto the steering wheel in disbelief. The groceries!

  “Oh God!” she cried. “How could I?”

  Josh opened the car door and grinned. “Move over. I’ll drive this time.”

  As they drove slowly back into town, he glanced over at her a couple of times waiting for her to say something.

  “Your hair looks nice. Francine’s cheap, but she does a pretty good job as long as you don’t let her talk you into anything too avant-garde.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She’s usually fast, too, at eight bucks. So did you go to the drugstore, look around town, what?”

  “I’m sorry about the groceries, Josh” Gwen said, miserably. “I’m a jerk.”

  “No problem. Lots of people are dazzled by the attractions Grove City has to offer. You could spend days there and not take in all the sights. You should have asked for the Zagat guide before you left the house.”

  “Very funny. But that’s what I was about to tell you before the grocery fiasco. I found this little shop called Ludlow’s, and the man there said - “

  His jaw hardened. “You talked to Paul Ludlow?”

  “Not ‘talked’ exactly. I was shopping....”

  “In Ludlow’s?”

  “Well, not shopping, exactly. But he said he recognized me as your wife’s ‘cousin’?”

  Josh groaned. “Yeah. That’s my fault. Sorry, but I didn’t need more questions. Ludlow’s got the biggest mouth in the county. How in the hell did you wander into a dump like Ludlow’s? My God! It’s in the middle of nowhere out on the goddamned edge of town.”

  “I was lost,” she lied quickly “And it looked so... so cute.”

  “Cute,” he repeated. “Well what did you and Paul and Wynnie find to talk about?”

  “Wynnie?”

  “Wynefryd Ludlow. Your nitwit hostess at the elfin cottage.”

  “Nothing really—just chit-chat.”

  “Nothing else?” He looked at her closely.

  Gwen pondered her next lie briefly and decided she was safe. “No, not really.”

  Suddenly as they turned onto Grove City’s ‘Main Street’, she changed her mind. “Mr. Ludlow did mention that he knew your wife,” she blurted out.

  Josh nodded. “He used to have a gallery in that same ridiculous building. Did a surprisingly good business out of it for a while. Susannah always felt sorry for the downtrodden and bad for the local businesses, so she let Ludlow show some of her smaller pieces. He’s been a pest ever since trying to get me to let him handle the rest of them.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m not interested.” He pulled into a parking place in front of the small grocery store. “You still have the grocery list?”

  * * * * *

  Having gotten away with her first investigative outing, Gwen began to plan for another. She had decided by now that “investigating” sounded even better than probing and vastly superior to snooping, so when Josh left to buy new tires for the Jeep at a dealer some forty miles away, she felt safe in poking about the overgrown garden at the far end of the property, looking for the gate to the abandoned beach staircase. Like the beach entrance to the same stairway, this one had been nailed firmly shut, almost lost in the underbrush and hidden by long-dead flowerbeds and tangled vines. A large tree overhung the gate, blocking what view there might have been down the stairs and beyond to the beach. It took longer than she had hoped to tear off enough of the overgrowth to get to the gate, and several more precious minutes to pull out the rusted nails with a claw hammer she’d found in the storage shed on the deck.

  When she was finished, the gate creaked open on badly rusted hinges, just far enough to allow her to squeeze through onto the small landing. From here she could see the slanted roof of the “guest house/studio,” its shingles laden with a deep brown thatch of dead pine needles. Built where it was on the second lower landing, Gwen could see that the little house had an unobstructed ocean view. It looked seaward to the cove and lagoon, and she could only imagine how lovely it had once been in full summer with its tall windows open to the ocean breeze. She stepped cautiously onto the first step and made her way down the shaky staircase.

  She rubbed the crusted dirt from one of the smaller rear windows and peeked inside. The furniture in the one large room was draped in white sheets, and by the front window a partially completed canvas still rested on a tall wooden easel, as if the artist had simply stepped away for a moment. Everywhere she looked, canvases leaned in neat stacks, their painted surfaces facing the wall. Gwen tried the padlocked rear door and when it wouldn’t open, she pried at the latch with the hammer until the latch simply tore from the wood frame and the door yawned opened, squeaking.

  Once inside, Gwen stood for a long moment and turned around and around with delight. The little building was nestled among the twisted branches of the spreading cedars that clung to the face of the cliff, giving an occupant the distinct impression of being in a tree house, suspended in space with nothing but the ocean as far as you could see. Enthralled, Gwen opened one of the tall windows and sat down on the dusty sill to take in the view and breathe the air. From the deck of the main house most of the ocean was obscured by dense trees, but the view from Susannah Channing’s window, especially as the sun began to set, was breathtaking.

  After a minute or so, Gwen got up and walked about the darkening room, touching the dusty relics of Susannah Denning’s life. Several stoneware jars of different sizes held a large number and chaotic variety of brushes. Dried-out, half-squeezed tubes of paint were heaped here and there on tables in a pleasantly confused jumble. Unlike her husband, whose overriding sense of order was apparent in everything he did, neatness had apparently not been one of Susannah’s priorities. Not a single tabletop and very few flat surfaces in the entire room had escaped paint splatters, as if Susannah had simply tested her color choices on whatever solid surface she was close to. Gwen smiled, running her fingertips across one of the tabletops where the accumulated paint had run into riotous globs and rainbows of color, occasionally dripping down a table leg onto the floor. She knew enough to recognize the paint as oil.

  And then she turned her attention to the stacked paintings.

  “I wondered how long it would take you to find your way down here,” Josh said quietly. Startled, Gwen whirled to find him standing in the doorway. “She never liked California,” he said, walking around the room, picking up things and then putting them back down. “She missed Maine and the wonderful light. The Maine coast had a special light that she talked about constantly, but I could never see the difference. We moved here after the book came out because I couldn’t deal with the gawkers and the intrusion any longer. I built the house for her, tried to make it what she wanted, and for a while it seemed all right. She began to paint again and found a good gallery in San Francisco to handle her work. She had always wanted children, so we started trying for a baby that summer. Then they found the tumor.”

  Gwen gasped. “Tumor? I thought your wife drow
ned. “

  “She was undergoing treatment when she drowned,” he said shortly. “She’d been having headaches, and for Susannah that was unusual. She was the most consistently healthy person I’ve ever known. I don’t think I ever saw her really sick. She ran four miles a day, had been a vegetarian all her life, had a glass of wine maybe three or four times a year. Her only real vice was smoking, and she finally kicked that, too, by sheer force of will. Just walked in one day and told me that kids shouldn’t have parents who smoked and then threw her last pack in the fireplace. That was it.

  “They found the tumor that summer, just after we got the news that she was pregnant. She had finished this a month or so earlier.” He reached down and turned over a large canvas—a view from the studio window.

  “It’s lovely,” Gwen said softly. “I can almost smell the ocean.” She sat down on a chair. “I wish I had known Susannah, Josh. I’m sure I would have liked her.”

  “No, you wouldn’t, “ he said sharply, “not after that summer.” He set the painting down. “Are you done here?”

  “May I see some of the others?” she asked.

  “Not now. It’ll be dark soon and the stairs are even worse than I remember them. Let’s go.”

  They climbed the stairs carefully, avoiding the splintered ones and trying not to touch the loosened handrail. When they were back in the “garden,” he took her arm and made her face him.

  “When I got back from town I took the dogs and looked up and down the beach for you for a half an hour before I figured out where you’d gone. The back door was wide open. You scared the hell out of me.”

  “I forgot about the door. I went out to the shed to get a hammer. I’m sorry.”

  Josh shook his head.

  “When I tried that defense as a kid,” he remarked, “my grandmother always said, ‘You’re about to be sorrier.’ That was usually just before she lit into my butt with a switch.”

  Gwen sighed. “I know I screwed up again, Josh but I didn’t really think of this as snooping.”

  “You’re not getting spanked for snooping. You’re getting spanked for frightening me.”

  Gwen sighed. “Anyway, you should have known I’d come here the first chance I got. Being an enquiring reporter is a hard habit to break. That’s what I’m calling myself, now, by the way—an enquiring reporter.”

  “Let’s see how long this habit takes to break,” he said. “It took two pretty good wallopings to cure you of smoking, as I recall.”

  “Three,” she pouted. “I obviously remember these things better than you do. But this is different, isn’t it? I explained my reasons. Are you still going to....”

  “I’m still going to.”

  “Come on, Josh not outside like this!”

  “Outside—at the scene of the crime, as it were.” He nodded toward the dismantled fence.

  Gwen looked up toward the distant road nervously. “Someone might drive by,” she argued, “or turn into the driveway.”

  Josh wasn’t impressed. “Maybe four cars a day come down that road. You’ll just have to take your chances. Maybe it’ll add to the excitement—the mystery. Now pull your jeans and panties down and lean against the tree, if you need to.”

  He reached up to the gnarled tree over the destroyed gate and pulled down a thick, sturdy switch—supple, but thicker, and not at all like the slender switches he’d used before.

  Gwen looked around frantically. It wasn’t dark yet, and if a car happened to turn into the private driveway, the gaps between the bushes could provide a careful observer a view down into the garden, especially in the glare of headlights.

  “Josh,” she pleaded. “Please! Not here!”

  He tapped the stick against his thigh and then gave the seat of her jeans one swift hard swat. “Down. All the way.”

  Keeping one wary eye on the road and blushing from her neck to her hairline, Gwen unbuttoned her jeans and slipped them down, along with her panties, then leaned forward and placed her hands flat against the tree trunk. There was already a sharp sting in her left cheek, which did not bode well for the moments ahead.

  “Spread your legs,” he ordered. “And don’t move. Every time you take your hands off that tree, I’m going to add two more.”

  Gwen obeyed, groaning under her breath. The stick didn’t look as lethal as his belt or the infamous paddle, but she remembered the old adage about looks being deceiving.

  A moment later she understood and almost immediately added another two swats to her total by dropping both hands and grabbing her backside as the stick struck home for the first time.

  “O-O-W-W-W!” she shrieked. “Goddammit, Josh that... O-W-W!” The second and third blows caught her directly across the backs of her thighs, just below the sensitive under curve of her buttocks. Denning pointed to the tree and Gwen moaned, but she still bent forward, clinging to the tree trunk more tightly this time. Two swats landed across her right cheek and another two across her left with such speed that she barely had time to gasp before the next one arrived. Gwen squirmed in misery but held on to the tree, unwilling to pay the price for another violation. She paid, nonetheless, as Josh administered one quick blazing swat to each of her calves before returning to the prime area of interest. He changed position slightly to bring his next strokes from underneath—strong stinging blows that landed directly on the soft swell of her each cheek where it met her thigh. Gwen gave up and let go of the tree and howled in protest as he pulled her across his thigh and laid into her buttocks for real, crisscrossing her already-crosshatched ass with a series of sharp blows that felt like molten fire.

  Finally, he added the promised “penalty,” in the form of three solid swats across the crest of her upturned buttocks which he counted aloud before taking a seat on the nearby wall to watch with undisguised amusement as she hopped around the tiny yard, rubbing her reddened cheeks.

  “Are you noticing a slight decrease in that burning urge of yours to be an enquiring reporter?” he asked, wryly.

  Gwen pulled her pants up very carefully, flinching as she inched them higher. She looked up at the road again. “Now that you mention it, yes,” she growled. “Tell me, were there any witnesses to my humiliation? I was too preoccupied to notice.”

  He shook his head. “Just the one truck full of lumberjacks stopping for a quick beer and a look at the ocean. Nobody important.” He leaned forward to tap her rear end with the remains of the stick. “I’ll bet that really smarts, doesn’t it?”

  She winced as she threw him a nasty look. “Smarts. Yes that’s one word for it, I suppose.”

  “My father was Welsh, as you probably know, but my mother was actually born in Maine and I spent several summers there as a child—visiting my maternal grandmother. I learned a lot from her—not the least of which was that a thorough switching leaves a two-day sting and a three-day itch. She thought hairbrushes and belts were for sissies. Of course Gran was stronger than I am. From hauling in all those lobster traps, I suppose.”

  “You should write all this shit down Denning,” Gwen sulked. “You could call it ‘Folk Wisdom From a Twisted New England Boyhood.’ A corny best seller like that might put you right up there on the New York Times bestseller list.”

  She tried to sit down on the wall next to him, changed her mind and leaned against the garden fence, careful to protect her sore backside from touching it. “I am sorry though—again—for snooping. I can’t seem to stop myself.”

  He got up and came over to where she stood and kissed her.

  “Let’s go in. I don’t know about you, but I’m beat.”

  “You’re beat,” she repeated sullenly. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am to hear that.”

  Later, inside the house, he noticed that she was still fidgeting.

  “Still bad?”

  “I itch,” she complained. “And not just where you … I swear that I itch all over. So according to your sainted New England Granny, I can expect this to last for three whole days?”

&nbs
p; Josh thought for a moment. “That tree out there was covered with some sort of vine. What does poison oak look like?” he asked suddenly. “Do you know?”

  “That’s not funny!” Gwen wailed. “Besides you handled it too for a very long time as I recall. If I was exposed so to speak you were too.”

  He grinned. “Ah, but I remembered to wash my hands when we came in. Like that sign in the men’s room at Wal-Mart: ‘Employees must wash hands before going back to work.’ Don’t worry, though. I believe I read somewhere that a person has ten minutes to wash before....”

  “Are you enjoying yourself?” she cried. “We’ve been back in the house for a fucking hour! You could have told me earlier, you sneaky .…”

  “I’m sorry, Gwen,” he said. “And to tell the truth, I’m a little sorry about the... what happened at the studio. I seem to be getting cranky as I get old.”

  She rubbed her bottom. “You could say that. You’re sure it wasn’t poison oak, though, right?”

  “Only time will tell.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s been a little more than an hour. Any other symptoms? Would you like me to check it out - the area in question?”

  Gwen demurred. “Another of those ‘hats’ you wear? No thank you, Dr. Schweitzer; I’ll take care of it myself ,but if this is poison oak I’d start sleeping with one eye open, if I were you. “

  Chapter Six

  Gwen’s writing continued to go well, and with each day that passed, Josh seemed more pleased with her progress. Although he had never actually promised her as much, she suspected that he would show the book to someone when he believed it was ready. Despite his protestations, Gwen knew from the mail she’d seen on his desk that he was still communicating with his publisher in New York. She also knew that no matter what he was telling her, Joshua Denning was working on a new book.

  In the days following her discovery of Susannah’s studio, Gwen hadn’t asked again about it or renewed her request to see more of Susannah’s paintings. He’d taken her snooping remarkably well, and most of her quick paddlings in the days following that night’s switching were precipitated, not for snooping, but by her continued misuse of dependent clauses and the overuse of florid dialogue. And slowly, as she came to accept his sense of justice, with only rare complaint, even Gwen began to see a dramatic improvement in the stories she gave to him.