Stargazey Point

by Shelley Noble

  “Oh, he left at the crack of dawn,” Millie said. “Gone fishing with Silas Cook. Didn’t even have breakfast. Said he and Silas would grab some sausage biscuits from the Tackle Shack.” Millie tsked, giving her opinion of breakfast at the Tackle Shack.

  “All that cholesterol,” Marnie explained to Abbie, mischief in her eyes. “Unlike the eggs, grits, bacon, and biscuits and gravy he would have had here.”

  Millie pursed her lips at her sister. “Won’t you have a biscuit, Abbie? I made them just this morning.”

  Abbie took one, not daring to look at Marnie and risk bursting out laughing.

  Millie passed the platter to Marnie. “I just hope they catch something worth eating.”

  The bisque might be thinner, but it was still delicious. And the salad was so fresh that Abbie knew the lettuce must have come straight from the garden.

  The sisters refused to let Abbie help with the cleaning up. She noticed there was no dishwasher and she could only sympathize with Ervina having to wash all those pieces of china and silverware by hand the night before.

  “You go on and enjoy yourself.” Millie began folding a dish towel, a crease between her eyebrows. “I do wish Cabot was available today to show you around. So much more fun with someone your own age, though I expect he is a bit older than you, still . . . I suppose we could get out the car ourselves.”

  “No, really, I’m fine,” Abbie said.

  “Maybe Abbie would just like to explore a bit on her own,” Marnie said. “We have a library full of old musty books if you’d like to drag one of the chaises out into the sun. Or take an umbrella down to the beach, equally musty I’m sure, since God knows when anyone has been down to the beach.”

  “I thought I might walk into town. Maybe pick up some writing supplies. Keep a journal while I’m here.” Try to get rid of her damn anger and resident ghosts.

  “Oh, but I’m sure we must have—” Millie began.

  “The Stargazey Inn has a lovely gift shop,” Marnie said. “Tell Bethanne you’re staying with us and she’ll give you the local rate. Or if you want something more utilitarian, Hadley’s probably keeps some school supplies.”

  “Abbie doesn’t want to go into Hadley’s. He hasn’t given that old shack a painting or a sweeping in decades.”

  “But he’s convenient, and it’ll give Abbie a bit of local color. Hadley’s quite friendly, once you get past the missing tooth.” Marnie grinned at Abbie.

  Abbie smiled back. “I think I saw it on my way through town.”

  “I just don’t know why they can’t fix up this end of town like everyone else has.”

  Marnie closed her eyes, then looked at Abbie. Obviously a long and repeated complaint. “This end of town took the brunt of the last big hurricane. It ripped the beach out and devastated the pier and the surrounding buildings. It’s taken them longer to recover than the people more inland.”

  Her interest piqued, Abbie said. “It looks like Crispin House survived. That was pretty lucky.”

  Marnie nodded slowly. “The old place lives a charmed life, that’s for sure. We lost a bunch of outbuildings, had some minor damage to the porches and the roof, but we were a lot luckier than most.” She paused, looking out the kitchen window.

  “So far, anyway.” She tapped the woodwork three times. Millie did the same.

  Abbie let herself out the back door and walked to town. Beneath the tunnel of trees, the air was dense, heavy with humidity. Moss hung from the overhead branches, like Merlin’s beard, shrouding the leaves and blocking out the sun. And the light at the far end seemed smaller than the light behind her. Abbie wondered if this is what Alice felt falling down the rabbit hole.

  She didn’t much like that image. She was supposed to be going forward not falling down. But as her mother often told the many schoolteachers who tried to reason with her about her children’s educations, “It’s a crime to stifle a creative mind.” Which in consequence had given the Sinclair children license to think outside the box. Which for the most part, they did. It was a blessing and a curse. Instigator of bright ideas and irrational fears.

  And Abbie would like to be free of it for just a few minutes today.

  So spill. What does she look like? What’s she doing here? Does she seem nice? How long is she going to stay?”

  “The wrench?” Cabot stretched out his hand for the pipe wrench that Sarah Davis held just out of reach.

  “Not until you give me the scoop.” Sarah took a step back and wiggled the wrench at him.

  “I thought you wanted me and Otis to put in the water heater for you.”

  “Not until you give me the lowdown on the mysterious visitor.” Sarah flashed a smile at him. She was all of five feet two in heels. Today she was barefooted. She was swallowed by a pair of oversized overalls rolled up at the cuff to show athletic nut-brown calves. A batik headscarf was tied turban style around her head.

  Hard to believe she had a PhD and lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

  “Hell, Sarah, I don’t know. Blond, blue eyes, late twenties, early thirties, hard to tell. She looked tired.” She’d looked haunted, he thought, dark hollows under her eyes, a marked contrast to a soft creamy complexion and that fine pale hair.

  “She’s not the only one lookin’ tired this morning. You lose sleep dreaming about her blue eyes?”

  “Oh, cut the crap,” Cabot said. “I didn’t give her a thought after I left Crispin House.”

  Which might or might not be the truth. He didn’t actually think about Abbie Sinclair, not consciously anyway. But for the first time since moving to Stargazey, Cabot had not slept well, and he was afraid he might have the Crispins’ new guest to thank for that.

  Sarah raised one eyebrow and fisted both hands and the wrench on her nonexistent hips. “Cat got’cha tongue? Because, honey, if you don’t start spilling the beans, I’m gonna get Ervina to put the hoodoo on you.”

  Cabot barked out a laugh. “What would your colleagues at Columbia think if they could hear you now?”

  “Pots and kettles, Cabot Reynolds . . . the third,” Sarah said, lapsing into her normal New York accent.

  Cabot snorted. “That’s how Millie introduced me to Ms. Sinclair last night. She was not impressed.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  Cab sighed. “I guess. Yeah, she is. But kind of, I don’t know, elusive. Or maybe she was just being reserved . . . or secretive, conniving, dishonest . . .”

  “Okay, I get the picture. Here’s your wrench. I’m obviously going to have to scope this out myself. Now come on outside. I think I just heard Otis drive up with the new water heater.”

  Cabot returned the wrench to the toolbox and followed Sarah through the three-room community center and onto the front porch. Otis Monroe was climbing out of a rusted Chevrolet. It had once been an Impala, but Otis had torched off the top, making it a rather suspect convertible. A huge cardboard box was strapped into the backseat.

  Otis opened the back door and climbed in to loosen the straps, then he and Cabot maneuvered it out of the car. With Sarah giving directions, they carried it back through the house to the storeroom.

  “So what do you know about the visitor up at the house?” Otis asked.

  “God,” Cabot said, exasperated. “You’d think this town never saw a tourist before.”

  Otis snorted. “Haven’t seen too many in the last few years. And especially not this time of the year. I saw Silas
and Beau getting into the bateaux this morning. Both mentioned that you had been up to the house last night for dinner. Beau seems to think she’s a pretty thing.”

  Which didn’t make Cabot feel any better.

  Otis gave him a cocky grin. That grin mixed with his red-orange hair and the freckles spread across his latte-colored skin always made Cab think of a Gullah Huck Finn.

  “Maybe you’re just keeping secrets.”

  “Hell, I don’t know more than anybody else. She hardly said a word during dinner and I left afterward.”

  “You are some kind of somethin’.” Otis turned to Sarah and confided, “For a man who doesn’t know much and for a woman who don’t say much, Cab here still managed to get himself a date for tomorrow.”

  “What?” Sarah stopped pulling tape off the water heater box and screwed up her face at him.

  “Ooo-ee, you’ve gone and made Sarah jealous.”

  “Hush your mouth, boy. Cabot the third would give his eyeteeth to go out with me.”

  “Absolutely,” Cab said and was only half kidding, not that he was about to go down that road. Ervina would put more than hoodoo on him if she found out he was messing with her great-granddaughter, no matter what kind of sophisticated New Yorker Sarah had become. “What are eyeteeth again?”

  Sarah threw a wad of packing tape at him.

  “Come on, you two. I ain’t got all day.”

  “Lord, don’t tell me you got a job.”

  “Aw hell, Sarah. It’s not like I’m not looking. But I’m not gonna commute to no Myrtle Beach. If I wanted to drive a half hour to work and back each day, I’d move to Manhattan with you.”

  “Not with me, you won’t.” Sarah stepped aside so Cab could pull the box away.

  He and Otis lifted the water heater and shimmied it over to stand next to the old one.

  Cab gave the old one a shake. “Seems empty to me.” He knelt down and loosened the rusted connection that had been soaking in WD-40 for the last hour. The three of them managed to roll the old water heater out the back door and to the side of the house.

  “I’m not putting that dirty old thing in my car,” Otis said.

  “Well, I’m not going to let it sit here in the yard like some kind of white trash.” Sarah’s fists went back to her hips. Then she looked past them and her eyes widened.

  “Well, well, I do believe that’s the Crispins’ mystery guest in the flesh. And she’s gonna pass right by us.”

  Chapter 4

  Abbie was glad when she stepped out into sunlight and a wide street lined with palmettos and shrubbery.

  To her left she could see the openings of drives on the far side of the street. But on her side, there was unbroken shrubbery, which lent credence to her idea that the Crispins owned a whole lot of beachfront property.

  She turned toward town. She’d hardly been aware of it as the taxi drove through yesterday. She had the impression of several blocks of colorful quaint shops petering out to the more derelict “this end of town” that Millie had talked about.

  And this end of town was in pretty bad shape, she had to agree. She came to a stop in the middle of the tarmac where it widened to make a parking lot in front of the old pier she’d seen from the beach. Though it was hardly recognizable as a pier. It tilted, twisted, and folded in on itself until it terminated at a covered pavilion perched precariously against the tide.

  She walked across the parking lot toward the octagonal building she’d seen on her ride through town. A closer look revealed broken latticework and a damaged cupola at the peak of the eight-sided roof. It could have been an old meeting hall or possibly a church, and it was a shame that it had been abandoned and left to fall.

  Next to it was a whitewashed house with a sign above a blue door. community center. A rusted car was parked in front of it, and three people were standing next to it, one of whom might be the man she’d met last night.

  Abbie quickly looked away and crossed the street. She wasn’t ready to meet the locals yet, and she was in no hurry to renew her acquaintance with Cabot Reynolds the third sooner than necessary.

  She found herself standing in front of Hadley’s, a clapboard store with one ancient gas pump and wooden steps that led up to a porch complete with barrels, an old chest-style drinks cooler, and a screen door that didn’t close all the way.

  She just needed a notebook. She could buy it here and return to Crispin House. But as she contemplated going inside, three men accompanied by a lumbering hound dog came out. All four stopped to stare at her. She kept walking.

  She passed two abandoned buildings with their windows boarded over. The chimney of one had fallen, and the bricks still lay in a pile at the side. The other’s porch had been removed, and the boarded door hovered three feet above the ground. The hurricane could have happened last week for all the rebuilding that had taken place.

  After a gap the size of a small house, she came to a brick sidewalk. And like Dorothy, she stepped into a Technicolor world.

  The town transformed into an assortment of pastel storefronts and clapboard businesses, big and small, tasteful and not so tasteful. Colorful and quaint as all get-out. A café, a real estate agent, a gift store, a tea shop, an art gallery, and some other businesses that were closed for the season. On the next block she came to the Stargazey Inn.

  Sitting back from the street behind an ornamental iron fence, the inn was a square, cream-colored building with the door and windows picked out in blue. There was no sign of it being open except for the white rocking chairs that sat unoccupied on the small porch. But the gate was unlatched, and from what Marnie had said, Abbie figured at least the gift store was open for business.

  She climbed the steps, deliberated about ringing the bell or just walking in, and decided on the latter. She stepped into a charming foyer, decorated in chintz and wicker. A dark wooden registration desk curved against one pale green wall; next to it an archway led to the gift shop. It appeared to be open, but no one came to see who had entered the premises.

  Abbie walked into the shop almost tiptoeing. The ambiance seemed to call for it. A glass display case was filled with jewelry and figurines. A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf held the latest fiction, cookbooks, books about the South and about Charleston, and a pamphlet on Stargazey Point.

  Abbie picked it up and was just beginning to read when a woman about the same age as Abbie came into the room.

  “Oh, I am sorry,” she said in a soft drawl, “I was in back.”

  Abbie noticed that she had a purse slipped over one shoulder. “Are you open? I didn’t see anyone so I just came in.”

  “Yes, I’m open. Can I help you with anything in particular?” The woman smiled. She was nice-looking, though not wearing makeup, with dark shoulder-length hair and dark eyes. As she reached to put her purse down, Abbie saw that her fingernails were bitten down to the quick.

  “Actually I just came in to see if you sold writing materials.”

  “For writing letters or journaling?”

  Did people still write letters? Or journaling. It’s what people in the suburbs or in recovery called putting your thoughts on paper. Abbie couldn’t bring herself to call it that. “A journal, if you have it, or any kind of a notebook.”

  “Sure. Just over here.” She led Abbie to a rolltop desk that held stacks of colorful journals and beach-themed notepaper.

  “You must be the guest the Crispins have been expecting.”

  “Yes.” Abbie reached for a seashell fabric journal.

  The woman was just trying to be helpful, and Abbie was being rude. She forced a smile and looked up. “I just got in yesterday.”

  “I know. I mean, I’m not usually so nosy. But you’re all Millie has talked about for the last week. We’ve all
been waiting for your arrival.” She bit her lip. “They’re just so sweet, all three of them. Beau comes in for my rhubarb pie sometimes.” She looked thoughtful. “And to talk.”

  “Beau? He hasn’t said much since I’ve been here.”

  “Oh, well, mainly I talk and he listens. It’s nice to have someone listen.”

  Abbie smiled. “I’ll take this one.” She thrust the seashell-patterned journal into the woman’s hands. “And two of these pens.” She grabbed the first two she could reach and handed them over.

  The woman flushed. Looked as if Abbie had slapped her, and Abbie chastised herself for being so abrupt. The woman was probably lonely. The town wasn’t exactly crawling with tourists. But she hadn’t thought it would be this hard—a simple conversation with a stranger. She’d been holed up with herself far too long.

  “I’m Abbie Sinclair,” she said.

  “Hi. I’m Bethanne Bridges. I run the inn and the gift shop. Actually I own it; well, my husband and I did, but . . .” She shrugged, trailed off.

  “It’s lovely,” Abbie said.

  Bethanne rang up her purchase and Abbie paid cash. No reason to keep receipts for her taxes. She wasn’t on location.

  Bethanne returned her purchases in a neat white bag with a picture of the inn marked out in blue. White and blue seemed to be a theme around here. She’d seen the blue door on the community center she’d passed by as well as on the real estate office and a tiny hole in the wall that she assumed was a post office.

  “Thanks.” Abbie started to leave. Bethanne grabbed her purse and caught up to her. “I was just going over to Flora’s. They serve afternoon tea or coffee. It can be daunting in a new place where you don’t know anyone. Would you like to join me?”

  Abbie’s first response was to decline, but she stopped herself. Bethanne was being friendly, and Abbie needed to start interacting with people again. “Sure. That would be . . . great.” Abbie let Bethanne lead her out of the gift shop and through the front door.

  She turned a sign over that said back in ten minutes. “Which hardly matters since I don’t have a soul staying at the inn now. Come on, it’s just right down the street.”