The Color of Light

by White, Karen

  As if she had called to him, he lifted his head and his deep gray gaze met hers, moving her forward. He met her halfway and he held her while she kept her eyes closed, knowing that when she opened them, she would have to face whatever nightmare lay beneath the sand in the open, dark pit. But here, in his arms, she felt safe and cherished. I love him.

  Then Linc held her away from him, his hands on her shoulders, and she saw the stretcher and the bright orange body bag behind him, and she knew.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” Her voice choked, the words coming out in a whisper.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe because I wanted to spare you this.” He indicated the scene behind him with his chin.

  “Lauren?” she managed.

  “It’s too early to tell. All they know for sure right now is that the body’s been there for some time. They’ll take the . . . remains for an autopsy. Weber said they’ll see if there’s enough of the upper and lower mandible to try and compare with Lauren’s dental records. Old Dr. Nordone still practices here, so that shouldn’t take very long.”

  His voice trailed away as he looked past her toward the ocean, the horizon reflected in his clear eyes much as she supposed the South Carolina shoreline had once reflected in the eyes of his pirate ancestors.

  They both looked up as Mason approached them. His eyes were cold as he directed his gaze on Linc, like a gull circling over its prey. “I’m going to need to ask you some questions, Rising. I’d like for you to come down to the station right now, if you would.”

  For a moment, Jillian thought Linc would refuse. Instead, he nodded his head. “I need to get changed first. I’ll meet you back here in about ten minutes.” He gave one last glance toward Jillian, then made to move up toward the house.

  “Wait!” she called, and kissed him quickly. “Call me when you’re done. I don’t care what time.”

  He nodded again, the skin around his mouth pale, and moved toward the boardwalk.

  “Jillian.”

  She turned toward Mason, her back stiff. “Do you need to question me, too?”

  “Not now. I’ll let you know.”

  “Fine,” she said, hearing her clipped voice. Her gaze strayed toward the pit, where two men wearing surgical gloves were squatting over something in the sand, while a third took pictures. She didn’t want to see, and looked back at Mason.

  His eyes had softened. “You go on home now, Jillian. It’s not safe here.”

  She could tell that he wasn’t just talking about the pit. But she had no energy to argue. She turned and began walking toward her house.

  “And keep Gracie away from here, too. I don’t want to see her getting hurt.”

  She half turned and sent him a cooling glance. “Don’t worry, Mason. Neither one of us will be likely to step foot on this beach for quite some time.”

  Each step felt labored and tedious, as if she had just begun the longest journey of her life. It was only when she had reached her own back porch that she realized why the beach had descended into silence. Every last bird had disappeared.

  Jillian sat cross-legged on the end of the boardwalk, clutching her binoculars, her flashlight and baby monitor nearby. She kept the binoculars pressed against her face, checking off the stars one by one and trying not to think of the dark pit just a short walk away across the dunes.

  “Looking for your star?”

  Jillian startled at the sound of Linc’s voice, but didn’t turn around. “It’s keeping my thoughts busy.”

  He sat down next to her, bringing one knee up to rest an arm, but didn’t touch her. “Mason knows who I am. Did you tell him?”

  She brought down the binoculars. “No, I didn’t, although I knew he was getting pretty close to figuring it out. He’d already done some checking on you and found out that William Rising had no past. Joe and Martha Weber have known all along.”

  He sent her a sharp glance. “And they never mentioned it?”

  Jillian shrugged, feeling the tenseness in her shoulders. At least that was something. She’d spent the afternoon completely numb, unable to penetrate the stabbing grief that had haunted her for sixteen years and had finally jumped out of the dark closet to confront her. She felt like a glass shattered into so many pieces she wasn’t sure she could find them again.

  “There was no need. They understood your desire to blend in and leave the past behind. You’re not a criminal.”

  He let out a deep breath. “Not everybody believes that. And when they find out that the body’s Lauren’s, there’ll be a lynching party.”

  “But it might not be her.” Even to her own ears, her words sounded hollow.

  He stroked her cheek and wiped away a tear she hadn’t been aware had fallen. “It is.”

  Something in his voice made her stiffen, but she still couldn’t abandon her hope. “How can you know? It’s too early to tell.”

  He studied her in the dark for a long moment, and Jillian held her breath, a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. With deliberate movements, he reached into his pants pocket and pulled something out. Taking her hand, he placed the object on her palm.

  In the yellow light of the moon, she could see it was cracked and splintered, the varnished wood brittle against her skin, as if it had been submerged in salt water for a very long time. The small heart had a split in the middle, nearly severing it into two pieces, like a broken heart. Still clinging to a hole in the middle of it was a gold chain, the yellow dully reflecting the moonlight.

  She felt the darkness descend on her like a great tidal wave trying to pull her under. But Linc was there, his arms around her, his shoulder under her cheek, and his hands, with the long, beautiful fingers that had once carved a heart and a star out of wood, stroked her hair while she cried.

  Her grief gave way to hard need. She reached for Linc, like a drowning victim reaching for an offered limb, their need for each other mixing with their need to prove their own survival. As Linc pressed her into the sand, she thought irrelevantly of soldiers after a battle.

  Their loving was frantic and rough, neither one wanting to take the time to remove all their clothing. He moved over her, touching and ripping and devouring her, and she felt his heat and the retained heat of the sun on the bare skin of her back and arms as she settled more deeply into the sand.

  The grains stuck to his sweat-soaked chest and rubbed her breasts as he slid into her in one hard thrust. She lifted her hips, bucking against him, and cried out with pain and pleasure as he continued to push into her, fast and quick until she thought she would go mindless with her need for this primal comfort, for this man and how he made her feel. He stilled for a moment, reaching his own release, and her cry drifted off across the dunes toward the ocean, where the dark water waited.

  They lay on their backs for a long time, watching the stars without speaking. The breeze blew on Jillian’s skin, chilling her, and she rose to get dressed. She could feel Linc’s eyes on her as she searched for her bra and shirt. Buttoning up her blouse, she faced him.

  “What happens next?”

  He stood, zipping up his pants and keeping his head down. He moved closer to her and took her in his arms. “We wait. People are going to be asking a lot of questions, and I don’t doubt that I’ll be made a scapegoat again. I guess I’ll find out who my real friends are.”

  She moved away from him, feeling chilled from the inside. “Do you mean me?”

  He raised his hands to his head, and she pictured him running his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. How did she get to be there? It looks like an underground tunnel, but I’ve looked and looked through the blueprints and all through the house and I can’t find anything.” His eyes caught the reflection of the moon for a moment as he watched her in silence. “And who else knows she’s there?”

  She saw him bend down and his hands sweep over the boards on the boardwalk, searching for something. He straightened, and she knew he held the wooden heart necklace
. Walking toward the water, he pulled his arm back and threw it as far as he could.

  Jillian ran to him and grabbed his shoulders, trying to shake him. “Why did you do that? It was evidence.”

  He looked coolly down at her and said softly, “I know. One less piece of incriminating evidence against me. That’s one mark in my favor. That makes it a million against one—not really good odds, is it?”

  She moved away from him, stumbling in the sand until she reached the boardwalk. “I’m going to bed. Call me when you’re finished with your self-pity and you’re ready to do something about this mess we’re in.”

  “What do you mean—the mess we’re in? This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  If she’d been closer, she would have hit him. “Damn you, Linc Rising—or whoever in the hell you really are. Forgive me for thinking that maybe we were having a relationship and that we’d work our problems out together. My mistake.”

  She yanked up the flashlight and the baby monitor and began walking toward the house, trying very hard to hold back tears.

  “Your father’s name is Mark, isn’t it, Jillian?”

  She faced him, furious, hurt and thoroughly confused. “What has any of this got to do with my father?”

  “Just remind me, would you? I always knew him as Mr. Parrish. I’m pretty sure it started with an M.”

  “His name is Mark. Why? Why do you need to know?”

  But all he said was “Good night, Jillian.” He bent and picked up his shoes, not bothering to look back at her.

  “You can be a real shit—you know that?”

  He paused and called over his shoulder, “You always had a foul mouth, Jillian. It was one of the funniest things about you.”

  She was amazed that she could feel embarrassment over all the other emotions that were running through her head. She jammed her balled fists into her sides. “Well, shit, Linc. I’m sorry as shit that I’ve offended you. I promise to try and stop saying ‘shit’ so much.”

  She heard him laugh quietly. “No, don’t. There’s not a whole hell of a lot to laugh at anymore.” He continued walking away from her, up toward his house, and she stayed where she was and watched him until she heard his back door shut.

  Linc stared up at the ceiling of his bedroom, too wired to sleep. He hadn’t meant to argue with Jillian. But he remembered the flicker in her eyes when he’d picked up the little wooden heart necklace. He’d thought it was doubt, and it had angered him enough to toss the heart out into the ocean. He wasn’t even sure why he’d done it; only that it had everything to do with Jillian and his need to pull at the bonds that seemed to inextricably link them together. He had learned how from a pro, after all. His mother had been the queen of emotional bondage, testing and pulling on him until he had simply given up and disappeared from her life. He was good at that—the leaving. And some foolish part of him had believed that he had finally come home for good.

  Until they’d found Lauren.

  He threw the sheets off of his naked body and pulled on a pair of jeans. Barefoot, he padded downstairs to the kitchen and pulled a beer from the refrigerator. Maybe if he got drunk enough, he could pass out in mindless oblivion.

  And then he smelled it again—the briny smell of salt water, strong enough that it seemed as if the ocean had moved outside his doorway. He paused with the beer halfway to his mouth. The closet.

  Slamming the bottle down on the kitchen counter, he half ran to the closet and stopped outside the open door. He hadn’t shut it since that night he’d found it open, and as he stood there, he could almost swear he heard the lapping of water nearby.

  Turning on the light, he got down on his hands and knees, examining each crack and crevice of the wooden plank floor. It had bothered him since the beginning when the dune had collapsed and revealed what had once been a tunnel of some sort. But a tunnel from where? As his fingers searched the floor, he thought he might have an answer.

  When he reached the left back corner, he noticed how the last length of board nearest the paneled wall wasn’t flush with the other boards. It reminded him of the hidden switch upstairs in the window seat. Wiping sweat out of his eyes, he slowly moved his hand toward the place where the board met the wall and pushed.

  With his breath held, he heard a slight clicking sound. Two wide boards on the wall had separated from the rest. He inched forward and pushed on them, and a small door formed before it stopped on squeaky hinges. He could hear the water louder now, hear it slapping against something solid. Moving closer, he put his shoulder to the hidden door. Shit. It wasn’t going anywhere.

  He retreated to the kitchen and found his flashlight, a can of WD- 40 and a hammer. He grinned ruefully at the hammer. This simply wasn’t a time for finesse.

  Returning to the closet, he sprayed the seams of the hidden doorway with half of the WD-40 can, then gave the door another shove and was rewarded when it swung open enough for him to squeeze through it. With one last look behind him, he stepped inside, allowing the dark to swallow him.

  He felt gritty sand and brick beneath his feet. Flipping on his flashlight, he found himself at the top of a narrow flight of circular brick steps. He pictured the outside of the house in his mind, trying to figure out where he was standing. I’m inside one of the brick posts.

  The light illuminated brick-and-mortar walls. Definitely old brick. Shining the flashlight at his feet, he saw the steps moving down in a spiral pattern until a path sloped away from the circle of light.

  He descended the stairs and found himself in a narrow tunnel, big enough for a man to crawl. His knees and hands scraped against moist brick as he followed the old tunnel, noting the timber supports that bolstered the ceiling. He paused for a moment, glancing behind him, and saw only blackness. He thought briefly of stopping and going back, but continued on.

  The sound of water was louder here, echoing off the brick. He felt the moistness of the ground and realized the water had climbed almost to his elbows. He stopped and looked ahead, realizing that his exploring had come to an end. A few feet ahead lay a steel door, the kind he’d seen at the old debtor’s prison in Charleston. The bottom foot of it was covered in water, almost to the large dead bolt that was clamped down in the locked position.

  He leaned against the brick wall for support, feeling the clammy, cold brick against his bare arm. He sucked in air, barely getting enough to fill his lungs, and wondered how long the oxygen would last once the secret doorway was shut. His gaze shifted back to the door. How did you get on the other side of this door, Lauren? And who locked you out? He looked at the lock again, at the firmly latched bolt, and felt the certainty that this had been no accident.

  Gripping the flashlight like a weapon, he turned around and made his way back into the closet, the sounds and smells of an unforgiving ocean at high tide lapping at his back.

  CHAPTER 23

  WHEN JILLIAN RETURNED FROM THE GROCERY STORE THREE DAYS later, it was to find an answering machine with a red light flashing insistently. Holding Ford in one hand and a bag of diapers in her other, she leaned over to stare at the display. Forty-eight messages. With one foot, she wrapped the cord around her ankle and yanked the plug from the wall.

  She had made it as far as the kitchen when somebody knocked on the front door. Before she could check to see who it was, Grace rushed past her, shouting, “I’ll get it!”

  Jillian turned on her heels. “Wait to make sure we know who it is. . . .”

  But Grace was already welcoming whoever it was. Dropping the diapers, she shifted Ford in her arms and went to the front door.

  Lessie Beaumont, in typical floral capris and yellow patent-leather sandals, sent her a sympathetic frown. She stuck a vase full of daisies at Jillian and walked inside, followed closely by Miss Janie and Baby. “You poor, poor thing! Mama and me have been just sick with worry about you. Your answering machine must be broken or something because we keep calling and calling and leaving messages, but you haven’t been calling back.”


  Lessie made her way to the kitchen, and everybody followed. Weariness won over annoyance, so Jillian tagged along, too, noticing that Janie had her arm around Grace’s shoulders.

  Lessie barely paused for breath as she filled the vase with water from the sink. “You here all by yourself now that William—or I guess it’s Linc, isn’t it?—has gone back to Charleston while the police tear his house apart, looking for clues. I don’t know why you don’t come live with Mama or with me and Ken. We’ve got plenty of room, and you know Mary Ellen would just die to have Gracie come stay with us. Plus, I need to get all the details about that tunnel. I’m almost done with my paper, and all this will be the perfect way to end it, don’t you think?”

  Jillian didn’t say anything, but just put Ford in the baby swing and started passing around a tray of homemade pralines. Gracie pulled a pitcher of sweet tea from the refrigerator and began filling glasses. Lessie sat down at the kitchen table and patted the seat next to her. “Come on, sweetie, and get off your feet. You look exhausted.”

  Too tired to argue, she sat down next to Lessie and took a long sip of her tea, watching as Grace scooted her own chair close to Janie Mulligan’s. Jillian leaned over the table to speak to her daughter. “Don’t eat too much. Your daddy will be here within an hour to take you up to Myrtle Beach for some lunch and miniature golfing.”

  Gracie bounced up and down in her chair. “Yippee! Can I wear my new dress with the little cats all over it? You know—the one Linc bought for me in Charleston?”

  Jillian felt Lessie’s gaze on her. Stiffly taking a sip of tea she said, “Sure, honey. That would be fine.”