I suspected Harley was paying for the trip. Jody rarely paid for anything.
“Of course I’ll miss him like crazy,” he continued. He put his arm over my shoulder and pulled me close to his side. “But he’s excited instead of scared, so I’m glad that’s what they’re doing. His friend Tom went with them too.”
The bell above the door chimed again. And again, the shop fell silent as everyone turned as if expecting the Gray Lady to march in and order the last of the chocolate cherry bonbons. A tall man dressed in a black full-body wetsuit. He had a full head of curly silver hair. His narrow face was covered in a tapering beard that made him look like a pirate.
He raised his hand and called out to Harley, “Bro!”
“Big Dog.” Harley answered. Being a competitive surfer himself, Harley knew most of the surfers who came to Camellia Beach. Harley and the new guy did one of those handshakes that involved their entire arms. “I didn’t know you were in the area.”
“What? You thought I could stay away and miss a chance to ride on waves kicked up by what could be the hurricane of the century? Never. Besides, I had some business to attend to.” His playful gaze glided over me. “You must be Penn. Harley”—he nudged Harley’s side—“no wonder you’ve been hiding her from the circuit. Half the surfers would be trying to steal her from you.”
I winced. Years ago Harley’s ex-wife, a fellow competitive surfer, had slept around with one of Harley’s biggest rivals on the surfing circuit.
“Penn’s far too smart to be taken in by sweet talk and lies,” Harley said.
Big Dog nudged his arm again and laughed. “Glad to hear it. You were never one to repeat past mistakes.”
“That’s because I’ve got brains in my head instead of seaweed,” Harley agreed, which only made Big Dog laugh harder.
“Wicked good waves,” the older surfer mused. “You should be out there.”
“Yeah.” Harley ran a hand through his hair, making it delightfully disheveled. “I’ve been busy packing up to evacuate. You know, doing responsible adult stuff.”
“He had to catch my mom’s cat,” Althea said. She wrapped her arms around Big Dog and kissed his cheek. “Good to see you,” she said. “It’s been a while.”
“Seems like y’all were just kids last time I saw you,” he said, looking Althea over with an appreciative eye.
“It hasn’t been that long,” she said with a laugh. “A few years at the most.”
“I heard about Mabel,” he said, referring to my maternal grandmother. “She’ll be missed.”
Bertie, who clearly knew him as well, poured him a cup of coffee. He took a few sips before putting the to-go cup down on a nearby table. “Well, I have a few more waves to catch,” he said on his way out.
“And then you’ll get off my island,” Byrd shouted after him. “Idiots, all of them, acting like this is some kind of playground.”
“He’ll be safe,” Harley said, I think for my benefit. He gave my hand a squeeze. “He knows when to leave town.”
“It’s high time we get out of town too,” Bertie announced. “The chocolates are gone. The coffee urn is nearly empty. And weather conditions are only going to get worse.”
I looked at the shop. The glass counter was indeed empty. The chairs had been turned upside down and set up on the tables. The cash register had been tightly wrapped in plastic to keep it from getting ruined if the shop flooded or the ceiling leaked. I hated that this might be the last sight I might have of this place. I loved my shop. Leaving it was going to tear my heart right out of my chest.
A quiet voice in my head wouldn’t leave me alone. It kept repeating the Gray Lady’s warning. I prayed the voice was wrong.
~~
The wind whipped around the motel in the inland town of Summerville where we’d taken refuge. It roared and battered the walls, shaking the entire building. The lights flickered on and off several times before leaving us all in the dark. After that happened, Stella backed herself as far under the bed as she could get herself and refused to come out. Not even her favorite bacon treat could tempt her to leave her hiding place. In the darkness outside, we could hear trees cracking and snapping. Harley tightened his arms around me as we huddled together on the double bed.
Texts pinged on my phone every few minutes, most coming from my favorite half-sister Tina. She was terrified the storm was going to wash me out to sea. Although I texted back, promising her I was safe, she kept asking for updates. And I kept renewing my assurances. That is, until we lost cell service.
The last message I received before the cell phone went dead was a long text from Peach—my mother’s younger sister. Earlier in the evening, she had asked where I was staying and insisted I stayed safe. In this text she wrote that the Maybank family, including my uncle Richard and my mother, had taken refuge in the small town of Cypress, in the middle of the state, at a lake house that my maternal grandparents had built. The text had included a picture of the house.
I stared at the picture of the sprawling two-story lake house for half the night, wondering if my mother—who I suspected was too proud for her own good—had asked Peach to check up on me. It was possible, since they were staying in the same house.
I didn’t know how I felt about the unexpected communication with the Maybank side of my family. Part of me wanted to be happy that they were making an effort to reach out to me. But that other part of me, the part that was so adamant about protecting myself from ever letting anyone close enough to hurt me, tried to find an ulterior—and sinister—motive for the texts. Perhaps they’d wanted to rub it in that they were together in the family lake house, a place I was neither invited nor welcomed. Perhaps they’d wanted to find more evidence that I was too inept to run their family’s chocolate shop. Perhaps—
Oh, the possibilities were endless, and wondering about it was only making me feel incredibly sad. So I tried not to think about it.
On the other bed in the motel room, Bertie and Althea sat together with Beauregard sleeping soundly at their feet. Althea shouted at the hurricane using sorts of colorful language whenever there was a crash outside.
“She’s never been afraid of storms before,” Harley, who’d once dated Althea, whispered after her last outburst.
“She’d told me not to worry,” I said. “But that was before she thought Joe had seen the Gray Lady. Gray Lady, indeed.” I snorted. “Like ghosts would waste their time walking around, telling us a storm would destroy us.”
He patted my leg. “Well, that explains why she’s so scared. You and Althea saw the Gray Lady too.” He held up a hand when I started to protest. “From a distance. And you may have not seen anything supernatural. But lots of people around these parts put a great deal of stock in those stories. The folklore surrounding Gray Lady’s existence dates back over a hundred years. Just the mention of her can make a brave man tremble.”
I thought of how Joe Davies had reacted. He’d been trembling with fear…and with another emotion I couldn’t describe. Anger? Astonishment? Surprise? What? I didn’t know.
Something smashed against the roof of the building.
I prayed the residents of Camellia Beach had all evacuated the island and had made it to a safe shelter. It sounded as if the world was coming apart at the seams outside our motel room’s steel door, and we’d traveled more than an hour inland of the shore. I hated to imagine the beating my favorite little town of Camellia Beach was taking on that horrible night.
Chapter 3
By midmorning, Hurricane Avery had moved to the north of us leaving the town of Summerville eerily quiet. I stood a few steps past the motel door with my hands on my hips. The air outside felt crisp, almost cool. The storm seemed to have sucked the humidity out of the area. Every cell in my body hummed with a need to get back to Camellia Beach and back to the Chocolate Box. Mixed in with that need was an equal measure of dread. Part of me (a big part) expected to find an empty spot where my beloved shop had once stood.
The good
news, according to Althea and Bertie, was that the hurricane had weakened before making landfall. It’d also blasted through the area rather quickly. They regaled me with stories of previous storms that had lingered and caused tremendous wind and flood damage. There was one that had bounced up and down the coast, leaving the area only to return a few days later to cause more damage. This hadn’t been that kind of hurricane.
But even though the storm was gone, we were stranded for several more days with no electricity or cell service. We ate food out of our cooler that was gradually losing its cool. By the end of the first day, we’d met nearly all the motel guests and employees. By the end of the second day, everyone at the motel had bonded over our shared hardships and were acting like family.
By the time the fourth day came, we were finally given the green light to return to Camellia Beach. Despite the Governor’s lifting of the mandatory evacuation order, local officials urged us to wait. We were cautioned that the power hadn’t been restored—we still didn’t have power at the motel either—and that many of the roads would be impassable. We didn’t care. Everyone was anxious to get back to assess the damage to our shops and to our town. After a series of hugs (which I awkwardly endured) and exchanges of email addresses and cell phone numbers, the residents at the motel began to check out and leave en mass.
Harley drove my Fiat that was packed with our essentials. We left the rest of our cars in the motel parking lot. It was as if by mutual agreement we decided to confront what was left of our beach as a united front. Bertie sat in the front seat. Today she was wearing a green T-shirt that simply read “Camellia Beach” in pink curlicue letters. Like her, we were all dressed for comfort in T-shirts and shorts and sturdy athletic shoes. Althea and I had stuffed ourselves in the backseat with Troubadour hissing in his carrying case and Stella barking at him. What should have been an easy one-hour drive back to Camellia Beach took more than three hours as we plodded in heavy traffic through the Lowcountry, weaving around fallen trees and pieces of homes.
At the bridge that crossed onto Camellia Beach, the National Guard stopped us and checked our identification before allowing us to go further.
“How’s it out there?” Harley asked a young guardsman wearing a camo uniform.
“Sand everywhere,” the guardsman said. “You won’t get far in that car of yours. Should have brought an off-road vehicle.”
The guardsman wasn’t kidding. A mixture of sand, marsh grass, and tree branches covered everything—the road, yards, sidewalks. We had to abandon the Fiat in a parking lot that had been cleared for that purpose. We found one of the last parking places and started unpacking. Stella sniffed the salty air and barked happily as she tugged on the leash.
“I suppose we walk,” Althea said as she pulled her rolling luggage toward what used to be Main Street.
I stepped into the sand. My foot sank several inches. Water oozed and soaked my shoe. I lifted my foot and gave it a shake. “It’s going to be a long walk.”
“Got nothing else on our schedule,” Bertie said as she struggled to pull her rolling luggage over a branch as thick as my leg.
“That’s the truth.” Harley took Bertie’s bag from her, which was silly of him. He was already carrying Troubadour’s carrier and his own luggage. He didn’t have enough arms to carry everything. I hurried over and tried to take Bertie’s bag from him.
He resisted. “Penn, stop it. I’m Southern and my mama raised me right. She’d have a fit if she found out that I let you lift this burden from me.”
Undeterred, I gave the luggage a tug. “And I’m from the Midwest. Where I was raised, women don’t go around letting men parade around pretending they are superior.”
“Sweetheart, I already know you have the strength of an ox.” He refused to let go of the bag. He flashed me a rakish smile. “I learned that well enough when you socked me in the nose.”
“Are you going to keep bringing that up?”
“Until the day I die.”
“I hit you because I had thought you were trying to kill me.”
“And I had thought you were harmless. We were both wrong. Let me carry Bertie’s bag.”
“No. That’s stupid,” I said, which convinced Stella that she needed to start barking even louder.
Luckily, a National Guard truck with huge tires that rolled over the mushy sand as easily as it would over pavement stopped beside us. A cheerful guardsman leaned out the driver side window and shouted, “Need a lift?”
“Dear Heavens, yes!” Althea said faster than anyone else. She glanced at me with a look of exasperation. “You two will be here arguing about who gets to carry the bags until nightfall if we don’t accept.”
My heart raced as the truck bounced us closer and closer to the shop. I kept wiping my sweaty palms on my pants. We turned a corner onto East Europe Street, the street where the Chocolate Box was located. The air suddenly felt like it was too thick for my throat.
Sand covered the road and landscaping. Branches stuck out of the ground like wooden tombstones. The cute cottage that housed a real estate office next to the Chocolate Box had a gaping hole in its roof.
“Can you see it?” I croaked, after tightly closing my eyes. “Is it—?”
“Honey,” Bertie said gently, “don’t fret so. That building of yours has survived a hundred years of hurricanes.”
That wasn’t assurance enough for me. “Tell me it’s still there.”
“It’s there,” Harley said gently. “Look.”
I popped a square of the shop’s special Amar chocolate in my mouth and savored its rich, tropical flavors before opening my eyes.
The ancient oak tree that stood sentry outside the shop had lost a few massive branches but was otherwise healthy. The building itself still listed to one side. But like an old friend, it was there waiting for me. Tears welled in my eyes. I breathed a deep sigh of relief.
We all climbed down from the back of the truck and waved goodbye to the guardsmen who were off to help other residents. I stood with my hands on my hips and stared at my shop, still quite unable to believe what I was seeing.
The white clapboard siding was stained where the sea had lapped at the building like a thirsty hound. Dirt and stain, I could handle. The building was there.
“We still have a roof.” Harley nodded to the second floor.
“Instead of standing around gaping, let’s see what it looks like on the inside,” Bertie suggested with a huff.
We had to work our way through a heavy thatch of marsh grass to get to the front door. The plywood boards covering the plate glass display windows were still attached. The sandbags we’d piled in front of the door were still in place, thought coated in the thatch of marsh grass. We began to remove the bags and found starfish, an assortment of exotic shells, and smelly, rotting fish.
“Look at that,” Bertie said pointing to something poking out of a mound of marsh grass that had gathered next to the door.
It was a tweed hat. It took me a moment to remember why it seemed familiar. “Wasn’t the man searching for Joe Davies wearing a hat like that?”
“I believe so. I hadn’t seen as fine a hat in a while. My daddy used to wear one, but Daddy’s had a little pheasant feather tucked in its brown silk band,” Bertie said.
I picked up it up, plucked off the seaweed before turning it over in my hand. I then read the inside label. Just as I’d thought. It was made by a prominent men’s designer. The back of my neck prickled. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Are you having a premonition?” Althea was quick to ask.
“No.” I frowned at her. Why would she think that? “But I do have enough common sense to know a man doesn’t simply drop an expensive hat like this one and forget about it. See the stitching? You don’t see that kind of tight, even quality every day. It’s actually quite difficult to find.” I sounded like my half-sister. She was a popular Chicago fashion designer. Apparently I hadn’t completely ignored her when she had gone on and on about the
troubles she often encountered when working with the garment industry. “Something happened here.”
“I hope he wasn’t foolish enough to try and ride out the storm on the beach,” Harley said.
“I hope—” I started to say. But I didn’t want to say it.
Harley’s brows rose, but he didn’t say anything.
“What?” Althea asked. “You don’t think—?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to think about it. For the next ten minutes we continued to move the sandbags away from the front door. It was slow going.
“Not as bad as we’d feared,” Bubba drawled as he joined us. He reached down and tossed aside a sandbag as if it weighed nothing.
“Your house and business are okay?” Bertie asked before I could. Her cheeks turned a pretty shade of pink as she watched him heave aside another sandbag.
“The house took a little beating, and there’s a bit of water got into the shop. It’s the loss of operating days that’s going to hurt worse than the cleanup.” He wiped his hands on his jeans. “Penn, you do know there are small business loans available to help businesses like ours stay afloat while we recover from natural disasters.”
“Hello?” Althea said with a little note of exasperation. “I’m also a small business owner.”
“So am I.” Harley smiled as he said it.
“And the two of you already know about the loans because we’ve weathered hurricanes before,” Bubba pointed out.
I’d been struggling to drag a sandbag—they were wicked heavy when wet—but stopped to turn to my friends. Dang, I was dense. Althea and Harley both had businesses that could have suffered losses. Instead of visiting their properties, my friends were here helping me. They were here helping because they knew recovery from a hurricane would be a new and frightening experience for me. And Bubba had come too, although I suspected he was here for a different reason. Bertie smiled whenever she glanced in his direction.
My grandmother, who was considered a saint in the town, would have been more worried about the other residents than about the state of this shop. She would have been spending her energies trying to figure out what she could do for them instead of worrying over the damage the storm had done to her building.
Bonbon With the Wind Page 3
