Before We Were Yours(53)

But the phone number is Elliot’s. I’m too wound up to calculate what time it is in Milan right now, but no doubt he’s working. “I was tied up when you called yesterday. Sorry,” he says.

“I figured. Busy day?”

“Rather,” he says vaguely, as usual. In his family, the women aren’t interested in business. “How are things on Edisto?”

Honestly, the grapevine in our family is better than microchip tracking. “How did you know I was here?”

“Mother told me,” he sighs. “She’d been over to Drayden Hill to get a baby fix, since your sister and Courtney and the boys are visiting. Now she’s on the grandkid kick again.” Elliot is understandably frustrated. “She reminded me that I’m thirty-one already, and she’s fifty-seven, and she doesn’t want to be an old grandmother.”

“Uh-oh.” I wonder sometimes what it’ll be like to have Bitsy as a mother-in-law. I love her, and she means well, but she makes Honeybee look subtle.

“Can we book your sister and the triplets to go stay at Mother’s for a few days?” Elliot suggests ruefully. “Maybe that’ll cure her.”

Even though I get the joke, it stings. I adore the triplets, even if they are little wild men. “You could ask.” Despite the fact Elliot and I have only talked about kids as an eventual part of our life plan, he’s already concerned that multiple births run in my family. He doesn’t think he could handle more than one at a time. Every once in a while, I worry that having kids someday might be never for Elliot. I know we’ll work these things out as we go. Don’t most couples have to?

“So how long are you at the beach?” he says, changing the subject.

“Just a couple days. If I stay any longer, Leslie will send someone to hunt me down.”

“Well, Leslie is looking out for your best interests. You need to be seen. That’s the reason you moved home.”

I moved home to look after my dad, I want to say, but with Elliot, everything is a step toward something. He’s the most achievement-oriented person I’ve ever met. “I know. But it’s nice to have a little breather. You sound like you could use one too. Get some rest while you’re over there, okay? And don’t worry about your mother and the grandkid thing. She’ll be focused on something else tomorrow.”

We say goodbye, and I finish the precautionary email to myself. If I’m never heard from again, someone will eventually check there. Midnight Tuesday evening. I’m going four doors down from the Edisto cottage to talk to Trent Turner about something involving Grandma Judy. Should be back in an hour or so. Leaving this message just in case.

It feels dorky, but I send it anyway before slipping out the door.

Outside, the night is quiet and deep as I walk the path through the dunes, shining my flashlight to keep a lookout for snakes. Along the shore, most of the cottages have gone dark, leaving only the glow of a full moon and a smattering of lights that seem to float over the watery horizon. Leaves and sea grass whisper, and on the beach ghost crabs scuttle sideways through the sand. I sweep the light over them, taking care not to ruin the feeding frenzy by stepping on someone.

The breeze slides along my neck and through my hair, and I want to walk and relax and enjoy the soothing song of the sea. I own meditation music that sounds like this, but I seldom take time for the real thing. Right now, that seems like a shame. I’d forgotten how heavenly this place is, a perfect meeting of land and sea, undisturbed by giant high-rises, or bonfires and ATVs.

I come to Trent Turner’s cottage before I want to. My pulse quickens as I slip along a well-worn trail through shrubbery and cross a short boardwalk to a leaning gate. His cottage is of about the same vintage as Grandma Judy’s. It sits on short stilts on a large lot, with a small outbuilding in the side yard. A stone path leads to the porch steps. Overhead, moths flutter in circles around a single bulb.

Trent answers the door before I can knock. He’s wearing a faded T-shirt with a tear along the neck and sweats that sag around his hips. His suntanned feet are bare, and he’s sporting an impressive case of bedhead.

Crossing his arms, he leans against the doorframe, studying me.

I’m suddenly all hands and feet, like an adolescent on a first date to the middle-school dance. I don’t know what to do with myself.

“I was starting to wonder,” he says.

“Whether I was coming, you mean?”

“Whether the phone call was just a bad dream.” But his lips curve upward, and I gather that he’s joking.

Even so, I blush a little. This is such an imposition. “I’m sorry. I just really…I need to know. What was your grandfather’s association with my grandmother?”

“Most likely, he was doing a job for her.”

“What kind of job?”

He looks past me toward the tiny cabin tucked beneath the trees in the side yard. I sense the struggle in him. He’s wrestling with whether or not he’s betraying the deathbed promise. “My grandfather was a finder.”

“A finder of what?”

“People.”





CHAPTER 14


Rill

It’s getting on toward dark by the time the viewing party slows down, and the workers start gathering kids to put them into cars and take them back home. By then, I almost don’t want to go. All afternoon long, there’ve been cookies and ice cream and licorice whips and cake and milk and sandwiches and coloring books and new boxes of Crayola colors and dolls for the girls and tin toy cars for the boys.