Mariah Stewart - On Sunset Beach

“I want to see them, but I can’t leave St. Dennis.” Carly told Enrico about the timing of the exhibit being moved. “Okay, send me a text with the photos so I can at least see what we’re getting into, and send me the paper trail so I can sleep at night.”

“So we can take them?” Carly heard Enrico’s voice catch in his throat.

“Assuming we can follow the trail, yes. Congratulations.”

“You want Taylor’s number?”

“No. I want you to call her. This is your gig, Enrico. Now start working on the announcement that you’re going to run in all the papers and online sites to let the art world know what you have.”

“Oh, yay! I’m calling Taylor right now. I’ll send you everything you asked for the second I get it.”

“Oh, and email me any recent updates to the list of our contacts. Press, critics, customers, dealers, other gallery owners. Art bloggers, columnists, anyone whose name and information I might not have on my list.”

“I’m on it. Now you go do your Carolina Ellis thing,” he said happily, “and I’ll tend to Miss Taylor. Oh my, but Summit Galleries is hot hot hot right now.”

Laughing, Carly disconnected the call but tucked the phone into her pocket.

She was almost as excited as Enrico had been at the prospect of adding two Mitchells to her inventory. If the past was any indication, they wouldn’t be there long, and she’d have a nice commission to share with Enrico. She generally didn’t delegate transactions as big as this, but she trusted Enrico, knew that he’d do his homework and would let her know if something didn’t feel right. Besides, given the current circumstances that were keeping her in St. Dennis, he was going to have to step up. It wasn’t easy for her to give up control to anyone, but she was going to have to do it, and now was the time.

Put it aside, she told herself, and get back to the task at hand.

To that end, she gathered the index cards from the table and began to sort through them, putting the paintings into their final order.

Ford dipped the paddle into the calm water of the Bay and glided over the surface toward the Choptank River. When he was a boy, he’d heard the stories of how the native people had built villages all along the banks, and how vestiges of those villages could be found, if you looked hard enough. As a kid, he had looked plenty hard, but he’d never found a trace. It had been years since he’d searched, and today, when the winds were easy and the sun not quite as blazing hot as it had been, seemed like a good day to take up the hunt.

He turned into the river and raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun while he scanned the shoreline. When he found the place he was looking for, he turned the kayak to the right and beached it on the rough sand. He pulled the craft almost to the where the grasses began and laid the paddle across the bow. He walked up a slight embankment to the clearing he remembered from when he and his buddies used to haunt these shores and the woods that lay beyond. After twenty minutes of searching for something that would let him know he was at least in the right ballpark, Ford sat on the thick trunk of a fallen tree.

The excursion this morning wasn’t as much about finding an ancient settlement as it was about getting his head straight. He’d spent a good portion of last night and again this morning trying to talk himself out of pursuing any sort of relationship with Carly, other than, of course, a professional one. Reporter to reportee, so to speak.

He’d thought up any number of rationalizations. They were both in St. Dennis temporarily, so why start something that obviously had no future? She was definitely an uptown girl and he was more the survivalist type. And maybe he was only interested in her because she was one of the few people in St. Dennis with whom he had no history, his thinking being that, unlike just about everyone else in town who’d known him his entire life, Carly had no expectations of him, no preconceived ideas of who he was or who he should be, and didn’t compare him to his father or his brother.

Even he knew it all sounded like so much BS.

And besides, if he wanted to be around someone who always looked for the upside of things, he could talk to his mother, who even his father had once referred to as Pollyanna. Her own brother used to call her “Silver Lining Gracie,” because no matter how hard things were, his mom could always find something good to focus on. Carly was like that, too. Being Grace’s son, he figured he had enough positive energy floating around him to last the rest of his life.

He knew the way the world really worked. He knew that people often acted inhumanly. He’d seen grown men who didn’t bat an eye at shooting a woman so heavily pregnant she couldn’t even run away. He’d seen families burned in their homes, the exits blocked so that none could escape. He’d seen just about everything that man could do to man, so he knew damned well the world wasn’t always quite as skippy as people like his mother—and Carly—believed it to be. He’d never be able to convince either of them of that, though. People like that were just not wired for reality, that’s all. It wasn’t their fault, no more than it was his fault that he always expected the other shoe to drop.

And in his experience, hadn’t it?

Had he always been the cynic that Carly had called him out to be? He couldn’t remember.

Maybe it had started on his fourteenth birthday, when he and his dad had planned a trip to Smith Island in his uncle’s skipjack. He’d been promised a Smith Island cake—thirteen microlayers of amazingness—but a storm had been brewing and the wind had been judged too much for a sail, so the trip was postponed for the following week. But Dan had come home from college to recover from a kick to the head he’d gotten in a soccer game, and it wouldn’t have seemed right to have gone off without him. So they looked to the next week, but his dad had gotten sick, and that had pretty much taken care of the trip to Smith Island.

If he were to be honest with himself—and he was trying to be—he’d admit that to have your entire life’s view colored by something that happened when you were a kid wasn’t real mature.

More likely, it started on the day he’d watched helplessly as Anna and three others were shot and left to die by a band of rebels led by a man who was now coming dangerously close to overthrowing the legitimate government. Seeing the woman you once loved shot in the back will go a long way to play with your head. Somehow, Ford knew, he was going to have to move past that. Not forget—he’d never forget—but move past. Ford was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen as long as Raymond Nakimbe still was free to murder and spread his evil brand of terror among the very people he wanted to govern.

Ford had a feeling that if he wanted any kind of relationship with Carly—even one of friendship, which was probably not his first choice after kissing her last night—he was going to have to let in a little more light to push out some of the darkness. And he knew he was going to kiss her again, at the very next opportunity. He’d been about to kiss her when she’d kissed him, taking him totally by surprise. It had been a pleasant surprise, but a surprise all the same. He was used to being the pursuer, but he was all right with the way things worked out.

It had been a long time since he’d kissed someone for real. Oh, he’d kissed women after Anna, but his heart hadn’t always been in it. Last night, his heart had been there, all the way, and he supposed that simple fact was what had him in a turmoil today. He’d come to St. Dennis looking for some time with his family, a time to heal a little maybe, a time to get reacquainted with himself, nothing more. The last thing he’d expected to find there was a woman who carried so much light within her, she lit up a room when she entered.

None of his attempts at rationalizing could explain the effect that light had on him. He only knew it was true, and that light had touched him, and he was unable to look away. Where it was going to lead was anyone’s guess.

CARLY had barely gotten to the carriage house on Friday morning for her appointment with Tony Rosetti when she heard a firm rap on the door a mere second before it opened.

“Miss Summit?” A tall, somewhat gangly woman somewhere between fifty and seventy stood in the doorway, a large leather portfolio in her left hand.

“Yes, I’m Carly Summit.” She inwardly groaned. Somehow she knew what was coming.

“I’m Hazel Stevens. I was told I’d find you here.” The woman walked into the room, leaving the door to bang shut behind her. “Ed Lassiter’s wife told me I could bring my paintings down here for you to look at and you’d hang ’em in the great hall over there in the mansion.”

The entire time she was talking, Hazel was taking in the carriage house from the roof to the floor. She appeared unimpressed.

“Yes, we are looking for some works by local artists for the exhibit, yes,” Carly told her. “There will be a piece in the Gazette this week inviting people to bring there work down for me to—”

“I heard all that from Shelly—Ed’s wife—but I thought, why wait and take the chance that all the spots will be filled up?” She looked around for a flat surface and, finding none, moved two sawhorses close together and laid the portfolio open across them. “Now, I don’t know how many of these you’re going to want, but I know you’ll want at least three of them.”

She held up the first one, then another, then a third watercolor painting of—Grace had called it correctly—cats. Carly had nothing against cats. She liked cats. Hazel’s cats were scary, with large yellow eyes that leaped off the paper.

“Ah …” Carly searched for something to say, but no words came out.

“You’re speechless, right?” Hazel beamed. “I knew it. I knew you weren’t expecting to find talent like this in St. Dennis.”

Carly cleared her throat and took each painting in turn in her hands and held it up as if studying it critically.

“That’s Bitsy, that one there with the black face,” Hazel pointed out. “She’s my baby doll.”

Bitsy was perhaps the scariest of all. Surely the cat herself was a sweet animal. It was her owner’s portrayal that was eerie. Carly put the painting back on the open portfolio and turned the same critical eye onto the next one.

“Now this would be …?”

“Fancy Nancy. I called her that because I always thought calicos looked like they were all dressed up in fancy clothes.”

“I see. Yes.” Carly nodded. “I can see where you’d think that.”

Fancy Nancy was less scary than Bitsy but not by much. It was a shame Hazel wasn’t more of an artist, Carly thought. Her cats were probably very beautiful.

“Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright,” Hazel said.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s the tiger cat in that last picture. That’s her name.”

“Oh. Of course. I get it.” No, she didn’t really. “Do you mind if I look at whatever else you have in your portfolio?”

“Oh, help yourself.” Hazel reached for her painting of her tiger cat and watched over Carly’s shoulder as the contents of the folder were viewed. She ran a commentary the entire time. “That there’s Milton, and that next one, Sherlock …”

“How many cats do you have?” Carly couldn’t help but ask.

“Oh, only the three right now, the first three I showed you. These others, they’ve all gone over the Rainbow Bridge.”