At the River’s Edge The Chesapeake Diaries (37 page)

T
HOUGH
the alarm, shrill and loud, rang inches from Sophie’s head, it took several minutes for the sound to pierce through her deep slumber. She raised a groggy hand and slapped at the offending clock until she hit the snooze button. Four days of rising at six, working in the restaurant until one, making a quick change for the office by two, and working there until seven or eight had totally worn her to a frazzle. When the alarm went off the second time, she pulled herself up, her pillow behind her, and tried to focus.

Why, she asked herself, had she ever thought this would be a good idea?

She ambled into the bathroom, then into the kitchen, where she made coffee and counted the minutes until it was ready. Through the kitchen window she could see the making of a beautiful day. She took her coffee out onto the back porch to listen to the birds. In her bare feet, she went down the steps and into the garden to see what might be growing there. Not much, she realized. A few daylilies that had yet to bloom, a few Shasta daisies that appeared to be overgrown, and a rosebush that had a lot of black
spots on the few leaves that remained on its thorny branches. She made a mental note to ask Violet if she knew anything about roses, then sat on the back step to drink her coffee in the sunshine that was just making its way across the backyard.

She was still sitting and sipping when she realized it was Saturday and she couldn’t go into the restaurant until the afternoon. The exterminator had told her to keep the building closed up for at least twenty-four hours, and then, if she had to go inside, to open all the doors and windows and allow the pesticides to clear out before she spent too much time in there. She could go back to bed for a few more hours of much-needed sleep. Of course, having caffeinated herself, sleep might be hard to come by. She could go into the office early and get a leg up on the research that Jesse needed her to do for an upcoming criminal trial.

Or she could sit here and drink coffee and watch the day unfold, which seemed to be the best immediate option. It had been days since she’d been able to just sit and not think of work or Blossoms or Jason. Thinking about Jason gave her a monumental headache. She’d never been in a situation like this one. She and Christopher had never argued, had never disagreed. They were both headed in the same direction, wanted the same things, or so she’d thought. Relationships were either wrong or they were right. Most of the time, she had to admit in retrospect, they’d been wrong. If he’d been Mr. Right, wouldn’t things have worked out? Everything in her past told her that when it came to relationships, there was black and there was white, but never gray.

This situation, however, confused her. It seemed … 
gray. As a prosecutor whose job it had been to ferret out the truth, she was now at a bit of a loss. She tried to weigh the facts.

Jason had dumped several loads of smelly crap next to the fence that separated their properties.

Sophie had not told Jason that she’d bought the property next door; therefore he had no way of knowing that she was planning on opening a restaurant there.

Okay, she’d give him that. Score one for Jason.

However, when she told him of her plans and asked him to move the piles, he refused.

He should have moved them, shouldn’t he?

She sighed, unable to answer with any confidence.

Which left the question remaining: had she been unreasonable in expecting him to move the mulch piles?

Gray, she told herself. Totally gray.

Right now, gray was better than black or white. Gray meant maybe there was room for compromise, something else she’d learned as a prosecutor. You didn’t always get your way in court, either from the judge or from the jury. When the evidence could go either way, when she wasn’t totally convinced of a defendant’s guilt, it often made more sense to offer a plea. She’d found it harder to compromise when she was certain they had the guilty party but the evidence might not have been there to support a conviction. She preferred things to be either/or, but it didn’t always work out that way. It was puzzling that this time, she wasn’t sure who was right.

Of course he had every right to run his business from his own property—as much right as she had.
But she couldn’t sacrifice her restaurant so that he could open a plant shop. Did he think that if he left those smelly old piles there long enough, she’d give in and slap a sale sign on the building?

The only sign that was going to be hung was the one that Ellie was painting with the name, Blossoms, on it.

So, stalemate.

How annoying that their individual dreams had gotten in the way of what might have been! Being with Jason had felt so right, so magically, fairy-tale right, that it felt wrong that things had turned out the way they had. Where, she wondered, had the magic gone? Why couldn’t he have been Mr. Right? It had started to seem as if he might very well be.

Sophie took a sip of coffee, found it had long since gone cold, and poured it over the side of the step into the grass.

Interesting, she thought, that she hadn’t deliberated this much when her relationship with Christopher ended. That, to her, had been an easy call. He cheated on her. Off with his head. Yes, it had hurt, but there, the boundaries had been clear. She’d cut that tie and never looked back. Never wondered if there’d been room for compromise, or if she’d done the right thing; never asked herself,
What if …?

So why, she asked herself now, had it been easier to walk away from Chris—after they’d been together for almost two years—than it was to walk away from Jason, after so short a time?

It had never occurred to her to fight for Chris. She’d let Anita have him without hesitation. So why was
she replaying the scene with Jason over and over in her mind?

Maybe, a small voice inside her whispered, because Chris hadn’t been worth fighting for, and maybe Jason was.

She thought back to last Saturday morning, when she woke to find he’d risen before her, that moment when she reached for him and found only empty space, the sudden sense of loss she’d felt when she thought he’d gone, left her bed without even saying goodbye. The smile she’d felt welling up inside when he’d walked out of the bathroom to kiss her and tell her he’d see her later at …

Oh, shit
. Ellie’s carriage house. The historical society. Saturday.

Today was Saturday.

Sophie scrambled to get into the house and upstairs, where she threw on a pair of cropped pants and a worn-thin short-sleeved sweatshirt. She grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge on her way out the door. A glance at the clock told her she was already late. Where had the time gone?

She had to park three houses down from Ellie’s on Bay View Road, but was relieved to see a few others arriving late as well. She tried to slip unnoticed into the crowd that was milling around the carriage house, and she thought she’d succeeded until Jason looked up from the window he was working on and said, “I didn’t think you’d be here.”

“I’m not a quitter,” she told him.

“Good. How ’bout washing the panes in the windows so I can paint them? Paper towels and window cleaner are on the table over by Grace.”

“Fine.” She winced when the word came out of her mouth. She hadn’t meant it to sound so strident. She took a deep breath. “Aren’t the panes loose? I don’t want to knock them out of the frames.”

“Just go easy. I’ve already secured them with joint compound but it may still be setting up on the two side windows, so do them last.”

“All right.”

She gathered up the paper towels and the bottle of cleaner and tried to get away from Grace with only a polite exchange. But Grace being Grace, she wanted the details of Sophie’s plans for the restaurant. After promising to meet later in the week for photos and an article for Grace’s paper, Sophie moved on to her task.

Going from one window to the next, she sprayed the panes and rubbed until the glass was clear. When she finished, she picked up the discarded paper towels and tossed them into a trash can just outside the carriage house.

She turned in the doorway to look back at Jason, who was leaning over, pouring pale green paint into a tray. The gray tank top he wore stretched across the muscles of his shoulders and when he stood and raised the paintbrush, his biceps seemed to ripple. She remembered those arms and the way they’d wrapped around her, remembered how those shoulders had felt when she ran her hands over them. The bolt of heat that flashed through her weakened her knees.

Maybe things weren’t so gray after all.

His eyes on his granddaughter, Curtis stepped into the carriage house and followed her line of sight. Ah,
yes. There was Jason. Pleased by what he perceived to be a sign that things were developing nicely between them, as he’d hoped, he called to Sophie.

“There you are.” He walked toward her, leaning heavily on his cane. “How’s your project coming along?”

“It’s … I guess it’s all right.” She seemed surprised—and perhaps not particularly pleased—to see him.

“Good, good.”

“Hey, Curtis,” Jason greeted him. “You sign up to help yet?”

“I doubt anyone would want my help,” Curtis replied. “I just stopped in to see this lamp lens that I’ve been hearing about.”

Jason turned and pointed to the huge glass lens that still sat in the middle of the carriage house floor. “There it is.”

“Well, now, would you look at that? How did that work, do you suppose?” Curtis walked around the lens as if inspecting it.

Jason explained the process to him as he had explained it the weekend before.

“Fancy that.” Curtis looked directly at Sophie, hoping to pull her into the conversation. “I remember when the lighthouse stood out there, almost right on the beach. I remember when a storm back in, oh, I think it might have been ’forty-six, brought it crashing down. Heard it all the way over on Bancock Street.”

“1846?” Jason asked.

Curtis laughed and slapped him on the back good-naturedly.

“Funny guy here, right, Sophie?”

“He’s a riot, Pop.”

Curtis was beginning to pick up a tension between the two of them. Something in the way they pointedly were not looking at each other, smiling with no trace of humor or warmth. Something, Curtis decided, was not right.

He chatted with them for a few more minutes, and failing at his attempts to include both of them in the same conversation, excused himself to chat with Grace, all the while watching his granddaughter and Jason work around each other.

This simply would not do.

Disturbed, Curtis said his goodbyes, kissing Sophie and reminding Jason that he was to stop over later that afternoon to pick up a check for the work he’d been doing. Then, feigning fatigue, he asked Violet, whom he’d accompanied, if they could leave.

“Of course, Curtis.” Violet waved to Sophie, then said goodbye to the group of volunteers she’d been regaling with tales of the previous occupants of Ellie’s house and the fun they’d had when they were younger.

“It always makes me so nostalgic, coming here,” she told Curtis as they walked to her car. “It reminds me of when I was young, and Lilly and Rose were still alive. Such times we had …”

“You were always fun to be around, Violet. I know how close you and Rose, in particular, were all through your school days.”

“That we were, Curtis.”

Violet’s car was parked at the end of Ellie’s driveway, a privilege Violet assumed because of her age.
The pair got into the car and began the drive back to Old St. Mary’s Church Road in silence, Curtis distracted by the apparent coolness between Sophie and Jason, and Violet accustomed to a quiet car.

When they made the turn onto Charles Street, Curtis asked, “Do you suppose it’s true what they say about Grace Sinclair?”

“What on earth are you talking about? What do they say about Grace?” Violet’s eyes narrowed, but she never took them from the road.

“Oh, that she knows … spells, or something like that,” he mumbled.

“They still say that, do they?”

“It used to be the talk of the town, how Grace and Alice Ridgeway and a few others dabbled in … whatever it was they dabbled in …” He sighed. “You know what I mean, Violet.”

“Yes, I certainly do.” Was that a half smile of amusement on her face?

“So, does she?”

“Does she what, dear?”

“Does Grace Sinclair still do that stuff?” He wondered if he sounded as silly as he felt, but it was for a good cause, wasn’t it? “Spells.”

“What kind of spell did you have in mind, Curtis?”

“Something like a … like a …” He lowered his voice. “A love spell.”

At first, Violet appeared not to have heard, but finally, she said, “I’m trying to figure out why a man whose next big birthday will be ninety would be interested in a love spell.”

“It’s certainly not for me.”

“Why, I do believe you’re blushing, Curtis Enright.” Violet seemed to be having a little too much fun with the conversation.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t blush,” he grumbled.

“I’m assuming that if it’s not for you, the spell you have in mind has something to do with Sophie.”

Curtis nodded.

“Don’t you think Sophie is old enough and smart enough to take care of things in her own time?”

“Maybe in her time, but perhaps not in mine. And I want to see the girl settled before my time is up.”

“I see.” Violet slowed as she approached his house and stopped at the curb. “The young man you have in mind would be …?”

“Jason.”

“Of course. I should have guessed.”

“He’s the right one for her, Violet. Rose and I both agreed.”

“And Sophie? How does she feel about Jason?”

“I haven’t asked her.”

“And he …?”

“Haven’t asked him either.”

“Then why on earth would you want to interfere?”

“Because I know what I know, that’s why,” he snapped, then softened. “Sorry, Violet. It’s just that, it’s one of those things you just know.”

She nodded. Apparently there were things she just knew, too.

“So?” he asked pointedly.

“Sometimes it’s best not to meddle,” she said. “Sometimes it’s best to just let nature take its course.”