On Folly Beach (21 page)

Thankfully Emmy hadn’t had to deal with Heath, who, according to Abigail, had gone back to Atlanta for several weeks for business. Emmy had forgotten that he was a developer and architect in Atlanta, and found it curious that he would choose to spend so much time on Folly, away from his company and the root of his business. She thought often of their argument the last time she’d seen him, wanting each time to feel the anger she’d felt then. Instead, she kept seeing the scar on the side of his head and the guarded look in his eyes, which made her think of a funhouse mirror you found at arcades where what you saw was a distortion of what you thought you would see.

Best of all Lulu kept to herself, moving unnoticed to and from her bottle garden behind the store, miraculously appearing whenever a potential bottle-tree customer visited the store. Emmy was amazed at the sheer number of people who came to Folly’s Finds for the sole purpose of buying a tree, as well as the letters she received from all over the country inquiring about ordering one.

Emmy stood and rubbed her back, sore from all the lifting and leaning, and wondered if she was too young to take a nap. She eyed the empty shelves, thinking of the next step that involved scrubbing the emptied shelves and lining them with the rolls of acid-free paper she’d ordered online.

Instead, she backed out of the alcove of the turret and left the bedroom, closing the door behind her so she wouldn’t be reminded of what awaited her. Then she returned to the living room, feeling reassured that the stairs and shelves would still be there later after she’d gone through more of the books.

Before she started, she turned on the stereo and stuck in a Glenn Miller CD. She’d been surprised to find it amongst the REM, Foo Fighters, and Rolling Stones, but somehow big-band music fit her mood. Maybe it was the photos on the walls taken in the nineteen forties that inspired her, but it was to the brass notes of “String of Pearls” that Emmy opened up her laptop, where she’d already transferred her inventory notes from the books in the box onto an Excel spreadsheet, and flipped it on before seating herself next to it on the floor in front of the first stack.

As she’d done before, she began at the top, pulling each book from the stack and meticulously turning every page in search of any writing. She still had her pile of books in the bedroom with the margin writings she’d found previously, and she intended to add any more she found to that stack. It had begun to occur to her that the messages might make more sense to her if she figured out some sort of order for them, and had already started on her computer a document about the messages she’d found so far. She’d studied them for a long time, and the only thing she’d concluded was what she’d already known from the start—that they were love notes between a man and a woman. The clandestine aspect of the love affair was still mere speculation, but she hoped she’d find more in Heath’s books, if only because they came from the same source—his mother’s attic.

She’d reached only the fourth book before she found the first note. It was in a later edition of Robinson Crusoe, and in the familiar woman’s handwriting in blue ink were written the words: I miss you. It’s cold outside and the pavilion is deserted.

Feeling satisfied that this was more evidence to support her hypothesis of a clandestine affair, she placed the book on the floor next to her to start a new pile, and reached for another book. It was nearly an hour later that she found the next message, this one in a worn copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the familiar broad strokes of the man’s handwriting were written the words: Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea change / Into something rich and strange.

Emmy recognized the words from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but wondered at their meaning in the message. What sea change? And who was the “him” referring to? She turned the page, seeing the impression of the words on the next page as if the writer had again written with agitation.

The CD ended, and she got up to replace it with a Tommy Dorsey’s greatest-hits album and poured herself a glass of wine as “In the Blue of Evening” began to play. Emmy’s mother always claimed that music was a subliminal advertisement for dancing, and Emmy began swaying across the room, avoiding the stacks of books, as she recalled the steps from watching her parents dance.

She waltzed into the dining area, where she hadn’t yet ventured, preferring to eat her meals on the bar stools at the granite kitchen island. She turned away from the windows and saw for the first time the wall arrangement of four more old photographs, matted in matching bleached and distressed wooden frames, and stopped. Taking a step forward, she took a sip of wine and began to study the people in the pictures, trapped forever in time in their wooden boxes like butterflies.

The photograph on the upper left was a wedding photo of a bride and groom standing outside on a boardwalk with the ocean behind them. The man wore the white uniform of a navy enlisted man, with dark shoes and a dark tie that crossed over his chest. He was tall and light haired, and while not what Emmy would call handsome, he had a charming smile and warm eyes that tilted up at the corners, which probably made him look like he was smiling even when he wasn’t.

The bride looked familiar, and after Emmy had studied the photograph for a moment, she realized that it was the same woman in the bathing suit in the photograph from the living room, Heath’s great-aunt Catherine. She was beautiful in her bathing suit, and even more so on her wedding day in a dress of white lace and clutching a tumbling bouquet of white roses. But whereas her groom’s face was open and smiling, her expression was a little unsure: an arched eyebrow that looked almost victorious matched with eyes that seemed more surprised than joyful. It was an odd combination for a wedding day, as odd as the two individuals that seemed to be mismatched as a couple.

Her gaze strayed to the next photograph of the woman she recognized as Maggie standing outside a store that Emmy easily recognized as Folly’s Finds. It was hard to determine the color in black-and-white, but it was lighter than the current pink, and the door was completely different, with only two large windowpanes devoid of any stickers.

Maggie wore peep-toe pumps and a prim checkered dress buttoned up to the neck. As Emmy had noticed before, she wasn’t beautiful, but her face demanded attention from the sheer intensity of her expression and the light in her eyes. Unlike Catherine, Maggie was a person Emmy wished she could meet, if only to understand how a person could remain alone in the face of a hurricane.

The third picture was of the little boy, whom Heath had told her was his father, John. He stood in a striped shirt and overalls, holding a fishing line with a tiny fish dangling from the end. His face was split with a grin, the boy apparently oblivious to the size of his catch.

The last photograph made Emmy pause as she sipped her wine. A male in a dark-colored suit and tie stared out at the photographer with a questioning look, as if he wasn’t sure why his picture was being taken. He was seated at a table and people were dancing behind him. He held a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of Pabst in the other, and his head was turned slightly as if he had been caught by surprise by the photographer. A gold signet ring winked from his finger, but the letter on the top of it was blurred, as if the photographer had caught the subject in movement. The man was young, about thirty, and undeniably handsome in an old-fashioned kind of way. But his eyes in the photograph were what made a person stop and pause; light and piercing, they conveyed much more than surprise. They were the eyes of a man unsure yet confident at the same time, a juxtaposition that Emmy presumed would break an ordinary man.

She stared at the pictures for a long time, making a mental note to ask Abigail more about them. Then she poured herself another glass of wine and returned to the stacks of books. Seating herself in her familiar spot on the carpet again, she reached for another book.

The rain continued its deluge outside, and twice she went to the window to check the level in the marsh, watching the tall grass sink lower and lower beneath water. She relaxed when the rain finally tapered to a persistent drizzle when the dock was still above the waterline.

Emmy sorted and inventoried and searched through pages of books for nearly two hours, switching from wine to an unbearably sweet tea that Abigail had sent home with her. Emmy had been assured it was a taste she’d become accustomed to, but she wasn’t sure. Her mother had always made unsweetened tea for her father, which made Emmy wonder what other concessions her mother made when she moved out of South Carolina.

It was nearly seven o’clock when Emmy’s stomach began rumbling, and she realized she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Emmy leaned back and sighed, then surveyed her progress. She’d inventoried about seventy-five books—out of approximately five hundred—and three of them were first editions of moderately valuable volumes. And she’d found three more books with notes—two from the man, and one from the woman. She’d ask Heath again about the first editions, and offer payment or at least a percentage of whatever she sold them for. She was thinking about moving the store’s rare book and document business online, and these three would be perfect on the home page.

She picked up her laptop and opened the correct document and began to type in the appropriate columns:

Moll Flanders, Page 105, Female—I saw you today at the Post Office. I waited across the street until you left so others wouldn’t see the way I look at you. She complained to me that you are gone most nights, doing your civilian duty, and I told her she should be proud. I know that I am. I must see you.

Huckleberry Finn, Page 34, Male—Forgive me.

Canterbury Tales, Page 222, Female—Yes, yes, yes. You make it impossible to say no and I can no longer consider the repercussions. All’s fair in love and war, and I cannot think how very true those words are.

Emmy saved the document, then slowly closed her laptop’s lid, not ready to stop but realizing she should to avoid this hunt for two unknown people becoming an obsession. She placed the laptop on a side table and stood, her knees stiff and cracking. As she stretched, she spotted a book about five volumes down in a nearby stack. Crouching next to it, she carefully pulled it out and flipped open the cover to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Slowly she turned the opening pages, pausing when she reached the title page. There, in the same scrawl she recognized from Lulu’s Nancy Drew book, were the words: To Margaret, a woman of boundless beauty and substance. Yours always, Peter.

Emmy stared at it for a long time before grabbing the copy of Huckleberry Finn to compare the handwriting. The crush of disappointment surprised her, making her realize that maybe it was too late to avoid an obsession. She wasn’t a handwriting expert by any means, but it was clear even to her that the notes in the book margins hadn’t been written by the mysterious Peter. The unidentified man wrote with the same bold scrawl as Peter, but the words were slanted to the left instead of the right, his L’s and T’s written with loops. Emmy was about to close the book when she noticed one similarity: in the P’s and B’s and D’s, the legs of the letters stood alone, the ensuing curves not intersecting the lines at any point.

Still, the rest of the handwriting was different enough to convince her that there were two separate writers. At least she had a name, and she made another mental note to ask Abigail.

Slowly she closed the book and put it on the side table to go through later. She was walking toward the kitchen to grab a frozen dinner to stick in the microwave when she heard the distinct sound of a key turning the front-door latch.

Emmy was frantically looking for some sort of weapon when a tall, slender woman walked into the kitchen. They stood staring at each other, and Emmy wasn’t sure who was more surprised.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I was about to ask you the same thing.” The woman spoke with a Southern drawl, her voice deep. She twirled a set of car keys in her hand, and when they slipped from her fingers, she left them where they fell.

Emmy almost smiled, remembering a nearly identical conversation she’d had with Heath on her first day in the house. “I’m Emmy Hamilton. I’m renting this house from Heath Reynolds for a few months.”

The woman raised an elegant auburn eyebrow, perfectly formed and set above a pair of large green eyes. Emmy noticed how incredibly beautiful the woman was at the same time she smelled the alcohol on her breath. The woman’s words weren’t slurred, making Emmy wonder if she’d had a lot of practice with that.

“He sure didn’t waste any time. Is he here?”

“Excuse me?”

Ignoring Emmy’s question, the woman walked over to the master bedroom and peered inside at the neatly made bed and the remaining stacks of books Emmy hadn’t yet moved into the great room.

Joining her in the doorway, Emmy said, “If you’re referring to Heath, no, he’s not here. And may I ask who you are and why you’re here?”

The woman looked down at Emmy, exaggerating the difference in their heights. Then she slid out of her high-heeled sandals and began to walk back to the kitchen, barefoot. Emmy couldn’t help but notice how even the woman’s feet were beautiful, the tip of each well-formed toe painted a crimson red.

The woman opened up a cabinet and pulled out a wineglass, then made her way back to the bar in the great room and helped herself to the opened bottle of wine. After taking a sip, she said, “I’m Jolene Quinn. This house was built for me.”

“Oh,” Emmy managed, watching as Jolene eyed the stacks of books along with the spare furniture and framed photographs hanging from the walls. She recalled what Lulu had said about Jolene, how they favored each other but that Jolene was prettier and with a bigger chest.

“I love what you’ve done with the place,” Jolene said as she took another sip of her wine. “What is this—early librarian?”

Defensive now, Emmy said, “Actually I haven’t done anything with the place. The furniture and books are Heath’s, but Abigail framed and hung the pictures.” She stopped herself from explaining more about the books. “You know, I don’t think you’re supposed to be here. As I said, I’m renting the house.”