CHAPTER 30
March 1960
The St. Ives pub’s honey-wood paneled walls glowed with the low lighting. A short woman with a wide smile played Irish jigs on the fiddle. Some of the crowd bellied to the bar while others danced on the wooden floors in the small area where tables had been pushed back. Kelty watched from the round table where they’d been sitting since a dinner of shepherd’s pie. Kelty was laughing with Ethan.
Hazel was dizzy from dancing with Harry. He dipped and twisted, and she with him, her dress swirling about her. She needed air; she needed stable ground. She let go of his hand and ran out the door, the music and Harry following her.
“Are you all right?” he asked, catching up to her on the sidewalk outside.
“Fresh air?” she asked, and pointed down the street where the beach they’d walked that afternoon shimmered in moonlight, a block away.
He nodded and took her hand. Harry’s hand in hers, knit together, was natural yet overwhelming. Whiskey in her veins, night surrounding them, they reached the beach and stood at the edge at high tide. The lighthouse light swept across the sand and his face.
There was nothing but this—Harry, stars above, sand below, and desire. But she could have none of it, and she let go of his hand, backed away as he watched her. She reminded herself it was just old feelings rising, nothing real.
The lighthouse shine swept past them again, illuminating his face. “Hazel… are you all right?”
With the utterance of her name, she came back to herself, awoke from the dream of being with him. It was wrong. If she let him touch her, it would destroy her. It would drown Flora again.
“Being alone with you,” she said. “It’s dangerous.”
“How is it dangerous?” he asked. “We are just standing on a beach…”
“But are we? What are we doing, Harry? You have a girl; I have Barnaby and to feel this way… it ruins things.”
“What will it ruin?” he asked.
“My life,” she said, knowing it made no sense and also knowing it was true.
“Then, Hazel, just stay here with me for a little while. Don’t leave. I promise we won’t ruin anything.”
“My head.” Kelty’s voice echoed through the inn’s room, waking Hazel from a fitful sleep. The red plaid curtains were open, and morning appeared in lemony light.
Hazel sat and looked at Kelty in the next bed. “I get it.”
But Hazel’s hangover was of a different sort. Hers was one of the heart. She’d said too much; laughed too much; opened up too much. She’d come for a single answer and ended in a pub with Ethan, Harry, and Kelty singing silly ditties with the band, then sitting on the beach with Harry as the moon rolled up and the stars pierced a dark sky one by one.
She and Harry had stayed on the beach for hours, telling stories of their lives over the past twenty years. Not all of it, of course. There wasn’t time for that. For one night, the past had faded away instead of lurking in the corner. Last night’s hours with Harry were a time Hazel knew she couldn’t have again. One night had to be enough. There was no way to change what happened and now their lives were on separate trajectories. They had other obligations, jobs, loves, and families. She’d come here to find out if he knew about Whisperwood, and he hadn’t.
“We need to go home,” Hazel said.
“But we told them we’d stop by and see their paintings and sculptures today.” Kelty stretched. “Fergus said not to rush back, so we needn’t hurry on account of me.” Kelty swung her legs over the side of the bed and ran her hands through her hair, pulling at the tangles. “Didn’t it feel like no time had passed at all? I know you felt the same—like we still knew them.”
“No. I felt like a million years had passed.” Hazel stood. “Listen, I got what I came for. We need to go.”
As Hazel walked toward the bathroom, Kelty called out, “Did you even think about Barnaby last night? Did you miss him at all?”
Hazel spun around and looked at her friend. “Yes, of course I did,” she said. “And we have to go.” And yet, the truth was she had thought about Barnaby, but only with guilt because if he’d seen her on the beach with Harry, if he’d seen them on the sand talking until the moon sailed across the night and the stars blanketed the sky, he would have been both hurt and angry. But she’d done nothing wrong.
Kelty flopped back on the pillow. “Fantastic, now I can be both carsick and hungover. Jolly good.”
They were in the car soon after the early morning tea and croissants had been put out in the inn restaurant. They’d put tea in their thermos and biscuits in their purses. Outside, as they tossed their bags into the boot of the car, Kelty paused to stare at the sea, the boats bobbing on the water and the fishermen pushing to sea with their nets flung out, and their caps low on their heads, hollering words lost in the breeze.
The road wound through the countryside as they retraced the route they’d taken only the day before. “I can see why they want to live here,” Kelty said. “It’s extraordinary. I can’t paint a straight line and this light and this place make me want to be an artist.”
Hazel nodded. She agreed, but everything was coming at her too fast. It was two hours before Kelty gently said, “Tell me what Harry said.”
This was the crux of it all, and Kelty had waited long enough.
“He never knew the story or the name of the land.”
Kelty let out a whoosh of air. “How do you feel about that?”
“I feel everything, Kelty. Everything all at once.”
“Then what’s next?” Kelty asked.
“I don’t know…” She fought tears of hopelessness as she stared out the windshield to see a blurry view of the velvet-nosed cows at the fence’s edges, the lazy sheep dotting the fields like gardenia blooms, and the road winding back to Bloomsbury.
“He was never suspected of foul play,” Hazel said, fire in her words.
Barnaby paced Hazel’s living room. He poured another finger of whiskey in his glass, and he rolled it between his palms. It was late, and he’d just returned from an outing with his cousin in town from Winchester. He was already well into his drink when he poured himself another. “Yes, Hazel. Harry Aberdeen was a suspect. I read it in the newspapers you left out on the kitchen table. He and his crazy mum. And there’s never been a father? She made him disappear?”
“It’s not like that, Barnaby.” She was tired to death of explaining how things weren’t the way they looked.
“Like what? It wasn’t like what?”
“It’s not how you’re making it sound. Like they were suspects or had the ability to make people disappear. Stop.”
Barnaby had arrived at her flat late that night after she’d returned from St. Ives. She’d been awake on the couch reading Peggy Andrews’s Whisperwood one more time, hoping to find a hint, a clue, a hidden phrase that might lead her to the truth. She’d forced the thoughts of Harry far from her mind but he returned again and again.
Barnaby now stepped closer. It was possible his anger had little to do with her being gone for two days and more to do with being able to see right through her.
“Hazel, you’ve never lied to me. So tell me the truth. Have you seen Harry since the day you left Binsey twenty years ago? Until you went to St. Ives with Kelty yesterday, had you ever seen him?”
“No.”
He pointed to the hall table where Hazel usually placed the mail, and Hazel spied the letters she hadn’t seen, the letters she’d left in the dusty corner of the trunk in the hall closet, the letters no longer wrapped in twine.
“You went through my things?” Her voice rose with each word.
“The trunk was open. It was open with all the articles and photos. I didn’t break into it or even go looking. It was right there.”
“Barnaby, I can explain, of course.”
He lifted one letter and then tossed it back onto the pile. “These are the melancholy letters of two people in love. It’s not hard to read between the lines.”
“They are old, and I never saw him again.” She held her hands in surrender. “And obviously I haven’t looked at those in years and years.”
“But you saved them. Tell me, do you still love him?”
Hazel thought about the truth and what it might mean to them both, about the honesty it would take to get to the other side. “Yes, and I always will. But not like that, not like us. It was childhood. And it was over the day Flora disappeared.”
“No.” Barnaby pointed at the letters with his lit cigarette. “It wasn’t over. For God’s sake, Hazel, he says life is more magical with you.”
“Barnaby, I’m sorry you saw and read those old letters, but this quest I am on isn’t about Harry.”
“I love you so much, Hazel.” His eyes softened. “And you’re worrying me, becoming obsessed with that book. You’re worrying me, running off to see an old love when a phone call would do perfectly fine, and believing your sister can rise from the dead like this…”
A surge rose through Hazel’s body, electric and fiery. “Don’t say that. Do not say she is dead. What is wrong with you?”
“Hazel, please calm down.”
She nearly laughed but it came out as an indignant sound of disgust. “Calm down? Seriously?”
He lowered his voice, softer now. “I know this is the biggest wound of your past, and I am so sorry. I wish it had never happened to you, but you can’t go chasing wild geese all over England and America, looking for your own fairy tale.”
“I already found a fairy tale, Barnaby. It’s in a book written by an American author. I am looking for the truth: How did this author know this story and is Flora still—”
“All right. If it’s important to you, it’s important to me. To lose a child is… beyond awful.”
“I’m so sorry, Barnaby.” She touched his unshaven cheeks. “We both lost someone.”
Barnaby’s baby daughter was gone, and he’d watched it happen. Hazel hadn’t seen Flora leave the world, but their losses were entangled, and he could not imagine anything different for Hazel, could not imagine that her story might be altered by a book that she just happened upon.