Chapter 30

Lane checked her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Out of her T-shirt and sweats, with her eyes made up and her hair blown out, she looked startlingly like her mother, fine-boned and delicately pale. Val was like their father, with strong, dark features that bordered on the exotic. Ironic that they should each resemble the parent with whom they had the least in common, an inexplicable prank of Mother Nature.

God help her. One day into her mother’s visit and already she was exhausted. Some part of her, the grown-up part, knew she was being unfair, dissecting every word and look, ready to pounce at the slightest hint of disapproval. But old habits died hard—for both of them, it seemed. Her mother was trying at least, attempting to bridge the distance that had always existed between them. But some chasms were simply too wide to cross.

Sighing, Lane applied a second coat of mascara and girded her loins for lunch with her mother. On the way downstairs she took a moment to look for Dally, following the butchered version of “I Feel Like a Woman” bleeding out into the hall from Michael’s room. She was just putting the finishing touches on the bed when Lane tapped her on the shoulder.

Dally yanked out her earbuds, eyes wide as she took in Lane’s transformation. “You look amazing! Date with Professor McDreamy?”

Lane made a face. “Lunch with my mother.”

“You still look great. You should dress up more often.”

“For who?” Lane held up a hand before Dally could open her mouth. “Never mind. Don’t answer that. Listen, I need you to do me a favor, and I need you to not ask me why. I don’t have time to explain right now.”

Dally’s eyes lit up. “Sounds like more tabloid fodder.”

Lane shot a quick look out into the hall to make sure her mother’s door was still closed. “You know the old woman who rides around town on that old bike?”

“You mean Dirty Mary?”

“Her name is Mary,” Lane replied evenly. “And yes, that’s who I mean.”

“What about her?”

“Well, she’s sort of a friend. Only I haven’t seen her for a few days. I’m worried something might have happened to her.”

“A friend of . . . yours?”

Lane could already see the wheels turning behind Dally’s narrowed gaze. “Look, I know it sounds weird, but I really don’t have time to explain. I just need you to keep an eye out for her. Let me know if you see her around town.”

Dally shrugged, part agreement, part confusion. “No problem. But don’t think I’m letting you off the hook about this. I want to know how you got to be friends with a bag lady.”

“Please don’t call her that.”

Dally shrugged again. “Sure. Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“Forget it,” Lane said, giving her arm a squeeze. “And thanks for not asking questions.”

Dally flashed one of her wicked grins as Lane headed for the door. “Oh, you can bet I’ll be asking plenty of questions. Just not now.”

Downstairs, she found Michael at work in the den, tapping manically on his laptop keyboard. Stepping behind him, she waited for him to finish his current sentence, reading silently over his shoulder. Finally, he turned. His eyes moved over her very slowly.

“Wow, you look . . . nice.”

Lane tried to ignore the pleasant tingle in her cheeks. “I’m taking my mother into the village. I thought we’d hit the Historical Society before lunch, then maybe do some shopping. I just wanted to let you know we’d be out. There’s leftover chicken in the fridge if you get hungry.”

She was about to step away when Michael took her hand and pulled her back. “What, no kiss?”

Lane took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m sorry about all this. Really. You must think I’m some kind of nut.”

Michael’s grin warmed into something else, something that made her heart beat faster. “I think nothing of the sort. And even if you were some kind of a nut, what do I care, as long as I get to keep kissing you? It’s not exactly a hardship, you know.”

Lane stared down at their fingers, loosely twined. “For me, either,” she said quietly. When the silence began to stretch, she cleared her throat. “Well, I guess I’d better be off. Oh, I meant to ask, what are your parents’ names?”

Michael frowned. “Matthew and Katherine. Why?”

“Because it’s likely to come up at lunch.”

“Ah, right. Then you’d also better know that my brother is Matt Jr., and my sister is Liz, short for Elizabeth. Matt’s an attorney. Liz is an attorney’s wife. She and her husband have two children—Brandon and Rhiann—and a pair of springer spaniels. I’m sorry. I don’t know the dogs’ names.”

Lane’s shoulders sagged miserably. “God, this really is insane, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Michael said huskily. “I’m beginning to enjoy playing house.”

He kissed her then, without a word of warning, a casual brushing of lips as he pulled her down into his lap. The kiss that followed was more thorough, deep and deliciously slow, turning her bones and her senses to liquid, until she could no longer tell where the lie began and the truth ended. Somewhere in her head a voice warned her that this was a mistake, a charade that could only lead to heartache. And yet—

The delicate clearing of a throat somewhere near the door shattered the moment. Lane slid off Michael’s lap, hands darting to her mouth like a teenager caught making out in her mother’s basement.

“Oh, excuse me, you two,” Cynthia said, smiling conspiratorially. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just wanted to let Laney know I was ready.”

Lane cleared her throat, ran a hand over her hair. “I’m ready, too, Mother. I was just . . .” Her voice trailed awkwardly.

“Telling your man good-bye. Yes, I recognize it.” She shot them both a wink. “I’ll be in the parlor. Take your time.”

Embarrassed, Lane turned to follow her mother. Before she could take a step, Michael recaptured her hand. “Have fun with your mother this afternoon.”

Lane’s eyes widened skeptically. “Fun?”

“She loves you, Lane.”

Had she imagined the faintly reproving tone? “How do you know?”

“Because she’s here. That says something. Quite a lot, in fact.”

“You don’t understand. You couldn’t. It’s a terrible thing to always be at war with the woman who brought you into the world, to at times wonder if you even . . . like her.”

Michael held her eyes for a long moment. “I understand more than you think,” he said finally. “Go on now. And remember what I said.”

“Yes, all right. I’ll have fun.”

She hesitated briefly before turning away, puzzled by the sudden change in his voice, and by the grave, faraway look that now shadowed his eyes. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask what had put it there, but she decided to let it go. Something told her she wasn’t likely to get a straight answer.

The scarred honey-pine floorboards creaked noisily as Lane and Cynthia entered the dimly lit anteroom of the Starry Point Historical Society. The attendant, a middle-aged woman in an ill-fitting navy suit, offered them a smile but made no move to get up from her desk at the back of the large, open room. Lane smiled back, then folded a five-dollar bill into the donation box just inside the door.

The atmosphere was somber and sepia-toned, the air heavy with the scent of beeswax. Lane moved to the first exhibit, a tribute to Starry Point Light, finished in 1872, featuring photographs and a sort of time-lapse tableau of the light in various stages of construction. She had seen it before but lingered while her mother read the captions beneath each photo.

“This is where we stood this morning,” Cynthia said, pointing to the jetty in one of the earliest photographs. “On these same rocks.”

“The very same,” Lane said with a nod. “As you can see, we’re very proud of our lighthouse. And of our dead whale.”

Lane pointed out a rather gruesome black-and-white of a dead whale that had washed up back in 1928 and had made the front page of the Islander Dispatch. When she saw her mother’s delicate shudder she moved on.

The next exhibit was a wall of images depicting damage done by various hurricanes over the years. The pictures were sobering, dating back to the 1933 Outer Banks hurricane that killed twenty-one people. The collection progressed through more recent storms like Irene and Sandy, all of which had left their mark on the vulnerable Carolina coastline: homes listing into the sea or washed completely off their pilings, fishing boats stranded in backyards, streets waist-deep in water, Highway 12, lifeline to the mainland, warped like a ribbon of shiny black licorice.

Cynthia studied the collection in horrified fascination, a hand pressed to her throat. “Laney, this is terrible. Doesn’t it worry you to live in a place where these kinds of things happen all the time?”

“Storms like these don’t happen all the time, Mother. These are the worst of the worst, and they span nearly a century. Most of the storms we get are nothing like this. In fact, we just had one, and the damage was pretty minimal, more of a nuisance for most of us than anything.”

Cynthia looked dubious as she wandered away from the photographic wreckage, clearly more at ease with images of Starry Point’s historical landmarks. “Oh, look,” she said, pointing. “Here’s your inn, Laney, back when it was still a convent, I think. And isn’t this the house just across the street?”

Lane came to stand beside her. “Yes, it is. It’s called the Rourke House, after one of the mayors who used to live there.”

“It says here that it burned, but you can’t tell from the street. Or from this picture, either.”

“Most of the damage is to the upper floor, at the back. A little boy died in the fire.”

Cynthia’s eyes closed briefly. “How awful. No one lives there now, though, do they? It looked abandoned to me.”

“It’s been empty since the fire.”

“Such a shame. It’s a beautiful house—or was. I wonder why they don’t restore it.”

Lane and Cynthia both started when the attendant spoke unexpectedly over their shoulders. “We’ve been trying to do just that for years. You’re absolutely right. It should be restored, but there’s always some kind of legal roadblock.”

Lane was surprised. “I always assumed it had to do with the expense.”

The woman in the navy suit shrugged. “Oh, there’s that, too. But we believe we’d recoup that quick enough with a small tour fee. The locals believe it’s haunted, you see, so over the years it’s gotten quite the reputation. Attracts tourists like crazy.”

It was Cynthia’s turn to look surprised. “I didn’t think anyone believed in ghosts anymore.”

“Oh, they do. And this house has two—an old man who hanged himself after the crash, and that poor little boy who died in the fire. I was only a girl when it happened, but it was a sad day in Starry Point, I can tell you. The story’s changed a lot over the years, but people claim to see things all the time.”

Lane stared at the early image of the house, tidy and well kept in its day, and tried to imagine the parlor beyond its empty, eyelike windows, bright and warm, ringing with boyish laughter, but she couldn’t. All she could see was the house as it stood now, hollowed out and gloomy, emptied of any joy that had ever existed within its old plaster walls.

Just thinking about it made her sad, and more than a little uneasy. Suddenly, she couldn’t shake Michael’s theory about houses having souls and collecting memories. It made sense when you thought about it, emotions leaving imprints on tangible things, scarring them.

All the good and the bad that’s ever happened.

Suppressing a shiver, she tapped her mother’s shoulder. “We’d better keep moving. It’s about time for lunch.”