Chapter 8
Drake Isle: Inner Sanctum
Emmy
bad chi going on here.” Raelynn Atkins stood in the middle of the yoga studio the following afternoon, hands on her hips. Long braids fell down her back, and she pursed bright pink lips. Her broad, bare shoulders were covered with tattoos, bright ink that stood out against her dark skin. The tattoos continued down her back and onto both legs. She’d knocked on Emmy’s door the month after Inner Sanctum opened and offered to teach meditation and reiki classes. Four years later, despite the decades between them, the two had become fast friends.
“It’s that noticeable?”
“Noticeable?” Raelynn tossed her braids. “Honey, I felt it out on the sidewalk. What’s going on?”
“How much time do you have?”
“We’re going to dinner, right? I kinda wanted to be home by nine. That gives you two hours to fill me in. A new episode of Naked in the Jungle starts tonight.”
“Is that the latest one you’re applying for?” Emmy asked. For all her intuition and sensitivity, Raelynn also had a TV junkie’s addiction to reality shows, the more dramatic the better. So far she’d been turned down by all the major ones she’d applied for. Now she was focusing on the smaller, niche ones that might be open to, as she put it, a middle-aged bisexual black babe who could start a fire one minute and rock a pair of stilettos the next.
Raelynn made a face. “You should see the pasty-white weaklings they get on there. Can’t even swing an ax to cut up firewood. One thunderstorm and they’re crying into their coconuts.” She made a fist and tightened her biceps. “Now this would draw viewers. Especially if I was cutting up firewood in that red bikini I picked up last month. I showed you that one, right?”
“The two pieces of fabric that combined were smaller than a washcloth? Yes, you showed me. I’m not really sure it would hold up to, say, wood cutting or fire building.”
Raelynn gave her a look.
“Although if anyone could pull it off, I’m sure you could.” She could only hope to look the way Raelynn did when she hit fifty.
“Exactly. So where are we going for dinner?”
“Someplace really inexpensive. Got any ideas?”
Raelynn closed one eye and tilted her head as if in concentration. “How about the Drift Inn? I could use a good burger.”
“Okay. But let me ask you something before we go.” Emmy took out the shoebox she’d stashed behind the front desk earlier that day. She had a small amount of emergency cash in her safe upstairs, but that combined with the money in her checking account wouldn’t pay her bills longer than a month. “I was wondering if you knew anyone who’d be interested in buying any of this.” She opened the box. Inside lay most of her mother’s jewelry.
“Oh, honey.” Raelynn lifted out a ruby bracelet and a string of pearls.
Emmy’s mom may have been a hippie who lived on coupons and the favors of strangers, but she’d also had impeccable taste. After she died, Emmy had been stunned to find an entire drawer full of necklaces, rings, earrings, and watches. Some she remembered seeing. Others she didn’t recognize at all. The realization of what she had to do with them had come to her late last night.
“You’re selling these?”
“I have to.” She had no idea what they might be worth, but she hoped it would total at least five grand. She wasn’t about to let Bryan off the hook, not by a long shot, but neither was she about to sit back and let Eastefire, the bank, or anyone else take Inner Sanctum while she still had breath in her body. “I need the money, like, yesterday.”
“I thought you were doing okay here.”
“I am. I just got over my head with some bills. From Mom’s funeral and stuff.”
Raelynn wrapped Emmy in a hug so fierce, she squeaked. “Can’t. Breathe.”
“Sorry.” In addition to working as a life coach and traveling ordained minister, Raelynn also occasionally entered bodybuilding competitions. Her biceps flexed as she held two necklaces up to the light. “These are gorgeous. If you really want to sell them, I know a guy on the mainland who’d probably be interested.”
“He owns an actual store? Or he has one of those temporary displays he puts out on the sidewalk when the cops aren’t looking?”
“Who do you think I hang out with?”
“I know who you hang out with. That’s why I’m asking.”
“Shoot.” Raelynn’s wide, white smile punctuated the word. “He’s on the up and up. He owns a pawn shop. He’ll give you a fair price.”
“I hope you’re right.” Emmy put the shoebox away and locked the door as they walked outside. Harbor Street buzzed with activity. “Oh, God, look at all this. I almost forgot.”
“Memorial Day Festival this weekend? How the hell could you forget?”
Emmy shrugged. Lots on my mind. And that was an understatement. The Drake Isle Senior Club had joined some of the local Scouts and their fathers in draping ribbon and bows around streetlights. Garlands already wound around the wooden fence that separated the ferry landing from the street. Someone had stuck an American flag into every pot of flowers on the block, including the one in front of Inner Sanctum. Al Harrison and a few other firefighters were up on ladders decorating trees and telephone poles. Yachts moored off shore glowed with red and blue lights of their own, and the stars and stripes whipped in the wind everywhere Emmy looked. In another twenty-four hours, the entire harbor would come alive in a show of patriotism that paled only in comparison to Fourth of July.
“They’re braver than I am,” Emmy said as they walked by the men on ladders. “I’m terrified of heights.” Anything could happen when your feet left the ground. You could lose your balance, break a leg, break your neck, break the hearts of everyone who knew you.
“Really? I didn’t know that.”
Emmy glanced sideways at Raelynn as they walked up Harbor Street. “My best friend died when she fell off the roof of a fraternity house in college. Right before we were supposed to graduate.”
Raelynn’s mouth dropped open, and she stopped in her tracks. “Are you kidding me? Shit. That’s horrible. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I try not to think about it.” Emmy tugged her friend’s arm. “Come on.”
They walked another few paces in silence, leaving the harbor behind them. “You ever talk to someone about it?” Raelynn asked. “That’s a hell of a thing to live with.”
“I saw a therapist a few times.”
“Did it help?”
“Not really.”
“You know if you ever do want to talk about it, with someone who actually knows you, I mean, I’m here.” They turned onto Sunset Avenue. This road arched up toward the center of the island, its highest point. The Drift Inn didn’t have the best food on the island, but it had one of the best views. Past it stood the island’s only school, across from the island’s only graveyard.
“Thanks,” Emmy said. “But right now I just want to get some dinner. Oh, and the number of that guy you know with the pawn shop.”
She’d vowed a long time ago to move forward. No dwelling on the past. No thinking about Piper’s death. And absolutely no thinking about Blake or Misterion or the person she’d been back in college. She lived on Drake Isle, but she didn’t have to revisit the things that had happened here. She kept her mind on her work and her feet on the ground. She never went down to the southern end of the island, and she’d given away her college yearbooks long ago. Minimal complications, little regret, and no balconies, ladders, or heights of any kind.
Life was just safer that way.
Boston: Blake
of the hall closet in his townhouse. There wasn’t much to see in there, especially since Hailey had moved out. Now it was home to his two winter coats, a pair of hiking boots he’d never worn, and some boxes he’d saved after college and graduate school. At the time, he thought he might use his old notes and textbooks for reference at work. But he hadn’t opened so much as one of them in all that time. Now he ran one finger along the row of boxes, reading the scrawls in black marker he’d written years ago.
He stopped at the last one. Yearbooks & personal shit
Fitting description, he thought as he pulled it down from the shelf. He crouched and opened the flaps. Pictures from college. Certificates from fraternity events, curled up at the edges. A faded red ribbon with gold print crumbled under his touch. He came across paperback copies of The Alchemist and How to Win Friends and Influence People. Had he ever read either of them? Finally, at the very bottom, he found what he was looking for. He left the box on the floor and backed out of the closet.
Misterion College
Salva veritate - With truth intact
Blake ran his fingers over the dusty red cover. When he opened the yearbook, two newspaper clippings fell out.
College Senior Falls to Death
Misterion Closed, Delta Eta Chi Fraternity Suspended
His face flushed, and he shoved the articles aside with one foot. Had he cut them out of the Island Courier? He had no memory of doing so. He carried the yearbook into the living room, sank into an easy chair and turned the glossy pages one by one. His dinner rolled into a tight ball in his gut as he looked at pictures of the campus, the ocean, clubs and groups and professors whose names he didn’t recall. He passed the pages of underclassmen on his way to the full-color senior photos and slowed. Emmy’s was on the third page. A vein in his temple throbbed as he traced the vee in her black dress and the milky white skin above it.
She hadn’t changed much. More tightness around the eyes now. More defined, hollowed cheekbones. In this picture, she smiled at the cameraman as though they shared all kinds of secrets. As if college had been the best years of her life. Blake flipped to his own senior picture, baby-faced and equally naive. He sported a shadow of stubble that his father had hated, and a red tie that Blake had thrown out along with almost everything else after Piper died.
He flipped some more, through the Sports Life pages to the ones featuring Greek Life. Delta Eta Chi was listed first, its house the biggest on campus and its membership the most prestigious. After the suspension, the national board had opted to keep the house sealed and maintained rather than rent it to anyone on the island. And even though Misterion had moved its campus to the mainland, Delta Eta Chi wasn’t allowed to reopen as a fraternity until ten years had passed. Blake’s distant relations had established the college. His great-great-grandfather had helped build the Delta house. Three generations of Carter men had lived in it.
“And I was the one who got it shut down.”
He slammed the yearbook shut and tossed it aside. Stupid, so stupid to walk down Memory Lane. What waited for him back on Drake Isle? Nothing but reminders of the life he’d lost a decade ago. Well, and the woman he’d once loved, but she was so far over him he’d be a fool to think otherwise. If he looked closely enough into the mirror, he was pretty sure he could see a bruise on his cheek from where she’d slapped him.
It should be easy to distance himself from Emmy, to think of her only as a competitor to vanquish. An opponent to strong-arm.
Except he couldn’t.
Hours later, after two glasses of scotch and a baseball game that went extra innings, Blake lay awake staring at the ceiling. This townhouse really was too big for one person, but he hadn’t gotten around to selling it after Hailey moved out. She was the one who’d wanted to live in the trendy, old-money suburb of Newton, but it was too far from the city center for Blake’s taste.
And now, to be honest, everything was too far from Drake Isle for Blake’s taste. He threw one arm over his eyes. He couldn’t get Emmy out of his mind, and he knew he’d take Trey’s advice and go back to the island, go back to her yoga studio, and see her again. Weakness, his father would say. You don’t need to see her again. Just make a phone call. Make the deal. Make me proud. Remember your name.
One of the things Blake had loved most about Emmy was that she knew nothing about him or his name when they first met. She’d never heard his family history. She had no idea his ancestors had funded the college in its earliest days. Even the fact that Carter Library was named after his great-great-grandfather had escaped her notice. When she finally connected the dots, she looked at him wide-eyed.
“Must be a hell of a weight to bear.”
It is, he thought now. It always has been. His hand dropped beneath the sheets, and before he knew it, he was stroking himself as he closed his eyes and thought of her. No one before and no one since had ever made him feel the way Emerson Doyle did—like he was flying and grounded all at the same time. Like he could touch the moon, or run a mile in under a minute, or swim the English Channel without stopping to take a breath. Or make a mistake and not be judged forever by it.
He couldn’t give into that weakness in the daylight hours, not with everyone at Eastefire scrutinizing his every move, and not with family expectations sitting squarely on his shoulders. He had no choice but to move forward with the acquisition of her building, regardless of the cost. But for now, tonight, on his way to dreams, Blake let himself think of her, and when he came, it was with such sweet violence that he fell asleep at once and slept like the dead, like he hadn’t in years, like he was still a Delta brother and all was right in the world.