Sweet Salt Air Read online

  So they spent another warm day at the beach. There were more bodies on towels today; weekenders had arrived, delivered early by the ferry with a guttural noise that could be heard from the pier, and the beach was the go-to spot. Though there was no boisterousness, there were iPod docks and earbuds aplenty. There was also lots of talk, with Nicole in its midst. Many of those newly arrived were people she had known for years but hadn’t seen since fall.

  Watching her, Charlotte thought she looked better. She was in her element with people, and though there were questions about Bob and Julian, she handled them well. She even accepted a dinner invitation from friends of her parents, who had half a dozen others coming as well.

  “They want you, too,” Nicole informed her when she returned to their towels and stretched out again, but Charlotte shook her head no.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not a dinner party kind of person.”

  “Are you kidding? You’d be the most interesting one in the room!”

  “I hate small talk.”

  “You can do it.”

  “Oh, I can. I just don’t want to.”

  Nicole must have sensed she was serious, because she said, “Then we’ll go another time. You’re my guest. I can’t leave you home alone.”

  “Of course you can,” Charlotte scolded. “You love the McKenzies. And besides, this breaks the ice for you. It’s better to see some people now, than everyone all at once Sunday morning at brunch.” Bailey’s Brunch was an annual event, ostensibly to celebrate the summer solstice, though truly to welcome back seasonal Quinnies. Held at the church, it would be the first townwide gathering of the summer, and therefore an important one for Charlotte and Nicole to attend. “Besides, these are your people, not mine.” She paused and said on a lighter note, “See the heads on the bluff?”

  Nicole glanced up at the rocks that anchored the far end of the beach. The heads were attached to bodies of local teenage boys, for whom hours on that bluff each summer weekend was a rite of passage. “They’re still at it.”

  “Obviously a different crew.”

  “For sure, but they do love taking it in. Warm bodies.”

  “Warm female bodies.”

  “And you in a one-piece suit. What happened to the bikinis you loved?”

  “The French Riviera,” Charlotte remarked, and at Nicole’s curious frown, said, “Bikinis all over the place, looking great on some bodies and horrid on others, and the occasional one-piece suit looking so much better.”

  “But you have the body for a bikini.”

  Charlotte couldn’t comment further. “Not like yours. You look amazing, Nicki. You absolutely have to go to the McKenzies’ tonight. Trust me. You’ll light up the party.”

  Nicole leaned close to be heard over the sounds of laughter and waves. Her eyes were a crystal-clear green. “Do you know how glad I am that you’re here? Come? Please?”

  But Charlotte shook her head and smiled. “After a day here with all these people? I’m socialized out. You go. I’ll sleep.”

  * * *

  She didn’t sleep, of course. She planned to, but wasn’t tired, and what she wanted, really, was to photograph herbs. Shouldering the Nikon, she walked down the road, familiar enough now with the terrain to move to the center even before the pavement worsened. She listened for hammering or barking but heard only the reverberating surf, and when she rounded the curve, there was nothing but moonlight on a dark house.

  Flash would be a problem. Not only would it skew the true color of the plants, but a sudden glint, no matter now brief, might alert Leo Cole. So, no flash, just moonlight, which gave a silver glow to the plants and was actually charming. She had a steady hand. She also had enough experience taking pictures in the wild to know how to brace her body for greater stability.

  By the time she thought this through, though, the smells had sunk in and were distilling her plans. Oddly mindless, she went to the same spot on the drive and sat down. Take pictures, ordered the tiny voice in her head. But she wasn’t in the mood. Borrow, said the voice. But she didn’t want to do that, either.

  She felt lethargic.

  No. Not lethargic.

  Relaxed. Content. Seduced.

  Legs folded, hands limp on her thighs, she dropped her head back, closed her eyes, and slowly inhaled. Basil? Mint? Cilantro? There were threads of each—but also of others far beyond her ability to name. And fertile earth. And sweet salt air. The moment was rich.

  Then came breathing. She righted her head and opened her eyes. The road to the house was empty, but when she looked left down an aisle of staked plants, she saw the dog.

  It came toward her on paws so large that she vetoed the idea of running. She wouldn’t get far, and the damage of lunging jaws could be worse. So she held her breath while it approached and sniffed her face, her neck, her camera. Its nose was wet. She wanted to recoil, but didn’t dare move.

  “Caught,” came a low voice from behind her. And still she didn’t take her eyes off Bear.

  “Call off your dog,” she said through lips that barely moved.

  “He doesn’t like trespassers, either.”

  “I’m just sitting.”

  “On my land.”

  “Call off your dog and I’ll leave.”

  He snapped his fingers—once, softly—and the dog lumbered past. Only then, with care, did Charlotte turn. Leo Cole was barefoot, bareheaded, bare armed and legged. Shorts and a tank, that was it. His face was shadowed, accentuating its hard lines, while the dog at his thigh watched her with distrust.

  “Fancy camera,” he said in that flat voice of his.

  “It’s part of my arm.”

  “Which you stand to lose if you lift it.”

  “No lifting. It’s too dark. Call off the dog.”

  “If it’s too dark, why’d you bring it?”

  “There were flowers back on the road that were pretty in the moonlight.”

  “And I’m a leprechaun.”

  She might have snickered. He was way too tall and deep-voiced to be any kind of magical creature, and with a menacing dog, foaming at the mouth beside him? Well, maybe not foaming. But scary enough. Trying to stay calm, she took a slow breath.

  “Were you meditating?” he asked.

  “No.” With movements measured enough not to alarm the dog, she rose. “I was … being. There’s something about this air. It’s like a drug.”

  “You with the FDA?”

  “No. With the cookbook lady.”

  That was nearly as bad, to judge from the tightness of his mouth. “Yeah. Looking for pictures. And recipes. You won’t get either, y’know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ll put out word that I don’t want you to.”

  “Why will islanders listen to you?”

  “Because I grow the herbs.”

  “I thought people here grew their own.”

  “I control the parent plants, and the parent plants control theirs.”

  Charlotte failed to make the connection. “Like, your plants decide whether their plants grow? That’s imaginative.”

  He shrugged, clearly not caring what she thought.

  “What’s it to you anyway, our cookbook?” she asked.

  “Publicity stinks.” He moved aside in silent command, and made the smallest scoot with his thumb in case she missed the message.

  She might have asked more—about Cecily, about the herbs, about what he did out here on the far tip of the island besides repairing his house in the dark—if it hadn’t been for the dog, and while, looking down on it now, she didn’t see any more viciousness there than last time, she wasn’t taking chances. Leo didn’t want her around. And Leo controlled the dog.

  That said, she wasn’t exactly sure how to get past them. Between him, the dog, and one narrow drive, there wasn’t a whole lot of room. If she went to the left, she would be close to the dog. If she went to the right, she would be close to Leo.

  She was trying to decide which
was safer when, sounding vaguely amused, he asked, “Are you afraid of Bear?”

  “I was bitten by a dog once.” She saw no point in denial. As far as she was concerned, caution was a good thing when you didn’t know the beast. “That one was supposed to be friendly. Yours looks anything but.”

  He touched the dog’s head with the tips of his fingers, apparently another signal, because, seeming suddenly bored, the dog looked away.

  Charlotte didn’t trust that it wouldn’t look back and lunge. Opting for the right side, she walked slowly past Leo and continued on down the drive.

  * * *

  “You what?” Nicole asked in disbelief. They were in the kitchen, topping off breakfast with seconds of coffee. Nicole had just given a blow-by-blow of dinner at the McKenzies’—good company, a pork tenderloin, from a local pig farm, that had been laced with rosemary and grilled and was surprisingly good, though pork wasn’t her favorite meat, and a stunning centerpiece of wildflowers floating in a hollow gourd about which she had just blogged—and she wanted to know what Charlotte had done.

  “I was at the Cole place.”

  “What do you mean, at the Cole place? Like walking around? Ringing the bell?”

  “I don’t think there’s a bell,” Charlotte said. She had her knees up, bare feet on the edge of her seat, hands cupping her mug. “The house is old and run-down. Leo was fixing a shutter. I gave him a hand.”

  “You what?”

  “Helped him out.”

  “Leo saw you? Charlotte, you are not supposed to go there. If there’s one thing Quinnies say, it’s that. Leo is dangerous.”

  Charlotte remembered being up on that ladder Wednesday night. He might have easily tossed her off or touched her inappropriately, but he hadn’t done either. He had steadied her until the job was done, then backed off. Granted, he was more annoyed last night, but hindsight cast a softer view on that as well. “I don’t think he is. I’ve been there three times—”

  “Three? When?”

  Charlotte felt marginally guilty. “The last three nights. It’s really no big thing, Nicki. That’s just the direction I walk. The distance from here to there is just right.”

  “He’s the island bad boy.”

  “Not a boy anymore.”

  “Which makes it worse. Three nights, and you didn’t tell me? What else haven’t you told me?”

  Charlotte felt a stab of serious guilt. What to say to that? “He has a dog.”

  “He has a dog,” Nicole repeated with a considering nod. “You hate dogs.”

  “Only because that Dalmatian bit me, but my father kicked it first, so it thought it was being attacked and went after the weakest thing in sight, that is, me. I’ve met some nice dogs.”

  “If this was Leo Cole’s, it was not.”

  “You don’t know that,” Charlotte warned. “When it came at me, I felt threatened. But it didn’t attack.” She paused. “Have you ever seen Leo up close?”

  “No. The day I got here, he was storming through the center of town. He was way down the street, but if looks could kill, I’d be dead.”

  Charlotte hadn’t felt anything murderous. “He didn’t seem so bad to me.”

  “What did he look like?”

  She retrieved the image, considering it now as she hadn’t before. “A man.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Fit.”

  “Muscular?”

  “No. Just … fit. Clean,” she added, though she wasn’t sure why the word popped up—maybe because he had been anything but clean in the old days, so she had expected the opposite? His hands had been smudged while he worked on his roof. But she wouldn’t have called him dirty.

  “You must’ve seen more than I did,” Nicole remarked. “Of course, you did. You were up close. Remember that long hair?”

  “It’s short now,” Charlotte said. “Brown. Maybe with flecks of gray, though that could have been the moon. How old is he?”

  “Four or five years older than us.”

  “So, late thirties. That fits.”

  “What was he wearing? When I saw him last week, he was dressed in black.”

  “The same last night, I think, though it might have been navy. He was wearing shorts.”

  “Oh boy,” Nicole drawled. “Falling off his butt, I bet.”

  “Actually, no. They were nylon—long, like basketball shorts—and they hung at the right place.”

  “His waist.”

  “His hips.” The shorts had been drapey in a modest way. “Slim hips. Ropy arms. What does he do, Nicki? I mean, he needs food, and for that, he needs money. I can’t imagine Cecily left him much, so how does he get it?”

  “He was a handyman for a while,” Nicole said. “We never used him. He smelled.”

  Charlotte laughed. “Who said that?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Well, he doesn’t now. At least, I didn’t smell anything.”

  “Not even the dog?”

  “No. It didn’t smell. It was short-haired.”

  “A pit bull.”

  “Uh-uh. Too big. He calls it Bear.”

  “That figures. He could be trouble, Charlotte,” she advised. “He could charge you with trespassing. He could go to court to prevent us from mentioning Cecily in the book. He could sue my publisher for a cut in the profits.”

  “He won’t do that.”

  “And if you really piss him off,” Nicole went on, “he could get—I don’t know—some kind of injunction to prevent us from printing any recipe that uses her herbs, which means the book is dead. Promise me you’ll stay away from him, Charlotte.”

  “But there’s a whole other side to this,” Charlotte reasoned, thinking of the camera she hadn’t yet mentioned. “What if I can get into his gardens?”

  Nicole reached across the table and grabbed her hand. “There’s nothing in those gardens that we can’t get anywhere else.”

  “Yes, there is. There’s—” A photo op, she might have said, but Nicole cut in.

  “Herbs? There are herbs all over the island. We don’t need any from Leo Cole. Promise you’ll stay away?”

  “There are roots.”

  “What—like parsnip, turnip, beet?”

  “No,” Charlotte said but stopped. The business about Leo’s plants being parents that controlled their offspring was ridiculous—but she wouldn’t put it past Nicole to buy it. At the very least, it would make her nervous. Besides, Charlotte wasn’t sure if that was what she meant by roots. She wasn’t sure what she meant. The word just popped out. Like clean.

  “Promise, Charlotte?” Nicole begged. “Please? For me?”

  * * *

  Charlotte had nodded. It wasn’t exactly a swear-on-the-Bible promise, which she would have had trouble making. But she couldn’t go to the Cole place today, anyway. Weekends on Quinnipeague offered choices. Many involved food, others sport, yard sales, or entertainment. This weekend being the kickoff of the summer season—and Nicole being committed, for the sake of the cookbook, to being seen by as many Quinnies as possible—their day was filled.

  They started at a library book sale, to which they brought bags of books culled from the shelves around the house. It was the first of the cleaning-out Nicole would have to do, but between the two of them, they worked with such speed and left so quickly, that the emotional impact was minimal.

  From there, they hit a cookout on the pier—actually, a cookout on Susan Murray’s forty-foot party boat. Susan was the CEO of a software company in Portland, which meant that, while she wasn’t a full-time resident of Quinnipeague, she lived close enough to visit year-round. A born manager, she loved to party, but there wasn’t an ounce of pretension about her. Her boat was an old pontoon, and the menu—Susan’s standard—was hamburgers, hot dogs, and chips, with mounds of s’mores cookies. The cookies were a must for the book, as was Susan.

  After lunch came softball on the school field. The school itself was small, limited to pre-K through five, with higher grades shuttled to the
mainland, but the field was the largest open spread on the island. Two games were played simultaneously, with Nicole in one and Charlotte in the other, and there were cold drinks afterward.

  Returning home sweaty, they went for a swim at the house and sat on the patio wrapped in towels until the shadows deepened, at which point they returned to town, grabbed salads at The Island Grill with six seasonals who happened to show up at the same time as they for dinner, followed by movie night at the church. This week’s showing was Titanic, which everyone in the place had already seen, but the island ambience—the smell of hot popcorn bagged by the minister and his wife as quickly as their little machine could produce it, the whirr of fans in the cathedral ceiling, and the creak of old wooden chairs—added a special flavor.

  The church was the go-to spot for every large island gathering. Saturday night was the movie, Sunday morning a service, and then, in a transformation that never failed to amaze Charlotte with its speed, came Bailey’s Brunch.

  The place was packed with islanders ranging from a ninety-year-old to a newborn, from weekend regulars to summer people to one-time guests. Charlotte and Nicole divided up here, too, working the crowd as much for the sake of the book as for fun. Charlotte had always been drawn to the less conventional of island residents, and though few of them were foodies and, hence subjects for the book, she remembered many and enjoyed catching up.

  And, of course, there was food, which was set out on long tables where an hour before parishioners had filled rows of chairs. The presentation was nothing to write home about, with paper goods and plastic utensils in piles. And still, in all her travels Charlotte had never seen as appealing a spread. There were quiches of every variety, French toast casseroles, fish hash, and a curried fish that she adored, plus tuna mousse, salmon cakes, and crab fritters. There were chowders—no island event went without. There were cruelly delicious sticky buns, cranberry scones, and tuna muffins. There was the fruit compote that she loved, and chewy chocolate candies, each with an almond inside, individually wrapped and filling a bowl. She knew that the makings for those, not to mention the coffee beans behind the rich coffee in her cup, were from another part of the world. Nearly everything else, though, was locally caught or grown.