The Wild Child

“Hey!” she called to the child and the big black dog.

Eva waved her hand, smiling. “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you.”

The child raised one hand in a hesitant response to Eva’s gesture and then slipped off the boulder. Eva stumbled forward, cursing the pebbles that hurt her feet and slowed her progress. Where were they—behind the boulder? Across the creek? Into the woods on the other side?

If not, they’d vanished into thin air again!

Eva didn’t know what to do. This was just too strange. Who was this little kid, out yesterday and today just—just wandering! Where was the mother? The father?

“Oh, how I love Judith Bowen’s stories! Such gutsy heroines and such lovable men! You can’t put the books down and you remember them with a fond, tender feeling. Now, that’s romance!”

—Bestselling author Anna Jacobs

Dear Reader,

The Sunshine Coast of British Columbia is a special place for me. My husband and I met there while I was working for the Sechelt Press and he was working for the Coast News. True love—over a village council meeting!

Liberty Island is fictitious, of course, but most of the other places and islands mentioned in The Wild Child are not. If you take a ferry from Horseshoe Bay today and get off at Langdale, you can meander up the rugged coast on your way to Earl’s Cove, stopping at Molly’s Lane and visiting the gravesite of the mysterious Danish prince at Roberts Creek. You can even poke your head in at the Half Moon Bay store and buy a loaf of bread made by the lightkeeper’s wife.

Eva and Silas meet on an island peopled by ghosts—the legendary but never seen Liberty Island goats, the tangled relationships from the past, living only in dusty love letters and old jewelry now, the remembered games of happy childhood summers spent on the island.

Silas shares his life with his secret daughter now, the wild girl of Liberty Island. Eva knows where her duty lies—but can she betray Silas, the man she’s come to love? I hope you enjoy Eva and Silas’s story. It’s a story very close to my heart.

Judith Bowen

P.S. Write to me at P.O. Box 2333, Point Roberts, WA 98281-2333 or visit me at www.judithbowen.com.

The Wild Child

Judith Bowen

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To fellow BICC Trainsters:

Cherry Adair, Chris Pacheco, Eileen Wilks, Susan Plunkett, Pam Johnson, Lynn Johnson, Ruth Schmidt, Karen Barrett, Myrna Temte and Cheryl Harrington. Thanks, gals! I couldn’t have done it without you.

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER ONE

EVA HAINES hadn’t been on the island a week before she realized she was being watched.

The feeling was unmistakable. Creepy. Eyes on her back, watching her from the forest on the other side of the creek as she scythed the knee-high grass near the house. Or from the wooded area behind the old, overgrown garden as she nailed plywood over broken windows. Or…from somewhere.

The first few days she hadn’t paid much attention. She was too busy getting set up for the summer to worry about weird feelings and imaginings—too busy dusting, cleaning, ferrying over foodstuffs and supplies from Half Moon Bay in the aging fiberglass runabout with its tattered dodger and temperamental Mercury outboard. Besides, she was quite sure she was alone.

The weather had been fine, which had made her frequent trips to the mainland easier, and if there was one thing she’d learned from a childhood spent on or near the water under her sea dog father’s demanding eye, it was how to fiddle with a temperamental outboard. Her unseen companion? Most likely an owl hidden in some monumental cedar tree keeping track of the intruder from the city. Or a vigilant nesting osprey. Or a rabbit. There were no bears on Liberty Island and Eva didn’t believe in ghosts.

Eva was spending part of her summer vacation tidying up affairs for an eccentric distant relation, a cousin of her mother’s, who’d broken her hip in the spring and who, at eighty-six, would not be returning to Liberty Island to live. Be prepared. Eva didn’t want any surprises, so her first task had been to get everything shipshape for the two or three weeks she’d be occupying Doris Bonhomme’s ramshackle house. That meant laying in plenty of oil and wicks for lamps, a spare propane tank for the kitchen range and refrigerator, among other necessities.

She wasn’t bothering with gasoline for the emergency generator, which she didn’t expect to have to use. What constituted an emergency on Liberty Island, where she and her sisters had spent the happiest summers of their childhood? Not being able to get Jeopardy on the ancient rabbit-eared black-and-white Motorola that Doris fired up occasionally to, as she put it, “keep in touch”? Definitely not!

But kerosene and candles were necessary. Jack Haines, who’d spent as much of his life as he could on or near the sea, had taught her well: only fools depend on luck.

Alone? Hey, what was she talking about—she had Andy to keep her company. She smiled, recalling how the ancient donkey had kicked up his heels, baring worn yellow teeth in a joyous hee-haw welcome when she’d first arrived. Then he’d bucked and galloped in an awkward circle just to show her how frisky he still was. Andy had been left to fend for himself when his mistress had been airlifted to the hospital and taken from there to a care home at the insistence of her doctor. Although Doris had reluctantly agreed that she could no longer look after herself in her isolated island home, she insisted that her beloved donkey was too old to uproot.

“I’m not putting that poor dumb creature through what I’ve been through,” she told Eva, during a visit to Saint Mary’s Hospital, shortly after Doris’s accident. “He’s too loyal. He doesn’t deserve such a fate at his time in life. Your dad will know what to do.”

And he had. Jack had arranged for a farmer from a nearby island to check on the animal, dumping off hay weekly, and treats like apples and carrots.

It wasn’t as though either he or Doris would dream of requesting assistance from Doris’s actual neighbor at the other end of Liberty Island. If, indeed, anyone still lived there…

It was so stupid, really. Eva’s gaze strayed to the long thin crescent of land that stretched eastward, curving south, thick dark woods all the way to the rocky headland. The Bonhommes and the Lords hadn’t spoken for fifty years, not since Doris had quarrelled with Hector Lord. What about? No one knew. There’d been a house once, nestled in the trees somewhere. Eva had never actually set foot on the Lords’ side of the island. As a child, she hadn’t dared; as a grown-up, now, she hadn’t gotten around to exploring yet. Her mother, who’d been a girl at the time of the upset, had divulged various details—that the Lord house had been grand, that Hector had been a tall, dark, handsome man, wildly attractive to women, that the family had money, pots of money, as Eva recalled her mother’s expression. Eva and her sisters had always imagined the Lords’ money—pots of it—like pirate booty, gold and jewels spilling out of thick oaken sea chests and massive porcelain Chinese jars.

Doris herself had never spoken of the matter. As far as she was concerned, the island ended where her property did, at the creek, and plunged in a perfectly severed line, as though chopped with an ax, straight into the sea.

Hector Lord was long dead and Eva had no idea who owned that half of the island now. A trust? Heirs? The house had probably fallen into its cellar and grown over with ferns and moss. It wouldn’t take many years to obscure all signs of any habitation in the fecund West Coast climate.

Certainly, there’d been no sign of life in the five days since she’d arrived: no smoke, no lights, no whine of outboards. Eva sighed and headed back to the Edie B. to retrieve the rest of the supplies she’d brought from the mainland that afternoon. How silly of Doris to nurse a grudge for so long. Fifty years!

Speaking of Andy—where was he? The donkey usually met her at the dock when she tied up after a trip to Half Moon Bay but he wasn’t there now.

Eva’s task this summer included finding a new home for the donkey. Most of the old woman’s assortment of worldly goods would be discarded or go to thrift stores, but it was her dearest wish that her property become a marine park eventually, one of a chain that ran north and south through the Gulf Islands of the coast of British Columbia. The Bonhomme half could be signed over to a marine park trust—and that was something else Eva was investigating—but, of course, Doris had no control over the part she didn’t own.

Finding a home for Andy would be a challenge. How long did donkeys live, anyway—forever? This one didn’t look as though he’d suffered spending nearly three months on his own in the company of seals and seagulls and the elusive handful of wild goats that were supposed to live somewhere on the island—that was it!

Eva straightened and put her hands on her hips, blowing a stray lock of hair from her hot face. The half-empty runabout rocked gently, but she adjusted her stance so automatically she didn’t even notice the motion. Why hadn’t she thought of the goats? She gazed inland, past the woods, past the gentle rise where Doris’s house stood, well back from the sea, to Abel’s Peak, the rocky pinnacle that marked the high point on the island a good quarter mile behind the house. The water supply for the house originated up there, in an ancient stone-and-timber dam that funneled spring water to both Doris’s house and, at one time, the residence on the other side of the island.

Of course! It was probably a goat she’d sensed when she’d been so certain someone—or something—was watching her. Like Jedadiah Island nearby, Liberty Island was rumored to be home to long-abandoned goat colonies, which some said went back to the days when the Spaniards cruised the area, Cortes and Valdez and Galiano, mapping the coast for Spain in the 1700s and accidentally losing some of their shipboard livestock in the process.

Eva bent down to heave a carton of tinned goods to the seat of the boat, then supported it against her hip. Balancing carefully, she stepped onto the dock and deposited the box beside the pile she’d already unloaded. No one knew if the story was true. Just as no one knew if the legendary goats were, less romantically, a few escapees from a farm on a neighboring island that had clambered ashore during an especially low tide sometime in the last several decades.

Whatever. Next task—moving everything up to the house. That was a job for the boxy wheelbarrow, equipped with two large bicycle wheels that Eva had found in the woodshed the day she arrived. Doris recycled everything. The homemade cart did an admirable job of transporting freight from the dock. It also handled a decent load of firewood.

Eva began to trundle toward the house. In late afternoon, the building looked dark and rather forlorn under the shadow of the tall cedars and the lofty arbutus trees to the west of the overgrown garden. There were shingles missing from the roof and any paint that had ever existed on the siding had worn off long ago. No need for repairs now, not unless the marine park people wanted to fix it up for a caretaker’s residence, which was highly unlikely.

The crunch of her shoes on the weedy shale and broken rock seemed overloud in the warm not-quite-evening air. There wasn’t a stir of wind. She wished now she’d brought Freddie. Her father had offered his dachshund—“for protection,” he’d said with a wink.

She wasn’t worried about protection; simple companionship was more like it. At least Freddie would bark if anything real was lurking about.

Why hadn’t she remembered the goats earlier, for heaven’s sake? Before she’d gotten herself all worked up over nothing?

THE VISITOR was disturbing. No, not disturbing, more like bothersome. Annoying. A presence on the island that set his teeth on edge when he remembered that not only had she arrived just after mid-month, which was already a week ago, but she seemed to be fixing up the house and settling in. A mere summer visit, he hoped. The briefer, the better.

Only why would anyone in his or her right mind be visiting Liberty Island? Or fixing up the house? The old woman had been airlifted off when he’d found her unconscious and obviously in very bad shape a dozen yards from her back door, her cart overturned and firewood scattered on the rain-soaked ground beside her. He’d stabilized her as well as he could and had called for medical help and, when he was certain it was on its way—he could hear the rotors of the air ambulance—he’d gone inside her house, where he’d found her cellular phone on the windowsill over the sink. He’d tucked it into her limp hand and left.

She’d hate to think she’d needed help, certainly not from him. This way, if she was dazed enough, she might assume she’d had the cell phone in her apron pocket, where she should have kept it at her age, and had actually called for assistance on her own before passing out. Foolish old woman.

That was before Easter. It didn’t appear as though she was coming back, which was just fine by him. He didn’t like company. At least, not company that wasn’t there at his invitation. She was too old and ornery to be here, anyway—a constant worry. How many times had he sent Matthew out to spy on her, make sure she was okay? Had enough firewood? Had tied her boat up properly so it wouldn’t wash away with a coming storm? How often had he told Fanny that, under no circumstances, was she to wander past the creek that separated the properties? Checking up on the old woman wouldn’t have been such a nuisance; it was making sure he and Matthew weren’t seen so they could both—he and his foolish neighbor—maintain the pretence that he wasn’t keeping an eye on her that was wearing.

He didn’t want to look out for her. He was glad she’d stayed away. She was well over eighty; she should’ve left long ago. He didn’t go so far as to wish her dead, just nicely settled into some warm, comfortable nursing home somewhere on the mainland. He imagined her watching afternoon television, cheating at cards, griping about the food, all the while squirreling away crusts of bread and half-eaten apples in her lingerie drawer.

As far as he knew, she had few friends and no close relatives, certainly not young, beautiful ones like this visitor. His first glimpse of her was still seared onto his retinas. At The Baths. No, with any luck, the Bonhomme side of the island would go on the block in the next year or so and he’d be there, ready to scoop it up. He’d always felt that Liberty Island was his, anyway; it was only a matter of opportunity and cold, hard cash.

Now this visitor—this intruder—was on his mind. Was she the new owner? Already? Impossible!

All his life, he’d hunted beauty, wherever it could be found. In the last half dozen years, he created a kind of beauty in gems and precious metals for the select few who appreciated his skill and could pay his price. Chancing upon the visitor when he’d walked to the bathing pools three days ago had been a feeling he ranked among the handful of the most moving experiences he’d ever had. Watching Vivian dance. Seeing Fanny for the first time, a saucy two-year-old. A midwinter blue moon. The otherworldly fire in the center of an uncut ruby….

He’d gone to what they’d always called The Baths, a series of three round hollows carved from the rock by the tides and the action of the sea over millions of years. One of them, the pool farthest from the open water, was where he’d bathed daily, summer and winter, ever since he’d returned almost three years ago. This time, walking along the stony path etched into the lichens, he’d heard a splash. The screech of a raven. A few notes of a song—in a woman’s voice.

He’d paused, cinching his towel tighter around his waist. Then, when he realized that someone was on his island, swimming in his pools, he crept closer. The third pool, the deepest, a basin with stone walls four or five feet above the water even at high tide, was most dangerous. Even though Fanny swam like a fish and never went anywhere without his dog, Bruno, she was forbidden to go near The Baths. Crude steps, hacked out of the rock, led to the water and somebody—some stranger—had obviously found and used them.

Probably a sailor from a passing yacht that had moored in the little V-shaped bay just offshore. He didn’t bother to check, instead strode directly toward the basin. This was posted private property, dammit, no trespassers allowed. Couldn’t people read?

Then he stopped. A mermaid. Wearing nothing but seawater and sunshine. She lay on her back, her hair floating like kelp, hands languorous at her sides, feet moving gently. A raven high in an arbutus tree nearby squawked—it had spotted him.

She didn’t understand what the raven was trying to tell her. As he watched, she stuck her tongue out and waved at the bird. She whistled, splashed with her other hand, then turned and kicked smoothly, gliding forward. Her buttocks were white in the sun, against the still, deep green of the water, her back lightly tanned. He could see the strap marks from a bathing suit.

So she was at least of this world.

He took a deep shaky breath and stepped back, unwilling to show himself. He had no idea then that she was staying at the old woman’s house, that she was, in fact, a real intruder. All he knew was the stab of awareness. Innocence, sensuality, the sinews, shapes and planes of youth, strength, physical perfection. The artist in him was stunned.

God help him, he lingered in the trees like a voyeur until she left the water, climbed to the top of the basin and picked up a towel under the arbutus tree to dry herself. He couldn’t—would never—deny the stirrings of his belly. That, too, was a kind of beauty. And it had been a very long time since he’d been with a woman. But, no, he simply craved more of the primal image before him.

Woman, without shame, alone in this primeval garden.

Then, when she’d laughed and flicked her towel at the raven, which flapped heavily through the trees with hideous cries, he’d slunk away. She hadn’t wanted anyone to see her naked, not even the bird.

It made him feel unclean. So he’d canceled his own daily swim and left, depositing the image in the bank of his memory, an image he knew he would draw on one day….

And that was that. Just serendipity, pure and sweet.

Until two days later, when he discovered she was no passing yachtswoman. She’d actually moved into the Bonhomme house and appeared to have every intention of staying, judging by the number of trips she made to the mainland for provisions.

Which meant she’d become a problem.

CHAPTER TWO

WHERE WAS ANDY?

Eva released the handle of the pump that brought water into the house from the stone cistern and peered out the small square window over the cast-iron pantry sink. The donkey had to be okay. He’d been on his own for months and was hardly going to get into trouble a week after she arrived. She pumped again, filled a pitcher and put the water in the propane-fired refrigerator, along with the eggs, cheese, milk and two bottles of sauvignon blanc she’d bought at the Half Moon Bay Store.

Now, what for supper? Eva opened a tin of cream of mushroom soup and warmed it up on the ancient combination propane-wood range that stood prominently in Doris’s big country kitchen. She was saving the limited supply of propane for the refrigerator, so had kindled a fire in the old range.

How about a grilled cheese sandwich to go with the soup? Why not? She’d had some variation on soup and sandwiches nearly every day so far. Then, just to make a dent in the silence, Eva switched on the transistor radio on top of the refrigerator and rocketed around from cupboard to counter to table, getting out a plate, a spoon, a bowl, half dancing, half walking, until she felt silly and stopped.

A person could go a little silly here. Had Doris gone a bit weird living by herself on Liberty Island? Of course, she wasn’t alone all the time. As a younger woman, Doris had traveled for three or four months every year, usually in the winter. Then there were the many visitors she encouraged. Every summer, Eva’s family had spent several weeks on the island. She remembered her father holding forth in the porch swing, admiring the view, a bottle of rum on the floor and a thick paperback turned over beside it. Or, if the tide was right and he felt like it, he’d be out in Doris’s rowboat, fishing for sand dabs and rockfish.

Eva’s mother, Felicity, gossiped with her older cousins and whoever else happened to be visiting, pulled weeds in Doris’s garden, and, if they came in August, helped her pick blackberries and put up her garden produce.

Eva recalled helping her mother and Doris, or playing with her sisters in the treehouse behind the garden. Was it still there? When there were other cousins around, they’d played house and cowboys, pirates and princesses—

What in the world? Eva stopped at the window over the sink, spoon forgotten in her hand, dripping soup onto the old linoleum floor.

There in the distance, halfway to where the ground began to rise to Abel’s Peak, was a small child and Andy and—and some kind of enormous black dog!

Eva rushed to the door and flung it open. “Andy!”

She caught her breath, wishing she hadn’t shouted, not wanting to frighten the child but…there was no one there. She blinked and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, like a cartoon character.

No child. No dog. Just the old donkey clip-clopping over the rocky ground as he trotted toward the house.

EVA WENT TO BED that night thoroughly rattled. The wind had come up in the evening and she could hear loose shingles banging on the roof. She hoped it wouldn’t rain, and if it did, she hoped the leaks weren’t near her bed. If necessary, she’d move to the other bedroom across the small landing at the top of the stairs.

Eva had always prided herself on being a calm, sensible woman. She had grown up the unflappable one in a chaotic family. Her father, a professor of literature at the University of British Columbia, spent every spare moment on whatever boat he happened to own at the time, ignoring his wife and drinking too much. Felicity Haines, a sad, gentle person, had died of an aneurysm when Eva was twelve, and Eva still missed her desperately. Kate, her oldest sister and very much her father’s daughter, had sailed away on a tall ships adventure when she was eighteen, had settled in Africa and was doing something noble for world peace, Eva believed. She hadn’t seen Kate for three years. Her other sister, Leona, had married a farmer and now raised ostriches, organic field peas and children—five of them, at last count—in Alberta.

Eva, the youngest by six years, had steered a steady course, graduating from high school with honors, working in a doctor’s office for two years and then taking a degree in education. She’d just finished her first year as a substitute teacher in three different elementary schools in Burnaby. The two terms with grade one and two classes had convinced her she’d made the right career choice. She’d adored her little gap-toothed charges and was almost sorry when June was over. In the fall, she hoped to land a permanent job, preferably in the Lower Mainland or Vancouver Island and preferably teaching kindergarten, although it didn’t much matter, and she’d sent résumés all over the province.