Lucy And The Stone

Alice had gone from Scotland to France and then directly back to Scotland, almost as if she didn’t want to come home. Lucy could have used her support at the time—particularly after she lost the baby. But Alice would have been devastated, and Lucy couldn’t wish that for her. Alice had still been visiting friends abroad when the divorce had become final.

It had been a quick one. At least Billy had agreed to that much, paying for her requisite six weeks’ residency. Afterwards, Lucy had sold her wedding and engagement rings, and the diamond and sapphire guard ring Billy had given her for her birthday, a week after their wedding, for enough to relocate. She’d been intending to try Richmond, but she’d missed a turnoff and ended up taking I-40 through Winston-Salem. Just north of town, her car had broken down, and by the time she’d had it repaired, she had only enough money left to rent a cheap room and look for a job. It was a way of life which was all too familiar. Unscheduled moves, unscheduled stops.

But the job had turned out to be a good one, waitressing at a popular restaurant. She’d attended night school, finished her teaching degree and was now in her second year of teaching sixth grade. Not half bad under the circumstances, she thought proudly.

“Lucy, my dear,” Alice had said that rainy night nearly two weeks ago. “Why didn’t you ever write? You knew I’d be concerned.”

“I’m sorry, Mother Hardisson” was all Lucy could think of to say. Sorry your son turned out to be such a bastard, sorry he robbed you of your grandchild and sorry you can’t divorce him, too. You’d be better off, believe me!

“Oh, please, my dear. I’m the one who’s sorry I wasn’t here when you needed me. I’m sure if I’d been able to reason with you both, we could have worked things out. Now I reckon it’s too late.”

It had been too late the first time Billy had struck her. It had been too late the first time he’d brought one of his floozies home and she had found them in the hot tub together, jaybird-naked.

It had been over the day she found his private stash in the celadon vase on the mantel. She had flushed it down the john and threatened to tell his mother if he didn’t straighten out. Wild with anger, he had struck her on the side of the head, knocking her halfway down the stairs. A few hours later she had miscarried.

But Lucy hadn’t said any of that. It wasn’t the sort of thing one said to a woman like Alice Hardisson. Billy’s mother had always been kind to her, even though Lucy knew she’d been shocked right down to her patrician toenails when her precious son had run off and married a nobody who’d been migrating north from Mobile, Alabama—a part-time student, part-time lifeguard, with no more background than a swamp rat.

Alice had graciously refrained from offering to buy her off. Instead, she had made the best of her son’s unfortunate marriage, and Lucy would always love her for that. Her father hadn’t left her much—a battered old twelve-string and a lot of wonderful memories—but he had left her a legacy of pride.

When, after three years, her ex-mother-in-law had called to tell her about the cottage she had leased for her companion, Ella Louise, to vacation in while Alice went on a two-month cruise with friends, Lucy’s first impulse had been to hang up.

But then Alice had gone on to tell her about Ella Louise’s tripping over a dog and breaking her hip. “Naturally, a place like that would be out of the question. She’s gone to stay with her sister down in some little town in Florida. So you see, if you don’t take the cottage, it will just go to waste. It was too late to cancel by the time I thought about it.”

“But why me? My goodness, surely you know someone else who would like to use it.”

“My dear child, you must allow me to soothe my conscience by providin’ you with a little vacation, else I’ll never forgive myself for bein’ away when you needed me most.”

And so Lucy, having been taught by the grande dame herself, had graciously allowed herself to be persuaded. There was no real reason why she shouldn’t accept a gift from a friend, she rationalized. The friend could afford it, and obviously wanted to do it. Why else had she gone to the trouble of tracking her down after all this time?

Come to think of it, how had she tracked her down? A forwarding address? Medical records?

Lucy was too tired even to wonder about it now. And too hot. Her backside was permanently bonded to the vinyl seat cover of her car. At least she was a whole lot closer to the end of her journey than when she had set out this morning shortly after daybreak.

Frank had risen early and come over to help her load the car. He’d promised to water her plants and air her apartment when and if the rain ever stopped. She had hugged his two daughters, one of whom was her student, and then hugged Frank, avoiding the question in his eyes the same way she had been avoiding it all year.

She didn’t love Frank Beane. Liked him enormously, adored his motherless children, but as much as she longed for a home and a family, she wasn’t about to take another chance. She had excellent taste in friends, lousy taste in husbands, but at least she had sense enough to learn from her mistakes.

Reaching over, Lucy patted the scuffed hard-shell case that held Pawpaw’s old twelve-string. She had strapped it into the passenger seat with the seat belt, having filled the back seat with books, linens, clothes and groceries.

“One of these days, Pawpaw, I’ll have music on my own back porch and a garden full of okra and tomatoes for gumbo, and maybe even a few cats. One of these days...”

She sighed. Lucy had no use for nostalgia. It was a nonproductive exercise, brought on, no doubt, by smelling salt air again after all these years. This was different from the Gulf Coast, but salt air was salt air, and Lucy was tired.

Pawpaw had been a roughneck. He had worked the oil fields, moving from place to place, but never too far from the Gulf Coast. Lucy, motherless for as long as she could recall, could remember piling into what they used to call the Dooley Trolley, an old camper truck held together with duct tape and baling wire, and setting out in the middle of the night for a new job, a new town—new friends.

Lucy could barely remember her mother, but there’d always been women in her life. Pawpaw—tanned and handsome, with his black-dyed hair and his broad grin, the metallic scent of crude oil that clung to his clothes, usually tempered by a mixture of sweat, bourbon and bay rum—had been like a magnet to women. A good-looking, good-natured man, Clarence Dooley’s only weakness had been an itchy foot and a deep-seated aversion to long-term commitment.

Nearing the tall, spiral-striped lighthouse, where the highway turned west, Lucy squinted against the glare of afternoon sun and thought about Pawpaw and Ollie Mae, one of Pawpaw’s lady friends, sitting on the back stoop after supper, Pawpaw playing his guitar and singing, and Ollie Mae sawing away at her fiddle, the sagging flesh of her upper arm swaying in time with each stroke. Pawpaw had been dead nearly eighteen years now, and Lucy had long since lost track of Ollie Mae and Lillian and the rest of Clarence Dooley’s mistresses.

For one isolated moment she felt utterly alone. And then she shrugged and put it down to no more than being in a strange place, among strangers. Something she should be used to by now.

It would pass. Everything passed, good and bad.

* * *

“You’ll like Maudie and Rich,” said Jerry, the boy from the marina where Lucy had been instructed to leave her car and take a boat out to Coronoke. “Maudie—she’s my cousin on my mother’s side. Well, I reckon if you go back a little ways, on my daddy’s side, too. She used to be—Maudie, that is—she used to caretake over to Coronoke, but then this guy—”

Lucy clutched her guitar case in both arms, wondering if there was going to be much spray. She’d brought her raincoat, but like an idiot, she’d left it in the trunk of her car.

Watch where you’re going! she wanted to say, but didn’t because he was only a boy. Still, she’d feel a whole lot safer if he would keep his mind on what he was doing instead of staring at her as if she were some kind of freak and filling her in on the pedigree of people she had never heard of and would probably never meet.

There was no spray. In fact, they were barely making a wake. Lucy could have swum faster than this if she hadn’t been so blessed tired. The boy—he couldn’t be more than sixteen or so—was looking at her in a certain way that made her feel like the butterfat champion at the county fair.

After thirty-four years she ought to be used to it. Towering over everyone in sight, having men make lewd propositions without even getting to know her first. It was all part of the curse that had befallen her at the age of twelve, when she’d shot up to five feet eight and her breasts had burst out of her training bra.

“Sugar, there’s not a blessed thing you can do about it, less’n you was to get fat as a sausage all over,” her father’s lady friend, Lillian, had told her. “Even then, it prob’ly wouldn’t do you no good. Girls with your looks’s got a hard row to hoe, and being big just makes you stand out more.” Lillian had been one of Lucy’s favorites. A blowsy redhead, she’d been kind enough to take a motherly interest in Lucy at a time when Lucy was undergoing a lot of frightening changes in her body and in her emotions.

“Don’t you never let a boy lay a hand on you, you hear me? They’ll try. Lord knows they’ll try to make you think they’re a-hurtin’ somethin’ fierce and you’re their only hope o’ salvation. But you tell ‘em you got the curse real bad, and your Pawpaw just sent you out to get some gun oil, ‘cause he’s a-cleaning up his shotgun. If that don’t shrivel up what ails ‘em, you use your knee where it’ll do the most good, y’hear?”

Lucy sighed. Nostalgia. It had to be the smell of all this salt air. She’d never been one for looking back. “Big adventures ahead, li’l sugar,” Pawpaw always used to say when they’d load up the trolley and light out in the middle of the night for a new town, a new job. “That ol’ highway’s unrollin’ right in front of your pretty brown eyes. You just keep on a-lookin’ straight ahead.”

The narrow beach was striped with coral sunlight and lavender shadows when Jerry pulled up to the pier on Coronoke. He clanged the tarnished brass bell that was attached to the side of a shed and within minutes, a woman came jogging down through the woods.

“Hi, you must be Mrs. Dooley. I’m Maudie Keegan.”

“It’s Ms. That is, I was married, but I took back my own name so—”

“I know what you mean. Neither fish nor fowl. Me, either, until I solved my problem by becoming Mrs. Keegan.”

By which Lucy concluded that Maudie Keegan had been married before and had shed her first husband’s name at the same time she’d shed him.

Lucy had gone from Dooley to Hardisson and back to Dooley so fast, even the IRS had trouble keeping up with her. She only hoped her social security would make it through the maze by the time she was old enough to need it.

“I see you stocked up on canned things. Good.” Maudie reached for the box of groceries Jerry was lifting out, and the three of them relayed everything up from the pier, along a winding path through shadowy, fragrant woods, to a small cottage perched a hundred-odd feet from the edge of the sound.

“Is that it?” Maudie Keegan asked when the last of the load was transported. “Okay, then here’s the rundown. Your closest neighbor is a birder named McCloud. He’ll be here all summer. There’s a novelist installed in Blackbeard’s Hole, but you won’t see much of him. He comes every year and holes up until Labor Day, working on the Great American Novel. There’s a couple from Michigan due in tomorrow and two family groups coming the next weekend. Eventually you’ll probably meet everybody, but no one’s obliged to socialize. Rich and I are on the other side of the island in the old lodge.”

Her small hands moved constantly while she spoke, and Lucy watched, mesmerized, murmuring an appropriate response when necessary.

“One of us will pick up mail and messages every day or so, and we have a radio for emergencies. The boats at the pier are for the guests. When we’re full up, we sign up a day in advance so everyone can make plans accordingly, but when there’re only a few people in residence, feel free to take one out. Rich keeps them fueled up. Meanwhile, if you need anything at all, one of us is usually available. Just follow the trail around the island until you come to a place that looks as if it ought to be condemned. That’s ours.”

Bemused, Lucy watched the woman jog through the woods until the lengthening shadows swallowed her up. Turning, she met an all-too-familiar look in the eyes of the young man from the marina.

Evidently, Jerry appreciated king-size blondes with brown eyes, wild hair and big mouths.

She sighed, knowing she would have to make certain things clear to avoid any future misunderstanding. Lucy got along well with people of all ages and sexes, but with the male variety, she had long since learned to get across a subtle message right from the first.

Accessible she was; available she was not.

Two

Stone, once more half-asleep on a drifting inner tube, roused at the sound of voices. Evidently, Lucy Dooley had emerged from her cottage. La Dooley, as he had taken to calling her in his mind. The ex-Mrs. William Carruthers Hardisson.

His quarry, he thought reluctantly.

She had arrived late the previous evening. Stone had heard the sound of an outboard from the screened deck of his own cottage. A few minutes later, he’d seen Maudie Keegan emerge from the woods, followed by the kid from the marina and a tall, shaggy-haired blonde, all carrying boxes, bags and baggage.

Alice hadn’t told him what she looked like, only that she had a common type of prettiness that appealed to some men. Evidently, it had appealed to Billy. The woman had waited until Alice was conveniently out of the way before she’d put the moves on poor Billy.

Poor Billy? Hell, now he was starting to sound like Alice!

Stone had considered wandering over to meet his new neighbor last evening. He’d decided against it. She wasn’t going to do anything the first day or so. Maybe not at all. And as long as she behaved herself, she wouldn’t even have to know he was there.

He continued to watch her from a safe distance, feeling pleasantly relaxed after a half hour spent walking the sandy perimeter of the island. Idly he wondered, without putting any great degree of effort into it, what a woman of her sort was doing coming out to a nowhere place like Coronoke. If her plan was to blackmail the Hardissons now that her ex-husband was in a particularly vulnerable position, it would seem to him that she’d have moved back to Atlanta to be closer to the action. But then, maybe she was just more subtle than the usual run of opportunists.

The devil take La Dooley! Alice had offered him a place to recuperate, and unless the big blonde went into action and called a press conference right here on the island—about as likely as Stone’s winning a Pulitzer prize for the series he’d done on archaeological piracy—he was damned well going to do just that. Recuperate.

With that end in mind, he had selected a book from the cottage’s shelves of dog-eared paperbacks and read until he’d fallen asleep on the sofa last night. He’d wakened just before dawn, at which time he had gone to bed to sleep another few hours.

Quiet. It was a luxury he could easily become addicted to.

He’d checked her cottage first thing upon awakening and seen no sign of life. But then, La Dooley was probably the type who played all night and slept until the sun was well over the yardarm. Which meant the mornings, at least, would belong to him.

At nine he had made himself a sandwich and a pot of coffee for breakfast. At 9:37, feeling remarkably fit considering the bloody and broken mess he’d been when they had hauled his carcass out of Africa a few months ago, he strolled down to the water and launched himself on the inner tube.

Approximately half an hour later, Stone got his first good look at the woman he’d been sent down to Coronoke Island to keep under surveillance.

He’d expected her to be attractive. His aunt had prepared him for that. Billy’s taste in women usually ran to showy types, which was why Stone hadn’t expected a little oatmeal-faced debutante.

But La Dooley wasn’t a little anything. What she was, was...well, big. Big frame, narrow waist, full breasts, generous hips. Legs that started at ground level and steepled all the way up to the stratosphere. Las Vegas showgirl big. Triple-dip, sugar-cone big.

A mullet jumped not three feet away and Stone ignored it, still staring at the big blonde who had taken his little cousin for over half a million and was threatening to come back for seconds. It wasn’t going to take a pair of binoculars and any cloak-and-dagger activity to keep up with La Dooley. If there was one thing she was, it was visible!

Her hairstyle, if you could call it a style, was kinky, streaky and blond, looking as if it hadn’t seen a comb in six months. From this distance, it looked almost natural, but then, on what she’d gouged out of Billy, she could afford the best salon treatment. If what Alice Hardisson had told him was even partially true, she could afford to fly to Paris once a week to have her legs waxed!

Evidently, she’d figured on a bit of privacy to recharge her batteries and work on her story. She wasn’t dressed for an audience. Instead, she was wearing baggy sweats, a pair of shades and, unless he was mistaken, that was an apple she had clutched in her teeth. The symbolism of it suddenly struck him and he began to chuckle. Still grinning at his small private joke, he began paddling toward the shore. The layer of pink on his shoulders, thighs and belly that he’d collected the day before had soaked in overnight, but Stone didn’t kid himself that he was in any condition to stay out through the middle of the day, sunscreen or no sunscreen. From his mother, who’d been Alice Hardisson’s sister, he’d inherited his height and his dark hair. The paternal side of his heritage was pure Highland Scot. Gray eyes, stainless-steel backbone, a taste for Celtic music and a hide that, without some preliminary weathering, tended to burn.

He had lost his weathering, along with a few quarts of blood and more than a few pounds, but he was working on it.

Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to take a closer look at his quarry. As distasteful as he found the whole business, he had given Alice his word that he’d keep the woman away from the gutter press. Alice had done her part by isolating La Dooley in a place with no phones, no fax, limited mail service and no reporters. The rest was up to him.

The trouble was, he hadn’t even started yet and already he was beginning to feel a little bit foolish. He was a journalist. He’d done his share of investigative journalism, but something about this assignment stuck in his craw.

By the time Stone reached shore, La Dooley had disappeared. He figured she’d probably wanted to scope out the territory—maybe drop in on the Keegans and check on the radio link to the outside world. If she was smart—and most predators were—she’d be wanting to get her bearings before she made her move.

If she made her move. Even steel magnolias like Alice Hardisson had been known to make a mistake.

* * *

Reluctantly, Lucy turned to go back inside. In spite of her dark glasses, the sun was blinding. She’d forgotten just how bright it could be near the water, even with the sky beginning to haze over. At the door to her cottage, she yawned, stretched and marveled all over again that she was actually here instead of back in her own sweltering apartment poring over the help wanteds and listening with one ear for the commode to stop running. It took three jiggles after each flush, and she did it so automatically that she couldn’t always remember whether or not she’d forgotten.

She made a pitcher of iced tea and carried it out onto the screened deck. That and the apple she had consumed earlier constituted breakfast. Maybe tomorrow she would fry up a can of corned-beef hash with onions and catsup for breakfast. That had been Pawpaw’s favorite. Familiar foods and familiar music always gave her a safe, comfortable feeling. Maybe she would write to Lillian and Ollie Mae, for old times’ sake.

Or maybe she’d simply vegetate. This was a vacation. Vacations were for being lazy and indulging whims. No telling when she’d get another one.

The trouble was, she was just too excited to vegetate. After showering, she unpacked a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and set off to explore her new surroundings, luxuriating in the raw-silk feel of pine straw under her bare feet and the total absence of traffic noises.

The only sign of life at any of the other cottages was a lineful of towels and bathing suits. Earlier, she’d heard the sound of an outboard heading over to Hatteras. So be it. She liked privacy.

And really, she wasn’t lonely. There were plenty of other people around if she got tired of her own company. The Keegans, for instance. And the reclusive bird-watcher, who was supposed to be her closest neighbor.

All the same, by early afternoon, having walked around the entire island, pausing to watch birds, distant fishermen, even more distant windsurfers, and to examine a set of footprints in the sand—long, fairly narrow, naked and probably male—she was beginning to feel a bit like Robinson Crusoe.

Her stomach growled. She breathed deeply of the fragrance of sun-warmed cedars and salt marsh as she reluctantly turned back toward Heron’s Rest. Funny—when she had accepted this windfall vacation from her ex-mother-in-law, after the first few minutes of shock, all she’d been able to think about was having an entire summer with no clock to punch and no one to fuss at her for playing her music too loud at night. As guilty as she’d felt for accepting anything at all from a Hardisson, she hadn’t been able to resist the lure of a few lazy, idyllic weeks all to herself. But already she was getting restless.

Not only that, she felt guilty. She despised Billy Hardisson, partly because he was a despicable person, but mostly because, with his courtly manners and his easygoing charm, he had made her feel like a lady. And it had all been a lie.

Alice was a lady. Billy was Nothing dressed up like Something. But for a little while he had made her feel special, made her feel beautiful, made her feel wanted as a person and not just for her body.

Of course, he’d wanted that, too, but when she’d refused to go to bed with him, he hadn’t called her names. Instead, he’d turned up the charm another notch.

The creep. The only decent thing about Billy Hardisson was his mother, and Lucy felt sorry for the poor woman. According to Lucy’s father, a lady was a woman who served his beer in a glass. Lucy had learned from Alice Hardisson that there was a bit more to being a lady than that, which was why she had quietly left town three years ago without telling anyone how she had come to lose her baby. The only other person in the house the day it had happened had been the maid, but she wouldn’t talk. She was Liam and Mellie’s niece. She owed her allegiance to the Hardissons.

Someday poor Alice was going to have her heart broken, but at least Lucy wouldn’t be a part of it.

Yawning, she shucked off unpleasant thoughts of the past. Last night she had read an entire paperback romance, and she intended to read another one tonight. But with the sun shining, the birds singing and all those endless acres of saltwater beckoning, she wasn’t about to spend the daylight hours reading, too.

“Time for a new adventure, li’l sugar.” She could hear Pawpaw now. That ol’ highway wasn’t a-rollin’ out before her, but all that water surely was. So why not take out one of the boats tied up at the pier for the use of the renters? It had been years since she had handled a boat. If she was going to make a fool of herself, she’d just as soon do it without an audience.