Dark Tides. Celia Ashley

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      “Did you find anything?”

      Meg sat a minute longer without answering, feeling the balance of the shifted earth settle back into place. Struggling to her feet in the sliding sand, she brushed the clinging grains from her pants before shoving her hands deep into her pockets to still their trembling.

      “I’m sorry, but I found nothing. That doesn’t mean something might not wash up tomorrow or the next day or even a month from now.”

      He remained seated, his gaze intent, trying by dint of will to get her to look at him. But she would not look at the man she remembered vaguely from that place between slumber and waking, wouldn’t look at the stranger whose scattered memories winked in and out of her mind with alarming intimacy.

      “Hopefully a month from now such evidence will be moot,” he said. “I can only trust I will remember everything by then.”

      “Hopefully,” she agreed.

      “I don’t want the police involved. Not yet.”

      “I understand,” she answered.

      “Do you?”

      She nodded. She remembered how their questions made her seem suspect rather than a willing participant in an investigation. Of course, she hadn’t been entirely willing or cooperative. It had been Matt they were investigating.

      “You should put ice on your head,” she said. “See if the swelling goes down. Dr. Redecker said that would be good.”

      “Okay,” he said. “Anything else?”

      She considered a moment. “Other things will bring on amnesia,” she said slowly, carefully. “Things too horrible to face.”

      “Is that what the doctor said?”

      “No,” she whispered. “That’s what I say.”

      He lurched forward with an abrupt, awkward movement and froze, eyes wide in a troubled expression, almost as if he knew what she could see shimmering in the air, fleeing through her mind, turning on the edge of awakening. Matt, she recalled, had been afraid of her extrasensory recognition. Perhaps Caleb was, too.

      He tipped his chin toward the sky, dark hair lifting in the breeze. Black-lashed tea-brown eyes narrowed against a swirl of sand he attempted to deflect with his hand as he regarded her solemnly. An attractive man, Caleb Hunter, lean and solidly built, his handsome face marked not only by bruising, but also by the evidence of a life lived, even if he could not remember it. The furrows beside his eyes spoke of days squinting in the sun, of concentration and deep passions. Yes, a very attractive man, who she had agreed to let sleep in a bed two doors down from her own.

      She exhaled at the same instant he did. The tension left his shoulders. His hand dropped with a slap against his thigh. “All right.”

      Crossing her arms over her chest, Meg started back toward the house that had been hers and Matt’s, where she had lived for three years without him since the day he had walked out with no intention of coming home. For all of her reliance on this stupid inner sense of hers, she hadn’t been a particularly good judge of Matt’s character in the end.

      As she climbed the weathered wooden staircase, she paused to look back. Caleb had not followed but had risen and moved to stand above the tide line, watching the sea.

      Chapter 3

      Meg cooked him dinner. He hadn’t expected that, although he didn’t know what he would have eaten had she not troubled to feed him. The food tasted fresh and delicately seasoned, and he wondered what he had been eating lately that forced him to make an unfavorable comparison to any unknown, recent meals. Following cleanup, she had gone about her business much as usual, he expected, in a room off the living room filled with paints and canvas, sketches, brushes, and pencils, sitting down before an easel where a painting rested, not yet completed. The light had faded rapidly from the autumn sky, necessitating the use of a lamp affixed to the top of the easel. He had the feeling he had kept her from performing this work at a more opportune time, but she did not say so.

      He watched for a moment, frowning at the dark depiction of the sea, the tide executed in gradations of purple, midnight blue, and blood red, the sky above a mass of storm clouds in varying shades of gray. The picture disturbed him.

      Leaving her to her work on the unsettling painting, he went into the living room, seeking distraction. There, he found a variety of children’s books with her name as illustrator on the cover of each, although the authors varied. In light and evocative watercolors, she had created beautiful scenes of wildlife and snowfalls, of children and young animals, of gardens and mountains and ancient, gnarled trees from which swings hung drifting in the breeze. Studying the pictures, he understood Meg had been happy once. Clearly, by the painting in her studio, she wasn’t now.

      Caleb flipped through the pages of a book he had removed from a stand that was centered on the bookshelf—a recently published work, as the year of copyright on the front page coincided with the calendar he had seen hanging in the kitchen. Carefully, he put the volume back where he had found it. Turning to move on, he stopped at a clatter of falling objects from the nearby room.

      “Are you all right?” Caleb called out.

      Meg appeared on the threshold, standing on one foot as she leaned into the room, wiping her hands with a paint-smeared rag. He could smell something pungent coming from the cloth and wrinkled his nose.

      “Turpentine,” she said. “Paint thinner. Hard on the hands, but gets the paint off.”

      He nodded.

      “I’ll be finished in here in a minute.”

      “Don’t stop because of me. I’ve just been looking at your books.” He pointed to the nearest. Her gaze darted in the direction he pointed, her expression altering. He couldn’t read the change, and in the next instant, it was gone, reverting to the smile she’d been wearing when she came in. He frowned.

      “Be right out.”

      As soon as she disappeared, he continued his circuit around the room, picking up objects for a brief examination and putting them back down. He paused in front of an old hutch, his attention caught by the worn, barn-red doors. Grabbing the painted knob on the right side, he pulled the door open to reveal a column of drawers, each with a scarred, brass keyhole. Meg’s light footsteps tapped across the hardwood floor behind him.

      “This feels familiar,” he said, without turning. “Is it a common type of furniture?”

      She stepped past him, closing the door with a definitive click of the latch. “There’s nothing in there.”

      “I wasn’t…I wasn’t asking.” Yet he felt like perhaps he had been. “It was just…well, it seemed I’d seen something like it before.”

      “That’s entirely possible. Probably not one exactly like this, but it is, as you said, a common type of furniture.”

      He continued to gaze at the shut door, visualizing the drawers behind it. He imagined they held all sorts of personal items, hints at a life, records and receipts and so many things he couldn’t put a name to, things he almost remembered, sitting hidden from light at the edge of thought.

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