Georgia Meets Her Groom. Elizabeth Bevarly

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      Two

      They drove the mile to her house in silence. Molly sat in the back seat, leaning forward between them, her heavy panting the only sound interrupting the quiet. Jack gazed with interest at his surroundings as they made their journey. He’d spent less than two years in Carlisle as a teenager, and it had been only one of a dozen locations where the state had placed him. But the small town had always been stamped indelibly at the front of his brain, never to be forgotten. Because this was where he had known Georgia Lavender.

      Since his parents’ deaths when he was seven years old, Jack had been shuttled and shunted from group home to foster home to correctional home and back again. He’d been a discipline problem from day one, fighting and backtalking and being generally bad tempered. That’s what happened when a boy was ripped from his home and his family without warning or concern. But no one had ever bothered to address that fact. No one had much cared. Not until he had come to Carlisle.

      The place had changed a lot, he noted. It had grown outward and upward, and looked to be quite prosperous for a small coastal community. Georgia lived in a subdivision that hadn’t existed when Jack had last been here, in an area well away from town, where the beach and ocean were too treacherous for swimming, but breathtaking to view, and made less accessible by jagged dunes.

      As they drew nearer, he saw that the houses were built up on stilts, unoccupied for the most part, with signs in the front yards advertising that they were for rent. Georgia’s house, sitting alone at the end of a cul-de-sac, seemed particularly isolated, a fact that didn’t set well with him for some reason.

      It, too, was perched on stilts, but where some of the other houses were looming structures of two and three stories, geometrically designed with sharp corners and slanted lines, hers was a simple ranch style with a series of stairways that started on the ground and wound about the house, ending in a square deck placed at the center of her roof.

      As they emerged from his car, he heard her keys jingling, Molly barking at nothing and the wind whipping wildly about the softly moaning house. And all of a sudden he felt as if time and the rest of the world had receded into nothing.

      “You’re awfully isolated out here,” he said, speaking his earlier observations aloud as they trudged up the creaking steps.

      “Yes, I am,” she agreed as she shoved back a fistful of hair that the wind had tossed ferociously down on her forehead. “I love it here.”

      The interior of the house reminded Jack of Georgia’s bedroom in the big house in Carlisle, where he had spent many a night as a teenager—unbeknownst to her father, of course—when he’d been too afraid to go home. Soft colors, lots of light and flowers everywhere—in paintings, on wreaths, in the fabric of the furniture, growing in pastel-colored planters. Everything was scented with the subtle fragrance of spring blossoms, made all the more poignant because it was the dead of winter and he knew he should be denied such pleasures at this time of year.

      He noted a telescope angled upward in front of the windows that faced the ocean, and remembered that she had always had an interest in astronomy, something her father had insisted she turn into a degree in astrophysics or aeronautical engineering. Jack wondered how things were between her and her old man these days. Although he’d been keeping track of Gregory Lavender from a business standpoint, he knew little about the man’s personal life. Certainly, from the looks of her, Georgia seemed to be out from under his thumb, but there was no way of knowing for sure where father and daughter stood currently.

      Wordlessly she closed the door behind them, went to the kitchen to fill Molly’s bowl with fresh water, returned to the living room to shrug out of her coat, and turned to face Jack fully.

      “So what’s the real reason you’ve come back to Carlisle?” she asked bluntly.

      He removed his own jacket and tossed it onto the same chair upon which she had discarded hers. But he remained rooted on the other side of the room opposite her, not certain exactly how to act. Georgia’s question was a simple one, he told himself. So why did he find it so impossible to answer her?

      When he met her gaze, he realized she was studying him intently, much as she had been since he’d pushed through the doors of the restaurant a half hour earlier. “Have I changed that much?” he asked quietly, sidestepping her question for the time being.

      She nodded. “Yes. Yes, you have.”

      “So have you.”

      “It’s been more than twenty years, Jack,” she said with a shrug. “That’s a long time. People can’t help but change.”

      He nodded. “I know. I just didn’t expect...”

      “What?”

      He shook his head and left his statement unfinished.

      “He’s dead, you know.”

      Georgia couldn’t imagine what made her blurt out the news that way—the words just tumbled out without her even having planned to say them. A muscle twitched once in Jack’s jaw, but he offered no other indication that he’d even heard what she said.

      “Buck, I mean,” she added softly. She hadn’t uttered the name of Jack’s foster father for two decades, but it still left a bad taste in her mouth when she did. “He died about three years ago. Finally drank himself to death. Faye is dead, too. About six months ago.”

      “I СКАЧАТЬ