scrunched up her brow, thinking hard. “Man, I don’t know. What did your parents do when you got in trouble?”
Nora tilted her head and cocked one side of her mouth up wryly.
“Oh, that’s right,” Stacy said, laughing. “I forgot you were the reigning Miss Perfect for a couple of decades there.”
“Miss Boring is more like it.” Nora began wiping down the countertop, though she hadn’t spilled much. “My friend Maggie used to say that if she weren’t around to keep things stirred up I would probably turn to stone.”
“I wish I could have met her,” Stacy said. “You always make her sound like a human stick of dynamite. I’ll bet she’d know how to handle Colin.”
Nora’s eyes stung suddenly. She turned around so that Stacy couldn’t read her face too easily. “Yes,” she agreed. “She probably would.”
“Well, okay, let’s think. I wasn’t exactly dynamite, but I wasn’t Miss Perfect, either. I remember one summer, when I was about sixteen, and I’d just met Zach. I stayed out until dawn. I thought my dad was going to kill Zach, but my mom held him back. They made me spend the rest of my summer volunteering every night at the local nursing home.”
“Oh, yeah? How did that go?”
“It was hell. I wanted to be wrapped in Zach’s manly arms, and instead I was reading the sports section to an old guy who hacked up phlegm into his plastic cup every few sentences and kept yelling, ‘Nothin’ but net!’ every time I mentioned the Gamecocks.”
Nora laughed.
“It’s not funny,” Stacy said, though there was a twinkle in her eye. “It could have scarred me for life. To this day, whenever I see a basketball, I twitch.”
“Okay, then, I won’t send Colin to the nursing home just yet. I’ll reserve that for the day he comes home at dawn smelling of Chanel.”
She looked toward the living room, which was suspiciously quiet. “Right now he’s in there stuffing candy canes into the goody bags for the Christmas party. Even that little punishment annoyed him. He seemed to think nearly breaking Mickey’s nose was a gift to mankind, something to be applauded.”
“In there?” Stacy pointed with her tortoiseshell glasses. “Sorry, but I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure I saw him climbing the tree when I came in.”
Nora frowned, then, without stopping to say a word, reached for the latch. She yanked the door open and, pulling her sweater closed against the blast of December wind, took the steps down to ground level quickly.
Oh, good grief. Stacy was right. Colin wasn’t indoors, working through his punishment. He was about six feet up the leafless maple tree, hanging by his knees from a large, spreading branch. His sweater nearly smothered his face, leaving his skinny rib cage exposed and probably freezing.
Beneath him, his friend Brad Butterfield squatted in the middle of about two dozen scattered candy canes, some broken to bits inside their plastic wrappers. Both Brad and Colin were eating candy canes themselves, letting them dangle from their lips like red-striped cigarettes.
“Come on, Colin, you’re only hitting like thirty percent. Let me try. It’ll take us all day to do these damn bags at this rate.”
“Shut up, butt-head,” Colin said, his voice muffled under folds of wool. “You’re the boat, and I’m the bomber. That’s the deal. Now…target ready?”
With a heavy sigh of irritation, Brad began moving the paper bag slowly across the winter-brown grass. When he was directly under Colin’s head, a candy cane came sailing down. It fell squarely into the bag, and both Colin and Brad made triumphant booming sounds.
Stacy, who now stood at Nora’s shoulder, chuckled softly. “Well, what a coincidence,” she said. “Nothing but net.”
MOST PEOPLE IN HAWTHORN BAY said the Killian men had an unhealthy obsession with gold. A Civil War Killian ancestor supposedly buried his fortune in small caches all over the Sweet Tides acreage, and no Killian since had been able to drag himself away from the house, no matter how hard the community tried to run them off.
But Jack Killian, who hadn’t set foot in Hawthorn Bay for twelve years and therefore had a more objective perspective, didn’t think their problem was the gold.
It was the water.
Living in the South Carolina lowlands meant your feet weren’t ever quite dry. Thousands of acres of spartina marshland, endless blue miles of Atlantic coastline, haunted black swamps and twisting ribbons of tea-colored rivers—that was what Jack saw when he dreamed of home, not the antebellum columns and jasmine-scented porches of Sweet Tides.
And certainly not the gold.
Almost every major incident in his life was tied to the water. He’d been four the day they’d dragged his grandmother out of the river behind Sweet Tides, where she’d unsuccessfully tried to drown herself. He’d been nine the day he’d broken his fibula learning to water-ski behind their new boat—Killian luck never lasted long, and that boat had been sold, dime on the dollar, before the cast had come off Jack’s leg. He’d been sixteen the day his mother, lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood, had sent him to find his father, who’d been drinking malt liquor at a shanty on the edge of Big Mosquito Swamp. It was the first time Jack had driven a car alone.
And, of course, he had won Nora Carson on the water—the day they’d wandered away from a high school science trip to a loblolly pine hammock, and he’d kissed her beside a cluster of yellow water lilies.
He’d lost her on the water, too, the day he’d taken her filthy cousin Tom out to a deserted spoil island, beat the crap out of him and left him there to swim home on his own. He hadn’t realized that he’d broken Tom’s arm, rendering the jerk unable to swim an inch, but the cops had decided ignorance was no excuse.
Jack had escaped an attempted murder charge by the skin of his teeth, and by a timely enlistment in the United States Army.
He hadn’t been home since. Until today.
He drove his Jaguar around back, between the house and the river. In Jack’s lifetime, no one but the sheriff had ever entered Sweet Tides from the fancy front, where gray, peeling Doric columns guarded the portico like ghosts from a long-lost world.
Yeah, the front of Sweet Tides was pure Greek tragedy, but the back was merely pleasantly ragged, with mossy oaks, leggy camellias, crooked steps and weathered paint that all needed a lot more tending than they ever got.
Jack’s brother, Sean, stood at the back porch. When Jack killed his engine, Sean loped down the uneven steps, arms open, a huge grin on the face that looked so eerily like Jack’s own.
“You made it! I thought surely the minute you hit the marsh flats you’d break out in hives and make a U-turn back to Kansas City!”
Jack folded Sean in with one arm and ruffled his unkempt black curls with the other. They both still wore their hair a little longer than other men—it was Jack’s one rebellion against the establishment. But while Sean clearly still cut his own with the kitchen scissors, Jack paid a small fortune to someone named Ambrosia, who knew how to keep the uptown-edgy-lawyer look from revealing its roots as backwoods bad boy.
