dated, although at one time it had been clear that she had her eye on Lacey’s father. Thank God Olivia had come along at that point, or Lacey might have ended up with Nola as a stepmother. Just talking to Nola on the phone could send a chill up her spine.
Nola had been a lax and permissive mother with Jessica. Lacey’s mother had certainly been lenient and indulgent, as well, but Annie O’Neill’s permissiveness had been balanced by her deep love for her children. Although Jessica had often been critical of Lacey’s parents, she’d admitted just a few years ago that she had actually been envious of the close and loving relationships Lacey had enjoyed growing up in the O’Neill family.
The traffic was ridiculous! She was driving through Duck, her car creeping so slowly that she feared it might overheat. It had happened before. She turned off the air-conditioning and opened the windows to try to prevent it from happening again. She knew every alternate route available along the Outer Banks, but the island was so narrow here that there was only one road running south and north, and she was on it. She glanced at her cell phone lying on the passenger seat. She could try to call Jessica on the cell, but she didn’t know what hospital she was in, and the thought of coping with cellular information and the iffy reception in the area was more than she could manage.
Her thoughts turned to Mackenzie. What had the accident been like? Mackenzie wasn’t hurt, Nola had said, so maybe she had been conscious and had witnessed everything. Maybe she saw her mother’s body pinned behind the wheel, or maybe the car had flipped over. Then she began wondering, as she always did when she thought about Mackenzie, what had become of the girl’s father. That had been a sore spot between her and Jessica for years. Mackenzie’s father was Bobby Asher. He’d been one of the many guys she and Jessica had hung around with the summer Lacey was fourteen. In her mind, Bobby would always be that seventeen-year-old chain-smoking, beer-drinking, pill-popping, sexy-as-hell guy, with the blond hair that touched his shoulders and the same light blue eyes she saw in every picture of Mackenzie. Lacey had lost her virginity to him, as had Jessica, the very next night. She’d been hurt that Bobby had ultimately picked Jessica over her. Jess had been less uptight, ready for anything. Lacey had been fairly wild that summer, too, but she knew the scared little kid inside her had been evident to anyone who looked hard enough. Nothing had seemed to frighten Jessica, however, and Bobby had been drawn to that quality in her.
At the end of that summer, Bobby returned to his home in Richmond, Virginia, and neither she nor Jessica ever saw him again. When Jessica realized she was pregnant, she adamantly refused to tell Nola or anyone else who the baby’s father was. Only Lacey knew. Jessica had had other lovers, if you could call them that at age fourteen. They’d both had others. But the timing of her pregnancy fit perfectly with her time with Bobby.
At first Lacey thought that Jessica was right to keep the identity of the baby’s father to herself. Bobby was crazy. Undoubtably, he would have talked her into an abortion so he could rid himself of the problem. Nola had tried to talk Jessica into an abortion herself, but Lacey had persuaded her not to do it. Lacey had only recently lost her mother, and the thought of yet another life being wiped off the planet, no matter how tiny and unformed that life might have been, was unbearable to her. Jessica agreed. She had turned fifteen by then, and there was no way any doctor would take that baby against her will. So Nola arranged for her to leave the Outer Banks, spiriting her away to an aunt in Phoenix so that her expanding belly would not be a source of gossip and shame for Nola, a prominent real estate agent.
When Lacey was sixteen, she learned that Tom was her biological father and her feelings about Jessica keeping the identity of Mackenzie’s father to herself changed. A child needed to know who her father was, even if knowing the truth created more problems than it solved. And a man needed to know that he was responsible for a child. The subject of Mackenzie’s paternity had nearly caused a falling-out between her and Jessica. As recently as Mackenzie’s eleventh birthday this past April, Lacey had once again brought it up with her. “You really should tell Bobby Asher,” she’d said. “Mackenzie’s getting old enough to know the truth.” As always, Jessica had adamantly refused to even consider it.
She knew Jessica had told Mackenzie that her father was someone she’d seen for a short time and that she didn’t know where he was. That was true, but he was findable. Anyone was findable. Lacey tried to picture Bobby Asher now—he would be nearly thirty, Clay’s age, but the only image that came to her mind was of a long-haired man in need of a bath, standing at a corner of a busy Richmond street, holding a bowl out to drivers passing by, the sign at his side reading: Homeless. Please Help. That was surely the direction in which he’d been heading.
When she finally reached Kiss River, she was glad to see that the chain across the driveway was already down and she wouldn’t need to get out of the car to unhook it. She turned onto the shaded lane and sped over the ruts, spraying gravel behind her, not really caring about anything other than getting to the phone.
Clay’s Jeep was next to Gina’s van in the parking lot, and she knew he was either in the woods with one of his search-and-rescue trainees or in the house waiting for a client to arrive. She jumped out of her car and ran across the sand toward the house.
Clay and Gina were in the kitchen when she pulled open the screen door, and Gina lifted a finger to her lips.
“Shh,” she said. “I just got her down for her nap.”
Clay was sweeping the always-sandy kitchen floor and he looked up from his task. “What’s wrong?” he asked, and she knew her worry was showing in her face.
“Jessica and Mackenzie were in an accident,” she said. “They’re alive, but Jessica was hurt.” She rattled off Jessica’s injuries to the best of her memory. “I’m going to try to call her at the hospital.”
“Whose fault was the accident?” Clay asked, as if it mattered.
“Drunk driver.” Dropping her purse on the table, she reached for the cordless phone and dialed Information.
“Who’s Jessica?” Gina asked Clay.
“An old friend of Lacey’s,” he said. “She was crazy. She got pregnant when she was fourteen, and I think she used every drug in the book that summer.”
“She’s completely different now.” Lacey felt tears burn her eyes as she waited to get a human being on the line. She didn’t know the name of a single hospital in Phoenix, much less which one Jessica was in. “Besides,” she added, “you were not so staid yourself.” She was annoyed at the speed with which her brother jumped to judge her friend.
“My guy?” Gina asked, putting her arm around Clay’s shoulders and planting a kiss on his cheek. “Did you have a wild side back then?”
“Lacey was so wasted that summer that she wouldn’t have known what I was doing,” Clay said.
She had known, though. She’d been at parties where she’d watched her older brother drink himself into the adolescent oblivion that was typical of the other graduating seniors that year. True, he’d only used alcohol, at least to the best of her knowledge, while she and her friends had dabbled in marijuana and an occasional tab of LSD. Some of the rowdier kids had actually used crack. But Clay had been old enough to pass himself off as a responsible adult when he needed to. She—and Jessica—had simply been a mess.
Finally, a male voice came on the phone. He gave her the numbers for three different hospitals and she wrote them down on a piece of paper Gina slipped onto the counter in front of her.
“I’m going to call her from the studio,” she said, clutching the paper in her hand as she headed out of the kitchen in the direction of the sunroom.
“Good
