The Girl Who Chased the Moon Page 16

  She dressed quickly, distracted, and went downstairs. Thankfully, Grandpa Vance had already left for breakfast, so she wrote him a note telling him she’d be at the lake.

  She didn’t mention who she was meeting there.

  Once on the sidewalk, she was about to get in her car when she heard her name being called in the morning quiet. Already jittery, she jumped in surprise and dropped her car keys. She turned quickly to see Stella walking toward her from next door. She looked strangely overdressed for that time of morning, in a strapless red dress and heels. Her wide face had fading blotches of makeup on it, and her exotic eyes were tired. She looked like she’d had a bad night. Or maybe a very good one. Emily couldn’t decide which.

  “Have you seen Julia?” Stella asked as Emily knelt to pick up her keys. “I just went by J’s Barbecue and she wasn’t there.”

  Emily stood. “I haven’t seen her since yesterday. But I did hear her leave in her truck around one o’clock this morning.”

  Stella looked confused. “I wonder where she went.”

  Emily shrugged. She tried to act casual, like she wasn’t doing anything wrong. Which, of course, she wasn’t. What was the matter with her? Why was she so nervous?

  “Julia almost never uses her truck, and she never goes out that late. I’m worried about her.” Stella started picking at her red fingernail polish. She shifted her weight to one hip and asked, “Do you think she’s been acting weird lately?”

  “Only around Sawyer.”

  “Hmm. Something’s on her mind. If I get enough wine in her, I can usually get her to talk. But I think she’s onto me about that now.”

  Emily looked over her shoulder anxiously, half expecting to see Grandpa Vance coming home. “She hasn’t said anything to me.”

  “Well, if you see her, tell her I’m looking for her.” Stella nodded to the Oldsmobile at the curb. “Where are you going at this time of morning?”

  “To the lake. What about you?”

  “Oh, I’m just getting in,” Stella said, then paused. “Crap. I can’t believe I said that to you. Erase that. I’m not setting a very good example. Crap. Just… do as I say, not as I do.”

  That made Emily laugh as she got in her car. Stella walked back to her house, taking off her heels and shaking her head to herself.

  There was so little traffic at that time of morning that Emily arrived at Piney Woods Lake in record time. The parking lot was nearly empty. She parked and turned off the ignition, then sat in silence while the engine ticked as it cooled. She knew she was too early, but she’d wanted to leave before Grandpa Vance got home. She didn’t want to lie to his face. She didn’t know if he would understand why she was doing this.

  Finally she got out of the car. The murky morning air was so heavy that it beaded on her skin as she walked to the boardwalk and sat on one of the benches overlooking the lake. There were very few people there. She propped her feet on the railing while watching the fog roll off the water. Some of the lake houses had their lights on, but not many.

  She heard footsteps approach on the boardwalk behind her, then Win appeared by the bench. She stared up at him, not knowing what to say. She had no idea he would be here this early, too. He waited a moment, then he sat beside her and put his feet on the railing beside hers. He stared intently at the water as if he would miss something important if he looked away. He had a strong, angular profile. Austere, proud, full of secrets. She wanted in. She wanted to know those secrets. Was this how her mother felt? She wondered if there was a curse, one that impossibly attracted the women of her family to the men of his.

  Yet here she was. Still doing this.

  “Come to my family’s lake house and have breakfast with me,” he finally said.

  “How long have you been waiting?”

  “A while. I didn’t want to miss you.” He took a deep breath, then stood. “I’m glad you came.” He held out his hand to her.

  It didn’t take long for her to accept it.

  Chapter 13

  They walked down the empty beach, then Win led Emily up the steps to the large deck of his family’s lake house. He gestured for her to sit in one of the Adirondack chairs. She did, pulling her legs up and wrapping her arms around them.

  She relaxed this stance only when Penny, the housekeeper, came out and served them frittatas. Penny was sixty-three years old, widowed, and extremely set in her ways. But she had a soft spot for Win, and Win adored her. When he was a little boy, he used to think of Penny and the lake house as a single entity. He’d thought she sat alertly on a stool in the kitchen all day and night, waiting for his family to visit so she could cook for them. The first time he’d seen her outside the context of the lake house, on one of her days off, he’d been downtown with his mother. He’d seen Penny walk down the street and he’d thought she’d escaped, so he’d yelled at his mom to catch her and bring her back. He’d been absolutely hysterical. His limited understanding at the time had been that, because of who he was, he couldn’t leave Mullaby, but other people could. They could leave and never come back. And that had petrified him.

  He and Emily ate breakfast in a silence that wasn’t entirely comfortable. He made her nervous, and she made him feel off balance. It felt like too much, like he was taking more than he should. But he couldn’t seem to help it. He’d spent his life accepting what his father told him he could never change, and forcing himself not to covet the freedom other people had. Things had to change. He couldn’t go on following rules that were made for a different time. It all made sense when he met Emily. She could make this right. She could take away this stigma. If Dulcie Shelby’s daughter, of all people, could accept him for who he was, then his family would have to take notice. Emily was the first step to a whole new way of life.

  At this point, he couldn’t even consider the possibility that he was wrong about this. He had to be right. He had to be.

  After breakfast, they sat side by side on the Adirondack chairs, quietly watching the sun burn the morning fog away. The beach was slowly filling with people, and the noise was beginning to swell.

  “Are you out here a lot in the summer?” Emily finally asked, watching a boat zoom across the lake, leaving a trail of churning water that looked like soda foam.

  He’d been biting his tongue, waiting for her to say something, not wanting to rush her. “My family uses this house all year round. It’s a home away from home. It drives Penny crazy, though. She likes to keep to a strict schedule, and we always throw her off it by showing up unexpectedly, like I did this morning.”

  “I get the feeling she doesn’t mind. I think she adores you.” She looked over to him with a smile that made his chest feel full. He was manipulating her. He knew that. But for the first time, he realized how easily she could be doing the same to him. He needed to be her friend to make this work. He never expected to have these other feelings. One well-placed smile and he forgot what he was going to say. All he could think was how different she was than he thought she would be, after all the stories he’d heard about her mother. She was striking and sweet… and had the most interesting hair. It always looked like a gust of wind was hiding in there, waiting to blow out. It was so endearingly quirky.

  In the silence that followed, her smile faded and her hands went to her hair. “Do I have something on my head?”

  “No, sorry. I was just thinking about your hair.”

  She gave him an odd look. “You were thinking about my hair?”

  This was the same hiccup he’d felt on the Ferris wheel with her. He couldn’t lose focus. “Yes. No. I mean, I was wondering if you ever wore it down.”

  She shook her head. “It’s in that weird growing-out stage right now.”

  “How short was it before?”

  “Really short. My mom wore her hair short, so I wore mine short, too. But I started growing it out a little over a year ago.”

  “What made you stop wanting to be like her?”

  “I’ve never stopped wanting to be like he
r. She was a wonderful person,” she said vehemently. Then she turned back to the water. “It was just a lot to live up to.”

  This wasn’t working. They had to shake some of this awkwardness off. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said as he stood.

  They left their shoes by their chairs and went back down the deck steps. They walked close to the water and got their feet wet. They didn’t talk much, but that was okay. Walking together, their strides in rhythm, getting used to each other, was enough.

  When they reached the cove, Emily looked toward the grotto where his sister’s birthday party had been held. There were two elderly couples sitting on folding chairs there today, away from the crowds and out of the sun. He knew what she was going to do before she took the first step.

  Without a word, Emily left him and walked away from the water, toward the trees. He hesitated a moment before following her. She passed the elderly couples and went to the tree where her mother’s and his uncle’s initials had been carved. Win stopped to say hello to the elderly couples, to put their minds at ease, because they were looking at Emily strangely, then he went to stand by her.

  The past few months of her life had been marked by a chaos he could only imagine. Looking at her like this, he could see her grief. He could see how alone she felt with it. But he understood that. He knew about things you couldn’t tell other people because they had no basis for comparison. Because they simply wouldn’t understand.

  “Will the kids at Mullaby High know about my mom? About who she was here?” Emily finally asked, staring at the tree.

  “If their parents tell them. You probably got the worst of it from my dad. I wouldn’t worry about Mullaby High. It’s not that bad.” He hated seeing her like this. He wanted to distract her. “Tell me about your old school. Do you miss it? The website made it seem very… intense.” That was putting it mildly. Roxley School for Girls was so full of righteous, politically correct indignation that a person could get a nosebleed just by reading the literature.

  She shrugged. “After my mom died, I wanted to find some sort of comfort in the school, but I couldn’t. There was just this legacy. More than ever, people there wanted me to fill my mom’s shoes, and I couldn’t. Ironic, isn’t it, that I come here and the same thing has happened, just in a different way. And I don’t know which is worse, trying to live up to her name, or trying to live it down.”

  “What about your friends there?”

  “I started having panic attacks after my mother died, and I didn’t want people to see me having them, so I started spending a lot of time by myself.”

  He suddenly thought of her sitting on the bench downtown with her head down. He’d been watching her for a while that morning, and he’d seen the moment something was wrong, the way she’d stopped short on the sidewalk, the color draining from her face. It had been alarming, and had forced him to approach her, when he hadn’t planned to at all. And that had changed everything. “Were you having a panic attack the first day we met?”

  She nodded.

  “What brings them on?”

  “Panic.”

  That made him smile. “Well, obviously.”

  “They come on when I start to feel overwhelmed, when there’s too much going on in my head.” She suddenly seemed wary. “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m just curious.” She continued to look at him, her brows low over her bright blue eyes. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I’ve never told anyone about my panic attacks,” she said, as if he’d somehow forced it out of her. “You now know my weakness.”

  “You say that as if you’re not supposed to have any.” He reached past her and started picking bark off the tree absently. “We all have weaknesses.”

  “Do you?”

  “Oh, yes.” She had no idea.

  He continued picking at the tree until she put her hand on his and made him stop. “And you’re not going to tell me?”

  He took a deep breath. “It’s complicated.”

  “I get it,” she said, and turned to walk back to the shoreline. “You don’t want to tell me.”

  He jogged after her. “No, it’s not that I don’t want to tell you. It’s more like… I have to show you.”

  She stopped. He almost ran into her. “So show me.”

  “I can’t. Not now.” He ran his hands through his hair, frustrated. “You’ll have to trust me on that.”

  “I don’t have much of a choice, do I?” she said.

  They headed around the lake, quiet again, and eventually circled back to the house. It was a long walk, and when they got back, Penny brought lunch out to them unasked. After she set out the plates of sandwiches and fruit, she passed behind Emily’s chair, still in Win’s view. She smiled as she pointed to Emily and gave him a thumbs-up before she went inside to answer the ringing phone.

  He smiled back at her.

  After they’d finished, Emily stood and walked to the railing. He followed the line of her long legs, up her body, to her face. He was suddenly fascinated by the progress of her hair tie as it slowly slipped out of her hair as she moved and stretched. Finally, the tie fell from the tips of her hair to the deck. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “I wish I had my bathing suit,” she said. “I’d go cool off in the water.”

  “Come inside where it’s cool. I’ll show you around.”

  When she turned, he reached over to pick up her hair tie. “You dropped something.”

  She held out her hand. “Thanks.”

  But he put it in his pocket.

  “You’re not going to give it back?” she asked.

  “Eventually,” he said as he walked into the cavernous living room off the deck. Emily followed, arguing with him about rights of ownership.

  She fell silent when she stepped inside. There weren’t any paintings of sand dunes or antique wooden buoys on the walls, the way he knew some of the surrounding lake house rentals were decorated, like they could double as fish-house restaurants. This place actually looked like his family spent a lot of time here, which they did. The furniture was comfortable and had a bit of sag. One wall was dominated by a flat screen, and the floor under it was littered with a Wii and tons of DVDs. Overnight travel was inconvenient for them, so their vacations usually consisted of coming out to the lake and staying here.

  “This is a lot more homey than I expected,” she finally said.

  “They can’t all be ivory towers.”

  He led her to the second story with a cursory wave to the four bedrooms there, then up to the third-story loft, through a door in the linen closet. The space was occupied only by a low couch, a stack of books, a television, and some storage boxes. No one came up here but him. He loved his family, but when they were all out here, sometimes he needed a break from their togetherness. So this was where he went. He didn’t like their house on Main Street as much-with its cold marble and oppressive history-but it was a lot easier to avoid people there.

  “I spend a lot of time in this loft when I’m here,” he said as she looked around. The only light was from the windows on the far wall, stacked in the shape of a triangle that followed the line of the sloping ceiling. Pink dust motes sparkled in the air.

  “I can see why. It has a secret feel to it. It suits you.” She walked to the bank of windows. “Great view.”

  He watched her from across the room, backlit against the windows. He was moving before he was even aware of what he was doing. He stopped directly behind her, mere inches away. Awareness immediately radiated from her like electricity.

  A full minute passed before he said, “You’re suddenly quiet.”

  He watched her swallow. “I don’t understand how you do this to me.”

  He leaned in slightly. Her hair smelled like something flowery, like the fading scent of lilacs. “Do what?”

  “Your touch.”

  “I’m not touching you, Emily.”

  She turned around. “That’s just it. It feels like you are. How do you
do that? It’s like you have something surrounding you, something I can’t see, that reaches out. It doesn’t make sense.”

  That startled him. She felt it. No one had ever felt it before.

  She waited for him to say something, to explain or deny it, neither of which he could do. He took a step past her, closer to the window. “Your family once owned all of this,” he said.

  She hesitated before deciding to accept the change of subject. “All of what?”

  “All of Piney Woods Lake. Years ago, that’s how the Shelbys made their money, by selling it off, parcel by parcel.” He pointed to the trees in the distance. “All that wooded acreage on the other side of the lake still belongs to your grandfather. That’s millions of dollars of potential development. It drives my father crazy. He wants your grandfather to sell him some of it.”

  “Why?”

  “Coffeys have always liked to have a say in the growth of Mullaby. Homesites, businesses, things like that.”

  “Why?” she asked again.

  “Because this is our home. For years and years, we thought this was the only place we could live.”

  “Is it?”

  He turned to face her. “Do you really want to know?” My weakness.

  “Yes. Yes, of course I do.”

  This was it. There was no going back after he told her. He had to show her then. “The men in my family have an… affliction.”

  She looked confused. “What sort of affliction?”

  He left her at the window and paced across the room. “It’s genetic,” he said. “A simple mutation. But it’s particularly strong in my family. My grandfather had it. My uncle had it. My father has it.” He paused. “I have it.”

  “Have what?”

  He took a deep breath. “We call it The Glowing.”

  Emily stared at him, still not understanding.

  “Our skin gives off light at night,” he explained, and it was amazing, actually saying that to someone outside his family. It was as liberating as he thought it would be. It was even better. The words were out and he couldn’t take them back. He waited for Emily to say something. But she said nothing. “That’s what you feel,” he said eagerly, walking back to her and putting his hands on either side of her face, almost, but not quite, touching her.