Chapter Four
Owen stood on the beach and rolled up his pant legs to his knees before stepping into the cool waters of the Chesapeake. Less than a foot from shore, the slimy tentacles of sea grass reached out to embrace his calves, and he flinched. As many times as he’d been in the bay, he’d never gotten used to that first tickle, which made him think of eels and octopuses slithering around his legs, of mean-spirited crabs with their sharp claws just waiting to grab on to an ankle or a toe. He knew all this was unlikely to happen—well, the crabs were a definite possibility, but as far as he knew, there were no octopuses in the bay. Eels, maybe, but they, like most sea creatures this close to shore, tended to flee rather than fight.
There was just something cringe-worthy about stepping into water that was so dense with vegetation you couldn’t see what lurked there. That was true of much of the Chesapeake, where the waters were dark with grasses in some places, and just plain dark in others. He tried to remember if he’d ever seen clear to the bottom anywhere around Cannonball Island and had to admit he had not. If such a spot existed, he’d not found it.
Yet here he was, wading in blindly to see how far one could walk before hitting the shelf where the bottom dropped off. He seemed to recall from his younger days that the drop was about ten or twelve feet from shore. A few more steps and he’d reach it. Mindful that he was close to the edge, he dug his feet in, which meant the sea grass caught between his toes—another sensation he particularly disliked. But he was a man on a mission and determined to find the ledge. Besides, it bothered him that he, big strong Owen Parker—adventurer, man of mystery, love-’em-and-leave-’em Owen Parker—had to fight the urge to scream like a girl when that first tentacle of slimy grass wrapped itself around his calf and reached for his knee.
“Scream like a girl’s a little harsh,” he muttered before taking another step forward, ever mindful of the crabs. It was still their mating season, after all.
His left foot found the spot he was searching for before his right foot, and he paused momentarily to avoid sliding down the uneven slope. He stood six feet three inches tall, and the water was just below his knees where drop-off began. But he knew from past experience the drop could be anywhere from fifteen to thirty or forty feet below the surface of the water, something he wasn’t prepared to look into at that moment. For one thing, he wasn’t dressed for swimming. For another, his purpose today was to try to determine how much the drop—and therefore the depth—had shifted since the last time he’d been here.
Was it his imagination, or did the drop-off begin farther from the shore? He knew that here, at the exact point where the river joined the Chesapeake, the depth had changed over time. The width of the river had changed as well, as had the shoreline. He’d long ago learned that the only thing constant about the bay was that it was ever changing.
He tried to recall just how long it had been since he’d waded into these waters. The best he could come up with was a range of three to five years.
Could that be right? He scratched his head and turned toward the shore. There was no denying he’d enjoyed the time he’d spent in the exotic—and not-so-exotic—places he’d been to since his last trip home, but it was good to be back on the island. It felt good to wake up in the old store every morning and to go downstairs and have coffee with Ruby and talk over whatever was on her mind that day. Sometimes it was something mundane, such as how Jolene Baker’s nephew had gotten her car stuck in the mudflats when he foolishly tried to take a shortcut across the island, and they had to get someone to tow it. Other times it was something profoundly beautiful, such as the story of how her Harold had wooed her by bringing part of his catch every day to her family’s back door when her father was ill and unable to work on the bay. Harold would quietly leave his offerings right next to the door where they couldn’t be missed, and he never missed a day in the entire six weeks of her father’s illness. Not until after her dad’d recovered did Harold ask to court her, coming to the front door with a handful of daisies for her mother, and a fistful of cornflowers for Ruby.
“I can still see him standing there, right outside the door,” Ruby’d told Owen. “Daisies for my mama, and a bunch of those sweet blue cornflowers for me. How he knew I favored them, I never knew and he never said. But for all our life together, he never came into the house without a few of those pretty blue posies in his hand when they were in season. He was so tall and so handsome, I’d’a married him anyway, flowers or no. I never told him that. Guess maybe I should have.”
She’d grown silent, and Owen had waited her out. He knew Ruby well enough to know that when she grew reflective, something else was always to come.
“It was winter when we lost our Annie to the influenza. My Harold had to dig through the frozen ground to bury her. There were no flowers for her until the spring. Soon as they were up a couple of inches, Harold dug some up and planted them on her grave. He almost never talked about her, but I know his heart was right down there with her every time he thought about her. Everyone grieves in their own way and that’s a fact. He loved that little girl—she was eight when she left us—just like he loved the son we buried just a few hours after he was born. Seemed so unnatural to me, to have carried that baby all those months, then have nothing to carry in my arms.”
Another short silence. “My Harold’s buried down there with them, at that graveyard next to my poppy’s old place. His kin wanted him buried over in the Carter plot, but he’d made me promise to lay him next to his babies, and that’s where he is. That’s where I’ll go when the time comes.” She’d looked up at Owen. “Might not be any room left for you or your sister, so you’re going to have to find a place of your own.”
Owen had smiled. “I don’t care where they plant me. I’ll probably die somewhere else and they’ll just bury me in some obscure corner of some unknown churchyard.”
Ruby’s eyes had narrowed and she’d rolled up her newspaper and smacked him with it. “You’ll be buried right here on the island where you belong, and you won’t be giving me sass about it.”
“Well then, I guess back there behind the store is as good a place as any. We can pull up a corner of your garden and they can bury me and Lis and Alec and their kids right there.”
Ruby must have liked the idea because she didn’t argue the point. “What about your kids? Where they gonna go?”
“You have to settle down before you have kids. You see me settling down, Ruby?”
“Humph. How much you know, boy,” she’d said softly, that twinkle in her eye telling him she knew what he did not.
Damn, but he’d miss her when she was no longer around. He couldn’t imagine life without her. She had been the one constant in his life. Wherever he was, however long he’d been gone, he’d always known Ruby would be there to welcome him home with a hug and a sly remark. His throat tightened at the thought of the unthinkable.
He hurried through the seaweed to reach the beach, which was a mixture of rough sand and pebbles. He put his flip-flops back on and headed back to the store. Passing Emily Hart’s driveway made him think about the one person he hadn’t wanted to think about today. Cass was dangerously close to getting under his skin, and he couldn’t have that.
Last night he had tried to read Cass, but just couldn’t get through, which annoyed him more than he’d like to admit. What was up with that?
He’d wanted to kiss her when he dropped her off. But he knew she was expecting him to, and he wanted to throw her off guard just a little. It remained to be seen if it would have the desired effect—making her wonder why he hadn’t kissed her when he could maybe have at least made the effort.
He’d rather have her wondering why he hadn’t tried than her feeling smug for having turned him down. Yes, it was a bit of a game, and ordinarily he wasn’t a gamer. For all he played the field, he was always up-front with any woman he dated. But this was different. Cass was different. He wanted her to think about him, so he did the one thing he figured she didn’t expect him to do.
He’d never had to work for someone, and he admitted that could be just a bit of Cass’s allure. Well, that and her pretty face and her sweet little compact body. He’d always been a sucker for short women.
Of course, if he had any sense, he’d forget about Cass and go to the new roadhouse out on the highway on Monday night, maybe meet someone who’d be happy to spend some quality time with him.
He’d have to give that some thought.
In the meantime, while he waited to hear from Jared, he’d see what chores he could do for Ruby. Thinking about her had made him feel sad over something that hadn’t even happened. Maybe he should plan to stick around for a while, help her while he still had her, let her know how much he appreciated having her in his life.
OWEN CAME IN through the side door of the store carrying an armful of dahlias he’d cut from Ruby’s garden. He’d eyed the cornflowers but decided those were Harold’s alone to give. He placed the flowers along with her favorite snips on the counter and paused on his way to the kitchen for a vase.
“What else can I do for you this morning, Gigi?”
“Tom be along sometime this morning with a delivery. Maybe you could unpack the boxes and restock the shelves.” Ruby sat at the old round wooden table next to the window on the far right side of the store, her favorite place to read the newspaper or a magazine, or, if things were really slow that day, one of the crime novels she so loved. Today she was reading the latest issue of the St. Dennis Gazette.
Owen grabbed a cold bottle of water from the cooler and walked over to see what this week’s hot topic was in the local newspaper. He peered over her shoulder and read the headline: “What Lies beneath the Dark Waters of the Waring River?”
“Wonder who Grace was talking to before she wrote that article?”
“Wonder all you want.” Ruby’s eyes never left the page. “You gonna put those pretties in water, or are you planning on letting them die right there on my counter?”
“Oh, right. I was going to get a vase and got distracted.”
“What be distracting you?” Ruby finally looked up.
“I don’t remember.” The sad truth was he didn’t remember why he hadn’t followed through with the vase, filled it with water, and dunked in the dahlias. It was as if something was there, at the far edge of his mind, begging him to look. But try as he might, he couldn’t bring it into focus.
He hated when that happened.
He made his way into the kitchen and opened the cabinet where Ruby kept her favorite vases. He picked a turquoise pottery pitcher he knew she especially liked, filled it at the sink, and took it into the front of the store. He knew Ruby always snipped the stems off a little before putting flowers in a vase, but didn’t know how far to cut, so he left that part for her and plunked the dahlias into the water.
“Gigi, you want me to leave the vase here?” he called.
“Right over here on my table with me be fine, thank you, son.”
Owen carried the vase along with the snips over to the table. Ruby looked over the arrangement and started to pull the stems out one by one and cut off the tips.
“What be on your mind?” she asked without looking at him.
“Just a little rammy, I guess.” He leaned over the back of one of the chairs and watched her prepare the flowers for the vase.
“I don’t know rammy.”
“Just . . . I don’t know, at loose ends, I guess. I’m getting bored waiting for this project to start. I don’t seem to have any other purpose here.”
“Tom be bringing stock later, seems you be having plenty of purpose then. And if you be all that bored, I can find plenty for you to do.”
Owen smiled. No one could put him in his place like Ruby. As he started to ask what she had in mind, he heard footsteps on the porch. Seconds later, Cass was walking across the wooden floor with great purpose. Just his luck. If rammy and antsy were steering his mood, he had this woman to thank for it.
Seeing her now made it clear to him that his little plan had backfired. He was the one wondering why he hadn’t kissed her when he might have had the chance.
Cass looked right past him as if he weren’t there and went straight to Ruby. “Miz Carter, I just came from the—”
“Well, hello, Cass. How’d you enjoy your dinner last night?” Ruby looked up as she folded her newspaper. “If you ever had fresher oysters or a tastier crab cake, you’re going to have to tell me where. Maybe even take me so I can judge for myself.”
“No, Miz Carter, I never did. Best seafood ever. But just now—”
“Glad we agree. Now, was there something you be wanting to say? Take a breath now, girl.”
Cass took a breath. “Last night you were talking about the graveyard by the chapel down the road from Mrs. Hart’s place.”
Ruby nodded. “Gave Josie’s girl directions to find her grandmother’s grave. Becky Singer be buried in that family plot.”
“Which is so overgrown with weeds, she’ll never find what she’s looking for. The weeds are up past my knees.”
“How’d you come to know that?”
“I was intrigued when you were talking about all those little private burying places. I remembered hearing something about them before, about how families buried their relatives right outside in their yard. So I thought I’d check out a few of them. I was thinking I’d need to figure out how to deal with them once we started marketing the houses we’re going to build. So I went to the one you talked about last night to take a look for myself and found it a mess. Isn’t anyone responsible for taking care of the graves on the island?”
“Time was, those little graveyards had white fences around them to set them off to themselves, kept the little ones from playing on ’em, kept the old folks from tripping over the stones. You see that white fence in someone’s front yard, you knew their kin was right there with them, where they belonged. Once families leave the island, there be no one left to tend to them, I suppose. Hadn’t much thought about it myself. Used to be preachers on the island, they’d get folks out to do some tending from time to time, but those were other days.”
“If the others all look like this one”—Cass pointed down the road—“it’s going to turn a lot of people off, not to mention the fact that it’s disrespectful to the people who are buried there. Someone from the island should be concerned about the state of those little private cemeteries.”
“And who do you think that might be? You know we don’t have a mayor and such, like other places. Things needed to be done, folks just did. I guess with so many leaving, there be no one left to care about the ones who passed on.” Owen didn’t need to look up to know Ruby’s eyes were on him. She took every possible opportunity to remind him that, as far as she was concerned, his place was on Cannonball Island, tending to its business, and nowhere else.
“I’ll go take a look at the Singer place,” he said. “I can mow the grass, if nothing else. It’s a small plot, it won’t take any time at all.”
“You better have a big mower with really sharp blades,” Cass told him. “I wasn’t kidding about the grasses being over my knees.”
“I’ll take a sickle.” He turned to Ruby. “There’s still that old one out in your shed, right?”
“My Harold’s tools are all still out there. Sickle be one of them. Don’t forget to clean it when you’re done with it, and put it back right where you found it, hear?”
“I’ll treat it like it was my own.”
“You’ll treat it like it belonged to your great-granddaddy, because it did.”
“All righty, then.” Owen kissed Ruby on top of her head. “Tell Tom to leave whatever he brings out on the porch and I’ll bring everything in when I get back.”
THE SUN BLAZED down the way it sometimes did in late September around noon. After twenty minutes swinging his great-grandfather’s sickle to cut down the high grass, Owen was covered with sweat. He took off his shirt and hung it over the fence surrounding the old graveyard.
Meanwhile, Cass made the rounds of the grave markers as he cleared them. “Look here. Isiah Singer. Born . . . I think it says 1814. Died 1881.” Cass looked up at Owen. “Eighteen fourteen would have made him one of the first babies born on the island.”
Owen nodded. “Maybe even the first.”
“I wonder if there’s any way to find out, short of checking every gravestone on the island. But even doing that wouldn’t guarantee we’d know for sure. It could be that the first person born here died elsewhere and wasn’t even buried here.”
Owen stepped around her with the sickle.
She went on to another marker. “This one is totally illegible. And this one . . . I can make out Singer as the last name but not the first. Looks like it starts with an E. Born 1821. Died 184-something. I can’t read the last number.” She stood and went to the next. “This is like reading a book. A family saga.” She knelt down to read the next one in line. “This guy . . . Joshua Singer . . . he was a bit of a ladies’ man. He’s buried with three wives.” She looked up at Owen and grinned. “Jealous?”
He laughed. “Nope. I don’t envy any man who had three wives.”
“Not all at the same time. The first one, Mary, died when she was . . . oh, my, seventeen. Must have been a child bride. Wife number two . . . Elizabeth, died when she was in her thirties. And the last one . . . ha! Ruth outlived him by eight years. Looks like she was another younger bride. She was twenty-two when she married him. Guess Joshua was a stud.”
Cass stood next to the broken fence and watched him work. “What can I do to help?”
“If you really want to do something, you could rake up all this stuff I’m cutting down.”
“Where do I get a rake?”
“Ruby has a couple in the shed.” He stopped for a moment, wiped the sweat from his face with his forearm, then wiped his arm on his shirt.
“I can do that. I’ll be back in a few.”
“Hey, Cass,” he called before she got too far up the road. “Ask Ruby for a couple of big bottles of water.”
“Will do.” She raised a hand and kept walking.
Cass hadn’t been kidding about the height of the grass. How was it that no one had noticed before? Were all the old graveyards around the island as overgrown and neglected? He’d bet most of them were, except for those whose adjacent homes were still occupied.
And the ones where Ruby’s kin were buried, he reminded himself. All of them. He knew this for a fact because she’d had him tend to them before he’d been back on the island for too long.
Gravekeeper. Cemetery attendant. Add those to my résumé.
If you wanted to live on Cannonball Island, you had to be a jack-of-all-trades. Not that he was planning on making the island his home again. This was temporary, only until this diving job for Jared was finished, however long that might be. Owen was certain that by then he’d be ready to be on the move again. Hopefully, by then, whatever had told him it was time to come home—that voice he heard inside his head, sometimes when he least wanted to—would have been satisfied. That voice—wherever it came from, whomever it belonged to—had been inside him for as long as he could remember. The only times in his life he’d really messed up had been the times he’d ignored it. Owen’d spent his life trying to ignore its implications, but he’d never been able to shake free of it. Ruby’d told him to just let it in, to hear what the voice had to say, but he’d never wanted anything to do with it.
“You be happy to have that voice someday,” Ruby had admonished him.
“I doubt it,” he’d shot back.
“Be careful what you wish for. You lose what you don’t use, son.”
“Good. Then anytime now it should be gone.”
So far, that hadn’t happened. At times he could stifle it, at times he could tune it out. Then the other night it tuned him out when he thought he’d try to read Cass.
Turn around.
Without thinking, he turned in time to see Cass headed toward him, pushing Ruby’s rusty old wheelbarrow. The uneven front wheel caused it to wobble. The light behind her gave her an all-over aura that drew his eyes and held them. He had to force himself to look away.
“That must be a bear to push.” He dropped the sickle and went to the road to help.
“I’ve got it.” Cass was all but out of breath, but she pushed on.
He stopped the barrow’s forward motion with one hand. “Here. You take the rake, and I’ll take this beast.”
He handed her the rake and grabbed the handles and started to push before she could object. It gave him something to do besides look at her. She was sweaty from pushing the barrow up the road, her short blond hair plastered to her now-shiny face. If she’d had makeup on, it had melted in the sun or it had been washed away by sweat. She was as sexy right then as she’d been in that black dress she’d worn the night he met her at the art show.
“Damn,” he’d said under his breath.
“It is a little unwieldy. Thank you. I didn’t want to complain, but—”
“What?” He tuned back in.
“The wheelbarrow. I agree, it’s a tough push. I said thanks for taking it off my hands.”
“Oh. Right.”
They stopped at the edge of the fence, and Owen pushed the wheelbarrow across the sandy soil to the gate.
“I guess we should pick up the loose grass that I cut down and load it into the wheelbarrow. Then I’ll come back later with the mower and cut it down to normal grass level, make it look neat.”
“I think Diane’s family would appreciate that.” Cass stood with her hands on her hips. “I can rake it into piles and you can pick it up and toss it in here.” She pointed to the wheelbarrow. “Oh, I almost forgot. Here’s your water.” She took the plastic bottle from the bottom of the wheelbarrow and handed it to him.
“Thanks. I bet I sweated off about eight pounds already today.” He unscrewed the top and drank down half the bottle. When he finished, he looked skyward. “I had no idea it was going to get this hot today. You can get dehydrated pretty quickly working too long out here.”
“Miz Carter sent up a couple of those. She said we’d probably need them.” Cass opened a bottle and took a drink, then removed the others and set them on the ground in the shade from the fence. “She also sent sunscreen and said for you to use it.” Cass dug the plastic bottle from her back pocket and handed it over. “She made me use it before I left the store.”
“Thanks. For someone who has never in her life used the stuff, she is almost militant about everyone else slathering it on.” Owen pulled off the cap and poured lotion on his arms and the back of his neck, then spread the remainder over his chest and face. He was tempted to ask Cass to rub it on his back and shoulders but knew instinctively that would be a bad move. Her hands on his hot bare skin? Ah—no. A very bad idea.
“Well, if you’re done cutting, I’ll rake.”
“I’m done. Go ’head and do your thing.”
Owen leaned against the fence and tried not to watch. Cass was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt that, before long, began to stick to her in all those places he’d told himself not to focus on. He was grateful when there were piles of grass for him to pick up. By the time she finished raking, the wheelbarrow was full to almost overflowing. The grass that wouldn’t fit into the wheelbarow was in a pile near the gate, and Cass looked as if she’d had enough raking to last a long time.
A car drove by, then stopped and backed up.
“Hey!” Lis had rolled down the driver’s-side window. “What are you guys doing?”
“Cleaning up the Singer plot.” Owen walked over to his sister’s car.
“Kind of you to give the old man a hand, Cass,” Lis said.
“Actually, I’m helping Cass. It was her idea.”
“Nice.” Lis nodded approvingly. “You’re becoming a real islander, Cass. Before long, you’ll be picking up your mail at the general store and sitting out on the old pier, catching your own crabs, just like the rest of us.”
Cass laughed.
“Gotta run. Alec is waiting for me. We’re going to look at some dining tables a woodworker over in Ballard makes from old barn wood.” Lis waved as she took off.
“Have you ever gone crabbing?” Owen asked as he walked back to the plot.
“No. I prefer my crabs caught and cooked by someone else.” Cass leaned against the rake and rubbed one hand with the other.
“Let me see what’s going on there,” Owen said, noticing Cass rubbing her palms. He reached for her left hand and turned it over, then looked at the right. “You’ve got the beginnings of some nasty blisters. Why didn’t you say something when it started to hurt?”
Cass shrugged. “I didn’t think the raking would take as long as it did. I didn’t realize how much grass there was, so I didn’t think it was a big deal.”
“It’ll be a big deal if you don’t put something on them. Come back to the store with me. Ruby has some stuff that will fix those right up.” He finished one bottle of water and reached for a second. When it was empty, he turned the wheelbarrow toward the road. “Can you carry the rake and the sickle?”
“Sure.” She put the empty water bottles in with the grass and walked along the shoulder of the road. “That little graveyard looks a lot better. It made me sad to think that Diane would travel all the way to get here, then not be able to find her grandmother’s grave because the grass covered it. Thanks for helping me.”
“Thanks for calling it to my attention. It never occurred to me to check in on those old places that have been abandoned. I guess if I’d been here when it started to overgrow, I’d have taken notice, but once the grass grows up like that, you can’t even see the headstones.” He slowed his step just a little. It was nice to have her all to himself for just a few minutes, to not have to share her attention. There always seemed to be someone else around. Of course, last night was his doing, but still . . .
“I should take a look around the island tomorrow and see which of the other home cemeteries need to be cleaned up,” he said. “It is kind of embarrassing, especially knowing you’re trying to sell some of those places. I don’t know what people would think.”
“They’d think the places were abandoned, which many of them were. It’s sad for them, you know? The people who are buried there? It’s like no one remembers their names. Who they were, what they did. Who they loved. Where they’re buried.”
“There are places like that all over the island. And you’re right. It is sad. Maybe when you start building, you can hire someone to keep up with them.”
“That would work for as long as there’s building going on, but once the crews leave and the buyers move into their new houses, what then?”
“I don’t know.” They’d reached the parking lot in front of the store. Owen wheeled the barrow to the shed and stopped in front of it. He knew better than to put away any of Ruby’s tools before cleaning them.
“Go on in and ask Ruby to put some of her special salve on your palms. She’ll know what you want.”
He brought the hose from the side of the house where it was hooked up and turned on the spray. He rinsed off the sickle and the rake, then turned off the hose and went into the store through the side door. He found Ruby and Cass in the kitchen, where Ruby was tending to Cass’s blisters.
“Gigi, we have a wheelbarrow filled with grass outside. Where would you like me to dump it?”
“On my compost pile, where else?” Ruby never took her eyes off Cass’s hand. “Why’d you let this girl with such soft hands rake so long?”
“I didn’t know her hands were that soft.” He shook his head as if to shake out the thought. He didn’t want his mind to dwell on how soft Cass’s hands were. “I mean, I didn’t know she’d blister.”
Ruby muttered something about someone not having the sense he was born with.
“There you go, Cass.” Ruby snapped the lid on the jar of ointment and returned it to the cabinet where she kept it.
“My hands feel better already. What’s in that stuff, anyway?”
“Little of this, little of that.” Ruby closed the cabinet door and turned to Owen. “You going to take care of that compost today?”
“On my way.” He went back out the side door.
“And you be sure to be washing down those tools,” Ruby called after him.
“Already done.”
He’d just finished dumping out the grass and was about to wash out the wheelbarrow when he heard the door slam.
“You should have saved some of that for me to do,” Cass said. “My mother always says a job’s not done until the cleanup is over.”
“That’s a Ruby-ism, too.” He finished washing down the wheels and returned the barrow to the shed. He stood in the doorway, mentally debating whether the mower or the weed whacker would best finish the job around the headstones.
“I got you into this. You didn’t have to help out.”
“Of course I did.” Owen laughed. “It’s my island.”
“How long before I get to call it my island, too?”
“Depends. How long are you sticking around?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
“Touché.” Maybe the weed whacker. The mower would be too difficult to maneuver around the stones, some of which were embedded in the ground. The weed whacker, definitely. He lifted it from its spot in the lineup of Ruby’s tools and put it into the wheelbarrow. He’d load it up with the grass they’d left near the gate and whatever the weed whacker cut down.
“Are you going back?”
“Yeah, I might as well finish up, cut around the grave markers with this.” He pointed to the weed whacker. “Then that plot is finished.”
“I’ll walk back with you. I left my car down at the point. I stopped in to see how the renovations at Lis and Alec’s cottage are going.”
“Things looked pretty good, last time I was there.” Owen headed toward the road pushing the wheelbarrow and Cass followed, a bottle of water in each hand. “The new roof is on, the HVAC guys were just finishing up, and the new kitchen was going in.”
“Your sister has a good eye. She was certain that old place could be rehabbed, and she was right.” Cass grinned. “Of course, it took a lot of money and some good planning, but the cottage will be fabulous when it’s finished.”
“Yeah, she was adamant that that was going to be their home. You know that Ruby and Harold lived there after they were married, raised their kids there, right? After they moved to the store, the cottage was vacant for years. Several contractors who looked at it told Lis she’d be better off tearing it down and starting over. It probably would have saved some money, but she wouldn’t hear it.”
Cass nodded. “I heard the story. When Alec came to me and asked if I could design an addition and some bump-outs, I was skeptical. But once I talked to Lis, I knew I had to come up with something. She wanted the floors her family had walked on, she said. The stairs her grandmother—your grandmother—and her sisters had climbed every night to go to bed. Once I heard that, I knew I had to find a way to make it work.”
“You did a great job. I’ve never seen Lis so happy.”
“I suspect that has more to do with her rapidly approaching wedding than anything I did.”
“I saw your name on the invite list.”
“That was Alec’s doing, I’m sure. He and I worked together quite closely to get the island project pulled together. Of course, now that’s up in the air. Deiter Construction could, conceivably, be left with twenty-two properties we can’t build on.” She looked at Owen as if expecting him to volunteer some information she didn’t already have, but he was silent.
They’d reached the graveyard, and Cass paused outside the fence while Owen went through the gate.
“It’s nice now that you can see the gravestones.” She leaned on the fence, and it swayed but held.
“It’ll be even nicer once I trim the rest of the grass away.” He pulled the string on the weed whacker and it roared to life.
She went through the gate to look over the stones while he worked, and gathered the loose grass with her hands and dumped it into the wheelbarrow.
“It looks great,” she said when he’d finished and the weed whacker was silent. “Nice and tidy. But I wish all the names and dates were legible. Still, there’s enough here that you can read the history of the family.”
“Let me guess. You’re thinking in terms of marketing your houses again, how cool it would be if you could give the new buyers a little history of their property.” For some reason, the thought irritated Owen.
Cass glanced up at him. “You say it as if it’s a bad thing.”
“I don’t think it’s a particularly good thing to be using a family’s dead to promote a sale.”
“That isn’t at all what I’m doing,” she snapped.
He could tell by the look on her face that she was offended. Good. He was starting to become offended by the constant marketing of his home. “What would you call it?”
“I call it making the best use of what I have to work with. Look, if I’m selling a property, of course I want to promote its best features. If the property happens to have a graveyard on it, I have to present that in a manner that potential buyers don’t think is . . . well, creepy. I mean, how would you feel about living in a house where there are graves right outside your door?”
Her hands were on her hips and she’d removed her sunglasses. The better to glare at him, he supposed.
“I grew up with dead people right outside my door.” He snorted. “And no one ever tried to call it anything other than what it was: your dead relatives’ final resting place.”
“Well, I don’t see where the families of all these ‘dead relatives’ have shown much respect for them. It seems to me that once people move from the island, they don’t look back very often, if at all. Do they ever think about what they left behind? Do they even remember the names of the people who were buried on their property?”
Cass went to the far corner of the graveyard, the section she hadn’t gone through earlier, and knelt next to a small flat stone. “Rachel Singer. Born August second, 1854—died January twenty-fourth, 1856.” She looked up at Owen. “Think anyone ever wonders what happened to her? Why she died so young?”
Cass took three steps to the right and pointed to one of the standing white headstones. “It’s another Mary—her middle name is gone, looks like it might have been Ida? Born 1815—died 1820. Looks like it says . . .” Cass drew closer. “ ‘Gone to fever.’ ” She looked over her shoulder. “She was five years old when she died. And look here.” Cass stepped to another grave marker. “Cora Singer, born May eighth, 1790—died November fourteenth, 1820. Looks like she was buried with a baby—see, under her name? Willie Singer, born November fourteenth, 1820—died November fourteenth, 1820. She must have died in childbirth and her baby died with her. It’s a sad story, Owen, but it’s her story. She lived here and died here.” Cass looked around the small plot. “There are a couple dozen stories here. Don’t you think someone should remember them? When do you suppose was the last time someone uttered their names?”
Owen stared at her for a long moment. He wasn’t sure what he thought. “I don’t know. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that you want to remember them and you want the people who eventually build a home on this lot to know who came before them. But maybe it’s a little crass to use them—to use their names—to make money.”
“Did you just call me crass? Seriously?” In the blink of an eye, Cass was standing in front of him, her eyes flashing with anger. “You think I spent the better part of my day out here, sweating my butt off, because I thought it would help my father make money?” She pushed him, both hands on his chest. “You’re even more of a jerk than I thought you were.”
She turned on her heel and walked briskly to the road and headed toward the point, where she’d left her car.
Owen stood in the graveyard, feeling stupid and small, and wondering how he could possibly mess things up more than he just had.