Ellen Block - The Language of Sand

What are you going to do if you catch him? Make a citizen’s arrest?

Common sense lost the tug-of-war to curiosity. Abigail threw the station wagon into drive, panning from side to side along the rows of houses. The man was gone. Again.

“Relax. You are not in some scary B movie. You’re on Chapel Isle in a town full of seafaring, bingo-loving people who are, for the most part, sane, and none of them will be jumping out of the bushes with an ax.”

Or so she hoped. Since the man had vanished, Abigail was stuck with the same choice as yesterday. To tell or not to tell. She hadn’t gotten a close enough look to describe him in detail, so the conclusion was simple.

“I’m going home.”

The word home resonated in her ears like the hum of a tuning fork. Had the lighthouse become her home? Her house in Boston, the place she’d truly considered home, was gone, leveled, the land sold off. The new owner would rebuild. It hurt Abigail to picture a new house replacing hers.

She and Paul had fallen in love with the property on sight. The Classical Revival home was the picture of elegant refinement, with its white stucco faade, dental molding, and black shutters. What made the house all the more appealing was that it had been modeled after The Mount, Edith Wharton’s estate in Lenox, Massachusetts. Abigail couldn’t have asked for more than to live in a lovely home resembling that of one of her favorite authors. But soon a new house would be constructed where hers once stood. No one would remember the detail about Edith Wharton or that it was Abigail and her family who had lived there. The facts that would endure were that the former house had burned down and that two people had lost their lives to the fire.

Abigail was getting into bed when the day’s exertion finally caught up to her. She’d forgotten to buy any pain reliever at the market, and the achiness threatened to keep her awake. She would have to cope with being sore the way she coped with everything else: by ignoring it as best she could.

Thinking a book might put her to sleep, Abigail went downstairs to look for Lottie’s romance novel, which wasn’t in the bathroom, where she thought she’d left it. In the living room, she passed Mr. Jasper’s ledger on the table.

“You could read that instead.”

Cradling the ledger, she went back upstairs and settled in under the quilt, with the book propped on her knees. A page in, her eyelids began to droop, then she drifted to sleep with the ledger lying by her side.

per si flage(pûr′sə fläzh′, pûr′–), n. 1.light, bantering talk or writing. 2.a frivolous or flippant style of treating a subject. [1750–60; < F, deriv. of persifler to banter, equiv. to per– PER– 1 siffler to whistle, hiss < LL sifilāre , for L sībilāre; see SIBILANT, –AGE] —syn. 1.banter, badinage, jesting.

Abigail awoke with a start to the sound of the ledger falling to the floor.

“Good morning to you too.”

Groggy, she picked up the ledger, dusted it off, and got dressed, donning the painting togs she’d worn the week before; a pale plaid shirt and a pair of now-spattered khakis. She hunted around for Lottie’s romance novel, found it in the study, then settled in at the dining-room table, thinking she’d read over breakfast before undertaking more household chores.

The story of the heiress and her pirate captain continued, each chapter ending in a crescendo of betrayal, a sword fight, or a chase on the high seas. As a battle ensued between the armada commanded by the dastardly count and the pirate’s band of sea dogs, Abigail felt a pain in her stomach. It was long past lunch. A whole chunk of the day had vanished. The predictable romance novel had become unpredictably entertaining.

Abigail ate a yogurt as the story hurtled onward at a swift clip, laden with soppy adjectives and fervent verbs. The count was about to have the heiress’s beloved pirate captain murdered in a secluded cove when a horn honked outside. Through the front window, Abigail could see Nat’s truck in the drive.

“Right at the cliffhanger.”

She closed the paperback and stood up too fast, making her head spin. She’d been sitting for so many hours that her legs were falling asleep. Abigail slapped her thighs and hopped on the balls of her feet, forcing the blood through her legs. The horn honked again.

“I’ll be right there,” she shouted out the window. Legs tingling, Abigail shuffled down the front stairs a step at a time.

Nat stared at her from the cab of his truck. “You hurt yourself?”

“It’s a reading-related injury.”

He didn’t understand and didn’t seem as if he wanted to. “You bringing any food?”

“Why?”

“This’ll take a while. You might get hungry.”

Abigail awkwardly walked back into the house, grumbling, “How was I supposed to know I needed to bring food?”

She threw together her usual sandwich and took an apple. The only bag she had to pack them in was a jumbo paper sack from Merle’s store.

Nat raised his brows at the bag as she slid into the truck. “You must have some appetite.”

They rode in silence as they crossed the island. Aside from the scuffed leather seats and sandy floors, the truck’s interior was surprisingly tidy. A paper evergreen tree dangled from the rearview mirror.

“What?” Nat said. “You assumed it’d stink of fish in here.”

“Kind of,” Abigail confessed.

“You know what they say about assumptions. They’re usually wrong.”

Abigail would have readily admitted to being incorrect about several matters regarding Nat Rhone, except one. His attitude.

“Usually,” she added.

The northwest end of the island was flat as a tabletop and blanketed by scrub brush. Nat pulled onto a bumpy, unmarked road. A quarter mile in, the single-lane path drained into a clearing. Scattered throughout the glade were a variety of boats in various states of repair. A handful of outboards were mounted on cinder blocks, while a damaged rowboat acted as a catchall for miscellaneous parts. Grass refused to grow in the clearing. The weeds were more persistent, though, poking their heads up through a gigantic anchor that had come to rest next to a gutted dinghy.

Between the clearing and the bay beyond was a clapboard cottage with a shake roof. The paint had been scraped away, yet traces of the former color—a ruddy beige—remained, giving the house a crusty appearance. Nat had mentioned prepping the place himself, which would easily have cost a couple hundred dollars. It must have taken days. Abigail wondered how much he owed this Duncan Thadlow.

The deal she’d struck with Nat was starting to seem unfair. All he had to do was move a few pieces of furniture, while she had indentured herself to a far more grandiose task.

“Don’t wait for an invitation,” he told her, getting out of the truck. Abigail followed.

Standing at the door to the cottage was a man with a thick brown beard so long it touched his chest. “Afternoon, Nat. Here to finish painting?”

“It’ll get done.” The man’s innocent question had rubbed Nat the wrong way. Repaying a debt in labor rather than cash wasn’t something he appeared proud of.