“Oh, sorry.” Stella laughed. “You look a lot like my daughter.”
At least Stella was taking it on the chin.
Addie dipped her paintbrush in a cup of white paint and motioned Jane closer. “Come over here, and I’ll show you a little trick I learned.”
The painting was really just a bunch of colorful splashes, sort of modernistic in a way. Jane wondered what Chandler Vanbeck would think ofit.
Addie’s demeanor was serious as she focused on the painting, placing the brush very carefully in the middle of the blue splotch and making a perfect white dot. “See? If you put a little white spot here, it makes it look like a reflection.”
“I see. That’s a great tip,” Jane said.
“Yes, well.” Addie stepped back, putting the paintbrush in a mason jar filled with water. “I think that’s enough for today. I smell lunch, and I don’t want to miss it because it’s grilled cheese. Would you like to stay, Jane?”
Jane would’ve loved to have stayed now that it was one of her mother’s lucid times, but she couldn’t. She had to meet Maxi at Tides. She longed to tell her mother about the wedding and ask for her advice, but she was afraid it might confuse her, so instead she simply smiled and patted her mother’s arm. “I have to run, but you have a good time at lunch. Do you need anything?”
Addie laughed and gestured around the room. “What would I possibly need? I have everything I could ever want right here.”
Jane left tall Pines feeling like at least part of the weight on her shoulders had been lifted.
Maxi power walked along the beach, her footsteps leaving deep prints in the wet sand. She’d chosen to walk to Tides for her meeting with Jane, even though it was almost two miles from her house. She needed to clear her head after the disturbing discovery she’d made while cleaning out the pockets of James’s suit before taking it to the dry cleaner.
Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to bring a heavy bag of sketching stuff, though, she thought as she hitched her blue-striped tote bag up onto her shoulder. But bringing along a sketch pad, pencils, and watercolor pens was necessary if she wanted to paint after she left Tides.
The tide was out, so the shoreline where she was walking was almost the length of a football field away from the buildings. Glancing over, she could see the big white structure of Tides. Jane was standing on the porch.
Maxi took a deep breath of calming ocean air, let it out slowly, then headed up on the dry sand to meet Jane. Plastering on a smile, she waved as she approached the inn.
“You walked?” Jane asked.
“Yep. Need my exercise.” Maxi made power-walking motions. A golden retriever trotted over from where he’d been sniffing the rosebushes. Maxi’s spirits lifted. Animals always made her feel better. “Is this Cooper, the dog you’ve been talking about?”
Jane smiled. The dog plastered himself against her leg, and she reached down to pet the top of his head. “Yep. Mike ran into a problem with his landlady, and he couldn’t keep him. So I offered to have him at Tides.”
“Awesome. How do you like having a dog?”
“It’s just temporary, but it is kind of nice having him around.”
Maxi looked at the dog wistfully, but a pet wasn’t in the cards for her right now. Her future suddenly felt uncertain. But this meeting was about Jane, not her. “So, tell me about this wedding. It’s so exciting.”
Jane took a deep breath. “I don’t know ifexcitingis the word.Terrifyingmight be more like it. Someone emailed from that ad I took out inCoastal Living. Their wedding venue was canceled at the last minute, so they wanted to see if we were available. But the thing is the wedding is in less than five weeks.”
“Five weeks? Can you pull a wedding together in that time?”
Jane shrugged. “I have no idea, but I’m going to try. They wanted a proposal and pictures of how it would be set up. I was hoping you could help me dress the place up a bit like it might be for a wedding.”
Maxi surveyed the area, looking at the porch, the beach, the gardens. Her artistic eye immediately homed in on some things to highlight. “I think you can take an angle of the garden to show the new plants. Maybe use that bench and put some decorative pillows on it.” Maxi turned to look at the porch. “And we can set up some tables on the porch here and put up those sheers and add some pillows.” She turned again to face the ocean, framing a little picture in her hands with her thumb and forefinger. “And then take a picture of where you would set up the arbor. It’s too bad we don’t have that now.”
“Maybe I can get Sally and Shane to work on that first. Andie is working on the garden. I could have her concentrate on one area so it will look nice for the picture.”
“That sounds like a good plan. I can get some pillows, and we can have Sally tack up one sheer curtain, just so we can get it in the corner of one of the pictures.
Jane hugged her. “Thanks so much. I don’t know what I would do without you and Claire.”
“Same.” At least Maxi could count on her friends. Even if things went wrong with James, she knew she’d have their support. She put her hand in her pocket, and her fingertips brushed the sharp edge of the business card she’d found in James’s suit. It was Sandee Harris’s card, and it had a phone number written in pen. Her business number was printed on the card, so Maxi assumed that must be a personal number. Why would James need that?
“Hey, remember when you asked if James and I were buying a cottage? Was that because you saw James with Sandee?”
Jane looked uneasy, her gaze drifting out to the ocean. “Well, I thought I did, but it was from far away. I was walking the beach and only saw them for a second. I think it was just someone who looked like James. Why do you ask?”
