“There were…” Jill hesitates. “Issues. Financial issues. This was during the years when the home was under Donovan’s father’s care. It takes a lot of money to keep up an old estate like this. Changes were required, and expenses needed to be cut. Upkeep of the grounds was the first thing to go. That was before my time, though. Donovanhired me nine months ago, after his father passed away.” She shrugs. “That’s really all I can tell you. Now, if you don’t have any other questions, I’ll see you out.” Without waiting for my response, she turns and marches back toward the home.
I pause to take one last look around. Already, the scents that race toward me are growing bolder, whispering to me of secrets, of things I do not yet understand. My gift is always strongest when I am here in Bantom Bay, near my roots. It’s one of the reasons why it is easier, simpler, for me to stay away. But now—my father needs me. And I can’t deny that there is something about this place that pulls at me, braiding around my heart, as though the scents themselves want me to stay.
When I at last turn to follow Jill, some movement from above catches my eye. I tilt back my head and peer up at the home. There, in a high window, I am sure I see a hand pressed to the glass, a face looking down at me—
“Coming?” Jill calls impatiently from the open doors.
I nod, and when I steal a final glance up at the window, whoever had been there is gone.
Chapter Three
FITZ
Fitz stands at the window of his room in the Oceanview Home and stares down at the woman on the terrace. Even from a distance, he can see how the light seems drawn to her. She’s beautiful. As bright as a rose.
She’s been dead for decades, but no matter: there she is.
Heat pricks his skin. If he could yell down at her, he would, but lately he can’t open a jar of jelly, let alone a window. He doesn’t usually mind. Of the things Fitz mourns, his strength is not one of them. He’s always had a temper, and in his experience, strength combined with temper never gets you anything but trouble.
So he doesn’t yell. He just watches. He sees how she gazes directly at that Pike man from whom everyone else seems to scurry—well, everyone but Fitz. She has a persuasive smile. Her sky-blue rubber boots stand out against the gray slate of the terrace as though painted in Technicolor. Even from three stories up, he senses her charm.
She tucks a loose strand of her chestnut hair behind her ear and he remembers the gesture so clearly that it is like a hand reaching into his chest and clawing at his heart. When she lifts her chin as though inhaling the scent of the air, Fitz finds himself inhaling, too. He almost believes that he can smell the rich soil, the scent of growing things, the forest and the sea. Beyond her, beyond the tapestry of ruined, walled gardens and the meadow of wildflowers and the fringe of forest, the ocean glints like a knife. Fitz presses a hand to the window. The glass is cool against his open palm, steadying it.
All these decades later, and he can still feel the frantic beat of her pulse below his tightening grip, can still see the fury that flashed in her eyes in those horrible last moments.
A suffocating gray cloud gathers within Fitz’s chest. His memory swirls, churns, breaks apart and comes together again. His breath grows labored.
“Good morning!”
The voice is both muffled and shrill. Fitz gasps and rips his eyes from the ghost on the terrace to glare at the wall that separates his apartment from the next one.
“Marjorie.”He spits out the name like a curse.
Marjorie Swenson receives a call from her grandson every day. Every. Single. Day. And the woman can’t do a damn thing, not even answer a call, without making an absolute racket. Marjorie Swenson, with her parade of visitors and her cackles of laughter. What in the devil could be so funny all the time? Especially here, now, when they’re all old and stuck living side by side, hovered over as though they are misfit children in a boarding school dormitory.Lights out, children. Lights on, children.
How many times has he demanded to switch apartments? For somuch of his life, Fitz told people to jump and they asked how high. But not anymore. No one at the Oceanview Home bothers to offer more than a half-heartedly wrinkled brow when he voices his complaints. It’s enough to make him question if he actuallyhasvoiced them! His memory does funny things these days, mixing him up. Being here, at the Oceanview Home, isn’t helping in the slightest.
It was his lawyer who recommended this particularly dysfunctional prep school for the dying to Fitz nine years earlier.
“There’s land,” Tyler Chadwick said. “A sea view. Gardens.”
Fitz scoffed. “Gardens? What do I care about gardens?”
“They say they’re good for the soul.”
Fitz did not reward this with a reply.
“Not for you, then,” said Tyler, whose patience had always felt like a rebuke. “For Tad.”
Fitz’s dog, Tad, was a tall, lean, twelve-year-old shepherd. As it turned out, the Oceanview Home was one of the few retirement communities in the area that accommodated dogs. This news swayed Fitz. It was Tad, after all, who had barked so loudly that his neighbors in San Francisco had called the police when Fitz had his stroke. The dog had saved his life, but Fitz tried not to blame him.
In the hospital after his stroke, a social worker asked all sorts of irritating questions about his family and his friends.My friends?Fitz scoffed. The woman was crazy and he gave her a look to let her know it. He was eighty-two years old! He’d long ago fallen out of touch with the men from his brokerage firm, the only real friends he’d ever had.
“There’s no one,” Fitz told her.
The social worker narrowed her eyes. “No one?”
Fitz narrowed his eyes right back at her.
