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It smelled like home.
“Are you doing all right?” Maybe looking out at the choppy water through the windshield, he’d be more likely to talk. “Bet it was hard to get the news about Mack.”
“He was only two years older’n me. I joshed with him, before he left, how as soon as I turned eighteen in December, I’d be over and joining him. Outshooting him too.”
“Now?”
“I dunno.”
Funerals had a way of dampening a person’s rah-rah for the USA. Ginny didn’t try to tell him what to do. He wouldn’t listen, and anyhow, who was she to give advice? One drowning person couldn’t do much good for another.
“You?” Lew asked, surprising her. “Guess it’s a different thing, losing your sweetheart.”
“Probably not much different. It’ll heal in time, like a broken bone.”
Here, with only Lew around, there was no use pretending. They’d both lost a friend, nothing more. But nothing less either—and a friend was a mighty thing, out here on a lonely island.
“There it is,” Lew said at last, pointing. As if Ginny wouldn’t recognize this stretch of coastline, its curves more familiar than the lone photograph of a loved one. Though, to be fair, she’d been avoiding looking at it, turning instead to the open sea.
Now she forced herself to angle toward the shore—and her grip on the railing tightened.
They’d turned her home into a navy fueling depot. Long, ugly piers jutted into the water, fronted by unfamiliar vessels.
Coastal defenses are important, she tried to remind herself.To give us a base and protect the shores in case the Krauts attack.
But it sounded more and more like the fluff that people like Louise Cavendish passed along from the government to get folks to buy war bonds and wait in line to use ration coupons with smiles on their faces.
Even thinking about Louise was funny, out here in what felt like the real world. The book club and its tea sandwiches and literary themes seemed not to matter at all, in the face of submarine nets and oil storage tanks.
Ginny shook her head and shivered as the promontory that used to be their home faded from view. The wind had kicked up a nasty chop at their bow. “We really ought to head back.”
He nodded, steering them around. Not another word passed between them until they docked at Patsy’s wharf.
But when he lent her a steadying hand to step out on shore, Lew actually volunteered conversation for the first time. “Don’tget too familiar, Gin.” His voice was quiet but with an edge of urgency she rarely heard.
She tried to laugh it off. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“With those town folks you’re chumming with.”
Was that all? “Don’t you worry. They’re nice, and they’ll pass the time all right until the war’s over. But they’re not island people.”
“Still, got to be careful, going into someone’s parlor. They always want something out of you. And if you wander into the kitchen ... wham! They get you.” For once, Lew met her eyes, dark and serious. “And then you won’t be coming back.”
twenty-nine
AVIS
AUGUST 17
Avis huffed in frustration as she wrote yet another check for seventy-five cents. Three quarters. What was the point?
Her earlier investigations had taught her that an association library was funded partly by member dues rather than public funds, an annual fee for anyone who wanted the privilege of checking out books. And now that Miss Cavendish had decreed the library’s doors would close once and for all on the last day of September, that meant each of the library’s ninety-three dues-paying members were owed a refund for one-fourth of their membership. “It’s only fair, after all,” Miss Cavendish had said.
Avis shook her hand from where it had cramped around the fountain pen. Easy for her to say. All she had to do was sign the checks, not write or deliver them.
“Well, it’s quitting time,” she announced. She’d developed a habit of speaking aloud when the library was empty, knowing she’d go back to an empty home as well. “Time to rest, until the tyrant cracks the whip tomorrow.”
She heard the deep, hearty chuckle before she could see the person attached to it. “Aw, come on, now. It can’t be as bad as all that.”
