Carnal Innocence Read Free Page B

reflection of everyone else’s desires.
    She was moving in, taking hold. And by the end of the summer, she intended to know exactly who Caroline Waverly was.
    Feeling better, she replaced her hands on the wheel and eased the car down the lane. She had a vague recollection of skipping down it once, on some long-ago visit to her grandparents. It had been a short visit, of course—Caroline’s mother had done everything possible to cut off her own country roots. But Caroline remembered her grandfather, a big, red-faced man who’d taken her fishing one still morning. And her girlish reluctance to bait a hook until her grandfather had told her that old worm was just waiting to catch himself a big fat fish.
    Her trembling thrill when her line had jerked, and the sense of awe and accomplishment when they’d carried three husky catfish back home.
    Her grandmother, a wiry stick of a woman with steel-gray hair, had fried up the catch in a heavy black skillet. Though Caroline’s mother had refused to taste a bite, Caroline herself had eaten hungrily, a frail, tow-headed six-year-old with long, slender fingers and big green eyes.
    When the house came into view, she smiled. It hadn’t changed much. The paint was flaking off the shutters and the grass was ankle-high, but it was still a trim two-story house with a covered porch made for sitting and a stone chimney that leaned just slightly to the left.
    She felt her eyes sting and blinked at the tears. Foolish to feel sad. Her grandparents had lived long, contented lives. Foolish to feel guilty. When her grandfather died two years before, Caroline had been in Madrid, in the middle of a concert tour, and swamped by obligations.It simply hadn’t been possible to make the trip back for his funeral.
    And she’d tried, really tried, to tempt her grandmother to the city, where Caroline could have flown easily between tour dates for a visit.
    But Edith hadn’t budged; she’d laughed at the notion of leaving the house where she’d come as a new bride some seventy years before, the house where her children had been born and raised, the house where she’d lived her whole life.
    And when she died, Caroline had been in a Toronto hospital, recovering from exhaustion. She hadn’t known her grandmother was gone until a week after the funeral.
    So it was foolish to feel guilt.
    But as she sat in her car, with the air-conditioning blowing gently on her face, she was swamped with the emotion.
    “I’m sorry,” she said aloud to the ghosts. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here. That I was never here.”
    On a sigh, she combed a hand through her sleek cap of honey-blond hair. It did no good to sit in the car and brood. She needed to take in her things, go through the house, settle herself. The place was hers now, and she meant to keep it.
    When she opened the car door, the heat stole the oxygen from her
lungs.
Gasping against its force, she lifted her violin case from the backseat. She was already wilting when she carried the instrument and a heavy box of sheet music to the porch.
    It took three more trips to the car—lugging suitcases, two bags of groceries which she’d stopped to pick up in a little market thirty miles north, and finally, her reel-to-reel tape recorder—before she was done.
    Once she had all her possessions lined up, she took out the keys. Each one was tagged: front door, back door, root cellar, strongbox, Ford pick-up. They jangled together like musical notes as Caroline selected the front-door key.
    The door squeaked, as old doors should, and opened on the dim dust of disuse.
    She took up the violin first. It was certainly more important than any of the groceries.
    A little lost, and for the first time lonely, she walked inside.
    The hallway led straight back to where she knew the kitchen would be. To the left, stairs climbed, hooking to a right angle after the third tread. The banister was dark, sturdy oak, layered now with a fine cloak of dust.
    There was a table just