Ghost Moon Read Free Page B

down.
    ‘‘Mosquito,’’ Sara said matter-of-factly.
    ‘‘Oh.’’ Olivia was thus recalled to the present, and realized in that instant that if she could live her life differently she would not, because living her life differently would mean that there would be no Sara, and Sara was worth far more than the sum of all the things that Olivia had given up to get her.
    ‘‘Thanks.’’ She smiled at the daughter who looked enough like her to be her own miniature, and twined her fingers more tightly with Sara’s small ones. ‘‘Ready to go join the party?’’
    ‘‘Are you sure it’s okay?’’
    Typically, when faced with a new situation, Sara’s instinct was to hang back. Shy was not quite the right way to describe her, Olivia thought. Cautious was more like it, and reserved.
    ‘‘I’m sure,’’ Olivia said, with more confidence than she felt, and drew Sara with her through the ring of torches. The band stopped playing with a flourish as she and Sara walked along the stone path toward the gazebo. A glance around at the people they passed told Olivia that the tie-strapped sundresses she and Sara wore, even though they were cheap to begin with, slightly soiled from traveling, and limp from the heat, would attract no notice in this eclectic gathering. Guests were dressed in everything from party clothes to a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. Not that what they were wearing mattered a jot, Olivia told herself. They hadn’t come to attend a party. That she should entertain so much as a niggle of unease about the suitability of her own watermelon-pink puckered cotton Kmart special surprised her. Apparently the style-conscious girl she had once been still lurked somewhere inside. For years now, she had been far more concerned about how much an article of clothing cost than about how fashionable it was. Their budget had not been able to stretch to include new clothes very often, and what little money she’d been able to scrape together for that kind of thing had been spent on Sara.
    Sweet Sara, her baby and her rock, who deserved far more than her shortsighted mother had been able to give her.
    Olivia breathed an inward sigh of relief as they drew one or two curious glances from the party-goers around them, but no real notice. She realized that she probably knew many of the guests, but from some combination of elapsed time and uncertain light and nervousness, she was not able to put a name to any of the faces she passed, and no one seemed to recognize her.
    More guests were headed in the direction of the Big House now—there was a parking area immediately beyond it—and the traffic on the driveway streaming toward the road grew increasingly heavier. Looking away from the blinding stream of headlights toward the gazebo, Olivia was both pleased and frightened to recognize a familiar figure at last: her grandfather, or step-grandfather, to be precise. Her feet faltered for a moment as she drank in the sight of him. Even at eighty-seven, as he must be now, he was still taller than the man he was talking to, although he was slightly stooped and thinner than she remembered and his age was obvious even at a distance.
    She had been gone too long, Olivia thought, with a sharp pang in the region of her heart. Whether he had loved her or not, and Olivia was not sure that he ever had, she realized in that moment that she had always loved him. She was lucky that he was still here for her return.
    Olivia was suddenly, fiercely glad to have this chance to put things right with him, with all of them. Despite everything, the Archers were the only real family she had ever known.
    ‘‘There’s my grandfather,’’ she said softly to Sara, indicating with a nod of her head the old man who had cast a shadow as big as a mountain over her youth. Big John was what nearly everyone called him, including his grandchildren, not Papaw or Granddaddy but Big John. He’d once stood six feet five and weighed two hundred fifty pounds, which was