Moonlight in the Morning Read Free Page A

Jecca was trying to get her son’s attention. She seemed to approve, because she was very nice to Jecca. She even gave a party and invited a lot of people from Edilean—most of whom were unmarried men. They all seemed to be interested in Jecca, but she paid no attention to them. Her mind was on Reede.
    After three days of trying to get his attention, Jecca gave up. If he wasn’t interested in her, that’s the way it was. She wasn’t going to keep on dressing like she was trying to get a job as a stripper.
    She got Kim to draw her a map of how to get to Florida Point—she whispered the name—put on her normal jeans and T-shirt, grabbed her case of watercolors, and used Kim’s car to drive out of town to the isolated place.
    She spent two days at the Point, working constantly. Kim had been right that it was a magnificent site. There was a tall rock cliff that had long views on one side and looked down into a deep, clear pond of water on the other. First, she photographed the views, holding down the button on the digital camera so it clicked rapidly. She’d never been good at painting from photos, but maybe she would learn.
    She worked hard to capture the blue mist that came up out of the Virginia hollows and gradually disappeared into the treetops. She played with putting one shade on top of the other to try to re-create the way the light faded then brightened.
    She experimented with working slowly and meticulously on one painting, then whizzing through the second one.
    On the second day, she didn’t go up the path to the top of the cliff but stayed below to study the flowers, the seedpods, the bark on the trees, the leaves. She didn’t try to arrange anything but painted what she saw. Leaves naturally crossed one another in a perfect balance of light, color, and form.
    A couple of times she stretched out on her stomach to see some flowers that were the size of a ladybug, then re-created them with her watercolors. She used her camera’s—thank you for the gift, Dad—close-up icon to enlarge the flowers so she could paint the stamens and pistils, the veining on the petals, and the tiny leaves.
    When she got through, she had a flower that filled an eight-by-ten piece of the heavy watercolor paper.
    She was so absorbed in what she was doing that she heard nothing until a shout made her jump. Turning, she looked through the bushes and realized how hidden she was from the grassless, worn area around the poe lround tol.
    Looking up, she saw a man standing on the high rocks. The sun was behind him so she couldn’t see his face, but she could see that his beautiful body was naked. And it looked like he was about to make one of the infamous dives off the cliff.
    “For you, Laura Chawnley,” the man yelled. “Good-bye, forever.”
    Jecca drew in her breath. It was Reede Aldredge up there. An extremely depressed young man was about to dive off a cliff into a pool of water of dubious depth.
    Jecca dropped her painting and tripped over her box of watercolors as she ran to the open area. “No!” she yelled upward. “Reede, no!”
    But he didn’t hear her. In horror, she watched him do a perfect swan dive off the high rock and head toward the pool. He cut down into the water gracefully—and didn’t come up.
    Jecca seemed to wait for minutes, but there was no sign of Reede. She didn’t think about what she did, just jumped into the cold water, clothes, shoes, and all. She wasn’t a good swimmer but she could move well enough to look for him underwater.
    She went down, eyes open, but saw nothing. She went up, grabbed a lungful of air, then went down again, holding her breath as long as she could. No Reede. The third time she went down she thought she saw a foot ahead of her. She swam underwater as fast as she could and grabbed the foot.
    Reede jerked around so fast that he made Jecca’s head hit the rock side of the pool. The next thing Jecca knew, she was going down, down, down.
    But Reede grabbed her under her arms