Speak No Evil Read Free

be—married to one girl, obsessed with another.
    There was nothing wrong with Kelly.
    She just wasn’t Caroline.
    “I’ll take another.”
    Kyle nodded and complied.
    Okay, so maybe as a description of the past several years, “obsessed” was a bit of an overstatement, because he had pretty much managed to put Caroline out of his head—except whenever life-changing decisions were about to be made. This minute, however, it was a full-on obsession, complete with phantom touches that were hijacking his body. Just seeing her had done that to him. It left him with a sense of longing that was acutely disagreeable, and he couldn’t shake it.
    Eyeing the phone again, he considered calling her—just so he could stop thinking about her—and it dawned on him that she was probably the reason he had never changed his number. That thought had never even entered his brain before this moment, but he was pretty sure it was true. He wasn’t over her. Worse, he was afraid he was never going to be over her, and the thought of living his life in limbo made him feel like chain-smoking half a dozen packs of cigarettes right in front of her.
    His cell phone rang and his heart thumped hard. Then he saw the number and felt the letdown: Kelly.
    He couldn’t avoid her forever.
    Draining his glass once more, he took out his wallet, paid the tab, grabbed his cell, and almost as an afterthought, reached into his pocket, digging out his last pack of cigarettes, still half full, and tossed them on the bar, then walked out. The phone stopped ringing, but he would call her back. Now that it was all clear in his head, he realized holding on wasn’t fair.
    It was time to let go.
     
    With the last of the guests gone, Caroline joined Savannah and Sadie’s son Josh out on the back porch while Augusta remained upstairs, packing for the flight she’d arranged the moment she’d confirmed a reschedule for the reading of the will. Now the reading was set for ten A.M. Monday morning. Augusta’s flight was at three. Somehow, that fact left Caroline feeling gloomier than watching her mother’s casket being lowered into the ground this morning.
    Once the three of them left . . . once the house was sold, the last “t” was crossed and the last “i” dotted . . . where would home be then?
    Enjoy the moment, Caroline.
    The moment was all they really had. That was a bitter lesson she had learned after Sammy. The last words Caroline recalled him saying were, “Yo ho, yo ho—look at me, Cici! I’m a pirate—just like Blackbeard!”
    Indeed, he was.
    Just like Blackbeard.
    Nothing left but a ghost.
    That afternoon, Flo had been sunning farther up the beach with a margarita in hand. Flo never heard him, and all three girls had continued drawing pictures in the sand, oblivious to the danger their brother was in. As it turned out, Caroline was the last to see him alive—something neither Caroline nor Flo had ever learned to forgive.
    They surmised Sam had floated out into the channel in his little inflatable boat, and from there, there was no telling what might have befallen him . . . a fishing boat that didn’t see him in time, a speedboat with a beer-drinking weekend warrior behind the helm, a hole in his raft . . . it could have been anything. The currents could have carried him out to sea.
    Once he was gone, nothing was the same.
    And no one ever called her Cici again.
    On the horizon, a thin ribbon of pink held the descending darkness up high. As it lowered, the creek lost some of its glimmer, fading to black.
    She had forgotten how beautiful spring and summer could be on the island.
    Oyster Point Plantation sat on the southwest end of a finger of land that crooked toward Clark Sound and the sea. The house itself was built so it offered a view of the salt marsh from the front and back verandas. Already, the marsh grasses were tall and verdant, permitting little more than glimpses of the water that glittered like diamonds beneath a mantle of green. A