The Beach Quilt Read Free Page A

beyond that, a heavily wooded area dense with pines and white birch and oaks. From this vantage point, you could often see deer grazing, and hedgehogs nibbling flowers, and chipmunks scurrying under rocks. On rarer occasions, you could spot a fox sneaking along the remains of an old stone wall not far into the mass of trees. Some years there were coyotes; you heard more than saw them, and the lonely sounding howls usually meant big trouble for the neighborhood cats and small dogs.
    And there were parading families of wild turkeys and all sorts of other birds on the wing, from tiny, brightly colored songbirds to impressive birds of prey, hawks, falcons, and even, on occasion, an eagle. At night, you could hear the haunting cry of owls on the hunt. And in the morning, if you looked, you could find the skeletons of the owls’ prey at the base of trees. Sarah had pointed this out to Cordelia on one of the rare occasions Cordelia had, reluctantly, accompanied her friend into the woods. Cordelia had run shrieking back to the house. Sarah had not made that mistake again.
    The room itself was very simply furnished. There was one bed, one dresser, and a small wooden desk with a chair. On the desk sat an old laptop, which Sarah used for school and research only. She had a very basic phone, and she was very careful about using it wisely.
    The walls of the room were painted white and on her bed lay one of her mother’s quilts, the one she had made for Sarah right after her birth. It was a magnificent example of something called a log cabin quilt. Every time she looked at it, Sarah was amazed at her mother’s skill.
    A bookshelf her father had built was crammed with volumes she had collected at yard sales and secondhand bookshops. Sarah loved to read, and it almost didn’t matter what the content was—fiction, nonfiction, history, mystery. She read everything but bodice-ripping romance. Recently she had discovered the works of May Sarton. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea was also a favorite. There was a biography of George Washington that had taken her almost a year to get through, not because it was difficult reading but because schoolwork came first. When her history teacher had asked what famous person from the past she would most like to meet, Sarah chose Abigail Adams. She had read a biography of her, too, and a lot of the letters she and her husband had written to each other. If she ever got married, Sarah hoped she would find a best friend in her husband, like Abigail had found in John.
    For now, Sarah had Justin. She really liked him, but marriage was the last thing she could think of, not until she finished school, and that could be eight or nine years from now.
    The blare of a horn alerted Sarah to the arrival of her boyfriend. She tossed the damp socks into a hamper in the bathroom, raced downstairs, grabbed her outerwear, and ran down the front steps.
    Justin was driving his friend Bud’s four-wheel drive truck. There was a raised plow attached to the front as Bud made extra money plowing for his neighbors. He had offered to cut Justin in on the business, but Justin had laughed off the offer. He was the first to admit that he was a pretty lazy guy.
    Gosh, he really is beautiful , Sarah thought as she climbed up into the passenger seat. “Where are we going?” she asked.
    â€œHow about back to my place? I got a frozen pizza for us.”
    â€œThat sounds great,” she said.
    Justin lived in a small apartment above a family-owned hardware store in downtown Yorktide. The apartment was clean enough but kind of messy. It was sparsely decorated with cast-offs from his parents’ house and plastic milk crates that Justin used for storage and as surfaces for dirty plates and empty beer bottles.
    Well, Justin might not be the neatest guy around, but Sarah thought he was certainly the most handsome one. He made her feel things she had never even guessed existed, a sort of excitement