Sea Witch by Virginia Kantra Read Free Book Online Page B

of their father, the ghosts of their mother and
    brother.

    Back to the island, where—for better and worse— everybody knew
    their name and their business.

    Back to the sea she feared and could not live away from.

    She had tried. Once. Ran away, hitched a ride from Port Clyde as far
    as Richmond and wound up on the dirty floor of a gas station restroom,
    puking her guts into the toilet. The memory still made her sick to her
    stomach.

    Flu, the doctor on the island concluded, after Caleb had found her
    and brought her home.

    Stress, the physician’s assistant at the college infirmary told her
    when she collapsed on a visit to Dartmouth, where she’d been offered a
    scholarship.

    Lucy didn’t know or understand the reasons. But through cautious
    experimentation, she learned never to travel more than twenty miles from
    the ocean. She attended state college in Machias, within walking distance
    of the bay.

    She licked her lips. “Why did you?”

    Caleb raised one eyebrow. “I have a job here.”

    “So do I.”

    48

    “How about a life?”

    She stuck out her chin. “This is my life. Anyway, you’re here.”

    “I’m thirty-three,” Caleb said. Reasonable, as always. “You’re
    twenty-three. You should be getting out more.”

    Lucy didn’t point out that the ten-year difference in their ages didn’t
    give him the right to dictate to her. He meant well. He always had.

    “So should you.”

    His face shuttered. “Not a priority right now.”

    She shouldn’t push. Open communication wasn’t their family’s
    style. Lucy hadn’t even met Caleb’s ex-wife—aka the bitch —before their
    wedding, and she didn’t know any of the juicy details of their divorce.
    But prying into her brother’s personal life seemed safer than discussing
    hers.

    “What about that woman you were asking about a couple weeks
    ago? Margaret somebody?”

    “What about her?”

    “Are you going to see her again?”

    “No. She left,” he added, before Lucy could ask why not.

    “Oh.” Oops . This was why her family didn’t talk. Too many
    awkward moments. She searched for something positive to say. “Well,
    maybe she’ll come back. Like, to visit.”

    “No,” Caleb said again in that Drop it , Lucy tone. “She’s not coming
    back.”

    She wasn’t coming back.

    Caleb’s hands tightened on the Jeep’s steering wheel. Well, fine. He
    was trying to build a life here. Pursuing another Woman-Who-Would-
    Not-Stick, even one who looked like an angel and fucked like a dream,
    was not in his plan.

    49

    Which didn’t explain what he was doing at nine o’clock at night
    driving along Old North Road toward the point.

    Maggie’s voice whispered in his brain. I walk on the beach in the
    evening.

    Not for the last three weeks she hadn’t.

    She was a tourist. A one-night stand. An aberration. A mistake.

    And he was an idiot, because he wanted her again.

    Caleb scowled at the darkness beyond his windshield. It wasn’t like
    he didn’t have better demands on his time, more urgent claims on his
    attention.

    The warmer weather brought out tourists like a rash. Brightly striped
    towels dotted the docks and hung from lines behind the rental cottages.
    Boats—and sometimes boaters—hit the water. Vacationers locked
    themselves out of their homes and cars, lost their dogs, their way, or their
    tempers. In the past week, Caleb had dealt with two kayak accidents and
    one fender bender, a petty theft at the Inn, and a handful of drunk and
    disorderlies. He’d spent his “free” hours trying to instill some respect for
    the speed limit in town and the ban against driving on the beach.

    Whittaker had stood up at the last council meeting to argue for
    extending the ban to walking on the beach, which had created some hard
    feelings between the eel-grass lovers and the merchants who depended on
    the summer season to get them through the year. Caleb’s offer to increase
    beach patrols and fine anybody caught littering