The Hunted

And she still leaned against the railing of the widow’s walk and watched the boats slip by. Only now, rather than feeling a sense of history and contentment when she watched them, Beth felt her restlessness increase until it was an almost physical ache in her legs and arms.

Did everyone feel it, in the quiet pockets of the day when nothing else occupied their minds and bodies? Or was it just her, this strange echoing, like there was something scooped out and hollow inside, when the seasons shifted and the winds changed? She had almost asked friends and total strangers, time and again, when she was away at college in Boston, and after, when she came home, when this whimsical mood attached itself to her. Each time, something had held her back from actually saying something. Fear of an answer, perhaps. Of discovering that yes, it was only her. That only she felt it, and nobody else would ever understand.

Not that it mattered. Each time winter or summer came, the restlessness passed, and she found purpose and focus again.

“More of the same. Always more of the same.” And yet, even as she said it, trying to reassure herself, something deep inside told her that there was more to it this time than simple spring fever. Something that surged inside her like a tidal pool, swirling and wearing at her, matching the physical ache with a pool of longing for.

For what?

Beth didn’t know. This spring, for some reason, it was different. Stronger. More painful. Usually standing up here and watching the waves move on the surface of the ocean took the harsh edges off, and a bit of physical activity—a bike ride, a hike along the dunes—dealt with the rest, got her through until it went away.

She wasn’t so sure it would be enough, this spring.

Once, her father would somehow sense her mood and swing her by the arms, tossing her into the pile of leaves they had raked up on the sloping backyard, or a pile of new-mown grass. Her cousin Tal, nobody ever called him Talbot, would leap after her, and they would wrestle. her father would laugh so hard he had to sit on the ground to recover, and they would leap on him, and the restlessness would disappear, chased out and forgotten.

Had her father known the same restlessness? If he were still here, would he be able to explain it away, give her the way to deal with it, the words to explain it?

It didn’t matter. He wasn’t here. All gone: father, mother and Tal, her entire family gone in one split second on a rainy highway nearly fifteen years ago. She was the only one left. The one left behind. Would she feel this way, if they had been spared? Would the feeling of separation, of restlessness be soothed by their presence? Or would it have been worse, knowing for certain that there was no one out there who could understand?

A trill at her hip interrupted her morbid thoughts, and she flipped open her cell phone to answer it. “Jake, hi.” Jacob Brown—Jake to his friends, which some days seemed to include every person living in Seastone and the surrounding towns. Open-faced and blueeyed, with a row of freckles better suited to a ten-year-old and the physique of a high school quarterback.

Five years they had been dating, since the summer they both turned twenty-four and got drunk together while sitting on the seawall at midnight. It wasn’t a great love, but it was comfortable, and they knew what to expect from each other. Five years, and neither seemingly eager to move forward, or move away from where they were. Every month for the past year Beth had resolved to end it, and every month Jake agreed with her, and yet they still found themselves having dinner and sex on a regular basis.

There was a lot to be said for stability. For knowing what you would be doing each day, and each night, and with whom, and what was expected of you, and what you could expect of them. Sudden changes had never been good things, for her.

“We still on for dinner?” she asked him, giving in once again to habit.

“Maybe not tonight. Storm’s coming up, according to the screens. Looks like it might be a doozy.”

A storm might explain her mood. Storms did that to her, when they came in off the ocean. “You afraid of a little rain?” she teased, glad for distraction from her own distraction.

“More likely a lot of wind, which means we’re probably going to lose power on half the island.” Jake was a Realtor, and the property manager for a number of nearby summer homes. If anything happened, he was the guy who had to deal with it, while the owners were safe and dry on the mainland. “Anyway, you remember what happened the last time we went out in a bad spring storm, at, I might add, your instigation?”

She did. Unlike Jake, she still thought it was funny, smiling now at the memory. How many people could say that they got chased across a beach by an irate and very lost bull seal? It wouldn’t actually have hurt them—seals were peaceable creatures, as a rule, unless you got near them during breeding or whelping seasons—but Jake’s ego had apparently been bruised something fierce by the experience.

Beth’s smile widened. “Point taken, forgive me. All right, no rain-swept walks on the beach. So we’ll eat somewhere in town?”

“Look … can we make a rain check? Literally?” He sounded distracted now, and she could hear the clicking of computer keys in the background. He must be checking on his clients, probably scanning the weather networks, too. Multitasking always made him cranky.

Beth looked up at the sky, watching newly arrived clouds scud past, wispy white against the pale blue. It looked innocent enough, but she had grown up watching these skies, learning the warning signs. Storms could come up fast, even when it looked clear, especially in the spring. She should know that by now. “Sure,” she said, sighing. It wasn’t like it mattered, anyway. Dinner with Jake wasn’t going to do anything about her feeling of restlessness. It never did. That was part of the problem.

She listened to his agreement, then ended the call.

She didn’t want to reschedule. She didn’t want to have dinner with Jake at all, truth be told. She didn’t want a casual, comfortable dinner where they talked about things they had talked about for years, until the edges were all worn off and it was soft and easy and no surprises, followed by sex that was … Well, it was nice. Enjoyable. But not surprising. Not … passionate.

She wanted passion tonight. She wanted to have a nice rough tumble in the sheets. Something dirty and sweet, sweaty and ache-inducing. Complete with biting and bruising, thrown clothing, tangled sheets, and no regrets, come the morning.

“Yeah, and that’s gonna happen,” she said, shaking her head. Jake was a sweet, tender lover. Careful and considerate, always whispering endearments. He was a good man.

He just wasn’t The One. Whatever that meant.

Disgusted with herself, Beth rubbed the smooth surface of the teak railing, as though to wipe those treasonous thoughts out of her head, but they wouldn’t go.

She was very fond of Jake. He was a great guy. But they were never going to go anywhere except in circles. And after five years … that wasn’t enough. They both knew it. And suddenly, right now, the lack made her want to scream.

“Spring fever. That’s all. You get it every year.” But even as she went inside, closing the door behind her as though to block out the disturbing influences of the salt-and pollenladen air, Beth knew that there was more to it than that. Something was rising in her, like the storm surge and just as impossible to control.

A glance out the window showed her Jake had been right—the storm was coming in, and coming hard. Even in the half hour since she had left the roof, things had picked up speed. The sea was agitated, churning back and forth, and the sky seemed lower than normal, visibility poor and getting worse. Pity the sailor caught out in this, if they didn’t make it home in time. At best they would lose their lunch over the side. At worst …

Worst in a storm could get pretty bad.

Her head was muzzy and stuffed, and her skin felt too tight. Maybe she was coming down with something.

She changed into an old pair of jeans and a thick fleece sweatshirt and went down to the kitchen to make her usual virus-fighting dinner of fresh pasta and vegetables, steamed and tossed with fresh-grated cheese, garlic and cracked pepper, and a beer that she didn’t finish. The taste was off, flat and metallic.

“Yeah, probably coming down with a cold. Joy.” She poured the beer down the drain, left the dishes in the sink and went back into the office, determined to get something accomplished today other than fretting and woolgathering. A client had sent her a number of old family photos, browned, yellowed and cracked, to be scanned and digitally repaired. Her professional shingle might say Elizabeth Havelock, Photography, but it was this restoration work that kept the mortgage paid and the groceries coming in.

Ten minutes of prep calmed her enough to start working, and another ten minutes into the project, and finally the panacea of work did its job, at least enough for her to forget her fuzzy-headed twitchiness. The whir of the scanner and the clicking of the mouse were soothing as she studied the image on the oversize flat-screen monitor that was her pride and joy, and made minute corrections to the photo, bringing the damaged photograph back to life. There was a crack across the woman’s face that slowly mended, half-inch by half-inch. Her world narrowed to the mouse and the screen and the pixels healing like magic under her application. It wasn’t art, wasn’t groundbreaking, news-making work, but it was satisfying in its own way.

The storm finally broke around 7:00 p.m., with the sudden hard patter of rain on the roof, followed almost immediately by a heavy crack of lightning overhead, and the low, rumbling echo of thunder rolling in from the ocean. The sense of sudden, almost painful relief flooding her body took her by surprise, and her shoulders, which Beth hadn’t even realized were hunched while she worked, relaxed immediately. She looked out the single window in the studio. Branches bowed and waved in the wind, and water splattered against the window, echoing from every pane in the house.

Storms sounded different out here than they did on the mainland. Hell, storms were different. When it rained in Boston, when she was in college, it never felt this … soothing.

Thunder crashed again, and she shook her head. “And that puts an end to that for the evening,” she said, shutting down her computer once everything was backed up. You didn’t take chances with the electronics in an old house during a spring storm, especially when those electronics represented your livelihood.

No sooner had she thought that than the overhead lights flickered, came back on and then went out. The familiar steady hum she barely heard anymore died as well, leaving the house in an almost supernatural stillness broken only by the rain.

“Jinx,” she muttered. Well, she was officially off the clock now. Mother Nature insisted.

In the drawer of her desk there was a flashlight, and she used it to find her way to the store of candles, the sound of thick, heavy raindrops on the roof and windows following her as she went through the house. The linen closet on the second floor was the repository of all blackout supplies—extra gallons of water, a box of protein bars, dry shampoo and soap, and an entire shelf filled with thick pillar candles.

Beth’s practical streak failed her when it came to candles. These were handmade by a local craftswoman, lilac in color and scented with clean, crisp lavender and sea grass. Picking three of the candles off the shelf, along with a book of matches, she closed the closet door and went back downstairs to the main parlor. It had always been her favorite room, aside from the corner bedroom that had been hers all her life, and if the storm was going to go all night, then that was where she would wait it out.

One pillar went on the walnut coffee table, one on the plaster mantel over the fireplace and the third she positioned on the table next to the old cracked leather sofa. Using only one match to light them all, the room was soon bathed in a warm, comforting light. There was something about the flickering of candle flame that she adored; it didn’t fill the room the way artificial light did, but it seemed to illuminate better, somehow. The antiques in the room looked better in firelight: her great-grandfather’s spyglass; the rough but gorgeous little carvings of ivory that dated back to when whaling was the industry on this island; the handmade wooden ships her father had collected, three-and two-masters, all perfect down to the last detail, including the narrow boats lashed to their sides. Neither she nor Tal had ever felt the desire to play with them when they were children. They would watch them for hours, but never once had she taken one down other than to dust or display it for someone else. It was as though it was forbidden to look too closely, to ask too much, although her parents had never forbidden her or Tal anything of the sort.

Now, in the candlelight, she watched the shadows their masts and riggings made on the cream-painted walls, and felt some of her restlessness subside. Those boats were her inheritance, as much as this house; they told the story of her great-grandfather helping to build the fleets that used to ply these waters, her grandfather’s specialization in the carpentry of higher-end boats that put her dad through college, and her own dad’s fascination with boats that never seemed to translate into anything larger than those models. An entire family, tied to the shoreline without ever actually going out to sea. Beth suddenly wondered why she felt no particular draw toward boats, why Tal had actually gotten seasick the one time he went out on a fishing boat when they were in grade school. Maybe it was something genetic, and the further from their shipbuilding great-grandfather you got, the less you cared?

“Maybe it was just the storm,” she said. “Maybe I need a vacation. Get off the island for a little bit. Maybe go inland, see a forest or a mountain.” She had never gone more than a day’s travel inland; there were entire stretches of the country she had never seen except as the backdrop for movies on the television. Maybe she could get a passport, leave the country. See England, or Paris, or …

Her imagination failed her. She didn’t have a passport. She’d never been on a plane. She didn’t even watch the Travel Channel, for God’s sake. “Maybe it’s time to change all of that,” she said. “Do something different.”

A crack of thunder and a flash of lightning directly overhead sounded as though in answer.

“Fine, but is that a yes or a no?” she asked the ceiling, half expecting a reply. But the lights stayed off, the rain came down and no further electrical energy exploded overhead.

“Thanks for nothing,” she said, curling up on the sofa, her arms around her knees. Her attention was drawn, not to the shadows now, or even the fireplace, laid with wood already in case she wanted one last fire before warmer weather came in, but into the next room, where a plate-glass window looked out over the small front yard, over the tops of smaller Cape-style houses, down the road that led to the shoreline.

There were lights flickering outside, on the road heading toward the beach. Most of them were white headlights, but—she squinted—at least one or two were red. Cops. Or an ambulance.