The Husband She Never Knew

“Nope. I have a car phone in the truck, but again, that involves going outside.”

“You must have a computer. I could send an e-mail.”

“I have a laptop that I hook up to—” he pointed to the telephone “—that line.”

Vicki frowned. “Great.”

“Sorry, Vicki, but until Imogene’s done with us, we’re not much better off than pioneers.”

Okay, there wouldn’t be a phone call to Graham tonight, and Vicki resigned herself to inventing a good alibi for her absence at the hotel. While she struggled to formulate a plan, Jamie worked the dials of a battery-operated radio he’d brought to the coffee table, along with a half-dozen of the scented candles. Vicki sat on the opposite end of the sofa from Jamie and said, “I’m impressed. You’ve reached the outside world.”

He nodded. “Yep. It’s an Elizabeth City station, about twenty miles from here.”

As they listened to the broadcast, Jamie’s expression grew serious. “You’re interpreting all this as bad news, too,” she said.

“Predictable, anyway. It could get rough now. The storm’s just two hours from landfall.”

The wind howled outside. Not a steady groaning, but a crescendo of wails and moans that made Vicki think of prowling wolves. “I think it already has gotten rough.”

He managed a tight smile before scanning the four corners of the room with alert eyes. “Like I said, we’ll be all right. I wish I’d done more to protect the shed, though.”

It was the second time he’d mentioned the building a few yards from the houseboat. “What’s in there that you’re so worried about?”

He shrugged off the question with an ambiguous answer. “Just personal items, supplies, tools, things I use in my work.”

Remembering the detective saying that Jamie was an artist, Vicki asked what he did for a living.

“I make things,” he said.

“What things?”

“Wooden objects, mostly. When you were in the Bayberry Cove Kettle, did you see any of those little triangles with all the holes and pegs in them?”

“Do you mean the leapfrog puzzles on the counter?”

“Yeah. I make those,” Jamie said. “You can find them all over town. The local businesses put their names on the triangles. I guess they use it for promotions. There are some in the Kettle, the supermarket, even in pew boxes next to hymnals at the Methodist Church—so I’m told.”

Vicki smiled to herself. Jamie made wooden puzzles. It seemed a logical calling for a man who was once a carpenter. But an artist? She hardly saw how cutting triangles and drilling holes qualified as art. But there was an appealing honesty about the pride he expressed in his contribution to Bayberry Cove society.

Vicki studied his face in the forgiving glow of the half-dozen candles. This Jamie was a more polished, confident version of the man he’d been thirteen years ago. Maybe he was no more successful than when his fingernails were stained, but the desperation in his eyes was gone. This Jamie was a man content with his life.

And though still a stranger, he was easy to be with. Comfortable. Of course Vicki could never make a life with a man like Jamie. His apparent lack of ambition was hard for her to understand. She’d come too far and worked too hard to escape her humble beginnings to settle for anything less than financial security.

When she met Graham Townsend, part of her attraction to him was his lifestyle, just the sort she longed for—stable, privileged. He, unlike her, had never known anything else. But in a way she envied Jamie Malone. She’d spent her life setting ever more challenging goals. She didn’t know for sure, but she bet Jamie spent his life just living, taking each day as it came.

“I can practically see the spokes turning from over here,” he said.

Vicki blinked, scattering her thoughts to the corners of her mind. “What do you mean?”

He pointed to her head and made a circle with his finger. “I can see the wheels going round in your brain. What are you thinking about?”

You. I decided your face is easy to look at.

“I was just watching the candle flames,” she lied. “I’m wondering what that scent is.”

He crossed one leg over the other. “You like the smell?”

She nodded.

“It’s bayberry. The bushes grow wild all over the coast. In fact, it’s almost time to harvest the berries.”

She gave him a skeptical look. “Are you telling me that you made these candles yourself?”

He laughed. “Me? No. But thirty per cent of the working population of Bayberry Cove made them, and thousands more like them. Nearly one third of the labor force in town works at the Bayberry Cove Candle Company. Bayberry candles are made from bayberries—pretty much like they were in Colonial days, with the help of a little modern technology.”

She admired the forest-green color of the candles and the soft flicker of the flames. “And I’ll bet you know exactly how it’s done, don’t you.”

For the next ten minutes Vicki learned how bayberries used to be gathered in bushel baskets and how it took one full bushel to boil the berries down to produce enough wax to make one taper. When Jamie explained the candle-making process in his lilting brogue, Vicki had the impression that it was as much magic as Colonial know-how that went into each one. Maybe thirty percent of the population of Bayberry Cove made candles, but Vicki could picture a half-dozen leprechauns having a hand in the process, as well.

And she knew for sure that as the wind blustered outside the Bucket o’ Luck, sending debris crashing into the walls, she was grateful for the woodsy-smelling candlelight on Jamie’s table, no matter how it was produced. And grateful to Jamie when he opened a bottle of wine and poured her a glass. “Go ahead, Vicki. It’ll do you good.”

She took a comforting swallow and leaned her head back against the sofa. For a few minutes she listened to the static-edged voice of a radio weatherman answering questions from callers about the hurricane. Everything he advised, she and Jamie had already done. Perhaps that knowledge, or perhaps the effect of the wine, gave her more confidence. Or maybe it was a sudden intense curiosity that made her ask the questions to which she’d never had definitive answers.

“So tell me, Jamie,” she said, “what were you running from that day in Orlando? Why were you desperate enough to marry a stranger? And where did you get…?” She stopped, knowing she was crossing a line that protected Jamie’s privacy.

He smiled, rubbed his finger and thumb down his jaw. “And where did a fella like me get five thousand dollars?” he finished for her.

“I didn’t mean…”

“Of course you did, Vicki, and it’s a fair question, considering the man I was when you married me. That’s why I’m going to answer it.”

JAMIE REFILLED Vicki’s glass. He was certain the walls of the houseboat would withstand the winds raging outside, but he’d run out of ways to convince Vicki of that. The wine was accomplishing what his logic and encouragement had not.

A kind of guarded peace had settled over her features. Her lips were soft and full, no longer defined at the corners by the crescent-shaped lines of worry. Framed by loose waves of shoulder-length hair, her cheeks had taken on a rosy blush. Her eyes, which minutes before had sparked with the icy blue of a winter sky, were now the delicate hue of Wedgwood. One blunt slam of a sea-pine branch against a shutter could fragment that calm, but right now—when Vicki wasn’t afraid for her life or trying to decide if her Irish husband could be trusted—she was incredibly lovely.

And perhaps even ready to accept his reasons for marrying her. “You have to understand what Belfast was like in 1988,” he began. “And then you have to know what it meant to be a Malone.”

“I have a friend in Fort Lauderdale who believes you were a criminal when you came to this country,” she said. “A wanted man.” She stared at the contents of her glass before looking directly at him. “But I believed Kenny Corcoran when he said it wasn’t so.”

“I’m sorry to tell you, Vicki, but Kenny half lied back then. I wasn’t a criminal. But I was a wanted man. It was hard to be a Malone and not be wanted by one official or another.”

He glanced briefly at a photograph on the desk across the room. Three cocky young men looked back at him. Their eyes were full of hope. Their smiles were full of the devil. And their arms were wrapped around each other as if the bombs that would later tear the family apart had no chance of separating them that day. The Malone brothers. Frank Junior, Jamie and Cormac. Invincible. Proud. And two of them brimming with all the spit and fire of the furnaces of the Belfast foundry where they worked.

He returned his attention to Vicki. “Northern Ireland was a quagmire of dissent and despair in those days. Protestants hated the Catholics. Loyalists hated the followers of the Republic. It’s better now since the peace accord, but back when the Malone brothers were finding their way, the young men of Belfast carried their pride and their anger in their fists.”

“I remember—the pictures on TV were very graphic,” Vicki said. “There were demonstrations and blockades. Children couldn’t go to school.”

He nodded. “A sad time for Ireland. And there were bombings and deaths and more heartache than a mother could measure. And through the middle of it all wound the crooked pathway chosen by Frank Junior and Cormac, my brothers. Of all the skills my poor mother imagined her boys acquiring, bomb-making wasn’t even on the list.”