When the Stars Sang Page 5

  Usually, Molly welcomed these days working alone with time to think, but today, she felt restless.

  A gull flew in through the open bay of the boathouse. He fluttered to a landing on the deck and squawked as he tilted his head, eyeing her.

  “Hello, Cap’n Jack,” Molly said, tossing him a bit of bread she’d saved from her lunch.

  He hopped on his one leg to snatch the bread and settled with a rustle of his wings. She guessed some seal had tried to grab him, getting only his leg for its trouble. He was an amiable bird, often keeping her company when she was working here at the marina. She had the feeling he preferred human company to that of other gulls.

  She switched to a finer grit sandpaper and resumed her patient sanding.

  Islanders, she mused, were a funny lot. They fell into one of two camps: the ones who couldn’t wait to get away—“couldn’t wait to escape,” she supposed they would have said—and the ones, like her, who maybe left for a while, but always felt pulled back and never really wanted to live anywhere else.

  Maisie’s children had escaped. Kathleen’s dad, Michael, had come back long enough to drop Kathleen and Bryan off every summer until Bryan died, but he’d never returned after that. The other one, Kathleen’s aunt, had never returned at all after she left. Maisie had been stoic about it, always cheerful when Molly had seen her, but she heard Miss Lou and Miss Ollie talking about how much it hurt her that they never called or came to visit.

  Molly paused, running her hands over the curved boards of the boat’s hull. Not smooth enough yet.

  She wondered how Kathleen was doing up at the cottage and then sat back, irritated that Kathleen Halloran was in her thoughts so often lately. It was annoying. Molly still expected to see her back at the ferry landing, her car packed up, ready to run back to wherever she’d come here from.

  “Maybe I need to take a few days,” she said to Cap’n Jack, who was the only one listening.

  It had been a while, over a year, she realized with some surprise, since she’d gone to the mainland for any kind of holiday. She wasn’t looking for an entanglement, just a night or two at a Portland bar, some dancing, maybe something more if she met a desirable woman. Sometimes, she missed being around more women. Other than Siobhan, the only women her age on Little Sister were married with families. Dorm life had definitely had its perks, she reminisced with a smile.

  Miss Louisa had hounded her into applying for scholarships, working with her late into the nights to make sure she aced her SATs. When she got accepted at Vassar, the entire island had celebrated, had raised money to help cover what the scholarships didn’t. Those four years had been magical—not just for the academic world that had opened before her, but everything else she’d discovered about herself.

  Everyone at Vassar had assumed she would be attending graduate school and making a brilliant career in the field of political science or law, but… she’d begun to feel the island calling to her. More and more, she had felt restless and homesick until it became a physical ache.

  She clenched her jaw and scrubbed harder with the sandpaper, trying to sand away the memory of the disappointment in Miss Lou’s eyes when she’d returned—one of Miss Lou’s last students, her last chance to show something for all her years of teaching.

  “And here you are, thirteen years later, repairing boats and fixing damned furnaces and picking up your drunk brother while you waste away on this rock.”

  Cap’n Jack gave a little squawk.

  “Shut up.”

  KATHLEEN TOOK HER GLASSES off and rubbed her eyes. The amount of mark-up on this manuscript was making her head hurt. Even a sunrise walk on the beach couldn’t make this project palatable. She wasn’t sure who had accepted this pile of gobbledygook, but it should have been rejected and sent back for a rewrite. There were plot holes as big as the Grand Canyon; characters changed names halfway through the story; the author had no sense of how not to switch point of view in the middle of a scene.

  She shoved her glasses back on. No amount of editing could make this presentable. She wasn’t sure she wanted her name associated with it at all.

  She pulled up her email and dashed off a message to the acquiring editor who had palmed this garbage off on her, telling him she would be charging triple if they insisted on trying to get this in publishable form.

  She absently raised her coffee cup to her lips to find it empty. She got up and stretched, taking the cup back into the kitchen for a refill. The windows were open, allowing a wonderful breeze through the house on what was probably one of the last warmish days of the fall. Other work called to her but…

  “I just can’t.”

  She pulled a light jacket off a hook by the door and stepped out onto the back porch. She smiled when she saw the licked-clean plate. The dog had eaten every bit of food she’d put out over the last few days. She’d gradually been moving the plate closer to the house, last night leaving it on the porch.

  She sat down on the top step. “Blossom, are you out there?”

  It was silly to give the dog a name, but ever since her scare that the unknown critter was a skunk, the name Blossom had stuck. She had seen only enough of the dog to know it was a male. A shadow moved beyond the bushes, and she knew she was being watched.

  “Want to go for a walk?”

  She kept talking as she headed toward the bluff, taking a path she’d discovered behind the cottage that meandered through the woods. Blossom trailed behind her. The wind made a light rattle as it blew through the dried leaves still dangling from the trees. The smell of salt air mixed with the bite of autumn. Kathleen breathed deeply as she tromped along.

  When she got to the head of the bluff, she sat, taking in the vista below. Sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, she heard the dog behind her. She patted her thigh invitingly, but Blossom stayed just at the edge of the trees, hiding under a bush.

  Kathleen turned back to the ocean. She felt… It was such a potent mix of emotions that she didn’t really have a name for it. The island felt like home—a feeling she realized only now she’d never had before, at least not since before Bryan’s death. But it came tainted with sadness and regret. She bitterly regretted never defying her father—or Susannah, said a voice in her head—to come back here while Nanna was alive. She’d slowly come to accept that not wanting to confront her father was part of why she hadn’t. Even after she was grown and could easily have come here on her own, she’d known without being told that her father would have been furious. She hadn’t been willing to face his rage. He had never stopped punishing his mother for letting Bryan out of her sight, for letting him pal around with the boys on the island, for letting him die.

  As for her mother, she’d never forgiven any of them.

  Her parents still didn’t seem to realize she was here. Or maybe, said that voice, they just don’t care. There’d been no emails. No phone calls, though she wasn’t sure how they’d get her number. The only messages she’d received had been emails from Susannah—pleading messages, asking where she was, how she could just disappear with no explanation, why she wasn’t answering her phone, what had happened between them, begging her to come home so they could go on from here.

  Normally, those messages would have torn at Kathleen’s heart. But she wasn’t sure she had a heart any longer. She tapped her chest, half expecting it to sound hollow, like the Tin Man.

  When she had met Susannah, caught her first glimpse of the laughter in Susannah’s beautiful dark eyes on the stairwell of their dorm, she had instantly fallen for her. Susannah seemed to feel the same—at least Kathleen had thought so for a while. Susannah trusted her enough to confide much of what her father had done to her, to all of her family, and it had broken Kathleen’s heart to listen to it. But then, Susannah had become afraid—afraid of how close they’d become, afraid of what her father would say if he found out. When she began to push back, saying she was tired of having Kathleen following her and hanging on like a puppy, Kathleen had only clung more t
ightly. When Susannah ignored her calls and went out with others, Kathleen camped outside her door until she got back, whenever she got back. She knew the other girls in the dorm had snickered, but she didn’t care. Susannah always came back. Always. When she told Kathleen to get the hell out of her life, Kathleen had known it was only a test of her love. When she refused to leave, and Suze eventually apologized and said she loved her, it was confirmation that Kathleen’s loyalty was what Susannah needed.

  Kathleen wasn’t sure when it began to change. Fourteen years of clinging to an emotional tornado had worn her down, hollowed her out. Now, Susannah’s messages left her cold. It was such a foreign feeling, she wasn’t sure what to do with it. She hadn’t responded to the messages, but she hadn’t deleted them, either.

  She froze at the soft sound of a snuffling breath at her back. She hadn’t realized that she’d been sitting with her forehead pressed to her knees. She opened her eyes and peered under her arm to see Blossom, lying as flat as he could, his ears back and his neck stretched out to sniff at her.

  She didn’t reach for him, but saw him watching her, his brown eyes wary and concerned.

  “I’m okay. Just some unpleasant memories.”

  When she lifted her head to look out over the ocean again, he stayed behind her rather than scurrying back to the bushes as she expected. She slowly set a hand on the ground beside her and, a moment later, felt a cold, wet nose probing it.

  Blossom belly-crawled a bit closer. He cringed but didn’t run when she lightly scratched his neck. She smiled when he allowed her to rest her hand on his back.

  “Well, that’s progress, isn’t it?”

  Chapter 4

  The wind howled, and the skies looked like something out of a Biblical end-of-days scene. Kathleen was grateful she’d taken the time to enjoy a walk earlier as she put the soup pot in the back seat of her car along with two wrapped plates of oatmeal pecan cookies. She’d found Nanna’s old cookbooks and remembered these cookies as a special treat when she was little. To her delight, they hadn’t turned out half-bad.

  As she drove to town, though, she realized she still didn’t know where anyone lived on the island. She smiled to herself as she headed to the diner. She was a passable cook, but nothing she made compared to Wilma’s husband, Nels. Funny name for a man descended from Irish or Ind—First Ones blood, she corrected herself.

  It was only mid-afternoon, but she’d skipped lunch working on that damned manuscript, so she was starving. Expecting to find the diner to herself, she was surprised to be greeted by cries of, “Hello, Katie!”

  Louisa and Olivia were seated at a table, waving to her as if she could possibly miss them.

  Giving up on any thoughts of a quiet meal, she threaded her way through the tables to theirs.

  “Join us, dear,” Louisa said.

  Kathleen pulled one of the empty chairs back before she saw the carved box sitting there.

  “Don’t sit on Daddy,” Olivia said.

  “Of course not.” Kathleen partially slid the chair back under the table and took the fourth seat.

  Wilma appeared with a mug of her wonderful coffee, not even bothering to ask. “Gonna be a big one. Good thing you’re getting out now. Should be here before nightfall.”

  “Did you watch the weather radar?” Kathleen asked.

  The other three women looked at one another in bewilderment and then all burst out laughing.

  “Don’t need radar to know that,” Wilma said, pulling a menu out of her apron pocket to place in front of Kathleen.

  “Still have any of the beef stew?” Kathleen asked, scanning it quickly.

  “That’s what we’re having,” Olivia said.

  “I’ll make it a third,” Wilma said, picking the menu up and bustling off to the kitchen.

  Kathleen watched her give the order to her husband. His blond head bobbed as he worked.

  “What’s their last name?” Kathleen asked. “Wilma and Nels.”

  “Greatneck,” said Louisa.

  “But that’s an island name,” Kathleen said, remembering other Greatnecks. “How does someone who looks Scandinavian have that name?”

  “Island names carry, dear.” Louisa nodded primly as she took a sip of her tea.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Any offlander who marries into an island family takes that name,” said Olivia. “So the island names pass down.”

  “The First Ones, naturally, didn’t have last names,” Louisa said, sounding very like a schoolteacher. “After the shipwreck, they took names, like the Irish had—Woodhouse, Greyeagle, Greatneck, Cooper, and others. Of course, the Irish kept their names. When the island charter was established, it was decided the family names would carry, whether it was through the wife or husband. This made sense to the First Ones, who traced their lines matrilineally anyway.”

  Wilma brought a big tray with their bowls of beef stew at that point. She set down a plate of hot rolls and, without being invited, pulled up a fifth chair to join them. Olivia scooted over to make room.

  “I don’t understand,” Kathleen said.

  Wilma must have overheard their conversation. “When Nels and I got married,” she volunteered, buttering a roll for herself, “he took my family name. Tim took Miranda’s down the market. Others have done the same. Anyway, it’s just the way it’s done here.”

  “Really?” Kathleen thought about this as she ate a few bites. “What about the First Ones? What you said about matrilineal.”

  “Oh, well.” Louisa blushed. “When the Irish were rescued, they found themselves among non-Christians.” She cleared her throat delicately.

  “The First Ones didn’t have marriage,” Olivia said bluntly.

  Wilma jumped in, leaning in to whisper, though there wasn’t anyone else in the diner to overhear. “And women weren’t property, so they didn’t belong to just one man. When a woman got pregnant, they sometimes didn’t know who the father was, but of course, they always knew who the mother was. Made sense to trace their lines back through their mothers.”

  “Wow.”

  “You really should talk to Rebecca if you want to know more,” Louisa said. “She knows the history of every island family going all the way back.”

  “Speaking of Rebecca,” Kathleen said, her curiosity getting the better of her, “she and Molly Cooper have very similar eyes, kind of light against dark complexions.”

  “Well, that’d be because Rebecca is Molly’s aunt,” said Wilma. “Like most of us, their family line has First Ones blood in it, more than some of the others. Rebecca is an Ahearn, one of three: Bobby you met on the ferry, her, and Molly’s mother, Jenny.”

  “But you said island names carry,” Kathleen said. “So why isn’t Molly an Ahearn?”

  The women chuckled, and Kathleen felt as if she were a young child being patiently lectured to.

  “Because Joe Cooper is an islander, too,” said Olivia. She nudged Wilma and grinned. “Jenny caught his eye early on, but she couldn’t see it. She didn’t want to stay. For the longest time, we thought Jenny would leave us, and she did for a while. But she came home and married Joe.”

  By the time Kathleen left the diner, with a takeout container of more beef stew and a bag of rolls that Wilma insisted on sending with her, her head was swimming with new information about the island families.

  She opened her car door, hoping she had enough time for a quick trip to the market before the storm hit, and saw the cookies.

  “Wait,” she called to Louisa and Olivia. She jogged to them with one of the covered plates. “I made these for you. They’re probably not as good as Nanna used to make, but I wanted to thank you for helping me get the cottage cleaned up.”

  “You didn’t have to do that, dear,” Louisa said.

  Olivia was leaning through the back door, seat-belting the wooden box in place. She closed the door and reached for the plate.

  “We were happy to help.” Olivia peeled back the foil and sampled a cookie. “Not bad.” Sh
e nodded. “Maisie would have approved.”

  “Can you tell me how to find the Cooper house?”

  “SIOBHAN?” MOLLY KNOCKED AND let herself through the door at the back of the gift shop into Siobhan’s private living quarters.

  Siobhan was on her yoga mat—nude—holding a tree pose with a dozen candles burning around the room.

  “Sorry,” Molly said, moving into the kitchen to wash her hands. She grinned, glad she hadn’t walked in on downward dog.

  She scrubbed the oil from her hands as Siobhan came in behind her, tying the belt of a robe.

  “I replaced the pump on your boiler,” Molly said. “Should purr now.”

  “Thank you,” Siobhan said, leaning against the counter. Her fall of red hair spilled down her back, loosely gathered in a scrunchy tie. Her robe fell open a bit, revealing the soft white curve of her breast. Molly cursed herself when her eyes drifted down.

  “You’re embarrassed by the memory of our time together,” Siobhan said. Her tone was amused, but a hint of hurt lingered in her eyes.

  “No,” Molly said quickly. “Not embarrassed. Exactly.”

  Siobhan turned to put the kettle on. “We found each other when we each had need, Molly. I was mourning my mother. You were lonely, that first winter back here with no one like you. There’s no shame in that.”

  Molly frowned as she rubbed a thumb against a callus on her palm. “I know.”

  Siobhan smiled and came to her. She ran her hand down Molly’s waist to her hips. Pressing her whole body against Molly’s, she kissed her lightly. “I would still take you to my bed, willingly, but you’re not built like that.” She moved her hand to press it against Molly’s chest. “You have to feel it here first.”

  Molly lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug.

  Siobhan laughed and caressed Molly’s cheek. “I have a feeling the one who can do that to you is already here.”

  Molly puzzled on her words as she drove home. The first fat raindrops began to splatter as Molly pulled into the driveway. She braked abruptly when she saw Kathleen Halloran’s Nissan parked there. She slammed the door of the SUV and ran for the back porch where she stopped at the sound of laughter.