Her room had changed little as well. The family wing in Sanctuary still glowed with Annabelle’s style and taste. For her older daughter she’d chosen a gleaming brass half-tester bed with a lacy canopy and a complex and fluid design of cornices and knobs. The spread was antique Irish lace, a Pendleton heirloom that Jo had always loved because of its pattern and texture. And because it seemed so sturdy and ageless.
On the wallpaper, bluebells bloomed in cheerful riot over the ivory background, and the trim was honey-toned and warm.
Annabelle had selected the antiques—the globe lamps and maple tables, the dainty chairs and vases that had always held fresh flowers. She’d wanted her children to learn early to live with the precious and care for it. On the mantel over the little marble fireplace were candles and seashells. On the shelves on the opposite wall were books rather than dolls.
Even as a child, Jo had had little use for dolls.
Annabelle was dead. No matter how much of her stubbornly remained in this room, in this house, on this island, she was dead. Sometime in the last twenty years she had died, made her desertion complete and irrevocable.
Dear God, why had someone immortalized that death on film? Jo wondered, as she buried her face in her hands. And why had they sent that immortalization to Annabelle’s daughter?
DEATH OF AN ANGEL
Those words had been printed on the back of the photograph. Jo remembered them vividly. Now she rubbed the heel of her hand hard between her breasts to try to calm her heart. What kind of sickness was that? she asked herself. What kind of threat? And how much of it was aimed at herself?
It had been there, it had been real. It didn’t matter that when she got out of the hospital and returned to her apartment, the print was gone. She couldn’t let it matter. If she admitted she’d imagined it, that she’d been hallucinating, she would have to admit that she’d lost her mind.
How could she face that?
But the print hadn’t been there when she returned. All the others were, all those everyday images of herself, still scattered on the darkroom floor where she’d dropped them in shock and panic.
But though she searched, spent hours going over every inch of the apartment, she didn’t find the print that had broken her.
If it had never been there ... Closing her eyes, she rested her forehead on the window glass. If she’d fabricated it, if she’d somehow wanted that terrible image to be fact, for her mother to be exposed that way, and dead—what did that make her?
Which could she accept? Her own mental instability, or her mother’s death?
Don’t think about it now. She pressed a hand to her mouth as her breath began to catch in her throat. Put it away, just like you put the photographs away. Lock it up until you’re stronger. Don’t break down again, Jo Ellen, she ordered herself. You’ll end up back in the hospital, with doctors poking into both body and mind.
Handle it. She drew a deep, steadying breath. Handle it until you can ask whatever questions have to be asked, find whatever answers there are to be found.
She would do something practical, she decided, something ordinary, attempt the pretense, at least, of a normal visit home.
She’d already lowered the front of the slant-top desk and set one of her cameras on it. But as she stared at it she realized that was as much unpacking as she could handle. Jo looked at the suitcases lying on the lovely bedspread. The thought of opening them, of taking clothes out and hanging them in the armoire, folding them into drawers was simply overwhelming. Instead she sat down in a chair and closed her eyes.
What she needed to do was think and plan. She worked best with a list of goals and tasks, recorded in the order that would be the most practical and efficient. Coming home had been the only solution, so it was practical and efficient. It was, she promised herself, the first step. She just had to clear her mind, somehow—clear it and latch on to the next step.
But she drifted, nearly dreaming.
It seemed like only seconds had passed when someone knocked, but Jo found herself jerked awake and disoriented. She sprang to her feet, feeling ridiculously embarrassed to have nearly been caught napping in the middle of the day. Before she could reach the door, it opened and Cousin Kate poked her head in.
“Well, there you are. Goodness, Jo, you look like three days of death. Sit down and drink this tea and tell me what’s going on with you.”
It was so Kate, Jo thought, that frank, no-nonsense, bossy attitude. She found herself smiling as she watched Kate march in with the tea tray. “You look wonderful.”
“I take care of myself.” Kate set the tray on the low table in the sitting area and waved one hand at a chair. “Which, from the looks of you, you haven’t been doing. You’re too thin, too pale, and your hair’s a disaster of major proportions. But we’ll fix that.”
Briskly she poured tea from a porcelain teapot decked with sprigs of ivy into two matching cups. “Now, then.” She sat back, sipped, then angled her head.
“I’m taking some time off,” Jo told her. She’d driven down from Charlotte for the express purpose of giving herself time to rehearse her reasons and excuses for coming home. “A few weeks.”
“Jo Ellen, you can’t snow me.”
They’d never been able to, Jo thought, not any of them, not from the moment Kate had set foot in Sanctuary. She’d come days after Annabelle’s desertion to spend a week and was still there twenty years later.
They’d needed her, God knew, Jo thought, as she tried to calculate just how little she could get away with telling Katherine Pendleton. She sipped her tea, stalling.
Kate was Annabelle’s cousin, and the family resemblance was marked in the eyes, the coloring, the physical build. But where Annabelle, in Jo’s memory, had always seemed soft and innately feminine, Kate was sharp-angled and precise.
