The wind picks up and we emerge, shaking and trembling, but it hardly matters. I’ve recovered another detail—I can swim.My muscles knew exactly how to do it. “Rather risky, don’t you think? Throwing me in that way.” I wring out my skirt on the darkening beach.
“Hardly.” He pauses to shake out his hair as a dog would, forming dark ringlets about his head. “My lady can do anything.” A wink.
I laugh, but it’s cut short when I spot movement ahead where we dropped our things. A sudden flash of realization hits—“AJ. The money. We’ve left it out!”
He breaks into a dead run and I’m close behind him, my frozen legs pumping until the muscles burn. The figure in the distance bolts, vanishing into the rocks.
Ansel reaches our picnic spot and stops abruptly, bending down to grab his knees, catching his breath, and I know already.
The money is gone.
Chapter 11
William, 1947
Themoneyisgone.
How?
Still breathless from running back after the long workday, William stands panting before the shelf where he’s always kept the crude jar that must have swallowed every cent he now desperately needs.
He slams the torn newspaper down on the table, then parts his fingers, forcing himself to look at the picture of the house he built for his Helen, with that wretched title over it in bold lettering.
NOTICE OF SALE BY AUCTION
By order of the Mortgagee
Messrs. Hardesty & Rowe, Auctioneers, are instructed to offer for sale by Public Auction…
The grainy image makes the house look so simple. So ordinary. An offering unworthy of the woman with ringlet curls and laughing eyes.
He must go to her. To save her with his own hands, to fix the problem. But he cannot stop picturing that artist sprawled on the floor after his temper exploded again, her red lips in anOof shock.
With a growl, he hurls the jar to the floor. The crash detonates image after image in his brain, fragments of bridges and homes and men. He stares at the mess, chest crackling with pain.
“Why did you let me break them, God? Why?”
He screams at the ceiling, then beats the rocks until his fists are numb and throbbing. As his heart pounds, the muck churns and swirls inside him, finally erupting in a great, guttural yell that he lets loose through the cottage. It bounces off the walls, ricocheting on stone, yet it’s muffled from the world by the cliffs and the surging noise of waves. But now it’s out.
Then the pervasive calm of Dunn Cottage seeps into his soul as it always does, replacing what he’s just purged. Faint, spinning, he collapses into a chair, head in his hands.
In the quiet his gaze falls upon the shattered pieces around his boots. One more broken thing. It’s as useless as the dirt it came from. But he can’t leave it there, as broken shards hurt people. He shoves them away with his boot and something on a larger shard catches his attention. There’s a signature. Is it art? Isitworth something?
That girl would know. He saw several earthenware pots on the rickety shelves at the art studio. Rather costly, if he recalls.
But he’s gone and ruined that connection.
And the vase.
His muscles are bunched across his chest and shoulders and through his calves. Frustration tightens into restlessness. Hethrows on a cloak, dashes out into the muddy day, and sets off at a run. As his boots pound, he focuses on the blood flowing through his body and the strength settling into his limbs.
He runs seven miles from St. Ives to Penzance. His days are full of work at the docks, his evenings with volunteer cleanup work from the war, like plenty of other local men. What the bombs and battles have destroyed, he can help build up again. It’s hard, healing work. But most of the time, it’s merely hauling away what’s irretrievably damaged to make room for the new. Life has a lot of that.
Like Helen. Perhaps she will remarry. He’s never considered that possibility, but now the thought hovers, thick and menacing. Out with the broken, in with the new. Cresting green hills, running alongside sheep, he breathes in the moist air as the drizzle begins.
Helen.
He owes her everything. Once upon a time in his youth he flitted about from one position to the next, scraping out an existence. And then she came along with her gentle energy and channeled his genius into something useful. He went to work at the Birmingham Electrical Engineering Company, assembling generators until the supervisors watched him rebuild an entire motor by hand and pulled him into engineering work. All because of her.
