Chapter One
One Week Earlier
Kim walked through the Marine Rescue Center pushing Josh Jr. as he gurgled sing-song noises in his stroller. She flipped through turtle-stamped t- shirts on a rack one at a time, as if she were studying the designs, but her eyes didn’t see anything but smears of dull color. Her vision had blurred and darkened. It was as if someone had wrapped a burlap bag around her head and, strangely, she didn’t care. It was a relief. The new gray-brown of her world kept her from screaming. She didn’t want to remove her veil of sadness. It was safer, deep inside. Even her limbs worked as if someone else ran the controls.
Earlier, she’d been driving home when her arms jerked the steering wheel left, pointing the vehicle toward the beach and away from home. When she passed the Marine Rescue Center she’d thought, I should take Junior to see the turtles.
That was the funny part: she wanted to take Josh Jr. to see the turtles.
She was inside the Center now, surrounded by rescued sea turtles lazily stroking inside giant tanks, when she realized how stupid she was.
He can’t see them.
That’s when the energy oozed out of her as if she were an overfilled sponge and she walked like a zombie, pushing Junior’s carriage through the gift shop.
I’d nearly done it.
That was the other funny part. She and Josh had almost made it. There’d been a time when their fighting occurred as regularly as the rising and setting of the sun—and every other solar position on the weekends when he was home from work. Then she got pregnant and everything changed. Josh was over the moon. He stopped drinking hard liquor in favor of beer. He started painting the nursery walls and building a crib. He spent days sanding the crib until it was as buttery smooth as their future baby’s bottom.
Don’t have a baby to save a marriage, her mother had warned.
Ha, Mom. What do you know?
The baby had saved her marriage.
She’d known it would. Josh had been talking about having a son since the day she met him. The day they found out it was a boy—
Oh boy.
The love kept piling on. She’d been promoted from Nagging Shrew to Queen Mother in the span of a few months.
Little Josh Jr. was born healthy. Check that off the list. Ten toes. Ten fingers.
A week later work promoted Josh to foreman.
Could things have been any better?
And then today.
Everything changed today.
Had they not been grateful enough? What did they do to deserve today?
Josh Jr. hiccupped and Kim looked at him without seeing him.
It was only fair. He didn’t see her either.
Today was the day she found out Josh Jr. was blind.
One checkup and everything changed. Somewhere in the pit of her being she’d already known it. There’d been a rock in her stomach for days, a creeping dread whispering something’s wrong. She trained herself to swallow her fears and hide them from Josh and herself—most of all, Josh. She’d almost cancelled the baby’s checkup, but she knew Josh would want to know how it went and she didn’t think she could live the way she’d been living much longer. She had to know the truth, for better or for worse.
Ha. For better or for worse. That was funny, too.
The marriage wouldn’t survive the diagnosis. Of that, she was sure.
She wished she hadn’t gone to the doctor.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
The way Josh Jr.’s eyes stayed fixed. The way he wouldn’t follow a toy when she moved it in front of his face—
I knew it.
As much as Josh loved having a son, he didn’t spend much time with the baby. When he did want to interact it was easy to show him the best things. If you booped the baby on the nose with his stuffed lion, he giggled, just like any other baby. There was no reason for Josh to think his son couldn’t see the lion. Josh wasn’t the type to look into things too closely.
I could have hidden it for months.
For years.
Josh’s mom was a different story, though. It wouldn’t have been long before she noticed. Kim had pretended to have a stomach virus to put off her own mother’s visit once already. How many times could she have the flu? A week ago Josh asked if she wanted to have his mom watch the baby while they sneaked to the bar with their friends and she had to fake a headache.
How long could I pretend to be sick?
So she’d kept the baby’s doctor appointment, hoping to be proved wrong and put all her fears behind her.
But that wasn’t to be. All her fears were with her now, fully realized, on top of her, smothering her.
Kim slipped her hand into her pocket and felt the card with her next baby doctor appointment scribbled on it. At the next visit the doctors would run tests to discover the cause of Junior’s blindness, but the chances it was anything reversible were next to zero.
She had the time from today until that appointment, the time during which some hope remained that Josh Jr. could be a normal baby, to enjoy her husband.
Then it would all be over.
Josh would be brokenhearted. The fights would start again. The marriage would be over and she’d be alone, raising a blind boy.
She still loved the baby, of course, but Josh—all he ever did was talk about someday playing catch with his son. The boy’s room had so much baseball-themed décor it looked like Cooperstown.
And what if there were more issues? Who knew what else might be wrong with Junior? How much could she take? There might be something wrong with his brain. They didn’t have the money to pay for expensive treatments. They barely had health insurance as it was. If Josh freaked out, lost his job—
She couldn’t breathe. Something cried out. Color burst back into the world around her but it wouldn’t be still. It was spinning. She was spinning—
The cry again.
She clutched a clothing rack and steadied herself, listening.
A baby.
She looked into her stroller.
Not Junior. He rarely cried. He was a dream baby.
Emphasis on the was.
Kim blinked at the store around her. Some obscure power had pulled the cowl of dread from her eyes, like a magician yanking away a silk scarf to reveal his greatest trick.
Ta da!
Everything became clear.
Kim’s gaze settled on the baby in front of her. Another baby, one who could be Josh’s twin, wrapped in blue blankets, sitting in a car seat, slung over his mother’s arm.
A boy.
The baby’s mother put the car seat on the ground and stepped in front of it to stand on her toes, helping her older daughter pull down a shirt with the Marine Rescue Center’s logo printed on the back.
Do it. Now. Fast.
Kim grabbed the baby car seat and moved.
She balanced the seat on top of her stroller and walked briskly out of the building to her car. She put the car seat and the stroller in the back of the mini-van Josh had insisted they buy. She didn’t secure them.
No time. They’ll be fine.
Move.
Kim ran around to the front of the car and climbed into the driver’s seat. She pulled out of the driveway on to US-1 and headed toward the bridge that would take her home. The lights turned sea-turtle green for her as she rolled through each.
This was supposed to happen.
She glanced at the clock. If she went a little faster she’d be sure to cross the Intracoastal Waterway before the bridge opened for boats on the hour.
Perfect.
A little trill of happiness made her shimmy in her seat and she stomped on the gas.
Chapter Two
Charlotte Morgan opened her eyes.
What was that?
She scanned her dark bedroom, the edges of furniture visible by the light of the moon filtering through her plantation shutters.
Beside her, her soft-coated Wheaten, Abby, breathed in the rapid, I’m-running-a-marathon-and-yet-sleeping way she often did, two of her paws pressed against Charlotte’s body to be sure she couldn’t sneak away. She didn’t know where Abby thought she’d go in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t going to happen on her watch.
Other than her dog’s breathing, Charlotte couldn’t hear anything except the steady patter of light rain outside.
Hm.
Something had woken her but she couldn’t put her finger on what. Maybe a dreaming Abby started tap dancing against her leg. Maybe she’d snorted herself awake. Both of those things happened with relative regularity.
She took a deep breath and released it, closing her eyes to start the falling-to-sleep process all over again.
Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in—
Something wet struck her forehead.
Aaaarg!
With a yip, Charlotte scrambled out of bed. The sheets tangled around her right foot and she threw out her hands to brace them against the wall to keep from plowing her head through the plaster. Her other foot found the ground in time and she jerked her right foot free from the sheets to have it join its mirror twin. She heard a thud, followed by the sound of scrabbling nails. Abby had fallen off the other side of the bed, half-asleep and as fully freaked out as her mother. She ran around the bed, ears perked, eyes wide, searching for some clue as to why Mommy would destroy the whole comfy sleeping thing they had going.
Charlotte slapped one hand to her forehead. It felt wet.
Ew.
She turned on her bedside lamp.
Wet. Wet. Something wet on my forehead.
She looked at her fingers.
No color.
Not blood. Not smooshed bug. Not slug, salamander, snail, snake or any one of the other hundred things that might crawl across her Florida-based bed in the middle of the night.
She didn’t know how other people in the country dealt with middle-of-the-night phenomena like these, but in Florida, when something unexpected touched you in your sleep, you got the heck out of bed. If what touched you was wet, all the worse.
But what could be wet?
She scanned her sheets and pillow.
Nothing moving. Nothing crawling.
With the tip of her finger she flipped over the pillow and jumped back against the wall, just in case.
Nothing.
Abby released a little puffy boof noise to let Charlotte know she stood ready to help. At least that was one interpretation. The other was that Abby wanted Mommy to know she needed to cut the nonsense and get back in bed.
It was hard to tell which.
Charlotte released a huff of her own.
“I don’t know, Abb, I don’t—”
She was about to drop to her knees and peek under the bed when something on her pillow moved.
She jerked back, staring at the spot through wide eyes.
The pillow looked clean and empty, devoid of creepy crawlies.
Did I imagine that?
She bent forward to better inspect the spot.
Nothing.
She touched the area.
It felt damp.
Water?
Her gaze rose to the ceiling above her bed.
A stain had formed on the formerly white ceiling. An amorphous brown swirl.
A leak.
Charlotte closed her eyes and tilted her face to the ceiling.
Ugh.
Great it wasn’t a snake, but how much was a leak going to cost to fix?
And worse, should I do something about it now?
Yes. That would be the responsible thing to do. Even though it was the middle of the night and it meant going through the dinky attic access and into the creepy attic. The last thing she wanted to do was climb into the attic crawlspace in the middle of the night. Attics were unknowns. There could be anything from a family of bats to the legendary Florida Man living up there, but she didn’t know how long the rain would last or how wet her bedroom might become. Again, Florida. It could be a two-minute shower or it could be the sort of thing that made Noah nervous. Checking the weather wouldn’t help—they were only right half the time. Weathermen cheerily lied to her face every day.
If she waited until morning and the rain did stop, things might dry and she wouldn’t be able to find the cause. If she blew it off and moved to the other side of the bed and it kept raining, she might wake up in a swamp.
Crap.
Thanks, Nanny, for leaving me your house, but home ownership is for the birds.
Charlotte padded into the kitchen and found a small but powerful LED flashlight in the utility drawer. Abby danced alongside her, now fully awake and excited to be on a rare nighttime adventure.
“You can’t go into the attic.”
Abby’s trotting didn’t slow, her toes tapping their own message on the tile floor. Sure I can. Why wouldn’t I? Of course I’ll come with you. You don’t even have to ask. I’m here.
In the hall, Charlotte pulled down the collapsible attic stairs and headed up. Abby watched her go, thwarted by the angle of the ladder, despite her previous enthusiasm.
Charlotte poked her head up through the square hole in her ceiling, half-expecting a rabid raccoon to jump on her face.
Nothing happened.
So far, so good.
On her left, boxes sat piled across sheets of plywood. She’d dragged those wooden planks home from the hardware supply store, each cut to the exact width of the square hole attic access. She’d needed to create a stable floor if the attic was going to be of any use to her.
On the plywood she’d stacked boxes of holiday decorations, her suitcases and a small collection of oddball things from her family she didn’t want to display but couldn’t bring herself to throw away. One really ugly lamp. An awful photo in a half-decent frame. A silver chafing dish.
What is chafing, anyway?
To her right, one strip of wood, barely wider than her foot, led off into the distance like the road less traveled. The attic’s spine pointed the way to the small window at the far end. That was the direction she had to go.
Steadying herself against the low ceiling, careful to avoid the roofing nails poking through, she walked like a Flying Wallenda down the wooden tightrope, searching for the spot that intersected with the beams above her bedroom. From there, she had to inch along an even smaller piece of wood, the two of the two-by-four, toward the area above her pillow.
She squatted and felt around, finding the pink insulation wet in that area.
Bingo.
Shining the light above her, she spotted a length of old plastic-wrapped wire with water dripping from its tip. She traced the path of the water as it led farther up the pitch of the roof. It had rolled along a beam and then diverted down the wire, sending it directly to the spot above her head.
Naturally.
She tried to look at the sunny side of her situation. If the water had found a path behind the drywall instead of dripping on her head, it could have gathered there for years until the pocket became a riot of termites and black mold—
Hold on.
The beam of her flashlight struck a strangely square edge nestled in a nest of fluffy pink fiberglass insulation.
Hm.
Dropping to her hands and knees, she inched forward until she could reach the object, plucking at it until she’d jerked it close enough to grab. It revealed itself to be a simple white shoebox. She could tell by the weight something was inside, and by the sound it made when she shook it, it wasn’t shoes.
Giving the area a once over with her light and confident the box was the only oddity in the area, she crept back to the relative acreage of the spine.
Eager to see what was in her treasure box, she opened it there.
Papers.
Nothing that looked valuable.
Shoot.
So much for finding D.B. Cooper’s money.
She put the dusty lid back on the box and carried it back to the exit. A red plastic Christmas-themed planter caught her eye. If there were ghosts in the attic, that pot was the reason. She’d killed scores of poinsettias in that pot.
Hm.
There’s an idea.
Putting the shoebox aside, she carted the planter back to the source of the leak, setting it beneath the drip to catch the water.
Problem temporarily solved.
Retracing her steps to the exit, she lowered herself through the hole and shifted the door back in place.
Hopefully the rain would stop soon. Tomorrow she’d have one of the Pineapple Port handymen come out and assess the situation.
Pain in the neck.
Abby jumped to her feet as Charlotte landed in the hall and stood sentry as she folded up the ladder and headed into the kitchen to get a better look in the shoebox.
Charlotte put away the flashlight and opened the box. It smelled like dust, if dust was a smell. She didn’t imagine anyone would be making Attic Dust a candle scent any time soon.
Probably somebody’s old tax documents.
Flipping through the papers inside, the first to catch her eye was a newspaper clipping about a new resort opening somewhere in Jupiter Beach, Florida. The story featured a small group of employees standing in front of a charming, multilevel gray building with white columns and trim.
Maybe a box of vacation ideas?
The rest of the container contained drawings, filled math and spelling worksheets and a few torn pages from yearbooks with row after row of smiling teenagers. At the bottom she found a yellowing photo of a baby wrapped in pink swaddling clothes.
A folded sheet of paper pressing against the side of the box turned out to be the birth certificate of Siofra McQueen, whoever that was.
Probably the baby in the photo.
What kind of name is Siofra? Charlotte wasn’t even sure how to pronounce it, but knew whatever she guessed would be wrong.
Charlotte did the math—if the certificate belonged to the child in the photo, baby Siofra would be forty-six now. She couldn’t think of anyone her grandmother might know named McQueen.
The box probably belonged to someone from the family who owned the house before Nanny.
She was about to fold up the certificate when the name of the birth mother caught her eye.
Estelle Byrne.
Hm.
The woman had the same first name as her grandmother, the woman who raised her after her mother died. Soon after, her grandmother also died, and Charlotte was unofficially adopted by the Pineapple Port fifty-five-plus community, and raised as their unofficial mascot. Overnight she’d gone from no family to hundreds of doting, if older, mothers and fathers.
The father’s name didn’t ring a bell: Shea McQueen.
Something nagged in Charlotte’s brain and she stared at the certificate in an attempt to give the thought ample time to bubble to the forefront of her cerebral cortex.
Byrne. Byrne. Something about that last name…
Wasn’t that her grandmother’s maiden name?
She lowered the paper and looked at Abby.
“Do I have an aunt?” Once again, maybe she had more family than she ever imagined.
Abby glanced up and then settled her head back between her paws, chin on the kitchen floor, her burst of midnight energy seemingly drained. She rolled on her side and stretched her legs out straight as Charlotte flipped back to the top of the pile and reopened the newspaper article.
The grinning faces of the Loggerhead Inn.
A few of the girls in the photo were the right age then to be around forty-six now…
If her grandmother had had another baby, and this box was full of snippets from that baby’s life, then her mystery aunt had to be one of the people in that staff photo, right?
Why else would the clipping be in the box?
Abby grunted to show her annoyance and Charlotte looked down at her.
“I think you’re going to have to stay with Mariska for a bit.”
Abby sighed and Charlotte leaned down to ruffle the crop of hair sprouting from the top of her sleepy pet’s head.
“Mommy’s going to Jupiter Beach.”
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