Daughters of the Sea by Ellyn Bache

Author:Ellyn Bache
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Guy Legacy had spent only three days in jail that summer, which was more than enough to make him swear off drunkenness forever. Then his bail was reduced because Parker Dean was taken off the critical list. This was standard procedure. Guy paid the bondsman most of his remaining cash and agreed not to leave the state of North Carolina before his court hearing in ten days.

Right, he thought. Don’t leave the state. He walked to the bus station and bought a one-way ticket to Beaufort, South Carolina.

What choice did he have? Veronica had been upset with him before, but this was the first time she’d cut off communications completely. She’d had their phone disconnected; she hadn’t answered either of his telegrams. Let him rot in jail, she was probably thinking. Do him good. The only way to make amends was face-to-face. It didn’t occur to him, until he found strangers in their duplex, that she and Simpson might actually have left Beaufort without a word or a forwarding address.

Guy went to all the neighbors to see if Veronica had left a message for him. She hadn’t. He went to Tammy’s T-shirts, where Veronica had worked, until she decided they didn’t need her salary. Lucy, the owner, said, “Lord, honey, she never called me once since the day she quit her job.”

Veronica had closed their bank account. There wasn’t much in it, anyway. According to the people across the street, she’d left the landlord red-faced and fuming about midnight movers.

Guy began to feel the way he did when he was about to get the flu—not sick, but not normal, either. In twenty-one years, this was the longest he’d ever gone without speaking to Veronica. They had had their low moments, but eventually they always made up. Was this some kind of practical joke? To punish him for all the times when he’d wanted to move on and she hadn’t?

By his third day in Beaufort, he knew it was no joke. Veronica had left him. By the fifth day, his desire to hear her voice was almost like fever.

For lack of a better idea, he took the bus back to Wilmington. It was the only place he could think of where he still had something left to do.

He arrived shortly before midnight and walked from the bus station to the hospital. From the graveyard-shift information clerk, he learned that Parker Dean had been moved to a regular room. He was told that visiting hours had been over for some time. But no one interfered when he headed for the elevator, or even as he walked the corridors of the boy’s floor or, finally, located his room and entered.

In the bed, Parker Dean lay bandaged and motionless, no longer attached to as many tubes as he had been, but otherwise not looking much improved. Guy stood watching him for a long time. Now and then, the boy’s half-closed eyes darted from side to side as if he were not asleep but keeping some painful, private vigil.

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