On Sunset Beach Read online

  “Maybe.” Ellie sounded thoughtful. “But don’t be surprised if some might want to hold on to them if the paintings have been in their family for a long time. Then again, don’t be surprised if some of them have disappeared over the years. You know, if they were thought to be of no real value back then, some of those paintings might not still be around.”

  “I guess we’ll just have to let that play out. First, we have to figure out who these people are and then determine if they still have the paintings.”

  “I’ll do my best. I’ll be seeing Grace soon. We’re both on a committee to decide what to do about the Enright property.”

  “What’s the Enright property?”

  “Curtis Enright recently signed over the title of his home to the town, and everyone in St. Dennis is all abuzz about it. He set up a trust for maintenance and taxes, so it isn’t going to cost the town anything. He wants it used as an arts center.”

  “Great idea. Every town should have one.”

  “It would be awesome,” Ellie agreed. “I’ll show Grace your list when I see her next Tuesday, see if she knows anyone on it or has any thoughts on where some of the paintings might be.”

  Carly felt a nip of disappointment. “Not till next week? I was hoping for something a little sooner.”

  “Can’t do it. Grace’s son is coming back from Africa tomorrow. Or maybe it was today.” Ellie paused. “Anyway, he’s been away for a couple of years and has quit the … I forget whether he was in the Peace Corps or something else. UN Peacekeeper maybe? Whatever. Grace has been over the moon about him coming home, so this week’s meeting has been moved to next week. Besides, don’t you have something else to do? A book to write? A gallery or four to run?”

  “All of that, yes. Fortunately, I have very competent staffs in the galleries, and the exhibits that are currently running were set up before I got distracted by your great-great-grandmother and her glorious hidden stash of art. So I’m really concentrating on the book mostly. I’m almost finished, but I don’t want to rush it. I want it to be good and I want it to be accurate. I want Carolina’s spirit to show through.”

  “Sounds like you’re getting to know the old girl quite well.”

  “I really feel as if I am. The more I read, the more I think she was a very modern woman trapped in an archaic world.”

  “Nice subtitle.”

  “Hmm.” Carly wrote down her words in the margin of her notebook before she forgot them. “Maybe. Thanks for the idea.”

  “Don’t mention it. Gotta run. Got an early date with the alarm clock. Send me your list whenever, and I’ll see what I can dig up for you.”

  The ink on Carolina’s list was faded and hard to read, so Carly photocopied it then scanned it into her computer. She enlarged and darkened the text before sending it to Ellie, who probably hadn’t expected to receive it that quickly. But Carly was compelled to get that phase of the project moving, lest it weigh on her mind until it was in Ellie’s hands. The job done, she sat back at her desk and picked up the journal.

  “So, let’s see what other surprises you have in store for me, Carolina.” Carly rested her feet on the desk and crossed her ankles. “What other secrets have you been hiding for the past hundred or so years …”

  Working on the effects of caffeine, Carly read for several more hours before falling asleep at the desk. When she finally awoke, every part of her body was cramped. Upon standing, she found her left leg numb from having sat with it under her for all that time. She stretched and flexed until she could walk without stumbling.

  Through the French doors of the study, she could see the first pale colors of dawn. She unlocked the doors and stepped out onto the patio. The air was still, heavy with humidity, and saturated with the heady fragrance of honeysuckle mingled with rose. She inhaled deeply, then walked on bare feet to the edge of the stone wall that surrounded the patio. The only sound was the waterfall that overlooked the pool. She lowered herself onto one of the lounge chairs and leaned back to watch the stars as their last light flickered before disappearing with the dawn. Tired but still buzzed, in her mind she arranged, then rearranged Carolina’s paintings on the walls of her Manhattan gallery for what was probably the fiftieth time.

  While she’d earlier professed to her mother that she no longer felt a need to prove herself, in her heart, Carly knew that wasn’t quite true. She was well aware that many in the art world considered her a lightweight, a wannabe player with deep pockets behind her. Armed with her degrees and her parents’ money, she’d boldly opened the gallery in Tribeca when she was twenty-five years old, but she’d heard the talk then, and sometimes she still heard a whisper here and there. Her petite size and long blond hair had given rise to a host of snarky comments about “Alice in Wonderland using her daddy’s money to take on the big boys.”

  It had taken several years before she’d been taken seriously, but these days, there didn’t seem to be as much comment on her appearance as there once had been. She’d worked hard to establish relationships with artists whom she considered up-and-comers, treating them as important long before they became relevant, and, in doing so, had a long list of now-prominent artists who would deal only with her. She had not been unaware of the presence of other gallery owners at the last of her several openings. The word on the street was that Carly Summit had a knack for finding and cultivating the artists who would become the next big thing. Her reputation was flawless, yet she knew that more than one rival turned green with envy every time she announced a new showing for an artist they’d hoped to exhibit.

  “Well, tough,” she muttered. She’d earned her good name the hard way. Yes, her parents had fronted the money for her galleries—she’d never tried to deny that—but she’d paid them back in full. She was pretty sure that there were some who still believed that Patrick and Roberta still wrote the checks, but there was nothing Carly could do about that. Still, her success and her reputation aside, she sometimes felt that she had to work her butt off to prove that she was the real deal.

  Which was why, she acknowledged, Carolina Ellis now dominated her days and nights. Once Carly announced her find and her plans to introduce the long-hidden paintings to the public, no one would ever again be able to question her legitimacy.

  It had taken her a long time to admit that bankrolling the European galleries had been part of her efforts to be taken seriously—a longer time still to recognize that many in the international art world viewed her actions as those of an amateur, someone with more money than good sense, a desperate attempt to make a big splash in that very big pool. While she’d done well with those investments, it was time to focus on her real passion—American women artists of the past century. Carolina Ellis would be the first of what Carly hoped would be a long line of fine women painters whose works would be displayed and brought to prominence by Summit Galleries.

  She yawned, closed her eyes, and with visions of long walls filled with glorious art dancing in her head, slept until midmorning.

  Chapter 2

  FORD Sinclair eased his rental car onto the approach to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel in Virginia Beach and reduced his speed. It had been several years since he’d made this crossing, and he wanted to savor it. The bridge—named one of the Seven Engineering Marvels of the Modern World—had been a favorite destination when he was a young boy and his father was still alive. Some days, they would sneak away from the family’s inn, just the two of them, and head south in the old Bay Rider down through Virginia’s Pocomoke Sound. His father would drop anchor off Raccoon Island, where they’d sit for a while and watch the cars passing over the northbound span of the bridge-tunnel—which was still new back then, and attracted attention like a shiny new toy—then they’d head back into Maryland waters, where they’d spend the rest of the day fishing. They’d go home, more often than not sporting a farmer’s tan along with a cooler of whatever had been running that day, rockfish or sea bass or croakers. Once his dad had helped him bring in a tuna that had given h
im—at ten—the fight of his life. The memory was so vivid that whenever Ford dreamed of that day, he still felt the rod biting into his hands as he struggled to hold it.

  The bridge-tunnel itself was, in fact, a marvel. A little over seventeen miles long from shore to shore, it was exactly what the name implied: a series of bridges and tunnels that crossed the Chesapeake Bay where it joined the Atlantic Ocean, connecting Virginia Beach to Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

  Ford stopped at the first of the four bridges and pulled into the parking area. He walked to the rail that overlooked the water, and from there he could see for miles. Below, where the Chesapeake and the Atlantic met, the water was still dark and disturbed from last night’s storm. In the distance, a large navy vessel headed into port at Virginia Beach, and far out in the ocean, another made its way toward the bridge. Noisy gulls circled overhead, hoping for a handout from the sightseers on the pier, while others swooped and soared over both sides of the bridge. Ford closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of salt water, and held it in his lungs for a few seconds before letting it out in a whoosh. Chesapeake born and bred, he hadn’t realized how much he had missed the Bay’s scent. In that moment, he couldn’t wait to be home. He climbed back into the car and continued his trek north.

  The radio reception was spotty along the back roads—some things, he thought, never changed—so he could only pick up a country station. He’d been away too long to know who was singing; he only caught enough to know it was a girl with a pretty voice singing about vandalizing the SUV that belonged to her cheating boyfriend. He turned it off when the static drowned her out, and drove in silence, the windows up and the air conditioner blasting against the heat and humidity of the late-summer afternoon.

  Before he knew it, Ford was crossing the bridge over the Choptank River and was halfway to Trappe, where he and his high school buddies had proven their manhood by spending the night in the haunted White Marsh Cemetery and living to tell about it. Even now, memories of that night made him grin. They’d been so cocky, all five of them, until they heard the faint tinkling of a tiny bell borne on a breeze around three in the morning. They spent the rest of the night wide-awake, huddled in the car, windows closed and the doors locked, but still bragged that they’d lasted the night because they didn’t drive back out through the cemetery gates until dawn.

  Ford’s smile faded when he recalled how far he’d come from that cheeky kid whose most terrifying moments had been spent in a dark cemetery with his friends telling ghost stories. Back then, he’d never imagined what real terrors the world held. The innocent boy—brash though he might have been—would never have understood the things he’d come to see. Even now, Ford was at a loss to really understand what motivated a man to commit atrocities such as those he’d witnessed over the past few years.

  He was close to home now. One left turn off Route 50 and he was almost there. He cruised along just under the speed limit so he could take it all in.

  If there hadn’t been another car behind him, he’d have slowed even more as he passed the Madison farm. Ford had learned to ice-skate on the pond that lay beyond the cornfield. It had been Clay Madison—now married to Ford’s sister, Lucy—who’d taught him to skate. Clay had always been sweet on Lucy—even as a small kid Ford had known that. An old pickup was parked near the back of the farmhouse, and he thought briefly about stopping to say hello, but he knew if his mother caught wind of him stopping somewhere other than home first, he’d be in for an earful. And somehow, his mother had always known what he was up to. He’d never really figured out how she knew things, but she did. He thought she must have had a pretty darned good spy network, though she never seemed to keep track of Dan or Lucy the way she’d kept track of him.

  Ford hoped that hadn’t held true these past few years. He hated to think she might have somehow picked up on exactly where he’d been and what he’d seen and done.

  Though his mother’s phone calls and letters had kept him abreast of the changes in St. Dennis, the development of the town’s center still surprised him. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t the upscale shops he passed. The supermarket was still in the same place, but it’s previously dingy facade had had a significant face-lift. When he left, most of the current storefronts had been boarded up or were still single-family homes. Now the shops he passed told a story of increased prosperity—Cupcake, Book ’Em, Bling, Sips, and on the opposite side of the street, Lola’s Café, Cuppachino, Petals and Posies. Only Lola’s and the flower shop had been there before he left.

  A new sign at the corner of Kelly’s Point Road pointed toward the bay and listed the attractions one would find by following the arrow: public parking, the municipal building, the marina, Walt’s Seafood—Ford was pleased to see that the St. Dennis landmark restaurant was still open—and something called One Scoop or Two.

  His mother hadn’t been kidding when she said there’d been a lot of changes in a very short period of time.

  Farther down Charles Street he turned right, onto the drive that led to the inn, and stopped the car. A very large, handsome sign pointed the way to the Inn at Sinclair Point. The drive itself had been recently blacktopped, some of the trees on either side had been cut back, and it was now, he realized, two full lanes wide where, for as long as he remembered, it had been one.

  What next? Ford wondered as he drove around the bend and got his first view of the inn that had been his family home and business for generations.

  The large, sprawling main building had been painted since he left, the fading white walls now rejuvenated. The cabins that faced the bay had been painted as well, and he noted that the front of each sported a window box that overflowed with summer flowers. He parked his car in the very full visitors’ lot and sat for a moment, trying to take it all in. There were new tennis courts, a fenced-in playground, and if he wasn’t mistaken, jutting out into the bay was a new dock—longer and wider—at which several boats were tied. Kayaks and canoes lined the lush lawn that stretched toward the water like a carpet of smooth green Christmas velvet.

  And everywhere, it seemed, people were engaged in one activity or another.

  “Damn.” Ford whistled under his breath. “Mom wasn’t kidding when she said they’d made a lot of changes since I left.”

  He got out of the car and looked around. While so much was different, the inn still somehow felt the same. Of course, he reminded himself as he gathered his bags out of the trunk of the car, it was still home.

  Home. He stared at the building that loomed before him, where a seemingly endless stream of people came and went through the door to the back lobby. No amount of paint or landscaping or added features could change the way he felt when his feet touched ground at Sinclair’s Point. The restlessness he’d felt when his plane landed that morning began to fade, but it was still there, under the surface. He knew that the sense of peace he felt would be fleeting, and could not be trusted.

  He barely made it across the parking lot when his sister flew out the back door.

  “You’re late, you bugger! We’ve been waiting for hours!” Lucy threw her arms around his neck and hugged him.

  “My plane was late.” He dropped his bags and returned the hug for a moment, then held her at arm’s length. “But look at you. You’re all tan and your hair’s long again.” He tugged on her ponytail. “When I left, you had that short do and you were working your tail off out in L.A., and now you’re—”

  “Working my tail off in St. Dennis.” She laughed.

  “Business is good?”

  “Business is great. If we were any busier, we’d be double-booking dates and holding weddings in the parking lot.”

  “Well, you must be doing something right, because you look a million times better than you did the last time I saw you. I’m guessing marriage agrees with you.”

  “Totally. Work is good, home life is fantastic. I never thought I’d come back to St. Dennis to live—and me, live on a farm? Ha! But I guess it just goes to sho
w, never say never.”

  “I’m glad you’re happy, sis.”

  “Never happier.” Lucy took his arm. “Let’s go inside. Mom has been pacing like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “I would believe. Mom never changes.”

  “I hope not. She’s amazing, with all she does here at the inn, and still she keeps the newspaper going. Of course, that’s her baby.” Lucy chatted away as they walked to the inn. “She still does the features and most of the photographs—though sometimes someone in town will have a great shot of something or other and she’ll use it. She did hire someone to do the ads, though, and someone to handle the books. And of course, the printing and mailing …”

  Ford frowned. “Mailing? Since when has she mailed out the paper? Who’s she mailing it to?”

  “You have been gone awhile. Gone are the days when you could only pick up a copy at the grocery store or the gas station or Walt’s.” Lucy grinned. “The St. Dennis Gazette now has out-of-town subscribers, mostly summer people who want to keep up with what’s going on so they’ll know when to plan to come back. She mails the paper every week to places as far away as Maine, Illinois, Nebraska. In your absence, little brother, the family business has become the go-to spot on the Chesapeake. We’re big doin’s, kiddo.”

  He paused and looked around. “The place looks amazing. And busy! I don’t remember ever seeing so many people here, especially this late in the summer. And I see there’s been a lot of work done on the grounds. I don’t remember a gazebo there.” He nodded toward the structure that sat between colorful flower beds and the water.

  “We had a professional landscaper in last summer and he suggested the new gazebo and designed the new gardens at my request,” Lucy explained. “I had a big-ticket wedding here and the bride wanted the ceremony out on the lawn overlooking the bay. Since she was dropping a bundle, we did what we had to do to make the area as gorgeous as we could.”