On Sunset Beach: The Chesapeake Diaries Page 23

  So right, actually, that she wasn’t sure if she should be running to him, or away from him.

  Chapter 19

  “DID you have a nice dinner, dear?” Grace asked Ford when he brought her the Sunday newspapers: the Baltimore Sun, the Capital Gazette, and last week’s Bay Times, without which Grace swore she could not begin her day.

  She patted the table next to her, indicating he should place them there. “How did Carly like Lola’s?”

  “She liked it just fine.” He stared at his mother suspiciously.

  “Your father and I went there frequently when we were courting. Of course, Lola herself was just a sassy young thing then.” Grace glanced up at Ford and smiled. “She’s still pretty sassy. Talking about running off with one of the busboys.” She laughed and shook her head.

  “How did you know …?”

  “That you and Carly had dinner there last night?” She peered at him over the rim of her glasses. “This is St. Dennis, Ford. Everyone knows you, and thanks to your articles, everyone knows Carly. Barbara from the bookstore stopped in this morning and brought me one of the new bestsellers. She and her niece just happened to be dining there last night as well. She said Carly looked stunning.” She looked up at Ford expectantly.

  “She looked pretty good.”

  Grace smiled that infuriatingly knowing smile, and he knew she could see right through him. Well, he’d make her work for it.

  “How is the carriage house coming along, did she say?”

  “She did.” He took a seat on a rectangular ottoman that stood near her feet.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “How is the place progressing? What’s been done? What still has to be done?” She swatted at him and he laughed.

  For the next fifteen minutes, he fielded her questions and brought her up-to-date. There was no such thing as an abbreviated version where Grace was concerned.

  “Well, then, it sounds as if she’ll be ready to open on time. That’s good. I knew she could pull it off.”

  “She’s got a lot on her plate right now, but she’s determined.”

  “I do hope you’ll offer to help her where she needs a hand, Ford.”

  “Sure.” He nodded. “Well, enjoy your reading. Do you need anything else right now?”

  “No, dear. Dan’s had the staff waiting on me hand and foot.” She smiled. “It’s nice for a change, but I wouldn’t want to get used to it. I’d rather do for myself.”

  He kissed the top of her head and started for the door. He stopped halfway and, snapping his fingers, turned back. “I almost forgot. What would you think of an article about Lola? She is, as you’ve said, quite the character, and just about everyone who spends any amount of time in St. Dennis ends up at her restaurant.”

  “Why, that’s a fine idea. I don’t know why I never thought of it.”

  “Actually, it was Carly’s idea, but I thought—”

  “Clever girl. And wouldn’t it be nice to follow up with an article about Captain Walt and Rexana. Yes, I could see a whole series of articles about the faces behind the restaurants.” Grace tapped her fingers on the arms of her wheelchair. “Excellent idea, Ford. Give Lola a call this afternoon and see what you can set up before she takes off on her next jaunt. She made some mention of seeing the south of France …”

  “Well, I didn’t mean for me to do it.” He stood in the doorway, his hands on his hips. “I wasn’t volunteering.”

  “Who were you thinking of?”

  “Well, I thought you could do it once you got back on your feet.”

  “Who knows how long that will be? So no, I cannot. But since I am still editor in chief, I give out the assignments. So I’m tossing this one back at you.”

  “Wait a minute, I thought the deal was that I was standing in for you on the Carly articles …”

  She gave him The Look, the one that had turned each of her children to stone on many an occasion while they were growing up.

  “All right.” He knew when he was defeated. “I’ll see if I can fit it in.”

  “Thank you. Oh, and leave the door open just a crack, would you? Housekeeping should be on their way up sometime soon …”

  Ford did as she requested, leaving the door to the family quarters slightly open, then went back to his room for his running shoes. He was getting soft sitting around, with no exercise other than paddling the kayak every couple of days, and he needed to move. He tied on the shoes and went down the back steps to the door used by staff to come and go through the kitchen, then started out on his run.

  St. Dennis was a quiet town most mornings, but Sunday mornings were pretty much dead, even in the summer. The churches were full, and the restaurants that served breakfast or brunch were gearing up for the crowds that would show up later in the morning. It was the perfect time for a run, not too hot yet, the breeze was just right, and he didn’t have to share the roadway with many others.

  He started out on Charles Street, but without planning to, he found himself making the right onto Cherry and running the one block to Hudson. His feet slowed as he passed Carly’s house, but the shades were still drawn on the side of the house that took the early-morning sun. At some point, he’d have to pick up that jacket he’d left in her dining room last night, but it wouldn’t be now.

  Was she sleeping in, he wondered, or had she gotten up early to work?

  Had she lain awake last night as long as he had, wondering where, if anyplace, they were headed? Had she wished he’d stayed?

  There was no question of where they could have ended up if he hadn’t put the lid on it, a move that had come at considerable personal sacrifice. There’d been nothing he wanted more than to take her to bed. There was no denying that she brought him to the boiling point, but at the same time, he had to recognize certain basic facts. Carly was a forever woman, if, of course, you were looking for such a woman, which he was not.

  The problem wasn’t that she could take him from zero to sixty faster than just about any woman he’d ever met. The problem was that the more time he spent with her, the more he really liked her. What would he do with a woman like that at this point in his life, when he didn’t know where he was headed or what his next move would be? It disturbed him that he’d passed his thirtieth birthday without having a clue about who or what he wanted to be for the rest of his life. He’d been a soldier for so long—a highly specialized one, to be sure, but a soldier all the same. The skills he’d been taught, the areas in which he excelled, were hardly translatable to the real world in which his family lived, in which Carly lived.

  He supposed he could go into law enforcement like some of his friends had done. He’d heard that Beck was looking to add to the police force, but that didn’t seem like a good fit to him. Dan would jump at the chance to bring him on board at the inn, but he’d already thought that through and dismissed it. He had no desire to run the inn, especially since Dan was so good at it, and Ford didn’t have a clue. It was good that someone in the family shared their father’s love for the old place, though. He appreciated the sense of history there, felt the presence of his ancestors in every one of the rooms. There was something about being part of an unbroken chain that went back so many generations in this town that made you feel grounded, whether or not you wanted to be. In the past, he hadn’t felt the pull quite as much as he did this time around. Of course, he hadn’t been home in a long time, and maybe being a little older he might be more aware of such things.

  His feet took him all the way to the end of Hudson, where it dead-ended on Old St. Mary’s Church Road. The carriage house on the Enright property was closed and still, the workmen—and Carly—gone for the weekend, the driveway empty of the cars and pickups that filled it every weekday. He jogged past the house, the mansion that old Curtis had signed over to the town, and kept going until he reached the town square. He stopped for a moment, recalling holidays that had been celebrated there: First Families’ Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day. Halloween para
des that had wound through the center of town and ended right here, where prizes for best costume had been given out and photos taken of the winners for the front page of the St. Dennis Gazette. He recalled one year when his mother had dressed the three of them as cowboys in matching outfits, and how Lucy had squawked at having to wear chaps like her brothers and a hat that made her hair go flat on top.

  Their grandfather had been alive then, and had taken their picture in front of an old live oak that stood behind the library. Ford walked around the building to see if the tree was still there, and found himself surprisingly disappointed when he realized it had been taken down. He wondered what had happened to that photo.

  He resumed jogging, and went straight back onto Charles Street and turned right. He ran past houses he’d known well when he was a child, houses where friends had lived, and he wondered what had happened to them all, where they were now. His best buddy through eighth grade, John-Luc, had lived in the gray clapboard house on the corner—it had been white back then—and Amy Weathers, the class brain, had lived next door. The last time Ford came home, his mother mentioned pointedly and on several occasions that Amy and John-Luc had married, had two children, and were living happily over on Fifth Street in the house they bought from the estate of Mr. Davis, who at one time or another had taught piano to just about every kid in St. Dennis.

  There was that chain again. So many people who lived in St. Dennis had families that went back several generations, so your parents knew theirs. Their grandparents had danced at your grandparents’ wedding. Their family albums held photos of some of the people you were descended from, and yours held theirs. It wasn’t something he thought about while he was away, but now that he was here, steeped in it all, he realized he was finding comfort in his own history, and that of his family.

  Farther out on Charles Street, the shoulder became more narrow, and the houses farther and farther apart. Up around the big bend was the Madison farm, where Lucy lived with her husband, where they’d raised their family. He felt a stab of something that took him a moment to recognize as envy, which made no sense to him at all.

  He crossed the road and took a left onto River Road and ran past Blossoms, where he’d had lunch with Carly, and past the old warehouses that Dallas MacGregor had bought and turned into a film studio. Well below the studio, the lanes narrowed again and the properties were larger and more stately. He ran past several large Victorian homes, the largest of which belonged to Dallas’s great-aunt Berry Eberle, known on the silver screen as Beryl Townsend, who was as colorful a character as any she’d played in films. Still he ran, back toward the center of town, past St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and the First Baptist of St. Dennis, where cars overflowed the parking lots on this Sunday morning. His route took him past the cafés and the shops, past the building that had once belonged to his grandfather, the building that housed the Gazette. There was a light burning on the second floor, and Ford paused before crossing the street. The first-floor door on the side of the building was open, so he trotted up the steps, wondering who had forgotten to turn off the lights and lock the door.

  “Hello?” he called from the top of the steps.

  There was a shuffling noise coming from the hall, and he rounded the corner to find Ray Shelton, the production manager, coming out of his office.

  “Oh, Ford.” The older man smiled with relief. “I couldn’t imagine who … and then I realized I’d left the door … but come in, come in.” He gestured for Ford to follow him. “Have a seat there. Just put those things on the floor …”

  Ford leaned against the doorjamb. “I don’t mean to interrupt anything you’re doing, Ray. I just saw a light on and wasn’t sure if it had been left on by mistake, so I thought I’d check.”

  “I come in most Sundays.” Ray lowered himself into his worn leather chair. “Oh, heck, I come in every morning. Gives me something to do. I hate to admit that I’m slowing down, but I am. Now it takes me seven days to do what used to take me four. Not complaining, mind you. I understand the alternative to getting old.” He grinned. “How’s your mother doing this week? She driving everyone at the inn crazy?”

  “I don’t know about everyone else, but she’d doing a number on me.”

  Ray laughed. “She’s something else, that Gracie. I know how happy she is that you came home to take over for her. I have to admit, I was worried.”

  “Oh, I’m not taking—”

  “You know, this paper’s been around for somethin’ like a hundred and fifty years, give or take. Yes, sir, it’s the voice of St. Dennis. People depend on it for their hard news and their gossip. Folks need both, you know. You can see the history of the entire town played out, right there on the wall of the old conference room. If it happened and was worth talking about, there was a photo on the front page of the Gazette. Don’t know what we’d have done if you hadn’t stepped in to take ’er over, Ford.” Ray leaned back in his chair. “Maybe one of these days I’ll have time to show you what we do here in production. I won’t be around forever, you know.”

  “I thought you had an assistant.”

  “I did. He went back to college in the spring, decided he’d rather be an engineer. Heard there was more money in it. Not too many people get rich putting out a weekly newspaper.”

  “Maybe you should run an ad, see if you can find someone to give you a hand.” Ford tried to calculate how old Ray must be by now, surely well past retirement age. He had to be almost as old as Grace.

  The thought gave him a start. It was still hard to acknowledge that she was aging.

  “I’ll run it past your mother when I get a chance, see if she’s all right with bringing in someone.”

  Ford made a mental note to mention it when he got back to the inn.

  “In the meantime, I have some ads to get ready.” Ray stood.

  “Right. Well, I guess I’ll see you later in the week. I’ll have another article for you.”

  “Good, good. You’re doing a fine job with those. I know how proud Gracie is. I have to say, I’m looking forward to St. Dennis having a real art center. Yessir, it’s going to be good for the town to have a fine art gallery. There was some talk a few years ago about someone opening one up the street here, but then Clay Madison’s mother bought the storefront and opened that shop that sold sweaters for dogs …” Ray’s voice trailed down the hall.

  Ford was almost to the bottom of the steps when he remembered what Ray said about the walls of the old conference room displaying the history of the town. He went back up the steps and walked straight to the front room and opened the door. The air was musty and the layer of dust on the top of the table was clear evidence that it had been a long time since any sort of conference had been held there.

  There on the four walls, in dusty frames, hung the front pages of editions long past. There were pages that spoke of national history—from the Hindenburg disaster to Pearl Harbor to the assassination of John Kennedy and the horror of the World Trade Center on 9/11, and natural disasters like Katrina and Sandy—as well as stories that were big local news. There were photos of winners of the Fourth of July sailboat races and of local pageants, and of returning servicemen from World War II. He smiled at the pictures of Brooke in her beauty queen days (LOCAL BEAUTY CROWNED MISS EASTERN SHORE!) and Dallas MacGregor winning her first Academy Award. Ah, and there were the three amigos in their cowboy clothes, he and Dan grinning like fools while a scowling Lucy sat on the ground in front of them, her hat pulled down over her eyes.

  He’d gone halfway around the room when he came to a photo of a once-familiar face. He leaned closer to read the caption: Future editor in chief? William T. Ellison, the current editor in chief and owner of the St. Dennis Gazette, shows off his newest grandson, Ford Winston Sinclair, the third child of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Sinclair. “You mark my words, he’s going to follow in my footsteps someday,” Mr. Ellison predicted.

  Ford felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him. He remembered his grandfather with great
affection, recalled sitting on his lap in this very room while grown-up talk about the newspaper swirled about him like the smoke from his grandfather’s cigar.

  “I get it, Gramps,” he said aloud.

  He did get it. He understood what the paper had meant to his grandfather, and what it meant to Grace. She hadn’t been the one her father had expected to pass the paper on to, but she took on the job and kept the family legacy alive when neither of her brothers would. He understood what the Gazette represented to the community, but more, what it meant to his family. It was as much a part of them as the Inn at Sinclair Point. He felt its pull as much as he’d fought against it.

  He closed the door softly and went down the steps and out onto the street.

  Don’t know what we’d have done if you hadn’t stepped in to take ’er over …

  No pressure there, he thought, and with a sinking heart, he jogged back to the inn, wondering if he was capable of carrying on that legacy—if he could live up to the standard set by old William T—even if he wanted to.

  There was, he supposed, only one way to find out. Whether or not he was ready to take that step remained to be seen.

  Chapter 20

  CARLY awoke on the living room sofa, a light throw over her legs and a crick in her neck. She sat and stretched, yawned, stood, then stretched again. She found her phone and checked the time: 7:39. A trip into the bathroom was followed by a trip into the kitchen, where she made coffee on her newly purchased one-cup-at-a-time machine. She stepped outside onto the patio and found the morning cooler and less humid than she’d expected. The neighborhood was quiet at this hour, the only sound she heard was the pounding of feet as a jogger passed by out front.

  She went back inside and fixed her coffee, then into the dining room, where she’d left her work from the night before spread out around the table. After Ford left, she’d tried to focus on the catalog, but finally gave up. He was too much in her head. More troubling, he was inching his way into her heart, and that, she told herself, was a no-no. She’d learned a long time ago to stay away from men who didn’t know who they were. And if ever a man needed to have a stern talk with himself to figure it out, it was Ford Sinclair. As far as she could see, he was suffering from a major case of denial.