How to Knit a Heart Back Home (23 page)

The night was even foggier now than it had been when they’d been sitting on the pier. Lucy almost mentioned that it was a good thing, that the fog would keep it from being as cold as spring on the coast could sometimes be, but the atmosphere inside the Mustang was heavy enough.

Instead, she held her tongue and they rode in quiet, uncomfortable darkness. Owen smelled almost as good as a man should legally be allowed to smell, of wood and soap and of something that she now knew was totally, completely him.

She cleared her throat. This silence couldn’t go on or she’d jump out of her skin.

“When did she go missing?”

“They noticed she was gone two hours ago. But she could have been gone for four. Ever since they checked on her at bedtime. Who knows? She’s wandered away before, but they’ve always found her fast.”

“Where are we going to start looking?”

“They asked me to go down to the water. Near the lighthouse.” His voice was strained.

“Seriously? They want you at the beach?”

“They have police officers already out looking for her, going in toward town. And they’re working near the riverbed themselves. But no one’s gotten to the beach yet.”

“She can’t have gone far.”

“They move fast sometimes. One time . . .” His voice trailed off.

“One time what?”

Owen turned onto Main, his hands tight on the steering wheel. “Usually when we got those calls, someone called dispatch within minutes to say they’d found a lost old person. Then we’d go get them and return them and everyone was happy.”

“But what was different this time?” Lucy kept her voice soft.

“An older Filipina immigrant had walked away. She had Alzheimer’s. We couldn’t find her. We looked for hours and then we had to go off shift, so we told the family to keep looking for her. I wrote the missing persons report. When I got back to work three days later, after my weekend, my voice mail was full of frantic messages from the family.”

“She still wasn’t home?”

“She hadn’t been in the country long, didn’t speak any English, had no money. She was scared of strangers.”

“How long did it take to find her?”

“A week and a half later, a guy at a gas station called. She must have walked for about a week, every day, with no food. They found her in a shed in the back. Hadn’t eaten, no water. Dead, of course.” Owens voice was flat. Hard.

“That’s
awful
.”

Owen pulled into the parking lot at the end of Fifth. He shut off the car with a deliberate twist of the key.

“Think about how many people saw her. Think about how many people probably thought she was a bag lady by the end. Didn’t talk to her, didn’t try to help.”

“But this isn’t the city. This is Cypress Hollow. We’ll find her.” Lucy was frightened by the despair that radiated from his posture. If the hero was worried, where did that leave her?

“We have to.”

Chapter Twenty

When your knitting scares you, when you dread picking it up and it stares at you from the corner where you threw it last, you’re either getting it very, very wrong, or very, very right indeed.

—
E. C.

L
ucy watched Owen climb down the rocks awkwardly, one hand on his hip. Just like her, though he’d probably been doing it all his life. Everyone who’d grown up in Cypress Hollow had spent time down here in the tide pools, away from the touristy soft sand. Balancing on slippery rocks, racing away from waves, it was a part of life here. High-school kids snuck bottles onto the beach and trysted in the small caves at low tide. They dared each other to climb up the rickety stairs of the old lighthouse, to hang off the top rail, counting the stars. Lucy, scared of heights, had never been up it, of course, but she loved the look of it outlined against the sky.

Lucy wondered how many women Owen had wooed down here over the years. God knew her first boyfriends had lured her to the beach with the promise of bonfires and s’mores, when in reality they just had forty-ounce beer cans and hickeys to give her.

Over his shoulder, Owen said, “It’s colder here.”

“It’s okay.” Lucy tried to sound reassuring, but it
was
dark and much colder here with nothing to protect them from the ocean wind.

“You want to go left, and I’ll go right?”

“Yeah.” Lucy didn’t want to, not at all, didn’t want to leave Owen, but she knew it would be better if they split up.

He nodded. “Check the crevices, okay?”

Of course she would, even though it was dark as hell out here, even with the flashlight. Her head ached, deep inside.

Setting off across the hard, packed sand, Lucy called Irene’s name into the wind. For a while she could hear Owen behind her, and then she could only hear the pounding of the surf. Thank God it was low tide; this beach could be treacherous for those who were careless when it was high. They could get stuck out here. She’d have nothing but her purse. Her knitting. And Owen.

What would it be like to be stuck with Owen on a rock all night?

Hot. Scorching. No way to be cold. She might not knit that much.

What a fantastic way to think about him while they searched for his missing mother. Lucy blushed in the dark. Stupid.

“Irene? Irene!”

The wind blew her words inland. The blackness of the night sent shivers up her spine that had nothing to do with the temperature.

Lucy went all the way to where the beach ended and the high rocks started, looking into each small cave, and then she turned around and headed back. Owen was doing the same thing from his end and it took everything she had not to run toward him.

When they were close to each other, he shook his head.

“Nothing?” Lucy wanted to take back the stupid question as soon as she’d uttered it. Of course there was nothing. Irene wasn’t with him. They’d struck out.

Owen’s lips pressed together in a fine, determined line. He shook his head. “I’m not sure where else to go. I suppose we can help them by the river . . . I just have to get out of here.” Looking up at the old lighthouse, Lucy saw him suppress a shudder. “I hate it down here.”

Lucy stumbled as fast as she could through the rocky sand behind him. Damn these stupid, strappy, sexy shoes. If she’d been in her Keds, she could have gone fast, instead of tripping like she was now. She followed him up the short incline through the ice plant to the car and looked at him as he leaned against his Mustang. “Should we go?” she asked. “To the river?”

Owen looked back up at the lighthouse. The white, peeling tower rose above them into the foggy sky. As if he hadn’t heard her, he said, “You ever go up there?”

She shook her head, feeling fog-clammy strings of hair hit her ears. “It’s been closed and falling down my whole life.”

“Never stopped anyone from breaking in.”

Lucy admitted, “I’m terrified of heights.”

“That’s the last place I saw my father.”

Lucy put her cold hands into her pockets and ducked her head in what she hoped was an encouraging gesture. A minute to listen while the searchers looked for his mother wasn’t going to hurt.

“That night.” Owen glanced at her. “You know the one.”

The night they’d kissed. The night he’d left town and never come back.

“He hit my mom.”

“Oh, God, Owen.”

Owen laughed, but it was hollow. “Oh, that was nothing special. That happened all the time. Just another Sunday night at the Bancroft house. But that night, after kissing you, I wanted more than just an awful family with no hope. I wanted something better. I told my mother she had to choose. Him or me.”

He closed his eyes and then opened them again, looking up at the lighthouse in the fog. The auto-beam swung from a small electronic box at its base.

“And she chose him,” said Lucy, the fingers of her right hand worrying a beaded stitch marker she found loose in her pocket.

“Yep. I ran out of the house, calling him a fucking asshole and her a whore.” He shrugged. “I was eighteen. I was stupid and brokenhearted. He chased me. We ran all the way down here. Up the steps of that fucking building,” Owen jerked his thumb at the lighthouse. “On the top deck there, he beat my ass so bad I couldn’t see out of my left eye for a week. Broke my wrist and my collarbone. I passed out.”

“Oh, Owen.”

He ran his fingers along the trim of the window and then down to the passenger mirror. “I think he thought he killed me. Or something. He must have said something like that to my mother, because she called the cops and told them where both his counterfeit machine and his drugs were stashed. They put him away long enough for him to get killed in prison, shanked in a dining-hall fight two years in. But I didn’t know that she’d called, not when I woke up. I snuck into the house, got a backpack full of clothes, wrote you that note, and left town. Never looked back.”

Lucy took her hands out of her pockets and hugged herself. She was getting colder by the minute. “What note?”

The query seemed to jerk Owen back to the present. He stared. “You didn’t get the note I left in your mailbox? I put it there the morning I left. Sealed. With your name on it.”

“I never got a note.”

“Well, damn.”

Lucy bit her lip and tried to still her heart. Then she said, “Will you tell me what it said?”

“Maybe someday. Now we have to find Mom.”

Lucy nodded. Later. His mother was the important thing. “What about her house?”

“Her old house? It’s vacant right now. They said that was the first place they checked. But the house was locked, and the gardens were empty.”

“They didn’t check inside?” Lucy pulled on the door handle. “She’s in the house.”

“How would she get in?”

“Does it matter how? A woman knows how to get back into her house if she’s locked out. She’s there. I’d bet my own house on it.”

Chapter Twenty-one

Home is where your stash is.

—
E. C.

O
wen fought the idea with every fiber of his being, but what if, on the off chance, his mother was inside the old place? It was cold tonight, and they had to find her before she hurt herself by accident.

Even if it meant going home.

Going back to the place he swore he’d never return.

God
damm
it.

Parking in front of the crooked mailbox, Owen said, “So now what?”

“We check doors.”

“You think they didn’t do that?”

“All of them?”

“Of course they did . . .
Shit
. What if they missed the side door? It’s pretty hidden by that old camellia bush.”

“I bet she still had a key in the backyard hidden somewhere, and that she’s safe inside.”

Owen felt wings of panic in his chest. “It’s not safe. It’s dirty and cold and torn apart and awful.”

“Hurry, then,” said Lucy.

The worst part was the roses.

It was bad enough that that the past owners had let the lemon trees go unpruned, the lawn be taken over by Bermuda grass, and the paint peel off the house in long, awful strips. It was hard enough to see that the house he’d grown up in had suffered from an extreme amount of neglect.

But the roses broke his heart.

It had been such a place of beauty. Floribundas and tea roses, twiners next to climbers. His mother had other plants, too: lavender bushes and rosemary, lilac and jasmine. She loved everything that gave off a sweet scent. But her passion had been the roses. When she was in the garden, she was happy.

Now, all but the rugosas were long and spindly, and even those weren’t flowering, though they looked like they’d survived. Barely. They hadn’t been pruned. Owen guessed they hadn’t been touched even once since his mother moved out. Many of them had grown tall and fierce, with thickets of thorny canes. Well, at least they were protecting much of the house. What was that fairy tale with the hedge of thorns? That must have been about roses.

His mother’s garden was ugly.

Owen pushed his way through the knee-deep weeds along the pathway to the old iron bench at the back of the yard near the creek. It was the only place that wasn’t a rose thicket. But if these weeds were knee-deep now, after a relatively dry winter, what would they look like by summer? Tripping over a low knot of some sort of rosebush that he couldn’t identify, he almost went down.
Shit
. The sudden motion wrenched his hip.

He caught himself on the edge of the bench and felt underneath it, running his fingers along the bottom of the iron for the hidden house key. Yes. There it was. His mother had always been good at routine. He’d known, if she’d unlocked the door with this key, she would have put it back before letting herself in.

Guilt, ugly as the rose stumps, washed over Owen as he stared up through his mother’s ruined paradise. She couldn’t have stayed alone in the house, though, not after those small fires, and back then he couldn’t afford both Willow Rock and her mortgage, as well as his own.

“Owen?” Lucy’s voice broke through his painful memory. “We should hurry.”

In the dark, the tangled mess of the garden was difficult to negotiate, even in the thin beams of their flashlights. Lucy cursed as she tripped.

“Hey! Last thing you need is a concussion tonight.” Owen held out his hand. “Come on, I’ll lead.” He wanted to touch her. That was the problem. He wanted to touch her too much.

Lucy hesitated, just for a second.

Owen said, “Fine. Just follow close.”

“No, wait.” Lucy put her warm hand in his callused one. “It’s dark out here.”

Walking ahead of her, Owen guided her over the exposed roots and low-lying stalks and branches. “Here, this way. Almost there.”

The back door looked like an afterthought, without even a porch or stoop attached, almost hidden behind an overgrown camellia that hadn’t been pruned in years.

“Goes to the laundry room.”