Stargazey Point
Authors: Shelley Noble
Stargazey Point
Shelley Noble
To my grandmothers, Minnie and Letty, strong Southern women with staunch opinions, steadfast loyalties, and zest for life
A
s always thanks to my agent, Kevan Lyon, and to my editor, Tessa Woodward, and to the HarperCollins art department for another wonderful cover.
I spent many happy and informative hours reading Deborah Lange’s
Restoring the Glen Echo Park Carousel,
an inspiration for anyone who loves historic carousels and is interested in learning about the work that goes into keeping them “alive” for a new generation.
A special thanks to all those who came to our aid when Sandy gave us firsthand experience of the devastation left in the wake of a hurricane. Little did I know while writing
Stargazey Point
that we would soon have so much in common with my fictional little South Carolina town still rebuilding many years later.
And three cheers to the Floyd L. Moreland Dentzel/Looff Carousel in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. May you ride again.
Contents
E
ven when the carousel music slowly wobbled to silence, Cab could still hear it playing inside his head. Sometimes he heard it in his dreams, and he and Midnight Lady would gallop over the sand, wild like the wind—his uncle Ned had read that from a book once,
wild like the wind
.
His uncle locked up the carousel, stuck the cash box under his arm, and came to stand beside him. “Tired, son?”
“No, sir,” Cab said, stifling a yawn.
“It’s a mighty fine night, ain’t it?”
Cab nodded. Stargazey Point was just about the best place in the world. Like living in a carnival.
Uncle Ned said good night to the women closing up the community store. They were going home for the night, but out on the pier people played the arcades and ate cotton candy and drank lemonade. If he listened real hard, Cab could hear music coming from the pavilion out at the end, where the grown-ups would be dancing to a real live band.
Ned put his arm around Cab’s shoulders. “Time we were getting home. Have us some leftover barbecue and get to bed.”
They walked away from the beach, the lights, and the sounds and into the night. They were halfway home when Uncle Ned stopped in the middle of the dark street. “Look up at the sky, Cab.”
Cab did. The sky was black and there were more stars than you could ever count. He sighed. School would be starting soon, and he’d have to leave his uncle for another year. He didn’t want to go; he didn’t like boarding school, and everyone here was nice.
“I wish I could stay in Stargazey Point forever.”
“Maybe you will one day. It’s a magical place, sure enough. It can mend your heart, make you strong, and show you the way to follow your dream. You remember that, Cab. There’s not a better place in the whole world than right here at the Point.”
H
ate.
How many times a day did that word come up in conversation.
I hate these shoes with this outfit. I hate Jell-O with fruit.
People laugh and say
I hate it
when that happens
. Hate could be a joke. Or an all-consuming fire that singed your spirit before eating your soul.
Abbie Sinclair had seen it in all its forms. Okay, maybe not all, and for that she was thankful, but in too many forms to process, to turn a cold eye, to keep plugging away in spite of it all.
A sad commentary on someone who had just turned thirty. Somehow, Abbie thought that the big three-oh would set her free, leave the crushed, dispirited twenties behind. But as the therapist told her during her first session, she wouldn’t be able to go forward until she came to terms with her past. She didn’t go back—to the therapist or the past.
So here she was five thousand feet above Indiana, Kentucky, or some other state on her way from Chicago to South Carolina, thinking about hate instead of worrying about what to have for dessert instead of Jell-O or what shoes
would
go with this outfit.
Abbie knew she had to jettison her hate or it would destroy her. But no matter how many times she’d written the word, torn the paper into little strips, shredded it, burned it, ran water over it until it disintegrated, stepped on it—no matter how many times she’d symbolically thrown it away, forced it out of her heart—there seemed to be just a little left, and it would grow back, like pus in an infected wound.
Pus? Really?
Had she really just made that analogy? Abbie pressed her fingers to her temples. The absolute lowest. Purple prose. Bad writing and ineffective emotion, something her mentor and lover insisted had no place in cutting-edge documentaries. Something her post-flower-child mother insisted had no place anywhere in life. And something that her best friend, Celeste, said was just plain tacky.
Besides, it didn’t come close to what she really felt.
Abbie had been full of fire when she started out. She’d planned to expose the evils of the world, do her part in righting injustice, make people understand and change. The Sinclairs’ youngest daughter would finally join the ranks of her do-gooding family. Instead, that fire had turned inward and was destroying her. How arrogant and naive she had been. How easily she’d lost hope.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Celeste said when Abbie showed up at her apartment with one jungle-rotted duffel bag and a bucketful of tears. “You can probably get your old job back. Want me to ask?”
Abbie just wanted to sleep, except with sleep came dreams peopled by the dead, asking why, why, why of the living.
They decided what she needed was a change of scene. At least that’s what Celeste decided. Somewhere comfortable with people who were kind. Celeste knew just the place. With her relatives in a South Carolina beach town named Stargazey Point.
“You’ll like it there,” Celeste said. “And you’ll love Aunt Marnie and Aunt Millie and Uncle Beau. They’re really my great or maybe it’s my great-great . . . but they’re sweethearts and they’d love to have you.”
It did sound good: quiet, peace, sun, and surf. “I’ll go,” Abbie said.
She was a basket case. She needed therapy. She went on vacation instead.
Celeste drove her to O’Hare. “You’ll have to take a cab from the airport. I don’t think they drive anymore. It’ll take about forty minutes if there’s no traffic and costs about sixty dollars. Here.” She thrust a handful of bills at Abbie then tried to take her coat. “You won’t need it there.”
Abbie refused the money and clung to her coat; she didn’t need it. That burning emotion she couldn’t kill was enough to keep her warm on the coldest day.
There was a mini bottle of unopened chardonnay on the tray table before her. She was still clutching her coat.
She wasn’t ordinarily a slow learner. And she usually didn’t run. That had changed in a heartbeat. And that’s when the hate rushed in.
She hated the company whose arrogance had washed away an entire schoolroom of children and the boy and his donkey, hated the security people who had smashed their cameras, hated those who stood by and watched or ran in terror, who dragged her away when she was only trying to save someone, anyone. Those who arrested Werner and threw him in a jail where he met with an “unfortunate accident.”
For that she hated them most of all. Selfish, but there it was. They had killed Werner on top of everything else.
And there was not a damn thing she could do about it. There was no footage, no Werner; she’d barely escaped before they confiscated her visa. Others weren’t so lucky.
The tears started, but she forced them back. How could she allow herself tears when everyone else had suffered more?
S
he should be here any minute now, Sister, and you haven’t gotten out the tea service. Do you think it’s goin’ to polish itself? And look how you’re dressed.”
Marnie Crispin glanced down at her dungarees and the old white T-shirt that Beau had put out for the veterans’ box, then looked at her younger sister and sighed. Millie was dressed in a floral print shirtwaist that had to be twenty years old but was pressed like it had just come off the rack at Belks Department Store.
“I know how I’m dressed; the garden doesn’t weed itself. I’m planning to change. And I’m not getting out the tea service.”
“But, Sister.”
“You don’t want to scare the girl away, do you?”
“No,” said Millie, patting at the white wisps of hair that framed her thin face. “But she’s come all the way from Chicago, poor thing. And I want everything to be just perfect for her. Beau, you’re droppin’ shavings all over my carpet.”
Their younger brother, who would turn seventy-nine in two months, was sitting in his favorite chintz-covered chair, the ubiquitous block of wood and his pocketknife in hand. He looked down at his feet and the curls of wood littered there.
“Oh.” He attempted to push them under the chair with the side of his boot.
“How many times have I told you not to drop shavings on my carpet?”
Beau rocked forward and pushed himself to his feet.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Beau looked down at the carving in his hand, back at Millie. “Going to watch out for that taxicab from the front porch.”
Millie pursed her lips, but there was no rancor in it. Beau was Beau and they loved him. “Just you mind you don’t drop shavings all over my porch.”
Beau shuffled out of the room.
“And tuck that shirttail in,” Millie called after him.
C
abot Reynolds heard the car go by. They didn’t get much sightseeing this time of year, a few fishermen, an occasional antiquer, a handful of die-hard sun worshippers, though most of them preferred the more upscale hotels of Myrtle Beach.
There were a few year-round residents and hearing a car wasn’t all that unusual. In the year he’d lived here, he’d come to recognize the characteristic sound of just about every car, truck, and motorcycle in the area. And he didn’t recognize the one that had just passed. Which could only mean one thing.
Wiping his hands on a well-used chamois, he climbed over the engine housing and looked out between the broken lattice of the window. Whoever it was had come and gone.