The Gilly Salt Sisters (35 page)

His expression was detached, as if communion with God blotted out all his earthly concerns. In contrast, across from Claire, Cutt Pitman prayed like the ex–navy man he was, hands clenched in tight formation, his neck bent the requisite forty-five degrees, with Dee kneeling to his left. A beam of light happened to pass over Dee’s face, turning her features from ordinary to blessed and
just as quickly back again. She looked up and noticed Claire staring at her, then dropped her eyes, flushing to one of her unattractive and uneven blotches.

Next to Claire, Whit was worshipping with his usual arrogant determination. Instead of folding or interlacing his fingers, he held his palms open and out to his sides, as if he were tempting fate to come and get him. So far it hadn’t. Today he was dressed in the cashmere blazer that Claire had given him last Christmas, and fine woolen trousers. A tiny smile played at the corners of his mouth, as if he and he alone were hearing the good news of Jesus and finding it more than satisfactory. Claire squeezed her fingers around the strange silver hoop in her pocket and fought off the urge to punch him.

“Please be seated,” Ethan said, and with a rumble the members of the congregation rearranged themselves. Up at the altar, Ethan looked solemn in his vestments. He caught Claire’s eye, half smiled, and she shifted on the pew. To her right, the mural of Our Lady of Perpetual Salt seemed to shimmer in the thin spring sunshine, and Claire frowned and looked away from her.

After the service was over, Ethan stood at the door in Father Flynn’s old place, greeting each of his new flock. When it came time to shake Claire’s hand, he gripped it a little tighter than he should have. The nest of his palm was warm and dense, and Claire fought an urge to leave her fingers in the security of it. Too soon, Ethan broke their grasp and turned to Whit.

“Good sermon, Father,” Whit said, and then put his hand on Claire’s elbow. After Ethan’s fingers they felt as sharp as January ice. Claire noticed Cutt stealing a sidelong glance at her, and she held her breath, hoping he wouldn’t say anything about her previous meeting with Ethan in the diner. She was relieved when he drifted to the side of the church with Dee, chattering with old Mrs. Butler, who was eager to hear his latest gossip but too deaf to get it right.

“Hello, Ethan,” Claire said. She’d taken extra care with her clothes that day, choosing a cashmere sweater she knew matched her eyes and a tweed skirt that flared along her hips. Instead of
heels she wore her usual polished boots, and she’d twisted her hair into a chignon, which she adjusted now. All through Mass she’d been aware of Ethan watching her. He’d stared as Claire had closed her eyes to recite the Lord’s Prayer and as she sipped the Communion wine. When she finally met his gaze, it was so clear and penetrating as to be almost surgical. He could still see straight into her, Claire realized, and she wondered if she could do the same to him. She waited until Whit joined Cutt across the church, and then she turned to Ethan.

“You were watching me during Mass.” She kept her voice so low that only he could hear it. He blushed along the side of his neck, and Claire struggled with an impulse to stroke him there, the way she used to.

“It’s just that you seem so different from when I met you at the Lighthouse.” He paused, and Claire knew he meant to say she seemed different in the presence of Whit, and she bit the inside of her cheek, hoping he wouldn’t bring up Whit’s name. He didn’t. Instead he asked about Jo. “How’s your sister?” he said. “I was thinking of paying her a visit. I understand she doesn’t come to services anymore. Uncle Chet said things have been pretty rough for her lately.”

Claire’s heart kicked in her chest as it always did at the mention of Jo’s name. She sniffed. “I’m sure you’ve heard by now that we don’t speak,” she said, glaring at Ethan. “If you want to get along here again, Ethan Stone,” she added, her lips cold, “you’d best remember how to navigate between the Gillys and the Turners, and you’d best do it quick.”

Ethan leaned so close to her that she could smell the faint wintergreen of his breath. “Which one are you these days?” he asked, and Claire hesitated.

“Turner, I suppose. At least according to my marriage license.” An awkward pause fell between them. It was maddening to have Ethan standing in front of her in robes, so near and yet marked so fully by his vocation that just thinking of him in carnal terms was a sin, she was sure. She wondered if his faith was really his
own or something he simply pulled on when it suited him, like his cassock. She licked her lips, turned her back, and walked away, winding a stray piece of hair in between her fingers.
Was all of this really worth leaving me for?
she wanted to ask.

A
ll that week Claire attended her committee meetings with fury—even ones to which she didn’t belong.

“But you’re not on the Garden Auxiliary,” Agnes Greene pointed out when she showed up for the annual tea.

“I am now,” Claire said, stealing the chair she guessed Agnes normally sat in and fixing her with her best lady-who-lunches smile.

Agnes took a seat beside Claire and ground her teeth. “Of course, we’re just
thrilled
to have you,” she simpered, and then turned to the woman on her left for the rest of the time.

When civic duties didn’t calm Claire’s nerves, she rode poor Icicle harder than she ever had, driving him through a punishing series of gallops and jumping him in the ring. He did everything she asked without complaint, which made her feel even worse. To compensate she spent extra time rubbing him down and gave him extra feed. She thought about going to confession but skipped it. Nevertheless, Sunday—and her excited dread of facing Ethan again—loomed ahead of her, not to mention all the questions she had about that earring she’d found in Whit’s car. Should she confront him? she wondered. Should she wait to unearth further evidence? She was more than sure there would be some.

Before she could decide, a hard wind woke her. It was Friday night, and she and Whit had been to a function at the club, where Claire had had too much wine. She startled up in bed, the covers puddling around her hips, and instinctively reached out for Whit, but her hand found nothing. He was gone. For a moment she was afraid, and then she was pedal-to-the-metal furious. No doubt he’d snuck out to meet the strumpet he was seeing. She pictured a busty woman with long, supple legs, or maybe a woman
who was always a little dirty-looking, like she needed to wash her hair. Certainly someone who rolled her ass when she walked, though, and smiled too slowly on purpose.

Claire leaned back on the pillows and tried to fall asleep again, but it was useless. A full moon was spilling iodized light across the floor, and the wind was making a symphony out of all the loose ends in the world. An owl wailed in the distance and then once again, and Claire listened harder.
No, not an owl
, she surmised, but definitely something animal and in pain.
Icicle
, she thought, her heart quickening.

She got up and felt her way down the stairs, not bothering with the lights. After twelve years she knew her way around Turner House as well as she knew any place, and anyway, the moon was so bright. She threw on a duffel coat, stuffed her feet into a pair of rubber boots, and then flung open the mudroom door, straining to hear the noise again, and there it was—an off-key wailing like a wounded fox.

“Whit?” she called into the darkness, but there was no answer. She cursed him as she shuffled toward the paddock to check on Icicle. What kind of man left his sleeping wife for another woman? Was he roaming because of the babies Claire had lost? When she found Whit, she planned on asking him all that and more, and then she would tell him some things of her own.

She neared the stable and was about to step out of the shadows when she noticed two things. First, the floodlights outside were on. And second, the top of the split stable door was hinged back like a penny tossed without a care. She scanned the dark paddock for Icicle but didn’t see anything, and so she started forward to close up the door. Before she reached it, a pair of rising voices stopped her. One of them was Whit’s.

“You have to!” he urged. “You’re in no position—” A panicked female voice answered him, breathy with alarm.

“We could leave! We could go somewhere else and start all over. Please, I didn’t plan this. I have nowhere else to go. My father just threw me out.”

“Shut up,” Whit said, his voice a furious rasp. “I’m not going anywhere with you. And I’m not about to let a little slut like you tarnish my good name. It’s the only thing of value I have left. If you ruin that, you ruin everything. I’m not giving you the chance, do you hear me?”

“I thought you wanted…” the girl tried to say, but he didn’t let her finish.

“Not like this. Not with someone like you…” Whit replied, and then his words trailed off, and Claire didn’t hear anything, just scuffling and a terrible heavy silence.

She tiptoed closer to the open threshold and peered into the darkness, squinting, and then she saw Whit embracing a young woman. Only something was wrong. The girl wasn’t moving. Claire crept closer and saw one of the girl’s feet sliding out from under her. Claire realized she was choking. And it was Whit who was choking her.

Claire couldn’t explain what happened to her next except to say that she finally felt what Jo must have when she pulled Claire from the fire. It was like she was burning all over, her skin so hot she was shivering, and there was nothing in her ears but a smoky roar. She flexed her arms, and her muscles quivered. From somewhere deep inside herself, the real Claire crouched and watched to see what this new version would do.

She did it without thinking—grabbed the shovel in the corner and wheeled straight at Whit, her arms upraised, a scream she didn’t recognize tearing her lips. At that moment she was pure Gilly again: red-haired, with fury for blood, perfect aim, and nothing left to lose.

Startled, Whit let go of the girl, who fell in a heap at his feet. He spun around to face Claire, dodging left just as she brought the edge of the shovel down on his skull. There was a sickening crack of metal on bone and then a second thump as Whit collapsed, a trickle of blood oozing along his ear. Claire stood over him, debating whether or not to keep going, but the girl suddenly gasped and flailed her legs, and only then did Claire see that it was
Dee Pitman from the Lighthouse Diner. Cutt’s daughter. Barely eighteen if she was a day.

“Thank God,” the girl said, hitching herself onto one elbow, and then she closed her eyes and sank back down again on the boards.

Icicle nickered and shifted in his stall, agitated by the commotion. At the sound, Claire returned to herself, becoming Claire Turner again, as coolheaded as she’d been on the morning of her wedding when she’d written the Turner name front and center in her heart and soul. And from that moment until this one, she’d checked everything against it. Now, however, she was glad for it. It made it so much easier to stand over the slumped bodies of her husband and his mistress, one of whom she wanted to murder and the other of whom she thought she already might have.

She squatted down and pressed her fingers to Whit’s neck, relieved to feel his pulse beating, and then she turned her attention to Dee, who was still unmoving. Her eyes looked bruised, and her lip was a swollen plum. Claire stepped over Whit and knelt down in front of Dee.

Dee looked up at Claire, her nose filmed with snot, her eyes confused as a child’s. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t even know what to do.” Well, she was a child, Claire thought. “I can’t go home,” Dee blubbered. “Not now.”

Claire sighed. She knew everything one person could about not going home, and frankly, it was a story she was sick of. In the darkness Icicle stamped a foot and whinnied, as if to get her attention.

“Stay here,” she whispered, settling Dee against the stable wall. “Don’t move,” she added. She led Icicle out of his stall. She gathered a blanket, his bridle, and a saddle, and then she fed the bit into his mouth and cinched the saddle tight.

“Put your foot in here,” she told Dee, guiding her toes into the stirrup. “Lean against me and throw your leg up. Now sit tight.” Dee did, wide-eyed but obedient as Claire also swung onto Icicle’s back.

“Hang on,” Claire said, nudging Icicle out of the barn. They started down Plover Hill, picking up speed once they got to the bottom. It was much later than Claire had realized. Very soon the sun would come up. Already the sky had the hazy, undecided look it always got right before it burst into full morning.

She dug her heels into Icicle’s flanks, and he broke into a canter. She felt Dee tighten her legs so she wouldn’t fall. The girl didn’t ask where they were going, and Claire didn’t tell her, but the salt ponds would be waiting, Claire knew, glowing in the dawn like the thick lace veil she’d worn pulled across her face on her wedding day and which she’d been tangled up in ever since, for richer or poorer, for better or worse, Whit’s chattel until death did one of them part, and please God, she prayed as she streaked through the last of the darkness, let it not be her.