The Gilly Salt Sisters (36 page)

I
t was the strangled call of one of those damn marsh cats that woke Jo, but it was the added noise of horse’s hooves on clay that got her out of bed. It was barely dawn, but already the spring gulls were out fierce and fast. The wind had shifted direction overnight, and whenever it did that, Jo knew, the birds were always the first to say anything about it.

She couldn’t claim she was surprised when she spied the spare shape of a white horse drifting into the marsh. She was used to seeing Claire ride out here at daybreak. About six years back, Claire had started coming by the graves. Jo knew all about her sister’s visits and the little piles of salt she sometimes left on Henry’s grave, just the way their mother had taught them. Jo didn’t like it, but she also didn’t think she could stop Claire. There were some things that were beyond human contention.

But Claire didn’t rein in her horse at the edge of the marsh that morning the way she normally did, and there wasn’t just one silhouette on the beast’s back—there were two. The light was misty and weak, true, and the farmhouse glass was old and blurred, but Jo didn’t think she was wrong to believe what she was seeing. She watched as the horse slowed and neared the house and two women got off, one followed by the other, arms looped around each other’s waist, beloved from the looks of it, but Jo knew that couldn’t be, because Claire was a woman who loved only herself.

Jo pulled back from the window and held her breath, hoping that the vision of Claire would fade away, but she kept coming. Jo could hear feet dragging out of kilter up the porch steps, and she sighed. If trouble came in the shape of a stranger, as Mama had always said, then the appearance of long-absent loved ones was even worse. True calamity was always stuck to them like the stripe on a skunk.

Claire’s fist sounded on the door, and Jo weighed the option of hiding. She glanced at the closet in the far corner of the room and then considered the nook between the grandfather clock and the sofa downstairs, but Claire was like the damn weather. You couldn’t outrun her, you couldn’t change her, and it would be just plain stupid to try to avoid her. With Claire a body was always better off battening down the hatches and waiting to see what would happen. Jo heard a heavy stumbling inside the house and then a heavier thump.

“Goddamn it, Joanna!” Claire called. After twelve years her voice was sharper than Jo remembered. “I know you’re standing on the stairs,” she said. “I can see you. Get down here and help me!”

Jo took a deep breath, filling herself like a sail, and descended, thinking she had the situation more or less under control. But when she got downstairs, she wasn’t the least bit prepared for what she found. In the front hallway, she saw Claire crouched in a ball over the unconscious blob of Dee Pitman.

Jo cocked her head. The stairs were dark, and her vision was one-sided, but Claire didn’t look like someone who had chosen to lop herself off at the roots and blow away free. She was wearing a duffel coat over a white cotton nightgown and rubber boots, and with her braid sprung loose down her back she appeared to be all of eighteen again.

“Help me,” she demanded, and Jo crept closer, already regretting getting involved, but what else could she do? When life dumped a mess on your doorstep, you had to get out the mop and start wiping it up.

“Let me,” she said, kneeling to scoop her good arm under Dee’s neck, loosening the girl’s scarf a little. She blew on Dee’s cheeks until her eyelids fluttered, and then she laid Dee’s head back down and stepped away before the girl regained full consciousness. Jo didn’t know what Dee was doing here in her house, but that wasn’t her concern. Let Claire deal with her.

“Fuck,” Dee moaned. “Holy fuck.”
Charming
, Jo thought. Dee hitched herself onto an elbow and looked at her without comprehension. “Where am I?”

Claire stepped forward, her nightdress billowing under her coat. “My sister will get you some water if you want.”

Perfect
, Jo thought. Here was Claire back for all of five minutes, and already she was giving orders.

Dee sucked in a breath, and her eyes went wide with terror. “You brought me to Salt Creek Farm?”

Claire sighed. “I didn’t know what else to do with you. You said you couldn’t go home. You said your father had thrown you out, remember?”

Dee rolled onto her side for a moment, then flipped herself onto her hands and knees like a cat. She sat back on her knees and blinked. “So you brought me
here
?”

Claire sniffed. “Here’s as good a place as any. And besides, beggars can’t be choosers.”

Jo interceded. “But what are
you
doing here, Claire?” If they were going to play twenty questions, Jo didn’t think it was fair that Dee should be the only one in the hot seat. Claire just chewed on a piece of her hair and said nothing, so Jo turned to Dee. She had a stubborn stare, Jo saw, and the way her mouth pinched at the corners told Jo that Dee knew more about hard times than her age suggested. “How old are you anyway?” she asked. She thought she remembered Dee’s father telling her she was quite young.

Dee’s lip trembled. “Eighteen last week.”

A babe
, Jo thought. “Why can’t you go home?” She pictured Cutt’s tattooed forearms and military-shorn hair. He seemed to move only in straight lines. Jo couldn’t think of one soft thing
about him. She didn’t know what Dee’s trouble was, but Jo wouldn’t want to go home to him either, she decided.

Dee rubbed the side of her neck, pulling her scarf open, and Jo saw that a row of purple ghost prints was starting to bloom on her skin. She was a girl who stumbled over her words, flattening one down more than the last like she was closing a fan in her throat, but it didn’t matter. Her tongue could have been oiled with the honey of heaven and there wouldn’t have been any good way for her to say what she did next. She rolled her hands together in a little ball, the only tidy thing about her. “I’m pregnant. It’s Whit’s. Only”—she wiped away a tear—“he doesn’t want me, and he doesn’t want the baby like I thought he would. He wants to get rid of us both.”

Jo supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised, but Claire let out a shriek. At first Jo thought it was surprise at the news, but then she followed Claire’s eyes and spied the necklace around Dee’s throat. It was a heart-shaped locket hung on a silver chain and embossed with a large and florid
W
—a bauble Jo knew very well. Before Jo could stop her, Claire reached out and snatched it clean off Dee’s neck, shoving it in the pocket of her coat.
Whoever said that memory carried no weight was wrong
, Jo thought. Clearly it did, especially when it was nestled in the palm of your hand.

Claire settled her face inches away from Dee’s. She shook her head so furiously that Jo wouldn’t have been surprised to see sparks fly off her hair. “This is Whit’s initial! He monograms everything with this exact script. You’re a little thief! You have no right—to any of it!” She sat back on her heels, covered her eyes with the white stems of her fingers, and began to cry.

Jo wrapped Dee in one of the scratchy blankets she found in the hall closet and left her to shiver on the sofa in the parlor. “Not like this,” she told Claire. “Come with me.” She led her to the kitchen. “This isn’t the time or the place. It’s just a cheap old necklace, after all.” She thought it prudent to stay silent on the fact that before any of the mess now unfolding in her hall, the locket on that chain was supposed to be hers.

“W
hat happened?” Jo poured out two cups of peppermint tea and sat Claire at the table in the center of the kitchen.

Claire rubbed her eyes. “I woke up and heard a noise, and Whit was gone. He wasn’t in bed, and he wasn’t anywhere in the house. That’s been happening a lot lately, him coming home late or leaving before dawn. I figured something was going on, but I didn’t know with whom.

“The noise was coming from the stable. The moon was so bright I decided to check on Icicle. I thought it was him. But, when I got there, I saw Whit and Dee, having an argument. She was saying they could go away, and he was saying he wouldn’t let her tarnish his name, and then, without any warning, Whit started choking her.” Claire shuddered and tipped the teacup to her mouth, then wiped her fingers across her lips. “I stopped him.”

Jo’s heart skipped a beat. “Claire,” she said carefully. “What did you do?”

“He’s fine.” Claire put down the cup. “I just hit him with a shovel, is all. He’ll most definitely have a headache in the morning, but he still had a pulse. I checked before I saddled up Icicle.” She shifted in her chair and lowered her voice. “I don’t care if Dee’s father does skin her alive and place her in a vat of boiling blood. She has to go.” She took the necklace from her pocket and laid it out on the table. “What the hell is this? Clearly it’s from him, but it’s not his style.”

A gust of wind clattered over the roof, and Jo shivered. The morning was turning out to be nasty in all senses of the word, she thought. At any moment rain would start thumping down, churning up the salt marsh, watering the mud she was trying to scoop. “Come on, Claire,” Jo said. “You’re the big churchgoer now. What about making room at the inn?”

Claire banged her fist on the table. “This isn’t the Christmas story! We’re not talking about an innocent virgin, here. That tramp was fucking my husband.”

Jo shrugged. “She only did what you once did.”

Claire’s rosebud lips fell open. “Is that what this is about for you? Settling scores?” She spread her hands on the table, her diamond wedding band winking at Jo like a fox’s crafty eye. “Look, all my old wounds are open for business. Are you happy?”

Jo slid her eyes away from her sister. “I don’t reckon it matters how I feel about things anymore, Claire. There’s something you should know before you decide if you want to stay here. We’ve both got scores to settle that are out of our hands.”

Claire chewed her lip. “What do you mean?”

Jo bowed her head. “Remember your dreams of college?” she said. “Well, I’m paying for those now, thanks to Mama.” Jo told her then about the second loan on the farm and how Mama had taken it out to use for Claire before all their plans went up in smoke. She finished by admitting how if she didn’t come up with some cold hard cash in the very near future, the bank would be taking the marsh.

Claire sighed and pursed her lips—an old habit that signaled she was about to admit something. What she said next shocked Jo. “I already know. Whit’s been talking about it. It’s almost
all
he talks about now. He has this crazy idea that if he can buy this place, everything will turn around for him.”

Jo snorted. “That doesn’t mean I’ll sell.” She grew sober. “But he does have the dollars in his pocket to do it.”

Claire hesitated. “Not really,” she said, and Jo leaned forward. “Things aren’t quite as on the up-and-up with Whit’s business as you might think,” Claire said. “Over the years he’s been selling off paintings and family silver, even his mother’s old fur coat. I don’t know how much he has left, but it can’t be much.”

Jo sat back hard in her chair. A waft of peppermint tea stung her good eye. Claire always did have the ability to reach under a person’s ribs and get to the heart of a matter, she reflected. It used to drive their mother crazy, and Jo could see how it might be unpleasant in a marriage, especially if you were married to a man
like Whit, who preferred his secrets boxed on a shelf and covered with dust.

Jo sized up her sister. “Tell me, Claire, if it hadn’t been for finding Dee and Whit together in your stable, would you ever have come back here?”

Claire blinked, and Jo could see the network of tiny wrinkles that had burrowed into the outer corners of her eyes, perhaps a sign that things hadn’t been going well with Whit—and not just lately either. Lines like that took time to groove into skin, like water wearing down rock, and if anyone knew the slow ways grief could carve flesh, Jo did.

Claire bowed her head. “I don’t know. Maybe. Eventually.”

That did it for Jo. She pushed her chair back from the table and stood. “She stays.”

Claire looked around as if waking from a long, unpleasant dream. She gnawed her thumbnail for a moment, considering, then went ahead and tossed her fate in with Jo, raising the stakes between them. She picked up her teacup. “Then I guess I’m not going anywhere either.”