The laughter in his eyes died. He looked down at the watermelon in his hands, but didn’t seem to notice the juice still dripping down onto his crossed legs. “No. Cal left, and I didn’t feel like going to the Water Festival anymore.”
“I love the Water Festival!” Maris said, oblivious to the sudden tension in the air. “It’s every July and it’s so much fun. There’s games and music and lots of really great food.” She turned to Owen. “You can come with me and my family—we go every year, because my dad has to enter the sailing regatta even though he’s never won. He says somebody has to come in last, so it might as well be him.”
Owen just nodded numbly, as if unsure whether any response was really required, or whether his attending the festival with Maris and her family was already a foregone conclusion.
Gibbes handed a slab of watermelon to Maris and then one to Owen and then, finally, one to me. He held it up like a challenge and I took it. Even though I was dying to wad up a pile of the napkins Loralee had packed but that had so far gone untouched, I took a bite out of the watermelon, closing my eyes at the unexpected sweetness that accompanied the crunch.
I chewed in silence, savoring every bite until all that was left were a few of the flat seeds in my mouth. Since it seemed expected, I moved them all to my lips and ejected them one by one. None were as impressive as Gibbes’s effort, but not bad for a first-timer. I eagerly picked up a second piece.
My victorious grin faded as I spotted a man on foot downstream from us standing on solid ground right on the edge of the marsh. He wore an Atlanta Braves baseball cap, jeans shorts, and a white T-shirt, and he was slowly coming down toward the water, waving with sweeping strokes in front of him what appeared to be a metal detector.
Gibbes leaned back on his arms, watching. “You’d be amazed at the treasures you find in the marsh. With the influx of new water and material every high tide, it’s not that surprising. Especially after a bad storm, when all sorts of things get dredged from the bottom. My brother got a metal detector for Christmas one year, and he and I used to treasure-hunt all the time.”
“Neat!” Owen scrunched his eyes at the sun, and I noticed that the tip of his nose was getting pink. “Did you ever find anything?”
Gibbes kept his gaze on the stranger. “We found lots of things—mostly junk. Beer cans, bottle openers, hubcaps—stuff like that. But sometimes we’d find cool things, too.” He stopped, his brows furrowed as if he were trying to remember something. “We found a Civil War bullet once. We were so excited when we brought it into an antique store on Bay Street and the man verified it was definitely from the Civil War era.”
“Do you still have it?” Owen asked, his eyes wide.
Gibbes shook his head. “No. Cal kept it, but I don’t know what happened to it.”
I turned my focus from the man with the metal detector to Gibbes, something he’d just said jarring my memory.
“What other cool things did you find?” Owen asked, leaning forward with his arms around his knees. Both were also turning pink, and I was about to tell him he needed to put on more sunscreen when Gibbes spoke again.
“Part of an airplane. It was a bolt with a little strip of charred metal on it. We had no idea what it was when we found it, but we brought it in to the same antiques dealer and he said he thought it might have come from a plane. He said back in the nineteen fifties a plane crashed into the marsh and we must have found a part of it.”
“Can we see it?” Owen asked, presumably including Maris, who was as wide-eyed as he was.
“I’m afraid I don’t have it either. Cal kept it with the bullet in a shoe box under his bed. He must have gotten rid of it when he moved away.”
“He didn’t,” I said, my throat suddenly dry. “He kept it.”
I remembered finding the shoe box in our closet after Cal had died. He’d never spoken about the box or its contents to me, and I’d almost included it in the bags I took to Goodwill before I moved. At the last moment I’d pulled out the shoe box and kept it, one of the few remnants I had of my late husband.
“I brought it with me. I’ll show it to you when we get back to the house.”
They were all looking at me, making me self-conscious. I discarded my half-eaten piece of watermelon and reached for a napkin and a clean plate. “I’m going to bring some food to Loralee. I’m sure she’ll want to eat when she wakes up.”
Gibbes cut another slice of watermelon from one of the quarters and placed it on the plate. Our gazes met and held, as if we were both remembering the same Cal, the boy who searched the marsh for hidden treasures with his younger brother.
But as I walked down the dock carrying Loralee’s food, all I could think of was the magic of this place into which Cal had been born and raised, and why all he’d cared enough to take with him when he left was an old bullet and burned wreckage from a crash.
chapter 14
LORALEE