After a roll or two around the island—it’s only about two-by-four miles—I see the newel post for Elizabeth Street.
A length of road later, I spot a lamppost with a small rectangular sign hanging by chains from a crossbar and boasting the address of the house I own. There is a car coming up behind me, so I turn onto the pink-brick driveway lined with flowering trees. About ten feet in from the street, the drive bends to the right, and I find myself driving through a masonry archway with the words GODDESS ISLAND GARDENS lettered along the arc. Some letters are missing, as if they’ve fallen victim to age: the DESS in goddess, and IS in island.
The sight steals my breath. With the letters missing, the archway reads GOD LAND GARDENS.
Listen to your daughter.
Elizabella had told me her father was at God Land.
My breath catches in my throat.
God Land!
I own this place. I have every right to be here, but it feels as if someone’s looking over my shoulder, as if once I’m far enough down this driveway, a SWAT team will descend and demand to know why I’ve disturbed the peace here. I speed up, as if getting there faster will dissipate the nagging sensation in my gut.
It’s a feeling akin to snooping through someone’s underwear drawer. Intriguing, yet an invasion of privacy. I’m trespassing through Micah’s secrets.
“You own the house,” I whisper to myself. The deed is at the bottom of my purse, along with a palm tree keychain and three keys, one of which I hope opens the door. But if I can’t get in, which I hadn’t considered until this moment, surely someone can come unlock the door—a locksmith, maybe—seeing as I have proof of ownership.
At the next bend of the drive, past a thicket of palms and tropical plants, the house emerges before us.
“It’s the big house, Mommy!” Elizabella shrieks.
“It is big.” I slow our already turtlelike pace to nearly a stop. Pale yellow. Arched windows. Exactly as Bella drew it.
“Nini was here once.”
“That’s what I hear.” I wonder, and not for the first time, if Elizabella has been everywhere Nini’s been. “Have you been here, Ellie-Belle?”
“Silly Mommy.”
“Have you?”
“Hungry!”
The house appears a bit unpolished, perhaps, and the vegetation surrounding it is definitely overgrown, but the patch of wiry lawn appears to have been mowed with regularity. The place is nothing if not large, about the size of the entire building we lived in at Old Town. A two-story stucco with a clay-tile roof, it’s not a brick short of charming, despite the obvious neglect and disrepair.
The pink drive terminates to a roundabout, its farthermost tip nudging a wide set of stairs, which lead to a quaint, covered porch.
I stop the car there, at the edge of the arc, and stare up at the place.
My God. What am I doing here? Suppose there are tenants. Or—Claudette Winters’s voice echoes in my head—suppose there’s a Misty Morningside, or even a Gabrielle, abiding here. The second thought only fuels me to charge up the steps. Not because I want to go head-to-head with whoever happens to answer the door, but because I’m anxious to prove to Claudette-in-my-head that there’s no one here.
Or maybe . . . suppose Bella is right? Suppose I find my husband, alive and well, beyond the door?
“Come on, Ellie-Belle.” I loop the handles of my shoulder bag over my arm and turn off the ignition.
Bella unclips her seat belt—“Come on, Nini. Undo your belt, too. We’re here!”—and climbs into my arms when I open her door.
“Mommy.” She presses a sloppy kiss to my cheek. “It’s God Land.”
I glance around the perimeter of the house—my house—and now that I think about it, it’s a mini Eden. Whoever named the property did so aptly.
I hike her up a bit higher on my hip—there’s only a dull ache around my ovaries now—when we start to climb the porch steps. “Is this where Daddy went?”
“Mmm-hmmm.”
“When did he come here?”
“In his plane.”
“The plane that crashed?”
An exasperated sigh slips between her lips, and she all but rolls her eyes. “It’s in the water, Mommy.”
I wish now I’d thought to visit Dr. Russo one last time after we received the news. Maybe he could offer insight that makes more sense than what I’m thinking: Elizabella saw the future; she—and Nini—predicted Micah’s accident.
I put her down on the porch, and I’m reaching into my purse for the ring of keys when the door whips open before me.
Elizabella startles and grips my hand.
I grip hers but don’t take my eyes from the figure in the doorway.
Chapter 20
The moment he steps out onto the porch, Bella shrinks against me. “No, no.” Her little fingers are in a death grip on my hand.
He rubs a thumb against an eyebrow, as if he’s just roused from a nap. My appearing here must be a big inconvenience for him, seeing as he’s hardly dressed for a polite conversation.
Some sort of canvas shorts, the color of an army tent, hang low on his hips, exposing a white line of flesh in contrast to the tanned rest of him. Swim trunks, maybe, with a drawstring pulled not tight enough. His T-shirt, if you can call it that, hangs off him like a flag whipping in the wind, the sleeves and sides scooped away with the jagged snips of scissors, putting his muscled frame on display. If this place is Goddess Island, he must be the resident demigod.
He washes a scarred hand—there’s a raised bump of flesh just south of his knuckles—over his chin, which appears about five days past a shave. “Can I help you?”
“I’m Veronica Cavanaugh.” Suddenly, I’m warm in jeans and a sweater, not to mention my ankle-high boots.
He shakes his too-long, brown-gold locks from his forehead and squints as if attempting to recognize me, then looks beyond me, toward the driveway. “Land of Lincoln?”
He’s reading my license plate.
I guess I don’t have to explain why I’m dressed for autumn in a place that appears to be bottoming out at near-paradise-degrees Fahrenheit.
Elizabella’s arms now wrap around my thigh.
“I own this property,” I say.
“Okay.”
“Are you a tenant?”
“Naw. Just looking after the place until Tasha comes back.”
“Tasha?” I pry my daughter’s hands loose and lift her to my hip. “Do you mean Natasha? Markham?”
“Tasha . . . I-don’t-know-Tasha. My neighbor. I live . . .” He thumbs in the general direction of things behind him. “Who are you again?”
This time, I offer a hand, which he shakes with a single pump. “Veronica Cavanaugh. And this . . .” I tilt my head to meet Elizabella’s. “This is my daughter. I own this place. I have the deed.” I shift to open my purse, but I can’t risk his seeing the cash—not that he’d ask where I got it, but it isn’t something I want to flaunt—and Bella’s weight makes it difficult to maneuver anyway.
“I’m sorry . . . come in.” He steps aside and opens the door farther.
I shouldn’t walk in while he’s in the house. The shadow of fear looms over me, and I feel as if a target has been painted on my back, just when I was starting to feel safe again. I glance over my shoulder, although I know no one has been tailing me since the Illinois-Wisconsin border. We’re twelve hundred miles from home, and I took a winding path.
No one knows we’re here.
Aside from Detective Guidry, that is.
“And you are?” I raise an eyebrow.
“Christian. Renwick.”
“Mister Renwick, I—”
“Christian. I’m just here to feed the cat.”
“Cat?” I enter the cool two-story foyer, my boots clicking against the pale-blue squares of porcelain. The place looks like something out of old world Capri, complete with a plaster-molded fountain niched into the wall with a copper faucet to supply it. The water isn’t running now.
“Is she not supposed to have a cat?”
“I don’t mind cats,” I say.
“When Tasha left, she didn’t say you’d be coming.”
I didn’t know I was coming, either. “When will Tasha be back?”
“She and the kids are usually back by September, for school.”