Lucy And The Stone. Dixie Browning

Lucy had long since lost track of Ollie Mae and Lillian and the rest of Clarence Dooley’s mistresses.

      For one isolated moment she felt utterly alone. And then she shrugged and put it down to no more than being in a strange place, among strangers. Something she should be used to by now.

      It would pass. Everything passed, good and bad.

      * * *

      “You’ll like Maudie and Rich,” said Jerry, the boy from the marina where Lucy had been instructed to leave her car and take a boat out to Coronoke. “Maudie—she’s my cousin on my mother’s side. Well, I reckon if you go back a little ways, on my daddy’s side, too. She used to be—Maudie, that is—she used to caretake over to Coronoke, but then this guy—”

      Lucy clutched her guitar case in both arms, wondering if there was going to be much spray. She’d brought her raincoat, but like an idiot, she’d left it in the trunk of her car.

      Watch where you’re going! she wanted to say, but didn’t because he was only a boy. Still, she’d feel a whole lot safer if he would keep his mind on what he was doing instead of staring at her as if she were some kind of freak and filling her in on the pedigree of people she had never heard of and would probably never meet.

      There was no spray. In fact, they were barely making a wake. Lucy could have swum faster than this if she hadn’t been so blessed tired. The boy—he couldn’t be more than sixteen or so—was looking at her in a certain way that made her feel like the butterfat champion at the county fair.

      After thirty-four years she ought to be used to it. Towering over everyone in sight, having men make lewd propositions without even getting to know her first. It was all part of the curse that had befallen her at the age of twelve, when she’d shot up to five feet eight and her breasts had burst out of her training bra.

      “Sugar, there’s not a blessed thing you can do about it, less’n you was to get fat as a sausage all over,” her father’s lady friend, Lillian, had told her. “Even then, it prob’ly wouldn’t do you no good. Girls with your looks’s got a hard row to hoe, and being big just makes you stand out more.” Lillian had been one of Lucy’s favorites. A blowsy redhead, she’d been kind enough to take a motherly interest in Lucy at a time when Lucy was undergoing a lot of frightening changes in her body and in her emotions.

      “Don’t you never let a boy lay a hand on you, you hear me? They’ll try. Lord knows they’ll try to make you think they’re a-hurtin’ somethin’ fierce and you’re their only hope o’ salvation. But you tell ‘em you got the curse real bad, and your Pawpaw just sent you out to get some gun oil, ‘cause he’s a-cleaning up his shotgun. If that don’t shrivel up what ails ‘em, you use your knee where it’ll do the most good, y’hear?”

      Lucy sighed. Nostalgia. It had to be the smell of all this salt air. She’d never been one for looking back. “Big adventures ahead, li’l sugar,” Pawpaw always used to say when they’d load up the trolley and light out in the middle of the night for a new town, a new job. “That ol’ highway’s unrollin’ right in front of your pretty brown eyes. You just keep on a-lookin’ straight ahead.”

      The narrow beach was striped with coral sunlight and lavender shadows when Jerry pulled up to the pier on Coronoke. He clanged the tarnished brass bell that was attached to the side of a shed and within minutes, a woman came jogging down through the woods.

      “Hi, you must be Mrs. Dooley. I’m Maudie Keegan.”

      “It’s Ms. That is, I was married, but I took back my own name so—”

      “I know what you mean. Neither fish nor fowl. Me, either, until I solved my problem by becoming Mrs. Keegan.”

      By which Lucy concluded that Maudie Keegan had been married before and had shed her first husband’s name at the same time she’d shed him.

      Lucy had gone from Dooley to Hardisson and back to Dooley so fast, even the IRS had trouble keeping up with her. She only hoped her social security would make it through the maze by the time she was old enough to need it.

      “I see you stocked up on canned things. Good.” Maudie reached for the box of groceries Jerry was lifting out, and the three of them relayed everything up from the pier, along a winding path through shadowy, fragrant woods, to a small cottage perched a hundred-odd feet from the edge of the sound.

      “Is that it?” Maudie Keegan asked when the last of the load was transported. “Okay, then here’s the rundown. Your closest neighbor is a birder named McCloud. He’ll be here all summer. There’s a novelist installed in Blackbeard’s Hole, but you won’t see much of him. He comes every year and holes up until Labor Day, working on the Great American Novel. There’s a couple from Michigan due in tomorrow and two family groups coming the next weekend. Eventually you’ll probably meet everybody, but no one’s obliged to socialize. Rich and I are on the other side of the island in the old lodge.”

      Her small hands moved constantly while she spoke, and Lucy watched, mesmerized, murmuring an appropriate response when necessary.

      “One of us will pick up mail and messages every day or so, and we have a radio for emergencies. The boats at the pier are for the guests. When we’re full up, we sign up a day in advance so everyone can make plans accordingly, but when there’re only a few people in residence, feel free to take one out. Rich keeps them fueled up. Meanwhile, if you need anything at all, one of us is usually available. Just follow the trail around the island until you come to a place that looks as if it ought to be condemned. That’s ours.”

      Bemused, Lucy watched the woman jog through the woods until the lengthening shadows swallowed her up. Turning, she met an all-too-familiar look in the eyes of the young man from the marina.

      Evidently, Jerry appreciated king-size blondes with brown eyes, wild hair and big mouths.

      She sighed, knowing she would have to make certain things clear to avoid any future misunderstanding. Lucy got along well with people of all ages and sexes, but with the male variety, she had long since learned to get across a subtle message right from the first.

      Accessible she was; available she was not.

      Two

      Stone, once more half-asleep on a drifting inner tube, roused at the sound of voices. Evidently, Lucy Dooley had emerged from her cottage. La Dooley, as he had taken to calling her in his mind. The ex-Mrs. William Carruthers Hardisson.

      His quarry, he thought reluctantly.

      She had arrived late the previous evening. Stone had heard the sound of an outboard from the screened deck of his own cottage. A few minutes later, he’d seen Maudie Keegan emerge from the woods, followed by the kid from the marina and a tall, shaggy-haired blonde, all carrying boxes, bags and baggage.

      Alice hadn’t told him what she looked like, only that she had a common type of prettiness that appealed to some men. Evidently, it had appealed to Billy. The woman had waited until Alice was conveniently out of the way before she’d put the moves on poor Billy.

      Poor Billy? Hell, now he was starting to sound like Alice!

      Stone had considered wandering over to meet his new neighbor last evening. He’d decided against it. She wasn’t going to do anything the first day or so. Maybe not at all. And as long as she behaved herself, she wouldn’t even have to know he was there.

      He continued to watch her from a safe distance, feeling pleasantly relaxed after a half hour spent walking the sandy perimeter of the island. Idly he wondered, without putting any great degree of effort into it, what a woman of her sort was doing coming out to a nowhere place like Coronoke. If her plan was to blackmail the Hardissons now that her ex-husband was in a particularly vulnerable position, it would seem to him that she’d have moved back to Atlanta to be closer to the action. But then, maybe she was just more subtle than the usual run of opportunists.

      The devil take La Dooley! Alice had offered him a place to recuperate, and unless the