Dark Tides. Celia Ashley

The rumors spoke of more than fishing. Hearing them, she’d been saddened more than surprised. She’d prayed they weren’t true. Restless, discontented Matt with his rash schemes and his silent, smoldering rages, a criminal? She would have expected proof to be easily uncovered, if even half of the stories circulating had any basis in fact. Now, of course, none of them would ever know. The investigation had stopped with Matt’s death. As for the pain and useless, stupid guilt that had punctuated the last years of married life? Well, it seemed to her Matt’s death had only made it worse.

      Lifting her face to the late autumn sun, she thought of the stranger she had left in her house, giving him free rein to go where he pleased, to steal from her if he chose, to lie in wait for her return. He could be shamming memory loss. The only thing he couldn’t lie about were his injuries. Or the look in his eyes. The images she had seen there appeared in her own mind with such vivid clarity.

      Confusing images nevertheless, images that could give him no peace. She did not believe him to be lying, did not sense any danger in his presence. But could she trust herself anymore? Trust the innate sense she had relied on so often in her life? She had not seen Matt’s ship going down. Had not seen it at all, yet it had, vanishing into the dark depths of the ocean.

      With a sigh, Meg yanked her ankles closer, gazing toward the horizon. Always capricious, the sea. When she chose to give up her carefully guarded secrets, there was no telling where they would come ashore. Ever.

      In the town, at its highest point above sea level, stood a single stone cross with a brass plaque beneath. Every year new names of the sailors who did not return were added to the plaque. If she walked far enough up the beach, she would see the tip of the cross and the spire of the church at Church and Center Streets. Somewhere northeast of the town, and many nautical miles out to sea, lay Matt’s body, or what remained after the creatures of the deep had finished with it. Lying with the others, bones scattered to the ocean floor for degeneration by the salt and the relentless motion of the water. She didn’t like to think of it, didn’t like to dwell on Matt’s fate, his drowning. She hoped for his sake that everything had been over quickly, that one moment he’d been alive and filled with the hope of survival, and the next done, finished, drowned, without ever feeling any fear between.

      Yet, he would have understood his chances and faced the inevitable with the harsh philosophy coloring everything he undertook, all the choices in his life. Fear might not have been a part of it. In later times, before the end, he used to tell her that the act of living itself was a risk, that pain and death were always right there waiting. As if she needed reminding.

      She lowered her lids against the glare of the sun. The constant sea breeze tugged at her hair, loosening strands from the barrette at the back of her head. She breathed in and out, evenly, deeply, trying to banish the emotion pushing toward the surface. Gulls circled overhead, crying in the wind, waiting for a scrap or two of food she did not possess to offer. The waves crashed against the wet sand of the shoreline, curling and foaming, the beach empty, as it often was at this time of year. Late October weather could be unpredictable. Freak storms came up without warning, and the month was often too warm for the cold and ice and bitter winds that gave sailors and fishermen pause to return to hearth, home, and safety.

      “Oh, Matt,” she whispered. She pressed her forehead onto her knees, squeezing her eyes shut. Always going after what he wanted, no matter the consequences. Conscience be damned. Once, he’d possessed a gentler soul. She hardly remembered that man anymore.

      She heard Caleb coming through the sand a few minutes later, a hitch to his step, the drop to his knees next to her causing a deadened thud of reverberation in her hips. He smelled ridiculously like her lavender soap and detergent, making him familiar to her when he should not have been at all.

      “Are you all right?”

      At the tone of concern from this wounded, troubled man, Meg bit her lip, willing herself not to weep. She would not. Not for everything she’d lost, for everything she’d bartered away in an attempt to keep a man who had not wanted her after all.

      “I expect I’m a good deal better than you are,” she said.

      To her surprise, Caleb chuckled in response. He wriggled himself around until he’d imitated her position, gazing out toward the steel gray ocean. Thinking they had a new target for scraps, gulls circled close again, voices shrill.

      “Did you find anything?”

      Meg sat a minute longer without answering, feeling the balance of the shifted earth settle back into place. Struggling to her feet in the sliding sand, she brushed the clinging grains from her pants before shoving her hands deep into her pockets to still their trembling.

      “I’m sorry, but I found nothing. That doesn’t mean something might not wash up tomorrow or the next day or even a month from now.”

      He remained seated, his gaze intent, trying by dint of will to get her to look at him. But she would not look at the man she remembered vaguely from that place between slumber and waking, wouldn’t look at the stranger whose scattered memories winked in and out of her mind with alarming intimacy.

      “Hopefully a month from now such evidence will be moot,” he said. “I can only trust I will remember everything by then.”

      “Hopefully,” she agreed.

      “I don’t want the police involved. Not yet.”

      “I understand,” she answered.

      “Do you?”

      She nodded. She remembered how their questions made her seem suspect rather than a willing participant in an investigation. Of course, she hadn’t been entirely willing or cooperative. It had been Matt they were investigating.

      “You should put ice on your head,” she said. “See if the swelling goes down. Dr. Redecker said that would be good.”

      “Okay,” he said. “Anything else?”

      She considered a moment. “Other things will bring on amnesia,” she said slowly, carefully. “Things too horrible to face.”

      “Is that what the doctor said?”

      “No,” she whispered. “That’s what I say.”

      He lurched forward with an abrupt, awkward movement and froze, eyes wide in a troubled expression, almost as if he knew what she could see shimmering in the air, fleeing through her mind, turning on the edge of awakening. Matt, she recalled, had been afraid of her extrasensory recognition. Perhaps Caleb was, too.

      He tipped his chin toward the sky, dark hair lifting in the breeze. Black-lashed tea-brown eyes narrowed against a swirl of sand he attempted to deflect with his hand as he regarded her solemnly. An attractive man, Caleb Hunter, lean and solidly built, his handsome face marked not only by bruising, but also by the evidence of a life lived, even if he could not remember it. The furrows beside his eyes spoke of days squinting in the sun, of concentration and deep passions. Yes, a very attractive man, who she had agreed to let sleep in a bed two doors down from her own.

      She exhaled at the same instant he did. The tension left his shoulders. His hand dropped with a slap against his thigh. “All right.”

      Crossing her arms over her chest, Meg started back toward the house that had been hers and Matt’s, where she had lived for three years without him since the day he had walked out with no intention of coming home. For all of her reliance on this stupid inner sense of hers, she hadn’t been a particularly good judge of Matt’s character in the end.

      As she climbed the weathered wooden staircase, she paused to look back. Caleb had not followed but had risen and moved to stand above the tide line, watching the sea.

      Chapter 3

      Meg cooked him dinner. He hadn’t expected that, although he didn’t know what he would have eaten had she not troubled to feed him. The food tasted fresh and delicately seasoned, and he wondered what he had been eating lately that forced him to make an unfavorable comparison to any unknown, recent meals. Following cleanup,