Bay Song Read online

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Excerpt from Relinquish

  About Noelle Adams

  Bay Song

  Noelle Adams

  Her mother used to say you can feel the truth in your throat. Maybe when her story is finally told, she'll be able to breathe again.

  For six years, Holly has lived a reclusive life--with the Chesapeake Bay, the wild animals on her property, and dark memories as her only companions. Then she meets Cade. He's smart and handsome and sensitive and sexy, and he simply will not go away. He wants to know all about her, and Holly starts to wonder if she can open up her heart again.

  Cade comes back to his hometown for a break, barely holding on to the fraying edges of his true-crime writing career. He needs to write another book, and it needs to be a success. When he meets Holly, he knows there's a great story hiding beneath her haunting beauty and her complete isolation. He's going to be the one to tell that story.

  Even if he breaks both of their hearts in the process.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Noelle Adams. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Excerpt from Relinquish

  About Noelle Adams

  One

  The Friday of Labor Day weekend was when everything changed. It started with Holly stepping on a broken board.

  She’d gotten up as the sun was starting to rise—at just after six—and she filled a water bottle and walked down to the beach to watch the sunrise.

  Holly did that every morning. The sun rising over the Chesapeake Bay was an event—one that deserved an audience. She’d felt guilty and unsettled on the few days she’d missed its rising over the past several years, like she hadn’t done her duty by the sun. As irrational as the feeling was, she made a point of always getting up on time.

  She went to bed as the sun was setting, so getting up early wasn’t difficult.

  It felt like a normal morning. The songbirds were making a racket in the river birches that surrounded three sides of the house, and as she opened the back door, a squirrel skittered away from its foraging on the small patch of grass behind her house.

  There was a boardwalk from the edge of her lawn to the beach, so she didn’t have to walk over the fragile sand dunes. The decking was old—having been laid when the house was built thirty years ago—and every day, she noticed more weakening boards and loose nails. She did what she could to make repairs, but one day soon, the walkway would need to be rebuilt. She wasn’t sure what she would do when that day came.

  She never let anyone onto their property.

  Anyone human. The animals and birds were always welcome.

  She was nearing the end of the walk when her foot landed on a cracked board that had finally gotten too weak to hold her weight. Her sandaled foot busted through the board, sending her falling clumsily and painfully onto the decking.

  The broken wood scraped up her leg as it descended, and the two feet from the wood to the sand was such a distance that her legs were pulled apart by necessity. She panicked, grasping desperately at the rest of the boardwalk in an attempt to hold herself up. The boards surrounding the broken one had cracked too from the force of her fall, so now there was a gaping hole in the walkway and her entire leg was trapped by it.

  When she’d stabilized herself, the panic faded, but the pain finally started to hit her brain. It was so intense and from so many places on her body that she couldn’t immediately process it.

  She experienced a familiar rise of fear—the memory of being trapped, helpless in the dark, waiting for danger to catch her—but she breathed deeply and slowly until she’d cleared her mind.

  She wasn’t in danger. She’d just fallen. It was to be expected since the boardwalk was in such bad shape. She remembered what her mother had always said when Holly had woken up terrified at night.

  Use your head when you’re scared. It knows more than the dark.

  Holly made herself think through what was causing her pain, listing the injuries out one by one. She’d pulled a muscle in her thigh from her legs being pulled apart. She’d scraped up the skin on both her legs. There was a deeper pain on the inside of one thigh, so she must have a piece of wood sticking into it. Her palms and forearms were scraped raw from catching herself. And her whole body was jarred, which had made her head hurt.

  That was all. It wasn’t a crisis. She could get herself out of this situation easily enough.

  There was no one to ask for help even if she’d wanted to.

  She eased her body up enough to pull her leg out of the hole in the wood. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded since the broken edges clawed at her skin.

  She kept going though since she would definitely be trapped if she couldn’t get her leg out. When she’d managed, she collapsed onto the intact boards, lying on her back and gasping. She was sweating although the morning air was still pleasant, and she could feel blood running down the skin of her thighs.

  When she’d recovered enough to sit up, she inspected the damage. As she’d expected, there was one large splinter of wood that had dug into the flesh on her inner thigh. It was still there, so she pulled it out, causing a surge of blood.

  There was no way she could make it down to the beach until she’d wrapped up the wound, so she heaved herself to her feet and limped back to the house.

  She had some first aid supplies, and she did her best to wipe up the blood and bandage the injuries. She was worried though. She didn’t have any more of the antiseptic wash she’d bought last year, and the one cut on her thigh was so deep it might get infected.

  If that happened, she would have to go to the doctor.

  She never went to the doctor. Not since she was seventeen and had the flu.

  She would have to go into town to the drugstore today, even though her normal day was Tuesday. She needed to buy some more wood to repair the boardwalk anyway.

  There were always a lot of people in town on Fridays, and today it would be worse since it was the beginning of Labor Day weekend.

  This weekend was the last hurrah of the tourist season in Cape Charles, Virginia. After Monday, the place would be quiet, half-empty. She had been looking forward to Tuesday when her trip to town would have been much less stressful than it was in the summer.

  But she couldn’t risk waiting. She wasn’t going to take the chance of the wound getting infected, and she didn’t like having a hole in her boardwalk for several days before she could get it fixed.

  She could step over the hole. That wasn’t a problem. But the boardwalk was theirs—just like the house and the beach and the rest of the property—and she didn’t like any of it damaged.

  It was too early to go into town now th
ough since she hated the larger, impersonal chain stores on Route 13. They would be full of strangers, and the idea of entering one made her faintly nauseated.

  She had to wait for the familiar little shops in town to open. She would go to the library first so she could finish the book she’d started reading last week. Then she would go to the little hardware store to get the wood. The gray man with the mustache was always there. He would smile at her and tell her, “Good morning, dear,” and wouldn’t try to ask her any questions. Then she would go to the drugstore and replenish her first aid supplies.

  Maybe she would get a cheeseburger. She only ever had cheeseburgers on Tuesdays on her weekly visits to town for supplies. But she would be making all the effort today, so she might as well reward herself with an extra cheeseburger.

  She would be back home before one, and she could fix the boardwalk this afternoon.

  Tomorrow everything would be easier. She just needed to get through today.

  Since she had time, she tried out her legs and decided she was fit enough to do her normal morning walk. She started out again down the boardwalk, this time testing each step carefully.

  Her legs were sore, so she couldn’t walk very fast anyway.

  The beach was clear except for some gulls scavenging for breakfast. She walked the length of beach that belonged to the property, letting the waves lap over her feet in her sandals.

  Sometimes trash washed up onto the sand but not today. The salt-tinged air was warm and familiar, like an old friend, and the bay made its cheerful, morning rumbles.

  She felt better when she’d made it across the stretch of private beach. She stood for a long time, looking at the pier in the distance. A grizzled man came out every morning, hobbling down the pier with a fishing rod over his shoulder.

  He would lean on the railing at the end of the pier and stare, never once casting his rod. Sometimes she brought binoculars so she could see him more clearly, but she didn’t have them this morning. He was familiar, like the hungry gulls, part of the background of this place. She liked to watch him. She liked the fact that he carried the fishing rod but never tried to fish.

  Finally she turned away. The strip of dunes was narrow at the far edge of her property, so she walked across them, careful not to disturb the delicate grasses that held them together.

  The sand in her scraped skin burned, but she ignored the pain.

  It was minor, superficial. There were things in the world that hurt so much more.

  When she’d crossed the dunes, she reached the woods that covered about half their property. The walking was much easier because there was a path that ran the perimeter of the trees. The woods on the edges weren’t particularly thick or dark—just friendly red maples, white cedars, and pine trees, with some scraggly foliage and a lot of grasses and wildlife.

  The bigger trees were in the middle—where it was dark, where she hadn’t been in three years, where she tried not to even think about.

  The fox found her right away, and she smiled when it appeared. It had bright, intelligent eyes and a bushy tail, and it followed her every morning on her walks.

  She didn’t know if it was warily keeping an eye on her or if it thought she was a friend or if it was simply curious about her passage through its woods every morning. She liked the way it kept pace with her, ducking into the shadows if she made any move in its direction.

  The woods were in good shape today. One branch had fallen from the oak tree, but that was okay. The deer would find the acorns. They weren’t quite ripe yet, but deer wouldn’t care.

  She saw the deer in the clearing protected by trees on all sides. There were about twenty of them—of all ages and sizes—and they were here every morning.

  They loved the apples that fell from the two apples trees, and in the spring she’d planted lettuce, beans, and strawberries for them, and some of the plants were still growing, so they occasionally still found a few bites.

  She stood on the edge of the clearing and watched them for a long time. She was sure they were aware of her, but they didn’t run at her presence the way they used to, when they’d started coming by a few years ago.

  She liked to watch them eat. It was rough going for deer on the Eastern Shore. There were too many of them and not enough food left for them to live on. She liked that these deer at least could find food on her property.

  When her leg throbbed with pain, she finally turned away and limped back to the house. She would need to rest for a little while before she rode her bike into town.

  She sat in a deck chair that offered a clear sight line to the beach and the bay, and she watched the low sun glinting on the little waves as she drank another bottle of water and ate an apple.

  It hadn’t been a good morning for her—she’d hurt herself and now had to make an extra trip into town—but the rest of the world didn’t seem to know this. The animals had gone about their routine, and the man who never fished hadn’t even appeared.

  She’d found that often to be the case. Her mother had been raped twenty-four years ago, and nothing significant had changed about the world—except Holly had been conceived.

  Then her mother had left six years ago after doing something heart-wrenching, and no one but Holly even knew about it.

  No matter how much something hurt you, the rest of the world went on as if nothing had happened.

  Later that morning, at just after ten, Holly stepped behind a couple of trees when she saw an older couple leaving the library just when she was about to go in.

  She always left her bike against those trees since there wasn’t a bike rack nearby. Her bike was battered and squeaky, so no one would be tempted to steal it anyway.

  When the couple had made it down the steps, turned the corner, and headed toward where they were parked on the street, Holly glanced around and then walked up to the front door of the library, which was in an old bank building with classic columns in the front.

  She wasn’t really scared of people. She didn’t mind watching them, and she was happy for them to go about their lives. She just didn’t want to talk to them, and she didn’t want them to speak to her.

  Holly had spent the first fourteen years of her life talking mostly to her mother since her mother had retreated from the world to their beach house after being raped. Finally her mother had thought she’d recovered enough to reenter society, and she had started to feel guilty about keeping Holly so cut off from the world, so she’d moved them to Maryland to live with an old friend and tried to socialize Holly more. But they’d returned to the beach house after a few years.

  Her mother had never been able to recover. She’d lived her life in fear, only feeling safe when no one else except Holly was around, no one else was even in sight. It had always just been the two of them.

  Then the world had blown apart when Holly was eighteen and her mother had left for good.

  There was a woman sitting behind the checkout desk in the library, but it was the same plump woman who was always there, and she merely glanced up at Holly and then away. Holly went immediately to the shelf of books by local authors.

  The book she’d been reading on Friday was still there, so she snatched it off the shelf and took it with her to the chair in the far corner that was nicely sheltered by a big plant and a wall of books.

  Holly liked the corner. She didn’t have to see anyone, and no one could see her unless they made a point of walking all the way to the end of the bookshelf.

  She found the place she’d stopped reading and started to read again.

  The book was by William C. Chesterton. Years ago, she’d found one of his books in a library book sale (she hadn’t gone on the day of the sale, of course, but there were leftovers still for sale on her weekly trip into town), and she’d loved it. It was about the Eastern Shore, and it combined travel, nature, and culture. He seemed to know the people, know the unique little towns, know the loveliest spots.

  She had read each of the four books he’d written after that,
and she was always disappointed.

  He’d started to write about crime—true-crime stories taking place all over the country with a lot of grizzly details. He still wrote beautifully, but she didn’t like to read about crime.

  But she’d loved that first book, so it felt like a duty for her to read all the others.

  This one was about a serial killer in Arizona. It made her feel a little sick, but she was glad she’d finally gotten to the place where the investigators were making real progress. She sighed in relief when the killer was finally caught.

  She wished William C. Chesterton would write about nice things again.

  Maybe people who had never lived through crime and murder and torture and human cruelty would want to read it for entertainment. There was a sad kind of innocence in a lot of people—a naïveté that could look on such evil and still keep an emotional distance, that could, in fact, turn it into entertainment.

  But Holly couldn’t do it. She would reread the Eastern Shore book this afternoon to refresh herself after this one.

  When she’d finished, she slid the book back into place, next to his other four books.

  William C. Chesterton was evidently from Cape Charles, but that was all she knew about him. His later books labeled him a New York Times best-selling author, so a lot of people must like those crime stories.

  She was about to glance through the other titles on the shelf to see if there was anything new, but a noise at the front door stopped her. A mother with several children was coming in, making a lot of noise, seeming to pull all the energy from the air, so Holly waited at a shelf with the reference books until they’d made their way to the children’s section.

  Then she hurried out the door. She’d check for new books on Tuesday.

  She’d gone outside and was starting to get on her bike when she realized someone was approaching.

  She paused instinctively, trying to process where the person was coming from.

  When she realized the sounds were behind her, she turned her head to look.

  Through the branches, she saw a man jogging on the sidewalk that ran right next to the trees.