Somewhere in the back of her mind she heard conversations going on around her. A few women chattered about their daycare situation, wondering if they should try the brand new facility opening up inland. A man talked on the phone, telling whoever was on the other end that he’d solved the puzzle. A husband and wife had a light-hearted argument about who was the better cook. Pippin blocked it all out, her focus on the closed book in her lap. Her index finger traced the words of the title.
“Still here?”
The voice startled her, and she jumped in her seat. The book slipped from her hand. It landed on its spine and fell open.
Glancing up, she saw Jamie. He waved to someone behind her, then nodded at her mug and plate. “Something wrong with the coffee and cookie?”
“What?” She followed his gaze. “Oh, no. I got distracted.”
“Right. With The Odyssey.”
She followed his gaze to the book laying open on the floor. Leaning forward again, she started to pick it up, but stopped. The words on the page undulated almost as if they were coming alive. She jolted as a memory shot into her mind from that one visit with Cora and Lily. They’d been in the lighthouse bookstore. Cora had placed a book on it on its spine. Let it fall open. Spun her finger around, finally dropping it to the page.
Pippin didn’t know why Cora had done it, or what her satisfied smile had been about, but she held her breath, circled her finger as her cousin had so many years ago, and pressed it down on the page. The words beneath her finger rippled, as if she was seeing them through water. She blinked, trying to bring them into focus, but they shimmied in slow waves, and then part of the stanza seemed to pull free—hovering, magnified above the page.
Jamie sat down next to her, his body turned to face her. “Hey. Are you okay?”
She pointed to the hovering words. “Look,” she said, her voice low, practically shoving the book at him.
He read the passage she pointed to aloud.
…Listen with care
to this, now, and a god will arm your mind.
Square in your ship’s path are Seirênês, crying
beauty to bewitch men coasting by;
woe to the innocent who hears that sound!
He will not see his lady nor his children
in joy, crowding about him, home from sea;
the Seirênês will sing his mind away
on their sweet meadow lolling. There are bones
of dead men rotting in a pile beside them
and fled skins shrivel around the spot.
Pippin felt like the air had been knocked out of her. “How many years was Odysseus gone from Ithaca?” she asked suddenly, but it wasn’t Jamie who answered. A man spoke from behind her. “Twenty years.”
Pippin turned to look over her shoulder, starting. It was the man she’d made eye contact with earlier. Everyone else in the coffee shop seemed fuzzy to her. She managed a small smile before turning back around. She didn’t like that he’d been listening to her conversation.
Jamie watched her, his eyes narrowed beneath his glasses. “That’s right,” he said. “Twenty years. Ten during the Trojan War and another ten wandering the sea on his voyage home.”
Exactly what Daisy had said. Pippin’s body went cold. It had been twenty years since her father’s disappearance. As they had for her mother, the words lifting off the page in the book were telling her about her father.
Like Odysseus, after twenty years, Leo Hawthorne had come home.
Chapter 9
“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”
~Harper Lee, from To Kill a Mockingbird
Pippin had slept fitfully. Just as she managed to drift off for what felt like the millionth time, images flitted in and out of her mind, jolting her awake again. The bones in the hatch. The lieutenant telling her and Grey that it had been murder. Standing alone on the beach, staring out at the churning water.
She rolled onto her side, pulling the pale green and white quilt up over her head to block out the streaks of morning light shining through the slats of the plantation shutters Grey had installed on the east facing windows of the master bedroom. She drifted off again, jerking awake to the sound of men’s voices. Would they ever be finished? She wanted to be alone in her house. To not walk into a room expecting it to be empty, only to find Jimmy or Travis or Kyron there.
She peered at the square wooden alarm clock on her bedside table. Nine o’clock! The last time she’d looked, it had been six-thirteen. She pushed herself to recline against the pillows, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Even with the extra hours she’d slept, she still felt groggy.
“Peevie!” Grey’s bellowing voice reverberated through the house, sliding into her room from under the door. “Come on! Pippin!”
She scurried from her bed, throwing open the door. “What?” she yelled, matching his volume.
“You need to get out. We’re ready to paint.”
She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. Oh God. That’s right. They’d done most of the prep work the day before. Today they’d be spraying. “Give me ten minutes,” she hollered back. She wanted nothing more than to slip back between the covers and sink into another hour of sleep. Instead, she went into the bathroom, threw her hair up into a loose bun, took a lightning quick shower, and dressed in a periwinkle blue sundress and her standard white sneakers. She went for comfort, first and foremost. She grabbed a lightweight sweater figuring it would still be cool outside.
Not even a dab of makeup could hide the dark half-moons under her eyes. She’d gotten less sleep than she’d even imagined, by the looks of it, but there was nothing to be done at this point. She slipped on her thin silver watch and a small pair of white gold hoop earrings. A few minutes later, she’d pulled her bike from the garage and pedaled toward town.
Researching anything at a library was not in Pippin’s wheelhouse, but visiting the library for the second time, she felt more comfortable. She walked into the little converted house expecting to see Daisy at the circulation desk. Instead, a slightly pudgy young man wearing a sky-blue polo shirt sat there. He looked to be in his mid-twenties but already his dark hair was receding, and he had the firm makings of a double chin. He had a band on his left ring finger and a thin chain around his neck. The badge on a lanyard strung around his neck gave his name as Harold Manatee. He had one elbow propped on the counter, his fist under his chin. With his other hand, he flipped through the pages of a magazine.
From this angle, his receding hairline looked twice as deep. He just had a big head, Pippin realized. “Hi,” she said cheerily. “Is Daisy around?”
He perked up when he saw her. Just like her first visit, the place was quiet without a single patron in sight. “Sorry, no. She has the morning off.”
Pippin felt more disappointed than she expected to. Even though she wanted to, she didn’t know Daisy well enough to call her up and beg her to come into work early on her morning off. Not that she would have done that even if they’d been best friends.
Harold sat up straighter and flashed an amiable smile. “What can I help you with?”
The fact that Daisy wasn’t there didn’t change Pippin’s goal. She was too spooked to think much about what had happened at the coffee shop the day before. Instead, she planned to direct her focus to other things. Namely the sunken boat at Devil’s Cove Landing. She’d already scoured the Internet, but she’d come up empty. Twenty years wasn’t a lot of time in the scheme of things, yet the Internet had exploded during those two decades. Things available online now hadn’t even been imagined then. She’d searched only to learn that Wikipedia didn’t launch until 2001 and Google wasn’t king yet. She come up empty.