“Perfect plan.” Celeste pulled me into a hard hug. “We are going to make magic here.” When she released me, she kept a hold of my shoulders and frowned. “You look so familiar.”
“I used to come here during the summer with my uncles.”
Celeste’s hold on me stiffened. “You were friends with the Branton girl.”
“I was.” A memory sucker punched me out of nowhere. The dark waves as boats searched the water for any sign of Jenn. Hundreds of people gathered to search. But no one had found a single clue. It was as if she had simply vanished into thin air. And those of us who remained were left looking for her for the rest of our days.
That was the thing about being the one left behind. You couldn’t help but look for your loved one in the face of every new person you met, scanning everyone you passed on the street, hoping against hope that she’d somehow simply appear again—even if your gut told you she’d never left the island you’d lost her on.
6
Hunter
“You were friends with the Branton girl.” The words echoed in my head as I watched Celeste drive off. Piper stood there, staring off at the water. No wonder she had shadows in her eyes.
I remembered when it happened—the summer before my senior year. The whole island had been in an uproar. When a search hadn’t turned up anything, people had decided that the girl likely had too much to drink and had fallen from the cliffs into the water below. They were probably right, but as far as I knew, nobody had found her body.
I’d had friends at the party that night. More than a few. They’d seen the girl. Not the girl—Jenn. I could still see it written out on a missing person poster. My friends had said that she’d been drinking, but no one remembered her wandering off. She was simply there one moment and gone the next.
I could only imagine what that had done to the people who loved her. The unknown. They must have guessed that the outcome wouldn’t be good. She was far too young to run off by herself. But all the questions could make a person go crazy, imagining one fate after the other—each one worse than the previous.
Piper had one arm wrapped around her waist, the other hand clutching at a necklace. She looked so damned alone in that moment. I couldn’t resist moving closer. “I’m sorry about your friend.”
She didn’t jolt or jump. It was as if she had known I was there all along. “I guess there’s more than one kind of ghost here.”
There was more truth in Piper’s words than she knew. There were plenty of events that haunted this land. “Maybe restoring this place to its former glory will exorcise a few of them.”
“I’m not sure I want mine to be exorcised.”
She kept staring at the sea, not turning to look at me. I came up beside her, the need to see her face clawing at me for some reason. When I took it in, the only word I could come up with to describe it was…ravaged. As if grief had carved itself into the bones of her face, refusing to leave.
I had the urge to pull Piper into my arms. To drive out the pain and loss. But I barely knew her. “Is she why you bought the place?”
Her mouth curved. “We used to joke about it. Make all these grand plans for what we’d turn it into. Thought we’d run it together. Build houses and raise our families here. Maybe that’s what planted the seed for me. Since college, I’ve worked towards opening my own place. I wasn’t sure if it would be a B&B or a hotel, but when I saw the Falls pop up on a list of foreclosures, it just seemed…”
“Meant to be?”
Piper let out a chuckle. “That. But let’s be honest, it’s a little bit insane, too.”
My lips twitched. “It’s ambitious. But I have no doubt you can do it if you set your mind to it.”
“From the guy who wasn’t sure he wanted me working on his construction crew.”
“I’ve seen the work you did on the lodge this past week. It’s sound.” It was more than that. It was damned good. I would’ve hired her in a second if she’d been looking for a job.
Piper turned towards me, the wind picking up some strands of her hair that had fallen free of her ponytail. “Good to know I haven’t lost my touch.”
“You certainly haven’t. And since that’s the case, why don’t you come take a look at something?”
She laid a hand over her chest with a mock gasp. “Are you asking me for my construction opinion?”
“Such a smartass,” I said, shaking my head. But that hint of mischief in Piper’s eyes chased out the shadows, so I’d take smartass all day long.
She started towards the cabin I’d been working on. “Takes one to know one.”
Her steps slowed as we approached number eleven, and I saw the hesitancy with new eyes now. “Did you used to stay in this one?”
Piper pulled open the door. “No. Eleven was where Jenn and her parents stayed.”
Hell. Of all the places to start, I’d had to pick this one. “We can start the work somewhere else—”
“No. I think it’s fitting that we start here.” A small smile curved her mouth. “She always wanted a hot tub on the back deck. I’m going to have to figure out a way to make that happen.”
I had no doubt she would. “How would you feel about some more drastic work inside?”
Piper opened her mouth to say something, then seemed to think better of it, shaking her head instead. “What were you thinking?”
I knocked on a wall that separated the living room from the kitchen and dining spaces. “This isn’t load-bearing, but all the cabins have them. Knocking them out wouldn’t be a huge change in supply cost, just labor. And it would open up the spaces considerably.”
She walked from the living room area to the kitchen space and back again. “It’ll give us a lot better light, too.” Piper’s mind seemed to whirl as she stared at a point on the wall. “Let’s do it. I can help with taking down the walls.” She paused and glanced in my direction. “Can your shoulder handle that kind of thing?”
The flex of my jaw was involuntary. A necessary measure I’d developed to keep from biting people’s heads off when they asked about my injury. “I’ll go slow.”
I’d need to move at a snail’s pace. My shoulder was already acting up with only a few days of work. I’d spent last night icing it and popping a few ibuprofen. I rolled it reflexively. The movement pulled, the minuscule flare of pain triggering a patchwork of memory. The fire in my shoulder. Shay running out the door of a cabin that looked identical to this one.
“And you’ll let me help?”
Piper’s voice pulled me out of the images overtaking my mind. I gave myself a good mental shake. “Sure. I can always use grunt labor.”
She stuck out her tongue at me. “That’s boss grunt to you.”
I chuckled. “I’ll remember that.”
7
Piper
I pulled into a parking spot on Main Street and turned off my engine. “I’m sorry, buddy, you have to stay in the car. I don’t think I can trust you in an antique shop.” With my luck, Bruno would knock over something priceless with his tail.