Ellie Mae shook her head. “Only if pride is a bone. How about you?”
“Nothing broken, but I’d hate to have to take all those boards off the windows by myself when Delilah passes over. Thank God you’re not dead.” Tabby stood up and took a couple of steps to be sure she hadn’t sprained an ankle. “I might have a few bruises—but, girl, you’re the only woman I know who can burn ramen noodles in the microwave. If I’d died, it’d be my fault that you starved to death.”
Ellie Mae got to her feet. “I’m glad you’re not dead, too. I can only live on ramen noodles so long before they start to gag me.”
Tabby tipped the ladder over and brought it to the ground, “According to Aunt Charlotte, clumsiness is the Landry curse, but then, we also got strong bones from the Landry DNA. We’ll have to buy a new ladder to remove the window coverings when this is over. I’m not going to trust a single one of those rungs on this old thing ever again.”
“Tough or not, you better get your skinny butt in the house or else put some rocks in your pockets.” Ellie Mae picked up the tote bag she had tossed on the ground and got a firm grasp on the other end of the ladder. “Tabby June Landry, you are not in Texas anymore.”
Tabby bent against the wind and headed around the east end of the house. “You are not in Texas anymore, Dorothy.”
“Same story. Different name,” Ellie Mae told her. “And, honey, as tall and thin as you are, this wind could carry you away and set you down in Montana.”
Tabby glanced over her shoulder and sent up a silent prayer that when Delilah passed through, the old stone building would still be standing, and her peace wouldn’t be destroyed—again.
Rising out of the rocky and sandy beach right across the East Bay of southeastern Texas and the Bolivar Peninsula, the Sandcastle Inn had a stone seawall in front of it that had been built with the same gray stones as the house. With twelve-foot ceilings in every room, the inn stood like a tall and proud sentinel keeping watch over the small beach town of Sandcastle. A wide porch wrapped all the way around the first floor and provided a catwalk for the rooms on the second story. Three of the bedrooms faced the Gulf of Mexico—or “the ocean,” as Aunt Charlotte called it—and two had a view of the old barn at the back of the property. The house had been home to generations of Landrys, was on the registry of historical homes, and had survived more than one hurricane.
Tabby was only five feet, seven inches, which wasn’t all that tall, though it seemed to Ellie Mae like she towered above her. She felt like that about most people since she had to stretch to measure an inch over five feet. Tabby was exactly—to the day—ten years older than Ellie Mae and had always been her younger cousin’s idol.
And still is, Ellie Mae thought as she helped fight the wind and carry the ladder around to the back of the house. They really should take it out to the edge of the water and hurl it out to the storm gods.
Hey, now! Aunt Charlotte’s voice popped into her head. That old thing might wind up in the Smithsonian as a relic someday.
Other than having the same birthday and sharing a sassy old gal, Charlotte Landry, for an aunt, not a single thing about the cousins would testify to the fact that they were related. Tabby was a tall brunette with dark brown eyes, compliments of her Hispanic mother, Gloria. Ellie Mae was a short curvy woman with strawberry blonde hair and mossy green eyes, just like her Irish mother.
“Ever notice that neither of us looks a thing like the Landry side of the family?” Ellie Mae asked.
“Just goes to prove that God is merciful,” Tabby said with a smile.
Together, they maneuvered the ladder to the barn out in the backyard. According to the historical marker hung up next to the B and B’s front door, the place had begun as the home of Rufus Landry, a prominent boatbuilder. The property had been passed down from generation to generation. Now it belonged to Ellie Mae and Tabby.
Rufus Landry’s boats had been built somewhere in a warehouse that had long since been destroyed by time and previous hurricanes. When they were ready for the final touches, each one had been brought to the barn to be painted in a dust-free environment. The huge stone building was bigger than the house and, just like it, had withstood a hundred years of whatever the weather could throw at it. The wide barn doors had been left open when the cousins brought out the ladder earlier that day, and now they flapped in the wind, slamming back and forth against the stone walls and threatening to break into splinters.
“Think Delilah will be strong enough to rip these doors off their hinges?” Tabby asked as she set her end of the ladder on the weathered wood floor.
“I hope not.” Ellie Mae looked up at the loft, where she’d built a playhouse as a little girl when her parents had left her with Aunt Charlotte for a whole week one summer while they went to a conference.
“I got my first kiss from a boy in this barn,” Tabby said, “and it wasn’t from James.”
“I should hope not,” Ellie Mae said. She gave the barn another glance and headed outside. “You didn’t meet him until you were in your junior year of college. I’d be disappointed in you if you hadn’t kissed a guy before then.”
Tabby drew in a long breath and said, “Well, far be it from me to disappoint my baby cousin in any way.”
“You’re riding high on that positive wagon, aren’t you?” When she slipped outside, the wind hit her in the face and brought a fine mist of salt air with it. With so much heartache in her cousin’s past few years, she wondered how in the world she could draw even one happy thought from her heart.
Tabby followed her, and together, they managed to get the doors closed and locked. “I was thirteen when I kissed a boy the first time. How about you?”
“Fourteen. His name was Elijah, and it was on the front porch of our house in Conway, Arkansas.” Ellie Mae jogged to the back porch and held the door open for Tabby. “Age before beauty.”
Tabby swatted at her as she dashed inside. “Delilah isn’t supposed to be here until midnight, but she’s sure tellin’ us that she’s on the way. Just knowing that ninety percent of the town has evacuated and being in this dark, creaky old place makes for an eerie feeling, doesn’t it?”
“As a little girl, I wondered if this place might be haunted.” Ellie Mae shivered. “There’s been a lot of Landrys come and go in it. Do you think their ghosts are still hanging around, watching to see what we do with the place now that we’re here? And who’s going to fill our shoes when we get ready to retire? We’re the last of the family, you know.”
“Guess you’d better have some kids so the almighty Landry name doesn’t die with us,” Tabby said.
“Why me? You can still produce little Landry babies.” Ellie Mae picked up a flashlight from the hall tree in the foyer and turned it on to illuminate their way into the kitchen. When the gold house phone hanging on the kitchen wall rang, it startled her so badly that she dropped the light, and the house went dark again.
“I’ll try to get it working again if you’ll fumble your way into the kitchen and get that phone,” Tabby said as she picked up the flashlight.
Ellie Mae knocked over a chair on the way across the kitchen floor, but she grabbed the receiver on the third ring and said, “Hello?” and then, “Well, crap! I missed Aunt Charlotte’s call!”