A second man was waiting in the parlor with Reverend Winthrop. He studied Edward critically and narrowed his eyes when he saw what Edward only now noticed: Jennie’s scraped knees and the small tear in her skirt. At about six foot two, the man stood eye to eye with Edward, although he probably carried a few more well-muscled pounds than Edward. He had the look of a battered warrior, in his eyes and in the lines of his face. Edward had no doubt that somewhere on his person, this man carried a badge of some sort—a fact that was quickly confirmed.
“Good afternoon, Miss Jennie,” he said in a gravelly voice that carried the remnants of a soft southern drawl.
Jennie smiled toward him. “Good afternoon, Sheriff Lambert. Isn’t it wonderful? This man knows me.”
“Might be, Miss Jennie. Might be. You hurt yourself?”
Jennie grimaced and sighed. “Am I a mess? I fell. It was stupid, I know. To fall, I mean. I was trying to walk in the garden alone. But, Sheriff Lambert, this man knows who I am. He said he wouldn’t tell me until we came back to the house. Ask him. Please ask him.”
Lambert put both his hands on Jennie’s shoulders, with the familiarity of someone who had done so many times before, and Edward forced himself to deny the tension that tightened in him.
“I will, Miss Jennie. But now I want you to go upstairs with Mrs. Higgins and take care of your lovely knees.”
Jennie straightened her small shoulders, and Edward recognized the defiant lift of her chin. “Sheriff Lambert,” she said in the same gentle voice Edward had once heard her use on a gallery owner who had made the mistake of thinking he could lie to her about sales of her work, “in spite of appearances and circumstances, I am a mature adult. I will not be sent to my room like a child.”
“No, Miss Jennie, and I wouldn’t do that to you, either. But I’m going to talk to this man and find out who he is before I let him try to tell me who you are. When I’m satisfied, we’ll all talk together. And that’s a promise. Until then, you just don’t go getting your emotions in a lather.
“You’ve been hurt enough, and none of us,” he continued, giving her shoulders a little shake, “none of us is going to let you be hurt again. Understand?”
After Jennie and a woman introduced as Mrs. Higgins left the parlor, Edward walked to the fireplace and looked again at the framed watercolor. His ship, the Lady B, named by his father years earlier, created the visual focus for the painting. Even at rest, bare-masted, with no sign of a crew, she seemed to dance in the water, to shimmer across the misty canvas.
He bowed his head in his hand. What now? How had Jennie come to Avalon? Why had she come to Avalon? And how had she been hurt? He straightened his shoulders, drawing his strength around him, and turned. Wilbur Winthrop was still standing near the door to the hallway. Edward pierced him with an accusing glare.
“You didn’t tell me she was blind.”
The two other men exchanged a long, measuring look, but it was Lambert who spoke. “Well, now, that answers one question, but it sure does raise up a host of others.”
“I’ll need to use your telephone,” Edward told the minister. “I have to call my assistant, arrange to have my plane flown here, put a—a what?—a neurologist? on standby, have someone get my apartment ready for Jennie—”
“I don’t think so.”
The quiet determination in Lambert’s voice put an abrupt end to Edward’s disjointed planning.
“You don’t think so? Sheriff, I have every right to take my wife home.” Edward heard the words spilling from his mouth.
Where had those words come from? He had fully intended to leave her to her own devices, with her greed to keep her company. Greed? Jennie?
He felt a hand on his arm and dimly realized Winthrop had led him across the room, was pushing him down into the chintz-covered chair, was once again wrapping his fingers around a squat, heavy glass. “Drink,” Winthrop insisted. “You look like the walking wounded.”
Edward did as he was told. He laid his head back against the chair and drew deep, even breaths, at first barely aware of what he was doing, then gradually recognizing what was happening to him. He began fighting the shock, fighting the fear and anger that had waited just below his conscriousness to claim him. Gradually, he summoned the strength of will that had sustained him over the years.
He couldn’t come apart now; he hadn’t since his parents’ deaths, and he’d been only ten at the time. He was an adult now, a grown man who could face any problem.
He became aware of the force with which he grasped the chair’s arms, of the silence in the room broken only by the ticking of a clock, of his own breathing. He became aware of Lambert watching him. Slowly, he released his grip on the chair, eased his breathing and met Sheriff Lambert’s steady gaze. Instead of the derision or pity he expected to find in the sheriff’s eyes, Edward found a grudging respect, as well as a wariness he felt sure this battle-weary warrior showed everyone.
“I have some questions for you, Mr. Carlton,” Lambert said, taking a small notebook from his suit coat and making no reference to what had just passed. “Let’s start with Jennie’s full name.”
“Allison Jennifer Carlton,” Edward told him in the same dispassionate tone of voice the sheriff used. Then, realizing Jennie had claimed the name Carlton for only a few hours before she disappeared, he added, a little too loudly in the waiting silence of the room. “Long. Her maiden name was Long.”
He saw Winthrop’s head jerk up, saw the horrified questioning glance the minister shot at the watercolor he so prized.
“Yes,” Edward told him, without waiting for the man to ask. “Yes,” he said, sighing, expelling a little of his own pain. “Jennie is that Allison Long.”
Jennie leaned back in the chaise longue in her room, her knees faintly smarting from the antiseptic Matilda had applied, her ego faintly smarting from being sent to her room.
Her life was being discussed downstairs. She had a right to be there. She had a right to have a voice in any decision made.
She smiled ruefully. Sheriff Lambert was probably right to exclude her. Apparently, she hadn’t done such a bang-up job of running her own life until now.
Her finger ached. Absently, she rubbed it, as she found herself doing often when she tried to put order to the puzzle of her life. The doctors told her they could fix it—a simple surgical procedure—rebreak the bone, set it properly. Jennie shivered. She’d had enough pain to last a lifetime. Too much pain, she acknowledged, remembering how it had been when she first woke up in the Avalon hospital.
She closed her eyes, and the field behind her closed lids grew dark. It wasn’t always dark; it was—it was more like walking into a dense fog just after twilight. Interesting, she thought. A new analogy. Before, she had compared her lack of sight to trying to look through layer upon layer of vaporous gray scarves.
When she slept, she had vision: color—vibrating, shimmering color—if not always shape. And sometimes her dreams were peopled. One person appeared repeatedly—a tall, stern man. In her dreams, she teased him, sensing it might somehow be similar to baiting a tiger. And although she never clearly saw his face, on rare occasions she found her efforts rewarded by a rusty, little-used smile.
Was he the one who had come for her?
She had been so afraid—When? Jennie couldn’t consciously remember feeling the soul-shriveling depth of fear she now knew had once gripped her. When?
“Here you go, love,” Matilda said as she entered the room. “Blackberry tea and some of Mrs. Winthrop’s wonderful chicken salad.”