Wild Island Horses

  Wild Island Horses

  Liz Harman

  Wild Island Horses

  Copyright © 2021 Liz Harman

  All Rights Reserved

  www.lizharmanauthor.com

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  Contents

  1. Laura

  2. Laura

  3. Laura

  4. Spencer

  5. Laura

  6. Spencer

  7. Laura

  8. Spencer

  9. Laura

  10. Spencer

  11. Laura

  12. Laura

  13. Spencer

  14. Laura

  15. Laura

  16. Laura

  17. Laura

  Epilogue

  About Liz Harman

  Also by Liz Harman

  Preview: Vicky on the Rocks

  Laura

  The moment Laura saw her grandmother's beach house, she fell in love.

  It wasn't one of the grand vacation palaces a little farther along the Outer Banks coastline, here on the sandy barrier islands off the North Carolina coast. But that was part of its charm. It was two stories, but the bottom floor was a cavernous, shadowy storage space underneath the house, enclosed on two sides by walls and the other two sides with wooden lattice fencing with wire mesh tacked over the top. The actual house was a small, tan-painted ranch raised up on piers above the storage space. A covered deck wrapped around two sides of the house, and a flight of wooden stairs descended to a crushed-shell path overgrown with weeds.

  "It's a house on stilts," Laura said, delighted, as she climbed the stairs with her grandmother's lawyer.

  The lawyer smiled. "You'll see a lot of that here, in these older beachfront homes."

  Her name was Shirley and she was barely younger than Grandma Edith. She was, in fact, the furthest thing Laura would have imagined from a lawyer, a motherly woman with a cloud of white hair whose first act upon meeting Laura had been to insist on being called by her first name. Actually, she had said, "Don't call me Shirley," and then laughed and amended, "No, honey, do call me Shirley, it's my name. Have you seen the Airplane movies?" Laura had not, but she liked the woman on sight and could see why Grandma Edith had chosen Shirley to manage her affairs.

  "What's the underneath space used for?" Laura asked. She leaned over, trying to peek through the wooden lattice.

  "Whatever you want. It's basically your garage. People park under there, or store boats and other things."

  From what Laura could see through the mesh, there wasn't room to park or store anything. It was a mass of shadowy dark heaps of boxes and old furniture.

  "It doesn't look like Grandma Edith could fit a boat under there," she said. "Or even a bike."

  "She does own a bike. She used to ride it all over town, unfortunately not for a few years, since her hips got bad." Shirley smiled and unlocked the front door, releasing a gust of warm, stale air. "Are you and Edith close?"

  "I'm afraid not," Laura said. Regret gnawed at her, not for the first time. Regret and guilt. "I haven't seen her in a long time." She stopped before admitting the rest of it, that she had fallen out of touch with Grandma Edith to the point where she hadn't even been sure her grandma was still alive until getting the call about the fall and the house.

  She risked a peek inside, but it wasn't a hoarder's house the way the underneath storage suggested. Instead it had the casual messiness of a lived-in place, combined with a distinctly run-down vibe to match the peeling paint on the outside.

  The front room was an open plan living room and kitchen. Through the shadows striping the room from the blinds, Laura saw heavy, dusty furniture and boxes of books, sagging kitchen counters and an old olive-colored refrigerator. The general color scheme everywhere was very 1970s, rust-orange and brown and olive green, from the slightly patchy carpet to the kitchen appliances and the rough, nappy covering on the couch and matching chairs. The cheap wood-veneer paneling on the walls had a mobile-home kind of vibe to it, and was bubbling and peeling in some places.

  "Be careful in the kitchen," Shirley said. "There's some water damage."

  Laura could see that even from here. The center of the floor sagged alarmingly, the old bronze-and-white linoleum cracking under the strain. The countertops were tilting, as if the floor underneath the cabinets was doing the same thing.

  "I don't think she had the money to keep up the place, the last few years," Shirley said. She sounded apologetic.

  Laura cautiously tapped the living room floor with the toe of her shoe, found it solid-feeling underfoot, and went on inside. The heat was oppressive, but there was a huge window, hidden behind tall floor-to-ceiling blinds. Maybe it opened, Laura thought.

  She pulled back the blinds, and gasped aloud at the beauty of the view. She hadn't realized the house was so close to the beach. Sweeping dunes covered in golden beach grass and low gray-green shrubs rolled down to the glittering azure waters of the ocean.

  The window itself didn't open, but there were louvers on either side. Laura cranked them wide, and an ocean breeze blew into the living room, helping to dispel some of the musty heat.

  "How long has it been since Grandma lived in the house?" she asked, turning back to Shirley, who was staying back at the door.

  "A couple of months. Her fall was back in January, but I understand that it took some time to find any living family members."

  "Yes, my parents are—gone." She wasn't sure what word to use; she rarely spoke of it, and the soft, pitying expression on Shirley's face reminded her why. It still stabbed her in the heart to say it, though it had been ten years since the car accident that took them while she was in college. And with them had gone all the family lore of the old rift that had separated her parents from her grandmother. She had last seen Grandma Edith at the funeral, a sad closed-off woman that Laura hardly knew. After that there had been some holiday cards from Grandma, that Laura occasionally reciprocated along with a guilty desire to do better. But in truth, they had drifted as far apart as two people could, even when the two people were the last surviving members of their family ... until the phone call came, breaking into the dreary gray cold of a Midwest winter.

  And now here she was, 1500 miles to the southeast, in a place so different that it felt like another world from Minneapolis.

  "I'm sorry, honey," Shirley said.

  Laura bristled a little, despite the sincerity of Shirley's condolences. "It was a long time ago," she said shortly. "My parents and Grandma were estranged even before then, so I never saw her much growing up."

  "Have you ever been here before?" Shirley asked.

  "A long time ago. I had almost forgotten."

  The memories came back in sun-drenched snatches. She must have been very young. She dimly remembered playing on the beach in the sand, and perhaps there was a vague memory of crawling up the stairs, and poking her head through the railing, with her mother yelling at her to get away from the edge.

  "Did Grandma ever talk about the rest of her family to you?" she asked Shirley.

  Shirley shook her head. "I knew she had a daughter who died. I didn't want to press her to talk about it."

  Laura hadn't realized it would hurt so much that her grandmother had never mentioned her, but that hit her in the chest, and hit deep.

  Maybe if you were the kind of granddaughter people want to have, she would have bragged about you.

  She had to blink rapidly to keep herself from crying. She hadn't cried yet about Grandma Edith, who was still alive but barely hanging on in the hospital up the coast. She wasn't going to collapse in a puddle of self-pity on the stained carpet, for crying out loud.

  "They told me at the
hospital that you've been coming to see her," she told Shirley. "Thank you."

  It must have been terrible for her, being alone in the hospital. I can't believe I didn't know.

  "I haven't been up to see her for a few days," Shirley said, looking embarrassed and a little guilty. "It's been so busy, with summer residents starting to come back and of course everyone has a thousand legal issues to sort out for the one licensed lawyer on Okokie Island. How is she doing?"

  "She wasn't awake when I was there." Laura tried not to think about that view of her grandmother in a hospital bed, impossibly thin, her slack face against the pillow surrounded by a cloud of flyaway white hair. She had been so dynamic when Laura had seen her at the funeral, even crushed by grief. But of course ten years could change everything for someone that old. "Was she very alone here? She must have had friends."

  "She kept to herself," Shirley said. "Most of the friends she used to have sold their beach places when the property values started going up." She took a deep breath and opened her briefcase. "Anyway, here's the paperwork for power of attorney so that you can handle Edith's affairs while she's in the hospital. The house isn't yours while your grandmother is still alive—it's a custodianship—but she was very clear that she wanted you to have it, and that you were welcome to stay here."

  Laura signed her name in the various places Shirley indicated, with a growing sense of unreality. A week ago, the entirety of her assets were a cramped apartment with a dying, dust-covered African violet in the window, a rattletrap car, a temp job with an insurance firm, and a fashion design degree that she had no idea what to do with, since nowhere was hiring.

  Now she was here on the sun-drenched Carolina coast, with two suitcases and the African violet in her backseat. She had brought the plant because she felt sorry for it and knew that going back to an apartment with a dead plant in it would be too depressing for words. Maybe she could nurse it back to health in the warmer Carolina climate. She'd had to give up the temp job, but that was no great loss.

  This isn't MY house, she reminded herself, and it's not my life. I still have an apartment back in Minneapolis—through the end of May, anyway.

  But there was no reason why she couldn't stay if she liked it here. She wasn't wedded to living the rest of her life in the Midwest.

  "So what's it like on Okokie Island?" she asked. "What kind of night life is there? I don't suppose there's much of a fashion industry."

  Shirley laughed, her eyes crinkling up in sun-creased skin. "I'm afraid not, on either count. A lot of people who live down here—I guess you could call us the outer fringe of the Outer Banks—commute to jobs in the bigger towns farther north, or work in the fishing or tourist trade. There's also quite a lot of seasonal coming and going, with the population ballooning in the summer when the vacation homes are full. It's not a life for everyone, and it's perfectly understandable if you don't want to live here long-term. In fact," she added, "I've been encouraging Edith to sell this place for years. She could get a really good price, and move to a nicer and much more convenient and accessible place on the mainland. You can imagine what living with all these stairs has been like for her."

  "I just got here, so it's not like I'm going to be making any major decisions yet." Laura scribbled her initials in the places indicated on a few more pages and handed the sheaf of papers back. "I think I'd just like to look around a little first. Maybe pack up some of Grandma's things for her, in case she manages to get from the hospital room to hospice."

  "The doctors don't think that's likely," Shirley said. "Don't get your hopes up, honey."

  "I know. I'm not. But I'm also not going to give up on her."

  She's all I have left.

  Laura

  After Shirley drove away, Laura brought her things upstairs—including the African violet in its brightly painted little clay double pot, which she placed on a windowsill in the shade of the blinds. "Here, little plant," she murmured. "Live and thrive." She tipped a tiny bit of water into the outer pot.

  Shirley was right about the stairs. This must have been a difficult place for an old woman to live, Laura thought, sweating as she labored up the stairs with her suitcases. It was a house much better suited to a young, active woman than to a seventy-five-year-old with bad hips.

  She was also going to have to do something about that kitchen floor. Grandma Edith must have used the kitchen—surely she had to have cooked her meals somewhere! Once Shirley wasn't around to be an audience in case of a disaster, Laura felt a little less inhibited about exploring the more questionable parts of the house. She cautiously tiptoed onto the unstable-looking kitchen floor, sticking to the edges by the cabinets. It sank a little under her feet, but nothing broke. So far so good.

  She had wondered how in Earth her grandmother could have lived here with the floor in such bad shape, but it was probably one of those things where it had happened gradually and Grandma Edith might not even have noticed.

  The fridge was unplugged. Laura opened it nervously, with dread of what she might find, but was startled to find it clean and empty. When she plugged it in, it started up with a cheerful hum.

  Shirley must have taken care of that too. Laura made a mental note to thank her.

  She left the fridge chilling down, edged around the sagging part of the floor—she still didn't trust it, and decided that fixing it was going to have to be her top priority—and went to look around the rest of the house. There were three small bedrooms clustered along a central hallway, and a cramped but clean bathroom with a floor that also sagged and creaked alarmingly under her feet.

  If the entire structure of the house was rotten, there might be no choice but to sell it.

  Still, the toilet flushed and the water from the sink tap looked clean. Laura didn't know what else to look at. She had never owned a house before.

  I need to find a contractor or someone to take a look at it. I wonder if Shirley knows anyone? I wish I'd thought to ask before she left.

  The bedrooms were all about the same size. It was clear which one her grandmother had been using, with its ruffled bedspread and dresser heaped with paste jewelry and paperback romance novels. Of the other two, one was clearly used for storage, mostly books. The other was set up as a guest bedroom that didn't look like it was ever used. The full-sized bed was neatly made with a quilt in bright sunshine colors. There was a heavy layer of dust on the empty dresser beside it, and an equally dusty vase of cloth flowers on the windowsill. There was something desperately sad about it.

  Did she hope that my mom would come visit? That I would?

  Well, she was here now. She moved her suitcases into that room to be unpacked later, and shook the dust out of the bedspread. The bedroom window opened, and Laura leaned out, breathing deeply of the sea air. The view wasn't quite as nice as from the living room, but she could still glimpse the ocean past the neighbors' houses. In fact—

  "What on Earth," she murmured.

  There were horses in the edge of the waves! Four or five of them, a mix of dark and light ones. They were trotting along with no sign of saddle or bridle, as if they felt it was perfectly normal to run through the edge of the surf.

  They disappeared behind the row of beach houses. Laura strained even further out the window, until she was in danger of falling, trying to see where they had gone.

  "You all right, miss?"

  Startled, Laura looked down. There was an old man looking up at her from the property next door, behind a low picket fence. It looked like he had been gardening; he was leaning on a hoe.

  "Hi!" Laura said. "Did you see some horses just now?"

  It was a crazy thing to say, and she realized it as soon as she had said it, especially when he frowned up at her quizzically. He looked about a hundred. His face was sun-browned and seamed with a web of crisscrossing lines. However, his voice was strong, his gnarled fingers steady on the handle of the hoe.

  "Yes, we have wild ponies here," he said. "Do you know that's Edith Mountjoy's house?" r />
  He had an interesting accent, not at all like Shirley's Southern drawl. It was a slow, rolling brogue, almost Irish-sounding. She was so intrigued that it took her a moment to realize why he was looking at her like that. From his point of view, she was a total stranger leaning out his neighbor's bedroom window.

  "Yes, I do," she said. "I mean, it's mine. Sort of. She's my grandmother. I'm sorry, I just got here today."

  The old man leaned the hoe against the fence. "Poor Edith," he said quietly. "Did she pass? I saw the ambulance come."

  He sounded deeply sad. It seemed Grandma had a friend in her neighbor, at least. "No, she's in the hospital," Laura said. "She broke a hip and had to have surgery. I didn't even know until this week. My mom and Grandma Edith didn't stay in touch." She found herself shying away, as always, from the topic of her parents' deaths.

  "You're a Yankee?"

  "I'm from Minnesota," Laura said.

  The old man seemed to take a minute to think this over. "Well," he said, "if you're Edith's grandchild, you have the islands in you, so I guess you're all right."

  He said it so seriously that she had to fight down a giggle, as if this was the most important thing in the world. Maybe to him, it was.

  "Have you and my grandmother known each other for a long time?" she asked.

  "A while," he said after another minute of thinking. "A goodly while. I'm Frank."

  "I'm Laura. Say, um, Frank—do you know anyone around town who does carpentry work? I was thinking about maybe hiring someone to fix up the house."

  "My niece's boy does that kind of thing. Could talk to him."