On Folly Beach
Karen White
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
Author’s Note
CONVERSATION GUIDE
A CONVERSATION WITH KAREN WHITE
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Praise for the Novels of Karen White
The House on Tradd Street
“Engaging. . . . The supernatural elements are not played for scares, but instead refine and reveal Melanie’s true character. . . . A fun and satisfying read, this series kickoff should hook a wide audience.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The House on Tradd Street has it all: mystery, romance, and the paranormal including ghosts with quirky personalities. For me this is White’s best work and I am looking forward to the sequel.”
—BookLoons
“White delivers funny characters, a solid plot, and an interesting twist in this novel about the South and its antebellum history.”
—Romantic Times
“Has all the elements that have made Karen White’s books fan favorites: a Southern setting, a deeply emotional tale, and engaging characters. ”
—A Romance Review
“The key to this quirky charmer is the depth of the lead characters, especially the heroine and even some of the ghosts. Fans of paranormal romantic suspense will want to read this wonderful tale as Karen White provides a fine treasure hunt mystery with a nasty spirit inside a warm romance in which readers will say yes that they believe in ghosts and in love.”
—Midwest Book Review
Written by today’s freshest new talents and selected by New American Library, NAL Accent novels touch on subjects close to a woman’s heart, from friendship to family to finding our place in the world. The Conversation Guides included in each book are intended to enrich the individual reading experience, as well as encourage us to explore these topics together—because books, and life, are meant for sharing.
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“If you enjoy ghost stories with some mystery thrown into the mix, you are going to love this one. The sights and smells of the old house, along with excellent dialogue and good pacing, add up to a wonderful, mysterious, and ghostly tale.”
—Romance Reviews Today
“Brilliant and engrossing . . . a rare gem . . . exquisitely told, rich in descriptions, and filled with multifaceted characters.”
—The Book Connection
“Karen White is an extremely talented and colorful writer with tons of imagination. If you are not a believer of paranormal, you will be after reading this novel.”
—Fresh Fiction
The Memory of Water
“Beautifully written and as lyrical as the tides. The Memory of Water speaks directly to the heart and will linger in yours long after you’ve read the final page. I loved this book!”
—Susan Crandall, author of Pitch Black
“Karen White delivers a powerfully emotional blend of family secrets, Lowcountry lore, and love in The Memory of Water—who could ask for more?”
—Barbara Bretton, author of Just Desserts
Learning to Breathe
“White creates a heartfelt story full of vibrant characters and emotion that leaves the reader satisfied yet hungry for more from this talented author.”
—Booklist
“One of those stories where you savor every single word . . . a perfect 10.”
—Romance Reviews Today
“Another one of Karen White’s emotional books! A joy to read!”
—The Best Reviews
Pieces of the Heart
“Heartwarming and intense . . . a tale that resonates with the meaning of unconditional love.”
—Romantic Times (4 stars)
“A terrific, insightful character study.”
—Midwest Book Review
The Color of Light
“[White’s] prose is lyrical, and she weaves in elements of mysticism and romance without being heavy-handed. An accomplished novel.”
—Booklist
“A story as rich as a coastal summer . . . dark secrets, heartache, a magnificent South Carolina setting, and a great love story.”
—New York Times bestselling author Deborah Smith
“As lush as the Lowcountry, where the characters’ wounded souls come home to mend in unexpected and magical ways.”
—Patti Callahan Henry, author of Between the Tides
More Praise for the Novels of Karen White
“The fresh voice of Karen White intrigues and delights.”
—Sandra Chastain, contributor to At Home in Mossy Creek
“Warmly Southern and deeply moving.”
—New York Times bestselling author Deborah Smith
“Karen White writes with passion and poignancy.”
—Deb Stover, award-winning author of Mulligan Magic
“[A] sweet book . . . highly recommended.”
—Booklist
“Karen White is one author you won’t forget. . . . This is a masterpiece in the study of relationships. Brava!”
—Reader to Reader Reviews
“This is not only romance at its best—this is a fully realized view of life at its fullest.”
—Readers & Writers, Ink
“After the Rain is an elegantly enchanting Southern novel. . . . Fans will recognize the beauty of White’s evocative prose.”
—WordWeaving.com
“In the tradition of Catherine Anderson and Deborah Smith, Karen White’s After the Rain is an incredibly poignant contemporary bursting with Southern charm.”
—Patricia Rouse, Rouse’s Romance Readers Groups
“Don’t miss this book!”
—Rendezvous
NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY TITLES BY KAREN WHITE
The Girl on Legare Street
The House on Tradd Street
The Lost Hours
The Memory of Water
Pieces of the Heart
Learning to Breathe
The Color of Light
NAL ACCENT
Published by New American Library, a division of
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First published by New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, May 2010
Copyright © Harley House Books, LLC, 2010
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
White, Karen (Karen S.)
On Folly Beach/Karen White. p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-40437-9
1. Folly Beach (S.C.)—Fiction. 2. South Carolina—Fiction. 3. Bookstores—South Carolina—Folly
Beach—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.H5776O5 2010
813’.6—dc22 2009053832
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
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To my parents, Catherine Anne and Lloyd Sconiers.
Thank you for your love and guidance.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the generous and gracious residents, past and present, of Folly Beach, South Carolina, especially Mary Rhodes, Bill Bryan, Ruth Rahaley, and Beth Lamm, for helping me with my research for this book. I would also like to extend a huge thank-you to the indomitable Marlene Estridge, city clerk for the city of Folly Beach, for the kind generosity of her time and information and her enormous patience with all of my questions. Now I know why there was a song written about her.
Thanks also for all of the lighthouse information provided by Carl Hitchcock of Save the Light, Inc., the organization working to restore and preserve the historic Morris Island Lighthouse for future generations. For more information or to learn how you can help, visit www.savethelight.org.
Great appreciation also goes to my readers, especially Sandra Popham and Mary Kelly, whose enthusiasm for my books is as flattering as it is inspiring. Thanks for all the kind words—I couldn’t do what I do without you!
And thanks, as always, to my friend and fellow author, Wendy Wax, and my family—Tim, Meghan, and Connor—for enduring yet another deadline and ending up relatively unscathed. You make all of this possible!
The ocean is the same ocean as it has been of old; the events of today are its waves and its rivers.
—Sayyid Haydar Amuli FOURTEENTH CENTURY
PROLOGUE
NOBLESVILLE, INDIANA
January 2009
Emmy awoke to the song of the wind in the bottle tree, to the black night and the winter chill, and knew Ben was gone from her the way the moon knows the ocean’s tides. She’d been born with what her mother called the knowing, and until this night Emmy had never been afraid of it. But now the keening of the wind through the colored bottles bled through her bones and flashed behind her eyes like a newsreel, illuminating the one thing she’d never wanted to know.
Lying awake in the stillness, Emmy began her grieving, missing already the way Ben’s laugh started as a rumble in this throat, and the warmth of his hand on her hip as he slept while she stayed awake to count her firsts and her lasts.
She’d started this on the night Ben had kissed her for the first time all those years ago, tilting her face to his as a sunflower turns toward the sun, and as he lowered his head toward hers she remembered thinking that this was the last time he’d kiss her for the first time. Emmy had assumed that everything with Ben would always be a litany of firsts, and for the most part, they had been. Except for saying good-bye. Since that first night, they’d made it a game between them, promising never to say good-bye to the other. It was insurance, Ben told her, that they would see each other again.
Slowly, Emmy rose from her bed and walked out of her childhood bedroom, where she’d moved when Ben left her for his second tour of duty. Then she went through the living room and the kitchen door to the backyard, ignoring the snow against her feet and the way the wind penetrated Ben’s flannel shirt. The shirt was a poor substitute for his arms, and wearing it in Ben’s absence was something her mother had told her was like swimming with a raincoat. But it was the one thing Emmy could hold on to.
She flitted like a ghost past her mother’s sleeping herb garden, to the back of the picket fence to where the bottle tree stretched itself out through a dusting of snow, howling its unease to the brutal climate. The tree was the only thing her mother had brought from her South Carolina home, as if to bring more would make her exodus too permanent. Although it had been. Except for the funerals of both of Emmy’s grandparents, her mother had never been back.
The tree itself was an artist’s rendition in metal of a tree trunk and multiple branches, upon which each end had been topped with a glass bottle in various rainbow hues. Slaves from the Congo had brought the tradition of the bottle trees from their homeland to the American South, their intent to catch evil spirits inside the bottles before they could make it into their homes.
The bottle tree had stood in the backyard since before Emmy was born, and she’d asked only once why after so many miscarriages her mother had still believed in its power to turn away bad spirits, and never given up and taken it down for good. The obvious answer—because then you were born—had never formed on her mother’s lips, and Emmy had stopped asking.
Still, the tree had become a point of refuge for her—a tie to a place she knew only in old photographs of her mother as a young girl, a place with an entirely different color palette from the flat Indiana farmlands of her home. Emmy had never seen the ocean, but as a child she’d liked to pretend that it was the sound of the ocean that lay trapped within the bottles, and if Emmy ever found the courage to lift a bottle from its branch, she’d finally learn what it was that made her mother miss a place so much.
A new moon bathed the frozen yard with a veil of blue light as Emmy closed her eyes and tried to block out the sound of the wind and the truth it wrapped around her head. Ben is gone. She closed her eyes tighter, trying to feel him again, to see him as she had the last time at the airport, when he was wearing army-issue fatigues with the name HAMILTON stamped on the pocket and saying everything but good-bye. But even her gift failed her, answering her only with bitter cold and utter blackness.
The screen door slammed shut, like a shout in the dark, but Emmy didn’t turn around. “Mama?”
Her mother’s voice came out as a sob. “Is it Ben?”
Emmy nodded, her words frozen. She turned in time to see her mother’s knees begin to buckle. It was Paige’s prerogative; she knew grief. She’d never allowed the birds of sorrow to hover above her, but instead had invited them inside to nest.
Emmy reached her mother before Paige fell into the snow, and found herself again being the comforter, the adult. She welcomed it. If Paige fell apart, Emmy woul
dn’t have to think about her own grief, of how she was barely thirty and already a widow. Or how she’d have to find a way to say good-bye to her husband for the last first time.
CHAPTER 1
FOLLY BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA
January 1942
The buzzing from the B-24 bomber approaching Center Street started like nothing more than that of a sand gnat, but soon the noise filled Maggie’s ears to the exclusion of everything else. She ran out onto the front porch as Jack McDonough buzzed his hometown on one of his regular flybys. She waved, not sure if he could see her, then ran back inside and up the stairs to her sister’s bedroom, recently relinquished to their widowed cousin, Catherine.
“Damn that Jack!” came a woman’s voice from inside the bedroom.
Maggie opened the door without knocking and fixed a reproving look at her cousin. “Watch your language, Cat. There are young ears in this house.”
