Free Firefly Beach by Luanne Rice

treasure hunting. He can teach you to dig for gold doubloons.
Love,
Joe
     
P.S. I’m only joking to make you smile. So smile!
P.S. again: Thought I forgot about the Cambria , didn’t you?
P.S. double again: Smile, C.
     

     
     
     
    C AROLINE WAS PREOCCUPIED .
    Michele Brady saw it right away, the way Caroline strode into the inn so purposefully, past the guests eating breakfast in the parlor, grabbing the phone messages off Michele’s desk with barely more than a “good morning.” Caroline looked gorgeous, as always: sleeveless black linen dress, black sandals, silver hoop earrings, silver necklace. She smiled, but it seemed forced.
    Or pained, Michele thought, concerned. From certain phone messages, she had gathered that Skye was in the hospital again. That girl certainly gave Caroline plenty to worry about. Her whole family did. Even Clea, whom everyone in town considered to be the picture of respectability, was always calling Caroline for something. And Augusta didn’t butter her toast without phoning Caroline for a consult.
    Michele had been Caroline’s assistant for ten years. At forty-two, she was just enough older than Caroline to feel rather protective of her. She was always telling her husband Tim about Caroline’s crazy family, the things that went on. He was a professor of English at Connecticut College. Tim would listen with wry detachment, amusedly saying that Skye was New England’s answer to Zelda Fitzgerald, or that the Renwick girls were like three divas in three different operas on the same stage.
    Michele couldn’t help laughing at Tim’s take on the family, but she loved Caroline nonetheless. Caroline had hired her the year she opened the inn. They had spent the last ten years in separate offices, side by side, and although Caroline didn’t specifically confide in her, Michele had been privy to the major moments in her life. She had watched Caroline transform from a…well, crazy Renwick girl into an astute and respected businesswoman. Caroline had always been loyal and kind, and those qualities had served her well.
    Michele answered the phone, so she knew the general workings of Caroline’s love life, business life, and family life. Over time she had watched Caroline build the Renwick Inn from a quirky little artists’ retreat into an inn that attracted guests from all over the world. Some came for the location, others for the charm, still others because of the Renwick name.
    Caroline’s father was famous in a way usually reserved for actors or politicians, a man whose work hung in museums in New York, Paris, and London and whose wild nature had made him a favorite of magazine writers. One story in Esquire had called Hugh Renwick “the Hemingway of twentieth-century landscape painters.” The author cited his bravery in World War II, his drinking and adultery, violence and self-destruction, the way his talent seemed to engulf everything—and everyone—in his life.
    Doing the story, the author got drunk with Hugh. So did the photographer, who was famous in his own right. Their drunken escapades became part of the piece. They photographed him in a hunting jacket, with a rifle, somewhere in the woods at the edge of a bay in Maine. Hugh had told the story of an intruder that made it into the piece, a man who had entered his home and held his family hostage, finally blowing his own brains out.
    Michele remembered Hugh’s fury. It had saturated the magazine story: his home had been violated, his daughters threatened. He couldn’t protect them twenty-four hours a day, but he could damn well teach them how to shoot a gun. He was sorry about the event on Redhawk Mountain, the hunting accident involving his daughter Skye. As Michele remembered it, the story didn’t actually mention the name of the man she killed. All Hugh’s sorrow and self-doubt had been edited out of the piece, leaving only rage and bluster.
    Michele knew differently. Hugh Renwick was heartsick. As much as he had loved