Free Alice At Heart by Deborah Smith Page A

breathing—and they are quite friendly to me.
    “A person can lose her voice so easily when no knows how to listen,” the mother of the family confessed to me in her singsong words. “Sometimes I become so quiet I can’t even tell myself what I am thinking.”
    I couldn’t agree more.

7

    Pull to and fro, Row men, row! Keep your eyes upright and your ears shut tight! The devil’s in the sea but he won’t get thee! Pull to and fro, Row men, row! The devil looks up from the depths below!
    — Ballad of the Merfolk , British sailors’ song, 18th century
    The nurse’s aide wasn’t more than twenty-five—not quite young enough to be his daughter, Griffin decided, but close. Apparently her main duty was to touch him as often as possible. She was pretty, with bright blond hair, and looked as if she belonged not in the ponderous Victorian confines of Randolph Cottage but in a smoky urban club, some dark, loud place where goateed college boys sucked pacifiers and traded small packets of pills beneath retro 1950s diner tables. Her typical work outfit consisted of snug little sweaters cut low enough to show cleavage and tight black pants with a little flair at the ankles. The pants stretched just enough to emphasize every flexing inch of her, front and back. She smelled of good perfume. Her name was Kelly. She spelled it Kellee.
    On the average day, she managed to caress Griffin five or six times through his pajamas, always as casual as a kitten strolling by. She practically crawled atop the big old-fashioned bedstead with him, fluffing the dozen fat pillows that propped his broken leg, his broken arm, his still-sprained back, his still-stiff neck. She brushed her fingers across his thighs, or his stomach, the side of his jaw, and, hell, he noted, even his good knee. Some morbid sense of humor compelled him, and he began tallying the come-ons in a small notebook.
    An efficient male nurse named Ben helped him with his baths, his medications, and trips to the john. But Kellee fetched and toted, brought him books to read, kept his water pitcher full, artistically arranged meal trays he barely touched, and tried to give him erections.
    That didn’t work either and worse, he didn’t care that it didn’t work.
    “No, thanks,” he told her gently and cupped a scarred, pale hand around her face. She cried and left the room.
    Griffin, who had never had a problem with either the obvious reaction or the obvious follow-through to female attention, laid a pillow over his groin. From then on he spent the time gazing, hollow-eyed, out a large window that faced BellemeadeBay. Randolph Cottage sat on a spit of sand dunes two miles south of the bay’s namesake—Bellemeade—the village Simon Sainte Bonavendier had rescued from an English warship during the Revolution.
    Griffin was an avid historian, so he knew every detail. The cannon battle between Bonavendier’s ship and the English had taken place right off the cottage’s shores, just inside the bay’s narrow mouth, bracketed by the island on the oceanside and this jutting peninsula of sand dunes and sea oats on the bayside. Bonavendier had cornered the English warship there, pounded it with cannon fire, and let the villagers of Bellemeade finish it off.
    Behind Randolph Cottage, buried under dunes, lay the coquina foundation of FortBellemeade. Two cannonballs—one from Bonavendier’s ship and one from the fort’s artillery—graced massive newel posts at the foot of the cottage’s staircase. One of Simon Sainte Bonavendier’s own swords—a gift to Randolph ancestors who had commandeered that fort—hung in the cottage’s living room.
    Randolphs and Bonavendiers. Land and water. They had been allies then, but the friendship had faded over the generations. Randolphs were merchants at heart, Bonavendiers, pirates.
    On the clearest March days, Griffin could see across the bay to Sainte’s Point. The island made an ethereal blue-green strip on the horizon. He knew that a mile