Free Alice At Heart by Deborah Smith Page B

beyond it, beneath the jagged waters of the open Atlantic, pieces of his parents’ sailboat still lay on the ocean floor. Pieces of his childhood. Only the island stood between him and that place, and he was grateful.
    Our kind will go the way of unicorns and dragons. Reduced to fantastic illusions, dismissed by science, forced into hiding. It is so much easier for people to believe nothing extraordinary exists in their own nature.
    On the cusp of a new millennium, with magical technology folding the world in on itself, Lilith diligently wrote in a large journal atop a slender, gilded desk in her private office. Her great-grandparents had salvaged the delicate writing desk from a wrecked French cargo steamer in the mid-1800s. The steamer’s journey had begun somewhere off the coast of Europe, and it had been heading for one of the Randolph estates near Savannah. The desk was rumored to have belonged to Napoleon.
    The Randolphs suspected but had never proved anything. The Bonavendiers considered the desk a small commission for rescuing the rest of the steamer’s cargo, not to mention the passengers and crew.
    Lilith knew precisely where remnants of the steamer’s hull lay off the island’s shoals, alongside the shells of other vessels once employed by Randolph Shipping. One of her many projects involved cataloging all the romantic and tragic ships that had sunk in the island’s arms—some modern, some ancient, some fact, some merely lore.
    She had dutifully researched her family’s diaries and letters and had explored the underwater wreck sites herself, of course, like many Bonavendiers before her. Now she meticulously entered locations, circumstances, how many passengers were rescued by Bonavendiers, and how much property. She wasn’t compiling the journal to brag about the family’s reputation for wit and bravery in the old times, before ships circumvented the island’s deadly shallows via satellite tracking systems and computer-aided navigation charts. Nor was she gossiping about the goods they’d plucked from hapless brigands and schooners and steam-powered paddlewheelers and diesel tankers during two hundred years of Bonavendier history on Sainte’s Point. She was writing it all down as a gift for Alice and Griffin. Whether they knew it or not yet, they understood the desire to bring back what the sea would give and forgive.
    One page of the thick leather journal remained blank except for a few small notations at the top. The Calm Meridian , she had written quietly, followed by the date of the small sailing yacht’s demise: November, 1967. Thirty-five years ago. She had listed three passenger names: Undiline Randolph, Porter Randolph—the parents. Griffin Randolph—their young son, and only survivor. She included the latitude and longitude of the wreckage, and a brief description of the scattered woods and metals that had once comprised the handsomest and fastest luxury sailing yacht on the Georgia coast. Beneath it all she had written this small epitaph.
    God rest your sweet soul and forgive Porter for his cruelty, dear Undiline.
    She stood resolutely and closed her journal. Beyond her parlor’s louvered Spanish shutters and hand-blown English windowpanes, the first balmy hint of spring put a tinge of green on the massive maritime oaks on the front lawn leading to the cove. Seagulls and pelicans shared squatting privileges on the cove’s docks. Dolphins surfaced like gray-blue cats arching their backs. Barret kept a ferryboat named the Lorelei ready to leave at a second’s notice. Thirty minutes of peaceful passageway would take Lilith and her sisters across the bay to the mainland whenever they wished.
    Alice would arrive at the coast any day now, and they would go immediately to welcome her in style.
    But it was time to welcome Griffin home, first.
    “Thank you, Barret.”
    “You’re most welcome.”
    Barret offered a brawny hand as Lilith stepped from the Lorelei ’s broad, mahogany deck onto the