He had a lot to think about, and he needed a few minutes alone to do so.
It had been a hell of a day. And it was only a little after noon.
3
THE BIG OAK TREE had to be well over a hundred years old. Its trunk was huge, gnarled, its branches spreading far out around it. Lightning had hit the tree at some point in its long history, leaving a thick scar down the north side. But the tree had endured.
Lucas didn’t remember the first time he’d climbed that tree. He couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. Some twenty feet up was a hollow formed by the juncture of several large, leafy branches. In the summertime, a boy could sit in that hollow, hidden from the world, and do a lot of thinking.
He remembered well the last time he’d sat in that spot. He’d been twenty. It had been an impulse of a young man who was desperately in love, frustrated, confu
sed, angry, uncertain.
He’d had a quarrel with an angry Roger Jenkins that morning. Roger had found out that Lucas had been secretly meeting Rachel, despite a long history of animosity between the McBride and Jenkins families. Roger had been infuriated that his sister had been consorting with the stepson of the woman who’d seduced their father away from his family.
There’d been some pushing. Some shoving. Some threats.
Resting one hand against the trunk of the oak, Lucas closed his eyes, and he could almost hear Roger snarling, “Stay away from my sister, McBride. Or I’ll kill you.”
And Lucas had answered, with his usual reckless temper, “I’ll kill you before I let you keep me from her.”
“The same way your father killed his wife and my dad?”
Lucas’s first reaction to Roger’s question had been scorn. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Nine years earlier, Nadine McBride and Al Jennings had run off together. They hadn’t been heard from since. Roger had been convinced that his father, Al, would never have voluntarily abandoned his children. “If he was alive, he would have called. He would have wanted to see us. I think your father caught my dad with your slut of a stepmother and killed them both.”
“And I think you’re out of your mind.”
Roger had sworn then that he would find proof. “And when I do, your father will go to prison. And my sister will never let you near her again.”
They’d parted after a few more angry snarls and empty threats. Needing to cool off before facing his family, Lucas had come impulsively to the old oak tree where he’d spent so many quiet hours as a boy. The hollow had still held him, hidden him from view. Given him a private place to get his temper under control and contemplate Roger’s ridiculous accusations.
He’d been sitting there perhaps half an hour when his little sister and their cousins, Savannah and Tara, had trudged into the clearing, toting an old cypress trunk between them. From his vantage point, Lucas could see and hear them as they’d giggled and chattered and dug in the rain-softened ground with shovels borrowed from his father’s tool shed.
Shamelessly eavesdropping on the conversation, Lucas had discovered that the girls had designated the trunk as a “time capsule,” to be dug up in fifteen years on Savannah’s birthday—a time so far in the future they could hardly imagine it. Before burying the trunk, they’d opened it to make sure the contents were securely wrapped. Lucas had learned that each girl had packed an individual box of “treasures,” written their names on the tops with permanent markers, and wrapped the boxes in plastic garbage bags to protect them inside the trunk.
He’d found the little ceremony amusing, a welcome distraction from his personal problems. He’d thought Emily was so cute tagging along with her older cousins, imitating their speech and behavior, participating so eagerly in burying the trunk. He had wondered if they would remember to dig up the trunk in fifteen years, or if it would be long forgotten by then.
Now, after reading the article in the Honoria Gazette and learning that a heavy gold bracelet had been stolen from Emily in a recent home break-in, Lucas knew that the trunk had, indeed, been unearthed.
Lucas himself had hidden that bracelet in Emily’s time capsule only two weeks after the girls had buried it. It had been the day after Roger Jennings fell from the bluff—less than two months before Lucas left town vowing never to return.
What had Emily thought when she found it? Who had taken it from her, and where was it now?
Those were the questions that had brought Lucas back to Honoria, questions he hadn’t found quite the right time to ask.
“Lucas?”
It took Lucas a moment to make the transition from past to present. Emily-the-child faded into memory as Emily-the-woman approached her brother. Bundled into a down-filled parka, she carried his leather jacket in her arms. “Aren’t you getting cold out here without your jacket?”
He was cold, actually. He was just so caught up in his thoughts, he hadn’t realized it. He took the jacket and shrugged into it, touched by her concern. It had been a long time since anyone had worried about him.
Emily tucked her hands into her pockets and looked around. “Checking out the old grounds?”
“Yeah. Hasn’t changed much.”
“No. Not much.” Her gaze drifted to the bare patch of earth where the chest had once been buried.