Moonlight in the Morning Read online

  “I’m so sorry for him,” Jecca said, but inside she was elated. Beautiful man, heartbroken, in need of consoling. The summer was looking more interesting by the second.

  When they got to Edilean, Jecca made the appropriate sounds about how cute the little town was. Historical buildings had been restored and every façade was under a strict code for conformity of appearance. No glass and steel structures allowed in Edilean!

  As an artist, Jecca appreciated it all, but she was working hard to get out of her small town in New Jersey where she’d grown up. Right now, she only admired cities, specifically New York.

  As for Reede, he was going to be a doctor, so he could work anywhere—and now his connection to Edilean was broken. Jecca had a vision of the two of them living in Paris. He’d be a renown heart surgeon and she an artist revered by the French. They’d visit Edilean and see Kim often.

  When they reached the Aldredge home, Jecca was smiling. “When can I see Kim?”

  “Anytime. My wife is already at the hospital, and I’m going over there as soon as I unload your suitcases. You can go with me if you want.”

  “I’d love to.”

  He drove them the ten miles to the hospital in Williamsburg, and when she saw Kim sitting up in bed with a sketchbook in her hands, Jecca laughed. “You’re supposed to be taking it easy. Resting.”

  Kim’s parents politely left the room.

  As soon as they were alone, Jecca said, “I told your father I wanted to go painting at Florida Point and I thought he was going to faint.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I did!” Jecca said. “So spill the dirt.”

  “I told you not to say that name to anyone from Edilean.”

  “You did not,” Jecca said.

  “Okay, so maybe I didn’t.” She glanced at the door, then lowered her voice. “It’s the local makeout point—and has been for centuries.”

  “Centuries?” Jecca asked in disbelief.

  “Certainly since WWI and that ended in—”

  “1918,” Jecca said quickly. “And donand8220;An’t remind me of the Great War. That’s when Layton Hardware was founded, and if I hear one more time that we Laytons have a tradition to uphold . . . Okay, so what about that war?”

  “Somebody called the place the French Letter Point. That’s old slang for a condom and they were used a lot there. Somewhere along the way it got shortened to F.L. and since that stands for Florida . . .”

  “I get it,” Jecca said. “So I’m to say Stirling Point to anyone over thirty.”

  “Good idea.”

  “So let me see what you’re designing,” Jecca said and picked up her friend’s sketchbook. Kim’s passion was jewelry and she loved organic forms. That was one thing that had united the three young women when they’d met at school. Whether it was jewelry, paintings, or sculpture, they liked reproducing what they saw in nature.

  “I like this,” Jecca said, looking at the branch-like designs. They flowed in a way that would hug a woman’s neck. “Will you add any jewels?”

  “I can’t afford them. I can barely afford the silver.”

  “I could get Dad to send you some steel ball bearings.”

  Kim laughed. “So tell me what you said to your dad to get him to let you come. And tell me again about you and all those men in tool belts.”

  “Gladly, but first I want to hear all about Laura and Reede and the bad boy preacher.”

  Kim groaned. “Whatever you do, don’t mention any of that while Reede is around. And don’t make jokes!”

  Jecca stopped smiling. “Really bad, huh?”

  “Worse than you can imagine. Reede was really in love with that little slut and—”

  “Has that always been your opinion of her?”

  Again Kim looked at the doorway. “Actually, it was worse. I thought she was ordinary.”

  Neither she nor Kim would ever say it out loud, but having been born with a talent in art made them feel grateful but also, well, sometimes disdainful of people who didn’t create. “How ordinary?” Jecca asked.

  “Bland. Nothing she ever did was different from what everyone else did. The way she dressed, what she talked about, what she cooked, everything was tasteless, flat. I could never understand what Reede saw in her.”

  “Pretty?”

  “Yes, but not in a way that would cause any notice.”

  “Maybe that’s why she left. Maybe she was intimidated by Reede,” Jecca said. “I only saw him once, but if I remember correctly, he wasn’t bad to look at. And he must be smart or he wouldn’t be in med school.”

  Kim was looking at her friend hard. “Did you come here to see me or my newly single brother?”

  “I didn’t know he was single until an hour ago! But now that I’ve heard, I’m not exav h17;m noctly torn up about it.”

  Kim started to say more but she saw her mother about to enter the room. “You have my blessing,” she whispered and squeezed Jecca’s hand.

  Blessing or no, over the next few days Jecca found it impossible to get Reede’s attention. If anything, he was better-looking than she remembered, and at twenty-six, he was close to being a full-fledged doctor.

  But hard as she worked she couldn’t get him to notice her. She wore shorts that showed her legs, low-cut tops that displayed a lot of her breasts. But he never looked. In fact, she never saw him look at anything. He just wandered around the house in old sweats, watched TV some, but mostly stared at the walls. It was like his body was alive, but his mind wasn’t.

  A couple of times, Jecca saw Kim’s mother looking at her as though she knew that Jecca was trying to get her son’s attention. She seemed to approve, because she was very nice to Jecca. She even gave a party and invited a lot of people from Edilean—most of whom were unmarried men. They all seemed to be interested in Jecca, but she paid no attention to them. Her mind was on Reede.

  After three days of trying to get his attention, Jecca gave up. If he wasn’t interested in her, that’s the way it was. She wasn’t going to keep on dressing like she was trying to get a job as a stripper.

  She got Kim to draw her a map of how to get to Florida Point—she whispered the name—put on her normal jeans and T-shirt, grabbed her case of watercolors, and used Kim’s car to drive out of town to the isolated place.

  She spent two days at the Point, working constantly. Kim had been right that it was a magnificent site. There was a tall rock cliff that had long views on one side and looked down into a deep, clear pond of water on the other. First, she photographed the views, holding down the button on the digital camera so it clicked rapidly. She’d never been good at painting from photos, but maybe she would learn.

  She worked hard to capture the blue mist that came up out of the Virginia hollows and gradually disappeared into the treetops. She played with putting one shade on top of the other to try to re-create the way the light faded then brightened.

  She experimented with working slowly and meticulously on one painting, then whizzing through the second one.

  On the second day, she didn’t go up the path to the top of the cliff but stayed below to study the flowers, the seedpods, the bark on the trees, the leaves. She didn’t try to arrange anything but painted what she saw. Leaves naturally crossed one another in a perfect balance of light, color, and form.

  A couple of times she stretched out on her stomach to see some flowers that were the size of a ladybug, then re-created them with her watercolors. She used her camera’s—thank you for the gift, Dad—close-up icon to enlarge the flowers so she could paint the stamens and pistils, the veining on the petals, and the tiny leaves.

  When she got through, she had a flower that filled an eight-by-ten piece of the heavy watercolor paper.

  She was so absorbed in what she was doing that she heard nothing until a shout made her jump. Turning, she looked through the bushes and realized how hidden she was from the grassless, worn area around the poe lround tol.

  Looking up, she saw a man standing on the