Sanctuary

Desire.

FIVE
    T HE ferry steamed across Pelican Sound, heading east to Lost Desire. Nathan Delaney stood at the starboard rail as he had once before as a ten-year-old boy. It wasn’t the same ferry, and he was no longer a boy, but he wanted to re-create the moment as closely as possible.
    It was cool with the breeze off the water, and the scent of it was raw and mysterious. It had been warmer before, but then it had been late May rather than mid-April.
    Close enough, he thought, remembering how he and his parents and his young brother had all crowded together at the starboard rail of another ferry, eager for their first glimpse of Desire and the start of their island summer.
    He could see little difference. Spearing up from the land were the majestic live oaks with their lacy moss, cabbage palms, and glossyleaved magnolias not yet in bloom.
    Had they been blooming then? A young boy eager for adventure paid little attention to flowers.
    He lifted the binoculars that hung around his neck. His father had helped him aim and focus on that long-ago morning so that he could catch the quick dart of a woodpecker. The expected tussle had followed because Kyle had demanded the binoculars and Nathan hadn’t wanted to give them up.
    He remembered his mother laughing at them, and his father bending down to tickle Kyle to distract him. In his mind, Nathan could see the picture they had made. The pretty woman with her hair blowing, her dark eyes sparkling with amusement and excitement. The two young boys, sturdy and scrubbed, squabbling. And the man, tall and dark, long of leg and rangy of build.
    Now, Nathan thought, he was the only one left. Somehow he had grown up into his father’s body, had gone from sturdy boy to a man with long legs and narrow hips. He could look in a mirror and see reflections of his father’s face in the hollow cheeks and dark gray eyes. But he had his mother’s mouth, firmly ridged, and her deep brown hair with hints of gold and red. His father had said it was like aged mahogany.
    Nathan wondered if children were really just montages of their parents. And he shuddered.
    Without the binoculars he watched the island take shape. He could see the wash of color from wildflowers—pinks and violets from lupine and wood sorrel. A scatter of houses was visible, a few straight or winding roads, the flash of a creek that disappeared into the trees. Mystery was added by the dark shadows of the forest where feral pigs and horses had once lived, the gleam of the marshes and the blades of waving grasses gold and green in the streaming morning sunlight.
    It was all hazed with distance, like a dream.
    Then he saw the gleam of white on a rise, the quick wink that was sun shooting off glass. Sanctuary, he thought, and kept it in his sights until the ferry turned toward the dock and the house was lost from view.
    Nathan turned from the rail and walked back to his Jeep. When he was settled inside with only the hum of the ferry’s engines for company, he wondered if he was crazy coming back here, exploring the past, in some ways repeating it.
    He’d left New York, packed everything that mattered into the Jeep. It was surprisingly little. Then again, he’d never had a deepseated need for things. That had made his life simpler through the divorce two years before. Maureen had been the collector, and it saved them both a great deal of time and temper when he offered to let her strip the West Side apartment.
    Christ knew she’d taken him up on it and had left him with little more than his own clothes and a mattress.
    That chapter of his life was over, and for nearly two years now he’d devoted himself to his work. Designing buildings was as much a passion as a career for him, and with New York as no more than a home base, he had traveled, studying sites, working wherever he could set up his drawing board and computer. He’d given himself the gift of time to study other buildings, explore the art of them, from the great cathedrals in Italy and France to the streamlined desert homes in the American Southwest.
    He’d been free, his work the only demand on his time and on his heart.
    Then he had lost his parents, suddenly, irrevocably. And had lost himself. He wondered why he felt he could find the pieces on Desire.
    But he was committed to staying at least six months. Nathan took it as a good sign that he’d been able to book the same cottage his family had lived in during that summer. He knew he would listen for the