Sanctuary

feeling well. I’ll worry about her until we get in touch.”
    Jo shifted the camera on her shoulder, watched her tentative morning plans evaporate. “Sure. Fine.”
    “Let me know when you get it straightened out.” Kate shooed them to the door and out. “And don’t worry about housekeeping detail. Lexy and I will manage well enough.”
    Because their backs were turned, Kate smiled broadly, brushed her hands together. There, she thought. Deal with each other.
    Jo climbed in the passenger seat of her father’s aged Blazer, snapped her seat belt on. It smelled of him, she realized. Sand and sea and forest. The engine turned over smoothly and purred. He’d never let anything that belonged to him suffer from neglect, she mused. Except his children.
    Annoyed with herself, she pulled her sunglasses out of the breast pocket of her camp shirt, slid them on. “Nice bonfire last night,” she began.
    “Have to see if that boy policed the beach area.”
    That boy would be Giff, Jo noted, and was aware they both knew Giff wouldn’t have left a single food wrapper to mar the sand. “The inn’s doing well. Lots of business for this time of year.”
    “Advertising,” Sam said shortly. “Kate does it.”
    Jo struggled against heaving a sigh. “I’d think word of mouth would be strong as well. And the restaurant’s quite a draw with Brian’s cooking.”
    Sam only grunted. Never in his life would he understand how a man could want to tie himself to a stove. Not that he understood his daughters any better than he understood his son. One of them flitting off to New York wanting to get famous washing her hair on TV commercials, and the other flitting everywhere and back again snapping photographs. There were times he thought the biggest puzzle in the world was how they had come from him.
    But then, they’d come from Annabelle as well.
    Jo jerked a shoulder and gave up. Rolling down her window, she let the air caress her cheeks, listened to the sound of the tires crunching on the road, then the quick splashing through the maze of duckweed that was life in the slough.
    “Wait.” Without thinking, she reached out to touch Sam’s arm. When he braked, she hopped out quickly, leaving him frowning after her.
    There on a hummock a turtle sunned himself, his head raised so that the pretty pattern on his neck reflected almost perfectly in the dark water. He paid no attention to her as she crouched to set her shot.
    Then there was a rustle, and the turtle’s head recoiled with a snap. Jo’s breath caught as a heron rose up like a ghost, an effortless vertical soar of white. Then the wings spread, stirring wind. It flew over the chain of small lakes and tiny islands and dipped beyond into the trees.
    “I used to wonder what it would be like to do that, to fly up into the sky like magic, with only the sound of wing against air.”
    “I recollect you always liked the birds best,” Sam said from behind her. “Didn’t know you were thinking about flying off, though.”
    Jo smiled a little. “I used to imagine it. Mama told me the story of the Swan Princess, the beautiful young girl turned into a swan by a witch. I always thought that was the best.”
    “She had a lot of stories.”
    “Yes.” Jo turned, studied her father’s face. Did it still hurt him, she wondered, to remember his wife? Would it hurt less if she could tell him she believed Annabelle was dead? “I wish I could remember all of them,” she murmured.
    And she wished she could remember her mother clearly enough to know what to do.
    She took a breath to brace herself. “Daddy, did she ever let you know where she’d gone, or why she left?”
    “No.” The warmth that had come into his eyes as he watched the heron’s flight with Jo iced over. “She didn’t need to. She wasn’t here and she left because she wanted to. We’d best be going and getting this done.”
    He turned and walked back to the Blazer. They drove the rest of the way in silence.
     
     
    JO had done some duty at the campground during her youth. Learning the family business, Kate had called it. The procedure had changed little over the years. The large map tacked to the wall inside the little station detailed the campsites, the paths, the toilet facilities. Blue-headed pins were stuck in the sites that were already occupied, red was for reserved sites, and green was for those where campers had checked out. Green sites needed to be checked, the area policed.
    The rest room and