CONSCIENCE POINT
PREVIOUS BOOKS BY ERICA ABEEL:
Only When I Laugh
I’ll Call You Tomorrow and Other Lies Between Men and Women
The Last Romance
Women Like Us
CONSCIENCE POINT
Erica Abeel
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Unbridled Books
Denver, Colorado
Copyright © 2008
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abeel, Erica.
Conscience point / by Erica Abeel.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-932961-53-9 (hardcover)
I. Title.
PS3551.B333C66 2008
813’.54—dc22
2008018615
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Book Design by SH • CV
First Printing
To Maud and Neilson
“He seems to have a penchant for my children.”
—EVELYN WAUGH, Brideshead Revisited
CONSCIENCE POINT
First
I suppose it was the accident that wild, wet night on Wildmoor that got me writing this story. This . . . call it Gothic modern tale, complete with family curses, unquiet spirits, forbidden love—a bizarre crime, even; seasoned, of course, with ’90s grabbiness and irony. A story rather in keeping with the fantastical contours of Conscience Point. Like some back-lot castle for Ivanhoe, Violet used to joke. Held together with plaster ’n’ spit.
I wrote because the accident felt . . . fated; like a crack on the head from the past, capstone to a course set in motion decades back. A course that began one glorious May afternoon when I breached the garden wall to an enchanted country. I needed to understand: How could people so blessed by fortune so bungle it, and end in a pileup of buckled metal? Even allowing for the contrarian imp that rides us all? And my own blindness: How did I not see what was there to see all along?
Deep into my draft, though, new revelations surfaced, shoving a counterversion in my face—and forcing me to scramble for a foothold as old certainties crumbled like shale. And then, an odd thing: I discovered I was writing a letter of sorts, across continents and years, to a child in whom all the players in this tale are mingled.
If my letter should ever reach him, he’ll learn how we’re all bound up together—he and I, Laila, Violet, Nick. More entwined than through the usual ties of blood. And though we’ve all spun apart now, he’ll sense, my reader, how those ties persist, like phosphorescence lighting the night sea. And he’ll know, too—in the end, real estate rules—that Conscience Point is his to claim any time he chooses.
How strangely mixed up together we all are. Isn’t that what Nick said in the library that stormy night?
But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself; better not hop all over the lot. After all, I’m writing, too—such is human vanity—to put the world on notice that our little caravan passed this way. The trick is to put a bit of starch in the narrative. The trick is to lay it out the way it happened. Before I start missing them all too much . . .
CHAPTER 1 The Vertical Ray
It began in France on a May morning of their lovely stolen holiday. They sat, she and Nick, on the terrace of an inn shoehorned into George Sand’s country estate, reveling in the morning sun, the silvery warble of merles. Air that felt breathed for the first time. When Nick nosed their Avis Renault into the driveway the evening before, they might have crossed into an earlier century. . . .
“Do you get many visitors here off-season?” he asked the innkeeper. Scoping out the terrain. He’d just signed up a book on Sand’s beloved Berry region, a quilt of dreaming farm fields and dark hedgerows, in 1997 still little known to tourists.
“Not as many as now,” said the innkeeper, a woman with ’40s-style marcelled hair. “Though we did have a writer here all winter, working on a screenplay about George Sand and Chopin—and Sand’s daughter. There’s a girl knew how to make trouble.”
Nick frowned, Maddy uncertain why. The innkeeper continued to hover. Not the first time Maddy noticed how she and Nick acted as attractants; they must give off a musk. She watched the woman’s gaze linger on Nick: the wolf-grey eyes, longish space between nose and lips, tawny weave of hair. The tastiness of him. Humbly, she demishrugged at the innkeeper. Never flaunt happiness. Hide.
“Just think, it’s this time of year we first met,” she said when they were finally alone.
He circled an arm around her chair. “Have I told you you’re nicer now? Back then you were kind of . . . thistle-y.”
“Damn right. You were ogling me naked on the beach.”
“You’re prettier now, too.” Blind—Nick the hypercritical—to the faint seam imprinted by the pillow on her cheek and other stunts of her morning face. He shifted his chair closer and planted tickly kisses down her neck and she laughed giddily. “Mmm, wanna go back to the room?”
“Might kill us.”
“Uh-huh.”
Last night Nick vexed at himself, at odds with his own body. Then, this morning, he’d surprised them both. Early farm sounds beyond their window, pails clanking; gamey barnyard smells. She imagined them wartime lovers hiding out in the countryside. Her face twisted away, throat arched . . . wait, wait . . . fingers at the hard ridge of muscle on either side of his spine. Their cries mingling with a rooster’s below. They’d arrived at breakfast overflowing with the goodwill born of coming from the pads of your toes to the roots of your hair.
Their waiter, carrot-haired and fey, laid out breakfast with balletic flourishes: fresh orange juice and a basket of tartines, glazed earthenware crocks of apricot preserves and sweet butter, two white pitchers of steaming coffee and milk. They dug in.
“I been thinking, if they want, I dunno . . . Video Kitten, to hell with Chronicle, Nick said, picking up an earlier debate. “I mean, you give concerts and do the show—you give good value.” Grimacing at his own expression.
“Nicky, the suits don’t dote on me quite like you.”
“Well, who does?” He smiled and daubed a crusty tartine with chunky preserves. “Anyway, I been thinking, maybe you should pare down a little, do just the piano. Give us a little wiggle room. More of this.” He nodded toward the terrace. “Though maybe you enjoy”—raising an eyebrow—“working like a galley slave?” Maybe; how well he knew her. “Multitasking, as a new editor in my office would say,” Nick continued. “She also ‘transitions,’ when she isn’t ‘partying’ . . . or