Beach Girls Read Online Free PDF

my hair and shared with the mama birds, to help them build their nests . . .”
    She was right: Emma had done that very thing. After brushing Nell's hair . . . it had been part of the ritual, and Jack had loved to see her do it; it had seemed part of who Emma was, how much she had loved being Nell's mother.
    Jack stared at Nell. How had she tracked down her mother's friend? She hadn't asked him for help—or had she? What were those questions about the blue house at the end of the beach? Was she keeping secrets again? He remembered those terrible nights last winter, when she had woken herself up screaming for her mother. Six months with a therapist had helped—they were experimenting by taking the summer off. Dr. Galford was two hours away, in Boston. Nell still had trouble sleeping, but at least the screams were no longer bloodcurdling.
    “Back to the Band-Aids, Nell. What happened?”
    “Well, like I said, Dad. I took a fall, and Stevie fixed me up.”
    Stevie.
Jack narrowed his eyes, giving Nell his sternest look, but she just looked back with that implacable green gaze. “Would you like to tell me how you found her?”
    “All the kids around here know her. They flock to her house.”
    “Like the birds she paints!” Francesca said.
    “You know, you're almost like a kid yourself,” Nell said so radiantly that Francesca missed the barb and beamed.
    Jack was tired. He had planned to take everyone out for a shore dinner, but right now he just wanted to lie down and stop thinking. Since Emma's death a year ago, anything could wear him down. He wanted her here, back with him, right now. He wanted it so badly, he knew that was why he had returned to the beach where he'd first met her, and he knew—thinking of Nell seeking out Emma's best friend and seeing the glitter the meeting had put in her eyes—that coming to this beach was a huge mistake.
    “Just don't bother her again,” Jack said. “That's an order.”
    “I won't,” Nell promised.
    “I want you to make best friends of your own,” Jack said. “Kids your own age, to play with at the beach.”
    Nell giggled.
    “What's so funny?”
    “Nothing. 'Cept that when you say ‘kids my own age' you remind me of something she said. Stevie mentioned you,” Nell said.
    “What did she say?”
    “That you were ancient!” Nell laughed teasingly, but the look she shot Francesca was all business. And by the time she looked back at her father, her eyes were once again wide-open, waiting, devoid of the joke. Jack tried to take her hand now, but she ran out of the room, up the stairs. He heard her footsteps on the bare boards overhead. Francesca walked over to hug him, whisper something in his ear, but he couldn't feel her or hear her.

Chapter 3
    STEVIE'S NEXT BOOK WAS provisionally
titled
Red Nectar
, about hummingbirds and their penchant for red flowers. Although she was under a tight deadline to finish, that evening she set it aside and began a series of watercolor sketches of a small brown wren.
    Tilly looked on with total disapproval. She knew, somehow—Stevie had long since stopped trying to understand the mystical connection between her and the cat, had ceased trying to look through the veil between humans and felines—that her mistress was shirking her work duty in favor of inspiration
not likely
to bring money and
likely
to bring a certain amount of pain.
    Generally Stevie preferred to paint—or at least draw—from life. Every one of her books had come from real-life stories, birds that had entered her sphere, if only for a very short time. She liked to set up her paints in the backyard, behind the hedge, and draw the birds that landed at her feeders, pecked in her yard, perched on her roof. But right now it was dark, and there were no wrens awake—and besides, this particular wren was not really a wren.
    Tilly grumbled. When Stevie glanced over, the cat showed her teeth—the front four missing. “Till—let me finish, okay? Then I'll go mousing with