She yawned, closed her eyes, and with visions of long walls filled with glorious art dancing in her head, slept until midmorning.
Chapter 2 
FORD Sinclair eased his rental car onto the approach to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel in Virginia Beach and reduced his speed. It had been several years since he’d made this crossing, and he wanted to savor it. The bridge—named one of the Seven Engineering Marvels of the Modern World—had been a favorite destination when he was a young boy and his father was still alive. Some days, they would sneak away from the family’s inn, just the two of them, and head south in the old Bay Rider down through Virginia’s Pocomoke Sound. His father would drop anchor off Raccoon Island, where they’d sit for a while and watch the cars passing over the northbound span of the bridge-tunnel—which was still new back then, and attracted attention like a shiny new toy—then they’d head back into Maryland waters, where they’d spend the rest of the day fishing. They’d go home, more often than not sporting a farmer’s tan along with a cooler of whatever had been running that day, rockfish or sea bass or croakers. Once his dad had helped him bring in a tuna that had given him—at ten—the fight of his life. The memory was so vivid that whenever Ford dreamed of that day, he still felt the rod biting into his hands as he struggled to hold it.
The bridge-tunnel itself was, in fact, a marvel. A little over seventeen miles long from shore to shore, it was exactly what the name implied: a series of bridges and tunnels that crossed the Chesapeake Bay where it joined the Atlantic Ocean, connecting Virginia Beach to Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
Ford stopped at the first of the four bridges and pulled into the parking area. He walked to the rail that overlooked the water, and from there he could see for miles. Below, where the Chesapeake and the Atlantic met, the water was still dark and disturbed from last night’s storm. In the distance, a large navy vessel headed into port at Virginia Beach, and far out in the ocean, another made its way toward the bridge. Noisy gulls circled overhead, hoping for a handout from the sightseers on the pier, while others swooped and soared over both sides of the bridge. Ford closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of salt water, and held it in his lungs for a few seconds before letting it out in a whoosh. Chesapeake born and bred, he hadn’t realized how much he had missed the Bay’s scent. In that moment, he couldn’t wait to be home. He climbed back into the car and continued his trek north.
The radio reception was spotty along the back roads—some things, he thought, never changed—so he could only pick up a country station. He’d been away too long to know who was singing; he only caught enough to know it was a girl with a pretty voice singing about vandalizing the SUV that belonged to her cheating boyfriend. He turned it off when the static drowned her out, and drove in silence, the windows up and the air conditioner blasting against the heat and humidity of the late-summer afternoon.
Before he knew it, Ford was crossing the bridge over the Choptank River and was halfway to Trappe, where he and his high school buddies had proven their manhood by spending the night in the haunted White Marsh Cemetery and living to tell about it. Even now, memories of that night made him grin. They’d been so cocky, all five of them, until they heard the faint tinkling of a tiny bell borne on a breeze around three in the morning. They spent the rest of the night wide-awake, huddled in the car, windows closed and the doors locked, but still bragged that they’d lasted the night because they didn’t drive back out through the cemetery gates until dawn.
Ford’s smile faded when he recalled how far he’d come from that cheeky kid whose most terrifying moments had been spent in a dark cemetery with his friends telling ghost stories. Back then, he’d never imagined what real terrors the world held. The innocent boy—brash though he might have been—would never have understood the things he’d come to see. Even now, Ford was at a loss to really understand what motivated a man to commit atrocities such as those he’d witnessed over the past few years.
He was close to home now. One left turn off Route 50 and he was almost there. He cruised along just under the speed limit so he could take it all in.
If there hadn’t been another car behind him, he’d have slowed even more as he passed the Madison farm. Ford had learned to ice-skate on the pond that lay beyond the cornfield. It had been Clay Madison—now married to Ford’s sister, Lucy—who’d taught him to skate. Clay had always been sweet on Lucy—even as a small kid Ford had known that. An old pickup was parked near the back of the farmhouse, and he thought briefly about stopping to say hello, but he knew if his mother caught wind of him stopping somewhere other than home first, he’d be in for an earful. And somehow, his mother had always known what he was up to. He’d never really figured out how she knew things, but she did. He thought she must have had a pretty darned good spy network, though she never seemed to keep track of Dan or Lucy the way she’d kept track of him.
Ford hoped that hadn’t held true these past few years. He hated to think she might have somehow picked up on exactly where he’d been and what he’d seen and done.
Though his mother’s phone calls and letters had kept him abreast of the changes in St. Dennis, the development of the town’s center still surprised him. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t the upscale shops he passed. The supermarket was still in the same place, but it’s previously dingy facade had had a significant face-lift. When he left, most of the current storefronts had been boarded up or were still single-family homes. Now the shops he passed told a story of increased prosperity—Cupcake, Book ’Em, Bling, Sips, and on the opposite side of the street, Lola’s Café, Cuppachino, Petals and Posies. Only Lola’s and the flower shop had been there before he left.
A new sign at the corner of Kelly’s Point Road pointed toward the bay and listed the attractions one would find by following the arrow: public parking, the municipal building, the marina, Walt’s Seafood—Ford was pleased to see that the St. Dennis landmark restaurant was still open—and something called One Scoop or Two.
His mother hadn’t been kidding when she said there’d been a lot of changes in a very short period of time.
Farther down Charles Street he turned right, onto the drive that led to the inn, and stopped the car. A very large, handsome sign pointed the way to the Inn at Sinclair Point. The drive itself had been recently blacktopped, some of the trees on either side had been cut back, and it was now, he realized, two full lanes wide where, for as long as he remembered, it had been one.
What next? Ford wondered as he drove around the bend and got his first view of the inn that had been his family home and business for generations.
The large, sprawling main building had been painted since he left, the fading white walls now rejuvenated. The cabins that faced the bay had been painted as well, and he noted that the front of each sported a window box that overflowed with summer flowers. He parked his car in the very full visitors’ lot and sat for a moment, trying to take it all in. There were new tennis courts, a fenced-in playground, and if he wasn’t mistaken, jutting out into the bay was a new dock—longer and wider—at which several boats were tied. Kayaks and canoes lined the lush lawn that stretched toward the water like a carpet of smooth green Christmas velvet.