Sanctuary

letting him pick her up as if she were a child. “I want to go home.”
    “Okay. Just close your eyes now.”
    The photo fluttered silently to the floor, facedown atop all the other faces. She saw writing on the back. Large bold letters.
    DEATH OF AN ANGEL
    Her last thought, as the dark closed in, was Sanctuary.

TWO
    A T first light the air was misty, like a dream just about to vanish. Beams of light stabbed through the canopy of live oaks and glittered on the dew. The warblers and buntings that nested in the sprays of moss were waking, chirping out a morning song. A cock cardinal, a red bullet of color, shot through the trees without a sound.
    It was his favorite time of day. At dawn, when the demands on his time and energy were still to come, he could be alone, he could think his thoughts. Or simply be.
    Brian Hathaway had never lived anywhere but Desire. He’d never wanted to. He’d seen the mainland and visited big cities. He’d even taken an impulsive vacation to Mexico once, so it could be said he’d visited a foreign land.
    But Desire, with all its virtues and flaws, was his. He’d been born there on a gale-tossed night in September thirty years before. Born in the big oak tester bed he now slept in, delivered by his own father and an old black woman who had smoked a corncob pipe and whose parents had been house slaves, owned by his ancestors.
    The old woman’s name was Miss Effie, and when he was very young she often told him the story of his birth. How the wind had howled and the seas had tossed, and inside the great house, in that grand bed, his mother had borne down like a warrior and shot him out of her womb and into his father’s waiting arms with a laugh.
    It was a good story. Brian had once been able to imagine his mother laughing and his father waiting, wanting to catch him.
    Now his mother was long gone and old Miss Effie long dead. It had been a long, long time since his father had wanted to catch him.
    Brian walked through the thinning mists, through huge trees with lichen vivid in pinks and red on their trunks, through the cool, shady light that fostered the ferns and shrubby palmettos. He was a tall, lanky man, very much his father’s son in build. His hair was dark and shaggy, his skin tawny, and his eyes cool blue. He had a long face that women found melancholy and appealing. His mouth was firm and tended to brood more than smile.
    That was something else women found appealing—the challenge of making those lips curve.
    The slight change of light signaled him that it was time to start back to Sanctuary. He had to prepare the morning meal for the guests.
    Brian was as contented in the kitchen as he was in the forest. That was something else his father found odd about him. And Brian knew—with some amusement—that Sam Hathaway wondered if his son might be gay. After all, if a man liked to cook for a living, there must be something wrong with him.
    If they’d been the type to discuss such matters openly, Brian would have told him that he could enjoy creating a perfect meringue and still prefer women for sex. He simply wasn’t inclined toward intimacy.
    And wasn’t that tendency toward distance from others a Hathaway family trait?
    Brian moved through the forest, as quietly as the deer that walked there. Suiting himself, he took the long way around, detouring by Half Moon Creek, where the mists were rising up from the water like white smoke and a trio of does sipped contentedly in the shimmering and utter silence.
    There was time yet, Brian thought. There was always time on Desire. He indulged himself by taking a seat on a fallen log to watch the morning bloom.
    The island was only two miles across at its widest, less than thirteen from point to point. Brian knew every inch of it, the sun-bleached sand of the beaches, the cool, shady marshes with their ancient and patient alligators. He loved the dune swales, the wonderful wet, undulating grassy meadows banked by young pines and majestic live oaks.
    But most of all, he loved the forest, with its dark pockets and its mysteries.
    He knew the history of his home, that once cotton and indigo had been grown there, worked by slaves. Fortunes had been reaped by his ancestors. The rich had come to play in this isolated little paradise, hunting the deer and the feral hogs, gathering shells, fishing both river and surf.
    They’d held lively dances in the ballroom under the candle glow of crystal chandeliers, gambled carelessly at cards in