The Hunted - Anna Leonard

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Her voice echoed in the tile-and-chrome workroom, startling her even though she was the one who had spoken.

      She was well ahead of her deadlines—waking early and restless did wonderful things to her to-do list, even if it was making her antsy beyond belief. Business was good right now, but not good enough to keep up with her sudden surge of energy, as though she had been mainlining energy drinks and chocolate rather than her usual healthy diet. Maybe she should switch to chocolate bars and soda for a week, see what that did for her.

      “All that will do is give you zits like you were fourteen again,” she said, horrified by the thought. “It’s spring fever like usual, that’s all.” It wasn’t anything unusual for her, for all that it seemed more severe. She got like this every year, when the weather finally began to soften, and the days started getting longer. This winter had been a particularly rough one along the New England coast, and when they weren’t getting hit with surprisingly heavy snowfall, they were being battered by seemingly nonstop nor’easters. Waves and wind were nothing new to hardy Nantucketers like the Havelocks, but after several months of overcast white skies and the never-ending howl of the wind, that first day of spring, when the skies were blue and the air mild, could rouse even the most phlegmatic of New Englander into flights of relative fancy. And while Beth Havelock was many things from practical to responsible, she wasn’t phlegmatic.

      She also wasn’t focusing at all. That really wasn’t like her. Normally, once she settled in to work she could shut out any distraction, not noticing anything except what she was doing. Today, even the sound of a bird singing outside was enough to break her concentration.

      She sighed, moving away from the window and staring at the far wall. It was painted a darker white than the other walls, intentionally, to better showcase the photos mounted there. Her own work ran the gamut, from a traditionally posed wedding photo of a bride and groom, to three dolphins leaping in the surf, to a single lonely form standing on the rocks at night, like a human watchtower. She was a good photographer, although not good enough to make a living at it. Her technical skills were better than her artistic ones. But sometimes she caught just the right moment, like the photograph at the end that, no matter how many times she saw it, always caught her attention: a single harp seal, pulled up onto a shelf of rock, gazing up at her with sad eyes … and one flipper raised in what, in a human, would have been a rude gesture.

      Even on bad days when everything was going to crap, that photo could always make her laugh. Today, instead, it filled her with a strange sense of wistfulness.

      Giving in to her mood, she locked up the darkroom, put away her materials and, still barefoot, left the work space on the second floor of her Victorian-era home. That was the advantage to working for herself, rather than reporting to an office. Worse pay, longer hours, but moderately better perks, including the ability to work at 4:00 a.m.—or take off at 4:00 p.m. Rather than heading downstairs to the rambling porch and the enticements of the still-sleeping garden, however, Beth went up to the third floor, to the room at the end of the hall.

      The room had been her mother’s workroom when Beth was growing up. The drafting table was still pushed up against the wall, but it was bare and empty. The pencils, papers and watercolors that used to clutter the space were long gone, as was her mother. The memories were there, but tucked away, out of daily reach. Now the room was simply something Beth walked through to get to the great wooden door set in the far wall.

      That door led out to a narrow walkway running along the roof-edge of her home.

      A widow’s walk, it was called. A platform, with waist-high rails all around, that circled the house’s two chimneys, and gave Beth an almost unobstructed view of the ocean beyond the boundaries of the small town of Seastone, Massachusetts.

      She leaned against the railing, feeling the wind tangle in her sleek black hair and tie it into elf knots. When she was a little girl, her father would sneak her and her cousin up here. Her mother, working at her sketches, would pretend not to see or hear them as they crept, giggling, past her. They would watch the sailboats in the harbor, and the great fishing boats and tankers passing by much farther out in the green-capped waves.

      Beth was older now, her family long gone, and her hair was cut short, above her shoulders, but the wind still tangled it in exactly the same way, as though a giant hand were tousling it.

      And she still leaned against the railing of the widow’s walk and watched the boats slip by. Only now, rather than feeling a sense of history and contentment when she watched them, Beth felt her restlessness increase until it was an almost physical ache in her legs and arms.

      Did everyone feel it, in the quiet pockets of the day when nothing else occupied their minds and bodies? Or was it just her, this strange echoing, like there was something scooped out and hollow inside, when the seasons shifted and the winds changed? She had almost asked friends and total strangers, time and again, when she was away at college in Boston, and after, when she came home, when this whimsical mood attached itself to her. Each time, something had held her back from actually saying something. Fear of an answer, perhaps. Of discovering that yes, it was only her. That only she felt it, and nobody else would ever understand.

      Not that it mattered. Each time winter or summer came, the restlessness passed, and she found purpose and focus again.

      “More of the same. Always more of the same.” And yet, even as she said it, trying to reassure herself, something deep inside told her that there was more to it this time than simple spring fever. Something that surged inside her like a tidal pool, swirling and wearing at her, matching the physical ache with a pool of longing for.

      For what?

      Beth didn’t know. This spring, for some reason, it was different. Stronger. More painful. Usually standing up here and watching the waves move on the surface of the ocean took the harsh edges off, and a bit of physical activity—a bike ride, a hike along the dunes—dealt with the rest, got her through until it went away.

      She wasn’t so sure it would be enough, this spring.

      Once, her father would somehow sense her mood and swing her by the arms, tossing her into the pile of leaves they had raked up on the sloping backyard, or a pile of new-mown grass. Her cousin Tal, nobody ever called him Talbot, would leap after her, and they would wrestle. her father would laugh so hard he had to sit on the ground to recover, and they would leap on him, and the restlessness would disappear, chased out and forgotten.

      Had her father known the same restlessness? If he were still here, would he be able to explain it away, give her the way to deal with it, the words to explain it?

      It didn’t matter. He wasn’t here. All gone: father, mother and Tal, her entire family gone in one split second on a rainy highway nearly fifteen years ago. She was the only one left. The one left behind. Would she feel this way, if they had been spared? Would the feeling of separation, of restlessness be soothed by their presence? Or would it have been worse, knowing for certain that there was no one out there who could understand?

      A trill at her hip interrupted her morbid thoughts, and she flipped open her cell phone to answer it. “Jake, hi.” Jacob Brown—Jake to his friends, which some days seemed to include every person living in Seastone and the surrounding towns. Open-faced and blueeyed, with a row of freckles better suited to a ten-year-old and the physique of a high school quarterback.

      Five years they had been dating, since the summer they both turned twenty-four and got drunk together while sitting on the seawall at midnight. It wasn’t a great love, but it was comfortable, and they knew what to expect from each other. Five years, and neither seemingly eager to move forward, or move away from where they were. Every month for the past year Beth had resolved to end it, and every month Jake agreed with her, and yet they still found themselves having dinner and sex on a regular basis.

      There was a lot to be said for stability. For knowing what you would be doing each day, and each night, and with whom, and what was expected of you, and what you could expect of them. Sudden changes had never been good things, for her.

      “We still on for dinner?” she asked him, giving in once again to habit.

      “Maybe not

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