Waking Up Gray Read online

  Other R.E. Bradshaw titles:

  OUT ON THE SOUND

  (Adventures of Decky and Charlie, # 1)

  SWEET CAROLINA GIRLS

  THE GIRL BACK HOME

  RAINEY DAYS

  (Rainey Bell Series, #1)

  Coming Summer 2011:

  Rainey Nights

  (Rainey Bell Series, #2)

  WAKING UP GRAY

  R. E. Bradshaw

  © 2011 by R. E. Bradshaw. All Rights Reserved.

  R. E. Bradshaw Books/May 2011

  ISBN 13: 978-0-98357-200-8

  http://www.rebradshawbooks.com

  Rebecca Elizabeth Bradshaw on Facebook

  For information contact [email protected]

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author and publisher.

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and events portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblances to actual persons living or dead or events are entirely unintentional.

  Acknowledgements

  The very first acknowledgement I need to make is to the North Carolina Language and Life Project (NCLLP) at North Carolina State University and to the public television stations of UNC TV. It was while watching the NCLLP production of “The Carolina Brogue” that the idea for this novel began. Growing up on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I was immersed in the Brogue for most of my life. It is a charming and unique feature of the area and I encourage anyone who hasn’t visited the Outer Banks to do so, but if you cannot, at least take a listen to the brogue in its purest form. Information about the NCLLP can be found on the website: http://ncsu.edu/linguistics/ncllp/index.php

  To the readers who took a chance on an unknown independent author, I am eternally grateful. It is your words of encouragement that keep me at the keyboard. I would be remiss if I did not mention the wonderful women in the Facebook group, Readers of Author R. E. Bradshaw. Thank you for many hours of laughter and inspiration.

  To all the authors and readers in the Virtual Living Room, who have offered much needed advice and help, God bless you.

  Kaycee, thank you for being patient while working with this newbie. Editing my manuscript could not have been easy. I promise to work on the comma situation.

  Catherine, you have no idea how much I appreciated handing the formatting over to you.

  Patty Henderson, you are a Godsend. Thank you, thank you.

  Chris, Linda, Dawn – Thank you for keeping me laughing and sane.

  Lynne, you have been my best friend for twenty-five years. Your constant love and encouragement have been a blessing. I am so lucky to have you in my life.

  Mom, thank you for reading to me and beginning my life long love affair with books.

  Dad, thank you for your undying faith in me.

  Jonathon, you are the best son in the world and we are so proud of you. Thank you and Kendra for handing out my books to all your lesbian friends.

  And lastly, but definitely not least, Deb, you are and have been the wind beneath my wings for twenty-four years. This is just one in a long line of dreams you have made come true. I love you and thank you for believing in me.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  About the author

  “Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”

  Henry David Thoreau

  Chapter One

  The Hatteras Class ferry, drafting at only four feet through the shallow inlet, was packed with tourists trying to hang on to the last vestiges of summer before school and jobs beckoned them home. The floating behemoth rumbled and roared its way through the Pamlico Sound, carrying a full load of cars and campers, followed by a chorus of seagulls. The larger black-backed scavengers squawked and screeched, with the gray Laughing Gulls adding their trills to the mix. Children and adults alike giggled and squealed while tossing pieces of bread above their heads as the large birds swooped and dove to within inches of their faces. Some of the more brave souls held the bread aloft until a bold gull would dive in and take it from an outstretched hand. Those passengers still spooked by the movie, ‘The Birds,’ remained at the bow of the boat, far away from the action at the rear.

  On this, the last Friday in August, the sun blasted its rays down from a beautiful clear blue sky. Off the coast, a tropical storm was heading straight for the Outer Banks of North Carolina, spurring the current influx of tourists to enjoy the weather while it lasted. Next weekend would be the Labor Day holiday, one of the busiest times of the year, but the weather reports were ominous. It was, at the least, going to be a wet weekend. Today there were no signs of the offshore disturbance. The ferry pushed the clear green water aside as it made its way across to Ocracoke Island. The deck began to sway with the waves, when the vessel broke out from behind the protection of Hatteras Island, and moved out into the ocean waves pouring into the Sound through the inlet.

  Mary Elizabeth Jackson Moore, Lizbeth to family and friends, studied the name on the side of the ferry, “Chicamacomico,” from her perch on the hood of her car. She knew the name from the historic life-saving station in Rodanthe. She passed through the tiny village, at the north end of Hatteras Island, an hour and a half ago. Lizbeth was on the last legs of a long journey, both figuratively and literally. She started this trip from her home, in Durham, that morning, but the voyage began many years ago. Now, she was crossing from Hatteras to Ocracoke Island on a ferry named Chicamacomico, and the word mesmerized her. She knew it was an old Native American place name, previously designating the area around the present day village of Rodanthe. It wasn’t what it meant, as much as how it felt in her mouth when she said it. It was something about the rhythm of the syllables that made her smile.

  Lizbeth loved words, old and new words, words naming things and places no longer in existence; all words fascinated her. From her first memories, she had been in love with the dictionary. She studied words for the fun of it and then found out someone would give her a degree for that. She was currently in her final semester of study in Linguistic Anthropology at Duke University. By taking classes through the summers, she would graduate with a Master’s Degree in only five years. She was headed to Ocracoke to complete the final assignment, her thesis paper.

  Lizbeth intended to spend the next three and a half months studying the Carolina Brogue, unique to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. She needed to collect evidence to support her theory that the almost Cockney accent and word usage were a product of many years of isolation on the barrier islands. This isolation protected some parts of the original speech, brought to this country by the islanders’ English and Irish ancestors. It was a dream project for Lizbeth. She had been coming to Ocracoke all of her life. As a child, she had fallen in love with listening to the “hoi toide” accent. It was a pure pleasure to study it, in hopes of preserving the quickly disappearing brogue of old. The sound of a native islander speaking was part of the ch
arm of the quaint village community on the south end of the small island.

  Lizbeth Jackson - she dropped the Moore after the divorce - was not the typical college student. She began her first undergraduate courses at age thirty-five. She turned forty in July and found her first gray strand of hair this morning. Lizbeth started her education at Duke after raising a daughter and while divorcing a husband. Years of seeing to everyone else’s needs and wants had left her tired and unfulfilled. After the divorce, Lizbeth decided to take care of her own desires for a while. The results had been astounding and the woman she had been destined to be, before life got in the way, began to emerge. She was happy and satisfied with her current path.

  A young man took his shirt off in front of her and threw it into the back of his Jeep Wrangler. He reached in the Jeep and started a Jimmy Buffet CD, turning it up to overcome the growling ferry engines. From behind her dark sunglasses, Lizbeth watched his tanned muscles ripple. She was beginning to think it was true that women reached their sexual peak at forty. She had started to pay more attention to the men around her, finding the ones her own age uninteresting, but those young hot studs all over the Duke campus were becoming increasingly attractive. She smiled at her inner cougar. The young man by the Jeep looked to be in his early twenties, around her daughter’s age. Well, it never hurt to look. After all, she was forty, not ancient.

  Lizbeth’s arms began to tingle under the glaring sun. She reached into the canvas bag beside her, pulling out sunscreen, and applying it to any exposed areas. She had a beautifully rare combination of fair skin, dark hair, and piercing blue eyes. At five foot six, she was equipped with long lean muscle, and could still wear the same size jeans she wore at twenty-one. She was blessed with a fast metabolism and maintained an exercise regimen since the birth of her only child. Lizbeth Jackson might have been forty, but she wore forty very well, so well in fact, much younger men frequently asked her out. She hadn’t accepted any of their offers, but the idea of a twenty-something suitor was starting to appeal to her.

  She leaned back against the windshield of her car and bathed in the warm sunlight while the ferry started the wide turn toward the Ocracoke docks. She was going to live on an island, a magical place treasured since childhood, until mid December. Then she would graduate, beginning the New Year with a Master’s degree and a job in the state library system; it was all arranged. Lizbeth smiled to herself. Her future held the greatest of possibilities. No more looking back at what might have been.

  Jimmy Buffet crooned from the Jeep stereo. The song was ‘A Pirate Looks at Forty.’ Lizbeth sang along to herself. The ferry rocked through a wave set and life was good.

  #

  Lizbeth disembarked the ferry with a smile and a nod from the khaki clad ferryman, as her car bumped up the ramp. She turned the sixty-five Mustang, a prize from the divorce, to the right and onto NC Highway 12, joining the line of cars making its way slowly toward the village at the far end of the island. There were only thirteen and a half miles from the Hatteras Ferry dock on the north end to the Swan Quarter and Cedar Island Ferry docks on the south end of the island, but with the traffic, it took Lizbeth nearly thirty minutes to drive it.

  Ocracoke was one of the barrier island strips of sand along the coast that kept the ocean from reaching the mainland. It bore the brunt of the angry sea and would soon serve that purpose again, according to the weather broadcast coming over her radio. Lizbeth didn’t care. Today the sun was shining and the skies were clear. Memories of her previous trips to Ocracoke flooded her mind as she drove past the waving sea oats on top of the dunes lining the ocean side of the road.

  Lizbeth had been a regular visitor, with her family, every summer as far back as she could remember, until she turned sixteen. That was the summer she met James and begged to stay in Durham with a friend. Maybe things would have worked out differently if she had joined her family, but then she wouldn’t have her daughter. She thought about the first summer she brought Mazie down to Ocracoke. Laughing and kicking at the surf when it washed across her toes, at only six months old, she took to the water like a duck. That was back when she and James, though faced with the stress of being very young, new parents, were still happy and in love. Lizbeth tried to remember the pleasant times when she could, but the bad still outweighed the good.

  Sea oats and twisted live oaks sprung up along the highway. Six miles into the drive, Lizbeth passed the Banker Pony pens, on the Sound side, where the National Park Service maintained a herd of about thirty formerly wild ponies. The ponies roamed freely for two hundred years, at times in herds as large as five hundred head. Depending on the story one chose to believe, the Banker Ponies were the descendents of animals left by Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition, Spanish ponies brought by DeSoto, or shipwreck survivors of vessels that lost the battle with the Diamond Shoals. The infamous shoals off the coast of North Carolina earned the nickname, “The Graveyard of the Atlantic,” now host to countless souls.

  The island, a slender splinter in the Atlantic, grew broader then thinner again, as Lizbeth watched the Pamlico Sound come in and out of view. From an aerial map, Lizbeth thought the island looked like a fishing rod with the village resembling the reel, attached on the Sound side and protected from the ocean waves. She slowed the Mustang down to a crawl on the outskirts of civilization, represented by the first manmade structures looming up out of the marsh on the right. The charm of Ocracoke Village, like its speed limits, brought the hurried world to a creeping pace. The meandering speed prevented Lizbeth from running over several tourists, who were trying to share the skinny road with the vehicular traffic. She couldn’t wait to park her car.

  Highway 12 turned into Harbor Road as it snaked to the right around Silver Lake Harbor. The sign at the turnoff for Howard Street read, “Drive Real, Real Slow,” another reminder of the slow pace of island life. Howard Street had never been modernized. It was merely a lane used by the residents to reach their houses, some of them standing since the early 1700’s. The street was paved with only crushed oyster shells, hard packed in the sandy loam. Moss-covered picket fences lined Howard Street, shaded by a live oak canopy entangled with cedar trees. With so few vehicles passing through, the road took visitors back in time, engulfing them in the quaint old cottages interspersed with aged family cemeteries.

  Lizbeth pulled into the driveway of the familiar cottage. It was a classic “story and a jump” style, prevalent in the original homes. The “jump” consisted of the two bedrooms upstairs, shaped by the steeply slanting roof, having only half windows and low, cramped ceilings. Downstairs, at the front of the cottage, a narrow hallway leading to the dining area and kitchen at the rear intersected a small parlor and another bedroom. The wooden, slat-sided exterior was painted white, with blue trim. A sitting porch wrapped its way around the front and right sides of the house. The porch was screened-in, top to bottom. Two old rocking chairs and a small table sat next to the front door. A day bed called to Lizbeth from the side porch for her to come and take a nap. She dearly wished she could.

  After an already long day of travel, she was anxious to unpack the car. Lizbeth pulled in slowly, passing the red brick chimney, and stopped at the end of the driveway. She fished around in her purse and finally located the keys to the cottage. Her great-aunt, Minnie, had lived in the cottage all her life. She played hostess to Lizbeth’s family and all the other members of the Jackson clan that had a notion to spend time on the island every summer. Aunt Minnie was a true “O’coker,” always welcoming her guests with smile and a bear hug. She would forever hold a special place in the Jackson family. She passed several years ago, leaving the cottage to Lizbeth’s cousins, who graciously agreed to let Lizbeth rent it this Fall at a discounted price. Still, this little sabbatical was costing Lizbeth nearly ten thousand dollars. She could afford it. Her ex-husband was paying dearly for his unfaithfulness.

  Lizbeth got out of the car, stretching up to the sky, taking in a huge breath of the fresh island air. She opened the tru
nk and began the task of unloading the car. Using the key, she let herself in through the front door while balancing a box of papers on one hip. The cottage was spotlessly clean. Lizbeth knew her cousin Sharon had someone come in and make the place ready for her. She would have to remember to send her a thank you note.

  She put the box down on the end of the couch and took a tour of what would be her home for the next fourteen weeks. The cottage, built in the late 1800’s, had few alterations over the years. With good maintenance, the cottage had survived hurricanes, tropical storms, and nor’easters for more than a century. White bead board covered the walls of the small rooms and low ceilings. A fireplace dominated one wall in the parlor and was bookended by windows made of antique panes of glass, the bubbles and swirls giving away their age. A few panes had been replaced over the years and were easily distinguished from the originals by their lack of imperfections.

  The floors were old wood planking, worn smooth from years of sandy feet. The cousins had recently had the floors resurfaced, the final coat still glistening from its recent polish. The bedroom, across from the parlor, had two sets of twin beds stuffed into the tiny space. There was barely room to move in between the four beds. Now that it was a rental property, Lizbeth assumed they were trying to get as many beds in the small cottage as possible. Down the hall, on the same side as the parlor, was the only bathroom, with a tub, toilet, and sink all crammed into the tiny room. The recently repaneled walls enveloped her in the aroma of cedar.

  At the end of the hall, the kitchen, a long narrow room, ran the entire width of the cottage with a breakfast nook at one end. Lizbeth found a bottle of wine on the top shelf of the otherwise empty refrigerator. A note and a bow were attached to the neck of the bottle. The note was from her cousin, telling her to enjoy her stay. Lizbeth intended to do just that as soon as she finished unloading the car. She opened the back door, stepping onto the little porch, where someone had left a few fishing rods, a tackle box, and a bicycle. She wasn’t sure she would do much fishing, but the bike would come in handy. No one who lived on the island drove around the village. Everyone walked or rode a bike. It was part of the charm of Ocracoke, to leave modern conveniences to the mainlanders.