Charlie St. Cloud Page 0,12

scales. She thought of the mariner’s rhyme, “Mare’s tails and mackerel scales make tall ships carry low sails.” It would be blowing hard in a few hours, just the way she liked it.

When she cleared the harbor mouth and passed the light, she aimed the boat on an unlikely course. Her compass indicated a 58-degree heading straight for the Eagle Island Channel and the Powers Rock buoy. For Tess, the easy route was never an option. If she couldn’t make it through a little low pressure, how would she ever get all the way around the world? So she eased the sheet to a broad reach and filled the mainsail with wind. Then she watched her instrument dials leap as Querencia gained speed and rode a rising wind straight into the storm.

SIX

THE WOMAN IN THE BLACK DRESS WEPT.

She kneeled beside a gravestone and clutched the granite slab with one hand. Her frail body jerked with every sob, and her gray hair, wrapped in a careful bun, seemed to shake loose strand by strand.

Charlie St. Cloud watched from behind a boxwood hedge. He recognized the woman but kept his distance. He was respectful of the pain. There would be a time to step forward and offer a helping hand, but not now. So he tucked his work gloves in his back pocket, unwrapped a piece of Bazooka, tossed it in his mouth, and waited.

He had opened this very grave that morning, carried the casket from the hearse, lowered it into the ground, and backfilled the job when the funeral was done. It was the only burial of the day in Waterside Cemetery. Work was pretty quiet. One of Charlie’s men was out trimming hedges. Another was pressure-washing monuments. A third was collecting branches that had come down in a storm. September was always the slowest month of the year in the funeral business. Charlie wasn’t sure exactly why, but he knew December and January were definitely the busiest. Folks passed away more often in the coldest months, and he wondered if it was the frost or a natural response to the excess of the holidays.

Thirteen years had gone by since Charlie had first come to Waterside. Thirteen years had passed since the paramedics failed to revive his little brother. Thirteen years had vanished since Sam was buried in a small coffin near the Forest of Shadows. Thirteen Octobers. Thirteen World Series. Thirteen years keeping the promise.

Charlie was still a handsome young man with a flop of sandy hair. That mischievous dimple in one cheek always flashed when he smiled, and his caramel eyes melted just about everyone he met. With each passing year, his mother insisted he looked more like his father—a compliment of sorts because the only picture he had ever seen of his dad showed a rugged man on a motorcycle with shiny aviator sunglasses propped on his head.

Charlie had grown a few more inches and stood 6¢3≤. His shoulders were square and his arms well muscled from hauling caskets and stone. The only legacy of the accident was a slight limp, and it was barely noticeable. The doctors had said the pins, screws, and plates in his femur and fibula would set off metal detectors—but he never had the chance to find out.

After the crash, he had finished high school, spent a couple of years at Salem State College, and gotten a degree in emergency medicine. He was a licensed paramedic, but no matter how hard he tried to move away, he could never go too far from Waterside. Even the love of a pretty teacher in Peabody couldn’t pull him away, for he was always drawn back to this place and the promise.

Waterside was his world, eighty acres of grass and granite encircled by wrought iron. He lived in the caretaker’s cottage by the forest and ran the whole operation—interment, mowing, and maintenance. It was a responsible job, and he was a responsible young man, except for that one night on the bridge that had changed everything.

Now twenty-eight, Charlie had spent his adult years looking after the dead and the living of Waterside. He had sacrificed greatly to keep his word to Sam. He had given up on big dreams of working for the Red Sox front office at Fenway Park or even Major League Baseball on Park Avenue in New York.

Today, like every day, he watched someone weep, and his heart ached. It was always this way. Young, old, healthy, or infirm: They came, they coped,