Charlie St. Cloud Page 0,29

years, Charlie had vigilantly organized his life around the sundown meeting with Sam, and there was no margin for error. He knew that night he had until exactly 6:51 P.M., the precise moment of civil twilight when the center of the sun’s disc dropped six degrees below the horizon and the hidden playground was dark. That gave him twenty-one minutes to race around in his old ’66 Rambler to pick up swordfish steaks at the Lobster Company in Little Harbor, and then whip over to the other side of town for salad and dessert ingredients at Crosby’s.

It was going to be very close.

He thought of Tess standing up there on the hill and couldn’t believe his gumption. He had actually asked her to dinner at his place, and her green eyes had lit up when she said yes. Joe the Atheist would be stunned. Had he ever been around a woman like this, so full of spunk and sass? Just talking to her made him feel more alive.

“Relax, you just spent fifteen minutes with her,” Charlie told himself. He was a practical man in all matters, including the heart. He had to be. In his life governed by the setting sun, there was no room to get carried away.

Indeed, it had been four years since he had gotten tangled up with anyone. Becca Blint was his last girlfriend. They had met at the Pub at the Landing on beer-tasting night and had fallen for each other over a pint of Angkor Extra Stout from Cambodia. She was a first-grade teacher in Peabody and was funny, flirty, and older. She had definitely taught him a thing or two during their summer together, sprinting through the sprinklers, skinny-dipping in the pond, and snuggling up in the cottage. But when autumn came, Becca wanted to go away on weekends to watch the leaves change or use frequent-flyer miles, jet off to Paris, and visit the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, where Jim Morrison was buried.

Charlie never told her his secret about Sam, and soon his need to be in the graveyard every night at sundown became ridiculous to her. When he had run out of excuses and was exhausted by her nagging, he tried to relax the sunset rule a little, showing up a few minutes late now and then. Nothing terrible happened, so he pushed the limits further. One night, he actually got there after dark, and that’s when he realized that Sam was beginning to fade. At first, the change was almost imperceptible, but then it became frighteningly obvious that he was losing his gift. The hard fact was that the more he lived in one world, the less he could see the other.

So he drew the line, retreated to his old ways, and refused to discuss the subject with Becca. When the New Year arrived, she was gone. Charlie found a note pinned to the steering wheel of his cart. I’m done with this cemetery, she wrote. And I’m finished with the living dead. Breaks my heart that I can’t be the one to set you free.

It hurt to see her go, but the choice between Sam and Becca was a no-brainer. He could see no compromise. After that, he protected himself by working even harder and avoiding any real attachments, especially of the female variety.

He kept up the happy-go-lucky appearance and was always first with a joke or quip. But when it came to real entanglements, he had mastered the dodge. Every chance, he sabotaged, and every night, he remembered why. He had robbed Sam of life, so he, Charlie, didn’t deserve love or happiness.

The logic was irrefutable.

Now this scary new feeling inside was sounding every alarm. Tess was trouble. If anyone could toss his carefully ordered world upside down, it was she.

He aimed the Rambler into a parking place on Orne Street, glanced at the sky, and checked his watch. Seventeen minutes to go. He got out of the car and saw an energetic woman in a burgundy track suit leading a group of tourists away from Little Harbor, the rocky cove where boat-makers and fishermen had done business for centuries.

Uh-oh. Where to hide?

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she bellowed, “please note how our chimneys lean to the east. See? Over there?” She pointed toward a tilting smokestack. “That’s because of the sun and the way the mortar dried.”

Fraffie Chapman was the town historian and chairwoman of the esteemed Historic District Commission. No citizen could add a cornice or gable or even brick