Read Just Before Sunrise for Free Online

remaining stooped. She turned to Annie, her vivid eyes shining with tears. "Thank you. I knew I hadn't made a mistake when I chose you."
    "Why did you? Choose me, I mean. I haven't quite figured that one out."
    Sarah shrugged, then said simply, "I've been to your gallery."
    "I know, but that doesn't explain—"
    "Yes, it does."
    "I don't understand."
    Sarah smiled, her tears subsiding, and for a moment she might have been a gentle, maternal older woman instead of an eccentric recluse. "It was the painting behind your register that convinced me you were who I wanted."
    Gran's painting. "It's a watercolor my grandmother did of our cottage in Maine. Most people dismiss it as tourist art."
    "So?"
    "Exactly what I say. Gran managed to make a decent living as a painter, and she just loved it. She did our cottage, the rocky shoreline, wild roses, lobster boats, lighthouses, you name it. They're all skillfully done, unpretentious, openly sentimental— just what people want to take home with them from vacation."
    "Is the painting in your gallery the only one of hers you have?"
    Annie nodded. "Gran died about a year and a half ago. Our cottage was lost in a coastal storm last fall."
    "A hurricane?"
    She shook her head, remembering the relatively innocuous weather reports, a storm coming at high tide, the potential for some coastal flooding, then, seemingly out of nowhere, the surging ocean, the wind, the panicked fire chief racing down her isolated peninsula, yelling for her to get out. "It was just one of those nasty, unnamed New England autumn storms that got out of hand. I escaped just before it washed my cottage into the bay." She cleared her throat, fighting back the memory of that terrible moment when she'd realized with utter finality that Gran was gone, her cottage was gone, and no matter what she did, her life in Maine could never be put back together again. "There was hardly a stick of the place left. The painting and Otto were about all I had left. I decided I needed a new start."
    "So you came west," Sarah said.
    "I guess I'm hardly the first. I didn't agonize that much over leaving Maine. I pretty much woke up one morning and decided it was what I wanted to do." She smiled. "I've lasted out here longer than any of my friends thought I would. Anyway, it's refreshing to find someone who appreciates Gran's work. I'm glad I could help you, Sarah. I can write you a check for the balance of your ten thousand—"
    "Keep five hundred for yourself."
    "We agreed on one hundred, but I don't really want any payment. It was fun." For the most part, she thought, remembering Garvin MacCrae's eyes boring into her from the back of the Linwood ballroom.
    "I put you in an awkward position. You had to go up to five thousand—it must have been far more of an ordeal than you expected. Please. Take five hundred out for yourself." Sarah started back toward her chair on her walker, but paused to glance back, her vivid eyes warm and far too knowing. "Who bid against you, do you know?"
    "A man named Garvin MacCrae. He's—"
    "Haley's husband."
    Standing in the middle of her tiny house, Sarah gazed back at the portrait she had dispatched Annie to buy on her behalf, then proceeded slowly to her chair. The name Haley struck a chord with Annie. Haley MacCrae. No, she couldn't place it, but there was something hovering in the back of her mind, out of reach.
    "Then you know him?" she asked Sarah.
    "Oh, yes. I know Garvin, John Linwood, Cynthia." She staggered back to her chair, sank into the soft cushions, cast her walker aside. A sheen of perspiration had formed on her upper lip. She brushed one large, paint-stained hand through her hair. She seemed suddenly exhausted, overcome. "I know them all."
    "Because of the painting? This Haley—she's a Linwood?"
    Sarah's eyes seemed focused elsewhere, another time, another place. "I painted Haley a long time ago, before Garvin or Cynthia were in the picture—before I even knew what I was doing with a