Read Moonlight in the Morning for Free Online Page B

seemed to be in a hurry. She saw them smile and wave, and greet each other by name. There seemed to be an abundance of baby strollers, and women paused to look at one another’s chubby healthy infants.
    Heaven deliver me, Jecca thought as the light changed. She knew that Kim loved the town with a passion that bordered on an obsession, but Jecca wanted a city.
    But right now, she looked forward to being in little Edilean. She had three whole months to dofasX nothing but paint. Working in an art gallery in a big city paid the bills, but it didn’t feed her deep desire to create. There was nothing like taking a piece of paper and filling it with form and color—or with words, for that matter. Or taking a bit of wax and melting it into something beautiful, then casting it into jewelry, as Kim did. Or a lump of clay to shape into a creature or a person, as their friend Sophie did.
    For Jecca, to make beauty from nothing was her ultimate goal in life, what she always strove to achieve. What she wanted most in the world was to be like Kim and figure out a way to make a living from her creations. Maybe in these three months she could make some paintings that would actually sell .
    She was thinking so hard about what was ahead for her, meaning the time to do nothing but create, that she drove past the little street sign. She made a U-turn and went back to Aldredge Road. She couldn’t help smiling every time she saw the name. A couple hundred years ago the pathway had been named for one of Kim’s ancestors.
    “Our branch of the family doesn’t own Aldredge House and we don’t live on that road,” she’d told Jecca long ago.
    Maybe not, Jecca thought, but her family was still in the same town.
    Jecca made a left turn and immediately felt as though she’d entered a wilderness—which she had. Kim had told her that sometime in the 1950s the U.S. government decided to make the whole area a nature preserve. They nonchalantly—as though it wouldn’t really bother anyone—told the people of Edilean that they had to leave the area. All their houses, some of them built in the 1600s, were to be demolished. The government officials were surprised when the residents loudly, vehemently, and very publicly refused to leave—and certainly not tear down any buildings.
    Jecca had heard the story of how one of the older residents, a Miss Edi, had spent years fighting and had finally won the battle to allow the town to stay intact. However, the catch was that the wilderness had been allowed to surround the town, cutting it off from the rest of the world until it was, in Jecca’s opinion, much too isolated.
    Because of that battle, which had been hard-won in the courts, families that had lived in Edilean for centuries still owned land that was in the midst of what was, in essence, national forest.
    As Jecca drove down Aldredge Road, she felt as though there couldn’t possibly be a house at the end of it. At least not one with plumbing. But Kim had told her there were two of them. First was Aldredge House, where the local doctor lived. He was, of course, Kim’s cousin and she swore that Jecca had met him on her first visit, but she didn’t remember. In Jecca’s mind, that summer was a blur of Reede and painting. After the doctor’s house was Mrs. Wingate’s place.
    “It’s new,” Kim had said on the phone when Jecca called her before she left. “The house was built in 1926 by Olivia Wingate’s late father-in-law. He came here from Chicago.”
    “New people, huh?”
    “Of course,” Kim said, her tongue firmly in her cheek. “If they didn’t settle in Edilean before the American Revolutionary War, they’re . . .” She paused and waited.
    “Newcomers!” they said in un"0ey said ison, and laughed together.
    “I don’t know how you stand it,” Jecca said. “My dad likes to brag that his grandfather opened the hardware store in 1918. He thinks that’s really old, but you guys . . .”
    “Yeah, I know,” Kim said.