High Tide at Noon by Elisabeth Ogilvie Page A

around your feet and small coins of sunlight slipped through the green boughs and were warm on your face.
    A freshening wind, a glimmer of light beyond the dark trunks, and she knew she was coming out to the water—Old Man’s Cove, on the west side. It was hardly more than a gash in the towering red-brown rock. As Joanna went down on the beach the blown spray fell on her cheeks with a cold light touch. The mouth of the cove was choked with foam; beyond it the whole western sea was a sheet of rippling silver, and the world was full of the vast roar. Tiny and shrill came the cries of the gulls as they floated high on the wind.
    It was a moment before Joanna’s eyes saw a man knee-deep in the surf. His boots were pulled up to his hips, and the foam swirled about his legs as he watched a plank drive toward him through the creamy green and white froth. He was dark against the sun as he caught the plank and waded shoreward, dragging his catch up over the rolling beach stones. Then Joanna saw the coppery gleam of hair that meant Simon Bird.
    Almost at the same moment Simon saw her. It had been three years since she had spoken to him. Meeting him on the road or at the store, she looked past him with remote dark eyes. Even in the rush and laughter of a square dance, she would be silent in his arms, as if he didn’t exist, and sometimes he would tighten his fingers around her hand until she bit her lips to keep from crying out; but her silence always held, and when he let her go his mouth would be thinned and hard, his face drained white with fury beneath his red crest.
    Now he was coming up the beach toward her in long rapid strides, and he was smiling a little. Because I’m not running away, Joanna thought. Because he knows he could catch up with me if I did run . . . Her hands in her jacket pockets had unconsciously clenched, and her face felt cold, as if the blood had quite left it. Watching him, knowing he would presently be close enough to speak, she wondered if anybody else in the world possessed a hatred like this one. When she met Gunnar Sorensen, her resentment boiled and bubbled inside her, and swift turbulent words fought to come out instead of the civil, “Hello, Mr. Sorensen.” But it was different when she saw Simon. It was a cold and soundless thing . . . And deadly.
    â€œHello, Joanna,” he said, and it was as she remembered it, the narrow, smoky-gray eyes looking at her with an odd concentration in spite of the easy smile; the voice that was soft as a cat’s tread when it stalked a bird. “You’re far from home,” the voice said.
    She looked at him wordlessly, with a black and insolent stare; her bold cheekbones, whipped red by the wind, her strong Bennett nose, her very chin, expressed her supreme contempt.
    So they faced each other.
    â€œMad, ain’t ye?” he said. “You’ve been mad for a hell of a long time, and I don’t know as I blame you.” She didn’t answer, and he went on, “I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time,” he said, “I know I didn’t do right. But I was crazy wild . . . You’re grown-up now, you’re smart, you’re not one of these narrow ones who don’t understand the way a man is when a girl’s got him hogtied.” It was soft and it was beguiling, the way he looked into her eyes. Once, Joanna had been beguiled. But only once.
    Her voice was level and chill. “My father has never forbidden anyone to go on his land. But if I can’t walk on it without being annoyed, he’ll have to do something about it.” She felt a sharp pleasure in seeing his face darken. “We can’t keep people off the water, no matter how rotten they are. But we can keep them off our property.”
    He took a step toward her, his lips twisting, and she said tranquilly, “The boys are just up yonder in the woods. And they don’t like you, for some reason.”
    She