Page 27 of Return to Whitmore
That was when it struck her that they were heading north.
He wouldn’t dare drive them back there. Would he?
“Jack, where are we going?” she asked, grateful to call him by his real name when they weren’t around other people.
Jack hammered the steering wheel and smiled.
“Jack! But why?” Charlotte’s anxiety spiked. “Things are going so well…”
Was he going out of his mind because of the breakup?
“I’m just curious about some stuff,” he said finally. “Can’t I be curious?”
“You can be curious. But you have to clue me in.” For once.
Jack laughed. “You sound like Allegra.”
“Be nice,” Charlotte said. “You haven’t told me, like, anything. And we’ve been living together for seven months!”
Jack sighed in a way that suggested the trauma of their past was not something he carried easily. Charlotte bit her lower lip and considered telling him to pull over and let her out. It felt like ghosts awaited them back in Nantucket—the living and the dead.
Plus, Vincent was back there, probably. She was sure he was still with Jamie, kissing and laughing on the boardwalk, doing all the things that she and Vincent had once done. What if she saw them? What if Vincent accused her of stalking him, of beingunable to get over him? (Which was true in a way, wasn’t it?) What if news of Jack being back on the island got back to their mother—and Francesca flew from Italy to chase them?
“Jack,” Charlotte said, electrified. “People think you’re dead.”
“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “I have a disguise.”
Charlotte’s heart felt heavy. She reached over to touch his shoulder. “But why, Jack? Why must people think you’re dead?”
“It all got too messy.” Jack’s face was shadowed.
“What the hell were you doing?” Charlotte demanded.
“That’s part of the reason we’re going back,” Jack stammered. “I want to understand more about it myself.”
That shut Charlotte up for now.
When they parked near the ferry that would take them to Nantucket, Jack retrieved his disguise from the trunk: a blond wig, a baseball hat, and a Hawaiian shirt.
“That won’t work,” Charlotte began to say as he changed.
But when he finished, he brought his hands out beside him and shook them and said, “Ta-da!”
Charlotte had to admit that Jack looked remarkably different. Gone was his black Italian hair. With sunglasses on, he might have been any other Northern European tourist.
“What about me?” Charlotte asked. “I look almost the same.”
Jack squinted at her, then went to rummage through his trunk to find a large bucket hat and a pair of sunglasses. “This should do it.”
Charlotte put them on and looked like herself, but with a bucket hat and sunglasses. It would have to do for now.
Jack drove the rental onto the ferry and led Charlotte to the top deck so they could watch their home come closer over the murky blue horizon. Charlotte felt tears in her eyes. Under her breath, under the sounds of the ferry engines and the whipping winds, she asked, “What are we looking for, Seth?”
Jack’s face went pale. Finally, it seemed he was ready to tell her something. “Tio Angelo was up to something back then. He roped me and a few others into it. I think it went deeper than even I understood.”
Charlotte could hardly breathe. “You think Tio Angelo is still on the island?”
“No. I mean, he’d be stupid to stay,” Jack said. “Although this was the center of his scheme.”
