Sand Between The Toes

A Cape & Island Escape Novel--
--Luggage, bikes, coolers and kayaks...Pack Up and Head Down Cape for Three Weeks This Summer...*Don't forget a Beach Read/Cape & Island Escape Novel with romance, suspense and a secret or two buried at the bottom of it--

'Fire and lies are so inviting because they are both warm--before they burn...'
    *Featuring Readers' Favorite Characters from 'Sand Between the Toes'--

     A horrible act and decades of secrets follow these friends and relatives to Cape Cod for 'Three Weeks in August'--
Constance Brewster knows about fire and lies. As her family members gather in Truro on Cape Cod for a long overdue reunion, Constance Brewster tries to control people and events she interfered with thirty years ago--and keep hidden a terrible secret from two decades earlier...  

 
Constance_____________


Fire
and lies are so inviting because they are both warm--before they burn.    Alone on the porch of the house in Truro, I
look out at the sun which is setting like a fire.  Early fire, warm embers--I think.  Closing my eyes I think about fire. The
screams I am not sure I did or did not hear from the gallery and studio as I
drove away that night fill my head.   On
the wall in the house behind me the painting hangs--a reminder always of the
fire that summer I wish that I could forget.        


      Some women would have insisted the
painting in the house be removed, maybe even destroyed.  I kept it.We left it hanging on the wall.  I
wanted it here in Truro as a reminder for my husband, something he would have
to see each time we were here, causing him to remember all that was lost.  Sometimes the best interference is doing
nothing at all.  
         People never want to hear your
complaints.  There's nothing they can do
about them.  Complaining serves no
purpose. On the porch of the house in Truro, listening to the sounds of the
sea, I remind myself of this.   People don't want to hear complaints.  That's why I don't tell anyone that my back
aches today. Complaining serves no purpose.


        The Cape always called to my husband, Ellis.  Lower Cape was his favorite,
Truro and Wellfleet--and, yes, Provincetown. My thoughts go to that ghastly painting Ellis
insisted upon purchasing.  It would not
hang in my home!  I told him as
much.  My eyes go to it now through the
windows.  It hangs here, in Truro.  The home my husband loved.


      The trouble between our family members came from this house in
Truro.  I always blamed it all on that
summer they were all together.  The
summer my children and their friends are all coming together to commemorate next month.


       Leaning back in the rocker I
look out over the beach and the water now.Complaining is like worry I tell myself.  Worry is like a rocking chair.  It gets you nowhere.

Gwen Coleman should worry me. I would
tell the world Gwen Coleman is down in Provincetown if I could!Her words and the evil grip she had on my arm stopped me. 


    "I will ruin you!" Gwen Coleman said
through gritted teeth.


The truth
was, I knew, that she could.  That's why
I have not said a word about Gwen Coleman being down in P-Town to anyone.  As much as I would have liked to, I can't say
a word.   Gwen Coleman knows the thing I
did--a thing so much worse than her crimes.   


    I close my eyes again, listening to the
sound of the waves washing upon the shore.  Recollections are a gateway to other
times best left forgotten.  I try to
swoosh away my memories the way I might a bothersome insect now, the
recollections I have of the summer the trouble came out of thirty years ago and
the secret I have kept from so long before that--a fire that started like the
lies that followed--dance in my head warm and inviting before they burn...

 Told through the alternating viewpoints of each character, 'Three Weeks in August' chronicles the hopes, dreams, long-guarded secrets, grudges and illicit desires of family members spending three weeks together on the shores of Cape Cod as they share a home in Truro...