Reunion Beach by Elin Hilderbrand (best ebook reader under 100 .TXT) 📗

shoulder-length hair was usually bound back in a ponytail or a clip. Neither of them gave their hair much mind. What bound them from the moment they’d met twenty years earlier was their love of sea turtles.

Unlike Elinor, however, Maeve took care to exercise in a class at the rec center three times a week and ate healthily. She was always scolding Elinor for not joining her class, for drinking too much wine, and her love of chocolate. Nonetheless it was Maeve who was struck by a minor heart attack at sixty years of age. It had shaken her, deeply, and she’d given up any duties that might cause stress, including relinquishing the task of project leader to Elinor.

Maeve’s voice was filled with excitement. “What’ve we got?”

“Tracks,” Elinor replied, making a small gesture toward the two sets of hatchling tracks. She smiled seeing Maeve make a beeline for the tracks.

Betts overheard and without a word, bent over the two-inch tracks, pulling her camera to her face. Betts was tall with grayish hair cut short because, as she claimed, short hair didn’t get in the way of her camera lens. She’d been the first female photographer on the storied Chicago Tribune newspaper, and she applied that same tenacity to getting a good shot of the turtles and documenting the action of the team. One never saw Betts without a camera in tow.

Ting released her easy smile at seeing Elinor. She made it easy to smile back. Her long black hair was braided under her team ballcap and her eyes were covered with aviator sunglasses. There was never any drama with Ting. She came for the turtles and let the question of who got to do what on which morning slide from her like water off a shell. Ting was the turtle whisperer. She could find eggs in the sand when no one else could. Elinor thought it was because turtles had always been a part of her life. Born and raised in Thailand, she’d worked with more species of turtles than anyone else on the team. In South Carolina, loggerheads were the only turtles that nested regularly on these beaches. In Thailand they had the whole gamut: loggerheads, greens, leatherbacks, hawksbills, and olive ridleys.

“Why don’t you start?” Elinor said, giving Ting the nod to begin the inventory.

“Okay, boss,” Ting replied, slipping off her sunglasses with a satisfied grin.

Elinor looked past Ting to see Caroline approach. She strode along the beach path with a youthful swing in her hips, her long legs in shaggy-edged jean shorts. Unlike the rest of them who wore the team T-shirt loose and baggy over tired nylon pants, Caroline’s T-shirt was cropped short around a lean thirty-year-old body. Her spiky blond hair was too bright for natural and faux lashes fluttered like butterflies at her eyes. It was Caroline’s power of observation and cheerful enthusiasm that had singled her out to Elinor from the one hundred plus volunteers who walked the beaches every morning in search of turtle tracks.

And her youth. Elinor felt some young blood was needed to begin building the next generation of team members. They needed that sense of wonder that came at first blush. Elinor was nearing sixty and didn’t allow herself to be sentimental about the fact that she’d be leaving the team. Living on the beach made one attuned to the cycle of life, the repetition of seasons, the passing of years. Her mind trailed off, thinking again of another young woman, her hair blond but worn long. This woman was older than Caroline. Forty years old. Today.

She felt a quick ping in her heart. A few more hours. That was all . . .

“It’s six o’clock. We should start,” Maeve said, sidling close to the nest where Ting was already kneeling on her towel and putting on plastic gloves.

Elinor walked to her backpack and pulled out a notebook. She rifled through the pages, ragged from moisture, sand, and wind, and checked the schedule of nest duties. She looked at Maeve, lifted her brows in commiseration, then said, “Caroline, you’re up.”

Maeve set her lips but stepped back to allow room for Caroline to join Ting at the nest. Elinor’s word was law on the team, and everyone knew her to be fair. Still, she knew it sometimes came hard on Maeve to have lost her role as team leader, waiting on Elinor to call the shots. There were mornings when the team gathered, pawing at the ground like horses at the gate.

As the two women began digging into the sand, Elinor turned and followed the barely visible trail of two tiny turtle tracks. The morning’s light breeze scattered sand, almost camouflaging tracks, another reason why the volunteers walked the beaches at first light. As suspected, there was a meeting of turtle and ghost crab tracks, which ended poorly for the hatchling. She felt a stab to the heart. It was common enough. Nature wasn’t always kind, but she always felt the loss personally. Poor baby . . .

Biologists hated it when anyone called a hatchling a baby. What did they know about the time and care and love that went into the tending of turtle nests? She’d sat on the other side of that desk and understood the science. But being present on the beach, sitting night after night like midwives, waiting and watching for the nest to heave and release an abundance of tiny, helpless hatchlings, well, it did something to your heart. You couldn’t help but love them in a maternal way. And for her, hatchlings were the only babies she had. Her thoughts kept returning to that theme today. So she called them babies and didn’t care one whit who heard her. Because in her mind, that’s what they were. A bunch of motherless babies scrambling for home.

“We’ve got one!”

All heads turned to Ting, who held up a hatchling in her gloved hand. The tiny brown carapace was caked with sand and its flippers waved wildly in the air. Every woman’s face burst into