The Truth About Tara Read Online Free Page A

she’d done so many times before.
    You don’t want to believe your mother could have abducted a child, a little voice inside Tara’s head insisted.
    True enough.
    It was a moot point. As far as Tara was concerned, the absurd matter was closed.
    The only person who had ever raised the possibility that Tara hadn’t been born a Greer was a stranger passing through town. When Jack DiMarco left Wawpaney, he’d taken the question with him.

CHAPTER TWO
    T ANGIER I SLAND WAS A THROWBACK , a tiny slice of land in the Chesapeake Bay with nothing near it but crab shanties on stilts and miles of water. The teacher in Wawpaney who looked so much like the age progression of Hayley Cooper seemed very far away. So did civilization as Jack had come to know it. If not for the tour guides who greeted the ferry from Onancock, Jack imagined Tangier hadn’t changed much in hundreds of years. The guides stood in front of golf carts, which according to the ferry captain was the main method of transportation on the island aside from walking. The boat had been about a third full, which apparently was typical for a weekday before summer kicked in. The other passengers, all of them dragging suitcases, went directly to carts. Jack hung back.
    “Ten dollars for a tour of the island,” a short middle-aged woman, wearing a straw hat, called to Jack. She had the same formal English accent as the ferry captain, which supposedly didn’t sound much different than the way Tangier residents had spoken in the 1600s.
    “How much to take me to the Marsh Harbor B and B?” Jack asked.
    “The same.” The woman smiled at him, revealing a gold front tooth. She swept a hand toward her golf cart.
    Why not? Jack thought. He hopped in, resting his large cardboard folder on his lap.
    “Do you have any bags?” the woman asked.
    Jack tapped the folder. “This is all I need.”
    The woman nodded and joined Jack in the cart, pressing her foot down on the accelerator. The canopy over the cart provided welcome relief from the blazing June sun that made the day feel warmer than eighty degrees.
    The cart crawled ahead more slowly than the posted fifteen-miles-per-hour speed limit down a quiet, narrow street leading away from the dock. People wandered from shop to shop. None of them seemed to be in a hurry.
    “This is Main Street,” the guide said, pride evident in her voice. A few restaurants shared space with a place to rent bikes and a smattering of gift shops, one of which proclaimed Tangier The Soft Crab Capital of the World. There wasn’t a fast-food chain or department store in sight. In the distance, a church steeple pointed to the sky.
    “Legend has it that Tangier Island was settled in the middle of the 1680s by the Crockett family. No relation to Davy,” she said in her accented English. “This was after Captain John Smith discovered Tangier in 1608. Not counting the tourists, we have about seven hundred residents, most of them watermen.”
    After a few blocks, she veered the golf cart off the main thoroughfare onto an equally narrow street. She chatted about the island’s eclectic mix of styles while they passed Victorian cottages that were next door to double-wide trailers. A few homes had weathered gravestones in their front yards.
    Jack breathed in the earthy smell of the marsh. He wasn’t in Tangier as a tourist, but the guide had aroused his curiosity. “How big is the island?”
    “Three miles long, one-and-a-half miles wide.” She turned the golf cart down another street that had a partial view of the bay. “We have room for some churches, a few grocery stores, a school, a health center and not much else. Even in the high season, we’re not crowded. Exactly how we like it.”
    She pulled up in front of a large yellow clapboard house with turn-of-the-century Victorian architecture and a steeply pitched white roof. A wide porch wrapped around the house.
    “Here we are,” she said.
    If Jack had known exactly how close the dock was to the