Landers was now talking about hiring lawyers to get out of paying any more. If he did that, Devlin didn’t know what he was going to do next. During his once-a-month call to Emmie, she’d told him that Uncle Tate—how Devlin hated that name!—had bought the Virginia plantation and her mom had fixed it up.
“You mean that old place Nina used to go on and on about, with those two kids?” He was annoyed that he hadn’t been told this useful information earlier.
“Letty and Ace,” Emmie said with enthusiasm.
“I didn’t think that place was real. Will he be there?”
As young as Emmie was, she knew who “he” was. “Mom wants Uncle Tate to come, but she says that if he does, he’ll only stay for a day. My uncle is a celebrity and he can’t—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Devlin said. “I gotta go,” and he’d hung up.
It had taken him a while to swallow his anger over that news. He was having to scrimp on everything, from clothes to his car, but Landers was buying plantations. How was that fair?
Devlin did some investigating and found the town of Summer Hill, where the old plantation he’d heard too much about was. When he read of the auditions for the local play, he thought that maybe, for once in his life, his luck had changed. He’d go there, be in the play, and he’d work on getting Nina back. They could live on that lovely old plantation in the little town and he’d become…what? The mayor? He imagined town meetings with everyone lined up, asking for his autograph.
But his long-term plan wasn’t working out. As always, everything good was given to Landers. He’d shown up with Jack Worth—the B-movie actor who had been chosen for his friendship instead of Devlin—and taken over the whole town. That was all anyone could talk of.
And now it looked like Landers might be falling for some local girl. Sure she could cook, but who the hell was she? Nobody!
Devlin knew that if he were given what fate had dished out so generously to Landers, he’d go after some rising starlet—or three. Not some cook in a nowhere town in Virginia.
As he made his way to where he’d cut an opening in the fence at the back of the property, he thought about the photos he’d bought. He wasn’t yet sure what he was going to do with them, but he’d figure out something. His goal was to do to Landers what had been done to him—and it looked like that would involve this local girl.
Smiling, Devlin went back to his Toyota, which was hidden at the side of the road. His next car was going to be a dark-green Jaguar.
“Good morning.”
Casey looked up to see Tate standing at the screen door. The early-morning sun behind him made her remember the first time she’d seen him: wet and naked.
What she was thinking must have shown on her face because Tate’s eyebrows raised in a way that made her blush.
“Maybe now’s not a good time,” he said as he turned away.
“You don’t have to leave.” She took the two steps to the door and held it open.
As Tate went past her, he lifted his arms as if he were in a holdup, and stepped sideways. She knew he was making a point of not touching her, so no electricity would pass between them.
She ignored his theatrics. “Where are the others?”
“Richmond. Gizzy said she had to go there to get something for her dad, and Jack asked to go with her. My guess is that they’ll spend the night. That means I’m…” He shrugged.
“That you’re all by yourself and I’ll bet you’re hungry. Sit down. I made breakfast burritos, so we can eat before the rehearsals start.”
Tate straightened his shoulders. “Actually, I told Kit I needed a break and whether he liked it or not, I was going to take the entire day off.”
Casey gave a derisive little snort. “He called off rehearsals today, didn’t he?”
“Oh, yeah. His relatives are moving into their new house and he’s spending the day with them. This whole place is going to be free of people, so I thought I’d go exploring. You wouldn’t want to go with me, would you?”
“Love to!” Casey took four stainless-steel buckets out of a closet. “I was told there’s a stand of blackberry bushes on this property, and I’d like to find it. Wrap up a couple of burritos and we can eat as we walk.”
“Walk, ha!” Tate said. “I live in L.A. We drive from the kitchen to the living room.” He quickly wrapped two burritos in foil, grabbed bottles of water, then held open the door. Outside was a little red utility truck.
“Perfect.” She set the buckets in the back.
Tate put the burritos and water on the seat, then returned to the house. Moments later he came out with a big plastic pie carrier and a huge spoon. “Must feed my addiction.”
Casey laughed as he put it in the back, then got in beside her, turned on the engine, and drove across the lawn. “So who are Letty and Ace?” A flash of something she couldn’t read went across his eyes, then it was gone. It looked like he’d guessed that Devlin had first mentioned the children to her. Was he jealous?
“My mom spent summers here until she was ten. Her real name was Ruth but she asked everyone to call her Letty, short for Princess Colette, because she thought that was the most beautiful name she’d ever heard. The boy she played with every summer was called Ace. When Nina and I were kids, Mom told us stories about what they did.”
“Anything about peacocks?”
“Oh, yes. Ace covered a piece of cardboard with aluminum foil and used it as a shield. He used to run a particularly big peacock away from the well house, where he and Letty had their most secret hideout. My mom said Ace was a true hero, fearless and brave.”
“Like you were with the peacock?”
“No. I didn’t confront the beast. I was a total coward. Threw my shirt over the creature, gave it a push, then ducked down under the window—and he still almost pecked my face off.”
“And Emmie saw it all?”
“Every second of it. It entertained her immensely, but then, she thinks her uncle Tate is fairly ridiculous. So what made you decide to become a great chef?”
“I haven’t reached that level by any means. Ow!” Tate had hit a pothole so deep that her head hit the ceiling.
“Sorry. We are now going into uncharted territory. But you’ve been here for months, so you must know the place better than I do.”
“There was too much snow this winter for me to get out much, and besides, Kit got me quite a few jobs so I was busy. I cooked for him until he dragged his former housekeeper out of retirement. She wasn’t happy about it, and every day she says she’s leaving. What’s that?”
She was pointing at a ramshackle building under a big oak tree. The roof looked fairly new but some windows were missing.
“Probably the old chicken coop.” He stopped the truck. They opened the burritos and began to eat.
“This place has a lot of memories for you, doesn’t it?”
“From my mother’s stories, yes,” he said. “After my father died, I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t there to toss me around and throw a ball to me. My mom did her best, but she was grieving too. She had a baby and a rambunctious four-year-old, and lots of bills.”
“It must have been awful for all of you.”
“It was.” He looked back at her. “But that’s when Mom started telling me the Letty and Ace stories. The kids vowed to be best friends forever and ever.”
“Was Ace his real name?”
“I don’t know. I’ve always wished that I’d asked. At first I was too young to question the name, then later I was too busy with my own life to think about it.”
“Your mom…?”
“Died just before I got my first major role.”
Casey could hear the pain in his voice, and she reached across the seat to put her hand on his.
“Thanks,” he murmured, then in the next second a charge of electricity went through both of them.
Casey snatched her hand away and started to make a sharp retort, but instead she laughed, and Tate joined her.
“Sh
all we explore the henhouse? I’ll tell you how Letty and Ace made a ramp to roll the eggs down. It worked perfectly—except that every egg broke. They were— Bloody hell! There he is!”
Casey looked up to see a huge peacock, long tail trailing behind him, strutting in front of them. He disappeared into some rhododendron bushes.
Tate tossed his empty foil to the floor and handed Casey his water bottle. “Hold on! I’m going to get that creature.”
She grasped the doorframe of the truck as Tate drove around the huge shrubs, but on the other side was a tangle of what looked to be young trees. They could see the peacock making his way through them.
“He’s going somewhere,” Casey said. “He’s not just wandering; he has a destination.”
“Are you up for following him?”
“Oh, yeah!” Casey braced her feet and tightened her hands. The ground was rough, with ditches and holes and stumps.
“Nina said that when she first saw the place, it was all like this. She had a couple of acres around the house cut and smoothed.”
“My brother Josh did the work,” Casey said. “Yeow!”
“Okay?”
“I’m fine.” The peacock turned left. “Maybe he’s leading us to the blackberries. I was told they’re hard to find.”
Tate jerked the wheel around so hard that Casey almost flew out the side, but he grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “Tell me how you came to be a chef.”
“Thanks. My mom and I found my career by accident. Since she’s a doctor, she was gone a lot.”
“Sorry,” Tate said.
“No! No! It was okay. She’s a bit intense, so…” Casey shrugged.
“Got it. Serious, dedicated doctor. Great in a hospital but overpowering to live with. I’ve played that role before. So who took care of you?”
“Nannies. I had a Jamaican woman for the first seven years of my life and I loved her very much. When she decided to go back home, my heart was broken.” She paused while Tate drove around a magnificent magnolia tree. Casey looked back. “There’s a big statue under that tree.”
“Probably where Letty and Ace made contact with outer-space demons. They conquered them and saved the world. How did you put your heart back together?”
“By not repeating that error. I told Mom I never wanted to hurt like that again, so we decided to hire a different nanny each year. Mom suggested we find people who could do specific things, like art or teaching me how to swim. She especially wanted me to learn some lifesaving techniques. She never said so but I knew she wanted me to be a doctor. Anyway, that’s what we did. Mom and I would think up things that I wanted to learn, then she’d find someone to teach me.”
The peacock had found something on the ground and was pecking at it, so Tate stopped the truck. “That was either a lot of fun or a nightmare.”
“Exactly! One of the artists once said she needed a few puffs of her special herbal smoke-sticks to be truly creative. My mom came home to find her eleven-year-old daughter rolling marijuana joints in origami paper and the nanny stoned. I was rather good at it, and I thought they were very pretty. Quite colorful.”
Tate laughed. “My guess is that nanny was fired.”
“Right that moment. After that, Mom hired a retired woman who had worked in a bakery for twenty-some years. I learned a lot from her. The next one was an Italian man who showed me how to make pasta. After those two, I realized I liked cooking the best, so the rest of my caretakers were in the food industry. By the time I was in high school, Mom and I changed them every six months, and I got interested in the cuisines of different nationalities. French, Basque, Hungarian. I loved Mexican cooking! When I left for college I could make my own tortillas, cut sushi, and decorate a wedding cake.”
“And roll joints.”
“In tortillas?” Casey sounded confused. “I don’t think they would burn properly.”
Laughing, Tate put the truck in drive. The peacock was on the move.
“Was that…?” Casey asked as they passed a group of gravestones.
“My ancestors’ private burial plot,” Tate said. “Uncle Freddy is buried there. He lived here for many years with his caretaker, Mr. Gates, and when he died he left the whole place to Mom. By the way, Nina told me it was my job to see that the family cemetery was cleaned up.”
“What did Letty and Ace think of that place?”
When Tate turned to grin at her, he almost hit a tree stump. They were near the back of the property, and it looked as though it hadn’t been trimmed in a century. “Of course they said it was haunted. One time they sneaked there at midnight, but Mr. Gates caught them, picked them up, and carried them back to the house. I’ve always wondered what he was doing outside at midnight.” Tate backed the truck up and went to the left, but there was a clump of thorn-covered bushes.
“I’m not sure, but I think those are gooseberries,” Casey said.
He was backing up again and glanced over at her. “Aren’t they pie material?”
“They are. Pies and tarts and jams and— Look out!”
He slammed on the brakes just in time to not hit a family of opossums. The mother glared at him, then started walking again, her two babies following her.
“Now we see who really owns this place.” He turned off the engine. “I think we should walk. Or if you don’t want to, I could take you back to civilization.”
Casey got out. “Remember that I’m good at following.”
“And you know that idea sends me into spirals of lust.”
She frowned. “I thought I was pledging to follow the peacock.”
“That’s cruel,” Tate groaned as he got the pie carrier out of the back. “Speaking of the devil, where is he?”
Casey, holding the buckets, crouched down enough to see the long tail disappearing into the bushes. “He’s going that way.”
It took them another thirty minutes of following the peacock, sometimes fighting their way through six-foot-tall overgrown patches of weeds, before they found the blackberry tangle. It was tall, with branches twisted together to make what appeared to be an impenetrable clump. Not far away, plants had been cleared for the newly erected fence. They were at the very back of the plantation.
The peacock—who had not deigned to acknowledge their presence—was lazily pecking at the ground.
Casey started pulling blackberries off the vines while Tate looked around.
“See that?” He pointed.
She had to stand on tiptoe, but she saw the point of a roof. The little building was surrounded by a mass of thorn-covered branches.
“Maybe I should go back and get a chain saw.”
Casey looked at him in horror. “And destroy wild blackberry bushes? Are you out of your mind? These need to be pruned professionally, not by some redneck with a chain saw.”
“I grew up in California. How do I get labeled a redneck?”
“Ancestry can always be told,” she said seriously.
“I—” He broke off because the peacock, beak in the air, had strolled between them, arrogantly ignoring them. It lowered its head and went into the bushes. Tate crouched down to see where the bird had gone. “There’s a tunnel here. Someone has bent sheets of galvanized steel to make it. It’s old, but…” He stood up. “I think we may have found Mom’s hideout. If I have to slither like a snake, I’m going in.”
“Tunnel or not, those thorns will tear you apart. You can’t—” A crack of thunder cut her off and she felt the first sprinkles of rain.
“The keys are in the truck and it’s that way. No. Wait. It’s over there. No, that’s not right. I’m sure it’s that way. Or maybe—”
“Go!” Casey said. “I’m right behind you.”
“If we end up crawling on our bellies, I’d rather get behind you and watch.”
“No.” She motioned for him to go first. Under her breath, she said, “And I’d rather see you naked and wet.” She spoke so quietly that he didn’t hear her.
Tate went in front of her,
the pie container before him. “The path is a bit overgrown,” he said over his shoulder.
Pebbles and dried, thorny branches littered the ground, and, above them, blackberry stalks had found their way through the sheets of metal. It took a while to get through the tunnel, and the rain was coming down harder.
But before they got to the center, the rain hit them. It came down through the canopy of crisscrossed branches and gaps in the old tunnel. By the last few feet, they were soaked.
In front of Casey, Tate attempted to stand up, but the branches were too intertwined to fully separate. He helped her stand halfway up, her back against a wooden wall, while he wrestled with an old door. He managed to get it open a few inches, and Casey slipped inside, Tate behind her.
It was a small building, about the size of a walk-in closet, and to one side were remnants of some machine.
“Well pump,” Tate said, as he ran his hands through his hair to get the water out.
“For what well?” Casey was wringing her shirttail out. There was a little window in one wall, but between the rain and the blackberries, there wasn’t much light.
“I have no idea. I was told about this place from the point of view of a child. I doubt if Mom asked what the big machine was used for. If I remember correctly, and if no one has moved it…”
She could see his silhouette as he ran his hands along a wall until he reached the corner.
“Aha!”
She heard a match strike, saw a flame, then he lit a candle and they had light. Tate held aloft an antique pewter holder with a shield on the back.
Behind her was a stack of rugs and cushions that looked as though they’d been pilfered from the Big House. They ranged from a couple of dark velvet ones, probably Victorian, to one that had big red lips with a cigarette hanging from the corner.
“Mom didn’t mention that she and Ace were bandits. Want to sit and wait this out?”
“Sure.” As they moved the pillows, they coughed from the dust, but it was better than sitting on the hard wooden floor.
Casey leaned a fat pillow against the wall, put more on the floor, then sat down. Tate was still standing. The light of a single candle was behind him, and his wet T-shirt was plastered to a body she remembered well.