Amanda liked the fact that her room had a private entrance, but when she went back inside, she checked the French doors carefully to make certain they had a sturdy lock. Then, leaving the doors open, she began unpacking.
She worked briskly, trying not to think too much. Already, she could feel the strain of being forced to weigh every word before she spoke it, and she had been in this house no more than a couple of hours. What would it be like in a week? Two weeks? A month? With so many people watching her, waiting for her to make a mistake, how long would it be before, inevitably, she betrayed herself?
Amanda carried her toiletries bag into the bathroom, hung blouses, slacks, and her few summer dresses and skirts in the roomy closet, and put several pairs of shoes neatly on the closet floor. Then she began filling the dresser drawers with piles of tee shirts and other cotton and knit tops, as well as jeans, shorts, and underwear. She ignored the two tall chests since she didn’t need them; unpacked, she was ruefully aware that all her belongings occupied a very small amount of the available space.
She went to the bedroom door, hesitated for a moment listening, then gently turned the old-fashioned brass key in the lock. She was a little amused at herself for taking that precaution while leaving the balcony doors wide open, but told herself that none of the large people in this house could possibly climb the iron staircase outside in silence. So she’d have warning before an unfortunate interruption. Probably.
She went back and sat down on the bed beside her biggest suitcase, now emptied of clothes. Carefully, she opened the concealed false bottom. Handy for keeping papers neat, the salesman had offered without a blink. The two manila folders Amanda had placed there were certainly uncreased, as were the three small hardbound books.
Amanda smoothed her fingers over the books slowly, then set them aside and opened one of the manila folders. It was filled with photocopies of magazine articles and photographs. There were quite a few, because Glory was probably the most-photographed and most-written-about house in the entire South. She flipped through the pages, studying the pictures she’d gone over so many times and skimming the articles where, with a yellow marker, she had highlighted entire paragraphs.
Glory. By now, it was equal parts strange and familiar to her. Blindfolded, she might have been able to find her way through the house, but its sheer size—in the flesh, so to speak—had surprised her. The master bedroom, Jesse’s bedroom, had been identified and photographed in exhaustive detail—but Amanda wasn’t sure where the other occupants of the house slept.
Would Sully be in the rear wing rather than this main section, as far away from Jesse as possible? What about Reece? And Maggie, obviously much more than a housekeeper—where was her room?
So many questions.
Frowning, Amanda closed that folder and set it aside, then opened the second one. This one also held numerous clippings, mostly from newspapers, as well as photocopies of very old articles from myriad newspapers, books, and magazines. From their earliest days in America, around the time of the Revolution, to the present, these pages contained the varied and colorful history of the Daulton family.
Important even before old Rufus Daulton had acquired thousands of acres of Carolina land in speculation deals in the 1700s, the Daultons had made a name for themselves during the Revolution when twin brothers George and Charles Daulton had become heroes of that war. Only one had survived, George having been betrayed by a woman whom Charles later strangled with his own hands. He had been tried as a matter of form, acquitted promptly, and gone on to marry the dead woman’s sister and sire seven children.
Amanda shook her head over that, as she had the first time she’d read the story and every time since, bemused and wishing the sister had left a journal or letters to explain her thoughts and feelings about such a bizarre situation—and its outcome. But history kept that woman silent, just as most of the Daulton women were. The men, with larger-than-life personalities and actions, seemed to delight in making themselves heard in every generation, but the women were, at least to history’s eyes, mere footnotes.
It must have been difficult, Amanda thought, for any woman to hold her own with those big, darkly handsome, and fiery-tempered Daulton men, especially given the times. Yet women had married them, borne them, nursed them when they were sick, and buried them when their uncommon strength failed them.
Amanda flipped through the pages slowly, studying the photographs and scanning the sections of text she’d highlighted. An interesting family, to say the least, with plenty of stories at least as curious as the one concerning the twins. Hard-drinking, like most mountain Southerners, the Daultons had fought for their country, brawled with their relatives, and feuded with their neighbors generation after generation.
Lucky enough to plant Burley, a popular tobacco that grew well in the sandy soil of the Carolina mountains, they were also shrewd enough to begin branching out even before the Civil War brought about changes in their way of life. While continuing to grow tobacco, they established a sound program of breeding and training Thoroughbred horses, mined gold and other precious metals in the mountains, and, later, got into textiles and the manufacture of furniture as well.
The Daultons, always lucky in finance, made money hand over fist while other great families floundered in the ever-changing rush of progress. Yet, in every generation, the reins of control for the family were held in one pair of hands—usually that of the oldest male—who, rather like the masters of the old British and Dutch trading houses of Hong Kong, enjoyed a position of ultimate power and authority. He wasn’t called a tai-pan, and his authority wasn’t spelled out in ancient documents, but the leader of the Daulton clan was very much in charge.
Amanda continued through the clippings until she reached more recent times. Separating this group of articles from the earlier ones was a sheet of white paper on which was hand-drawn a simple, three-generation family tree.
Amanda studied the tree, one finger tracing the lines from parent to child. She let her thoughts drift. Their thirties seemed an especially arduous time for the Daultons. Adrian had been killed at thirty, Brian at thirty-three, and their mother had died in childbirth at thirty-five. Reece and Sully were in their thirties now with Kate barely past hers—definitely a stressful period, what with the abrupt arrival of long-lost Amanda.
Shaking those thoughts off, Amanda considered for a moment and then returned the folders to the suitcase. It was not an obvious hiding place, since few people would think to keep searching a conspicuously empty bag, so it seemed to her the most secure place in the bedroom.
She looked at the three small books, then opened the topmost one. On the first page, handwritten in neat but flowing letters, was the word Journal. Farther down the page, in the same writing, was Christine Daulton. And at the very bottom was the notation 1962–1968.
The second journal was dated 1969–1975. Both journals covered her life from the date Christine married Brian Daulton until the year of his death. The third and final journal covered the same period, but in a much more specific way. It was labeled Glory, and the notation of dates read Summers 1962–1975.
Amanda found herself lightly touching the first page of the third journal, her index finger tracing the letters forming the name of this house. Interesting, how Christine had set apart the time spent here. They had spent every summer here after their marriage, from late May to early September. As a world-class horseman, Brian had enjoyed riding in the shows and hunts common in this area, and it was clear from her writings that Christine had loved this place.
Amanda had read the journals. What she hoped was that, now that she was here at Glory, some of the enigmatic and ambiguous entries might make more sense. Probably because these were journals rather than diaries, with no locks meant to keep the contents secret, Christine’s entries were sometimes vague or oblique. She often wrote, Amanda thought, as if guardedly aware that other eyes would read what she wrote.
Whose eyes? Her husband’s? Had Brian Daulton been
the kind of man who believed there should be no privacy between husband and wife?
Amanda found that speculation unsettling. As adults, children often found their parents to be relative strangers with unsuspected secrets and undisclosed pasts, but Amanda felt herself even further removed than that. Brian Daulton had been dead for twenty years, and Christine Daulton’s journals revealed only snippets of feelings and the occasional noting of a problem or argument between them; there was no journal for the years after Brian’s death, and not so much as a hint in any of the personal papers she’d left behind of her thoughts and feelings about him.
What, if anything, did it mean?
Amanda shook off the thoughts and looked around her room. There was a shelf holding a number of books near the door, and she contemplated it for a few moments before electing to return the journals to the suitcase’s hidden compartment. The journals might have fit in anonymously with the several hardback and paperback novels provided for a guest’s bedtime reading, but Amanda preferred not to chance it.
She closed the bag and set both her cases inside the closet. Her makeup case was on the dresser; she opened it and lifted out the tray holding various brushes and compacts to reveal the small niche designed to hold jewelry. Amanda had very little good jewelry: a small diamond cluster ring and one emerald band with very small stones, a couple of bracelets and chains of fine gold, some delicate earrings.
She ignored those pieces, drawing out a small velvet pouch, which contained a small pendant on a delicate chain. The pendant, hardly more than an inch from top to bottom, was the outline of a heart done in tiny diamonds. It was not an expensive piece or an impressive one, but when she put it on and looked in the mirror above the dresser to study the heart as it lay in the V opening of her blouse, it felt to Amanda as if she had fastened something very heavy around her neck.
Pushing her luck, there was no question about it. The smart thing would be to say very little and listen to everything during these first days, especially while she was trying to get the feel of this place and these people. Why ask for trouble so soon? She touched the little heart with a fingertip, hesitating, then sighed and left it.
She fingered a few other items in the jewelry niche thoughtfully. A man’s gold seal ring, a pair of very old pearl earrings, an ivory bracelet—all pieces much older than the others in the niche.
Tucked into a corner and wrapped in tissue was a small crystal trinket box, which Amanda carefully unwrapped and placed upon the dresser. She took off the lid and removed another bit of tissue paper, this wrapped around an opaque dark green stone.
There was nothing particularly memorable about the stone. It was hardly more than a couple of inches from end to end, a roughly oval shape with several jutting facets common to quartz. Amanda held it for a moment, her fingers examining the shape and hardness of the stone, rubbing the smooth facets. Then she returned it to the trinket box, adding the two delicate rings and several pairs of earrings from the jewelry-niche. Satisfied with the resulting jumble, in which the green stone seemed merely a bit peculiar, she replaced the lid on the box.
After a moment’s thought, she deliberately cluttered the dresser’s polished surface, putting out her hairbrush and comb, a bottle of perfume, and several items of makeup. She left the case open.
A glance at her watch told her it was only three-thirty, which meant she had some time to kill. Supper at six, Jesse had told her, and she might Want to wander around and explore this afternoon. Obviously eager to spend time with her, he had nevertheless made a conspicuous effort to avoid overwhelming her, to give her room and time to herself. There would be a car and driver at her disposal if she wanted to go into town, he had said, and if there was anything she needed—anything at all—she should tell either him or Maggie.
Amanda felt a brief craven impulse to remain here in her room until suppertime, but shook it off. She’d come this far, and so going on was inevitable.
She left the window open since it was screened, but closed the balcony doors; summer wouldn’t officially begin for another month, but until Amanda found out how bad the flies and mosquitoes were around here— according to what she’d read, it varied from year to year—she had no intention of issuing a blatant invitation to the insects to enter her bedroom. She went to the hall door and unlocked it, and went out into the hall.
She turned left to head toward the stairs, moving slowly as she studied several landscapes and the occasional furnishings lining the wide, carpeted hallway. She had stopped to examine a beautiful gilt mirror and was still a good twenty feet from the head of the stairs when she heard a low, guttural sound that caused the fine hairs on the nape of her neck to rise, quivering.
Very slowly, she turned her head. Back toward her room and not six feet away stood two black-and-tan dogs. Like so much else about Glory, they were big, heavily muscled, and wickedly powerful. They were Doberman pinschers, and they were not happy to find her here.
Amanda considered her options rapidly and decided that one thing she couldn’t do was stand here and scream for help. Even if the dogs didn’t get more pissed off just because of the noise, she didn’t want any of the large—and undoubtedly courageous—people in this house to find her frozen with fear and yelling her head off.
So, forcing herself to relax, she turned to face the dogs and dropped to her knees in the same motion. “Hi, guys,” she said to them, her voice calm. “Want to be friends?”
It took nearly ten minutes and all the patient tranquility Amanda could muster, but she liked dogs and that helped her to get on the right side of these two. Whether it was her voice, her scent, or her attitude, the dogs decided to accept her.
They were extremely friendly once that decision was made, and she ended up having to (gently) push one of them off her lap before she could get to her feet. Both the dogs were wearing silver chain collars, and she paused to examine the engraved tags announcing their names.
“Hope you guys haven’t heard the stories,” she murmured with a wince, wondering if she had just been granted a glimpse into the darker—or, at least, darkly mischievous—side of someone’s nature. To whom did the dogs belong, and who had named them?
Filing the question away to be answered later, Amanda continued on her way downstairs, a dog on either side of her. She paused only once, reaching out to gently touch the ancient grandfather clock on the landing, then shook her head a little and went on.
She had just reached the polished floor of the entrance hall when Maggie appeared in the hallway leading to the rear of the house and looked at the threesome in surprise.
“I’ll be damned,” she said. “You made friends with those hellions?”
“I didn’t have much choice,” Amanda replied with some feeling. “They were just there in the hall upstairs when I came out of my bedroom.”
Maggie frowned. “They were supposed to be shut up in Jesse’s bedroom until he could introduce you.”
Which answered the question of the dogs’ ownership.
“Maybe he let them out,” Amanda offered.
“No, he wouldn’t have. Besides which, he’s down at the stables looking over a couple of new horses.” Maggie studied the two dogs, which stood on either side of Amanda so that her fingertips brushed their glossy black coats, and shook her head slowly. “I’ve never seen them take to anybody but Jesse; they just tolerate the rest of us.”
“I like dogs.”
“A good thing, I’d say. Are you exploring?”
“I thought I would. If it’s okay.”
With a lifted brow, Maggie said, “I thought Jesse had made it pretty clear. You can do just about anything you please here, Amanda.” Then, briskly, she added, “The garden is beautiful this time of year. Just go straight down that hall and out through the sun-room—exploring along the way, of course.”
“Thanks, I will.”
They passed each other in the entrance hall, since Maggie was going upstairs. But with one foot on the bottom tread, the housekeeper calle
d Amanda’s name.
“Yes?”
“That necklace you’re wearing. Christine had one just like it.”
“Yes.” Amanda’s voice was deliberate. “She did.”
Maggie looked at her for a long moment. “Keep the dogs with you. They’ll protect you.”
Amanda felt a chill. “Protect me? What do I have to be afraid of here?” she asked.
“Snakes.” Maggie smiled. “Watch out for snakes. The black snakes won’t hurt you, but copperheads are poisonous.” Then she continued on up the stairs.
Alone once more but for her canine companions, Amanda drew a breath and looked down at them. “Come on, guys. Let’s take a look at Glory.”
The mountain trail was narrow and winding, crossed here and there with fallen trees and rusting barrels and moldy bales of hay that made up crude but effective jumps. Only an expert rider with a highly trained—or suicidally obedient—horse would have attempted the rugged course, and then only at a carefully balanced canter.
Not a flat-out gallop.
But the big Roman-nosed black climbed the trail like a mountain goat, taking the jumps in stride, his ears flat to his head and his gait so smooth that the man on his back hardly felt the unevenness of the trail.
It took an unusually large and powerful horse to carry Sully for any length of time, particularly at top speed over rough terrain. That was the major reason he’d stopped competing in his late teens, because he was simply too big and too heavy to give most horses a fighting chance over jumps, and that was the only kind of riding he really loved. This kind of riding. And this horse, the only one he currently owned that was capable of taking him up this trail.