The Summerhouse

  A month later, my sister’s husband received a fabulous job offer: double his salary, free housing, free cars. A full-time nanny for their daughter, three maids, and a country club membership were included. It was a job they couldn’t refuse. It was in Morocco.

  After Jimmie’s plane crashed and left me a widow at thirty-two, all the media around the world wrote of only one thing: that Jimmie had willed me “nothing.” None of his billions—two or twenty of them, I never could remember how many—none of it was left to me.

  “Are we broke or rich today?” I’d often ask him because his net worth fluctuated from day to day, depending on what Jimmie was trying at the moment.

  “Today we’re broke,” he’d say and he would laugh in the same way as when he’d tell me he’d made millions.

  The money never mattered to Jimmie. No one understood that. To him it was just a by-product of the game. “It’s like all those peels you throw away after you’ve made jam,” he’d say. “Only in this case the world values the peel and not the jam.” “Poor world,” I said, then Jimmie laughed hard and carried me upstairs, where he made sweet love to me.

  It’s my opinion that Jimmie knew he wasn’t going to live to be an old man. “I’ve got to do what I can as fast as I can. You with me, Frecks?” he’d ask.

  “Always,” I’d answer, and mean it. “Always.”

  But I didn’t follow him to the grave. I was left behind, just as Jimmie said I would be.

  “I’ll take care of you, Frecks,” he said more than once. When he talked of such things, he always called me by the name he’d given me the first time we met: Frecks, for the freckles across my nose.

  When he said, “I’ll take care of you,” I didn’t give the words much thought. Jimmie had always “taken care” of me. Whatever I wanted, he gave me long before I knew I wanted it. Jimmie said, “I know you better than you know yourself.”

  And he did. But then, to be fair, I never had time to get to know much about myself. Following Jimmie all over the world didn’t leave a person much time to sit and contemplate.

  Jimmie knew me and he did take care of me. Not in the way the world thought was right, but in the way he knew I needed. He didn’t leave me a rich widow with half the world’s bachelors clamoring to profess love for me. No, he left the money and all twelve of the expensive houses to the only two people in the world he truly hated: his older sister and brother.

  To me, Jimmie left a rundown, overgrown farm in the backwoods of Virginia, a place I didn’t even know he owned, and a note. It said:

  Find out the truth about what happened, will you, Frecks? Do it for me. And remember that I love you. Wherever you are, whatever you do, remember that I love you.

  J.

  Chapter 2

  Phillip watched Lillian get out of the car and walk slowly toward the house. Though she’d had a quick burst of tears when she first saw the place, he thought she was holding up well. Considering what she’d been through, she was holding up extremely well. Shaking his head in disbelief, he remembered all he’d done to prevent this moment. He and three of his associates had spent two afternoons and one morning trying to persuade her to fight James Manville’s will—a will Phillip had come to see as immoral and possibly illegal.

  But he hadn’t always felt that way. When James had told Phillip what he wanted to put in the will, Phillip had raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t dared let James know what he was thinking—that, obviously, James had found out that his young wife didn’t deserve his money; that she was probably having an affair. But instead of speaking his mind, Phillip had tried to talk James out of causing what would surely be years of court battles. It never crossed his mind that James’s widow wouldn’t contest the will. Phillip told James that if he wanted to leave his brother and sister money, then he should split the fortune three ways; there was enough for everyone.

  But James didn’t seem to hear Phillip. His only concern had been how to make sure that Lillian got some farmhouse in Virginia. “She’ll love it there,” James said in one of his rare self-revelatory moods. “I stole a lot from her and this is the way I can give it back.”

  To Phillip, cheating a woman out of billions of dollars didn’t seem to be repaying her; it seemed more like a punishment. But he kept his mouth shut.

  It wasn’t until after James’s death, when Phillip saw the true nature of Atlanta and Ray, that he wanted Lillian to fight. He wanted to head a team of the most clever, most conniving lawyers in the U.S., and he wanted to take every penny away from those two greedy worms. In the weeks since James’s death, Phillip had never seen anything like what had been done to Lillian, both by the media and by people he’d thought of as James’s friends.

  But Lillian wouldn’t budge. Nothing anyone said could make her file suit. Phillip and the other lawyers told her that she could give the money to charity after she won it, but that still didn’t make her change her mind.

  “Jimmie was very smart about business,” she said, “and he did this for a reason. There’s something he wants out of this, so I’m going to abide by the will.”

  “Manville is dead,” one of the lawyers said, his face red with exasperation. His thoughts were written on his face: What kind of woman could turn down billions of dollars?

  After the third meeting, Lillian had stood up from the table and said, “I’ve heard all your arguments, seen all your evidence that shows that I could win, and I still won’t do it. I’m going to abide by my husband’s will.” She then turned around and walked away from them.

  One of the lawyers, a man who hadn’t known James, and certainly didn’t know his wife, snickered and said softly, “Obviously, she’s too simple to know what money means.”

  Lillian heard him. Slowly, she turned around and looked at the man in a way that was so like James Manville, Phillip drew in his breath. “What you don’t understand,” she said quietly, “is that there is more to life than money. Tell me, if you were a billionaire and you died and left your wife nothing, would she fight for it? Or would she love the memory of you more than the money?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and walked out of the room.

  The other lawyers hid their faces from the man Lillian had just told off because they couldn’t contain their laughter. He had, in fact, just been through his third very nasty divorce and his ex-wife had fought him down to who got the antique doorknobs.

  In the end, Phillip had given up trying to persuade Lillian to fight. The night of the last meeting, he’d fallen into bed beside Carol and said, “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Help her,” Carol said.

  “What do you think this has all been about?” he’d snapped at his wife.

  Carol was unfazed; she didn’t even glance up from the magazine she was looking at. “You’ve been trying to make her into what she isn’t. You’re a worse tyrant than James was.”

  “Yes, and I can see that you’re terribly intimidated by me,” he said sarcastically. “So what’s in that pretty little brain of yours?” After twelve years of marriage, he could almost read her mind, and he knew when she wanted to tell him something. As always, she’d waited for him to fail, and only then would she offer her help.

  “You’ve got to help her do whatever it is that she wants to do,” Carol said.

  “Any ideas what that is?” he asked, looking at her with skepticism. “She stays alone in the guest room, and doesn’t talk to anyone. All those so-called friends that James used to fill the house with haven’t so much as called her to say they’re sorry about his death.” His voice was filled with disgust.

  “I don’t know her very well, but it seems to me that when she was with James, she tried very hard to have a normal life.”

  Phillip snorted. “Normal? With James Manville? Carol, did you have blinders on? They lived in vast houses all over the world; they were surrounded by servants. I took her into a department store right after James died, and I swear she’d never seen one before. Or at least not since she ran away from home
and married him.”

  “That’s all true, but what did Lillian do when she was in those houses? Give parties?”

  Phillip put his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling. “No,” he said thoughtfully. “James gave the parties and Lillian put in an appearance. I don’t think I ever saw anyone more miserable than she was at those functions. She used to sit in a corner all by herself and eat. Poor kid.”

  “Did you ever see her happy?”

  “No, not—” Phillip began, then stopped. “That’s not true. One day I took some papers to James to sign, but after I left his house, I saw that he’d missed one, so I went back. When I got there, I could hear voices, so I went through the house toward the back and I saw them. They were alone, just the two of them, no guests, no servants and . . .”

  He closed his eyes for a moment in memory. It had been one of James’s multimillion-dollar houses, “all glass and steel,” as Lillian had said, and the voices had come from a room Phillip had never seen before. It was off the kitchen, and since the door was open, he looked inside. As he was standing near some flowing drapery that some designer had put up, he knew they weren’t likely to see him. He knew he was playing the voyeur, but he couldn’t move as he looked in on the scene.

  Lillian, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, not the designer clothes that he’d always seen her in, was serving James dinner. They were in a small sitting room with a tiny, round table at one end. From the look of the room, no designer had touched it. The sofa was covered in a rose chintz; near it was a plaid chair. The table was pine and scratched; the two chairs with it looked like something from a country auction.

  None of the furnishings had that fake look that designers managed to achieve. There was nothing “arranged” in this room. Instead, it looked like half the living rooms in America, and the couple in the room looked like what other American couples hoped to be. As Lillian filled James’s plate from the food set out on a buffet, James was talking nonstop. And Lillian was listening closely. When she turned and put the plate in front of him, she laughed at what he was saying, and in that moment, Phillip thought she was beautiful. She wasn’t just the billionaire’s plump wife who never had a word to say, but a real beauty. As she began to fill her own plate, she started talking and Phillip was astonished to see James listening to her with an intensity he’d never seen in him before. James nodded as she talked and Phillip could see that he’d asked her opinion about something and she was giving it. “Partnership,” was the word that came to his mind.

  Silently, his paper unsigned, Phillip tiptoed away. How many times over the years had he heard people say, “Why doesn’t Manville ditch the dumpling and get a woman who isn’t afraid of her own shadow?” But, obviously, as in everything else, James Manville had known what he was doing.

  On that day, as Phillip walked back to the car, he thought that in all the years he’d known James, he’d never been jealous of him. Thanks to James, Phillip had all the money he wanted, so he didn’t envy James his billions. But Phillip realized that when he’d looked in on that scene, he’d felt a hot wave of jealousy. Carol hadn’t looked at him like that or listened to him in that way since the first year they were married.

  Phillip had looked at the unsigned paper and was glad he hadn’t made his presence known. It would be better if James didn’t know that his private moments with Lillian had been observed.

  “Yes,” Phillip said to Carol. “I’ve seen her happy.”

  “Oh?” Carol asked, her voice full of curiosity. “When was that?”

  James might be dead, but Phillip still couldn’t bring himself to betray his friend by telling what he’d seen. The memory of it, though, just made him more confused. If James loved his wife so much, why hadn’t he at least left her enough money to protect herself from the press? “You have something you want to tell me,” he said to his wife, “so why don’t you spit it out?”

  “On the way to James’s funeral, Lillian asked me if I’d seen the farmhouse that James left her.”

  “So?” Phillip asked. “What does that mean? The place is a pig sty. It’s horrible. The countryside around it is beautiful, but the house ought to be torn down, and only a bulldozer would help the landscaping.”

  “Hmmm,” Carol said, closing her magazine. “Nobody made as much money as James did without being able to plan. What do you think his plan was for that farmhouse?”

  “Insure it for millions then burn it down?”

  Carol ignored him. “How can she ever live there in peace? She’ll have reporters setting up camp in her front yard. She’ll . . .” Trailing off, she looked hard at her husband, as though she expected him to figure out the rest of her idea.

  Phillip was too tired to play guessing games. “What?” he asked.

  And that’s when Carol revealed her idea to change Lillian’s looks, and even her name.

  Now, as Phillip got out of the car and watched Lillian—no, Bailey, he reminded himself—look at the ugly old place, he had to admit that she certainly looked like a different person. He remembered one day when James had slammed a book down on a desk and said, “I can’t concentrate. Lil’s on one of those damned diets again.” Then he’d yelled for his secretary to come into the office—no intercom system for James Manville. He’d ordered his secretary to send Lillian a pound of every kind of chocolate the nearest Godiva store had. “That should do it,” he had said, smiling. “Now let’s get back to work.”

  Without her husband’s sabotage, Lillian had dropped a lot of weight in just a few weeks. When Phillip told his wife what James used to do to keep Lillian off her diets, she’d laughed and said, “So that’s the secret to losing weight. I’ll remember that the next time you get on a plane.”

  Between the weight loss and the removal of that big schnoz of hers, Phillip had to admit that Bailey was a looker. Pudginess had been replaced with slim curves, and without that nose, you could really see her beautiful eyes and small, full lips. One morning at breakfast, Carol, holding a metal spatula, had leaned close to his ear and said, “You keep on looking at her like that and I’ll ram this . . .”

  But Phillip did admit that Bailey looked good. “Do you think anyone will recognize me?” was the first thing Lillian had asked when the bandages were removed.

  “No one,” the doctor, Carol, and Phillip had all assured her, each trying not to say how much better she looked, because that would have been saying how bad she used to look.

  Now, Phillip got out of the car and motioned to the man in the car behind him to remove the suitcases from the trunk and put them inside the house. He’d arranged for two cars to be waiting for them at the airport: the SUV he’d bought for Lillian, and a black sedan from a local car service to follow them and drive Phillip back to the airport.

  On the plane to Dulles Airport in D.C., Lillian had put her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. When Phillip had spoken to her, she’d just nodded. He figured that she wasn’t speaking to him because he’d taken the job with Atlanta and Ray. He wanted to explain to her why, but at the same time, the less she knew the better. If she wasn’t going to fight for herself, then he was going to do it for her. And the only way he knew how to do that was from the inside.

  It had been a three-hour drive from the airport to the tiny mountain town of Calburn, where the farmhouse was. On the drive Lillian had put aside her anger and had pumped him for everything he knew about the town and the house.

  Unfortunately for Lillian, Phillip could honestly say that even though he’d been James Manville’s friend for twenty years, he knew nothing about his childhood. Truthfully, he wasn’t at all sure that this farmhouse was even connected to James’s past.

  “How can Jimmie be related to people like Atlanta and Ray?” she’d asked. “I can’t understand that.”

  Phillip was tempted to say, “That’s because you never saw James do business. If you had, you’d know that he was more like them than you realize.” But he didn’t say that. Let her have her dreamy-eyed visi
ons about her dead husband, he thought.

  Lillian—Bailey, he corrected himself again—had walked around the house to look at the back. The investigator Phillip had hired had taken photos of the property, so he knew that the back was more tangled than the front, and he dreaded when she saw it. Using the key that James had given him when he’d signed over the deed to the house, Phillip opened the front door.

  The door fell off its rusty hinges and crashed onto the floor, taking the jamb with it. In astonishment, Phillip turned and looked at the man behind him, whose arms were loaded with suitcases. Turning back, Phillip stepped onto the fallen door and into the house.

  The place was ghastly. Thick, dusty cobwebs hung down from the ceiling all the way to the floor. He could hear creatures—mice, rats, and whatever else they have in the country—scurrying about under the floor. The sunlight that came through the dirty windows showed years of dust floating through the air.

  “Take the luggage back to the car,” Phillip said over his shoulder to the man behind him. “She’s not staying here.” He waited until the man was gone, then he turned, stepped onto the door and out into the fresh air. He’d never thought of James Manville as evil until this moment. That he’d leave his wife this filthy place, and expect her to live here, was either insane or truly evil. Since he knew for a fact that James was not insane, that left . . .

  Lips tight with anger, Phillip walked toward the back of the house to find Bailey.

  The photos hadn’t lied: the back really was worse than the front. Huge trees, vines that were covered with lethal-looking thorns, bushes that were as tall as trees, and weeds that were as big as something in a science fiction movie fought each other for space and light. The tangled mass of plants around him made Phillip shiver. To his right were stones set in the ground that made a narrow path through weeds as high as his head. The many bees buzzing around him made him quicken his step. “Lillian?” he called, then caught himself, and, like the lawyer he was, he looked around to see if anyone had heard him make the error of calling her by her former name. But as he looked at the tangle of weeds, he knew that an army could be hiding ten feet away and he’d not be able to see them. “Bailey?” he called louder as he quickened his pace. Still, there was no answer.