Return to Summerhouse

  “What good will that do?” Zoë asked, sitting upright and out of Faith’s embrace. “Russell is here, not there. Even if I take another three weeks with him, that’s all I’ll get.”

  “I think you need to find out what happened to you in our time,” Faith said in a motherly way.

  “Look who’s talking. I think you should find out who killed your boyfriend.”

  As soon as she said it, Zoë clamped her lips shut. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.”

  Faith looked at Zoë, then Amy. “What is it that you two know that I don’t?”

  “I don’t think now is the time to go into this,” Amy said. “I called you two here to talk about Tristan.”

  Faith stared at Zoë. “I want you to tell me what you know.”

  “Go ahead and tell her,” Amy said, frustrated that she could never seem to get the women to talk about what she thought was their reason for being there.

  Zoë took a breath. “I saw it on the Internet. Six months ago a skeleton was found at the bottom of a cliff in your hometown. He was identified as Tyler Parks.”

  Faith looked as though she’d been slapped. “Ty is dead?” she whispered. “When did it happen?”

  Zoë looked at Amy as though asking her for help.

  “Tell her all of it,” Amy said.

  “He didn’t just die,” Zoë said as she reached for Faith’s hand. “He was murdered about fifteen years ago.”

  “How?” Faith whispered.

  “A blunt instrument,” Zoë said. “Maybe a…a rock.”

  Faith got up from the chair and walked to the far end of the room. “That’s why Ty never came back,” she said. “After we had our fight I never saw him again. We all thought he left town. The money he made from the sale of the land was given to his mother. I talked to her once and she also thought he’d run off. I always thought it was because of me, because of our argument. And because I married Eddie soon afterward.”

  When Faith looked back at them there were tears in her eyes. She put her hand to her mouth. “But he didn’t leave me.”

  “Is that better than death?” Zoë asked.

  “Yes. I mean, no.” Faith sat back down. “I…He didn’t leave me.”

  Zoë looked at Amy.

  “Someone murdered him,” Amy said. “It was a long time ago, so I doubt if they’ll ever find out who did it, but—”

  “My mother,” Faith said. “She killed Ty.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t understand it until now, but on her deathbed she told me she’d killed him. I thought she meant she’d killed the love that Ty and I had. It looks like she meant she actually killed Ty. She so wanted me to marry Eddie that she killed to attain it.”

  Amy raised her eyebrows to Zoë.

  “I can go back,” Faith said. “Just like you went back to change your past, I can go back and change my life with Ty. When he climbs in my window, I’m going to be packed and ready to leave with him. We’re going to live in that old farmhouse and I’m going to have a ten-acre herb garden. If I could figure out a way to take Beth’s seeds back with me, I might make some of her products.”

  “Put them in your hair like Amy’s ribbon,” Zoë said, and Faith’s eyes widened as she remembered that the ribbon Amy had been wearing was still in her hair when they arrived in the eighteenth century.

  “What a great idea,” Faith said. “I could—”

  “Would you two mind if we talked about why we’re here?” Amy said. “We have three days left and I’m worried about Tristan being killed.”

  “I’m sorry, Amy,” Faith said, “but I have to leave now and think about all this. This is a big change in my life and…” She didn’t say anything else as she seemed to float out of the room.

  “Wow,” Zoë said. “I thought she’d be angry to hear that her old boyfriend had been murdered.”

  “Better dead than to have dumped her,” Amy said. “I think we just released the source of Faith’s lifelong depression.”

  “Let’s send Jeanne a whopping great bill,” Zoë said.

  “Let’s talk about what we need to do to keep Tristan alive.”

  “When you saw him dead in your dream wasn’t he in his bedroom in this house?”

  “Yes,” Amy said.

  “So why don’t you move him to that greenhouse Faith lives in and let lots of people sleep around him?”

  “I don’t think Tristan would agree to that. He has a real stubborn streak in him.”

  “Then get Faith to drug him. Or tell him you’ll sleep with him if he’ll do it.” She raised her eyebrows at Amy’s look. “We all have to make sacrifices.”

  For the first time, Amy smiled. “This meeting has not gone as well as I hoped it would, but it has certainly been interesting. I think you’re right and I’ll do everything short of sex or murder to get Tristan out of this house.”

  “Good,” Zoë said, standing up. “Then we’re done. I’m—”

  “Everyone in this village, and probably for about three over, know what you’re going to do today and have been doing since you arrived here.”

  “Celibacy can sure put a woman in a bad mood,” Zoë said.

  Amy ignored that remark. “Is it too much to ask if you did what you said you were going to do and talk to the maids about anyone who might be harboring a grudge against Tristan?”

  “I did better than that, I asked Russell. He put the word out to the women and they’re to tell him anything they hear. So far, there’s been nothing. Now, if you don’t mind, I have something else to do.” She left the room.

  Amy put her head in her hands. “Oh, Stephen,” she moaned. Just three more days, and she’d be back with him. Just three more days.

  Twenty-two

  “Are you feeling all right?” Faith asked Amy. “You look—”

  “I don’t need another person to tell me how bad I look.” They were standing in front of the orangery and Amy was studying the glass walls. “I don’t think this place is safe.”

  “If it were a prison it wouldn’t look safe to you.” Faith took her hands. “Amy, everything that can be done is being done. Tristan will have Thomas to look after him. He’s going to sleep in a dormitory with lots of other people.” It was all Faith could do not to let her displeasure show. In these past weeks her life had become very comfortable. True, it had been hard on her to see the line of people who came to her with diseases that she couldn’t cure, but aside from that, she and William and Thomas had formed a nice life. William was very easy to live with. His constant good humor had kept a smile on her face, and as he healed, he began to help her with the herbs. One morning, in a moment of honesty, he’d told her that his life had never been useful.

  “I am sure my nephew has told you that I have never achieved much. I was much younger than my ambitious older brothers, and I was my mother’s favorite. I stayed with her until she died, but by that time I had no inclination to marry and burden myself with children. She left her money to me and I spent years traveling about the world. I even went to that America of yours.”

  “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “If I had, I might have missed out on the stories that you have told me. I did not see it as a place of great advancement that you seem to know it as.”

  Faith had to turn away to hide her red face. She’d joined Zoë in coming down hard on Amy for telling Tristan the truth, but she realized she’d told William a great deal more than she thought she had.

  “I know you plan to leave here,” he said, then held up his hand when she started to speak. “I listen more than you think and I hear you whispering with the other two women. I know that the time is coming soon. I was wondering…”

  Turning, Faith looked at him.

  “If you feel that you need to leave because you have no real place in this world, I would like to make you an offer. The old house, the one you have ranted about having cows in it, is mine.”

  She smiled at his use of the word “ranting.” She wanted to p
rotest that she’d done no such thing, but she had. Good! she thought. Maybe she’d made enough of an impression on him that after she was gone they’d take care of the house and not let it fall into ruin.

  “I can offer you the house,” William said softly. “And me.”

  She realized that he was offering her marriage and a comfortable life with him. It would be nice, she thought, to live here. She would love to oversee the remodeling of that wonderful old medieval house, and she’d like to continue working with the herbs and applying what she knew while learning more.

  She looked at William. He had gained a lot of weight in the last weeks and she was beginning to see the man he once was. He was handsome, intelligent, and wonderfully good company. He would make fine husband.

  She looked down at the big white marble mortar and pestle that was filled with ajuga leaves. She was pounding them to make an infusion to use on mouth ulcers. No, she thought, she’d had a life of comfort with a “fine husband.” Eddie had been good company and he’d had more money than they could spend. If he hadn’t been ill and had a mother from hell, he would have made a great husband.

  Except for one thing, she thought: passion. She and Eddie had never once had passion. When she looked at Tyler, her knees had weakened. She’d never felt that with Eddie.

  “I’m going to hold out for passion,” she said aloud, then looked at William in horror. What an awful thing to say to a man who’d just proposed to her!

  William surprised her by letting out a loud laugh. “You are a wise, wise woman,” he said, then he looked at her in a way that he never had before. “Give me a bit more time and I think I can fulfill your wish.”

  Faith returned his smile. She wanted love with her passion. Not a one-night stand, but true love and passion that made her knees weak. “It would take you more than a bit of time to take me on,” she said to William.

  He laughed again and reached for her, but Faith eluded his hand. “Sit down and eat,” she said in the motherly voice she usually used with him.

  Since that day there had been an easy, teasing camaraderie between her and William that she’d enjoyed immensely. But now Amy was moving into their cozy glass house with Tristan and probably half a dozen retainers.

  “Do not look so down,” William said. “My nephew is a man of humor.”

  “Yeah, but does he pick up his socks?”

  William smiled at her ill humor and went back to taking the flower heads off the chamomile that Faith had given him to work on.

  Since Zoë had told her about what happened to Tyler, Faith had not been the same. She was restless now. There were only two days left, then what would happen? Would the three women disappear in a puff of smoke? And if they did, would they end up back in Madame Zoya’s sunroom? Would Faith and Zoë be given second chances at their lives?

  Turning, Faith left the walled garden and headed for the tower. Yesterday she’d confronted Zoë about her and Russell being in there.

  “Keep your shirt on,” Zoë said. “We didn’t hurt anything.”

  “It’s a matter of privacy,” Faith said. “And where did you get a key?”

  “Russell said he borrowed it.”

  “Stole it, more likely,” Faith said. “I want that key.” She had an idea that Russell had had a duplicate made from Beth’s key, and he’d probably done it while she was in London. She didn’t blame him. The tower would be an excellent place to paint when it rained. And a place to escape the girls who made eyes at him every minute of the day.

  The truth was that Faith wanted to use the tower as her own private sanctuary, a place where she could go to be alone. It seemed that soon she was going to be faced with a great many decisions in her life and, this time, she wanted to do what was right for her. Not for Ty, Eddie, her murderous mother, or even for Eddie’s battle-axe of a mother. Faith needed to figure out what was right for her.

  As she went through the quiet forest, she stopped once because she thought she saw a shadow move. She waited, but saw no one, then went on to the tower quickly. Beth had told her about wolves in the forest and she didn’t want to meet one of them.

  In the days since Beth had shown her the plants in the tower, Faith had asked every question she could think of about them and the recipes, the “receipts” that Beth had written out for her. Beth had shown Faith how to cut the bark of the shrubs to get the sap out, then how to use it to make the ingredient in the face cream, the shampoo, and the soap. They were simple recipes with one, single, extraordinary ingredient.

  Since working with the balsam plants, Faith felt as though they’d become her friends. She felt honored to be near something so old as they were, plants that had had so much written about them. Even in the ancient world it was said that they grew in only one place on earth: Jericho. She would spend hours in the tower looking at the plants, inhaling their divine fragrance, and wondering what catastrophic events had caused the plant to become extinct.

  Faith went to the stone where she knew Beth kept seeds hidden. She’d said that her ancestors had done everything they could to get the plant to grow in their gardens but it wouldn’t. It had taken years to find out that it liked the dryness inside the tower, the heat reflected off the stones, and the small amount of water poured onto its roots.

  Faith had written down every word that Beth told her about the plants themselves and her family’s history with them, then Faith had memorized it all. She knew that since the plant was extinct in her time, that meant the Hawthorne women’s preservation of it had not survived. One lightning strike to the glass roof, one flood, and the plants would die, Faith thought. If it was at all possible, she was going to preserve the precious plants. She had spent hours sewing tiny tubes that would hold the seeds. On the last day she planned to tie them in the hair of the three women.

  When she left the tower it was nearly nightfall and the woods were growing dark. As she walked quickly down the path, Faith looked from right to left, remembering the shadow she’d seen on the way in. She was almost to the gate when she stopped. Hadn’t that shadow been where she’d seen the poisonous mushrooms? When Eddie was alive and they’d spent their days reading about herbs, he’d made jokes about that brilliant red mushroom. In the sixties and seventies, the hippies made psychedelic drugs from it.

  She was musing on this when it occurred to her that wanting to get high was not just a modern desire. She overcame her fears of whatever was lurking in the woods, turned off the trail, and went into the darkening forest to look for the mushrooms. She’d knocked down all of them she’d seen but she could have missed some.

  Within minutes, she saw that she’d missed several of them and that someone had taken the trouble to hide them under leaves. There was one freshly broken stem in the earth, showing that within the last hour or so, someone had broken off one of the poisonous mushrooms.

  Annoyed, Faith stood up and destroyed the rest of them, but it looked as though someone were using them. For what? A trip?

  Her head came up as she looked back toward the trail. People did things on drug trips that they didn’t usually do in life. Sometimes it was silly; sometimes it was violent.

  “Tristan,” Faith said out loud. In the last weeks Amy had lost weight, had pretty much given up sleep, as she tried to figure out who hated Tristan enough to kill him. What if no one hated him? What if someone on a drug trip went berserk and stabbed him?

  For a full minute, Faith’s mind’s eye could see the inside of the orangery. Tristan’s big bed had been moved in there that morning. Amy had posted guards at the entrances to the walled garden, but their instructions were to allow no strangers in. She’d even shown them how to search people to make sure they carried no knives.

  Zoë had laughed at Amy for her paranoia, but now Faith seemed able to see it all. It wouldn’t be an enemy who killed Tristan, it was someone he knew, someone who thought it was fun to eat a bit of a poisonous mushroom and feel like he was flying or…

  Faith didn’t take time to think any more. She’
d left her big knife on top of the cabinet nearest Tristan’s bed. She grabbed her skirt up to her knees and took off running as fast as she could. As she ran, cursing her out-of-shape body, she wanted to hit herself for not listening to Amy, not paying attention to her. Faith had been so wrapped up in her own problems that she’d left Amy alone. She and Zoë might as well not have come to the eighteenth century for all that they’d helped Amy.

  When Faith could see the walled garden, she ran even faster. Her lungs were about to burst, but she didn’t slow down. When she was still a hundred yards from the gate, she saw William saunter outside the wall.

  Faith didn’t know how else to get his attention but to scream at the top of her lungs.

  William turned and started toward her. Faith didn’t slow down but dropped her skirt and waved at William to go back. “Tristan!” she yelled, then tripped on her skirt and fell flat on her face. As she was trying to get up, she looked up at William and saw that he understood.

  With all the energy he had, he hobbled back between the gates on his canes and out of sight. Faith got off the ground and started running again.

  There were three people in the walled garden when she ran through. They were all trusted employees and were resting from having moved furniture for Tristan into the orangery. He’s not here, Faith thought. Tristan isn’t here yet. She was relieved, but she didn’t slow down. The people in the garden stopped to look at her as she sped past them and into the orangery.

  What she saw inside made her halt in terror. She could see the bottom half of Tristan lying on the bed. In front of him was the young woman who brought Faith herbs twice a day. William’s frail body was behind her, his thin arms around her shoulders. When he heard Faith enter, he turned the girl. Faith’s largest knife was dangling from the fingertips of her right hand, and her eyes had the wild look of someone who had just taken a hallucinogenic.

  Behind them Tristan, eyes open, was lying on the bed in absolute stillness.

  Faith put her hand to her mouth. “He—”

  William, still tightly holding the girl to him, moved aside and Faith saw Tristan. His eyes were open and, best of all, there was no blood on him.