“You could have trusted me.”
“It was lousy communication, not lack of trust.”
“No, you thought James was right about my motives.”
“I had been thinking about you, all day. Wishing you were here. You showed up, as if you knew—as if you needed to be with me as much as I—” He halted. “Then everything went to hell.” He spoke with harsh, weary emphasis. “Just as it always seems to, because one or both of us can’t break through the wall of pride.”
“At least something good came out of the effort. Elizabeth believed my story, and her children are safe now.”
“No one doubted your story. Not even James. Thank you for protecting Elizabeth’s children. I’m sorry I made it so difficult for you.”
She felt his hand stroking her hair, and couldn’t make herself tell him to stop. When he pulled her into a deep, comfortable hug, she rested there gratefully, her head on his shoulder, her arms slipping around his back. It was reassuring—no fireworks, no threat, no questions. The seconds passed in slow, protective regard.
Her arms tightened around him in silent acceptance. During this brief truce she would cherish being pressed against his body, loving the warmth and intimacy between them.
“Excuse me,” Michael said softly.
Lily jerked her head up. Artemas did not immediately loosen his hold on her, so she stood there awkwardly, close to him, looking at Michael, who gazed back with discreet scrutiny. “What is it?” Artemas asked.
“Will you talk to Elizabeth? The rest of us aren’t having much effect. Maybe you can calm her down.”
“Of course. I’ll be right there.”
Michael nodded and walked back into the nursery.
“You go on back now,” she told Artemas. “Whatever gratitude they feel toward me will evaporate if you don’t. They need you. Especially Elizabeth.”
“And you’ll never admit you need me.” He looked down at her with weary resignation. “That’s where the honesty between us stops.”
She let her silence give an answer. His eyes darkened. They turned from each other, the spell broken.
Late the next afternoon, Lily hurried out of her house anxiously, at the sound of Lupa’s barking. Elizabeth stood at the base of the porch steps. Her blond hair was disheveled and her face sweaty with the afternoon heat. She wore a wilted shirtwaist dress and white jogging shoes; as if prepared to take flight from a garden party. The lush flower beds framed her on both sides of the front path, and the shade trees dappled her with shadows, like the voluptuous centerpiece of a living Monet.
“I told everyone I was going for a walk,” she explained. She hugged herself and looked distraught. “They’re watching me like mother hens. They think I’m having a nervous breakdown. Maybe I am. Maybe it’s irresponsible to show up here without warning.”
“No,” Lily said slowly. “You love your children, and it’ll take some time to deal with what happened to Jonathan. I don’t mind you coming here—depending on why you’re here.”
“I never thanked you. What you did took so much courage. If you really hated us, you’d have ignored what you saw.”
Lily shivered. “I don’t hate you. And even if I did, I wouldn’t take it out on your children.” Her voice faltered. Very few things were clear to her, but that was. Lifting her chin, she added, “I’d like to believe any of you would have done the same for my son.”
“Oh, yes, yes.” Elizabeth, her shoulders hunched and eyes glazed with inner turmoil, seemed to be on the verge of withdrawing into some personal hell.
At a loss and feeling sorry for her, Lily gestured toward the door. “Come inside. I promise not to tempt you with peach wine, like Cassandra.”
Elizabeth swayed. “There’s so much I can’t say to my family. I shouldn’t be here, trying to tell you.”
“I’d think you could say anything to your brothers and sisters. Y’all are so close.”
“That’s why I can’t tell them …” Her voice trailed off. Clearing her throat, she moved tentatively up the steps, then halted, searching Lily’s eyes. “If you don’t want to be bothered with me, I’ll understand.”
“No. Come on inside.” Elizabeth looked at her with relief. Lily sensed she was desperate to talk. “Anything you say to me is just between us. If that’s what’s worrying you, relax.”
Elizabeth began to cry. Lily guided her inside, and she collapsed in one corner of the couch. “I thought I was safe. But now I know I’ve never been safe. I’ve been lying to myself. All these years. Lying. I am such a coward.”
Lily sat down on the hearth across from her. “What do you mean?” Her question brought a moan of anguish from Elizabeth. “I drove my husband away because of it. I see that now. I shut him out, over and over, until he was so confused and hurt that he left.” She sobbed. “I couldn’t let him get too close. I hid. I loved him, and I didn’t want to drive him away, but I couldn’t help myself.”
Her ambiguous confession made Lily fear that she really had disconnected from reality. Moving beside her, Lily clasped her shoulder. “But if you still love your ex-husband—”
“I do. But the way I treated him was something I couldn’t control—and still can’t.” She swiveled on the couch and grasped Lily’s hands. “You have to swear to me you won’t repeat this. Whether you think I’m right or wrong, I think I’d die if my family ever found out. We went through so much when we were growing up.”
“You have my word.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes. Then, in a small voice drenched with misery she whispered, “Yesterday brought back a lot of horror. I can’t ignore it anymore.”
“What horror, Elizabeth?”
Her eyes flew open; they looked bleak and terrible. “My father. He used me. He molested me, when I was a child.” Elizabeth flinched. Lily quickly took her by the shoulders. “It’s all right. Keep talking.”
“I said it. For the first time in my life, I’ve told someone.” She sounded stunned.
Goosebumps scattered down Lily’s spine. “When did it start?”
“I was about seven.”
“Elizabeth, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Poor Artemas—I’d sneak into his bed at night, to sleep with him, for protection. He didn’t know; he was embarrassed to have his little sister crawling into his bed. He made me stop. It would kill him if he knew what Father had done to me.”
Elizabeth crumpled. Lily put both arms around her and held her as if she were still a heartbroken child. In many ways, she was.
But she thought of Artemas, too, and her throat constricted with fierce tenderness. He’d devoted himself to saving his brothers and sisters from their parents’ careless cruelty. She didn’t want him to know what had happened to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth leaned against her gratefully. Lily took a shaky breath. “ ‘How long did it go on?”
“For years. Until my father d-died.” Her body shook. “I thought I was free then. I thought I’d forget what he’d done and be just like other girls. By the time I entered college, I’d suppressed the memories so much that I was convinced they didn’t matter. But the first time I slept with a man, I realized I’d never be normal. Sex was the most terrifying, disgusting thing. I pretended to enjoy it, but it made me sick. I decided I’d never escape those feelings. I took a handful of pills and tried to kill myself.”
Lily rocked her. “And you suffered alone rather than tell your brothers and sisters, even then?”
“Yes.”
“You’re one of the bravest people I’ve ever met.”
Elizabeth leaned back and stared at Lily. Her eyes flickered with surprise. “How can you say that?”
“You’ve lived with a terrible secret all these years. And you’ve survived. You’re a good person, a gentle person. Your whole career is centered on helping others through Colebrook projects. You take care of your children devotedly And you tried to spare your family a lot of pain, at your own expense. That takes a rare form of courage.”
“But … I should have done something to stop my father. I let him use me. I was so stupid—the only way I fought back was by eating. I wanted to gain weight so he’d leave me alone. I wanted to be fat, like Cass. He thought Cass was repulsive.” Loathing and fury tortured her voice. “I was his special daughter, he said.”
Lily was frozen in thought. “What about Julia?”
Elizabeth winced. Pulling her hands away from Lily, she covered her face. “You think I’m brave? Julia asked me once, when we were older, if Father ever visited me at night. I knew what she meant. I knew he must be doing it to her too. But I said no.” Elizabeth moaned. “I let her think it was just her, because I was too ashamed to admit he did things to me.”
Lily died inside. What emotional scars had Julia borne? Suddenly Julia’s broken relationship with Frank took on new clarity What had Julia expected from men? Like Elizabeth, had she walked a tight line between fear and a desperate desire to trust them? Lily didn’t doubt that she’d loved Frank and had thought he loved her in return.
When his interest had cooled, it must have been an unbearable violation. Reacting with vicious, blind vengeance must have seemed reasonable—desperately self-protective—to Julia.
Elizabeth was watching her, Lily realized. She dragged her attention away from the tortured speculation and asked as calmly as she could, “Where is your ex-husband now?”
“He’s in Oregon. He produces documentaries. He has his own film company.” Elizabeth shuddered. “He’ll be coming back through Atlanta in a few weeks to see the boys. He’s never ignored them—he loves them so much. God, what can I tell him?”
“Do you think he still cares about you?”
“I don’t know. He’s always kind to me. But I never give him anything to hope for.”
“Then give him a chance. Don’t wait. Take your children and go see him. Tell him what happened to Jonathan. And what happened to you. If he’s worth loving, he’ll respect you. He’ll understand so much about the way you’ve behaved. It’s a place to start. You’ve already proved you can do it by telling me.”
Elizabeth sagged back on the couch. There were glimmers of amazement in her eyes as she considered what Lily had just said.
Elizabeth stayed for the next two hours, talking, reworking everything in her mind, trying to believe she’d come to a turning point in her life. When she rose to leave, she hugged Lily. “I’ll walk back. I feel stronger in a way I never expected. Thank you. Thank you so much. I don’t know why you did this for me. But somehow, it’s not surprising.”
“I only said what you needed to hear. The rest is up to you. I know you can do it.”
They went out to the porch. Lily sat down on a step and watched Elizabeth stride through the yard. Elizabeth stopped, turned to face Lily once more, and called, “I want things to be right between you and my family. I’m going to work on it.”
Lily inclined her head slightly, acknowledging the sentiment without revealing the pain it caused. A door had opened slightly, enough to let her glimpse possibilities but not reach them.
Twenty-six
Mr. Estes had dredged up a talent as sly as a fox’s. Sitting beside Lily in a little Queen Anne chair that looked incongruously elegant for his bulky, grizzled self, he hunched over an office desk strewn with wholesale price lists, their project proposals, and Lily’s landscape designs. Lily kept her back straight and remained calmly aloof. The fact that the man sitting across from them was intent on keeping a clawlike hold on every penny of his investment in the restoration of one of Victoria’s largest inns only infused her with a sense of challenge. Parts of her life could be solid with confidence and enthusiasm again, and if she nurtured that, it helped overcome the bleakness when she thought about the rest.
“Me and my partner may have to go outside and arm-wrestle over this, Mr. Malloy,” Mr. Estes told the man, sighing. “She can argue the horns off a brass billy goat.”
Malloy looked at his watch. “We’ve been haggling for thirty minutes. I have other concerns besides landscaping to take care of. Your budget’s too high. That’s all there is to it.”
Lily shook her head solemnly. “If we cut our overhead on installation, we can’t justify bringing in a full crew.” A full crew was only the difference between Mr. Parks and two sons or Mr. Parks and one son, but it sounded important. “I just can’t do it,” she added, crossing her arms over her chest and sighing.
Mr. Estes jabbed a blunt forefinger toward their prospective client. “Lily, you are bein’ too hard on this feller. He’s got two whole acres he wants torn up and redone from the word go. We’ve got to cut him some slack.”
“Nope. If we can’t budget a full crew, we’ll never get the job done before winter. We’ve got to recontour the back section before we do any planting. We’ll run into cold weather before we can set all the shrubs and bulbs out.”
Mr. Estes rolled his eyes. “I say we can still make the schedule and give Mr. Malloy the budget he wants. I’m willing to go along and drop the bid by four thousand dollars.”
She shook her head again. “We’ll end up with a bunch of frostbitten plants that won’t look decent next spring.” She sighed heavily and gazed at Mr. Malloy with regret. “No can do. We have our reputation to think of.”
The man threw up his hands. “Could you come down two thousand?”
“Well, I don’t know—”
“Aw, Lily, don’t be hardheaded,” Mr. Estes interjected.
She pretended to study the proposal for a minute, tapping her fingers on her forehead, tugging at her hair, chewing her lip. Finally she exhaled in defeat. “Okay. I can manage that.”
Mr. Estes pounded the desk. “Thank the Lord!” Malloy shot Lily wary glances as he grabbed the contract they’d provided. “Let’s get this deal signed and sealed before someone starts arguing again.”
Lily tried to look abashed.
When she and Mr. Estes were safely inside her truck, he slapped his knees and began chuckling. “He never knew what hit him!”
Lily clamped her hands to the steering wheel. She felt weak with relief. Colorful autumn leaves floated down from the roadside trees, and she watched them skitter across the truck’s hood. For today, at least, she wasn’t like them. She wasn’t aimless, frantically searching for a safe place to land. She smiled with satisfaction. “He wanted good, fast work at rock-bottom prices. He got a fair deal, and so did we.”
Mr. Estes looked positively elated. “We’ve finally got ourselves a big foot in a big door. You were right, Miss Tiger Lily. This is goin’ to be a success. And it’s fun too. I didn’t expect anything to be this interesan’ again.” He rubbed a hand over the sheepskin vest that covered his flannel shirt. “Whew. I got indigestion from all the excitement. I got—” His ruddy face began to pale. Sinking back on the seat, he said in a tight voice, “I got chest pains.” He winced and shut his eyes.
Lily cranked the truck quickly. Trying to sound nonchalant, she told him, “We’ll just run by the hospital.”
“Yeah. Let’s do that.” His lack of bluster and protest scared her.
Little Sis bounded into the examining room, took one look at Mr. Estes lying on a gurney with EKG electrodes nestled among his fuzzy gray chest hair, and gave a little shriek of dismay. Lily rose from a stool beside the gurney and waved both hands at her in warning. Mr. Estes, ashen-faced and worried, lifted his head and stared at Little Sis. “You think I’m dying,” he said out of the corner of his mouth to Lily. “You called the vulture.”
“Shush,” Little Sis said. She slipped past Lily and bent over him. “You’ll short-out your wires if you start fussing.” Her distraught tone softened the tart words. She put a trembling hand out and stroked the graying hair back from his forehead. “You old fart,” she added tenderly. “You’re not having a heart attack. I won’t let you. You haven’t even asked me out on a date yet.”
“His blood pressure’s high, but not too bad,” Lily interjected. “They gave him a nitroglycerin tablet. That ease
d most of his chest pains.”
Mr. Estes rested his head on the pillow and stared up at Little Sis with fading bombast. “I feel like I’ve used up all my chances,” he said in a gravelly little voice. Little Sis mewled sadly and tugged at his hair in reproach. “Old fart.”
Mr. Estes looked wistful at the endearment. Clearing his throat, he said in a stronger tone, “Lily, come ’ere.”
Lily stepped closer and laid a hand on his bare, freckled shoulder. “Yes, sir?”
“Get me a piece of paper and a pen. I want you to write out a change in my will.”
Little Sis scowled tearfully. “That’s negative self-talk. Think positive. Close your eyes. Concentrate—”
“For God’s sake, woman, if I die, you can tie a crystal around my neck and say bad energy done me in. But not right now. Lily. Get that piece of paper.”
Because he was growing agitated again, Lily fumbled in a pocket of her nylon jacket and grabbed the notepad and pen she always carried. “Go ahead.”
“Just write out something that says I leave the old MacKenzie place to you, and everything on it. I can’t die knowing that I kept it from you just because of revenge for what Colebrook done to Joe.”
She lowered the pad. “No, sir. I can’t be a party to this.”
His eyes flickered with shock. “Why?”
“Little Sis is right. It’d be bad luck.”
“What do you care? It’s good luck for you.”
“I don’t want my luck that way.”
“Why?”
Little Sis moaned with disgust. “We like you. Can’t you get that through your thick head?”
Mr. Estes looked teary and unnerved. “Helluva time to find it out.”
“I ought to skin you alive for being such a fool,” Little Sis said, crying. She grabbed him by both ears. Lily tried to pry her hands off.
A dusky-skinned middle-aged woman in a white lab coat came into the cubicle. “Good gracious, don’t threaten my patient,” she said when she saw Little Sis hovering like a ferocious honey bee. She spoke cheerfully, with a lilting Indian accent. Lily gently guided Little Sis out of the way as the doctor began studying the EKG printout.