Since I didn’t quite know how she meant that, and my mind buzzed with unanswered questions about Olivia, I said, “Queer beasties seem to be the order of the day around here.”
“Aye,” Bea chortled, and slapped my back so hard my teeth clicked together.
“This house,” she went on comfortably, as we walked upstairs, “is timeless, it is. A survivor. The chapel is the soul of the family but this house is the heart. It feels sad now, but Herself and I believe it will somehow come back to rights, even with Simon gone. We all miss him so. Gib, God bless his manly hide, will have to fill his big brother’s shoes.”
“I expect Gib can accomplish anything he sets his mind to.”
Bea sighed. “It’s not what he sets his mind to, dearie. It’s where he puts his heart. And his heart’s been torn out of him. Take no heed in what he says to you. He’s not found his new place, yet. None of us have, really. Ruth is wanting to sell the valley—”
“To Cousin Emory?”
“Aye. His investors. She’s for it, thinks it’s the best plan for the future. Min’s leaning in that direction, too, and so is Isabel. Gib and Herself have no’ persuaded them to give up the idea yet and fight.”
“But Gib and his sisters are so close and loving. I haven’t met Ruth yet, but I assume she and Gib—”
“Aye, they’re specially so. Since they were wee bairns it’s been all for one and one for all. But it was a hard time, those early years. A pack of orphaned children, Simon and Minnie mere teenagers trying to be father and mother to the brood, Herself not able to speak, and me, well, a stranger in a strange land, for a time. It made the children what they are, for good or bad, but very, very strong, each in a way. Dear Gib decided early that he’d be the family gladiator. That no one would ever hurt anyone he loved again. It’s his whole nature. Protecting.” She gestured dramatically. “Lock the gates and fortify the castle walls!”
“That explains a lot about him.”
We halted on a stair landing where more exquisite oil portraits and sepia photographs of long-dead Camerons lined the walls like a gallery of ghostly jurors.
Bea nodded sadly. “He couldn’t save his brother, and it may be that he can’t save the Hall. And it’s killin’ him inside.”
“I don’t want to cause him more trouble. I really don’t.”
“He needs your kind of trouble, I’m betting. You’re a tough she-girl, inside and out. Not so easily lovable like the dear lassies who’ve trailed Gib about over the years. He’s outgrown the pets, he has.” She looked me up and down then tapped my head with her blunt forefinger and nodded. “Come along. I’ve something to show you.”
She led me to a suite in a corner of the second floor. It was a sun-washed room with a high-plumped kingly bedstead. Tall windows fronted a small sitting room brimming with wicker chaises, and there was a huge, claw-footed tub in the bathroom.
“The best guest room in the house,” Bea said proudly. “It was christened with love from the very first.” She faced me as I gazed wistfully at the peaceful and romantic place. “Your parents,” she said softly, “stayed in this room.”
By the time I realized it, she’d left me alone there. I didn’t sit on the bed. That seemed a sacred spot. Trembling, I sat down in a wicker lounge in a small alcove nearby. I put a hand over my heart and felt the rhythm of my own blood.
My heart’s memories began in that room.
Ella was still gone. It was after two o’clock and Olivia had requested me for tea at four. I told Min I’d like to take a nap first, then went back to the main wing and sat quietly by a window in the bedroom Mom and Pop had shared.
Finally I heard footsteps and a knock on the door. I jumped up, ruffled my braids, and called out, “Just a second. Let me get awake.” When I opened the door I looked up into Gib’s wickedly amused eyes. “I saw you from the lawn. You nap sitting up by the window?” he asked. “Are you a cat?”
I patted my braids and gazed about, feigning ignorance while my face tingled. But retaining my dignity was hopeless around him. “Kiss my big furry tail,” I retorted glumly.
“The static electricity might stun me.”
“I was watching for Ella. She was dragged off by Carter and a buffalo. I can’t hunt for her because some self-righteous mountain man towed my car.”
“You’ll need two days for the car repairs, Nellie,” he said. He flexed his right arm in a careful way that said the arm hurt a little.
“Hmmm?” I replied vaguely, fixated on the arm, his soft chambray shirt, and old jeans. He was big, wholesome, and handsomely denimed. “What?”
“When I took a look this morning I was afraid I’d have to put your hatchback out of its misery. My first thought was that you’d twisted the axle. But you didn’t, and Charley, my mechanic over in Hightower, says he can have it up and running in a couple of days. So stop giving me that beady-eyed once-over.”
It was appreciation, nothing to do with the hatchback, but I scowled for disguise. “My sister has disappeared with your cousin.”
“She’s fine with Carter. You’ve got my word on it.” He stood aside and gestured toward the hallway. “Why don’t you stop worrying about your grown sister and teeter off charmingly downstairs? I’ll show you something purty, I swanie.”
“Something what? You what?”
“Something pretty. I swear.”
“Speak English, not Tennessee.”
He grunted. I stepped into the hall, avoiding any casual contact with his outstretched arm. If any other man had said “Come see something pretty” to me I’d expect the “something pretty” would involve showing off a part of the male anatomy that, at best, resembled a sunburned salami.
But with Gib, I was depressingly safe.
It was sleek, black, and beautiful, and had an ivory smile I couldn’t resist. I put my ear close to the keyboard then gently stroked an A, then a C-sharp. “Not bad,” I announced, as the pearls of sound faded into a low tremble inside the piano’s chest. Pianos lived and breathed, to me. Pop put the idea in my head when I was very small—that pianos were magical animals hiding in wooden shapes to fool people, and that to coax songs from them you had to tickle them. This grand Steinway was the most beautiful creature I’d seen in years.
“In honor of your arrival I hired the best piano tuner I could find,” Gib said.
“He did a good job. It purrs.”
“It what?”
“Nothing.”
“This piano belonged to my mother,” he continued. “My father bought it for her as a wedding gift. She was traveling with a gospel music show when they met.”
“Your mother was a musician?”
“No. She was a secretary. But she loved to play the piano.”
I played a few chords. “Good acoustics,” I said. “Good ambiance.” The piano occupied one corner of a cozy room known among the family as the Franklin Cameron Smoking Parlor. The Camerons could call it the smoking parlor if they liked, but from that moment on, the big, old-fashioned room, full of leather armchairs and comfortable clutter, would always be the music room to me.
“The guests loved this room,” Gib noted. “They’d come in here when the weather was too cold or wet to hike or explore. They’d play cards, games. Talk. Read. And they’d sit for hours, listening to my brother’s stories about our history. Simon loved to entertain.”
“When are you going to reopen to the public?” I knew it was a loaded question.
“I don’t know if we ever will. It takes everybody working full-tilt from dawn to midnight to operate the inn. Min’s not up to it, and there are certain jobs I can’t hire anyone to do for us.”
“I’ve spent my whole life in restaurants and nightclubs, so I know you can find the right help if you interview enough people.”
“I can’t hire a host. I can’t replace my brother.”
I skimmed the keyboard, just playing a few scales, letting the moment cool off. I was comfortable with the piano helping me speak. “They didn’t teach y
ou to grin and bow and say howdy do in the Secret Service?” I finally said.
“It takes more than that. Simon had a sixth sense about people. He knew how to make them feel comfortable. He never met a stranger. I’m the opposite. I’m very good at making strangers feel very uncomfortable.”
I remembered his chilling stare in Chicago. “You have to practice diplomacy and showmanship,” I said. “And pretty soon you’ll be an old pro at hosting—once you get past the urge to dole out kung-fu chops instead of handshakes.”
“Good God.” He almost smiled. The smile simmered then disappeared, leaving a quiet scrutiny that said he never quite knew what to make of me.
“I get the impression,” I went on, “that either you’ll run this place so it’ll pay its own keep or you and your sisters will have to sell out to dear Cousin Emory and his demon seed. There isn’t a third choice?”
“No. Taxes and maintenance cost a small fortune. However it may look, we’re not the rich branch of the family, Nellie.” He came over and leaned on the piano. I got goosebumps on my skin. Gib polished a tiny speck of dust on the piano’s closed lid. He had chosen a perfectly discreet distance by anyone’s standards but mine. And unfortunately it wasn’t that I wanted him to move away. I wanted him to come closer. “My former high-paying civil-service job wouldn’t pay the costs around here, even if I could go back,” he said.
“The Secret Service offered you an administrative job, I bet. Min told me you were extremely respected as an agent.”
“My life is here now. I’m responsible for this place and this family.”
“I understand. You’re The Cameron, now. I heard Ebb call you that.” A frisson of excitement slid through me. The old-world honor was very appealing and solemn. There was rebellious allure in casting Gib as the chieftain of the Cameron clan, modern sensibilities and patriarchal macho considerations be damned.
His eyes flashed. “That title has to be earned.” He lifted his maimed hand. “You say all I need to do is learn to smile at people and offer them a handshake. How many people will be happy to shake this nauseating victory for medical science? There are days when I wish the doctors hadn’t saved any part of my hand. That they’d just amputated it. Then I could stick a decent-looking fake on the end of my arm.”
I became very busy pressing keys and listening to tones. I played a few chords, tilting my head, my eyes closed as if I continued to assess the room’s acoustics. When I opened my eyes I found Gib watching me closely. “Sit your tight-ass John Wayne behind down on this bench,” I ordered, “and give me that perfectly likable bum paw.” I reached out and grabbed his hand.
I think he was too surprised to resist. He studied me sharply but sat down. I scooted over a little to make room. He tried to avoid touching his left thigh against my right one. I planted my left hand over his damaged right one, then pried his fingers apart. “Relax,” I said. “Piano teachers do this with kids. Relax. You’re as stiff as a frozen octopus.”
I pressed his thumb on a key, then his first finger, then his second. “One, two, three, then curl your thumb under and repeat. Start here and go to there.” I pointed. Awkwardly, slowly, he performed the simple exercise. “Congratulations, Mr. Cameron. You just played a basic little ol’ scale. And you played with two fewer fingers than mere ordinary beginners. Now stretch those fingers. Do this.” I showed him another maneuver. “And we add the left hand. Voilà! Smack that key. Now this. Now together.”
“What am I doing?” he muttered, as he played.
“You’re playing Mozart!”
“Get outta here. Sounds like ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ to me.”
“Yes, but it’s also the melodic theme of twelve variations Wolfgang wrote on Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman.” I launched into an elaborate segment of the piece, got caught up in the glory of it, and when I finished I realized Gib was simply gazing from me to my hands with his lips parted in awe—a handsome, vulnerable sight that made me stare at his mouth, and at him. I hadn’t played classical pieces very often over the past ten years. There was deep sadness in them for me, a lot of memories, because Pop had coached me, and each bar of the music was polished and polished again, until it was an ingrained part of me, part of my skin and soul, fingertips and heart, and he was so proud of my talent.
Finally I realized Min, Bea, and Olivia had entered the room while I was playing.
“My word, dearie,” Bea said softly. “My word.”
Min cried gently. “You have a beautiful gift,” she said.
Olivia’s eyes glowed. She shuffled, barefoot, toward me, then bent over a notepad she took from a pocket of her white cotton blouse, and wrote: He forgets to hate himself when he’s around you.
Gib craned his head to read it, but Olivia put her notepad away. She rapped her knuckles on the piano’s lid and waved a hand for us to continue.
Gib nodded to her. “Today, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle,’ ” he said dryly. “But after I reach my musical peak? ‘Chopsticks.’ ”
Everyone laughed. Gib’s expression became strained. I think the unaccustomed joy in the Hall, combined with his cozy proximity to me on the piano bench, suddenly made him feel guilty. “I have work to do,” he said abruptly, and left the room.
Troubled emotions flashed across Olivia’s wizened, girlish face; tentative, then sad; a smile, then quick, dewy shyness. She sat down on the bench beside me. I pretended Gib hadn’t insulted me and arranged her fingers on several keys. “Press them,” I said. “That’s a happy chord.”
She pressed. Smiling sadly, she nodded at me. Then she took my hands in her small ones and looked at me firmly. She fluttered her hands like birds, then settled them on the keys, glanced at me firmly, then performed the strange ritual again.
“I belong here?” I asked. She nodded. “I don’t think so.”
Olivia settled back in a deep chair and I played a little Chopin for her. She eventually fell asleep with a smile on her face. I sat and watched her awhile, wondering if she spoke in her dreams.
In my nightmares, I could not make a sound.
It was sunset before my sister came back with Carter. I’d been watching out a big window at the end of the upstairs hall. The beauty of the evening registered on my frazzled senses like a fine wine I didn’t want to be tempted to drink. The valley filled with soft darkness. Fat, black beef cattle gathered for dinner around a hay feeder in the front pastures. A silver mist rose along the river, and the sky above the mountains deepened into purple, pink, and gold jeweled by my namesake evening star like a diamond earring. To love it all, to even think about falling in love, was too useless. All too soon Ella and I would be back in a city somewhere, hunting for work. Even with one hundred thousand dollars to cushion us, our life on the road would return to the same frugal grind, at least until I decided how to use the money.
Carter dramatically leaped down from the cart, patted the buffalo’s narrow rump, then held up his arms to Ella. She laughed and scrambled off with less grace but infinite adorable awkwardness, while Carter caught her by the elbows. They stood on the front lawn with his hands on her shoulders, and her hands on his forearms, and they gazed at each other mistily.
I rapped on the window. Ella jumped and looked up sheepishly. I retreated down the hall and into our bedroom.
When she came in she avoided my stern gaze and headed for the claw-footed tub in our bathroom with a packet of her favorite bath salts in one hand and two vanilla-scented candles in the other. “I can’t wait to soak in that deep tub filled with hot water,” she called in a high, too-cheerful voice.
“I think you might better take a cold shower,” I retorted, and slammed the bathroom door.
The next afternoon, when she disappeared with Carter again, I was so angry I thought I’d explode. I slipped out of the house and made my way to a gazebo along the river, brooding over Carter’s instant effect on my sister. I leaned on a railing and stared down at the water.
A car pulled up the road then stopped. I didn’t recognize the w
oman who got out and started my way. She looks like a high F-sharp to me, I thought as she marched across the lawn. She was tall and upholstered—easily two hundred pounds—all of the round flesh firmly fitted into a soft blue blouse and a snug beige skirt. Her dark hair was wound into a plump French braid with tendrils escaping as if pulled outward by the static electricity of her attitude. She looked prickly.
“It’s about time I took a look at you,” she brayed, then smiled ferociously and strode to me, thrust out her hand, and pumped mine in a firm grip. “Ruth Cameron Attenberry,” she announced. “I’ve been in Washington on state business. A legal seminar.”
Aha. Gib’s other sister. The lawyer who lived in Hightower with her husband and baby daughter. The sister who “disapproved” of Ella and me. “Nice to meet you, Ruth,” I lied. “State business? Should I salute?”
She leveled a brusque hazel stare at me as she made herself at home in a white wicker chair. “Are you always a smartass?”
I squinted at her. Interesting way she had of putting things. “Oops,” I said breezily. “My reputation precedes me.”
Her nostrils flared. “I hope mine precedes me. I’m an assistant district attorney.”
“Technically, then, you get paid by the government to be obnoxious?”
“You are a piece of work. The rumors don’t do you justice. I heard in town that you had a big mouth and a chip on your shoulder. That’s an understatement, obviously.”
“Look, I’m sorry you and I are getting off on the wrong foot. I’m a little testy at the moment. Let’s start over.”
“Right.” She dismissed my apology with a wave of one plump, manicured hand. “For the record, my brother insisted I stop by and welcome you and your sister.” She made the word welcome sound like a chore. Her expression was anything but gracious. “I’m not happy about this visit of yours. I didn’t agree to it. I’m also not happy about the money your old daddy foisted on my brother Simon. Listen up, now, missy, I’m going to be as blunt as a hound’s snout with you.”