The Summerhouse

by Jude Deveraux

  “I want to take your pictures. I keep a scrapbook of all my clients before and after. It helps me to remember.”

  “Could we see your scrapbook?” Ellie asked instantly.

  “You’re the writer, aren’t you, dear?” Madame Zoya said, smiling. “You can always tell writers. They’re always trying to turn every word into pages, which of course turns into money for them, doesn’t it?”

  The way she stated it made it sound as though Ellie’s whole life were about money. As Ellie gave a weak smile, she could feel her face redden.

  “I’ll be back in a jiff, and I’ll expect you three to have made up your minds by then.”

  The second Madame Zoya left the room, all three of them let out their pent-up breath.

  “What the hell have you got us into?” Madison exploded.

  “Ellie or me?” Leslie asked calmly.

  “What does it matter?” Madison asked. “This whole thing is absurd. I’m leaving right—”

  “If she’s a charlatan, I’m out three hundred bucks, but if she’s for real—not that I believe she is,” Ellie said, her voice low, her eyes on the doorway. “But if she can do what she says, you can find Thomas.”

  “Before you miscarried,” Leslie said so softly that they could barely hear her.

  At that Madison sat back on her chair and looked straight ahead at the greenery outside the window. There was a look of shock on her face.

  “What about you?” Leslie said to Ellie. “You want to go back to the day the three of us met? Before you met your ex-husband?”

  “No!” Ellie said firmly. “Who knows what would have happened to me? Maybe I would have met some nice, normal guy and had five kids by now. If I did that, I never would’ve had enough time alone to find out that I could write. No, for all that he was a jerk—or maybe because he was a jerk and I wanted to escape him—I wrote. I wouldn’t want to mess up that balance. No, I’d just like to change what was done to me in the divorce. He went into that fiasco prepared; I was caught off guard by the ruthless way he handled it. What about you?”

  Smiling, Leslie started to answer, but Madame Zoya returned to the room holding a cheap Polaroid camera. “Now smile, dearies,” she said, then snapped them one after another.

  She didn’t show them the photos that came out of the camera. In fact, she didn’t look at them herself but set the camera and the photos on the windowsill, then looked back at the windows. “Have you made up your minds?” she asked as though they were trying to decide about lunch.

  “Yes,” Leslie answered, while Ellie and Madison merely nodded.

  Madame Zoya looked at Madison. “You first, dear. I feel that you have lost the most.”

  “I thought you didn’t read palms,” Madison said before she thought. She’d already had one encounter with the woman’s sharp tongue and didn’t fancy another one.

  But Madame Zoya kept smiling. “I don’t. But I’ve lived long enough to see pain in a person’s eyes when it’s there. Now, where do you want to go?”

  “To the day the three of us met,” Madison said firmly. “The ninth of October, 1981.”

  Madame Zoya didn’t reply to that but looked at Ellie. “And you?”

  “To three years, seven months, and two weeks ago,” she said. “To three weeks before the court date for my divorce.” She would have liked to return earlier so she’d have more time to gather evidence, but she had to return to a time after she’d already filed for divorce.

  Madame Zoya looked at Leslie.

  “I don’t know the exact date,” Leslie said, “but it would have been April of 1980, the year before I graduated from college.” She lowered her voice. “Spring break,” she said softly. It was embarrassing that the others should hear this, as she thought it was a foolish wish to want to meet a boy she hadn’t seen in twenty years. But how could she explain the ties that love put on her? No matter how she tried to explain, she knew that, by comparison, her problems wouldn’t sound as serious as theirs. How did one faithless husband hold up against what Madison and Ellie had been through? If—she refused to think “when”—she and Alan divorced, she was sure that Alan would be fair and honest and . . . “A cheat,” she heard her mother’s voice say.

  “Are you sure, dear?” Madame Zoya asked Leslie. “Absolutely sure?”

  “Yes!” Leslie said firmly. “Yes, I am. Very sure.”

  “All right then, girls, lean your heads back and close your eyes and think about the time where you want to go.”

  Obediently, with mixed feelings about the absurdity of what they were doing, the women leaned their heads back against the chairs and closed their eyes.

  Instantly, the three of them felt as though they were floating. It was a lovely sensation, and they each smiled as they experienced it. After a moment, the floating stopped and they seemed to be moving toward something, as though they were being rushed through a tunnel.

  Just before she reached the end of the tunnel, Madison remembered that they had been on the road when she was talking about the show she’d seen on TV, not standing on the porch. So how had Madame Zoya heard what she’d said? She didn’t come up with an answer before she opened her eyes and saw that she was sitting on a bench in the DMV in New York. And Ellie, a very young, very thin, Ellie, was walking toward her.

  Eighteen

  MAY 1997

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  Ellie put down her pen and glanced at the door again. The sign on the private detective’s door said, “Be back in ten minutes,” but she’d been waiting for thirty-two minutes and he still hadn’t returned. She looked down at her notebook again. She was making notes on a story about three women who go back in time and change their lives. The book would be a departure from her usual stories about the life and adventures of Jordan Neale, but if it was good, the readers would like it.

  She looked down at her watch again, then her glance traveled up her arm, and from there she looked down at her legs showing beneath her short denim skirt. Putting her notebook down on the seat beside her, she put her hands around her waist. She’d measured it every one of the three days since she’d returned, and each time she felt a thrill when she saw that her waist was once again a teeny, tiny twenty-four inches. And every morning, she’d weighed herself. The first time she’d stepped on the scales and seen the needle stop at one hundred and one pounds, she’d burst into tears.

  Three days ago had been the day before her fortieth birthday, but three days ago she’d been sent back to her old life, back into her former, slimmer body. But, more important, she’d been sent back to her own mind. For the first time in years, Ellie once again had stories running through her head. She had energy. She had a feeling that good things were going to happen to her, that they could happen to her. This happy feeling was odd because she knew of the horror that was going to happen very soon in the coming divorce, but since it hadn’t actually happened yet, she didn’t have the depression that she knew would come after the divorce.

  “How much time is wasted in depression,” she whispered aloud.

  She was sitting on a wooden bench outside the office of Joe Montoya, the private eye she’d hired to investigate her soon-to-be ex-husband. She’d gone to the detective the first day she’d returned, and she’d had a lot to tell him. Most of the things she told him were what she’d found out after the divorce, but now, this time around, she knew what her ex was up to.

  On her first visit to the detective, she’d sat on the other side of his desk, opened her notebook and started on her list of things that she knew were going to be important in the divorce. “He’s going to say that he coauthored my books, so I need for you to document his daily activities to show that he was too busy socializing at my expense to have time to help me write. And you said you know a forensic accountant? I need help in finding out what my husband has done with all my money over the years,” she told the private eye.

  He was writing quickly, only now and then looking up at Ellie in speculation. She knew what he wa
s thinking, that most women on the verge of divorce were a basket case of tears and misery. But Ellie had done that—and as a result, she’d lost everything.

  “He’s going to say that he did all the research for my books, that he contributed at least half of their development,” she continued. “And he’s going to say that he was a brilliant manager of the money I earned, so I need an accountant to look at the discrepancy between what I earned and what was left after he finished with it. And I need someone who can be a down-and-out and get my ex to talk.”

  “What?” Montoya asked.

  “My slimy ex-husband—almost ex, that is—is going to tell the court that he has no money hidden, but I know that he does because after the divorce I found out that—”

  “What do you mean, ‘after the divorce’?” the detective asked.

  “Sorry. My mistake,” she said, smiling. “It’s just that I want to get away from him so much that I tend to think of it as a done deal.”

  She could see that he didn’t accept her explanation, but she wasn’t worried that he’d guess the truth. “Do you have someone who could get to know my ex . . . uh, my husband?” she persisted. “It has to be a man, preferably someone who looks like a drunk, or is a drunk; that would be even better.”

  The detective put down his pen. “Why don’t you tell me what this drunk has to do with hidden money?”

  “My ex—” Try as she might, she could not bring herself to call him her “husband.” “Often goes out to bars in the evening. I believe he meets a woman there.”

  “I see,” Montoya said, then bent over his desk and picked up his pen again.

  “No, you don’t see. This isn’t about another woman.” Taking a deep breath, she leaned back against the chair and tried to calm herself. “Mr. Montoya, may I be honest with you?”

  “It would help,” he said, also leaning back in his chair.

  “The truth is that when you have as much money as I’ve earned in the last years, the courts and the lawyers couldn’t care less about who’s sleeping with whom. I could walk into that court with eight-by-ten glossies of my ex in bed with two men, three women, and a chimpanzee, and it wouldn’t matter in the least.

  “What matters to them is money and that’s all. Money, money, and more money. California is a community property state, and I don’t mind giving him half of what I’ve earned in the past—not that he deserves a penny of it—but I can live with that. But I know him, and he’s going to tell the courts that I couldn’t have written the books without him. And, based solely on his word, the judge is going to decide that he deserves far more than what I have earned in the past. The judge is going to say that Martin Gilmore deserves all my past income and half my future income because he made me what I am. What I need to do, and do very quickly, is gather enough evidence to show the court that Martin Gilmore is not the upstanding, self-sacrificing person that he says he is. I want to show the court that he’s been skimming money from me and that he now has it hidden. I just need to find out where it is.”

  For a moment the detective looked at her. He knew how successful she was, and he’d dealt with a couple of other writers, so he knew about royalty payments. “You’re talking millions, aren’t you?”

  “Millions in money and an unimaginable amount lost in dignity and self-esteem,” she said softly. “He’s after money, but I am fighting for my sanity. For my future.”

  He continued to look at her for a moment; then he picked up his pen again. “So what makes you think he’ll tell about this money to a stranger? A drunken stranger?”

  She smiled at the top of his head. He was an ordinary-looking guy, and there were a couple of framed photos on the cabinet behind him of a woman, two kids, and a dog. “My ex has a big mouth and he loves drunks,” she said. “The losers of the world make him feel better by comparison.”

  “And you want him to talk about money he’s hidden?”

  “Yes. Where is the money he’s taken out of my bank accounts over the years? You see, I did a little accounting on my own and even though he spent—spends—a lot, I’ve earned more. But I don’t know where it is. In the last three days I’ve searched through every piece of paper in our house, but I found nothing. My only hope is to get him to talk.”

  Looking at her, Montoya lifted his eyebrows in question. “And you think he’s going to tell that to a stranger?”

  “Yes,” Ellie said firmly. “Martin loves to brag, loves to tell people how clever he is. If you plant someone near him who has a mournful story about a wife who’s ripping him off, Martin will reveal all his secrets of how to turn the tables and get back at the bitch.”

  The detective snorted, shook his head, then began to write again. “Okay, you got it. One drunk comin’ up. I have an actor friend who—”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “A two-headed green Martian in his last play, but I think he could easily manage being a drunk.” The detective smiled at her, and she smiled back.

  “What next?” he asked.

  After that Ellie had given him all the details that she could think of that he’d need to help her prove that her ex had been hiding money from her for years. If she could find that money, he wouldn’t be prosecuted for stealing; oh, no, taking money from his wife was purely legal. Most people would agree that it was immoral, but she’d seen that the law didn’t care about immoral, only illegal. No, all Ellie could do, if she could prove that he had the money, was to force him to share it, to give half of it back to her, as the community property laws required money to be divided equally.

  And, maybe, if she could show that Martin was the type of man to hide money, just maybe the judge wouldn’t believe that Martin was being honest when he said he helped Ellie to write the books.

  After her first meeting with the detective, she’d driven her red Range Rover back home, to the house that she shared with Martin. The first time around, the judge had said that Martin was to get the house, but Ellie had to pay the mortgage. The judge’s “reasoning” was that Ellie was now “forcing” Martin to return to the profession he’d abandoned to manage her career, and since the house had a small recording studio in it, he had to have that house.

  When Ellie first entered that house again, she was glad that Martin wasn’t there; she didn’t think she could bear to look at him. In fact, she wasn’t able to look at the house because she knew she’d see all the personal possessions that last time became Martin’s: her cookware, her photography equipment, years and years of photos, cookbooks, even some of her clothes. Instead, she ran through the house, out the back door, then down the hill to her studio. She knew that if history repeated itself, the judge was going to take away her beloved studio too. Take it from her and give it to him because they believed his lies. But Ellie also knew that just a few months after she signed the property settlement, Martin would rent the house and move to Florida, where he would live in comfort on the money that Ellie had to pay him.

  During those first three days after Ellie returned to the past, she’d been so busy that she’d looked at nothing. It had felt so very, very good to work again! She’d had three long years of doing nothing but going over the horror of what had been done to her. She’d spent months asking herself why the judge had believed Martin.

  Truthfully, she didn’t think she’d ever understand why it had been done to her, but maybe, this time, she’d be able to head it off. The first time, she’d been unprepared for the accusations that had been hurled at her. All she’d done that first time was cry at the injustice of it all.

  When she’d first reappeared in the small town outside of L.A. where she and Martin had lived for years, it had taken Ellie a while to remember that after she’d filed for divorce, she’d moved into a hotel to wait for the proceedings to take their course. During that time she had done little but cry and talk on the phone to her lawyer. Her pride hadn’t let her dump on her friends or relatives, so she’d stayed alone in a room and waited.

  But this time around she wa
sn’t going to sit and wait. And, she reminded herself, she still had as much right to be inside the house as Martin did, and if she saw him, so be it. But so far, even though she’d returned to the house several times, had even spent hours inside it searching for papers, she hadn’t seen him.

  She’d spent a great deal of the three days writing letters and requesting documents. She wrote her publisher asking for an affidavit swearing that her husband had never negotiated a contract for her. She asked her money manager for a document swearing that her husband had never called or written her about a single investment.

  For three days Ellie dug through documentation and put together all that she could. It was going to be said in court that she lied about her income, therefore she requested that her publishing house give her financial summaries for every year. These were faxed to her within minutes, so Ellie stapled them to copies of past tax returns.

  So now, Ellie was sitting on the bench waiting for the PI to return so she could go over her list with him again. And she wanted to talk to him about her sanity. Or at least see if he had any ideas about how she could prove that she was sane. During the first divorce Martin had said that since Ellie had twice spent time with therapists during their marriage, this was proof that she was insane—and therefore incompetent to handle her own money. When Ellie had heard this, she’d laughed. It was too ridiculous to contemplate. But no one else had laughed.

  She’d been told that she was going to have to get letters from those therapists swearing that Ellie was sane and therefore capable of managing her own money. Since Ellie had parted company with one of the therapists in anger, she knew that that letter would never be forthcoming.

  Ellie had gasped at this. “This is not the Victorian era!” she’d said. “A man can’t do that!” But she’d been told that in a community property state, all the property, in this case, the books, was considered as much his as hers, so, yes, the judge could indeed decide who was more competent to handle the money, she or her ex.