Magnolia Nights

by Ashley Farley

  “I write under the pen name Holly Knoll.”

  Abbott had never read a romance novel in his life, but even he’d heard of the reclusive Holly Knoll who never showed her face even though she topped the charts with every new release.

  “You’ve made quite a name for yourself,” Abbott said. “Did you ever remarry?”

  Louisa turned up her pert nose. “No, I never did. I haven’t been in a relationship since Lia came into my life.” She drained the rest of her coffee. “I know what you’re thinking, Abbott. You’re not the first to ask me that question. An author doesn’t have to be experienced to write about love. Every woman dreams of romance despite her age and relationship status.”

  “I’m sure Lia’s very proud of your success.” Ellie’s tone was now sarcastic. “Did you ever consider trying to find my father, to let him know about his daughter?”

  Louisa stared out the window at the sailboats zigzagging back and forth across the river. “I thought about it for about a second in the beginning. Then I realized Lia was my only chance to have a child of my own. After that . . . well, I loved her too much to give her up.”

  “How much does my sister know about her past?” Ellie asked.

  With a trembling hand, she set her coffee cup down on the table. “She knows her biological mother was a friend of mine who passed away and left her in my care. Whenever she asked about her father, I told her I knew nothing about him.”

  Abbott wasn’t surprised. He’d anticipated such an answer.

  “I realize my sister was only three, but do you think she remembers anything from when she lived in the house? I’m curious if Lia has been plagued with suppressed memories like me.”

  Louisa paused a minute to think before responding. “As far as I know, she doesn’t remember anything from that time in her life. She’s struggled with depression off and on over the years, but I don’t see how her past could possibly have anything to do with it.”

  Ellie glared at Louisa. “Are you kidding me? It’s common knowledge that abused children are prone to adulthood depression.”

  “Is she mentally stable now?” Abbott asked.

  “She was never mentally unstable,” Louisa snapped. “So she got a little depressed. Don’t you get depressed sometimes, too? She’s perfectly fine now, happily married with two beautiful children.”

  “How long has it been since you’ve seen her?” Abbott asked.

  “Several months. They came here last summer for the Fourth of July holiday. We don’t get to see each other as much as we’d like with them living so far away in—” Louisa clammed up.

  Ellie moved to the edge of the sofa. “Living where, Louisa? Where is my sister?”

  Her turkey neck wobbled when she shook her head. “I can’t tell you that.”

  Abbott peered at her from under his brow. “You can, Louisa, and you will. Otherwise I’ll be forced to go to the authorities.”

  Tears welled up in Louisa’s blue eyes and she stood up with surprising speed. “Excuse me for a minute,” she said and fled the room.

  “Do we really have grounds to go to the authorities?” Ellie asked once they were alone.

  “Who knows?” He threw his hands in the air and fell back against the sofa cushions. “If we don’t pressure her, we’ll never get what we need.”

  “Forget about Louisa. I’ll find what we need on my own.” Ellie leaped up off the sofa and crossed the room to Louisa’s desk by the window.

  “What’re you doing?” he asked in a hushed tone when she began rifling through the drawers. “You can’t go through Louisa’s desk without her permission.”

  “Watch me.” She rummaged through the drawers one at a time until she found Louisa’s address book. Abbott moved to her side and looked over her shoulder while she thumbed through the gold tabs. When she didn’t find Lia’s contact information under P, she flipped back to L. The top entry was Lia’s. “Here she is. Lia Bertram. She lives on Cherry Blossom Lane in Decatur, Georgia.” Ellie set the book on the desk and snapped a photograph of the contact information with her phone.

  Louisa appeared in the doorway. “What’re you doing?”

  “Getting my sister’s address. You can’t stop me from seeing her.” With fists clenched at her side, Ellie marched across the room to face her. Abbott feared his daughter might strike the poor woman.

  Louisa took a step backward and pressed herself against the doorjamb. “What’re you planning to do?”

  “I’m going to Georgia to see my sister.” Ellie glanced over her shoulder at her father. “How long do you think it’ll take us to get there?”

  “Nine or ten hours.” Abbott looked down at his watch. “We won’t get there until late tonight.”

  She turned back to Louisa. “Then you have until morning to provide an introduction for us. I don’t know what kind of relationship you have with Lia, but I imagine it’ll make it easier on her if you explain the situation.” Ellie stopped at the door. With her back to the woman, she said, “And, Louisa, be sure to tell the whole truth this time.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Ellie

  Ellie and Abbott hit the road again, this time heading in the opposite direction. Her father insisted on driving. She sensed he didn’t trust her driving skills, but he would never admit it.

  “What’s bothering you?” Abbott asked when he saw her staring blindly out of the window at the cars passing by.

  “Did you get the feeling Louisa was holding something back?”

  “That’s vintage Louisa. She likes to play games. She’ll tell you part of the story while leaving out a few key details. Maybe that’s why she’s made a successful career as a novelist. She likes to have control.”

  “She seems shady to me,” Ellie said. “I don’t trust her one bit.”

  “There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense to me about this situation. Maybe once we meet Lia we’ll understand more.”

  Ellie called Julian with the latest developments and then spent the next sixty miles stalking her sister on social media. Using Lia’s married name, she located profiles on Instagram and Facebook, but she seemed to spend most of her time posting images of white sandy beaches and tropical alcoholic beverages to her Pinterest boards. Lia used the same profile picture for every account. With dark hair and eyes and a dainty version of his nose, she appeared to be a female clone of their father. The photographs in her stream of posts on Facebook showed two little girls about the age of four with doe-brown eyes and hair to match. They weren’t identical, but there was no doubt they were twins.

  “Looks like you’re a grandfather. Twin girls, judging from the pictures.” His face beamed, and she felt a pang of jealousy. “I’m sorry I never gave you grandchildren.”

  “I’m sorry, too, Ellie, for you and for me. You would make a wonderful mother. Women are having babies well into their forties these days. Maybe it’s not too late for you, if things work out with Julian.”

  She shrugged it off. “You’re getting a little ahead of yourself. We’ve been seeing each other for less than two weeks.”

  “I know a good match when I see one,” Abbott said with a twinkle in his eye.

  “He already has a daughter. I don’t even know if he wants more children. We haven’t talked about it.”

  “You’ll get to be an aunt, if that’s any consolation,” he said in a soft voice.

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” She wondered if, once they got to know each other, her sister would allow her daughters to visit her for a few days in Charleston. “Maybe I’ll teach them to paint.”

  He threw his head back and laughed. “Good thing there are two of them. You can teach one of them to paint. I’m going to show the other our magnificent planet through the camera lens.”

  “They might not be interested in either if they didn’t inherit your creative gene.” Ellie returned to her stalking. “Based on her Pinterest boards, Lia likes to travel. I wonder who keeps her daughters while she’s gone on all these trips. They
don’t look like family-type vacations to me.”

  “Don’t judge a Pinterest board by its cover. Maybe she’s planning an anniversary trip.”

  “Maybe.” Ellie dropped her phone in her bag. “We didn’t think to ask Louisa if Lia has a career. Which means we’ll have to be at her house bright and early tomorrow morning to catch her before she leaves for work if she does.”

  The drive to Atlanta seemed to last forever. They were exhausted by the time they checked into the Marriott Courtyard in Decatur at ten o’clock that night. They booked two nights at the hotel in the hopes their reunion with Lia would go well and she’d invite them to stay in town for a few days to get better acquainted. They rose before daybreak the next morning and left the hotel without eating breakfast. Ellie’s Google Maps app directed them to Lia’s house, a medium-size new-construction home identical to the others on the cul-de-sac. At seven thirty, parents were departing their houses for work and a group of young children were lined up near the stop sign waiting for the approaching school bus.

  Abbott parked by the curb in front of Lia’s house and turned off the engine. “There aren’t any cars in the driveway. I hope we haven’t missed her already.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I have butterflies in my stomach,” she said as she smeared her nude lipstick across her lips.

  “I’ll admit to feeling a little queasy.” He took a deep breath. When they got to the front door, Ellie rang the doorbell and took a step back. A couple of minutes passed with no answer, and she tried the bell again, adding a clang from the brass knocker for good measure. Still no answer. She peeked through the side window and saw light streaming from a pair of lamps on a long table in the center hallway. Pressing her ear to the door, she heard faint voices coming from a television in a distant part of the house. She rapped on the door several times before finally giving up.

  “Maybe she’s in the shower,” Abbott suggested.

  “Or maybe she ran out for some milk, which would explain the empty driveway.”

  “Why don’t we go get some coffee and come back in a few minutes,” Abbott said, and she agreed.

  They located a Starbucks about a mile away. They fiddled with their phones while they drank coffee and nibbled on egg bites. Having been in the car together for two days, neither had much to say.

  An hour later they returned to Lia’s house. The driveway was still empty, but when Ellie looked through the window, the inside of the house was dark and silent. “This is strange.”

  “Maybe her car’s in the garage.” Abbott started around the side of the house, and Ellie followed him. He had to stand on his tiptoes to see inside the garage window. “I see a minivan—a mommy car for sure.”

  “Maybe Louisa scared her off and she’s avoiding us.”

  They returned to the front door, but this time Abbott did the pounding. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he called through the window, “Lia, we know you’re in there, and we’re not leaving until we talk to you. We’ve come a long way to see you. Will you please give us a few minutes?”

  They heard the pitter-patter of feet and the sound of tiny voices. The door opened a crack, enough for them to see Lia balancing one little girl on her right hip and the other hiding behind her left leg.

  “What’s this about?” Lia asked, a note of impatience in her voice.

  “A family matter.” Ellie took a step forward, forcing Lia to open the door wider.

  Her sister’s appearance caught Ellie off guard. Lia wore jeans and a black turtleneck despite the warm day. She was hollow cheeked and bone thin, the kind of skinny that resulted from an eating disorder. Her haunted eyes gave them the once-over and then traveled up and down the street behind them. Ellie turned around, but there was nothing of interest aside from her MINI Cooper on the curb and a tricycle on the sidewalk at the neighbor’s house next door.

  “We met with Louisa yesterday at her house in Virginia,” Ellie continued. “She was supposed to call and tell you we were coming.”

  Lia set her glassy eyes on Ellie. “I’ve been ignoring the phone. I haven’t been feeling well.”

  When the child Lia was holding squirmed, her turtleneck stretched down far enough for Ellie to see a burn scar, faded and puckered, that traveled up her neck and crept onto the bottom part of her face along her jawline. Every nerve ending in Ellie’s body stood to attention. Was that scar connected to some event she had yet to remember?

  “May we come in?” Abbott asked in a gentle voice. Ellie sensed, without having to look at her father, that he, too, had noticed the scar.

  Lia’s eyes darted to the end of the street and back. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Please, it’s important.” Ellie cringed inwardly at the begging tone in her voice. “I promise we’ll take only a few minutes of your time. We’ve traveled all the way from South Carolina to Virginia to here, tracking you down.”

  Lia shifted the child to her other hip. “You mentioned a family matter. You’ll need to be more specific.”

  “It’s about your biological mother,” Ellie said.

  Lia’s thin body grew rigid. “You knew my mother?”

  “And your father,” Abbott added.

  She hesitated for only a second. “In that case, come in.” She stepped out of the way so they could enter and then closed and locked the door behind them. “I’ll turn on a movie for the girls, and we can talk in the kitchen.”

  Ellie took that as a signal to follow Lia to the rear of the house. The rooms were immaculate, not what she’d expect in a home where little children lived. Aside from the small pile of toys on the family room floor, everything appeared in its place. There were no breakfast dishes in the sink or coffee mugs on the counter. No baskets of unfolded laundry on the floor or finger smudges on the glass doors leading to the back deck. Once the girls were settled in front of the TV, Lia led Abbott and Ellie to the round dining table in the kitchen and waited for them to sit down. She did not offer them coffee or tea or even a glass of water.

  Louisa’s words echoed in Ellie’s head. She’s perfectly fine now, happily married with two beautiful children. The woman sitting in front of her was neither fine nor happy. They came here last summer for the Fourth of July holiday. We don’t get to see each other as much as we’d like with them living so far away. “How long has it been since you’ve seen Louisa?”

  Lia lifted a bony shoulder and said, “A year or so ago, I guess. We’re not that close.” She glanced at the clock on the stove. “I need to leave for work soon.”

  “Do you mind if I ask what you do?” Abbott said.

  Lia glared at him. They were mirror images sitting across the table from each other. How could her sister not notice the resemblance? “That’s really none of your business. Either tell me why you’re here or I’ll have to ask you to leave. I’m not in the habit of inviting strangers into my home when my husband’s not here.”

  “Do you remember anything from your childhood before you came to live with Louisa?” Ellie asked.

  “Of course not. I was too young.”

  Ellie moved to the edge of her chair. “This may come as a shock to you, Lia, but we share the same biological mother. You and I are fraternal twins.”

  She gave Ellie’s face a quick once-over. “I don’t see the resemblance.” She fell back in her chair. “This can’t be happening to me right now. I’m seriously not in the mood for long-lost twin sisters today.”

  Ellie held back her frustration. This was not the reception she’d hoped for. “I don’t mean you any harm, Lia. I learned of your existence only a few days ago. But I came as soon as I could. I wanted to meet my sister.”

  “You’re thirty-seven years too late,” Lia said, her attention focused on an object outside the window behind Ellie. “Louisa is the only family I’ve ever known. Lord knows, I don’t need any more of that kind of headache.”

  Ellie shot her father a look. Should we stay or should we go?

  Abbott tapped the table b
eside Lia’s arm to distract her from whatever invisible being held her attention in the backyard. “If you could give us a little time, Lia. We just wanted the opportunity to get to know you, no strings attached.”

  Lia jerked her head toward him. “We?” Her eyes traveled his face, from his square chin to his hooked nose to his M-shaped forehead. She aimed a thumb at Ellie. “If she’s my twin, who the hell does that make you?”

  Ellie noticed a slight quivering of his chin when he said, “I’m your father, Lia.”

  Lia let out a high-pitched laugh. “This is great. A twin sister who looks like Annie and Daddy Dearest.”

  The twins peered over the back of the sofa in the adjoining room when their mother laughed.

  Lia planted her elbows on the table and her face in her hands. Ellie’s eyes gravitated to the angry red scars peeking out from beneath her sleeves. A suicide attempt? Louisa had made light of Lia’s depression, but they knew she’d been holding back. This woman in front of her was a mess. Ellie didn’t need Lia’s kind of problems. She observed the tender faces watching her from the sofa. These little angels were her nieces, her own flesh and blood, and she didn’t even know their names. She shuddered to think what kind of life they led with a mother like Lia.

  Her sister sprang out of her seat. “You’ve come at a really bad time. It’s best if you just go away, and we’ll pretend none of this ever happened.”

  Ellie noticed the little girls duck down behind the cushions in fear.

  Abbott stood to face her. “We didn’t mean to upset you, Lia.”

  “Once upon a time, I dreamed of finding my family. But that was a really long time ago. I don’t feel any less empty now than I did thirty minutes ago when you barged your way into my home. I heard you out. Now you need to go.”

  She started for the door, leaving them no choice but to follow. Ellie removed the hotel notepad—with their names and numbers scrawled across the top page—from her handbag and dropped it on the kitchen counter on her way out.