Return to Cedar Hill

by Jacie Middlemann

  Carrie cleared her throat, waited until her mother turned her way. "Remember what you always told me Mom...to be careful what you wish for."

  Casey couldn't help the laughter that she'd held back from the moment Mallie had responded. Once she started the other four women at the table cut loose as well.

  "Right now she's telling her folks that it will all be just dandy because she's working for Casey as well as at the store on the corner, which Jack will remember, and to top it all off she's going to live under your watchful eye." Carrie watched her mother's expression. "She's spinning a tale like no other as only a teenager can." She smiled at the irony of it. "I wonder where she got that from?"

  "Good grief!" Now it was Charlie who wondered what she'd gotten herself into.

  "Well, that takes care of her. I love this place, Mary and appreciate more than you will ever know how you took me in at a moment's notice not to mention in the middle of the night to boot. But I think I'm going to fix up one of the rooms at the Marshall Street house."

  Eyeing her cousin, Carrie sighed. "I think I'll do the same." She tried valiantly to keep in mind that her and Casey's numerous thorny issues were twenty years in the past.

  "Well." Mary looked around her kitchen table, surrounded by cousins, her aunt, and a new friend with old ties. "Well." She repeated not certain exactly how to express her feelings at that moment.

  Casey understood. "Who would have figured we'd all end up together like this?" She looked around...thinking back. "And here, not just in Burlington, but in the same neighborhood, the same house. Houses," she corrected.

  "And all at the same time," Carrie added. "Like you said last night," she addressed Casey specifically. "This isn't what brought me here," she looked at her mother. "But it has almost everything to do with what's keeping me here." She looked at everyone around the table. "It's helped me to see the choices I can make in my life."

  "Same here," Casey agreed. "I don't know where I would have gone if Mary hadn't been here when I walked away from my job."

  "But I was here and now so are all of you." Mary spoke quietly, "I've talked about coming here for years but maybe it was only meant for me to come now, to be here when you needed me to be." She looked at Casey and then Carrie. "Both of you."

  "Well, I for one am so grateful you're all here." Grace leaned forward, "I came here to get away from a life I couldn't live anymore but I didn't have friends, not really, until all of you arrived."

  "Honey," Aunt Charlie scooted over into the chair Mallie had vacated to put her arm around Grace. "I can't tell you how glad I am you’re here with us. Your grandfather was one of the closest of friends to me and my sisters. And to my parents," she added. "He was a wonderful man, a good friend, and it's a privilege for me to have his granddaughter as my friend as well."

  "Oh, God," Casey choked, "she's going to have me going in a minute."

  Grace didn't bother to hide her tears. "Thank you." She hugged Charlie back. "There are times I miss him so much."

  "He's with you, honey. You keep remembering him and he will always be with you." Charlie spoke with conviction.

  "Yes." Grace agreed simply.

  "They're all with us," Mary spoke softly. "And I think with their presence in our hearts there is no way we can fail."

  This time it was Carrie who agreed with a hitch in her voice. "Not just with them but because of them."

  Casey slapped her hand down in the middle of the table. "Together." She stated and looked at her companions.

  "Good Grief! This is so you, Casey." Carrie said in a voice clogged with laughter and tears but lay her hand down on top of her cousin’s.

  The other three at the table did the same and looked at each other. Smiles and laughter combined with tears. They were united, joined by a desire not just to succeed but to succeed together.

  "This is going to be a heck of a lot more fun than sitting around listening to your brothers telling me what to do." Charlie told her daughter and the room at large, joy filling her voice.

  Mallie burst into the room. "It's cool! Mom and Dad are okay with it....sort of." Seeing the age old sign of a compact made she walked to the table and slapped her own hand down with the others. "I am so in!"

  

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  Mary pulled on her robe and took the time to slip her feet into her pink jeweled and embroidered ballerina slippers even as the pounding on the door started up again. What was it, she wondered, that people couldn't at least wait until the sun came up to bang on her door.

  At least she didn't have to worry about waking anyone else. Aunt Charlie and Mallie were happily co-existing in the renovated rooms above the Carriage House. With the decision made to convert the ground level of the building into living areas the upstairs had been made into two master bedrooms along with a light filled studio for Aunt Charlie.

  Casey and Carrie had each chosen a room that satisfied them on the second floor of the Marshall Street house. She wasn't sure how happily they were co-existing but they were making the effort and keeping an eye on the other two generations on the property who were having to their way of thinking, way too good of a time.

  The Woodhaven house had been vacated though she had yet to go through it. For that matter she had yet to figure out what to do with it but knew it would come to her. Just as everything else had since she'd come back to Burlington.

  She swung the door open without even glancing through the peep hole. Standing on the front porch was the last person on earth she expected and the one that she had waited desperately to show up.

  "Got room for one more?" His distinctive voice boomed into the silence.

  "Daniel."

  

  Sneak Preview of Retreat to Woodhaven - A Hills of Burlington book.

  Mary saw the blinking light on her phone the moment she walked through her front door. Not certain why because she would normally leave it until after she had a cup of hot coffee in her hand she strode over immediately to the device her husband had insisted on and pushed the caller id button to see who had called and at the same time activated the recorder.

  "Mary. Call me." There was no mistaking her cousin Jake's voice over the machine. Specific. To the point. Arrogant. Jake never said in a dozen words what could just as easily be said in two.

  Her hand still on the phone, she paused. She couldn't think of a single reason Jake would be calling her. Except one. Casey. And while her cousin was doing ten times better than the night she'd arrived on her doorstep several months ago, there were still parts of her life she avoided dealing with. Her oldest brother was one of them.

  Mary lingered only a moment longer before walking away from the phone and into the kitchen. She wasn't avoiding him, she told herself, she was getting a much needed and deserved cup of coffee before sitting down and calling him. If it amounted to an injection of false courage she'd take it and admit to it.

  While the coffee brewed she stared out the back kitchen window. She could see a shadow of movement in the upper floor of the Carriage House down towards the end of the alley and wondered if her Aunt Charlie was making use of the art equipment they had surprised her with the week before. It had been an emotional couple of moments for all of them. Her cousin Carrie, Aunt Charlie's only daughter, has come as close to breaking down as she'd ever seen. But then Carrie was dealing with a lot at the moment. Not the least of which was her estranged husband. The esteemed Senator from one of the great southern states of which she would never again visit simply out of spite for the man.

  She listened to the coffee maker sputter and cough, added the need for a new one to her mental shopping list. And she thought about her cousin Jake. He wasn't just the oldest of Casey's brothers he was also the most composed of them. Little ruffled him and more than once in a crisis he came through in his calm and cool manner that none of the others ever quite matched up to. And though she'd known him all her life there was little she really knew about him.

  She knew just about as
much as everyone else did, she considered thoughtfully as she poured her coffee. Fresh out of college he'd done freelance reporting on topics others didn't see as relevant or worthy of their time. Jake had proved otherwise in almost every instance. He'd won awards for a couple of them that had made his name known in almost every household. He'd written on issues long before they were considered such.

  A handful of job offers came in after that all of which he turned down to travel overseas and do there what he had already accomplished in the US. Find stories that no one else bothered with. Instead he had found wars to report on from locations few others could imagine getting into let alone reporting from. And while the American public waited with anticipation for the next Jacob Kyle report from inside the shaky lines of war his family waited for the same for far different reasons. With each report they breathed a cumulative sigh of relief. If he was writing he was alive. But it was years before the need to report on the terrors and ravaging destructions of man's battle against his fellow man diminished and he found his way home.

  But the man who returned from war wasn't the same idealistic young adult who had left in pursuit of righting the world's wrongs through the written word. The Jake who had finally returned to his family was harder, cynical, and spoke only when he had no choice but to otherwise do so.

  Mary closed her eyes, thought about that first year after Jake had returned. Worried for him and knowing how worried her Aunt Leslie had been she had paid him an unexpected visit. One of the results of that illuminating visit had been a best-selling novel Jake had poured himself into for months after that was very loosely based on his experiences. That had resulted in a hugely popular movie based on the book. Both had made Jake more money than he would need in a lifetime. Add to that, she thought with no little amount of pride, the half dozen additional best sellers that came after the first, and Jake was now set for several life times.

  She sighed as she remembered back to those days. Her visit like the writing had helped him to heal but neither had really helped him to move forward. He was still as cynical and solitary as ever. She carried her coffee with her over to the phone. She couldn't imagine why he was calling but speculating about it wasn't going to get her very far.

  Even as she reached for the phone it rang. She picked it up almost before it had a chance to ring a second time. She heard her cousin's voice on the other end before she had a chance to open her mouth.

  "Mary, did you end up buying Aunt Charlie's old place down the street?" Came the deep voice across the phone lines as clear as if he was standing beside her.

  "And hello to you too, Jake." Men, she thought. Not a manner to be found in the lot of them. "And I did, yes." She waited in the silence, knowing from a life time of experience he would let her know in his own time what he wanted...or needed.

  "What are you going to do with it?" Came the next question, almost grudgingly.

  "Actually, I just got back from there. I was just painting the kitchen. It's looking pretty nice."

  "I mean long term." At the silence he expounded, "Do you plan on keeping it, renting it, selling it, whatever?"

  "I'd hoped to keep it in the family." She still wasn't certain why she bought it, other than one morning she looked out the window and saw the For Sale sign in front of it.

  "Do you know how many houses there are in Burlington that one or another of our parents or their parents have lived in?"

  "Actually, yes, I do."

  "Jesus!"

  "Jacob." She admonished him gently.

  "Fine. Fine." He thought about it, hated asking anyone for anything. Anyone. "I need a place, I could buy it from you but I don't want my name on the title...not at the moment so I'd rather keep it in your name if we go in that direction."

  Mary ran the possibilities through her quick mind and as a mother came up with all the dire ones first. "Are you in trouble?" She asked, concern lacing every word.

  Jake sighed. Family was always a huge confusion to him. Mary was every bit a sister to him as the one who had been born into his life and spent most of it at his heels. "Not the way you have raging through your imagination as we speak." His voice softened though he didn't realize it. Didn't hear it. "I need a place to think. And I don't want outside company." He thought about the press and how he'd like to strangle more than a few of them. Most of them. "There are probably going to be some nosy reporters trying to find me but no law enforcement types if that's what's worrying you."

  "I was just worried about you, not who might be looking for you." She paused. "Though I dearly hate reporters."

  "That's ironic," he said dryly, "being that you have one practically living in your lap." He thought about his baby sister who had hibernated to Burlington the year before.

  "She calls that her other life now."

  "Speaking of which, how is she? I tried to get a hold of her a little while ago and no one answers."

  "Hmmm."

  "Is she in trouble?" Jake ran through the possibilities in his head. Mary rarely was elusive and did poorly at it when she tried.

  "No." She couldn't help the small laugh that escaped. "At least I don't think so."

  "Mary, where is Casey?" He drew the words out succinctly. Now he was worried. Not for her safety, Mary wouldn't be laughing if that was an issue, but he was worried about his sister nevertheless.

  "She's out skating with some friends."

  "She's what?" Of everything he expected to possibly hear nothing came close to this.

  "She's out with a friend of hers and his kids at the local skating rink."

  "What kind of skating?" Jake asked cautiously. He couldn't remember a time in his life when his sister exhibited any interest whatsoever with moving on anything but her own two feet.

  "Roller." Mary continued her efforts to keep the laughter out of her voice. Her own images of Casey skating were difficult enough to come by, imagining what Jake was thinking was almost impossible. "Actually," she continued the effort to inject a note of seriousness into her voice, "a friend of mine and I were talking earlier about how long it had been since either of us had been skating. I was thrilled to hear there was even a skating rink in town. We're thinking about going there tomorrow and seeing how we do."

  "Next thing you're going to tell me is the ice man delivers."

  "I don't know about that but I am getting twice weekly milk delivery on my doorstep." She paused, let it sink in. "Every once in a while he also delivers these wonderful locally made potato chips."

  Jake started to come back with another sarcastic response but stopped. He could live with milk and snack deliveries.

  

  Other books available by the author.

  The Last Christmas Ornament

  Cost of Redemption

  Her Letter

  When Words Matter

  The Hope of Hyde Hills

  When We Trust

  How We Love

  Where We Turn…coming soon

  The Andersen Saga

  Betrayal

  Resolute

  Broken

  Found

  Choices

  Regrets

  Remember

  Forgiven

  Truths

  Always

  Expectations

  Decisions

  Disillusioned

  Believe

  Hills of Burlington

  Return to Cedar Hill

  Retreat to Woodhaven

  Summer Street Secrets

  Refuge on Leebrick

  A Christmas Dinner on Marshall Street

  Return to Summit Falls

  Going Home

  Home Again

  Coming Home

  Finding Home

  Sharing Home

  Home to Stay

  Home Again for Christmas

  The Delahass Legacy

  Family

  Family Unbroken

  Family Shadows

  Family Always

  Family Trust

  Family Prom
ise

  Home In Madeira Springs

  The Typewriter Playoffs

  They Will Know You

  The Civil War Connection

  The Seneca Falls Connection

  The French Revolution Connection

  The Wilberforce Connection

  Worlds They Left Behind

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX