by Nora Roberts
"She doesn't believe me." Kate grinned hugely as Margo moved off to her customer. "She thinks I snatched hers and went crazy. It's all the stress I'm under." Letting her head fall back, she laughed like a loon. "Stress is a killer."
"Maybe some water," Thomas murmured, and looked up in relief as his wife hurried down the stairs. "Kate seems to be a little hysterical."
Calmly efficient, Susan took the bottle of champagne from the ice bucket and poured half a glass. "Drink," she ordered. "Then breathe."
"Okay." Kate obeyed, but she couldn't stop snickering.
"You're all looking at me as if I'd grown another head. I haven't snapped, Uncle Tommy. I promise. I just found part of Seraphina's dowry. I was walking on the cliffs and it was right there. Bright as a penny and a lot more valuable."
"Just sitting there," Margo hissed as she walked by carrying a Limoges box in the shape of a sun hat. "Like hell. Take her upstairs, will you, Mrs. T? I'll be up as soon as I can."
"Good idea," Kate agreed. "There's more champagne up there. We're going to need a lot of it." She tucked the coin back in her pocket, toyed with it as she climbed the winding stairs. First things first, she ordered herself, and turned as she stepped into the kitchen. "I need to talk to you, Aunt Susie."
"Hmm." Her back stiff, Susan crossed to the stove and put a kettle on to boil. The pretty little eyebrow windows were open to the breeze and all the bells and whistles that were summer on Cannery Row. But Susan said nothing.
"You're still angry with me." Kate sucked in both breath and triumph. "I deserve it. I don't know how to apologize, but I hate knowing that I hurt you."
"I hate knowing you feel the way you do."
Kate shifted her feet. Staring at the pretty footed glass bowl filled with fresh fruit that sat on the counter, she tried to find the right words.
"You never gave anything to me with strings attached. I put them there."
Susan turned, met Kate's eyes. "Why?"
"I'm no good at explaining things that don't add neatly up. I'm better with facts than with feelings."
"But I already know the facts, don't I?" Susan said quietly. "You'll have to make an attempt at explaining your feelings if we're going to settle this, Kate."
"I know. I love you so much, Aunt Susie."
The words, and the simple emotion in them neatly sliced away a layer of Susan's anger. But the bafflement was still there, and under it, the hurt. "I've never doubted that, Kate. I wonder why you should doubt how very much I love you."
"I don't. It's just…" Knowing she was already fumbling it, Kate slid onto a stool, folded her hands on the counter. "When I came to you, you were already a unit. Whole. Templeton House, you and Uncle Tommy, all so open and perfect. Like a fantasy. A family."
Her words stumbled over each other in their hurry to get out. "There was Josh, the crown prince, the heir apparent, the clever, golden son. Laura, the princess, sweet and lovely and kind. Margo, the little queen. Stunning, dazzling really, and so sure of her place. Then me, bruised and skinny and awkward. I was the ugly duckling. That makes you angry," she said when Susan's eyes fired. "I don't know how else to describe it."
Deliberately, she made herself slow down, choose her words with more care. "You were all so good to me. I don't mean just the house, the clothes, the food. I don't mean the things, Aunt Susie, though they were staggering to a child who'd come from my barely middle-class background."
"Do you think we would have treated you differently if we hadn't had certain advantages?"
"No." Kate shook her head briskly. "Absolutely not. And that was only more staggering." Pausing, she stared down at her hands. When she lifted her eyes again, they were glossy with threatening tears. "All the more staggering," she repeated, "now, because… I found out about my father."
Susan simply continued to stare, her head angled attentively. "Found out?"
"About what he did. About the charges against him." Sick and terrified, Kate watched her aunt's brow crease, then slowly clear.
"Oh." She let out a long, long sigh. "God, I'd forgotten."
"You—you'd forgotten?" Stunned, Kate ran a hand through her hair. "You'd forgotten he was a thief? You'd forgotten that he stole, was charged, that you paid off his debts and took his daughter into your home? The daughter of a—"
"Stop it." It was a sharp order rather than the sympathy Susan would have preferred. But she knew her Kate. "You're in no position to judge what a man did twenty years ago, what was in his mind or heart."
"He stole," Kate insisted. "He embezzled funds. You knew all of it when you took me in. You knew what he'd done, what he was. Now I'm under suspicion for essentially the same thing."
"And it becomes clear why you sat back and took it, and made yourself ill. Oh, you poor, foolish child." Susan stepped forward, cupped Kate's face in her hands. "Why didn't you tell us? Why didn't you let us know what you were thinking, feeling? We would have helped you through it."
"Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you tell me what he had done?"
"To what purpose? A grief-stricken child has burden enough. He made a mistake, and he would have paid for it."
"You paid for it." She tried to swallow, couldn't. "You took your own money and made restitution for him. For me."
"Do you think that matters, that Tommy or I gave that part of it even a moment's thought? You mattered, Kate. Only you mattered." She smoothed back Kate's hair. "How did you find out?"
"A man, a client who came in. He was a friend of my father's. He thought I knew."
"I'm sorry you found out that way." Susan dropped her hands, stepped back. "Maybe we should have told you when you were older, but after a while, it just passed away. What timing," she murmured, heartsick. "You found this out shortly before the business at Bittle?"
"A couple of months before. I looked into it, found articles from newspapers, hired a detective."
"Kate." Susan wearily pressed her fingers to her eyes. "Why? If you'd needed to know, to understand, we would have explained. You had only to ask."
"If you'd wanted to talk about it, you would have."
After a moment Susan nodded. "All right. All right, that's true."
"I just needed to know, for certain. Then I tried to put it aside. I tried, Aunt Susie, to forget it, to bury it. Maybe I could have, I don't know. But then, all of a sudden, I was in the middle of this. The discrepancy of funds from my clients' accounts, what was my explanation, internal investigations, suspension." Her voice broke like glass, but she made herself go on. "It was a nightmare, like an echo of what must have happened to my father. I just couldn't seem to function or fight back or even think. I've been so afraid."
Kate pressed her lips together. "I didn't think I could tell you. I was ashamed to tell you, and afraid that you might think—even for just a second you might think that I could have done it. Because he'd done it. I could stand anything but that."
"I can't be angry with you again, even for such foolishness. You've had a rough time of it, Kate." Susan gathered her close.
"It'll come out," Kate murmured. "I know it will, and people will talk. Some will assume I took money because my father took money. I didn't think I could stand that. But I can." She sat back, scrubbed away her tears. "I can stand it, but I'm sorry. I'm so sorry it touches you."
"I raised my children to stand on their own feet and to understand that family stands together. I think you forgot the second part of that for a while."
"Maybe. Aunt Susie…" She had to finish, finish all of it. "You never made me feel like an outsider, not from the first moment you brought me home. You never treated me like a debt or an obligation. But I felt the debt, the obligation, and wanted, always, to be the best. I never wanted you to question whether you'd done the right thing by taking me, by loving me."
With her own heart still aching, Susan folded her arms. "Do you think we measure our love by the accomplishments of the people we care for?"
"No. But I did—do. It's my failing, Aunt Sus
ie, not yours. At first, I'd go to bed at night wondering if you'd change your mind about me in the morning, send me away."
"Oh, Kate."
"Then I knew you wouldn't. I knew you wouldn't," she repeated. "You'd made me part of the unit, part of the whole. And I'm sorry if it makes you angry or hurts you, but I owe you for that. I owe you and Uncle Tommy for being who and what you are. I'd have been lost without you."
"Did you ever consider, Kate, what you did to complete our lives?"
"I considered what I could do to make you proud of me. I couldn't be as beautiful as Margo, as innately kind as Laura, but I could be smart. I could work hard, plan things out, be sensible and successful. That's what I wanted for myself, and for you. And… there's something else you should know."
Susan turned to switch off the spurting kettle, but didn't pour the hot water over the waiting tea. "What, Kate?"
"I was so happy at Templeton House, and I would think that I wouldn't be there with you, with everyone, if the roads hadn't been icy that night, if we hadn't gone out, and the car hadn't skidded and crashed. If my parents hadn't died."
She lifted her eyes to Susan's. "And I wanted to be there, and as the years passed, I loved you so much more than I could remember loving them. And it seemed horrible to be glad I was with you instead of them."
"And you've nurtured that ugly little seed all these years." Susan shook her head. She wondered if parents and their children ever really understood each other. "You were a child, barely eight years old. You had nightmares for months, and you grieved more than any child should have to. Why should you go on paying for something over which you had no control? Kate." Her fingers stroked gently over Kate's temples. "Why shouldn't you have been happy? Would you have been better off clinging to the pain and the grief and the misery?"
"No."
"So you chose guilt instead?"
"It seemed that the best thing that had ever happened in my life had grown out of the worst. I could never make sense of it. It was as if my life began the night they died. I knew if a miracle had happened and my parents had come to the door of Templeton House, I would have run to you and begged you to keep me."
"Kate." Susan shook her head, smoothed Kate's hair back from her face. "If God Almighty had come to the door, I'd have fought Him tooth and nail to keep you with me. And I don't feel the least bit guilty about it. What happened wasn't your fault or mine. It doesn't make sense. It just is."
Nearly believing it, Kate nodded. "Please say you'll forgive me."
Susan stepped back, eyed her. Her child, she thought. A gift given to her out of tragedy. So complicated, so layered. So precious. "If you feel you have to owe me for—how did you put it—making you part of the unit, the payment is that you accept who you are, what you've made yourself. We'll be even then."
"I'll work on it, but in the meantime…"
"You're forgiven. But," she continued as Kate sniffled, "we're going to work on the rest of this together. Together, Kate. When Bittle deals with one Templeton, he'll deal with all of them."
"Okay." Kate knuckled a tear away. "I feel better."
"I'm sure you do." Susan's lips curved. "So do I."
Eyes wide and a little wild, Margo burst into the kitchen. "Let me see that coin," she demanded, and thrust a hand into Kate's pocket before Kate could move.
"Hey!"
"Oh, my God." Margo goggled at it, then goggled at the matching doubloon she held in her other hand. "I checked my purse. I really thought you were playing some sort of idiotic joke on me. They're the same."
And the world somehow settled neatly back into place. "I was trying to tell you," Kate began, then grunted when Margo grabbed her and squeezed.
"They're the same!" Margo shouted and held the coins in front of Susan's face. "Look, Mrs. T! Seraphina."
"They're certainly from the right place and the right time."
Struggling to switch gears, Susan frowned over the coins. "You just found this one, Kate."
"No, this one." In a proprietary move, Kate snatched the coin from Margo's left hand. "Mine," she stated.
"I can't believe it. All these months since I found the first one. All these months we've been searching and scraping and hauling that silly metal detector around. And you just stumble over it."
"It was just there."
"Exactly." Margo crowed in triumph. "Just like the first one was just there. It's a sign."
Kate rolled her eyes. "It's not magic, Margo. It's luck. There's a difference. I just happened to be there after the coin got kicked up or washed up or whatever."
"Hah," was all Margo had to say to that. "We've got to tell Laura. Oh, who the hell can remember where she is with that insane schedule of hers?"
"If you'd bother to look at the weekly schedule I've posted in the office, you'd know exactly where she is." Feeling superior, Kate glanced at her watch. "If memory serves, she's at the hotel for the next thirty minutes, then she has a meeting with Ali's teacher. After that—"
"We don't need after that. We'll just—" Margo stopped short. "Hell, we can't just close the shop in the middle of the afternoon."
"Go ahead," Susan told her. "Tommy and I can mind the store for an hour."
"Really?" Margo beamed at her. "I wouldn't ask, but this is so exciting, and we're in it together."
"You've always been in it together," Susan said.
"It perked her up." Margo loitered in the lobby after their brief contact with Laura. "It's frustrating to have to wait until Sunday to go back and look, but with her schedule we're lucky to manage that."
"Don't you think she's taken on an awful lot?"
Kate scanned the sweeping lobby with its elaborate potted plants, half hoping to see Byron breeze by on some executive mission. Instead she saw wandering guests, bustling bellmen, a group of women standing near the revolving doors with shopping bags heaped at their feet and a look of happy exhaustion on their faces.
"I know she likes to fill her time," Kate continued. "And it probably helps keep her mind off… things. But she barely has a minute in the day just for herself."
"Ah, you finally noticed." Then Margo shook her head and sighed. "I can't nag her about it anymore. When I suggested that the shop could probably swing a part-time clerk and that she could cut back there, she almost took my head off." Absently she rubbed a soothing hand over her belly as the baby kicked. "I know the bulk of her salary here at the hotel is earmarked for the kids' tuition."
"That bastard Peter." Kate's teeth began to grind even as she thought of it. "He was a slimy creep for taking Laura's money, but taking his own children's… that makes him whatever's lower than slime. She could have fried his sorry ass in court."
"That's what I'd have done," Margo agreed. Amused, she noted that two men in one of the lobby's plush seating areas were trying to catch her eye. "What you'd have done. Laura has to handle this her own way."
"And her way is to hold down two jobs, raise two children on her own, support a full staff because she's too softhearted to lay anyone off. She can't keep working twenty out of twenty-four hours, Margo."
"You try telling her." Out of long habit, she sent the hopeful men a quick, flirtatious smile.
"Stop playing with those insurance salesmen," Kate ordered.
"Is that what they are?" Carelessly, Margo scooped her long hair back. "Anyway, Josh and I have pushed Laura as far as we can push. She's not budging. Nobody could tell you to take a vacation, could they? To see a doctor?"
"Okay, okay." That was the last thing Kate wanted to hash over. "I had reasons, and I'll explain it to you when we have a little more time. I should have told you before."
"What?"
"We'll talk about it," she promised, then baffled her friend by leaning in and kissing her. "I love you, Margo."
"Okay, what have you screwed up?"
"Nothing. Well, everything, but I'm starting to fix it. Now, back to Laura. We'll just have to do more to pick up the slack. Maybe take the girls off her hands
a few hours every week. Or run some of the errands she's always got a million of. And worrying about this is spoiling my mood." She pulled the coin out of her pocket, watched it glint. "Once we find Seraphina's dowry, the rest will be irrelevant."
"Once we do, I'm going to open a new branch of Pretenses. In Carmel, I think."
Surprised, Kate swept her gaze up to Margo's face. "I'd have figured you for a cruise around the world, or a new haute couture wardrobe."
"People change." Margo shrugged. "But I might add in a short cruise and a swing down Rodeo Drive."
"It's a relief to know people don't change too much." But maybe they could, Kate mused. Maybe they should. "Look, there's something I want to do. Can you handle the shop until closing?"
"With Mr. and Mrs. T there, I don't have to go back myself." With a chuckle, Margo dug out her car keys. "If I could keep them in the shop for a month, we'd double our profits. Oh, say hi to Byron for me."
"I didn't say I was seeing Byron."
Margo sent a sly smile over her shoulder as she walked away. "Sure you did, pal."
It was demoralizing to realize she was so obvious. Demoralizing enough that Kate nearly talked herself out of going up to the penthouse. She was still arguing with herself when she stepped out of the elevator. When she was told Mr. De Witt was in conference, she decided it was for the best.
At loose ends, she rode back down, but rather than heading to her car, she wandered out to the pool. Leaning on the stone wall that skirted it, she watched the play of the courtyard fountain, the people who sat at the pretty glass tables sipping colorful drinks under festive umbrellas. She spotted name tags pinned to lapels that identified conventioneers taking a break from seminars.
In striped lounge chairs around the curving tiled pool lounged bodies slicked with sunscreen. Magazines and bestsellers were being read, headphones were in place. Waitpeople in cool pastel uniforms delivered drinks and snacks from the poolside bar and grill. Other guests splashed and played in the water, or simply floated, dreaming.
