by Wendy Webb
“Guilt is a powerful thing,” he said. “It erodes something inside of you. A person can live with it only so long.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re implying she was guilty of something.”
He leaned back onto his elbows and gave me a slight smile. “Aren’t we all, Norrie Harper?”
My stomach flipped, and I smiled back. Charming as he was, I couldn’t let it go. “It sounds like you know something you’re not saying.”
He reached up, took hold of a lock of my hair, and twirled it gently. “Oh, I know plenty I’m not saying.”
We weren’t talking about Miss Penny anymore. Were we? The air began to thicken between us. I noticed his broad shoulders beneath his shirt, the light in his eyes. I wanted to reach out and touch his cheek, to pull him close, and feel his arms around me. But—why? I had just met this guy and really didn’t know much of anything about him. I shook those thoughts out of my head. I curled my legs up under me and busied myself pouring another glass of wine. I cleared my throat a couple of times and could feel the heat rising to my face.
“Norrie, Norrie,” he said. “What am I going to do with you?”
“Well, you could continue with our picnic, for a start.”
“That’s a very good idea,” he said, sitting up and cracking open another beer.
We made small talk after that. When we got to the obligatory “Where did you grow up?” question, his response made my palms tingle.
“I grew up here,” he said. “At Cliffside. I’ve never lived anywhere else, other than during my years of medical school.”
I squinted at him. “Are you a member of the Dare family?”
“No.” He shook his head. “My father was the last physician on staff at the sanatorium. When it closed in the fifties, he stayed on as the family’s personal physician, and later as the doctor on staff of the retreat, also seeing patients in town.”
“And you took over his practice when he retired,” I finished his thought.
“I did.”
“He must’ve retired a very old man,” I said, trying to calculate the years.
Nate chuckled. “I thought he’d never leave. I started to feel like Prince Charles waiting for Queen Elizabeth to step down already.”
I shook my head and laughed.
“Seriously, the old man practiced until he was well into his nineties,” Nate said, flashing that movie-star grin again. “I came on as his partner as soon as I finished with my residency, but his patients, especially his longtime patients in town, wanted old Doc Davidson to take care of them.”
“How did you feel about that?”
“Oh, I was completely fine with it,” he said, his eyes looking into the past. “He was the quintessential small-town country doctor. His patients idolized him. Births, deaths, and everything in between. I remember once attending a basketball game at the high school with him, and he told me he had delivered everyone on the court. Both teams.”
I smiled at him sharing these memories with me. “You don’t find many doctors like that anymore,” I said.
“That’s very true,” he said. “But enough about me. What about you, Norrie? Where did you grow up?”
“Oh, there’s not much to tell,” I said, shrugging. I wish he hadn’t asked, but he had no way of knowing I was ashamed of my upbringing. “I was in and out of foster homes until I was twelve. An elderly couple, Joe and Phyllis Harper, adopted me, and I finally found a soft place to fall. It was my first true home, the first place I felt wanted. They were everything to me.” Tears stung the backs of my eyes.
“Were?”
I nodded. After all this time, it was still hard for me to get the words out. “They died when I was in college,” I said, finally. “It was a robbery gone wrong. Dad took a bullet for Mom, and she died the next day. Of a broken heart, everyone said.”
He reached up and touched my shoulder, running his hand down the length of my arm until it got to my hand, which he took in his. I felt the skin-on-skin touch all throughout my body.
“I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” he said, his eyes filled with compassion. “You must miss them terribly.”
“Their killer was never caught,” I said, clearing my throat. “It’s part of the reason I went into crime reporting. I knew police work wasn’t for me, but I wanted to do what I could to help put the bad guys away.”
“Why did you leave it? Why come here?”
I shook my head. “I got fired,” I admitted. “For the past several months, I have been feeling—it’s hard to explain. The doctors called it post-traumatic stress disorder. I began to feel afraid all the time. Wary. On edge. As if something was coming for me. It made it really hard to do the job. And when I heard about Miss Penny retiring . . .”
“You were drawn here?”
I looked into his eyes. “Exactly. I felt it was where I belonged.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so honest and open with anyone. We sat there looking into each other’s eyes for a long moment, my heart pounding. Something was building between us. I knew this was the moment that a kiss might happen, and I sort of wanted it to, I imagined it, but my stomach tightened, and I pulled back.
“Don’t be afraid, my dear,” he whispered, raising his eyebrows. “I’m a doctor.”
We both burst into laughter, then, and the moment was lost, but another one, just as pleasant, even more pleasant, slipped into its place. We laughed together for a bit as the feeling washed over me—I really liked this man.
Just then, a raindrop or two tickled my cheek. I looked up to see dark clouds hovering overhead; beyond, they were darker still. He gathered our plates and glasses into the basket, stood up, and extended a hand to me.
“We had better go before we get ourselves into trouble,” he said, casting a glance skyward.
But as I looked at Nate Davidson, I knew trouble had already found me.
CHAPTER 9
We hurried up the path, reaching the top of the cliff just as the sky opened. Nate held my hand as we ran together across the lawn toward the house, not stopping until we were on the veranda under my balcony.
“Why don’t you come in?” I said to him, the rain pounding down just beyond the balcony. “We can get warm and dry by the fire.”
He shook his head and handed me the basket. “I need to get back. Harriet will throttle me if I drip all over her clean floor. I’ll see you soon, Norrie Harper.” He took a few steps out into the rain and turned back to me—his hair soaking wet, his clothes sodden—and flashed me the brightest smile I think I have ever seen. “Thank you for being my only friend on the playground today,” he said.
“Thank you for a lovely afternoon!” I called, but he was already on his way, loping across the lawn. I watched him go, his rain-soaked shirt sticking to his muscled frame, and I made a mental note to pay a visit to the good doctor’s house sometime soon.
Inside, Harriet gave a slight shriek when she saw me, and scurried over to take the basket from my hands. “Whatever were you doing out there in this rain, Miss Harper? You’re soaking wet! You’ll catch your death!”
“I was down on the beach, and I guess I didn’t notice the clouds coming in,” I said, purposely omitting Nate from the explanation. I didn’t know what, if anything, was happening between us, and the last thing I wanted was for gossip to start flying in the house.
“Why don’t you go up to your suite and have a nice bath before dinner?” Harriet suggested. “Otherwise you’ll be cold to the core.”
What a delicious thought—an afternoon bath. “Thank you, Harriet, I think I will do just that,” I said, kicking off my sodden shoes.
“You leave those down here and I’ll get them dry by the fire,” Harriet said, crinkling her nose up at my shoes. “Once you get out of those wet clothes, send them down the laundry chute and I’ll have Mary see to them.”
I was really beginning to love having someone like Harriet around to tend to my every need. What an utter indul
gence. How did I get so lucky? I could feel the gratitude from the inside out.
“And where shall you have your dinner tonight, Miss Harper?”
“Why don’t we do a dry run?” I suggested. “I’ll come down at five thirty and have a glass of wine, and then we’ll have dinner in the dining room, just as we’ll do with the fellows when they arrive.”
“Very good, ma’am,” she said and was off to tend to whatever it was Harriet tended to.
I tiptoed across the floor, hoping I wasn’t leaving too much slop trailing behind me. Once I reached the stairs, I hurried up to my suite.
I flipped on the tap over the tub and peeled off my clothes before dropping them down the laundry chute I spied on the wall of my bathroom. I had brought my favorite bath salts with me, and I sprinkled some into the water as the steam began to rise.
As I sank into the warm water, I thought of Nate, and the time we had just spent together. As wonderful as it was, a dark thought slithered into my mind. Here I was, the brand-new director, going on a picnic with a staff member—I know he said he wasn’t really staff, but as Cliffside’s doctor, he was, all the same—right out in the open where anyone might have seen us. Was it unseemly? It wasn’t the wisest course of action, I thought, as I submerged my head and let the sound of the water rush into my ears.
As I floated there in the massive tub, my face just above the surface and my body totally submerged and weightless, it occurred to me that gossip among the staff was probably the reason Nate had declined to come into the main building with me. He was thinking ahead. I had never been the director of anything before, and I had never had to consider something like propriety. How things would look.
What an idiot I was, I thought as the warm water worked its magic on my muscles. Making a spectacle of myself, running through the rain with some guy I just met. I wondered if the staff had seen us through the windows and was whispering about us now. My stomach seized up at the very idea of it. What would Harriet and Mr. Baines think? What would the staff think?
Discretion, Eleanor. Discretion. That was going to be the name of the game from now on. What was done was done, but I was going to be much more careful in the future.
Two hours later, dressed, hair dried, makeup on, I was headed back downstairs to the drawing room for my dry run of the dinner ritual here at Cliffside. I poured a glass of wine for myself, sank down into an armchair, and stared into the flames crackling in the fireplace. It was just me, and I felt a little foolish, all dressed up for a solo dinner, so I tried to imagine how it would be when the fellows had assembled for their first gathering, nervously chatting about the house and grounds and their various projects.
Soon, Harriet appeared in the doorway and summoned me for dinner. I followed her into the main dining room where a place was set for me at the head of the table, which—I did a quick count—could seat twelve. A massive fireplace, with floor-to-ceiling stone, stood on one end of the room, its blazing fire illuminating the ornate, green wallpaper adorning the walls. An armoire made of deep, dark wood, carved with animal heads and decorated with inlaid gems, dominated one corner, a gleaming silver tea set on its exposed shelf.
“I’ll always sit here at the head?” I asked her, slipping down into the chair.
She nodded, placing a bowl of soup in front of me. “Yes, ma’am. It was Mr. Chester’s place, then Miss Penny’s place after him, and now it’s your place.”
The sense of responsibility struck me, then. I was only the third director in Cliffside’s history.
As I lifted the first spoonful of the thick lentil soup to my lips, I couldn’t help wondering, again, why Miss Penny chose to take her own life nearly the moment I had arrived. It was inexplicable. My reporter’s instincts took hold. She had indeed left me a mystery to solve—was this it? The reason she asked me here?
And now that she had been laid to rest, now that everything was set for the fellows’ arrival, now that I was more comfortable with my new surroundings . . . now was the time to begin to look into it.
These thoughts swirled around in my brain as I finished my dinner of salad and roasted chicken, and all at once, I knew I wanted to take a look at my notes from the Chester and Chamomile Dare case, all those years ago. I kept meticulous records of all of my stories on my computer, which I had brought with me. I had heard about Cliffside all my life, but the only thing really connecting me to this place was their deaths and my work to try to solve what I believed were their murders. That was the place to start.
Harriet arrived with my dessert and coffee just as I was pushing my chair away from the table and dropping my napkin on my plate.
“Would you mind if I took this up to my suite?” I asked her. “I’ve just remembered some work I really should finish. I’d like to get started on it right away.”
“Of course, ma’am,” she said. “I’ll just—”
“Don’t worry about it, Harriet,” I said, taking the delicate ramekin of crème brûlée and the coffee cup out of her hands. “I can manage.”
I made my way upstairs, careful to not spill my coffee as I went. Back in my suite, I turned on the desk lamp—an old, beautiful thing with a rosy glass shade etched with a floral pattern—and settled down into the chair. I opened my laptop and took a few spoonfuls of the sinfully creamy dessert while the computer whirred to life. A quick search of my hard drive turned up what I was looking for: a folder labeled Chester Dare, Chamomile Dare, Cliffside Manor, March 1991.
I opened the file. I might as well start with the first story I had written about it. I clicked it and it popped up on the screen.
Wharton: March 19, 1991 Chester Dare, Chamomile Dare, Dead in Apparent Accident
Chester Dare, local industrialist and patron of the arts, and his daughter, Chamomile “Milly” Dare, both died in the early morning hours of March 18 on the Cliffside Manor property, when the car Chester Dare was driving plunged off the cliff just south of Wharton. Chamomile, who had been a passenger, was not wearing a seat belt and was thrown from the car, apparently during the fall. Of the twenty-three staff members at Cliffside, none saw what happened, and none heard the accident. There is speculation that heavy fog in the very early morning hours played a contributing role.
I shuddered when I remembered the fog on the day I arrived at Cliffside.
Penelope Dare could not be reached for comment.
Chester Dare founded Cliffside Sanatorium in 1925, first for tuberculosis victims in his own employ in the various businesses he owned in and around Wharton, treating most of them without payment. Later, it was opened up to TB patients in the general population. Now called Cliffside Manor, it is a retreat for artists and writers. Chester Dare was a lifelong patron of the arts.
Funeral arrangements are forthcoming.
It seemed pretty straightforward—a windy, cliffside road, a foggy day, a terrible accident. Why had I been so sure it was murder?
I had covered hundreds of stories in the twenty years since then, and the details of countless individual cases floated through my memory, the boundaries between them blurring with the passage of time. I closed my eyes and let my mind wander back to that day, the first time I set foot on the Cliffside property. I could see myself here, all those years ago, in my jeans, black turtleneck, and blazer, clutching my notebook, my stomach in knots. It was my first big story. I was so determined to get it right.
After talking with the police about the specifics of the accident, I approached some members of the staff. They had all been very tight-lipped and grief-stricken, which wasn’t surprising—they had all suffered a terrible loss. But, it was what they weren’t saying that set off my radar. The looks on their faces. Their eyes, shifting. I detected an undercurrent, but what was it, exactly? Suspicion? Guilt? Remorse? Maybe a combination of the three?
I didn’t remember Harriet specifically, but I knew there was a housekeeper who seemed to be the head of the operation, and everyone else deferred to her. It must have been Harriet. She had been at Cliffside f
or eons.
I clicked open another folder, this one labeled Dare Case Notes. I had a nightly habit of transcribing my scribbled notes into computer files—a trick shared with me by a veteran journalist on my first day on the job. It not only forced me to go over the details of any given case one more time, but it made for easy storage of those notes. I couldn’t even imagine the amount of reporter’s notebooks I had used when covering stories over the years. The sheer volume alone would’ve made it impossible to keep all of them. I was glad for that practice now that I was able, with a couple of clicks, to access my notes about that day:
Fog
Drove off the cliff. Car found at bottom.
“Certain it was an accident,” Officer Tom Johnson, Wharton police.
Chester Dare, father. Chamomile Dare, daughter. “Milly.” Both dead.
Milly thrown from car. Not wearing seat belt.
Staff isn’t talking. They know more than they’re saying.
Penelope Dare—interview tomorrow.
Follow up with Harriet Baines. Lead housekeeper.
So it was Harriet after all. Now that my memory was jogged a bit, I could see her back then. Jet-black hair pulled into a bun. All-business demeanor. Sensible shoes. I went back to my reading:
Questions to answer:
Where were they going at that hour?
Why did they set out in the fog and not wait for it to lift? Train to catch? Plane?
Did Chester Dare have enemies?
What is the condition of the brakes in the car?
