by Teresa Hill
"If there was a custody agreement, I'm not aware of it. The only thing I handled was the will and your father's estate."
"But... you could check?"
"Of course. I'll do anything I can to make this easier for you, my dear."
"Thank you," she said, so many questions running through her head. Allie settled on one. "All this time... My mother... she wouldn't come here?"
"No," he said simply.
"Why not?"
"I'm sorry. I don't know," he said. "The first time I called your house when I asked for Mrs. John Bennett, she hung up on me. I called back and got an answering machine. The next day the number had been disconnected."
Allie remembered her mother abruptly having the phone number changed. She'd claimed she was getting crank calls.
"I wrote letters," Mr. Webster continued. "She never replied. I finally flew to Connecticut, thought she'd throw me out of her house. But she must have seen that I wouldn't give up, because we came to an agreement. She didn't want anything to do with the house. I offered to have it sold. She said she'd think about it. I told her there was some money from your father's estate. She didn't want it. So I paid taxes on the house, had somebody cut the grass, that sort of thing. I kept your mother informed all along. She never responded."
Allie could hardly believe it. All that time her mother had known.
"For what it's worth," Mr. Webster said, "I always liked your father. And he missed you, Allie. I could see it in his face whenever he talked about you and your mother. He missed you both."
"My mother said he didn't want to have anything to do with us," Allie whispered.
"I scarcely knew your mother. I couldn't say what might have given her that idea. But I knew your father. He missed you."
Allie thanked him for all his help. Once he left, she stood with her back pressed against the door, the house spread out before her like a mystery to solve. The first piece of the puzzle only left her with more questions.
Allie shouldn't have given in to her mother's wishes. She should have demanded answers years ago, no matter how much it upset her mother.
How could she have let her mother slip away without telling her anything? Allie knew, of course, but that didn't make it any easier to accept. She'd done it by refusing to accept that her mother was so close to dying. Janet Bennett had been diagnosed with breast cancer and seemed to respond well to chemotherapy. But she'd grown weak, her body worn down by the treatments. She needed the kind of care that could only be provided by someone with her day and night. As much as Allie hated to give up the independence she'd gained over the years, she quit her job and moved back into her mother's house.
In the end, it was nothing but a cold, which turned into pneumonia, that sent her mother slipping into a coma and dying. For so long, Allie had longed to be free of her mother, a master manipulator. Until she was free, and it didn't feel like freedom anymore. It simply felt like being left all alone.
She'd been sorting through her mother's things one day when she started finding letters. Not just the ones from Mr. Webster. There was the letter Allie wrote her father that had never been mailed. Stamped and addressed in her childish scrawl but never mailed. She'd found it in a box tucked into the corner of a drawer by her mother, who seldom threw anything away.
Allie had written many such letters, full of love and longing and sadness, and later, shortly before she'd simply given up, letters full of adolescent rage. Her father had never answered her. Her mother's face fell every time Allie asked about him, every time she asked her mother to send off another letter. She'd stopped writing around the time she was twelve. She'd started to believe her mother, who was all she had left then, and she'd never imagined her mother might not have even mailed those letters.
But it was the last letter she found that had sent her rushing back here.
It had arrived at their house in Connecticut after her mother's death, forwarded by Mr. Webster from their old address in Kentucky, from a man named Jason Getty, who lived in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. He wrote rather cryptically that he was trying to contact the parents of Megan Bennett, who had been killed in a car accident in Georgia nearly fifteen years ago. He had questions about the incident he hoped they could answer, and he might have information for them as well. He suggested they might help each other.
Allie tried to tell herself it really didn't matter, not after fifteen years. Her sister was dead and buried. Nothing could bring her back. The letter was probably someone's idea of a sick joke. But she simply hadn't been able to leave it alone.
There was indeed a man named Jason Getty at that address in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a forty-three-year-old stockbroker, with a wife and three children, a man who claimed he'd never heard of Megan Bennett or her mother and knew nothing about a fifteen-year-old accident. He couldn't imagine why anyone would think he would, and seemed genuinely baffled by the whole situation.
Allie had the man checked out by a private detective. He was well respected in his job and his personal life, paid his bills on time, had never been arrested, seldom missed being in church on Sunday. As far as they could tell, he'd never been to Dublin, Kentucky, or to the town in Georgia where Megan died.
He'd pointed out, quite reasonably, that anyone could use any return address they wanted on an envelope, and if the letter writer truly wanted answers about her sister's death, he wouldn't have Megan's family writing back to a false address. All of that was true. But why would anyone write such a letter in the first place all this time? Why use Jason Getty's address? Had they simply picked it from the phone book?
It had been so odd, and it had made Allie think. She really didn't know much about how her sister died, didn't even know why her sister ran away. She didn't know why her family fell apart all those years ago. It was her mother's way, of course. To avoid all things unpleasant, to pretend they didn't exist, to hope they might go away. Well, none of Allie's questions had ever disappeared. They'd always been there, hovering on the edges of her mind. And she'd decided it was time to stop wondering, time to go after the answers for herself.
She just hadn't realized how hard it would be to come here after all these years. Even this morning, at the airport, her bags packed, her plane ticket in her hand, she'd had the ridiculous urge to get up and walk away. The past might tease at her mind, like the half-forgotten lyrics of an old, familiar song. It might haunt her like a dream at times, a nightmare at others. But she'd lived with it for so long, the questions, the uncertainties, the odd sense of yearning for something she didn't even understand. It had taken all of her resolve simply to board the flight.
But now that she was here, she made a solemn promise to herself. No matter what happened, she wasn't leaving until she found out the truth. About her father, her sister, her life. She had to have those answers before she could ever really put this behind her and start fresh.
Which meant she had no business standing here with her back pressed against the front door as if she meant to escape at the first opportunity.
Outside, she heard the ominous roll of thunder, felt electricity in the air. At any moment it would come together in a blinding bolt of lightning. More than likely, she'd lose power again before the night was over. Interminable hours of darkness stretched before her.
It was that thought which finally propelled her through the first floor, past the graceful, swirling lines of the grand staircase in the front hall, through the living room—the furniture like ghostly mounds under fading white cloths—to the kitchen in back. In the walk-in pantry, she rummaged through the cabinets until she found several large candles and some matches. She lit three candles all around the kitchen, then had the oddest feeling of the past closing in on her, smothering her.
She'd been in this room so often, and the memories seemed to come rushing back, memories she thought she'd lost completely in the intervening years. Allie turned her head and could have sworn she saw...
Herself?
She blinked twice. The image before her remained stub
bornly the same. For a moment, it was as if someone had turned one of the pages of time, and she was back in this room, fifteen years ago. Like she was two people—herself, as a grown-up, watching herself, as a child.
She sat on a high stool in the corner of the kitchen, using the wrapper from a stick of butter to give a baking pan a thin coat of butter, something she'd done a hundred times. Her mother never threw away a butter wrapper. She folded them neatly into rectangles and stored them on the shelf on the refrigerator door that held the butter dish. When it came time to bake, Allie got out one for each baking pan. There was just enough butter left on the wrapper to grease a pan.
"Almost done, dear?"
Allie whirled around. There was her mother, clad in a pristine white apron her hair without a speck of gray, her face not nearly as sad. She walked over to little Allie and dumped a quarter cup of flour into the pan. Allie worked it around the bottom and the sides, so nothing they baked would stick, and her mother smiled at her. There had been times when her mother smiled beautifully, when she'd been happy, as well. Allie had forgotten that.
"Can I lick the bowl?" little Allie said, looking unbelievably young and happy and innocent.
Allie knew why. This had been before.
Their lives together were inexorably separated into before and after.
Before Megan ran away, little Allie had been happy, unafraid, thinking life would go on just like that, that nothing would ever change.
Blinking to clear her eyes, the grown-up Allie now saw nothing but the flickering of candlelight in the corner where they'd been. A chill ran down her spine. Her own voice—hers as a child—seemed to echo in the room, the sound filtering through the house, like water flowing down a gently moving stream, until it was gone and silence remained.
"Oh, God," Allie whispered. Obviously, she was in dire need of a decent night's sleep and some food. Her stomach had twisted itself into knots, and she had a bad case of the shakes, which meant her blood sugar level was crashing. She always got the shakes when she waited too long to eat.
Allie turned on the stove, put the casserole inside, and set the timer. Coffee sounded good, too, and the caffeine didn't worry her in the least. She had no prayer of sleeping well tonight. She made a pot, stood there in the kitchen waiting for it to brew, finding her gaze darting this way and that at every little creak, every whine of the wind.
It didn't matter what happened here—what she thought she saw—she was staying. If the house didn't hold the answers she sought, the townspeople likely did. This was the kind of place where people were born, lived out their whole lives, and died. She'd find people who knew her father, remembered her mother and her sister. She'd ask her questions, have her answers, no matter how painful.
She was still standing there a moment later when the wind started screaming. Even though she was expecting it, she still gave a start when the thunder finally sounded and the lights flickered and died.
She was just starting to calm down a little when she heard another sound. Someone was knocking on the door. Her heart gave another painful lurch, thinking of that eerie vision of herself and her mother in the kitchen. But the noise persisted, and Allie hurried to the front door.
Without even looking to see who it was, she flung open the door, forgetting all about the candle in her hand. The wind came at her in a rush, the light dying abruptly. Lightning crashed around them, for a second providing dramatic backlighting for the man. She'd thought Mr. Webster might have returned for some reason, but this man was much younger, taller, broader through the shoulder, darkly handsome, and he looked as surprised to see her as she was to see him.
"Oh, my God," he said softly. "Megan?"
Chapter 2
A bit of light flared between them—from a cigarette lighter, she realized—and Allie gaped up at the tall, dark stranger. He reached for her, and it wasn't until she'd likely made a fool of herself that she figured out he only meant to light the candle she held in her hand. She was trembling so badly he put his hand over hers to steady it, then took the candle from her. He slipped the lighter into the pocket of his raincoat and carefully shielded the candle flame from the wind as he held it up to her face. The man stared at her for a long moment, as if he couldn't reconcile the image he saw with the truth—that the girl he remembered was dead. Surely he knew that.
"She died," Allie said. "Fifteen years ago, she ran away and never came back."
"I know. That's why I was so startled by the sight of you." He stared at her, his eyes narrowing, recognition dawning yet again. "Allie?"
"Yes." She gave him a tentative smile. "I'm afraid I don't remember you."
"I doubt you would. You were what? Six or seven years old? When you and your mother left town?"
"Nine," she corrected. She'd just finished third grade and had so few specific memories of that time. Struggling with multiplication tables. Watching with curiosity and envy as a few of the older girls started filling out in all the right places and gossiping about boys.
She didn't remember this man.
Just then, the rain came thundering down, running off the sides of the porch and blowing toward them. The man came one step closer. Allie hesitated only a moment. She dreaded the idea of being alone in this house, and he had known her sister.
"Would you like to come inside?" She would never have invited a stranger into her apartment in Connecticut, but this wasn't Connecticut, and he wasn't exactly a stranger.
"Yes, thank you."
As she closed the door she realized there was no other car in the driveway. He must have walked here before the rain started, and she wondered if he was a neighbor.
He set the candle on a small table at the bottom of the stairs, took off his obviously expensive and now very wet raincoat, and hung it over the banister. He was wearing a beautifully tailored suit in a rich brown color, the jacket showing off the wide expanse of his shoulders. He ran a hand through his hair, which was short and dark and wet, then stared at her once again.
"Sorry," he said. "I can't get over how much you look like your sister."
Allie found herself absurdly pleased by the idea, and she liked knowing someone still remembered Megan. Sometimes it had seemed she was the only one. Her mother hadn't so much as mentioned Megan's name in years, and Allie had learned not to, either, as she'd learned not to ask about so many things over the years.
She let the man take his time looking at her as she studied him. He was in his mid-thirties. Tall, trim, with the build of an athlete and an air of self-assurance and power. Money, too. It was evident in the cut and quality of the suit. He looked like a man used to having the best, to getting his way.
A second later, he turned his head a bit, and the light hit his face at just the right angle. Allie saw something there, something she recognized. The shape of his eyes, maybe the hint of gold in the dark green irises or the shape of his lips when they stretched into the barest hint of a smile.
"You used to live next door," she said.
"Still do."
"Stephen Whittaker?"
He nodded. "I'm surprised you remember."
"I'm surprised now that I forgot," Allie said. "Megan talked about you nonstop from as far back as I can remember. She watched from the window of my bedroom when you went out on your first date. Then she cried for days."
He looked surprised, then a bit embarrassed. "Megan was a sweet kid."
Allie nodded. Stephen, if she remembered correctly, had been a few years older than Megan. Allie wondered if he'd always viewed her sister as nothing but a sweet kid, if there had ever been anything more between them.
Allie's memories of the time she'd spent here had always been vague, but strangely, the closer she tried to get to her memories of that summer Megan ran away, the more difficult it was to recall anything at all. Was it merely the fact that she'd been so young? Or something else entirely that made it difficult to remember those last days with her sister?
Allie couldn't say. But Stephen would have b
een in high school or college. He'd always lived next door to her family. His mother did volunteer work at her parents' church, and his father was a judge. Surely she could trust him.
Impulsively, Allie said, "Someone was kind enough to leave me a casserole for dinner. I think it had enough time to heat before the power went out. I also made a pot of fresh coffee. Would you care to stay for dinner?"
"Coffee and a hot meal? In the middle of one of these storms? That's an offer I couldn't possibly refuse."
By the time she served the casserole, Stephen was sitting at the small table by the window in the kitchen, the flames of a half dozen candles dancing around the room. Outside, the thunder and the wind had subsided, but the rain still fell heavily, the wetness glistening against the windowpanes, the atmosphere suddenly intimate.
They ate hungrily. Stephen had her laughing as he came up with news of people and places she remembered. The food was warm and settled her stomach. She'd stopped shaking, was more relaxed than she'd been in weeks.
"I don't remember the last time I enjoyed a meal more," she said.
"Then the man in your life ought to be ashamed of himself."
He grinned as he said it, and there was power in the easy smile that rested so naturally on his lips, in the richness of his voice, the warmth in his tone, the mere hint of flirtation in his sparkling eyes. She couldn't help but admire the elegance infused within every move he made. Everything about the way he carried himself spoke of unfaltering self-confidence and an assurance of his place in the world and with women.
He had to know women found him charming. All women, she suspected. Allie suspected he could get most anything he wanted, simply by asking. She wondered exactly what was happening to her. If it was some trick of the soft, pretty light or her gratitude in having someone to keep her company tonight. Whatever it was, she was enchanted with him. And she found it was easy to sit there in the dark with him. She wasn't nervous or tongue-tied, as she often was around men like him, because she knew him. It seemed she'd always known him, and that at the core, the man was not so different from the boy. He'd always been kind to her and Megan.
