Room at Heron's Inn

by Ginger Chambers

  MINUTES LATER, ROBIN slid her suitcases into the trunk of her car and closed the lid. As she settled behind the wheel, she saw David standing at the edge of the kitchen garden. He hesitated, as if of two minds whether to approach her. Finally he made a decision.

  Unshed tears blurred Robin’s eyes as she watched him come nearer—tall, very thin, very young, very dear. She brushed the moisture from her lashes.

  He stopped at the driver’s door and bent to look at her. “So, you’re just going to leave,” he said curtly.

  “I’m doing what Eric said to do.”

  “And not even say goodbye,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken.

  “I didn’t think you’d want me to.”

  David kicked the dirt. “That was a pretty lousy thing to do!”

  “Not saying goodbye?” Robin asked facetiously.

  Her pathetic attempt to lighten the atmosphere between them failed miserably. His pale blue eyes speared her as he corrected, “Not telling us who you are. What else did you forget to mention? You did a pretty good job on me. Are you a shrink or something?”

  “A psychiatrist? Me?” she responded, genuinely surprised.

  He narrowed his eyes, measuring the truth of her words. “I guess not,” he murmured after a moment.

  “David, I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, especially you. I thought—I thought, if I came here—”

  “Was it all some kind of joke to you? To see how gullible we are?”

  “No!”

  “To get us to trust you? To get us to tell you things?”

  “No! David, I—”

  “To get us to love you?”

  Robin closed her eyes, because they’d suddenly become flooded with tears again. Moisture slipped from the edges. She shook her head. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen! All I wanted was to meet you all, to see if there was anything I could do to help.”

  David laughed shortly. “And you found plenty of room for that, didn’t you?” He stepped back. “Oh, go on! Go back to wherever it is you come from. Go back to pretending that we don’t exist.”

  “David, please. Listen to me for a minute. It wasn’t like that. I’m not like that.” She took a bracing breath. “Don’t…don’t give up on yourself again. You have so much to contribute. A good mind. A fine spirit. If you want to be a chef, be one! Don’t let anyone stop you. Not even me.”

  He shook his head, saying quietly, “Somehow that just doesn’t play the same anymore.” Then he gave her a long last look and turned back toward the garden.

  Robin watched him move away with a feeling of powerlessness. There were so many things she wanted to say. But would he value any of them? She had abused his trust.

  “David!” she tried again, but he kept walking.

  Her grip on the steering wheel was like a lifeline. She didn’t want to leave them like this. But she had lost all power, all influence. Like a disgraced member of an ancient tribal society, she was being cast out.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ERIC HEARD THE CAR START and moments later pull away. But he didn’t look. He wouldn’t allow himself, because he might try to stop her.

  “One of us will have to make dinner tonight,” he said to the room at large. Samantha and Allison sat silently on the camel-colored couch. “Tomorrow I’ll place another ad. It shouldn’t be too long before someone suitable answers.”

  “You were wrong to send her away, Eric,” Allison said.

  “I was left with no other choice.”

  “She was going to leave tonight anyway,” Samantha said, surprising both him and Allison.

  “How do you know that?” Allison asked.

  “She told me.”

  Eric laughed hollowly. “And you believed her?”

  “I believed her. Also, she had her cases packed. A person doesn’t do that without planning to use them.”

  After a moment spent digesting this information, Eric asked, “Is that supposed to make a difference?”

  “It should tell you that she didn’t mean for this to happen,” Samantha said in her defense.

  “Or that she thought she was about to get caught!” Eric contradicted brusquely.

  “How can you say that?” Samantha demanded.

  “It’s easy,” he answered.

  From the corner of his eye, Eric saw Allison touch Samantha’s arm and give a tiny shake of her head. He turned on her. “And don’t try to tell me I didn’t have good reason! She lied to us, to all of us!”

  “I still feel your actions were extreme,” Allison retorted. “Look what she’d just done for Gwen and Colin.”

  “Look what she did for us all those years ago,” Eric countered.

  “We can’t change the past, Eric,” Samantha broke in.

  He jerked to his feet. “I’m not going to listen to this. I did what I felt was right.”

  “But if you love her…”

  Samantha’s unfinished sentence rang in Eric’s ears as he walked to his room and slammed the door. To hear his sisters talk, he was the one in the wrong. Not her. Not Robin…Roberta…Robin. He couldn’t call her anything else.

  He started to pace. She’d played him for a fool from the very beginning. Then slowly, insidiously, she’d wormed her way into his family, uncaring of how they would feel when the truth eventually came out. And it had to come out. Did she plan some kind of grand denouement? An announcement, with all of them in attendance? Did she think that just because she’d suckered them into accepting her, into loving her, that it could make up for the past?

  He sat down at his desk and dragged over a stack of paperwork. At the end of an hour, he’d reduced the stack considerably. But he had done nothing to reduce the pain in his heart.

  ERIC TRIED TO GO ON. He tried to forget her. But she had become too much a part of their existence. Everywhere he looked there were reminders of her.

  After Allison and the twins went back to Palo Alto at the end of their holiday, he interviewed four people for the job of cook. Three were awful, one he hired. A man this time, who had experience as a short-order cook. Eric checked his references with meticulous care.

  Barbara and Timothy came back from their honeymoon and were shocked to hear of Robin’s duplicity. Of course, Barbara sided with her sisters. He was the one in the wrong.

  Benjamin heard the story out, uttered a contemplative “Hmm” and said he’d try to be up the next weekend, only he didn’t make it.

  David reacted in characteristic fashion, by keeping his thoughts and emotions to himself. But in David, Eric knew that he had an ally. The boy had been hurt. He didn’t try to make excuses for her behavior.

  Possibly because of their mutual feeling of betrayal, relations between himself and David continued to improve, though there was still a lot of circling and wariness.

  At the three-week point, late one night, David sought him out. Eric sat at his desk, again doing paperwork—work that had never before received quite so much dedication. David hitched a seat a short distance from Eric’s elbow and said, “I’ve been thinking about something.”

  Eric leaned back and looked at him. “What?”

  “I want to learn to be a chef.”

  Strong memories of Robin stormed across Eric’s senses. His stomach tightened. “Why?” he asked simply, bracing himself for the answer. Robin’s name hadn’t been spoken in a number of days.

  “Because…I enjoy working with food. I think I could be good at it.”

  Eric shifted position in his chair. “Is that enough of a reason?” he asked.

  David hesitated, then he said, “Robin says it is.”

  “You’ve been talking to her?” Eric asked tautly.

  “When she was here. Not since. And before she left, she told me I should do it, if that was what I wanted. And I think it is.”

  Eric frowned. “How can you give credence to anything she said?”

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking about.” A newfound maturity had started to build in his youngest brother’s ey
es. A new seriousness. “I think maybe we’ve been wrong about her.”

  Eric could stand it no more. He lurched from his chair, shaking his head. “Not you, too! She lied to us, David. Lied to us. She knew how we felt.”

  “She knew how you felt.”

  “Why did she give us a false name? Why did she pretend that she didn’t know anything about us, when she knew almost as much as we know ourselves?”

  “That’s one of the things that’s been bothering me,” David said. “What did she have to gain? I can’t see anything.”

  “To satisfy her morbid curiosity, that’s what! Some people are like that, Davey. They like to go to terrible house fires. They like to watch horrible wrecks. That’s the way she is.”

  David shook his head. “No, I don’t believe that.”

  “She’s been a curse on this family from the very beginning.”

  “That’s another thing,” David said, undeterred. “You told me before that it’s not possible for a two-year-old to be responsible for someone’s death. If either you or I or Robin had died trying to rescue the twins, would they be responsible? They’re ten years old, just a little younger than Robin was when Dad died rescuing her. They were where they shouldn’t have been, doing something they shouldn’t have been doing. How is that different from her?”

  “It’s different, okay?”

  “You’re being unreasonable, and that’s not like you, Eric.”

  “How do you know what’s ‘like me’?” Eric demanded, striking out in his lonely pain. “Up to now, you haven’t cared very much.”

  “Robin helped me to see that I was wrong.”

  “Robin! Robin!” Eric shouted in frustration.

  David stood up. “If I were you, I’d do some hard thinking. If I loved someone as much as you obviously love her, I hope I’d be able to get past my own bullheadedness and tell her that I do.”

  “I’m not bullheaded.”

  David smiled slowly. “You’re the king of bullheaded. Go find her. Talk to her. See what she has to say. So far, you’re the one who’s done all the talking.”

  Eric’s fists worked at his sides. “You’re still pretty insolent, aren’t you, kid?” he said tightly. Then he released all the tension that had built up in his body. “And you’ve also turned out to be pretty smart.”

  “You’ll take my advice?”

  “Maybe,” Eric replied noncommittally. But they both knew that he would.

  As David passed by him on his way to the door, he tapped him on the shoulder for good luck.

  ROBIN FITTED THE KEY into the lock of her apartment door. But before she could turn it, she was aware of someone moving toward her from beside the tall leafy plant that decorated the landing. Her first instinct was to cry out. Her next reaction, upon recognition of the person, was relief, which instantly turned to alarm. Eric!

  She turned to guard her door, as if he were an unwelcome intruder. “What do you want? How did you find me?” she charged. She couldn’t let him see how shattered she felt.

  “May I come in?” he asked quietly.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” she replied.

  He looked so dear to her, so true to the picture in her mind’s eye—the hair, the eyes, the way he smiled. He smiled ever so slightly now.

  “I suppose we could conduct our business out here on the landing, but it is rather late.”

  “Why are you here?” she asked again.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “I thought you’d already said all you have to say.”

  “Obviously not. Otherwise, why would I be here?”

  “Maybe I don’t want to listen.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “Would you believe me if I said it was?”

  “That’s what I’d like to talk to you about.”

  Robin gave her head a short, angry shake. But she wasn’t really angry. It was just a surface emotion to cover all the other, more complex emotions that took turns surging through her.

  “I’ll give you ten minutes,” she said. Then with steady fingers that belied her inner turmoil, she turned the key in the lock and swept open the door.

  Never in Robin’s wildest dreams since her dejected return had she expected to see Eric Marshall inside her apartment. He made no attempt to hide his curiosity as she clicked on a switch and a subtle lighting system sprang to life. He looked around at the furnishings, at the evidence of her sophisticated taste. “Very nice,” he murmured.

  “The clock is ticking,” she reminded him.

  “A little more than a part-time student, part-time cook can afford.”

  She tapped a foot. She’d gone back to her old job at Le Jardin after learning that Marla and Jean-Pierre had yet to hire a replacement. With the resumption of her work there, she’d returned to her accustomed schedule of going in at two or three in the afternoon and coming home close to midnight. Yet her heart wasn’t in it. It wasn’t the same.

  His smile broadened, then he took a seat on her couch and patted the cushion at his side.

  She crossed her arms, pointedly waiting.

  “I found you,” he said, “after I talked with Benjamin. He gave me the name of the restaurant you told him, as well as the name of the owner. And the owner—Simon—gave me your address.”

  “He wouldn’t do that! Not so easily.”

  “Did I say it was easy?”

  Robin wondered what he had told Simon. “You shouldn’t have done that. He might worry.”

  “An old boyfriend of yours?” he asked.

  “No. A friend, that’s all.”

  Eric made no comment.

  “That’s still not telling me what you want,” she stated.

  “You,” he said very quietly. She could easily have missed it.

  Her knees wobbled. “Stop playing games with me,” she demanded.

  He sat forward. “This is about as far from a game as I can get. I was wrong when I told you to leave.”

  “Have you had a hard time finding someone else to cook for you?”

  “No, a very competent man named Henry is filling in for us now.”

  He’d replaced her so easily! “Then why—”

  “I was wrong,” he said firmly, “when I blamed you for causing our father’s death.”

  Robin sat down in the chair closest to her, looking blankly at Eric. He reached for her hand and she didn’t pull it away, because, at the moment, she was utterly incapable of doing so.

  “I thought about it—David’s advice, by the way—and I decided that all those years I blamed you, it wasn’t your fault. You were a child. You were no more to blame than Gwen and Colin.”

  It sounded good, but how deeply did the newfound feeling run? Robin withdrew her hand, clutching it to the other.

  “People tried to tell me that before,” he continued, “but I wasn’t prepared to listen. I could only see my point of view. But when I dived into the water after Colin and Teddy, I realized I’d been wrong to be angry with my father, too. Yes, he had family responsibilities. But he also had a responsibility to the girl—to you. He acted instinctively, just as I did. Just as you did. I doubt if he gave more than a passing thought to us. He saw that you were in danger, and he acted.”

  “You hate me for what happened,” Robin whispered.

  “Not anymore!”

  She shook her head, rejecting what he said. “It goes too deep, Eric. It’s like prejudice. That kind of feeling doesn’t change overnight.”

  “It’s been a lot of nights,” he said softly.

  Robin continued to shake her head. He slipped off the couch to kneel before her, covering her hands with both of his. “Robin,” he said huskily, “I love you. Finding out who you are…has been difficult. But it doesn’t make any difference to me now. I don’t care if you were playing where you shouldn’t have been—”

  She stood up abruptly, breaking contact. “But I wasn’t where I shouldn’t have been. I was on the beach…walking! Looking for shells! Looking for s
and dollars! I didn’t do anything wrong!”

  “Then you’re all the less to blame!”

  “No!” She drew a trembling breath. “This isn’t going to work, Eric. This is exactly what I faced when I lived at Heron’s Inn. If I told you who I was, you’d hate me. If I didn’t tell you who I was, you’d hate me when you found out. It’s true! I do love you. I love you more than—no! Don’t touch me.” She skittered away from his reach.

  Eric used the chair to push himself to his feet. “I don’t understand. If I love you, if you love me…”

  “The past is what’s the matter, Eric.”

  “Damn the past!”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  He ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “So what are we going to do? Give up? Live apart forever?”

  Tears trembled on her lashes. “I don’t know. I just know that at this moment, it isn’t right. The past is too…close.”

  “This is crazy!”

  “Your ten minutes are up.”

  He looked at her as if she’d hit him. “You can’t expect me to leave with everything so unsettled.”

  “I’m asking you to leave. Please.”

  “When can I see you again?” he murmured tautly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “May I call you?”

  “No.”

  His lips were tight, his body stiff as he moved to the front door. He opened it, turned to look at her, then he was gone.

  Robin stayed very still. She didn’t move until a siren sounded in the distance. Then she went to the computer and inserted the CD.

  She settled in the chair and clicked the appropriate buttons. There she was, on the beach, in shock, afraid. There he was, Martin Marshall, unchanged over the years. When the video switched to the Marshall children, this time Robin was prepared. She muted the sound.

  She didn’t hear Benjamin cry.

  THE CALL CAME ON A Sunday. From David. Robin greeted him warmly. She was glad that he wanted to make contact.