Chelsea had to pass by his place on four successive nights before she finally saw signs of life there. She pulled into the dirt drive beside the Kawasaki and went to the door. It was a while before he answered, and then his expression was guarded.
“Hi,” she said. “How’re you doin’?”
He glanced out at the Pathfinder, then scanned the front yard as though he expected her to have backup along. When he realized she was alone, he grew even more wary. “How come you’re here?”
“I want to talk.”
“About what?”
“Work, for one thing. You’ve been great at the quarry since Judd was hurt. Thank you for that.”
“He know you’re here?”
“Judd? No.”
“I thought you were spending all your time over there.”
She shook her head. “No reason to. He thinks he’s all better.” In fact she had stopped by his house each day since the accident. Sometimes she saw Judd, sometimes she didn’t. “The fact is that he can’t do what he was doing before. He doesn’t have full mobility of the shoulder, and he won’t for a while, but God forbid he should admit it.” She had spent more than her share of time at the guardrail watching from above while he directed the men. “If he sees something that needs doing, he tries. He hasn’t seen much. You’ve been one step ahead of him. I appreciate that.”
Hunter looked unimpressed. He sucked in a corner of his mouth and curved his hand around the door. It occurred to her that he might not be alone.
She tried to look beyond him, but he was a solid black figure blocking her view. “Is someone here?”
“No.”
“Can I come in?”
“That might not be wise.”
“Why not?”
“People will see your car here. You’ve got reputation trouble enough without me.”
Chelsea didn’t give a damn about her reputation. The look she gave him told him that, seconds before she stepped past him into his house. “Close the door. It’s cold out there.”
She heard the door close behind her, but her attention was riveted to what was before her. “Wow,” she said, “what a surprise!” From the outside the house looked like every other one on the street, and though she hadn’t seen the insides of the others, she doubted they were like this. What should have been a cluster of postage-stamp rooms was one large, open space straight to the roof, with a brick fireplace glowing warmly in the center. “Did you do this?” She sensed his handiwork in the finish of the walls, the rafters, the diagonal planks on the floor.
“I’m the only one crazy enough to.”
“It’s not crazy. It’s great.”
“I didn’t do it because it was great. I did it because I was locked up in tiny spaces when I was a kid. I can’t stand being confined.”
She looked back at him. As had happened once before, she was as shocked by what he’d said as by the fact that he’d said it. He opened to her. She didn’t know why, any more than she knew why she identified with him. But she did. That was probably why she’d come.
“I can’t stand being touched, either,” he warned, “so if you’re here because Judd won’t have you and you need someone, forget it. I’m not interested.”
She felt a quick anger. “Come off it, Hunter. I’m not here for that, and you know it. If there was a sexual attraction between us, we’d have done something about it long before this, but there’s nothing. On either side.”
He didn’t argue.
She dropped her coat on a chair and continued her study of the room. The furniture was minimal and modern, ironically like much of what she’d left behind in Baltimore, except all in a lightly lacquered pine. In the left rear corner was the kitchen, in the right rear a large platform bed. The rest was an open space dominated by a long sofa—cushions set in a straight pine frame—and an elaborate stereo system. Its headphones were dangling off the edge of the sofa, emitting a distant sound, which explained why he hadn’t heard her knock at first. The stereo system was state of the art and had an extensive compact disc collection, mostly classical, to match. She would have liked to spend a day with it.
Returning her attention to the room, she said, “You made the furniture yourself, didn’t you?”
He had his hands tucked under his arms. “It was something to do.”
“It’s beautiful. You’re very talented. You could do this for a living and be successful at it.” She bent over to touch one of the cushions. “Who made these?”
“A woman.”
“Someone from the Notch?”
After a pause he said, “Actually, she lives about forty miles up the road. I picked her up in a bar, slept with her, then saw her work. She sews better than she screws.”
“Maybe she says the same about you,” Chelsea said, and sat right down on the sofa. She crossed one knee over the other, folded her hands in her lap, and turned a pleasant smile his way.
He stared at her, glanced behind him curiously, then faced her again. “Did we have an appointment?”
“Do we need one? You’ve seen me throw up. You’ve seen me faint. Don’t worry. I won’t give birth to my baby on your sofa. I just want to talk.”
“About your barn?”
“For starters.”
“What do you mean, for starters? What else is there to talk about?”
“We always seem to find things, you and I.”
“Yeah, and one of us always ends up pissed off.”
“You. That’s why I’m here. You can’t walk out of your own home.”
“Wanna bet?”
“Come on, Hunter. I’m lonesome. I want to talk. Please, sit down?”
He looked at the headphones dangling over the edge of the sofa. After a minute he crossed to the stereo receiver, turned it off, then went on to the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator. “Want a beer?”
“In another four months. Do you have any tea?”
“It’s beer or orange juice.”
“Orange juice, please.”
He brought it to her in a tall glass, then took his bottle of beer by the neck and hunkered down before the fireplace to apply a poker to the logs. “I didn’t torch your barn,” he said in a factual voice. “I still think it would have made a great studio.”
They had argued about that during the renovation of Boulderbrook, but Chelsea had insisted on using one of the bedrooms. She wanted to be able to work in the middle of the night without going outside. Hunter, on the other hand, had broader notions. Given his earlier comment about being locked in small rooms, she could understand why.
“Who do you think did it?”
“Beats me,” he said as he poked at the logs.
“Could it have started by itself?”
“Only if it was hot as hell and dry as the Sahara, neither of which it’s been around here, and even then you’d probably need a bolt of lightning for a starter.”
Chelsea sighed. That was pretty much what Judd had said. “Nolan’s been combing through trying to find incriminating evidence, but there’s nothing.”
Having arranged the smoldering logs to his satisfaction, Hunter took a new one from the nearby basket and deftly laid it on top. “All you need is gasoline and a match. The barn was tinder.” Smoke immediately curled around the log he’d added.
“People in town think you did it.”
“That figures.”
“Because of the other fires?”
He bowed his head. She couldn’t see what he was doing. Then he stood, took a swig of the beer, put a hand on his hip. He looked down at the fire he’d built, which was dancing with flames. Quietly and without turning, he said, “Not because of them. I didn’t have anything to do with them, either. But I did set one fire. It was a long time ago.” He continued to stare at the burning logs until one crackled loudly and sparked. Then he sank down on the chair on the far side of the sofa, took another drink, and looked straight at Chelsea.
“I was nine years old and having nightmares. I thought that if
I burned it down, they’d end.”
She swallowed. “Burned what down?”
“The shack where I was born.” His eyes remained directed her way, but they had gone distant. “I spent the first five years of my life there. When she went out, she locked me in the closet. She told me that the bad things wouldn’t get me if I was quiet, and that if I made any noise at all until she opened the door again, I’d be eaten alive.”
“My God,” Chelsea cried. She remembered being terrified of being eaten by the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” but she’d had Abby to talk her to sleep. “Why did she do that?”
“She wanted to make sure that if anyone came while she was gone, I wouldn’t say a word. I was a secret. No one knew I existed. She wanted to keep it that way.”
“But why?”
“So I wouldn’t be taken away. I was all she had. She loved me, she said. I was her whole world. Besides, she prided herself on fooling the town. They all thought she’d given me away at birth.”
So she’d kept him locked up. Chelsea couldn’t imagine anything so sick. She must have had a look of horror on her face, because Hunter said quickly, “I didn’t hate her. Don’t get me wrong. She never hit me. She never yelled. Within that very confined world, she gave me everything she could. She cooked my meals and made my clothes. She brought books home from the library and taught me how to read. She bought cookies and cakes at the bakery. She bought fuzzy stuff at the store and made me a jacket. She just didn’t let me go anywhere in it.”
“Did you want to?” Chelsea asked because it was possible that what he didn’t know about, he didn’t miss.
“I wanted to all the time. The books were about kids being with kids. I wanted to be like them. I wanted friends. I wanted to see a man. I even wanted to go to school. I used to ask her all the time. Beg her. She responded by trying to be that much more to me—playmate, father, teacher.” He drew in a deep breath. His mouth was clamped shut, his eyes filled with remembered anguish, until the pressure became too great and the words spilled out. “She used to hug me and hug me and tell me everything would be all right, that I’d be happy, that she’d never ever leave me, and I felt like jumping out of my skin.” He drew in another deep breath, as though to separate himself from the past, but he couldn’t. “I escaped sometimes.”
“Where did you go?” Chelsea asked softly.
He looked at his hands, then at the beer bottle, then at her. “Boulderbrook.”
“The farmhouse?” she asked in surprise.
“It was abandoned. I used to play there.”
“Was that when you first heard the voices?”
“They were my friends.”
Chelsea caught in a breath. His friends. His imaginary friends. She wanted to cry.
Hunter stared broodingly at the fire. “She used to be furious when she found me. She’d lock me in the closet then and leave me there for a good long time. I was terrified.”
“Oh, Hunter.” It was all she could do not to go to him.
He turned to her. “I don’t want your pity. That’s not why I’m telling you this. I just want you to know why I burned down the shack. It stood for everything my mother had done to me. I thought that if it was gone, my past would be gone and I’d be more like everyone else.”
It struck Chelsea then that along with the clear, clean lines of his furnishings went little of a personal nature. There were no photographs, no keepsakes. She wondered if they’d burned down, too, or if they’d ever existed.
“Was that what you wanted most—to be like everyone else?”
“For a while. Because I felt so different from the others. By the time I was a teenager, that didn’t matter. I wanted my own identity, so I went my own way.” With barely a breath he said, “P.S., the shack I burned was on Boulderbrook land.”
“Boulderbrook land? But I thought Katie Love lived in Cutters Corner.”
“When she was with her husband, she did. Then he left town to go looking for an easier life.”
“Why didn’t she go with him?”
“She didn’t like him.”
“She told you that?” What would a young child understand of affairs of the heart, much less the body?
“She didn’t tell me. She used to pace the shack, ranting and raving to no one in particular. It wasn’t until years later that some of the things she said made sense to me.”
He lapsed into silence. Setting down his beer, he went to the fireplace and poked at the logs. When he was done, he sat on the floor with his back to her. “Anyway, she had been wanting to get out of the Corner for a while. She was different from the other women there. She wanted to move up in the world. She was a quilter.”
“So Margaret told me.”
He flexed one shoulder. When it settled back into place, his whole back seemed stiffer. “Did Margaret tell you what they did to her?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, I’ll tell you more,” he said, and turned only enough to hold Chelsea’s eye. “My mother was an artist. She had real talent. She used to support us by making signs for local shopkeepers, but that wasn’t what she was best at. She had a feel for color and design that was totally instinctive, more so than any of the other women in town. She taught herself to quilt by buying quilts and taking them apart. She’d go into the fabric store in town, buy remnants for pennies, and produce beautiful things. It occurred to the local ladies that she could do them some good, so they invited her to join them. They used her designs to make some of the best quilts they’d ever produced. She wasn’t one of them exactly, but they let her think she was. So when her husband left, she moved out of the Corner. She didn’t have much money, but the shack was cheap, and it was on Boulderbrook land. The way she saw it, that was the next best thing to living in the farmhouse.”
Pushing himself to his feet, he went to the window, put an elbow on the jamb for a minute, then took it off and returned to the fireplace, where he stood facing the flames. “When she got pregnant, the ladies went berserk. They accused their husbands. They accused their brothers. They accused traveling salesmen. But Katie Love wasn’t saying who the father was, so in the end they could only accuse her.” He walked back to the window and stood staring out into the dark. “She became a pariah. She was disinvited to tea, disinvited to library luncheons, disinvited to the Quilters Guild. They wouldn’t sell her butternut squash bread at church fairs. They wouldn’t give her the time of day. She’d burned her bridges in the Corner and was treated like a leper in town, so she spent her time alone. She went mad. That’s what they did to her.”
Chelsea couldn’t keep her distance any longer. Leaving the sofa, she went to him. She didn’t touch, just stood close. “They were wrong.”
“Wrong or not doesn’t matter in this town,” he said with the bitterness she’d heard so often from him. “They do what they want. That’s why you’d better rethink having your baby here. They’ll make you miserable.”
“I won’t let them.”
“I’m telling you, they will.”
“I’ll fight.”
He looked down his shoulder at her. “Why in hell would you bother? You have a life somewhere else. You have a family somewhere else.”
“But I like it here. I want to have my baby here.”
“You’re as nuts as she was,” he scoffed, and walked off. He lifted the bottle of beer from the floor and put it to his mouth. Tipping it back, he swallowed once, twice, three times.
“Do you think it’s Oliver?”
He didn’t pretend not to know what she meant. “Yeah, I think it’s Oliver. I think most of the town thinks it, too. It had to be someone powerful. Otherwise why would they have cared?” He turned to her with a look of frustration. “He bought me this place. Gave it to me when I graduated from the college that he sent me to. Would he have done either of those things if he wasn’t my father?”
Chelsea wanted to think he might have, that he was the very charitable man Margaret so righteously claimed, but in her heart
she didn’t believe it. She didn’t think Margaret believed it, either, in her heart. There was too much venom on her tongue.
Hunter put his head back and studied the rafters before turning to Chelsea. “I want him to admit that he’s my father. Is that so much to ask? But he won’t. He prides himself on his position in town. And then there’s his family. They’ll scream bloody murder. All except Donna. I think Donna knows.”
“She’s never said anything to me.”
“Because of Margaret. Margaret is the bottom line. She’s the fragile one in the family.”
“Margaret? Fragile?”
“She had a breakdown when Donna lost her hearing. Since then Oliver won’t do anything to displease her. Telling the world that I’m his son will displease her.”
“Why does he have to tell the world? Why can’t he just tell you?”
“Go ask him. And while you’re at it, ask him why he did what he did to my mother. He owed her more than she got. I stick around here like a thorn in his side to remind him of that.”
“But how can you live with the anger?”
“I’ve lived with it so long, the question now is whether I can live without it.”
“That’s sad, Hunter,” Chelsea said.
“Not sad. I’m doing okay. My life hasn’t been all tragic. There were some bright spots when I was little.”
“Like?”
He popped the empty beer bottle up and down in his palm. After a minute he went into the kitchen and put the bottle in the sink, and all the while Chelsea watched, wanting to know what he meant. He continued on to a chest at the foot of the bed. It was of the same lacquered pine, with the same clean lines as the rest of the furniture. After raising the lid, he shifted things around inside until he came up with a small bundle. He brought it to Chelsea.
“Like I said, she was talented. We used to play a game, make up our own story, kind of. She used to make sketches of a town, first a church, then a post office, then a library, then a general store. Then we made up people—children, usually—and had them go through little adventures.”
He offered her the bundle. It was a collection of drawings held together by a thin blue ribbon that might have easily come from one of Katie Love’s quilts. Chelsea took the bundle. She looked up at Hunter.
The Passions of Chelsea Kane Page 34
