Fences: Smith Mountain Lake Series - Book Three

by Inglath Cooper

  “Let’s take a look,” he says.

  Ann sits wide-eyed for a moment, not quite managing to hide her amazement. “Oh. Well. Absolutely,” she says in the suddenly neutral tone of a good salesperson. She plops her lemonade in a cup holder, starts the car, and we make record time out of town, as if she’s afraid he’ll come to his senses and change his mind.

  The whole way, Ann sings the praises of the old place, not realizing that we both already know everything there is to know about Cross Country.

  And then some.

  24

  Tate

  IT’S OBVIOUS THAT no one has lived at Cross Country for a good while.

  The Realtor navigates the potholes of the farm’s long driveway with a disapproving frown, her hands tight on the steering wheel, as if bracing for an oncoming wave.

  I find it hard to believe the farm has sunk into its current state of neglect. As we approach the house, I notice how the rose bushes out front have grown into one another. There’s at least a week’s worth of weedeating to do along the visible fence lines alone. The pastures are a mass of overgrown grass and weeds.

  Ann stops the car, and the three of us get out. I meet eyes with Jillie, instantly understanding the wounded pride I see in hers. I feel the need to defend the place in the same way I sense that she does, this old matriarch to whom we had once been so attached.

  “Well,” Ann says, clapping her hands together. “Let’s take a look, shall we?” She leads the way up the steps and unlocks the front door. We walk inside the foyer, and I remember what a grand place it had once been. A curved staircase to our right leads to the upstairs of the house.

  The original mirrors lining the staircase wall are still there, as if the idea of moving them had been too much to take on. An inch of dust cakes the windowsills and baseboards. A few pieces of furniture have been left along with the mirrors. They are covered with white sheets.

  From the foyer, we walk into the enormous living room the Masons had so often used for entertaining. I had seen it only once or twice in the years when I’d tagged along after Jillie all over this place. At one end is a fieldstone fireplace wide enough to park a lawn tractor in. The windows at the front of the room are tall and wide, the glass panes wavy and thick. The floors are dark cherry, aged to a patina.

  “It is awfully large for one person,” Ann says, giving me a skeptical look.

  “Would you mind waiting here while Jillie and I look at the rest?” I ask.

  The question throws her, but I suspect she prides herself on being a professional because her expression is neutral when she says, “Of course. I have some e-mails to check on, anyway. You two make yourselves at home.”

  I lead the way to the kitchen, Jillie following behind me. I can feel her disbelief but choose to ignore it for now, taking in the extent of repair work that might be needed room to room. When we reach the staircase again, I step aside to let Jillie go up first. I had never been up to this part of the house when we were kids, but I know that she had. She leads me to the master bedroom, opens the heavy, wood door with its antique doorknob. A very wide-paned window makes up most of the back wall, providing a view of the horse barn and fields beyond.

  “It’s an incredible view,” Jillie says, folding her arms across her chest.

  “It is,” I agree.

  We’re both silent for a bit. I can’t help but wonder if she’s remembering the times we found places to make out in those fields. If she’s remembered over the years how we couldn’t get enough of each other, how we lived for the next meeting, the next chance to be alone.

  I’m remembering.

  “You can’t think this is a good idea, Tate,” she says in a soft voice.

  “Probably not,” I say.

  “Then why would you . . . why are you considering it?”

  I look at her then, and it takes a second, but she finally turns her eyes to mine, as if she has no ability to stop herself. “Something about loose ends,” I say.

  It’s clear that she wants to argue the wisdom of this. But she doesn’t.

  And I wonder if she understands that even though this place had never been my home, it had been the center of the only good memories I can claim from my teenage years. That I’m overcome with a sense of hitting solid ground after an entire adult life of drifting wherever the current happens to take me.

  “You see it the way I see it, don’t you?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This place. Not as it is. But as it was. What it can still be.”

  She bites her lower lip, glances down at the floor, her gaze reluctantly pulling back to mine. “Yes,” she says softly.

  “That’s all I needed to hear,” I say.

  25

  Jillie

  I HAVE TO pick up the girls, and so Ann drops me off at the real estate office. She’s offered to take Tate to his hotel, and I get out of the car, stand for a moment next to Ann’s rolled-down window, not sure what to say about what happened today. I still can’t quite believe it. Have no idea what to make of it.

  Tate thanks me for my help, polite as any stranger. I say sure, no problem, and wave as they pull away, as if this is something we do every day. In reality, I still haven’t absorbed the absolute improbability of it all.

  The girls are waiting out front when I pull up at the school, late enough that the other cars have come and gone.

  “Where’ve you been?” Kala asks when she slides into the front seat, irritation rimming the words. This is a new thing with us, Kala’s frequent unhappiness with me, and I have to say, it never fails to put a bruise on my heart.

  “Helping an old friend,” I say.

  “Who is it?” Corey asks, plopping into the back, the rubber band from one of her pigtails barely holding on.

  “No one you know,” I say. Kala pops in ear buds, tuning me out. Corey tells me about her day, how Gerald Collins brought one of his dad’s magazines to school and got in all sorts of trouble because none of the women inside had clothes on.

  Driving the familiar roads to a place I have never been able to think of as home, I think about Tate and what he has done. I have no explanation for any of it, but something about it makes sense. He once loved that place every bit as much as I did.

  I still can’t believe that after all these years, he’s actually here at Smith Mountain Lake. I’ve tried to picture him in other places, wondered where he lived, what his life was like. None of the images ever clicked because I simply couldn’t imagine him anywhere else.

  The thought of him at Cross Country is like finding the last, but most critical piece in a gigantic puzzle that is finally complete. And even if I never see Tate again, there’s something immensely satisfying in knowing that he’ll be there at Cross Country. Where both of us had once been happy.

  26

  Angela

  SHE’S IN THE dry cleaner’s shop, picking up two of her mother’s dresses when news of Tate’s purchase reaches her ears. Lu Styers makes change for a twenty, counts it out in Angela’s hand while doing double duty in a phone conversation with her daughter.

  “That writer bought the Mason place,” she says, her voice going a couple of octaves higher. “Callahan, isn’t it?”

  Until now, Angela has been in a hurry, waiting a little too impatiently while Mrs. Styers retrieved the dresses from the rack in the back. But she takes her time now, tucking the money into her wallet, lifting the plastic bag from its hanger, hoping the older woman will drop a few more nuggets of gossip.

  “Maybe he’ll do something good with it,” Mrs. Styers says. “From the road, you can barely see it anymore, it’s so grown up with weeds.”

  The store owner glances up, and by now, it is obvious that Angela is lingering. She takes the dry cleaning and quickly leaves, shock rippling across her skin. She hits the remote to her BMW convertible, gets in, and sits behind the wheel, unmoving.

  Tate. Had he actually bought the Mason farm?

  She opens her purse, pulls t
he tabloid article from the side pocket, opens it and stares at the picture, then rereads the words, as she has done a dozen times in the past couple of days.

  Angela drops her head against the back of the seat. Almost twenty years, and she had begun to think that piece of her life was one she would never have to revisit. That her own transgressions could be locked away, forgotten.

  She presses her hands to the sides of her face, feeling as if the walls are closing in. She’d been so stupid.

  Tate is back. And she finally admits to herself something she cannot deny.

  She had known all along there would be a consequence for her actions.

  After all, you cannot blow a hole in the center of someone’s life and expect to never pay a price for it.

  27

  Tate

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK that evening, I get out of Ann’s Mercedes in the circular driveway of the house at Cross Country.

  She jangles a set of keys in the air. “I have to say I’ve never had a transaction quite like this one. Who says cash doesn’t talk? Done deal in a day.”

  “Thanks for going the extra mile,” I say.

  She waves a hand. “Are you kidding? I’m real estate royalty in my agency for selling this place. I should be thanking you.”

  I follow her up the stone steps, past the overgrown azaleas to the massive, walnut door at the house’s entrance. She inserts a key in the lock, and it swings open. “Let me get your things out of the trunk,” she says. “You go on in. I’ll be right back.”

  I start to protest, but then glance at my hands and realize I have little choice but to accept her help. The cumbersome bandages are beginning to get old already.

  I walk through the two-story foyer, flicking on lights with my elbow as I go. Dust sits thick on the stairway’s heavy banister. Cobwebs hang between the rails.

  To my left is the enormous living room, which I had seen only once or twice in the years when I’d tagged along after Jillie all over this place.

  The door opens again, and Ann clicks inside on her high heels. She sets my laptop bag and overnight duffel outside the living room doorway, then comes into the room.

  “Incredible, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a beautiful house,” I say.

  “I can’t wait to see what you do with it,” she says. “It’s a crying shame to let a place like this go to ruin. Do you have anything in mind?”

  The question incites in me a sudden urge to laugh. If I’d been asked just yesterday about the chances of me buying a house on Smith Mountain Lake, I’d have said less than zero. And yet, here I stand in the middle of this mausoleum of a home, with no idea what I plan to do with it.

  Nothing to attach me to it at all except a bunch of memories long past their expiration date. “Not exactly,” I say.

  “Well, if you should need any help, I know a great interior designer. And I’ve been told I have a decent eye for renovation.”

  “Thanks,” I say, hearing the undernote of something else in her voice.

  She’s an attractive woman, and more than once throughout the day, I’ve felt her interest. I wonder if Jillie had noticed, and then tell myself it hardly matters one way or the other.

  “I appreciate everything, Ann.”

  “Well,” she says. “Let me just get your pillows and blankets out of the car, and I’ll be off.”

  I meet her at the front door a minute later. She offers to carry my stuff upstairs, but I tell her I’ll manage.

  “Sleep well, then,” she says.

  I stand at the door until she pulls away and heads back down the winding driveway to the main road. Once she’s out of sight, I close the door, standing in the middle of the grand foyer that had once seemed to me like the entrance to another life entirely. I’m overcome with the oddest sense of past and present merging. And a single question. What have I done?

  That One Night

  THE PARTIES AT Cross Country were known to outclass anything else ever held in the county. Sonya Mason never did anything on a small scale.

  The event this Saturday night was no exception. It marked the celebration of her biggest win to date in the jumping world. Just the day before, she had returned from the show at Madison Square Garden in New York City where four of the Cross Country horses had won pretty much everything there was to win.

  Tate still felt as if the entire previous week was something from which he would most certainly wake to discover as a dream. People like him didn’t get to experience the things they’d seen and done at the show.

  When they weren’t working or riding, he and Jillie covered every inch of Manhattan they could possibly manage on foot.

  The thought of the city had never appealed to him before. In fact, he’d all but dreaded going, sure it would remind him too much of his earlier childhood in the poorest area of D.C. But seeing the city with Jillie made it different. He didn’t see the dirt on the sidewalks. Noticed, instead, how blue the sky was between the rows of enormous buildings. And that pretty much defined everything about what he felt for her.

  He stood at the foot of the winding staircase of the main house now, hands shoved in the pockets of the suit he’d borrowed from Jillie’s dad. The shoulders were a little too wide, and the waist of the pants hung loose, even with his belt in the last notch. He felt awkward and out of place, but Jillie wanted him here, and for that reason alone, he could endure the suit.

  Dr. Mason spotted Tate and walked over, clapping him on the shoulder.

  “They’ll be down in a few minutes, son. All that primping takes time.”

  “Yes, sir,” Tate said. Mrs. Mason was giving Jillie the special treatment tonight as a thank you for her winning ride at the National Horse Show in Madison Square Gardens. He wasn’t sure exactly what that involved, but they’d been up there for a long time.

  Just then Mrs. Mason and Jillie appeared at the top of the stairs. Both Tate and Dr. Mason went silent and stared.

  “There,” the older man said. “You see. They take forever, but they are worth the wait, aren’t they?”

  Tate nodded, unable to find his voice. Jillie walked down, one slow step at a time, careful in the high heels she wasn’t used to wearing. At the bottom of the staircase, she looked down at her dress, as if she weren’t sure what his reaction would be.

  Sonya Mason smiled and said, “This is the part where you say how beautiful she looks, Tate.”

  “I—” he began, and then, “Wow.”

  Mrs. Mason laughed. “Jillie, I don’t think we can ask for more than that.”

  Dr. Mason chuckled, took his wife’s hand and said, “You’re a knockout yourself, and you owe me a dance.”

  The two of them headed for the terrace at the back of the house where a band was playing classics, like “Fly Me to the Moon.”

  Tate found himself unable to look directly at Jillie, because every time he did, he lost all train of thought. She touched his shoulder. “Dance?”

  “Yeah,” he said, following her to the back of the house where they stepped into the middle of the dancing throng of people. For a while, they danced apart, but then the music slowed, couples drifting into each other’s arms.

  He and Jillie had never danced this way before, and he suddenly felt awkward and unsure of himself. But no sooner had she stepped up close to him than his arms went around her waist, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world that they should be together like this.

  They danced in a small circle, bodies pressed close, eyes only for each other. Tate couldn’t bring himself to stop looking at her. Her long, blonde hair was pulled back in a loose clip, her neck long and graceful in the V-cut, black dress.

  Looking at her, Tate felt as if he were the luckiest guy in the world. Once the music changed, Jillie linked her hand with his, pulled him across the terrace and through the backyard where the lights were dim.

  They stopped beside a short, rock wall that served as a divider between the grass lawn and a hay field. They stood side by side, shoulders t
ouching. He still couldn’t look at her.

  She touched a hand to his arm. “It’s just a dress. It’s still me, Tate.”

  He did look at her then, found her studying him with warm, appreciative eyes. “I know,” he said. “You’re just . . . you’re beautiful, Jillie.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Coming from you, it means something.”

  She leaned in then and kissed him. And it was like a thousand rockets going off above them, what he felt inside. He pulled her close against him, deepened the kiss. Her arms went around his neck, and they stayed that way for a long time, while the music from the house drifted out and fell around them.

  “Oops, didn’t realize this was the make-out site!” A giggle followed the exclamation.

  Tate and Jillie stepped away from each other. He turned to find Angela Taylor and Poppy Sullivan arm in arm, their ability to stay vertical apparently impaired by the glasses of champagne in their hands.

  He stepped in front of Jillie, shielding her while she adjusted her clothes.

  “Is this what happens when you have a big win, Jillie?” Poppy’s voice was sloppy drunk. “You get the trophy and the guy?”

  Angela laughed, and then cut it short when she met Tate’s unamused gaze.

  Jillie stepped out from behind him.

  “Whoa!” Poppy said. “And a makeover too.”

  Angela backed up a step and said, “Come on, Poppy.”

  “Why?” the other girl said. “This is obviously where all the fun is.”

  “I think you better listen to Angela,” Tate said.

  Poppy made a face, staggered a step, splashing champagne down the front of her dress. “As if she knows how to have fun?” She waved a hand in dismissal. She looked at Jillie, then teetered forward and placed her hand on Tate’s chest. She put her mouth close to his ear, whispered, “Come with me, and we can really get this party started.”