Refuge on Leebrick (The Hills of Burlington Book 4)

by Jacie Middlemann

  “My mother,” Jake said quietly.

  “You never heard anything about this from her?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Nothing, not even indirectly? We’re probably talking about a generational issue here as well. If their mother thought it was just so much woo-woo stuff that’s the impression they would have had of it growing up. Not to mention the public at large probably thought the same should the subject ever come up which I sincerely doubt it did. But the ground work was already laid in that generation. If you heard anything at all it would have been in regards to something where she knew different but wasn’t going to touch it with a ten-foot-pole, at least not directly.” He could tell that somewhere while he was speaking something had come to Jake. The look on his face was far different than the absolute denial when he’d first stated that his mother had never broached the subject with him.

  “Once,” Jake began slowly, pulling hard on his memories because of the surprising obscurity of the one he sought. “Maybe more than that in more subtle ways but there was a time…I was a teenager. A couple of kids were badly hurt in a car accident out on the road that runs along the river and up into the hills.” He leaned back in his chair, brought his drink to his mouth as he considered carefully back to that specific memory. The moment he’d clicked into it the gates literally opened and it all came back to him in a flood. “I was still pretty young, maybe eighth or ninth grade. I wasn’t driving yet but one of my friends had his license.”

  Tom remained silent. He could practically see the emotions play out over his friend’s face. He’d initially seen disappointment that came with the admission his mother had never spoken of what she knew, what she’d heard as a child. Now it was almost as if the revelation that there had been something, maybe not much but something, the fine lines that had etched Jake’s face were gone. He waited quietly for him to continue.

  “I wasn’t with them but I had planned to be.” He took a long drink from the bottle in his hand. Realizing he’d just finished it off he stood and retrieved two more from the refrigerator. Handed one across the table before sitting back down with his own. “Mom knew that. A couple days after the accident, not long after I got home from school she sat me down and asked me why I hadn’t gone with them.” He paused again, his face intent as he thought back. The memories were clear now and that too had him thinking. Up until a few moments ago they’d been cast in a fog and he knew damn well that had been one of the more memorable times of his younger life. “I’m not certain exactly what I told her. I’m not all that certain what I was telling myself at the time. I felt guilty, that’s for certain.” He looked at his old friend, his expression grim. “My thoughts pretty much ran along the lines of how I should have been with them, like that would have somehow changed the outcome…changed everything.” He shrugged, both men knew better. “I was a kid. My thought process was pretty much that of a kid.”

  “It sounds like a major deal for a kid. Had to have been hard to deal with at that age.”

  “Yeah. Probably. But that’s not what Mom wanted to talk about. She wanted to know why I decided, practically at the last minute, not to go with them.” Jake straightened up in his chair. A thought came to him that might not have had he not spent the last several months dealing with his own child. His adult child but still his child. “She wanted me to say it. She wanted to hear it out of my mouth,” he said as it all became just a little bit clearer to him. Brought the strength of his mother’s wisdom through all the years of his youth back into clear focus. “She didn’t want to assume anything.”

  “Say what?” Tom asked softly, wanting to know but not wanting to interrupt Jake’s telling of what he was remembering.

  Jake looked up from his drink. His thoughts very much obvious in his frustrated expression. While his memories were becoming clearer there were some that weren’t nearly as precise as he would have liked. “I don’t know exactly what I told her but I know what I was thinking at the time. I’d had a feeling. And whatever that feeling was I didn’t end up going with them because of it.” He shrugged his shoulders, took another long drink out of the cold bottle before continuing. “I honestly don’t know what it was that held me back. It could have easily have been the fear of getting caught by my parents out in a car driven by someone who wasn’t an adult. There was a big rule about that one in my house. And believe me, my sixteen-year-old buddy with his brand new license would no way have qualified as an adult in their eyes. And I knew that.”

  “But something held you back and that’s what you told your mom.” It wasn’t a question. Both men knew where he was going with his statement.

  “Intuition. Something kept me from going. Probably doesn’t matter what my teenage mind labeled it as but something inside kept me from heading out in that car that day when I had every plan to do just that.”

  “What did you mom say once that came out?”

  And that, Jake thought to himself, was the clincher. His memories of those couple of moments were as focused as if they were in Technicolor. And he was pretty certain they still fought back then over who got dibs on the single color television in the house. His father usually won that battle leaving the rest of them to the small black and white portables in the other rooms. “She was pretty serious. Not in a mean way but still more serious than she normally was when she wasn’t handing out all that we weren’t going to be allowed to do because of all the stupid things we’d already done.” He smiled suddenly, that particular memory was one that he could remember with some enjoyment now that he was past it all. “My mother was eerily adept at coming up with punishments that both fit the crime and made us never again care to repeat it.”

  “The best mothers are,” Tom agreed thinking of his own. She too had brought down the boom more times than he cared to count with an agile talent for nipping his wayward ways in the bud.

  “She took my hands, held them pretty tight,” Jake said remembering, almost to where he could feel the tight grip of her soft and ever so strong hands around his even now. “She told me if my thoughts ever told me to do something a different way than what I was planning, to always listen to it. To take heed.” He looked at the man listening intently. “That’s exactly what she said, to take heed of it.” He shifted his gaze away, focused on the view out the kitchen window. Thought of his cousin’s view out her kitchen window, down to the Marshall Street house and all the memories that were there. “Maybe I need to talk with Aunt Charlie myself,” he said almost to himself.

  “Wouldn’t hurt,” Tom agreed. He was thinking about what he’d just heard. “Sounds to me that your mom had some pretty good instincts herself.” He looked up from the bottle of the local brew he held loosely in his hand. “She might not have wanted to talk about it, maybe didn’t accept the past for what it held, she may not have accepted her own ability,” he took a breath before he continued. “But she accepted yours.”

  Jake nodded slightly, slowly. His mother’s eyes during that long ago discussion vivid in his memories. “Maybe,” he allowed. Looked up. “Mom was very much a no-nonsense kind of person. This would have been in the box she labeled woo-woo.”

  “Maybe,” Tom repeated his friend’s words intentionally. “But this was an instance where her thoughts on that box may have been shattered with the very real reality their contents may have saved her son’s life.” He stared hard at the other man. “You know as well as I that beliefs can be changed, shifted around and re-aligned, based on what we learn as we go. Who would have thought we’d even be having this discussion a couple of years ago? Hell, Jake, a couple of months ago. Not me.”

  “Yeah,” Jake agreed quietly. There was no disputing that. “I’ll have a talk with Aunt Charlie. I don’t want to press her too hard so it may not be soon. From what Mary told me this has been pretty rough on her.” And he could understand that. Pulling memories out from where they were sitting and catching dust wasn’t always a fun thing.

  “Let me know what you find out,” was all Tom said
as he nursed his beer, his thoughts every bit as intent as his friend’s.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Does it bother you being alone here, as big as this house is?” Grace asked as she got close to emptying what was on her plate. In many ways they had slid almost too easily back into the way they’d been able to talk about almost every and any topic that came up. But dinner was almost finished with and she wasn’t certain where to go next.

  “Not really,” Tom said easily, understanding her in ways he wasn’t going to share yet. She hadn’t changed all that much, not hardly at all. He would bet anything what he was seeing now was her real personality that she longer had to guard below the surface. “If Mary has her way I won’t be here on my own for long.”

  “I think her idea of turning it into an old-fashioned type of boarding house is wonderful.” She had been surprised when Mary had first told her about it but the more she thought of the many reasons the other woman had for going through with it she understood exactly what her purpose was and why. “Too many people spend way too much time alone. Some of the women who come into my store worry about that very same thing with their kids. That they go off on their own into an apartment all by themselves and other than what friends they might have wherever they work once they come home at night it seems most the time they’re on their own. They communicate with people mostly by email or text.” She leaned back in her chair, watched Tom pull a pan of something out of the oven. “I don’t have a problem with different forms of communication. I had a couple of pen-pals when I was in high school and college. But I also talked with them over the phone once in a while.”

  “People don’t talk all that much on the phone anymore, they text,” Tom said simply. He had his own opinions on the issue.

  “Exactly,” Grace agreed as she watched him put more plates on the table. “Oh, that looks so good. I just know I’m going to eat way too much.” And she knew he’d remembered her love of all things chocolate. Why else would she be looking at brownies loaded with chocolate chips and sitting next to a bowl containing her favorite dark chocolate icing to spread on top of them.

  “You can never eat too many brownies.”

  “Oh, yes,” she looked directly at the man now sitting across from her sliding a knife through the contents of the pan sitting between them. “You can,” she said firmly. She pointed to one of the larger pieces. “I want that one,” and promised herself since she was indulging it would be the only one she ate.

  Knowing her will-power was every bit as great as the size of her heart Tom gave her a slight nod of acknowledgment before speaking his other thoughts. “Then you can take some home with you,” even before she could do more than shake her head he continued. “You can share them with Mary tomorrow. Drench them down with some coffee.” He smiled at the thought and then shared his own with her. “That pot of hers is never empty. I’ve stopped by there a couple of times in the evening to either pick up information she’d found or to drop off something I’d gotten my hands on and it’s never empty.”

  “I know,” Grace said responding to the easy way they had always been able to share. “I don’t know how she sleeps some nights with all she drinks and not just through the day. She even drinks it late at night. Carrie’s the same way.” At the mention of her friends that she’d only recently found out she was ever so distantly related to she wondered what he thought about all of it. She knew he had done the same as she. Walked into that little room upstairs and felt the punch of something strong…something she’d decided to define as recognition and remembrance. Recognition of who you were, remembrance of where you came from. She’d spent a lot of time thinking about it since Mary had first told her about the room and even more so since experiencing it first hand.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” Tom asked noticing even in the midst of enjoying her desert that she’d gone off somewhere on her own.

  “I was thinking about the room upstairs,” Grace said with a slight nod in the direction of where the stairs were in the room beyond the kitchen. “And,” she paused, took in his steady gaze and saw he already knew what she was thinking. “And I was wondering what you thought about all of it.”

  “You’re wondering if I think it’s all a bunch of imagined nonsense?” Tom said the question easily. It wasn’t at all hard to read her thoughts when they were right there on her face. He couldn’t hold back the smile at her reaction and knew a sense of rightness he hadn’t felt in a long time. “Have you forgotten that I’ve walked into that room and felt what it’s like?”

  “Not everyone does,” Grace said quietly. She thought of what Carrie had told her the day before about how Rob had but was concerned about Addie knowing. He’d become very close to his new-found cousin and knew how much it bothered her that she’d walked into the little room and felt nothing.

  “No, and from what I’ve found in some of my research it could be that even some who do come down from this genealogical family line might not feel anything if their beliefs are strongly rooted against the possibilities.”

  Grace thought about what he was saying. “What makes you say that?” She knew that the generations of women between Mary and her great-grandmother hadn’t considered what they were talking about as much more than something akin to a fairy tale.

  Tom told her about his conversation with Jake the night before including that Jake surmised his mother knew deep down, believed, but refused to accept it as anything other than intuition.

  “But in some ways that’s just what it is,” Grace said softly when he finished telling her about the conversation between the two men. “It’s just that it’s so much more as well but that doesn’t mean it’s anything bad.”

  “How do you see it, Grace?” Tom asked seriously, curious about her view of it.

  Grace allowed herself a moment to think of how she wanted to answer his simple yet very difficult question. In her mind the answer was very easy, very basic. But to put it in words was something entirely different. Complicated didn’t even begin to describe it even though it seemed to be the new word of choice for what couldn’t be easily explained. But she was willing to try. “The moment I met Mary we just clicked. We didn’t have to search for what to talk about it was just there. Granted we had similar interests and opinions, more so than what we didn’t. But it went beyond that.”

  “You were easy with each other,” Tom said. “Comfortable in each other’s company.” Much like the two of them he thought to himself. Wondered if she considered that as well.

  “Exactly,” she said. “And that was before we got into the discussion of how tightly our families had been connected through the generations here in Burlington. Our grandparents knew each other, were tied together in ways that went beyond casual acquaintances.”

  “Maybe just as you and Mary clicked, they did as well.”

  Grace nodded her head slightly at his words. She had already thought the same. “They all included me in their world, almost without thought. Almost from the beginning it was as if it was just a given I belonged in their midst. From their businesses to the situation we dealt with when Jake and Beth came to Burlington and then later when Addie came to stay with Carrie.” She thought back to both those events and how she’d been every bit a part of working through those difficult times as the rest of them. As if even then she was considered family. She looked up at Tom, held the eyes that were steady on hers. “I’ve never felt such a part of something since…” she stopped before the words passed her lips. Knew without speaking them he knew what it was she’d been about to say. Since the two of them. And now knowing what she did she had to wonder if their distant family connection and everything else they knew about it had something to do with that as well. Then she let it go. One way or another no matter where they went from here all that had gone on before was in the past. She planned on leaving it there just as she had everything else she’d walked away from, intentionally and otherwise.

  “It shows,” Tom said quietly. He had a pretty good i
dea where her thoughts had gone and didn’t think that was an area of conversation they wanted to get into just yet. “What about the room?” As things went it was a perfect way to divert her thoughts and he was curious to know what her feelings were on it.

  “I may sound crazy but I understand it. Maybe not how but I get the why.”

  “Tell me,” Tom leaned forward. Despite the need to reach out as he would have years ago and taken her hand, played with her fingers as she talked, he held back. This…what he wanted for the two of them was too important to rush. He didn’t want to mess up…again.

  “I believe it all comes down to family.” Grace let out a long and heartfelt sigh as she reached for the spatula and scooped out another brownie from the pan. Then she gave the man sitting across from her a look that any man could…or should interpret. She watched him pick up the pan and set it down on the counter behind him, out of her reach, before turning back to her with an arched looked that silently said he was waiting for her to continue. “I don’t deny that those of us who feel the impact upon walking into that room may be more sensitive to things than others but if that’s true what does it mean? We can’t foretell the future. We don’t know how to prevent bad things from happening or for that matter how to make good things happen instead. What we can do is sense some thing stronger than others, connect with some people better than others, and more often than not it ties back in one way or another to family…our family. I also think that either because of it or as a result of it we have a stronger sense of family. A greater understanding of its importance to who we are or become as a person and how it effects our lives day-to-day as well as over the whole course of it.”