“Did you know,” he began, gesturing around the front parlor as if he was a college tour guide highlighting the institution’s most esteemed building, “that this neoclassical treasure—called Two Oaks by the locals—was commissioned by Cassandra’s grandmother June’s great-uncle Lemon Gray Neely in 1895?”
Cassie couldn’t imagine they were remotely interested, but Tate asked what Cassie knew about Lemon—“what a fabulous name!”—and Hank’s attitude did a one-eighty as she fingered the lace curtains. Frankly, the extent of Cassie’s knowledge about Two Oaks and Lemon Gray Neely ended just about there (and, to be honest, the dates were fuzzy).
But Nick had done his research: “He was the stuff of legend. A handsome, rich wildcatter—that’s what they called an oilman who took risks. Six foot tall. Born poor in Titusville, Pennsylvania, where Edwin L. Drake established the very first oil well drill in 1859. Lemon learned at Drake’s knee, then made his way here, to Auglaize County, which was booming with black gold by the 1890s—imagine the California Gold Rush, but with oil instead. Lemon got a loan from Drake to buy up the fertile farmland that lined Lake St. Jude, just a few miles west of here. Lemon and his rivals were the first people to dig offshore wells on American soil. Can you believe it? Offshore oil wells in the middle of Ohio?”
They all shook their heads in awed incredulity, as though they’d been wondering for years where the first American offshore oil wells had been drilled. Cassie felt a grateful shimmer for the binding properties of Nick’s nerdy optimism.
“Anyway, he made his fortune, fell in love with a local girl—Mae, I think her name was. Decided to build a house, but not just any house—he wanted it to last for the ages. He acquired these three acres, and decided to set the home’s doorway in the natural center of those two large oaks—” He turned and pointed toward them, still there, on either side of the front walk. “Then he had three wooden houses built on a few empty lots across the street to house the workers.” He gestured beyond the other side of the house, and Cassie knew exactly the small Victorian bungalows he meant; the one on the corner was where the nosiest neighbor lived, an old woman who obviously thought she was invisible but Cassie had seen peering through the blinds more times than she could count.
“Lemon had a draftsman down from Cleveland, and a bricklaying crew up from Cincinnati. He imported lathers and carvers from Germany, promising fair pay. In exchange for a roof above their heads, these men dovetailed, whittled, and built an estate Neely imagined would survive wars, christenings, cold winters and hot summers. It was a home built for the ages, built for generations.”
Here Tate laughed and clapped her hands together. Cassie noticed the large diamond sparkling there, so big it couldn’t possibly be real, except, of course, it was. “And here you are! Five generations later, as predicted! What an amazing house to grow up in.”
“I didn’t actually grow up here,” Cassie replied, genuinely sorry to burst Tate’s bubble, until she realized that, given Nick’s threats, these people probably already knew all about her parents, and more. Her words hardened under this wary realization. “I grew up in Columbus. My parents died when I was eight. This was my grandparents’ house”—in light of yesterday’s news, every other word now seemed laden with uncomfortable meaning—“but my grandma came down to Columbus and lived with me there. I’d already lost my parents; she didn’t want me to lose my friends, my school, you know, everything else.” She’d said this speech a thousand times, but it was taking on new meaning in front of this audience. “My grandpa died when I was nine, so there really wasn’t much reason to come back here. We spent a few summers in St. Jude, that kind of thing, but then I was a teenager and this was the last place I wanted to be. Really, it was only when I went off to college that my grandma moved back in.”
Guilt overcame her as she looked around the shabby room; how had her grandma let this place get to this state? Why hadn’t Cassie taken better care of her, especially after all those years when the shoe was on the other foot? She felt a knifing sorrow, which was quickly replaced with a nauseous quaver at the base of her stomach. She needed to eat or else.
“Illy’s! We should go to Illy’s,” she blurted.
Tate glanced at Nick, and Cassie understood that the woman had been instructed to tread carefully. No sudden movements. Cassie felt an oddly intimate desire to throttle Nick for scheming behind her back, although, to be fair, he did work for Tate, and Cassie and he hadn’t exactly left things on allied terms.
“It’s a restaurant,” Cassie clarified. “The only restaurant, actually. Unless you want Buffalo Wild Wings from the Pantry Pride parking lot.” Hank balked, which was satisfying.
Nick cleared his throat and gave Cassie a look that belied very bad news. “Good idea. Only—well, Tate isn’t ‘here,’ if you catch my drift. Officially, she’s three thousand miles away, and it’s best to keep it that way. You can’t begin to imagine the circus this town will turn into if word gets out she’s here. Paparazzi, neighbors wanting autographs…”
Tate glared at Nick, which shut him up. It was the same glare Cassie had used with her grandmother in high school, an “oh my god you are embarrassing me” look intended to shut someone up. Cassie felt a swoon of sympathy. Of course Tate Montgomery couldn’t walk into a restaurant and expect to stay incognito; just look at her. Cassie had never imagined looking like that could be an inconvenience.
“What?” Nick bristled under Tate’s glare. “This is how Margaret would have handled it. Don’t you want me to handle it like Margaret?”
“I wasn’t thinking,” Cassie apologized. “The bad news is I don’t have any food in the house.” She added (lest there’d been shakes on the plane), “And I’m going to need something soon.”
“Do they do takeout?” Hank chirped. “I’ll pick it up! I love a witch hunt!”
“Goose chase,” Tate corrected, then turned to Cassie, softening her whole demeanor. “Yes, full bellies for everyone. Illy’s sounds divine.”
Nick pulled a stack of twenties from his wallet—Cassie realized that, unlike nearly every other woman in the world, Tate wasn’t carrying a bag—and Hank left for Illy’s with her maps app open. Nick’s phone rang, and he took the call into the dining room. Tate asked for a place to powder her nose. Through the front parlor window, Cassie watched Hank turning this way and that on the sidewalk as she tried to get her bearings. Lord only knew what the irascible waitress at Illy’s would make of Malibu Hank traipsing in to order egg-white omelets and spinach salad with lemon juice on the side.
Cassie realized with sudden horror that she might not have recycled those tabloids that had been sitting beside the downstairs toilet for months, each with its own Tate Montgomery headline: TATE’S PREGGO FOR SURE!; TATE AND MAX IN PARADISE; HOW TATE STAYS FIT. Her stomach flipped like a Tilt-A-Whirl; she nearly went to the bathroom and knocked, then realized that would only make things more embarrassing.
Nick reemerged from the foyer. He was holding a bottle of Perrier. “From the car,” he explained, pulling a small packet of Advil from his pocket.
“I thought I told you to leave me alone forever,” she said gently, holding her hand out.
“That’s not how I heard it.”
“Apparently.” She wouldn’t trust him, not yet, but she’d enjoy his kindness while it lasted. She rested the medicine on her tongue and sipped the bubbly water, which tasted like the best thing on earth. “I look that bad, huh?”
“No,” he said plainly. But he wanted to say something else.
“What then?” she asked.
His weight shifted imperceptibly toward her. “You look—”
“Well then,” Tate interrupted, emerging from the bathroom, “shall we have a chat while we wait for sustenance?”
At the sound of Tate’s voice, Nick jolted away. He pulled his phone out and strode back into the foyer, past Tate, whose footsteps crisply marked her way to Cassie on the couch. It was clear, then, to Cassie, that, whatever this flirtation meant, i
t was something Nick didn’t want Tate to know about, which felt like a delectable secret, until she remembered what had brought him there in the first place, and then, once again, she tried not to feel like puking.
Cassie felt shy and breathless as she turned her eyes once again on Tate, sitting just beside her on the yellow couch. She wondered how many times a famous person could astound you simply with her presence. Cassie couldn’t even tell if the woman was wearing makeup, that’s how good the makeup job was. It wasn’t that her breath didn’t smell, it was that it smelled indescribably good, like actual baby’s breath. She looked, every second, as someone regular might look while glimpsed through a soft-focus lens.
Tate held out her left hand and pulled the giant, sparkling rock off it. The diamond was so big it should have had a different name, like superdiamond, or ultrastone. Tate held it up to the light, as if assessing it for the first time. Slices of Ohio light filled the room as the rock’s facets flashed in the sun.
How odd for Tate to hand it over. “My engagement ring,” she said. Cassie supposed that was her way of explaining she wasn’t giving it to Cassie. It was weighty in Cassie’s hand; the precious metal of the band retained the star’s body heat.
Popular opinion in the New York Cassie’d so recently belonged to had diamonds pegged as politically appalling on two fronts—the blood of African miners, and the trappings of marriage. For those reasons, and the fact that she was pretty sure she didn’t believe in lifelong monogamy, she’d never once imagined a big, flashy rock perched on her ring, certainly not a stone of this size. But, just for a moment, Cassie thought about slipping it onto her finger, this ring which she knew Max Hall had given Tate in that famous proposal on the beach at Cap Juluca. The fantasy felt positively velvety.
“Max—my husband—had it reset,” Tate said, tilting her head beside Cassie’s as they looked at the rainbows it sent shimmering across the parlor.
“Yeah,” Cassie said, cringing at her heh-heh-heh as she felt her face grow hot, “I know who Max is.” Max Hall, lead singer of Aloysius, hot in skintight leather pants, making love to the microphone. Max Hall, voted Sexiest Man Alive two years running, winner of Grammy Awards for Album and Song of the Year and every other best the music business could conjure. Max Hall, a man Cassie had imagined doing all sorts of things to her on more than one occasion, especially in her teenage years, especially under her comforter on Saturday mornings, based on one particular hair toss in the video for Aloysius’s hit “Alms,” as he cast his eyes down and howled the word devoooootion.
If Tate noticed Cassie’s lust for her husband, she didn’t let on, or maybe it was a Hollywood thing: no jealousy, at least not when it came to what your spouse was selling. Tate gestured to the ring. “This was the stone Daddy proposed to Mommy with, after they wrapped Erie Canal.” Tate’s eyes turned sad as she mentioned her movie star parents, but her smile stayed the same. Cassie could vaguely remember something scandalous about Tate’s mother. Drugs? Drinking? She’d died relatively young, that was all Cassie could recall; Cassie supposed the childish term Tate used for her mother belied that. What was the woman’s name?
Tate’s gaze batted about the room. “I’d always meant to come to St. Jude myself. Mommy and Daddy spent that May shooting all the interiors in L.A., so it’s not like they met here. But she always said St. Jude was where she knew Daddy was the one…” Tate’s sentence trailed off as she was overcome by emotion.
Cassie had seen the woman before her cry too many times to count. Tate’s movies had taught Cassie so many things, from how to French kiss to how to be the kind of gal who charmed and impressed men with a combination of self-reliance and fawning attention. Not to mention that Tate had influenced most of Cassie’s fashion choices between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two. It followed, then, that Tate had taught Cassie how to cry. Cassie understood this as she watched the event unfold in real life before her: the plunge of the woman’s chin, the tears rolling down her cheeks like silver sequins.
Cassie’s parents had died when she was a little girl, so the loss had mostly hardened like a ball in her gut, but there were still days when the wet sorrow nearly drowned her, and she could see now that Tate was only just discovering that grief would come and go like a tidal wave. Was it wrong to feel proud of how much more she knew about this particular topic, how much more experienced she was at orphanhood than this ultrafamous superstar who was married to a rock god? Cassie let Tate weep, because it was her experience that it was awful to be made to feel you should stop, especially when you were grieving your dead parents, and she decided to share that tidbit of wisdom at some appropriate point in the future.
When Tate had composed herself, she folded her hands in her lap. “So now you understand,” she said, as though she’d just completed a complex math proof.
“Understand?”
“Why I have to know. As soon as possible. I have to know if all that”—it looked as though Tate might cry again, but then grit killed the tears—“if the romance and the proposal and the fairy tale my parents fed me on was a lie. If the only reason Daddy asked Mommy to marry him was because he felt guilty for knocking up some townie.”
Tate seemed to have forgotten that that “townie” had raised Cassie. Nick hadn’t. He appeared, briefly, in the doorway, catching Cassie’s eye, offering a glance of apology.
Tate didn’t notice him. “You must help me, Cassandra Danvers. You must.” She grasped Cassie’s hand again and pulled it to her chest. “Daddy and I were so close at the end. We simply didn’t keep secrets anymore. We’d worked so hard on our relationship, especially over the last ten years. I just…I can’t believe he’d betray me like this. Can you understand that?”
The thing was, Cassie could. She, too, could not conceive of a world in which the woman who’d raised her—moral, kind, careful June—could have done any of the things that a positive DNA test would mean: have an affair, raise a clandestine love child, keep a secret from, yes, any of her family, but especially from Cassie. It hurt Cassie’s heart to imagine the burden it would have been to keep such a secret for sixty years. And yet, a part of Cassie itched with the crazy prospect that June might have done just that. June was touchy about secrets. Hadn’t that been the whole problem with the art show? What was it she’d said to Cassie in a low, devastated voice, outside the gallery? “What have you done, Cassandra? That was for us. That was our business, and not for the world to know.”
Tate grew fervent. “I don’t even care about the money—well, I care a bit, naturally, some of it was Mommy’s money, and anyway, he was my father, I don’t think it’s wrong that Elda and I believe we should inherit what we deserve—but truly, what I care about most is getting to the bottom of what happened. I just want to know the truth. And the only way to know is to test your DNA against mine.”
“What happens if you find out I’m not related to you?” Cassie asked bluntly.
Tate looked startled that Cassie had any questions at all. “Well,” she began carefully, as though the possibility was only just occurring to her, “I’d offer you a compensation package for all your troubles—”
“Yes,” Cassie said, impatient with the tiptoeing, because the money wasn’t what she’d meant, “a million dollars, Nick said that.”
Tate’s spine was straight, and Cassie got the impression she was hoping Nick would reappear to help her. “And then we’d…leave you be.”
“You’d be done with me.”
“Oh goodness no, I don’t think of it as that! I hope you won’t either. I just meant that once the test is administered—just a cheek swab, by the way—I’ll take care of all the logistics. You literally will not have to do one thing, pay one penny, in terms of lawyers. I’ll settle this whole mess for both of us, and you’ll, you know”—Tate’s hands shuffled before her—“you’ll…get back to your life.”
It was then that they heard the steps on the porch: manly, rapid. As they approached the front door, it became clear that they were not Han
k’s. Nick and Tate reacted so quickly, it took Cassie a moment to figure out what was happening: the quick, shared glance toward the entrance, then Nick grabbing an afghan off the edge of the davenport (where it had been for who knew how long), Tate pulling it from him and tossing it over her head, Nick putting his arm around her and shuttling her into the bathroom under the stairs, as though she was a wanted woman. Nick turned to Cassie and mouthed: “Do not open it,” and so Cassie stood there in the foyer, frozen, while the man approached the door, supposing this was what they’d meant when they said no one should find out Tate was in town. Did paparazzi really work this fast? How had they discovered Tate’s whereabouts? Cassie’s heart pounded as she heard the man reach the door—she nearly ducked at the possibility of the doorbell ringing—and then the mail slipped through the slot.
Nick and Tate, barricaded in the bathroom, reemerged at the sound of Cassie’s hooting laughter. She could barely get the words out as she clutched the new batch of past-due notices and tried to explain it was only the mailman. They looked amused, but certainly as delighted as she’d expected them to be, and then Nick asked if he and Tate could have a minute. “Something’s come up,” he said ominously, then they shut themselves back in the bathroom and Cassie found her way back to the couch.
What would June want Cassie to do about the DNA test? What June had said at the art show kept roaring up; she’d clearly valued privacy. Which meant, Cassie knew, that she’d loathe this, all of it; she’d be especially mortified to know her granddaughter and three strangers were speculating about her sex life, regardless of whether she’d ever even met Jack Montgomery.
June Page 9
