Follow the white pebbles

by Lillian Summers

  Follow

  the white pebbles

  by

  Lillian Summers

  Follow the White Pebbles, Copyright © Lillian Summers, 2013

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. While references may be made to actual places or events, the names, characters, incidents, and locations within are from the author’s imagination and are not a resemblance to actual living or dead persons, businesses, or events. Any similarity is coincidental.

  This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of International Copyright Law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines and/or imprisonment. No part of this book can be reproduced or sold by any person or business without the express permission of the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-9922771-0-9

  Editor: Cheryl Van Hoorn

  Line Editor: Cheryl Van Hoorn

  Cover artist: Charles Ewart

  To John O Linder,

  my best friend and most amazing supporter

  Thank you for being the sunshine of my life

  Acknowledgements

  A debt of gratitude to my editor Cheryl Van Hoorn for her terrific work and patience.

  To Judy DeVries for her tremendous assistance with proofreading the first draft of the novel.

  To my very talented cover artist, Charles Ewart, for his amazing work on this wonderful book cover.

  All my love and thanks to my sister for the endless hours she spent helping me with formatting the book for publishing. To my niece, for being my gorgeous cover girl and for her precious help with last minute proofreading. To my son, for his warm smiles, big hugs and wise advice that brightened my days and helped me move forward.

  A huge thank you to my best friend John Linder for his unwavering support and continuous encouragement.

  And to all those who, through their friendship and enthusiastic support, helped me get this novel from draft form to published work.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Arthur Wilburn’s face was steely and belligerent both by choice and a peculiar twist of fate. The physical traits of his lineage had been mirrored almost to perfection from father to son for the past five generations. It was precisely his perceived rebellion and almost palpable strength that drew women to him like crazed moths to a scorching flame. Yet nothing drove them madder than his thirty year old unwavering loyalty to just one of them: his wife Madeline.

  The men were, as usual, of the opinion that women were a weak, sentimental and brainless bunch. They were unanimously wondering how on earth an insensitive, insolent and proud beast such as Arthur Wilburn had been able to fall so deeply in love with such a gracious French woman. She had been only nineteen at the time he’d met her in Paris. But it was more of a puzzle in the minds of these bitter ones how the sweet, poetic beauty could have ever harbored any feelings for him in return.

  Obvious enough, the only one person who held the answer to the latter was Madeline Wilburn. A month spent at Arthur’s side thirty years ago in La Ville-Lumière had more than convinced her that he was an arrogant, loud-mouthed ox. A vain one too, at age twenty four. Yet it was enough to dig a little deeper to find a warm and tender Arthur with a vulnerable soul hiding from life’s blows underneath his pugnacious exterior.

  Madeline got acquainted with both the beauty and the beast of Arthur’s soul, and in a weird twist of fate grew to love the latter as well. It took her twenty years to learn that women are not destined to reform men. It took her further ten to get used to the bitter aftertaste of the realization. She still loved her husband with a lover’s passion, a friend’s fondness and a somehow motherly affection. But her heart had hardened along with Arthur’s face, just as his soul slowly began to turn rigid and unyielding after the loss of their only child almost eighteen years ago.

  At forty nine, Madeline didn’t show her age, but her smile bore no responsive warmth and her honey-colored eyes had long lost the glow that had crowned her as the most beautiful woman in the society since her arrival in the Empire City in 1981. She was now an untouchable beauty whose dispassionate gaze sent icy shivers down people’s spines and drew a long trail of whispers behind her. Some compassionate, some reverent, but most of them bursting with boiling curiosity: was it her husband who’d turned her into cold stone, or her daughter’s kidnapping? These rumors Madeline faced with dignified stoicism, while beneath bled her broken heart. Too bad tonight was another endless party, where she would have to front again pitiful stares from married women, sympathetic handshakes from their males, and inviting nods from old matrons who never failed to skillfully allude to her marriage while they were diligently forecasting the weather.

  Madeline sighed inwardly and started twisting her dark mahogany hair into an elaborate bun, absently pinning it. Maybe Elisabeth would have had dark mahogany hair too if she had survived. Maybe she did. Elisabeth… The name had ultimately been Arthur’s choice after a seven month long fiery debate.

  “It is going to be a girl, Madeline,” Arthur had said the moment the pregnancy was announced. “We will call her Elisabeth.”

  Madeline had looked at him with shock. Half because she had expected a different reaction from a man who had just found out he was going to be a father, but also bewildered by the choice of the name.

  “Elisabeth sounds nothing like a baby, dear. It is awfully biblical. It means ‘God’s promise,’ ‘Oath of God,’ ‘I am God’s daughter.’ You cannot possibly think of your child as a nun. It is pathetic,” she had said, her voice softly blurred by her French accent.

  “It’s not biblical, it’s royal.” He had dismissed her argument with a wave of his hand.

  Everything in Arthur’s life had to have majesty. From the way he behaved with those who surrounded him, to the opulence of the parties he hosted, and the pompousness of his tenure when he dealt with his business partners. Even the Upper East Side condo he’d chosen as his residence was obscenely snobbish with its Louis XV style interior decoration. The condo was a modern building redecorated on the inside to borrow a classic, provocatively towering look. But that was Arthur; pompous yet warm-hearted, defying life’s blows by imprinting his belligerence on everything he owned. And now it was his baby’s turn to be branded.

  “I am not giving birth to a princess, Arthur.” Madeline had rolled her eyes with visible frustration, knowing too well she was fighting an already lost battle.

  “Oh, yes, you are.”

  He had stubbornly crossed his arms over his chest and they had stayed that way for another seven months until the name ‘Elisabeth Wilburn’ was elegantly printed with winding letters on a commemorative birth certificate. Not only had Arthur been right about the baby’s gender, but a princess she was, her little face and minuscule hands poking out of silky white, porcelain doll clothes embroidered with the initials EW. So was she dressed the day of her kidnapping, in white.

  Madeline finished sticking the pins in her bun and sprayed a hint of Poison behind her ears. It was almost six o’clock, and the table was being set for an early dinner. She was suppos
ed to be downstairs supervising the butlers, not frozen in front of the mirror picking a forbidden lock she had sworn a million times not to tamper with anymore. Arthur’s heart would silently contract with pain if he knew what a cheat she was, breaking the promise not to obsessively push into her mind the same nightmare again and again, almost eighteen years on. Turning from her memory she left the room and descended the stairs with small, quiet steps, running the tips of her fingers over the lacquer of the balustrade.

  The heavy velvet curtains had been pulled closed in the dining room, although the sun was still up in the sky. The chandeliers were gleaming on the high ceiling, their soft radiance delicately mirrored on the silver cutlery.

  Arthur’s face lit up at the sight of his wife. His features always softened in her presence, his heart too. She still melted him.

  “You’re late,” he announced to her.

  He courteously helped her sit down, pushing the chair beneath her as she took her place at the far end of the table. His gaze quickly swept her.

  She could see the unspoken discontent that briefly flashed across his face before he regained his composure.

  Of course Arthur was unhappy. She was once more wearing black for tonight’s party. This was a battle that Madeline had won. There had been a few throughout their marriage. Black represented Madeline’s rebellion against him for trying to make her mingle with a world she had grown to despise: the high society.

  “It is not even six, dear.” Madeline glanced at the hands of the Grandfather clock.

  Arthur stood stiff with impatience in front of his chair.

  “I don’t even understand why we have to dine at home when we are going to a party.” He forced himself to keep his voice down. “There will be plenty of food there. If we don’t leave right now we will be late, and the Devins will take it as a slap to the face, you know them. They will think that we only went there out of perfunctory duty.” He finally sat down.

  “Well, they would be right as far as I am concerned, dear.” Madeline heaved a sigh in irritation at the world he wanted to inhabit and drag her along to.

  Eating before they went avoided the long tables where a decadent cornucopia of meals was arranged for the guests to take their pick. Those were the worst possible place to linger at a party. A whole herd of curious guests would without doubt corner her, sneaking skillful questions in between mouthfuls of food.

  The sadness in her voice made Arthur snap his gaze toward her just as he was occupying himself with placing a napkin on his lap. He sighed.

  “I think it’s time to stop pretending, Madeline,” he said, his voice now charged with tension and tenderness. “Stop protecting my feelings, and let’s talk about it. You just can’t let go, that’s what it is. It’s not the fact that they gossip about the happiness of our marriage, or that they ask personal questions about me.”

  Madeline’s heart skipped a beat. She knew what was coming. “It is not what you think, Arthur,” she started feebly, averting her gaze.

  “It’s not?” He stared at her, nailing her soul, even though she wasn’t looking directly at him. “Can you tell me that every time you stand in front of the mirror you are not asking yourself if she would look like you?”

  His words made her blink back tears, but she stood her ground, her back ramrod straight. He wasn’t being cruel, she knew that. It had taken her a long time to realize that his hurt ran as deep as hers, perhaps even more, because he bore her burden on top of his own.

  “Time is not a good healer, is it?” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

  He forced a sad smile past his lips, desperate to quell her distress.

  “This is because you never speak about your grief, Madeline. You just hide it, trying to protect me. I think that we are in bad need to talk about it and…”

  His words died at the sound of the butler’s voice exploding with profound indignation across the walls. The old servant burst into the dining room behind a short, fat man, holding his chin up and his back straight with impeccable dignity as was fit for a man of his station.

  “Mr. Rockwood, you are not permitted to walk in these premises, unless and until I announce your arrival and the Master allows you to enter,” the butler huffed at the unexpected guest.

  Madeline’s grief receded into a corner for a moment. William had been their butler for seventeen years. He considered himself part of the family by now, more often than not taking liberty to make rules of his own and terrorize guests and servants alike as he pleased. This was not the first time when a guest got rewarded with bluster for being a nuisance or for breaching the house rules.

  The sound of George Rockwood’s steps crashing against the marble floor ceased abruptly, and the rumble of his heavy breathing filled the room. The investigator clasped his chest with fingers whitened at the knuckles while the other hand jerked outward in a silent prayer to his hosts to wait a little.

  A tinge of alarm tickled Madeline at the back of her mind. She stood up and rushed to grab a glass of water then approached her guest with slow, reluctant steps.

  “It is all right, Mr. Rockwood, take your time,” she said.

  George Rockwood stared at her with wild, desperate eyes then his gaze roved over her husband’s face.

  “Mr. Wilburn,” he managed to utter. “Mr. Wilburn,” he repeated in a harsh gurgle, “I have news for you, sir, Madam… We found Miss Elisabeth!”

  The Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge came into view. Its Manhattan approach was supported on Guastavino tile vaults that formed the elegant ceiling of the Food Emporium Bridge Market and the restaurant Guastavino’s. The luxury limo turned smoothly on one of the four lanes that made their way toward Roosevelt Island along the bridge. None of the three passengers in the car paid any attention to the outside world. George Rockwood sat ramrod straight on the edge of the seat, his face contorted by his boss’s visible unease.

  Arthur Wilburn was acutely aware that his wife’s breakdown and the complete havoc of emotions that were now shaking him were not matters that should be so openly displayed in front of a petty employee. He leaned back on the seat with reluctance, maintaining the springiness on the arch of his back, at times furtively patting Madeline’s hand. She kept wringing an embroidered handkerchief between clenched fingers.

  “How sure are you that the person you found is in fact Elisabeth, Rockwood?” Arthur decided to ask in between his wife’s quiet sobs.

  George Rockwood’s tension leaped a notch higher. “There is no doubt about that, sir. We ran three DNA tests in different laboratories. They all returned a ninety nine point ninety nine percent affirmative result,” he replied, his rasped voice echoing his emotion.

  “Why ninety nine point ninety nine percent? What about the zero point zero one percent? Does that mean there’s a chance she’s not our child?” Arthur frowned.

  “Oh, no, sir, nothing like that. No respectable laboratory will return a hundred percent result. No DNA paternity tests are currently hundred percent accurate. Besides, it’s a matter of liability, a legal thing. Ninety nine point ninety nine percent is the maximum percentage the laboratories can issue. It translates in absolute certainty,” Rockwood said, his tone reassuring. “We have also had Police tests confirming our own.”

  A soft rapping sound made the men turn toward Madeline’s hands. She peeled her stare from the tear she’d made in the soft fabric.

  “Why would the Police need a DNA test, Mr. Rockwood?” she asked, looking at him confused. “Don’t they have a database where they could have looked her up?”

  “That’s the problem, Madam, or our strike of luck if I could say,” Rockwood said, settling into a softer style for the delicate woman who sat across from him. “Miss Elisabeth didn’t come up in any database. Not even a federal search returned any results. Police finished by contacting the Immigration Services, suspecting she was an illegal immigrant. Then they located a live image of her, recorded on a patrol car’s dashboard some seven months ago when she… uhmm…” He paused t
o clear his throat, swallowing hard a couple of times before he picked up the sentence where he’d left it. “When she was caught after stealing from a senior citizen in Beverley Square.”

  The collective gasp of horror that poured out of the Wilburns’ throat made George Rockwood want to sink so deep inside his seat until he would be totally engulfed, if that were at all possible.

  “Stealing?” Arthur managed to croak. “Are you sure it was Elisabeth they caught?”

  “So it seems, sir.” Rockwood nodded. “Police have undeniable proof of it. Apart from the video recordings, Miss Elisabeth’s voice was picked up through the police officer’s shoulder microphone when the offense was committed. Yesterday morning, police paid her a visit at the hospital as soon as they found out that her condition allowed her to be interviewed. They have forensically compared her voice with that recorded seven months ago and came up with a hundred percent accurate match. There’s no doubt whatsoever that it was Miss Elisabeth, I’m afraid.”

  “But I don’t understand.” Madeline twisted her handkerchief, her pain palpable. “If she was caught by police seven months ago, why is it that they were not able to identify her back then? Why did they have to wait until she was taken half-dead to the hospital after the hit and run accident?” she asked.

  “Madeline.” Arthur touched Madeline’s knee.

  She pushed out a pained sob.

  Rockwood’s face kept steadily changing from pink toward beet red. “Miss Elisabeth wasn’t actually arrested that day, Madam. She attacked the police officer and was able to escape on foot before reinforcements arrived.”

  Arthur stiffened. “Does that mean that my daughter will now be arrested and charged?” he boomed.

  “Let’s not worry about that right now, Arthur.” Madeline forgot for a moment her own pain and started rubbing his arm.