The House of Secrets

by Elizabeth Blackwell

  “Yes,” Evelyn said with a smile. “I would be honored to be your wife.”

  They were married a few days later in a quiet courthouse ceremony, with the judge’s secretary as their witness. Evelyn wore a pale pink dress that Will had suggested she buy on one of their shopping trips to Baltimore a lifetime ago. They used some of Winslow’s money to buy a five-course meal in the hotel’s dining room, complete with champagne.

  “To us,” Will said, raising his glass in a toast.

  “To starting over,” Evelyn replied, clinking her glass against his.

  With that, they turned their backs on the past. For years, as they slowly built new lives, they never spoke of the house in Oak Hill or what had happened on the roof that terrible afternoon. Until, one day, a figure from their past reappeared to remind them of what they’d left behind.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  LOGICALLY, ALISSA knew it was a mistake to date someone you worked with. She used to shake her head disapprovingly when she heard about office relationships, predicting they could only end badly. How could you possibly concentrate on your job when you were constantly distracted by your new crush and worrying about how you looked?

  But that was before she met Danny. He had a way of tackling obstacles that would have defeated anyone else. Confronted with structural challenges in a building, he doggedly found a way to fix them without getting frustrated. He handled Alissa’s concerns the same way, moving easily from coworker to boyfriend as the occasion demanded. He did it all so smoothly that Alissa wondered what she’d been so worried about.

  During the day, Danny focused on the house. He greeted Alissa with a brief kiss each morning, then went right to work. As she installed wood blinds in the living room or painted the master bedroom, she could hear him hammering or sawing somewhere, but they wouldn’t speak for hours. Over lunch, the conversation stayed strictly business, discussing their progress and upcoming projects.

  Come evening, the dynamic changed. Danny courted Alissa with old-fashioned sweetness, asking her out on dinner dates or trips to the local bowling alley. He introduced her to his mother and his closest friends. He spent occasional nights over at the house, and she missed him when he didn’t. It was very serious very soon and it felt right.

  Only occasionally did they allow their feelings to get in the way of work. One afternoon, Alissa asked Danny to look at her clogged-up bathroom sink. Although he wasn’t a plumber, he said he could probably clear the drain easily enough. While trying to loosen a rusty bolt under the sink with his wrench, he pulled off a weak section of pipe, spraying water all over the bathroom floor and soaking himself.

  Alissa shrieked with surprise, then laughter, as Danny crammed the pipe back on while being pelted with water.

  “Thanks a lot,” he said sarcastically after the spray had been tamed. He pushed his dripping hair off his face.

  “I’m sorry,” Alissa said, still giggling. “It was like a cartoon.”

  “I’m a mess,” Danny said. He took off his T-shirt and wrung it out in the sink. Alissa brought him her bath towel and wrapped it around his shoulders. Before she could move away, Danny dropped the T-shirt and grabbed her.

  “Was this part of your evil plan?” he asked. “A wet T-shirt contest?”

  Alissa leaned toward him, feeling the solidity of his body press against hers.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “So you could have your way with me?”

  Alissa smiled. Danny’s hands moved from her waist down along her hips. Drips of water from his hair fell onto her neck.

  The doorbell rang downstairs.

  “Oh, no,” Alissa said. She’d completely forgotten. Elaine, her Realtor, had asked if she could bring someone over to see the renovated house, and Alissa had suggested this afternoon. She backed away from Danny and gave him an apologetic smile.

  “It’s Elaine and her friend. I have to give them the house tour. I’ve got some old workout T-shirts in the dresser if you want something dry to wear.”

  She gave him a quick kiss, then hurried toward the stairs as the doorbell rang again.

  Alissa arrived at the door flushed and distracted. She opened the door, trying to smile.

  “Hello there!” Elaine said, immaculate as usual in a tweed suit and several pieces of elaborate gold jewelry. “Hope we’re not catching you at a bad time.”

  “We were having some plumbing problems upstairs,” Alissa said, “but Danny’s got a handle on it.” She turned to the woman at Elaine’s side and held out her hand. “Hello, I’m Alissa Franklin.”

  “Melody Foster.” Alissa was taken aback for a moment. So this was the woman who’d owned the house before her. She was taller than Alissa had expected, with straight shoulders and a brisk manner that gave her an air of authority. Her hand held Alissa’s in a firm grip, but her smile was wide and warm. It was only after she came inside that Alissa saw an indication of her true age, as her shoes shuffled more than stepped into the foyer.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, looking up toward the ceiling.

  “The chandelier?” Alissa asked. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think I ever saw it sparkle like that,” Melody said. “How beautiful.”

  “Well, cleaning it was quite a job, but it was worth it,” Alissa said. “The rest of the house isn’t quite so impressive, I’m afraid. It’s still a work in progress.”

  Melody shook her head as she slowly turned around, taking everything in. “You were right,” she said to Elaine. “She deserves this house.”

  Elaine nodded.

  “Would you like to take a look around?” Alissa asked. “You might not recognize the kitchen.”

  As they started down the hallway to the dining room, Alissa heard Danny’s work boots clattering down the stairs. Elaine waved at him.

  “Hello, Danny!” she called out flirtatiously. “Melody, this is Danny Pierce. He’s doing work on the house for Alissa.” She gave Alissa a teasing glance. Thanks to Danny’s mother, the whole town knew they were dating.

  Danny was wearing one of Alissa’s old college T-shirts. Big on her, it fit him snugly around the shoulders and chest. He was fidgeting self-consciously, but the effect was flattering. Alissa wished her guests had come later.

  Danny lifted his hand in a quick greeting. “Nice to meet you. Hi, Elaine. Alissa, I’m going to run to the store to get some stuff for that sink, okay?”

  Alissa nodded.

  “Looks and talent. It’s not often you find that in the same man,” Elaine said after Danny closed the door behind him. “Plus, he’s so kind. His mother is a lucky woman.” She peered at Alissa. You are, too, her gaze seemed to say.

  Alissa led her guests through the house, moving slowly to accommodate Melody’s shaky legs. Although Alissa wondered if it was hard for her to see someone else take over her old home, Melody appeared delighted by the changes.

  After the tour, Alissa invited the women to join her for tea in the living room. This room, at least, was close to how she had envisioned it, with comfortable cream-colored couches and armchairs arranged around a square rug with a pattern of green vines. The wood fireplace mantel had been stripped of its white paint and refinished to its original luster. The room felt both elegant and relaxed, the precise effect Alissa had hoped for.

  “You lived here for a long time, didn’t you?” Alissa asked. She already knew, thanks to her digging through the county records, that Melody Foster and her husband had bought the house in 1973.

  “More than thirty years,” Melody said. “After my husband died, my sister moved in to keep me company. We weren’t able to maintain it the way I’d hoped, and it simply became too much for us.” Alissa could hear the wistfulness in her voice. It couldn’t have been easy to move from this gracious home to a retirement complex.

  “I hope you’ll come again,” Alissa said. “We’ve got a lot more work to do, as you can see. And your sister, too, if she’d like.”

  “She’s living with her daughter i
n Boston, but I’ll tell her. She might like to come down. It’s always been more than just a house to us.”

  “It does have a certain spirit, doesn’t it?” Alissa asked. “I felt it the very first time I visited.”

  Melody smiled. “It’s more than that to me. It’s not something I’ve ever talked about, but I have a family connection to this place.”

  “Really?” Alissa asked. Elaine looked intrigued.

  “The original owner was my grandmother,” Melody said.

  But that was impossible, Alissa thought. The original owners were Charles and Evelyn Brewster, and they never had children.

  “You may have heard of Evelyn Brewster,” Melody began.

  Alissa nodded, and Elaine said, “Of course.”

  “I’m her granddaughter,” Melody continued. “Her first husband died young, and she moved to California to marry his brother, Will. My grandfather.”

  Will? He’d barely been mentioned in the family records Alissa had read so thoroughly. She’d dismissed him as a minor character.

  “I don’t know much about my grandparents’ lives before they moved to San Francisco,” Melody said apologetically. “Although I gather their marriage would’ve been quite the scandal.”

  “I would say so!” Elaine exclaimed. “I never heard a thing about it!”

  “Did she ever say anything about her first husband, Charles?” Alissa asked.

  Melody shook her head. “All I know is what my mother told me years later—that my grandparents once said they saved each other from a lifetime of misery.”

  “If you only knew how much time I’ve spent wondering about Evelyn and what happened to her!” Alissa marveled. “And now you’re saying she lived happily ever after.”

  “Oh, yes,” Melody said. “My grandfather ran a very successful business, importing artwork and furniture from Europe. My grandmother was one of those women who’s always involved in some charity project or another. They had one child, my mother, and brought her up in a lovely house on the edge of Nob Hill. I grew up less than a mile away and spent every Sunday with them. Even when they were older and considerably slower, they had such a spark. I adored them.”

  “How did you end up here?” Alissa asked.

  “As far as I know, my grandparents stayed in contact with only one person in the Brewster family, my cousin Beatrice. I met her once, when she visited California after the Second World War. I wish I could tell you more about her, but I was so young and quite uninterested in family history then. I remember her as reserved but kind. We found out later she was quite sick, and she died not long after. In her will, she left this house in some sort of trust for my mother. Beatrice had no children, you see, and she wanted the house to remain in the family.”

  Alissa remembered the courthouse records, the bank in San Francisco. Now she understood.

  “My mother was understandably confused,” Melody continued. “What did she want with a house in Maryland? My grandparents insisted she see the house before deciding what to do with it. They paid for plane tickets and brought her here for a visit.”

  “Evelyn came back?” Alissa asked, excitement rising.

  Melody nodded. “My sister and I were in school at the time, so we stayed in California with my father. I remember the fight my parents had when Mother returned from the trip and told Father she wouldn’t sell the house. He’d assumed they would, of course, and then there she was, putting her foot down and saying no. They eventually compromised and made arrangements to rent it out.

  “Still, I grew up thinking the house would be sold sooner or later. It certainly didn’t mean anything to me. Eventually, through a long series of events I won’t bore you with, my husband was offered a teaching position at the University of Maryland. I can’t help seeing it now as an act of fate. Suddenly, here we were, moving to the area where my mother happened to own a house. For tax reasons, my parents decided to sell us the house for a very reasonable amount rather than give it to us. Alissa, I think you’ll understand when I tell you I fell in love with the place immediately.

  “I always hoped one of my daughters would want to live here someday, but neither of them wanted the responsibility of this old place. Once I accepted I’d have to sell it, I told Elaine I’d wait for the right person. The money wasn’t important—I wanted someone who would treasure this house as much as I did. And then you came along.”

  “In all the time you lived here, why didn’t you ever tell anyone you were related to the Brewsters?” Elaine demanded.

  “Soon after I moved in, I realized the Brewster name still had a powerful mystique,” Melody explained. “I wanted to raise my family in peace. I certainly didn’t want anyone thinking I’d inherited a fortune!”

  “Shame on you,” Elaine said teasingly.

  Melody turned to Alissa. “Elaine told me you’ve been quite taken with the home’s history,” she said. “I thought you might be interested in seeing a picture of my grandparents.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a sepia-toned photograph. It showed a young couple standing close together, holding hands. Alissa recognized Evelyn immediately. Her dark hair, pulled in waves on the top of her head, looked the same as it had in other pictures, but her expression was one Alissa had never seen. She was smiling happily, exuding a warmth that brightened her whole face. Next to her, Will Brewster had the same piercing eyes as his brother, but none of Charles’s cool detachment. Will was undeniably handsome, but he wore his good looks loosely, without self-consciousness.

  Will and Evelyn looked at Alissa across the years. They felt as real to her as Melody and Elaine a few feet away. She thought of the picture of Charles and Evelyn in their party finery, sitting forlornly in an upstairs bedroom. She knew she wouldn’t keep it. She would make a copy of this one instead, showing a happy Brewster couple. Theirs was the spirit she wanted to celebrate in this house.

  The front door opened and Danny walked in. As he strolled into the living room, Alissa was overwhelmed by a rush of emotion. Is this how Evelyn had felt, watching Will Brewster? Knowing he was the last person she should fall in love with, but unable to resist?

  Alissa waved to Danny, motioning him to join them in the living room.

  “Danny—there’s a story you have to hear.” She patted the sofa next to her. She wanted him to hear the story of Will and Evelyn Brewster. She wanted him to know that happy endings were possible.

  EPILOGUE

  “TWO YEARS?” Constance asked. “Really?”

  “Almost exactly,” Alissa said. Two years since she’d bought what she still thought of as the Brewster house. Two years in which she’d transformed her entire life. Two years of uncertainty, frustration, excitement and passion. And, at last, contentment.

  “I never imagined you’d get a husband out of the deal,” Constance said. She followed Alissa through the French doors in the kitchen and out to the patio, where a row of glazed blue planters brightened the stark expanse of stone.

  “Remember when Danny first came for the interview?” Alissa laughed. “We thought he’d be some old guy missing half his teeth.”

  “And he turned out to be the hunky handyman!” Constance said.

  “I remember—I was so annoyed at you,” Alissa mused. “Flirting with him when I was trying to be all professional. Dating was the last thing on my mind.”

  “That’s why it worked out. Good things happen when you least expect them.”

  “For you, too,” Alissa reminded her friend.

  She looked at the little boy galloping across the lawn ahead of them. When Constance had signed up to be a foster mother, she had expected a short-term placement, a crash course in parenting to prepare for when she finally got pregnant. But Constance had fallen in love with two-year-old Ty immediately, showering him with the love she had hoarded for so many years. When Ty’s mother, unable to overcome her heroin addiction, begged the social workers to take the child off her hands, Constance had offered to adopt him. The child she’d dreamed of for so long hadn’t a
rrived the way she’d imagined, but he was hers nonetheless.

  Getting Ty had prompted a few other changes in Constance’s life. In order to spend more time with her son, she quit her job and decided to join forces with Alissa. The new offices of Franklin, Powers and Pierce—a full-service renovation and design firm with Constance as architect, Alissa as designer and Danny as contractor—had recently been set up in the old conservatory.

  Danny and Alissa had made their personal partnership official a few months before, exchanging vows in a simple ceremony followed by an informal reception at home. Close friends and family celebrated with dancing in the foyer well into the night. They’d decided to put off the honeymoon to focus on finishing the house, but Danny was already dropping hints about the European itinerary he was planning for next year.

  “Ty! Stop!” Constance scolded. The boy turned to her, brandishing the daffodils he’d pulled from the flower beds.

  “It’s all right,” Alissa said. “We’re going to redo all this anyway. Go ahead, Ty—you can keep playing.”

  “Are you boring Constance with your latest To Do list?” Danny stepped out from the kitchen holding a pitcher of lemonade and a stack of plastic cups.

  “Not at all,” Constance protested, taking a cup from Danny and holding it out for him to fill. “What do you have planned?”

  “Alissa wants to open all this up,” Danny explained. “Tear out the hedges, put down sod.”

  “It would be a lot easier to maintain,” Alissa pointed out.

  “It would also mean ripping out my favorite part of the yard,” Danny said in a resigned tone that signaled this was a frequent, unresolved topic of conversation.

  Constance looked at Alissa questioningly.

  “Haven’t you seen it?” Alissa asked. She led the way to the garden room and Danny and Constance followed, holding Ty’s hands, through the opening in the hedges. New leaves had started to fill in the branches of the maple tree above them.

  “Oh, this is charming!” Constance exclaimed. “Your own private getaway.”