West Wind
By Madeline Sloane
Copyright 2011 Madeline Sloane
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2011 Madeline Sloane
Web: http://www.MadelineSloane.com
Printed in the United States of America
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Prepared for publication by The Omnibus
Web: http://www.TheOmnibus.net
To lvan
Chapter One
James Weaver tilted a brass watering can over the small garden at his property line. "How am I supposed to know if she's okay?"
Standing on their neighbor's front porch, his wife, Ida, had alternately rang the bell, knocked on the door and tapped on the window for the past five minutes.
"Well, she never goes anywhere," Ida said, keeping her voice low so the elderly woman inside wouldn't hear. "She hasn't driven the Cadillac for at least a month."
"Just try the door then. Doubt if she locks it." His sage advice delivered, James went back to tending his flowers.
Ida visited Rose Windham a few times a week, getting as close as any neighbor could to the reclusive old lady. It was mid-morning, so she shouldn't be in bed. She twisted the knob and slowly opened the door of the Victorian mansion.
James Weaver dropped the watering can on his toe at the sound of her scream.
* * *
Sabrina's heart pounded as she groped for the telephone.
"Sabrina?" Her mother's husky voice still carried a slight Portuguese accent. "Are you awake?"
"I am now," she said, swinging her legs off the side of the bed. "What's wrong? Is Daddy okay?"
"Yes, he's fine. It's Grandmother Rose."
"What's happened?" Sabrina rubbed her face, wiping sleep from her heavy lids.
"She's in the hospital. She fell. Daddy's on the cell phone with her neighbor now. Doctors say she may have had a stroke."
Sabrina had limited experienced with illness. Her parents were healthy and Rose seemed invincible. These three made up her small family.
"We need you to go to Eaton."
Sabrina exhaled. Here it came. "Isn't Daddy going?"
"We're leaving for Tibet in two days, Sabrina. We can't change our plans now. We've got our visas and tickets and our itinerary isn't flexible." Her mother's voice rose, no longer husky.
Sabrina heard the threat of tears. She wondered if they were for Grandmother Rose, unconscious and injured in a hospital on the East Coast, or if they were for Marta, herself, busy with yet another trip to the Orient.
Her parents, Norman and Marta Windham, were bohemian writers, renowned more for their eccentric personalities and fantastic destinations than for the quality of the books they wrote as a team. For more than twenty years, their popular series of "Tread Lightly" travel guides sold well. They wrote about backpacking the Himalayas, rafting the Amazon, floating across Africa in a hot air balloon, and snowshoeing through British Columbia. They retained the "eco-friendly" attitude that attracted them to each other as young college students, sipping green tea, dining on hummus and lentils, favoring Birkenstock shoes and all-cotton clothing.
Sabrina, the daughter of aging hippies who smoked who-knows-what in their Hookah, mutinied in her youth. At the age of thirteen, fighting her way out of a lifestyle embellished with the exotic artifacts of her parents' travels, Sabrina begged to enroll in an all-girl, Catholic preparatory school in Maryland. At the time, the family still lived in northern Virginia, close to Washington, D.C., where her parents worked as freelance writers and co-hosted a show on public radio. They now lived in Boulder, Colorado, a bastion of aging "free spirits."
Norman and Marta were amused by their young, conservative daughter, who rebelliously dressed in plaid skirts, knee-high socks, leather loafers, white shirts and cardigan sweaters. They understood her need to "buck the establishment." The same need drove them into finding their destiny as teens, albeit with tied-dyed T-shirts and hemp sandals.
As the daughter of ramblers, Sabrina grew up self-reliant and reserved. She spent most summers at Grandmother Rose's home in Eaton, Pennsylvania, while her parents rode elephants in India and Land Rovered through the Australian outback. If anything, Norman and Marta were relieved that Sabrina wanted to attend a boarding school. It freed them of one more item on their checklist when traveling: Where to put Sabrina.
She sighed, pushing a weary hand through her dark, rumpled hair. "Alright; calm down. I'll go," she said.
"Good girl. I'll have Daddy text message you the details. Which hospital …"
"There's only one hospital in Eaton, Mom," Sabrina said, recalling the summer she broke her wrist. It prevented her from swimming at the community pool just when she learned how to dive. After the cast came off in August, her grandmother enrolled her in tennis lessons to build her wrist muscles. For the next few weeks, until she returned to Virginia for seventh grade, she swooned over Robert Hall, a pre-law college student who taught tennis at the rec center during summer vacations.
"Fine. Let me take care of a few things and I'll be there tomorrow."
"You mean tonight," her mother said.
Sabrina looked at her clock. The red digital numbers clicked to six a.m. and the alarm buzzed. Reaching out to slap the snooze button, she groaned. "Yes; I mean tonight. Good bye, Mom."
* * *
Sabrina worked from her apartment, the second floor of a 19th century row house remodeled into three levels of living. The landlord lived in the basement apartment, and an elderly married couple rented the first floor. The property owner's hobbies including gardening. He kept the small front yard blooming nearly year round. Instead of landscaping the backyard, he built small decks for each unit and filled them with potted trees, container gardens and patio furniture.
Renters appreciated the airy feel inside each apartment, thanks to the ivory walls and French doors opening onto the deck patios. Built-in oak shelving glowed, six-foot windows filled the rooms with light, and the kitchen was decorated in a Tuscany style. The effect was chic, yet homey, and the rent enormous, even for Baltimore.
Sabrina used her second bedroom as a home office where she operated her small financial consulting firm. Photographs from her parents adorned the walls. There were vistas of Mount Fuji, underwater shots of colorful fish and coral at the Great Barrier Reef, a photo of Norman and Marta in front of Stonehenge, and another of Marta racing the steps of a Mayan pyramid. There were no photos of Sabrina; she was never included in their journeys. Instead, they shuffled her to Grandmother Rose's home in Pennsylvania, or various college students would take turns house- and daughter-sitting for the Windhams.
After showering and packing a suitcase, Sabrina knocked on the basement door.
"Mr. Brothers; it's me, Sabrina Windham," she called through the steel door, knowing from experience that he rose early.
Ricardo Brothers opened the door, a steaming mug of coffee in one hand.
"Good morning, Sabrina. What can I do for you?"
"I have to go to Pennsylvania for awhile. I'm not sure how long. My grandmother is in the hospital," she said.
"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that." Ricardo took a sip of
his coffee. The aroma of freshly ground Columbian beans filled the hallway.
"Would you please collect my mail and forward it to me? Here is the address," she said, handing him an envelope. "I've included some cash for postage. Also, will you take care of the plants? I watered them on Saturday, so they're good for a few more days."
"Certainly. Anything you need. You have my phone number and my e-mail, so please keep in touch. I hope your grandmother is better soon."
She nodded her thanks. A car honked.
"There's my taxi. I have to run. Thank you, Mr. Brothers, I appreciate this."
Ricardo nodded kindly, and then sipped his coffee as he watched Sabrina hurry up the concrete steps. His orange tabby cat wound through his ankles, meowing softly.
"Morning, Sally. Ready for your breakfast?" He closed the door and followed the cat into his tidy kitchen.
* * *
The small airplane dipped below the clouds and touched down gently. The tube shook and ill-fitting cabinet doors rattled as the wheels roared down the runway. It coasted to a stop and the seatbelt light snapped off. Sabrina waited for the other passengers to disembark. She preferred to wait since the limited headroom on the "puddle jumper" plane meant she would have to crouch until others disembarked.
Across the aisle, a young mother cradled a sleeping infant over her shoulder. "You go ahead," she said as her harried husband struggled with the car seat.
Sabrina gracefully slid out of the cramped seat, opened the overhead storage and removed her briefcase. Packed with her notebook computer, cell phone, books and folders of pending work, the case weighed at least twenty pounds. She grunted, then shifted it in front of her, hoping it wouldn't throw her off balance as she exited the airplane. She paused at the top of the rolling stairs and looked around.
The small airport squatted in a valley nestled between green mountains with fog-shrouded peaks. The Appalachians were old, their shoulders rounded from millions of years of wind and rain. Sabrina viewed this same scene for many summers, coming to and going from Grandmother Rose's house. Always, she made the trip alone.
The same woman who used orange-tipped flashlights to guide the two-engine turbo prop commuter now drove an ATV with a trailer to the rear of the airplane. The steward opened the locker in the plane's belly and placed suitcases on the tarmac. The young woman, spry in a green, one-piece jumpsuit and yellow safety vest, slung the suitcases into the trailer.
"That it?"
The steward nodded and then tippled his fingers, miming a drink.
"Yeah, sure. I get off at four. See you at the pub?"
"I'll be there. I've got a couple of days off, so …"
Their voices lowered as they moved closer. The woman laughed and pushed at the young man's chest. "Perv!" She quickly kissed him and then sprang onto the seat of the tractor. "Gotta get these bags to the terminal. See you tonight."
Sabrina walked across the tarmac and entered the airport. In the lobby, people hugged and chatted with arriving passengers.
"Well, it's not much, but it has the right ingredients," Sabrina thought, glancing at the single security gate and the lone ticket window.
She headed for baggage claim, joining the other passengers in front of a set of garage doors. The metal doors lifted noisily and Sabrina watched as the young woman from the ATV tossed the baggage onto a low-slung counter. She'd driven the tractor about fifty yards from the plane.
Sabrina found her bag, and then headed for the car rental counter when a short, elderly man stepped into her path.
"Excuse me, miss. Are you Sabrina Windham?"
Puzzled, she nodded. The man twisted a worn baseball cap in his hands. "I'm James Weaver; Rose's neighbor. The visiting nurse said you were coming in this afternoon and that I should offer you a ride home."
"Thank you very much, Mr. Weaver," Sabrina said. "But, I'm going to need a car while I'm here in Eaton, so I'll rent one."
"Well, here's the thing. Miss Rose has a nice car and the nurse said you're to use that while you're here. It's a real nice one. Miss Rose always gets a nice, new car every few years. It's right out front."
He shuffled towards a sliding glass door that parted when he passed its electric eye. Parked at the curb sat a Cadillac, its motor running and the radio tuned to a conservative talk show.
Sabrina smiled at the small-town charm that allowed people to leave cars running when performing brief chores. Locked doors in Eaton are rare.
James Weaver pushed the key fob and the trunk popped opened. He took her suitcase and hefted it into the voluminous trunk, then slammed the lid. Scooting to the passenger door, he opened it, gallantly standing to the side.
"Thank you," Sabrina said, sliding into the elegant, full-size automobile that flouted her parent's ideology of hybrid fuels and conservation. She caressed the leather interior. I am, she thought, my grandmother's daughter.
Since the fifteen minutes when her plane landed, she claimed her luggage and was on the road. Small towns had their rewards and a lack of traffic in the airport and on the road, was the best, she reflected.
"Have you ever been to Eaton?" James Weaver tried to restart the car, the ignition system grinding. He grimaced apologetically. "Oops. Forgot it was already on." He slipped the gearshift into drive and, without looking over his shoulder, he made a quick U-turn and drove out of the airport parking lot.
"Yes," Sabrina said. "My parents traveled a lot, so I spent most of my summers here with Grandmother Rose."
The old man nodded, not really paying attention to her nervous, chatty reply. He drove along River Road toward Eaton. "River's up," he commented.
Sabrina glanced at the water, its ripples glinting in the late afternoon sun. "Has it been a wet summer?"
He nodded, then spent the next few minutes recounting the increasing number of rainstorms. "One good thing about the rain," he added, "is the fall leaves will be grand. That should bring more visitors."
He turned into a quiet neighborhood lined with Victorian mansions and spreading maple trees. Some houses were modified into apartments for college students, others into offices for lawyers and doctors.
The local preservation foundation owned a few historic houses, selling them to wealthy residents who could afford the restoration and the upkeep. Most were included on the foundation's annual Victorian homes tour. Rose owned such a house, with each rose-themed room decorated in a different color. Sabrina stayed in the yellow "Lord Mountbatten Rose" room when she visited.
Sabrina studied the elderly man as he drove. He seemed to be in his mid-sixties, possibly seventies, but appeared strong. She wondered who he was and how he knew her grandmother. She didn't know James Weaver, although she hadn't been to visit for a few years.
"Do you know anything about her accident?"
He glanced at Sabrina apologetically. "Not much. She was alone. Doctors say she had a stroke. She was on the floor all night until my wife stopped by the next morning. She saw her at the bottom of the staircase. 'Bout had a heart attack herself. She thought the poor old woman fell down the steps and killed herself. Doctor thinks she was sitting on the bottom step, trying to catch her breath when she keeled over."
Sabrina's eyes filled with tears. Grandmother Rose had always been kind to her, although Sabrina could well imagine her as the evil stepmother in a cartoon. She was tall, rail thin with her silver hair swept into a chignon. She always wore haute couture, despite the fact that she rarely left her house.
To Sabrina, Grandmother Rose seemed a haunted woman who denied herself the pleasure and love of people, but not the pleasure of things. She seemed to enjoy her oriental vases and bronze statues more than her own son and his family.
As a beautiful and wealthy young widow, Rose Windham should have been the belle of the ball. Instead, after she moved to Eaton in 1976, the town's residents learned that the haughty woman didn't want friends.
Sabrina knew that her father felt slighted by Rose. She shuttled him off to prep school the year his father di
ed, and then sent him to a military academy for college. In his junior year, he withdrew, making a list of the top ten liberal colleges in the nation and applying to all.
He chose Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, for its particularly open-minded reputation. There, he reveled in socially conscious, left-wing repartee and indulged in artistic expression, majoring in theater with a minor in psychology.
At Hampshire, he met the love of his life, Marta, a beautiful Brazilian exchange student majoring in creative writing. Throughout their bohemian life, they managed to rear their daughter, Sabrina, who, in turn, rebelled against her parents and sought education at a private girls' prep school and then at Harvard's business school studying finance.
She blinked back her tears as James Weaver pulled into the alley behind the Victorian mansion, parking the car in the carriage house.
"We're here."
"We're not going to the hospital?"
"She refused to stay. She's been released and has a nurse to take care of her at home."
* * *
Nothing could have prepared Sabrina for the sight of the fragile, pale woman. Rose's body barely mounded the quilts of the hospital bed incongruously placed in the dining room.
The crystal chandelier above Rose's head cast a yellow and ghastly light. Her nose, once patrician, now seemed hawkish, her mouth encircled with deep lines. Blue eyes pinned hers when Sabrina walked to the bed and gently picked up the bone-thin hand.
"Grandmother?"
"Sabrina," the elderly woman whispered, a tear rolling down the tissue-thin cheek.
"I'm here, Grandmother."
"Norman?" The old woman's eyes darted behind Sabrina, falling upon her neighbor, James Weaver.
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