by Nicole Baart
Directly across the hall was a formal sitting room that went mostly unused, but a quick glance inside stopped Adri cold. Victoria had found a purpose for it in her final days. There was a hospital bed in the very middle of the cavernous space, the sheets clean and tucked so tight around the mattress, a quarter would have bounced like a happy child. Apparently the hospital supply company hadn’t yet come to retrieve their rental. Adri made a mental note to track down and call whoever needed to be called. It would be her first act as executor.
But even making a mini to-do list didn’t stop Adri from feeling the full brunt of emotion as she confronted the place where Victoria had breathed her last. It wasn’t just that the older woman had almost been her mother-in-law. It was that Victoria embodied everything Adri might have been. Everything she had lost. A husband, a home, a name. An inheritance that spanned centuries and was carefully marked in books that were meticulously kept. What would she be if David hadn’t died? A wife, certainly. A mother? A daughter? Would she have nursed Victoria as her fragile heart slowly stopped beating, lifting a glass of cold water to her lips and listening to the confessions she whispered?
It was impossible to face the harsh reality of the years of erosion, the casualties of such a cruel life, and not be moved.
Adri could have spent the rest of the morning there, leaning against the vaulted entrance to the room and agonizing over Victoria’s letter and the tide of guilt it had unleashed, but the sound of the chain rattling on the front door spun her around.
“Anyone here?” Will’s voice resonated in the empty space, announcing his arrival before he poked his head around the side of the heavy door. “Adri?”
She palmed away tears and tried to sniff discreetly. “Of course I’m here,” she called. “Who else would be driving Betty?”
Will gave her a knowing smile and let himself in. Shutting the door quietly behind him, he moved toward Adri as if to give her a hug, but she crossed her arms over her chest and he stopped short. “I figured you’d be here. Dad told me you saw Clay this morning.”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“And what, Will?” Adri hated herself a little for being short with her brother, but she didn’t have it in her to parry his subtle insinuations. If he wanted to ask her something, he was going to have to just come out with it. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“I wanted to see how you’re doing.” He looked hurt, and Adri regretted snapping at him.
She sighed. “I need a drink,” she said by way of apology. “You coming?”
The main living area was at the very back of the house, and the only way to access the kitchen was to go straight through it. The floor-to-ceiling windows afforded a gorgeous view of the free-form pool and waterfall hot tub that had always struck Adri as a nonsensical feature in a Midwestern home—even one as grand as Piperhall. Because the temperatures dipped so low in winter, the hot tub was completely unusable seven months of the year. Sometimes more.
But the ornamental terrace that swept around the large pool and hot tub was still striking in any season, and large pots of hibiscus bushes and cheerful red geraniums clung to foliage with admirable tenacity. Adri was surprised to see that the pool was full and the surface was glassy and clean. A thin wall of warm water fell from the stone hot tub and was swallowed up by the deep end of the glittering pool. The water would be a comfortable 80 degrees. Adri hadn’t expected to see it up and running.
“Who’s taking care of the place?” she asked, motioning through the windows.
“She liked the sound of the water.” Will pulled out a bar stool and sat down as Adri lifted a pair of glasses out of the cupboard near the sink. “Once the big spring prep work is done, it doesn’t take much maintenance to keep the pool clean.”
“And I suppose you’re the pool boy?” Adri’s back was turned to Will as she filled the glasses with water from the tap, but she could feel his eyes boring into her.
“As a matter of fact, I am,” Will said. “Do you have a problem with that?”
Adri shrugged as she handed him the water. “You don’t find it a little strange?”
“That I helped out someone in need? That Dad and Jackson and I worked hard to fill in the gaps when you ran away?” Will gave her an uncharacteristically hard look. “Someone had to take care of Victoria, Adri, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be you.”
“Then why’d she leave me the house?” Adri watched her brother closely, waiting for the shock that would breeze across his features. There was none. “You knew?” she whispered, incredulous.
“Of course, I knew. I was the witness when she changed the will. Didn’t you see my signature?”
She hadn’t. She had forgotten to look. It had seemed important at the time, but when the full understanding of what Victoria had done hit her, suddenly who had known what didn’t seem to matter at all.
“Why didn’t you warn me?” Adri asked, too surprised to worry about the tremor in her voice. “Why didn’t you talk her out of it? I don’t want this. I never asked for this!”
She was half shouting, and Will raised his hands, palms up, as if that would somehow calm her. “Hey. It’s okay. I didn’t talk her out of it because I thought you would be honored. You’re all she had left, Adri.”
“Don’t make me feel guilty!”
“I’m not trying to make you feel—”
“Well, you are. What am I supposed to do with this? What in the world did she want from me?”
“Take a breath,” Will instructed. Adri tried to comply, but the air felt thin and insubstantial in her lungs. “Again.” He was silent as she struggled to get her breathing under control, though he covered her hands with his own when she slapped her palms on the countertop and pressed down as if she expected the granite to hold her up. After a few moments he said, “I don’t think she wanted anything from you. You’re reading too much into it. It’s a gift, Adri. You can do with it whatever you want.”
But he didn’t know everything. He didn’t know about the letter. Or about the things that had happened between Adri and David. Will didn’t know the truth about the day that David died.
Adri pulled her hands out from under her brother’s and gulped down the water that she had poured for herself. “I don’t think I can do this.”
“Do what?” Will didn’t try to hide his irritation as he rolled his eyes. “I love you, little sis, and I’m glad that you’re home, but this whole tragic love story is starting to get old.”
Adri was speechless, but Will was far from done.
“It’s been over five years, Adri. You’ve run as far away as you possibly can, ignored every responsibility and relationship you left behind, and now you’ve been given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by a woman who owed you nothing, and you’re going to act like it’s a burden?”
“You don’t understand.”
Will gave her a gentle smile. “Sure I do. I know you feel guilty—I do, too. I was there, you know.”
“No, you weren’t. You and Jackson were hiking. You were nowhere near when—”
“Whatever,” Will interrupted. “All I’m saying is, we all hate what happened to David, and we all wish that things would have been different. But you have got to stop beating yourself up. I know you loved him and I know you miss him. We all do. But you need to learn to live again. To let it go once and for all.”
He made it sound so simple, but when Adri probed each of his confident declarations, she was far from convinced that his words were true. She had loved David, but she wasn’t sure that she loved him when he died.
And what in the world was she supposed to do with that?
Adri was a fraud, pure and simple. She had killed him, but she could never, ever admit that to anyone but herself. And Caleb, she realized with a start. She had told Caleb. But he’d be long gone by the time she reclaimed the life she had
worked so hard to make for herself. “I never stopped living,” she said defensively. “I happen to like my life.”
“Your life didn’t begin five years ago. You can’t keep ignoring everything that came before.”
Will was right, but Adri could hardly tell him that. “Victoria should have left the house to you,” she finally said. “You and Jackson. Nora and the baby. You could have lived like royalty.”
“What if we don’t want to live like royalty?”
“And what about me? What if I don’t want to live like a queen?”
Will shrugged. “Then you do something about it. Sell it, give it away, write a big, fat donation check to every health clinic you can think of in West Africa.”
“It’s not about the money.”
“You’re right,” Will said, and there was a note of bitterness in his voice that made her cringe. “It’s about you.” And then he pushed back from the counter and stalked away.
Adri was sure that he had left, though the front door was so far away from the kitchen, she couldn’t hear it slam.
The rest of the house was in pristine condition, but Adri hardly noticed as she walked from room to room. Some wings had been closed off entirely, yet when Adri threw open the doors and wandered the abandoned halls, there was barely a speck of dust to mark her haphazard passage through the mansion that was now, impossibly, hers. She avoided Victoria’s bedroom on the northeast quarter of what the late Mrs. Galloway had pretentiously designated “the chamber story” (it was actually the third floor), and also David’s apartment in the garden level basement (only a couple feet were underground). But everywhere else felt like fair game, including the suite at the opposite corner of Victoria’s rooms on the uppermost floor.
The first time David took The Five to Piperhall, he didn’t give them a tour. He let them explore. A quick rundown in the vast entryway outlined the bones, and then he disappeared down the steps to his rooms. Adri wanted to follow him, but the allure of the mansion was too much to ignore. They’d find their way downstairs soon enough.
“Have fun,” David called over his shoulder, trailing Will and Jackson in his wake. “Get into all the trouble you want.”
Harper looked as if she’d love nothing more than to do exactly that. Grabbing Adri’s hand, she hurried her through the halls, up stairs and around corners, half running as if they were being pursued. “It’s huge,” Harper gasped after they had wound through the dining room, the library, and a room that looked like it had once been used for formal balls. “Have you ever been inside?”
“No.” Adri was as breathless as Harper, but she tried to suppress her excitement. After all those summers of walking the grounds but being strictly forbidden to enter the mansion, it felt strange to be unchaperoned in Piperhall. And she couldn’t forget that somewhere in the recesses of the seemingly endless estate, Victoria Galloway hid.
No, not hid. Victoria was not the sort to hide. Cool and regal at every summer picnic, Victoria had presided over the festivities as the proud matriarch of Piperhall. She was narrow and elegant, always wearing a tailored, sleeveless dress that hung off her body as if it had been made for her. Adri once overheard a woman value one of Victoria’s dresses at several hundred dollars. “It’s a Vera Wang,” she muttered to her frumpy, T-shirted friend. “How would you know?” the other responded. But of course it was. Or another equally expensive label that was nothing short of outrageous in a town as inconsequential as Blackhawk, Iowa. Victoria shone against the backdrop of her peers. But they weren’t really her peers at all; they were small-town people, hardworking but ordinary, and Victoria was everything they weren’t. Adri didn’t necessarily admire her for it. But she was intimidated by her. And she had no desire to bump into her before their intended rendezvous for dinner in the dining hall.
“We’re supposed to find a bedroom,” Adri reminded Harper. David had told them to avoid the rooms to the east of the central staircase, and Adri fully planned to comply. “Second floor, west wing.”
Harper snorted. “West wing. Don’t you love it?”
They wound their way back to the main entrance and up the sweeping staircase that opened onto the second floor. Adri led the way left, past half a dozen rooms on each side interspersed with arching windows and serene sitting areas that looked like they had never been used.
The hallway narrowed here, as if the builders had run out of room and were forced to slant the hallway just to fit everything in. It was almost quaint in a house of vast excesses, and Adri had been immediately charmed. A shuttered window opened on the west lawn, and as Adri and Harper dragged their small suitcases and duffels down the corridor, there was something warm and alluring about the pink wash of late-afternoon sun. Best of all, there was a separate staircase that started in a hall behind the kitchen and ended almost at the door of the bedroom that Adri and Harper decided to claim as their own. They didn’t care that there was only one queen-size bed. Harper called dibs on the plush couch, and the girls pretended that the reason they wanted to bunk together was companionship and not because the mansion was enormous and filled with eerie sounds with no discernible origin.
Part of the appeal of the room was the close vicinity to a lesser-known exit, but when Adri stepped over the threshold, she also fell in love with the small balcony that overlooked the garage. Victoria insisted on calling it the carriage house, but as far as her son was concerned, it was little more than a place to park his Audi in the rain. And smoke. He loved to smoke tucked beneath the eaves, and from her first visit to the Galloway home until the very last, Adri loved to watch him.
“He’s like candy, isn’t he?” Harper purred on the inaugural night they spent in the room. She was hanging a purple cocktail dress in the huge, empty closet, and Adri couldn’t help but suppress a smile at her friend’s ridiculous choice of weekend attire. And her words.
“Candy?”
“I just want to lick him.”
“That’s disgusting.” But David was leaning against the side of the garage, smoking the last inch of a Camel, and Adri’s gaze was drawn to him like a moth to the proverbial flame.
“Nothing is disgusting when David Galloway is involved.” Harper threw her a wink. “Nothing is off-limits.”
Adri tore herself from the window and grabbed her own duffel bag. The clothes she had stuffed in it were far more casual than Harper’s getaway wardrobe, and, truth be told, the contents leaned heavily toward books. There was a thick pharmacology textbook and a slim paperback about the ethics of health care. Adri loved those books with something akin to pie-eyed adoration, and it was no great sacrifice for her to bring them along on what was supposed to be a leisurely excursion to Piperhall. But she had also brought her Western Civ notes and a college comp book that gave her an involuntary tic. When she plopped them all on the desk in the corner, Harper laughed.
“What are you doing? This is supposed to be a fun weekend! We’re here to relax and party . . .” She waggled her eyebrows up and down. “And get to know our new friend David better.”
“I have a test on Tuesday,” Adri confessed. “And a chem lab on Monday that will eat up all my study time.”
“You’re such a puritan.” Harper climbed over the bed and swept Adri’s books into one of the desk drawers, ruffling the pages and making Adri cry out. “It won’t kill you to take a break.”
“It’s a tough program!” she complained, trying to rescue her books. Harper snapped the drawer shut and leaned against it.
“I’m sure David would love to spend some time with Nurse Adrienne.” Harper spun Adri around by her shoulders and gathered her dark hair into a low, messy bun. Pulling a few strands loose to frame Adri’s face, Harper whispered, “I think you should wear your hair like this tonight. After supper. In the hot tub.”
David had told them to bring their bathing suits, but Adri had hoped to excuse herself from such public awkwardness by claiming tons o
f homework. Thus the books. It wasn’t that she was a prude, she just wasn’t ready to prance around half-naked next to her pinup-girl best friend. Adri had seen Harper’s bathing suit—it was white (white!) and stringy. Her own swimming suit was a conservative Speedo two-piece left over from her lifeguarding days. It even said Lifeguard across the chest. She needed a new suit, but it was nothing she had ever thought about until David uttered the words hot tub.
“I don’t think so.” Adri pulled away and her hair fell back to her shoulders. “I’m not really a hot tub kind of girl.”
“It’s the suit, isn’t it?” Harper gave her a sympathetic look. “Don’t worry, I saw it and I brought a few of my extras for you to try.”
From deep in her duffel came an explosion of color, bikini separates sprinkling the duvet like cheerful confetti. And Harper made Adri try them all on. At first Adri disappeared into the private bathroom for every wardrobe change, but Harper wasn’t the shy sort and she couldn’t stop herself from tightening straps and tugging bottoms so that they accentuated Adri’s assets. “Heavy on the ass,” Harper laughed. “Not that you aren’t perfectly perky in every way,” she hastened to add.
When the ideal suit had finally been selected—a robin’s egg–blue ensemble with diminutive flowers that was the most conservative of the bunch by far—Adri slipped her clothes back on and flopped on her stomach on the bed. Harper was attaching false eyelashes as she sat on the desk, face turned toward the light and the mirror she had propped against the sash of the double-hung window.
“Why would you do that?” Adri asked.
“Do what?”
“Bring suits for me. I mean, obviously David is interested in you or he never would have invited us all here this weekend. And any man in his right mind would pick you over me. But why try to make me pretty? I don’t get it.”
