“What about that thing you and I were in the middle of discussing?” Connal asked from behind her. There was strain in his voice now, almost a note of fear.
Anna realized she’d forgotten her hat, and she turned and snatched it from the chair. She couldn’t help seeing his expression then, white and pinched and worried.
“You and I will have to talk about that some other time,” she said, with no intention of discussing it with him again at all. Brushing past JoAnne, she hurried toward the steps.
Never Loved So Blindly
Had we never lov’d sae blindly,
Never met—or never parted—
we had ne’er been broken-hearted
Robert Burns
“Ae Fond Kiss”
Behind Anna, the front door crashed open and Connal shouted, “Anna, wait!”
Anna ignored him and rushed on through the copse of silver-trunked birches toward the narrow side gate. The key shook in her hand when she worked the lock, and a fresh flurry of snowflakes brushed her face, catching in eyelashes wet with tears of fury. Impatiently, she brushed away both the warmth and ice and slammed the gate behind her.
Connal gave another shout. “Anna, please. Hold up!”
She knew she couldn’t ignore him forever. Lately, she’d been ignoring too many things she couldn’t face. She’d told herself that was part of living in the moment, but all she’d been doing was setting herself up for brand-new heartache.
Nothing good ever came of throwing your heart away. Of trusting blindly.
On the other hand, what had caution ever brought her? A limbo of going to work and coming home, getting engaged to someone she liked—a lot—but didn’t love. Not with all her soul. She’d convinced herself she was happy. She had been happy, but it had been a half-asleep happiness that was colorless compared to the wide-awake, pure joy that being with Connal gave her. When had she ever paused to watch Mike for the pleasure of looking at him? It wasn’t Connal’s looks that took her breath away; it was so much more than that. It was the way the light caught his eyes and made them exactly ten times more alive than anyone else she’d ever met, the way he would pause at the crest of a hill and watch a hawk surfing the wind, his face filled with wonder and longing as if, in that moment, he could imagine himself gifted with the miracle of flight.
God, how could she have been so stupid? Hadn’t she learned anything since Henry?
She spun to face Connal as his feet pounded on the path behind her. “What did you think I was going to do when I found out?” she demanded. “How did you think I was going to feel?”
“Anna.” He raised his hand to cup her face, his fingers trembling lightly with cold or emotion—he hadn’t even stopped to put on a coat. She pulled back, and he dropped the hand, fingers curling uselessly at his sides. “Please listen,” he said. “When I told you that no one knows I’m Graham, I meant no one at all. Not one person except my agent, and she has to know. It wasn’t something I ever set out to do. I was going stir-crazy when I first brought Moira here, and she never slept. Until she was nearly two, I was up rocking her half the night, so I started sitting at the computer with her on my lap, writing my thoughts out in the small hours. The thoughts turned into stories. Into escapes. I had no idea what I was doing, or whether what I was writing was any good. I never said a word to my agent for a year and a half after I’d finished the first screenplay, and by that time I’d written three of them—”
“That doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that you lied to me.”
“Please. Just listen.” Connal’s breath came in hard white puffs, his chest rising hard. “My agent and I came up with the pen name together, not only because the first whiff of anything related to Gregor Mark was going to stir things up again, but also because we were afraid people would always see a Gregor Mark movie in the writing even when it wasn’t there. That was the last thing I wanted. We talked about masks a while ago, you and I. Well, Gregor wasn’t—isn’t—a mask. He’s me. Naked and bare and raw, and it’s taken me years to understand that. To recognize myself in the words I put down on the page.” Lines of sincerity furrowed into Connal’s face, as if it mattered that Anna believed him.
How could she tell if he was being honest? If he was real?
He raised his hand, reaching toward her once more, and she took another backward step.
His shoulders tensed again, and he bowed his head. “What I’m trying to say is that I haven’t told a soul about my writing. Not even Moira knows, and she’s been the most important thing in my life—the only important person in my life until you. I’ve kept this secret so long, I didn’t know how to share it, and around here, a secret spreads like fire. Any little thing is liable to burn down the refuge I’ve tried to build for Moira.”
“Are you sure it’s Moira you’re protecting?”
“What do you mean? Everything I’ve done has been for her.”
“Yes, and now she’s going to the festival, and you aren’t. You’re still hiding.”
“What kind of fun would she have if everyone stared at her because of me? If I was suddenly the center of attention?”
“We’re all a product of our parents. Their mistakes. Their choices. Moira’s strong. She’s kind and generous. Thoughtful. And she’s smart. She’s seen herself in the mirror. She knows what she looks like. I’m not saying maybe it isn’t a good idea to let her experience the festival as her own person instead of as your daughter, but I still don’t think you’re being fully honest with yourself about your reasons. You’re lying to yourself as much as you lied to me. That’s even more dangerous—I know that from personal experience.”
“So what are you saying?” Connal’s eyes glittered, but he looked away and stood hunch-shouldered, fists pushed down into the pockets of his jeans. “Where does that leave us?”
“It leaves us with a lot of work to do until the festival then a quick good-bye when I go home—which is what I was always going to have to do.” Anna’s voice quivered. “Hopefully, it leaves us friends. You can trust me, though. I won’t tell anyone your secrets.”
Turning away was one of the hardest things that Anna had ever done. She gathered her dignity and walked on through the flurrying snow and the damp, mildewed leaves left over from the previous fall. Connal didn’t follow her, and the more distance she put between them, the more she felt as if she’d reached into her chest and torn her heart out, leaving herself numb and empty.
Shivering a few minutes later, she stomped her feet on the mat at the front door to Breagh House and let herself inside. As always, the house did its best to wrap her in warmth and comfort: the quiet gleam of old wood, the scent of orange oil furniture polish, the slightly dusty odor of antique carpets that spoke of stable decades passing.
She followed the inviting scent of Elspeth’s plum crumble pie into the kitchen. The room was empty, so she went on to the rose-colored morning room that Elspeth had adapted into a study. Seeing Elspeth’s head bent over the laptop, eyes peering across the top of her reading glasses, Anna felt suddenly like a child again. She wanted to run forward and have Elspeth wrap her in her arms and tell her everything was going to be all right, even if that was flimflam.
Honesty was hard.
Taking one look at Anna’s face, Elspeth pushed up from her chair. “Aw, sweetheart. What happened? What did Connal do?”
Not trusting her voice, Anna only shook her head. She’d promised Connal she wouldn’t share his secret, and now she would have to keep it from Elspeth, too.
“It’s just very cold outside,” she mumbled, remaining in the doorway. “Snow flurries. I’m worried about the festival, that’s all.”
“Don’t borrow trouble where none is needed.” Elspeth’s eyes remained fixed on Anna’s face. “And don’t try to sell me smokescreens. Did Connal fire JoAnne? He did, didn’t he? Tell me.”
“Nothing like that.” Anna’s voice was even tighter. “Although I think we were right about it being her. She didn’t quite confess
to it, but close enough. Connal warned her off.”
Elspeth tipped her head, her eyes too sharp for Anna’s comfort. Whatever she saw, she let it go. “Good then, but now the bad news,” she said. “I got hold of the remaining vendors, and the order for the volunteer T-shirts had been canceled, too. Not only that, but the tent rental and security rope people rang back to say that someone had asked for the date to be pushed back a week.”
“That’s clever and even sneakier than canceling it outright.”
“Aye, and given that, can we afford to assume it was JoAnne? What if it wasn’t and the sabotage doesn’t stop?”
Anna took a long, hard breath and tried to think. “All right, here’s what we’ll do,” she said a moment later, “I’ll phone everyone back again and give them a code they’ll have to receive from anyone who tries to request a change. We’ll use a unique code for every vendor, and give them out to anyone who is purchasing stall space for the craft fair, too. Meanwhile, would you track down the main websites where the festival should be listed, and make sure it’s there and that the information is right?”
“I already sent out the press release, too.”
“That’s great. Then hopefully, we’re back in business.”
Retreating into the kitchen on the pretext of not wanting to interfere with Elspeth’s work, Anna spent the rest of the afternoon trying to stay out from under her aunt’s watchful eye. It was a blessing to lose herself in spreadsheets and telephone calls, but at five o’clock, she straightened, stretched her stiff neck, rolled her shoulders, and closed the file in front of her. Picking up the house phone, she checked to make certain the line was free before phoning Brando to ask him to get the camera trap from Connal at the play rehearsal that night.
“Aren’t you coming up to meet Julian?” Brando asked. “You’re the first thing he asked about when he checked in. All right, second thing technically—he made certain there was whiskey in his room first, but then he asked about you. ‘So where’s this girl Connal won’t stop talking about?’ That’s exactly what he said.”
Anna pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head. “Tell him I doubt Elspeth and I will finish with the committee meetings before rehearsal wraps up for the night, but we’ll look forward to meeting him tomorrow night instead.”
She kept her tone cheerful, but Brando’s curiosity trickled down the phone line with a long silence before he spoke again. “You’d tell me if something was wrong, wouldn’t you?” he asked. “I’ve got a willing ear.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Anna said, “apart from the sabotage. Like I said, please talk to Connal about the camera. I didn’t get a chance to finish making arrangements because JoAnne came in, but if you can get that and the poster set up on the highway tonight, that would be fantastic.”
She hung up and sat a moment, alone in the kitchen with its sunny wallpaper and the photographs on the Welsh dresser on the far wall. On her way to make a fresh pot of tea, she stopped and picked up her favorite of the pictures, an old black and white of Elspeth and Ailsa pulling a newly-cut pine tree for Christmas between them across a blanket of snow, both of them laughing while they sank knee-deep with every step. They’d been seventeen and eighteen that year, according to Elspeth. Ailsa had intended to go off to university in Edinburgh that fall, although she’d never gone. She’d run off to Ohio with John Cameron that summer instead, and she’d never come back except once for their mother’s funeral.
The thought of never coming back to Balwhither hit Anna so hard it was as if someone had kicked her in the chest. Never seeing Connal and Moira, the loch and the hills, Brando, Flora and Duncan, Davy Grigg. Kirsty and Angus. Every one of the people in the village who, with all their quirks and arguments, made her feel welcome and accepted as herself. In turn, that acceptance was letting her find out who she was, who she wanted to be.
The ache of leaving was still with her when she drove Elspeth to the inn a little later for the committee meetings. She slowed the borrowed Vauxhall that Brice at the garage had loaned them, wanting to drink in every wave on the loch and every steep, green hillside. One of the MacGregor pipers stood at the water’s edge playing something that managed to be both mournful and full of hope, and Shame, the retriever, sat beside him with his tail sweeping the ground and his golden head tilted as if listening intently. Even Davy’s sheep stood turned in the piper’s direction, flicking their ears and chewing thoughtfully.
“Everything here is always both joyful and heartbreaking,” Anna said. “It’s never one thing or another.”
“That’s the way life is, though, isn’t it?” Elspeth turned in her seat and studied Anna’s profile. Catching Anna’s hand, she gave a little squeeze. “Love comes from interest and joy, and the other edge of that is pain. There’s always pain. But you and Connal will work things out—I’ve no doubt of that. Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”
“I can’t. It’s not my secret.”
“Meaning there’s something you just found out.” Elspeth studied her long and hard. “I won’t pretend to know what that is, but secrets are funny things. The longer you hold on to them, the harder it is to let them go, and they burrow in and eat away at you. If Connal’s shared something with you that he hasn’t told the rest of us, give him a little leeway. You two are too good together to give up so easily. Trust me, I know what it’s like to be left alone with regrets and could-have-beens. You don’t want to live like that.”
Tears welled in Anna’s eyes in answer to the pain in Elspeth’s voice. She pulled onto the shoulder of the single-track road in front of the inn and cut the Vauxhall’s engine. “You’re not alone, Aunt Elspeth. There are so many people here who love you.”
“There’s no amount of people who can take the place of that one special person. That’s the plain truth of it.” Elspeth sighed.
Anna’d always wondered why Elspeth, who was so beautiful inside and out and with so much life and love to give, could have ended up with no one by her side all these years. Was that same loneliness in Anna’s future? If the joy she had felt with Connal these past weeks had shown her anything, it was that having a career and her own sense of accomplishment was important to her, but that it was far from everything she wanted in her life. She didn’t want to go back to feeling half-alive.
“Who was he, Aunt Elspeth?” she asked, her voice barely audible. “The man who hurt you?”
“He didn’t hurt me, love. Not in the way you’re thinking. Secrets get in the way of love, and it withers before it ever blooms.”
Climbing Walls
Every man dies,
not every man really lives.
William Ross Wallace
Anna sat crosslegged on her bed that night and typed out yet another chatty email to her mother. That was the good thing about the time difference between Scotland and Ohio: she could send out an email last thing at night and turn off her phone again with the perfectly legitimate excuse of having gone to bed before her mother immediately rang her back.
Tomorrow, she promised herself. Tomorrow, she would pick up the phone and sit through the verbal version of what she’d already gotten in a dozen emails, variations on the theme of her own many failings.
At least, in one way, it would be a relief to get it over with. The task of finding excuses for not picking up when her mother called was taxing her creativity.
Dear Mom,
Sorry I couldn’t phone you back. The committee meetings ran long tonight, and earlier I was trying to find a way to track down the thief who’s been stealing the festival posters and canceling orders with our vendors. On a bright note, Julian Ashford arrived today to begin rehearsing with the actors from the village. Neither Vanessa Devereaux nor Pierce Saunders can arrive until the day before the festival. They’ll do only the last dress rehearsal and the two performances, but they’re both such pros that I’m not worried. Aunt Elspeth’s knee, meanwhile, is much better. I had to talk her out of trying to walk to the inn tonight for the meetings
, but fortunately the temperature was so cold that I was able to complain with perfect sincerity that I would freeze on the way back home.
I’m thrilled for Margaret about her Good Morning America audition. So exciting! I know you’d miss her, but think how much fun you two will have shopping when you go out to New York to visit. Will try to call soon!
Love,
Anna
She sent the message and turned the phone off, then crossed the room to plug it in to charge at the spindle-legged writing desk. A faint scratching beneath the windowsill outside caught her attention, and she paused to listen.
The sound came again, too loud for a bird, as if some large creature was scrabbling along the wall. Scanning the desk for something heavy, she found only the brass lamp that stood about twenty inches high. She unplugged that and carried it with her to the window. After easing the sash up, she poked her head out with the lamp raised like a weapon above her head.
“Don’t hit me with that,” Connal said from three feet below her. “At least not until you hear what I have to say.” Toes and fingertips dug into the crevices between the stones, he lifted one hand higher, found a new fingerhold, moved his feet, and repositioned the other hand so that he was about a foot closer to the window than he had been.
Anna’s heart kicked into runaway mode, and she sucked in a freezing blast of air. “What on earth are you doing, you idiot? You’re going to fall and crack your skull like an egg.”
Lake of Destiny Page 14
