Secrets of the Lost Summer

by Carla Neggers

  She remembered her father saying, “Look at Jess, Louise. She’s okay. You can relax. All’s well that ends well.”

  He’d been reassuring, protective. In those days, she hadn’t let her worries impede her. Then came her daughters’ teen years and a car accident that would have challenged any parent’s nerves.

  It didn’t do much for mine, either, Jess thought, all at once faintly irritated with her mother.

  “We’re fine,” she said aloud, as if to convince herself. “We were fine then and we’re fine now. We were lucky.”

  She didn’t want to think about the accident, but she was proud of her mother for recognizing her problem and doing something about it. Jess had often wondered if she’d stayed in Knights Bridge just to avoid upsetting the applecart with her mother. She was twenty-seven and had never lived in another zip code.

  Was that why she’d fallen for Mark? Because he’d keep her in Knights Bridge, and she wouldn’t have to confront her own anxieties?

  Jess gave herself a mental shake. Was she out of her mind? She loved Mark.

  She drank her coffee and reviewed a complicated order of doors and windows for the restoration of a Maine museum. She loved working for her family’s business. She loved living in her hometown. Was it wrong not to want to do anything else, live anywhere else? Should she live in Boston or New York—or Paris—before she settled down in Knights Bridge? She and Mark had talked about starting a family right away. How long before they could afford to travel? If she didn’t go to Paris now, when?

  Her mother materialized behind her. “I’m going to California, Jess. I don’t want you and Olivia to trim your dreams because you worry about me. I want to be an example to you.”

  Jess rose with her coffee. “Don’t go to California for our sake, Mom. Do it because it’s what you want.”

  “I am.” Her eyes brimmed with tears even as she smiled. “I am, Jess. I’m making this trip. I don’t care if I have to have someone knock me out with a brick to get me on the plane. It’s not flying that gets to me so much as…going. I didn’t know that for a long time. I rationalized my fears.”

  Jess noticed her father had left. “Did you tell Dad you’re seeing a therapist?”

  Her mother waved a hand in dismissal. “It’s none of his business.”

  “You and Dad…”

  “We’re fine. Don’t worry.”

  “I’ll worry if I want to worry,” Jess snapped, immediately regretting her impatience. “Sorry. I got up too early.”

  When her mother returned to the office, she shut the door behind her, which she almost never did. Jess called Mark on his cell phone but hung up before he could answer.

  He called her back. “Everything all right?”

  Jess hesitated. How could she explain that her mother was seeing a therapist and marking dots on a page over a trip that most people would jump at the chance to take? “Mark, Olivia and I are strong, independent women, aren’t we?”

  “What? Yeah. The strongest and most independent. Why?”

  “Anxiety isn’t a weakness. It’s a condition that can be treated.”

  “Jess?”

  She stopped short of telling him about her attack of claustrophobia. “I’ll see you later?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Jess—”

  “I’m fine, Mark. Sitting at my desk going over an order for reproduction twelve-over-twelve windows.”

  “I’ll be back in time for dinner.” He paused, then added, “We can plan Paris.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it.”

  He hung up, and Jess looked out the window at the familiar scene of brook, trees and rocks. The broad, sweeping branches of the old sugar maple by the entrance were leafing out, creating dappled shade now that the sun, as expected, had burned off the morning mist.

  Paris…an entire ocean between her and Knights Bridge. Between her and her family.

  Her stomach twisted. Her mother would worry even if she said she wouldn’t.

  Jess pictured the Louvre, the Seine, croissants. A week alone with Mark in one of the most romantic places in the world. They wouldn’t have to think about someone they knew popping in or driving by.

  She smiled, loving the idea. Whatever had awakened her in a panic this morning was gone, and had nothing to do with Paris.

  By evening, Olivia and Maggie had moved the hutch out of Maggie’s cellar at her gingerbread house in the village and into Olivia’s back room, where she’d set up her painting supplies and lined up her to-be-painted furniture. The hutch was made of pine, scarred and weathered, absolutely perfect for painting and then displaying anything from teapots and herbal teas to artisan soaps and potpourri sachets. After Maggie left, Olivia cleaned it off and now was debating her options for painting it, whether to do a smooth, glossy finish or go with layers of colors. Clouds had moved in, and the warm, sunny spring day had changed quickly into a drizzly evening, but she didn’t mind. Best she stayed in tonight. She didn’t need to be tempted to check on her neighbor and see what he’d been up to all day.

  “Olivia—Olivia, it’s me,” Jess said, bursting into the kitchen, a large sketch pad tucked under one arm. “You’re game, right, Liv?” Without waiting for an answer, she set the pad on the table and tore off two sheets. She glanced back at Olivia. “You must have crayons or something.”

  Olivia saw that her sister was agitated and determined, and didn’t argue. She went into the living room and returned with a box of oil pastels. “I came in late to Mom’s explanation about the dots.”

  Jess dumped the pastels out on the table and pointed to the two sheets of blank white paper. “First you take a crayon or whatever and make a dot that represents you.”

  “Middle of the page?”

  “Anywhere that works for you. I think deciding is part of the process. Then you pick out colors for the people in your life and make a dot for them in relation to you.”

  Olivia considered the assignment. “Okay, Jess. I can do that.”

  “I want to be green, though. A rich, deep-forest green. We can’t be the same color. That’d be too weird.”

  “I’ll be magenta, then.”

  They grabbed pastel crayons. Jess angled her shoulders so that Olivia couldn’t see her page, but she stood straight and frowned. “It’d probably be more effective if we were doing this not knowing the point of the exercise,” she said.

  “I’m not sure I do know the point.”

  “It’s a physical demonstration of where the people are in your life in relation to yourself. Mom keeps us all very close. She has everyone clustered around her one little dot. Never mind what it does to us, what does it do to her? She can’t move. She can’t breathe. You can keep everyone on the page and still give them all and yourself room.”

  “Jess, have you had wine?”

  She grinned. “Just do the exercise, will you?”

  Olivia looked at the array of pastels and considered all the different people in her life. This could take forever, she thought.

  “Marilyn Bryson doesn’t get to go on the page,” Jess said. “You put her there and I’m going to erase her or white her out or something.”

  “You’re interfering with my page.”

  “I guess my dot’s going close to you?”

  “Right. You’re suffocating me.”

  They laughed but drifted into silence as they did the exercise. Olivia debated what to do with Roger Bailey—should he go on her page? What about future guests of Carriage Hill? But she was getting ahead of herself. First came family—her parents, Jess, her grandparents.

  Mark Flanagan?

  Olivia glanced at Jess, no engagement ring yet on her finger, and picked out a sturdy brown for Mark and made a dot close—but not too close—to her sister.

  She had dots for Maggie O’Dunn and a few other friends in town and in Boston.

  As instructed, she had no dot for Marilyn Bryson. She put a faint yellow one high up in a cor
ner for Jacqui Ackerman.

  A steel-gray crayon made her think of Dylan. She cleared her throat. “We’re not going to tell each other who our different dots are, right?”

  Jess nodded. “Right. That would never work. You don’t even have to show me your sheet.”

  “Okay, good.”

  Olivia picked up the steel-gray pastel and placed a dot near her dot. It felt too close, and yet at the same time not close enough. She was surprised the effect the exercise was having on her. Definitely a strange experience.

  “I’m running out of colors,” Jess muttered. “We have a lot of family and friends.”

  Olivia had just been thinking she had far more colors than she needed. “You’re doing a dot for everyone? Cousins, uncles, aunts?”

  “They’d be offended if I didn’t, wouldn’t they?”

  “Jess, we’re not showing our papers to anyone. We can burn them in the fireplace after we’re done.”

  “Oh. Maybe I should rub out Uncle Richard.”

  They laughed, and when they finished, they silently folded their sheets into squares, hiding the dots. Olivia got down glasses and poured chilled pinot grigio.

  “Where’s Buster?” Jess asked.

  Olivia thought he was in his bed in the mudroom but he was gone. She groaned in frustration. “He must have slipped out when you came in, or when Maggie and I carried in the hutch she gave me. For a big, noisy dog, he can be very quiet when he wants to be.”

  “Old habits from his life before he adopted you,” Jess said.

  They started out back with their wine, the drizzle now a light but steady rain. Dylan was at the mudroom door with her soaking wet, muddy dog. He got Buster inside, pulled the door shut and let go of her misbehaving dog’s collar.

  He stood straight. Olivia saw that he was almost as wet and muddy as Buster, just a lot better looking. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had no idea he’d sneaked out.”

  “Look at it as an opportunity. Wolf dog and I are getting to know each other. We didn’t come back here with my left arm in his teeth.”

  Jess leaned against the counter, observing Dylan, Buster and Olivia as she sipped her wine. “Where was he?”

  “I spotted him in the field and caught up with him in the brook.”

  Olivia frowned. She hadn’t yet touched her own wine. “I didn’t think he liked water.”

  “He was after a rock.” Dylan glanced from her to Jess and back again. “I don’t want to interrupt a sisterly wine-and-laugh session.”

  Buster bolted past him and shook off in the middle of the kitchen. Jess set her glass on the counter and subtly held her page of dots at her side. “I should get going before I have too much wine. I’m meeting Mark for dinner, anyway. The place looks great, Liv. The Farm at Carriage Hill is just what this area needs. Before long you’re going to have more bookings than you can handle.”

  She breezed out through the front door, shutting it firmly behind her. Olivia suspected her sister wouldn’t have stayed even without Dylan arriving with Buster or her dinner with Mark. The dot exercise had gotten to Jess.

  Dylan sighed. “Buster and I are tracking mud. I’ll clean it up.”

  “No muddy woods at home on Coronado Island.”

  “Not like here.”

  “Don’t worry about the mud. I’ll let it dry and sweep later.” Olivia took her wineglass with her and set it on the table as she put away the pastels. “What’s up, Dylan? You look as if you have more than muddy paw prints on your mind.”

  “I have to go back to San Diego for a few days on unexpected business. I’ve been on the phone most of the day. It can’t wait.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “I head to Boston tonight for an early-morning flight.”

  “You fly as if you were driving.”

  He shrugged. “It’s safer than driving, statistically. I don’t think about it.”

  “That’s good. You had to fly all the time as a hockey player. It must have become routine for you. Your father was a world traveler. Flying is what you know.”

  He picked up a dark blue crayon. “It gets me where I’m going.”

  “When I was growing up, flying was a big deal, at least among the people I know. They would plan trips for months. They didn’t just buy a ticket one day and fly the next. They still don’t.”

  “You’re spooling up, Olivia,” he said, setting the crayon in her box.

  She shut the lid, set the box back on the table and sipped her wine. He was right. She could feel the anxiety building in her. She wanted to blame Jess and her dots, but she knew if they were playing a role, it was only a small one. “Sometimes just thinking about flying gets me going.” She ignored the tight twist of anxiety in her stomach. At least her hands weren’t shaking and she didn’t spill any wine. She gave a small, fake laugh. “I know wine doesn’t help.”

  Even with the gloom and fading daylight, her house felt cozy and cheerful. The colors and furnishings she’d chosen so far worked, creating just the right atmosphere, she thought, trying to focus on anything except the panic mounting inside her. She was aware of Dylan watching her as if she might fall into pieces at any moment.

  “Thanks for fetching Buster,” she said. “If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”

  “Don’t call the fire department too fast if my house catches on fire.” Dylan gave her an irreverent smile. “Not that I’ve deliberately left any fire hazards.”

  “You wouldn’t want the place to burn down if any treasure is there. Imagine a volunteer firefighter bashing down a wall and discovering a fortune in gold.”

  “I don’t think that’s likely to happen.”

  “And you don’t need a fortune in gold,” Olivia said, then immediately wished she hadn’t.

  Dylan didn’t seem to take any offense. “If my father was on some kind of treasure hunt, there’s a good chance he figured out whatever he was after was a lost cause.”

  “That could explain why he more or less abandoned the house and never mentioned it to you.”

  “Or he just ran out of time.”

  “Dylan, if you discovered something new—you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

  He gave her a quick, unreadable smile. “Hypotheticals get me in trouble every time. I should get rolling.”

  “Nice sidestep.” She let it go, at least for now. “You’ll let me know if you decide to stay in San Diego? Who knows, I might want to buy your house.” She added lightly, an attempt to ease her own tension, “I could use the acreage for more herbs.”

  “Just what you need. More herbs.”

  “Whatever you decide to do, I’ll still be right here.” She finished off her wine a little too quickly and took the glass to the sink. “I’d like to visit San Diego one day. I wonder if I’ll end up like my mother, planning trips…” She turned back to him. “Safe travels, Dylan.”

  The rain shifted to a heavy downpour, lashing at the windows. His expression—unsmiling, his eyes narrowed, his jaw set—hinted at the intensity of a man who had been a top athlete, who had helped grow and manage a successful corporation.

  Then the intensity was gone, a smile playing unexpectedly at the corners of his mouth. “Does that mean you don’t want me to kiss you?”

  She did. She definitely wanted him to kiss her, but not as a means to avoid talking to her. “Your house here is a wreck and it brings up unresolved issues with your father.”

  He grinned and walked over to her. “Unresolved issues?”

  She blamed the dots, the wine and the thought of flying for her pensive mood. “Not terribly introspective, are you?”

  “Sometimes. Not right now.” He covered her hands with his, hooked his fingers into hers. “Right now I want to kiss you. What do you say, Liv?”

  “You want my permission to—”

  “Lots of Frosts and people related to Frosts in this town. I’m all by myself here.”

  “Isolated and alone, huh?”

  He tightened his fingers around her
s and smiled. “You don’t feel sorry for me, do you?”

  “Not even a little. It’s not what you’d want, anyway. It’s not what I want, either. About my thing with flying—” Olivia felt the warmth and strength of his hands and forced herself to concentrate and make her point “—I’ll figure it out.”

  “You have plenty to keep you occupied here.”

  She took a shallow breath. “You could tell Noah you’re staying to help me paint walls and furniture and pull weeds.”

  “Noah’s a friend and I owe him, but I don’t jump whenever he snaps his fingers. He’d hate that and I couldn’t do it.” Dylan slipped his hands out of hers and planted them on the counter on either side of her, more or less pinning her against the counter. “I’m coming back, Olivia. I promise you. I’m coming back.”

  “I won’t hold you to that.” She realized she was arching her back over the counter, as if to get farther away from him when it was the last thing she wanted. She gave a small laugh. “I’d have to get on a plane to hold you to it.”

  “You could send Buster,” he said, lowering his mouth to hers.

  She lost her balance and shot out a hand, grabbing hold of him, steadying herself. She inhaled sharply at the feel of the hard muscle above the waistband of his jeans and knew immediately she was lost. She wrapped both arms around him, her lips parting for their kiss. The taste of him set her on fire. She let her hands course up his back. He responded, probing deeper with the kiss, lifting her off her feet.

  The wind picked up outside, and she realized she’d left the window above the sink open. Cool air and a spray of rain hit her overheated skin. She hooked her legs around his hips and he pressed himself into her as if they were naked.

  They could be, she thought. In a few seconds, she and Dylan McCaffrey could be making love against the kitchen sink. All the anxiety of earlier fell away. She just wanted him inside her.