It so rarely was.
I went back into the bedroom and arranged myself and the tray on the bed. I removed the plate cover—crispy bacon, buttered toast and strawberry jam, one egg scrambled dry. All my favorites—Maeve hadn’t forgotten, even after two years.
I blinked back some tears.
I poured the coffee and started eating. It was, of course, perfect. I checked my email on my phone while I ate, and deleted all the junk. There wasn’t anything that needed immediate attention, thank God. I had another cup of coffee. When there was nothing left but crumbs I put the tray outside my door—something else that had taken me a long time to get used to, the way you just could put things out in the hall and someone would take care of it, like in a hotel.
I’ll take it down to the kitchen myself after I shower, I decided, closing the door behind me. It wasn’t like Maeve was hovering in the hall, anyway, waiting for me to finish. I smiled to myself as I started the shower and picked out something to wear.
I might be staying at Sea Oats, but I wasn’t going to go back to depending on the staff waiting on me hand and foot. It was my little way of rebelling, rejecting the Swann lifestyle.
As I showered, I thought about my conversation with Angus and the nightmare I’d had again. The secret is in the center of the maze. What the hell did he mean by that?
The police didn’t seem to think it had anything to do with him being killed, and maybe it didn’t.
It still creeped me out that I was the last person to see him alive. I couldn’t help thinking he’d been trying to tell me something.
Maybe he was trying to ask me for help.
That was a horrible thought.
If so, he’d been asking the wrong person.
I picked up the tray and carried it down the back stairs to the kitchen. Maeve was doing the dishes when I backed through the swinging door with the tray.
“Miss Ariel, you should have called me! I would have brought that down.” She dried her hands on a towel before taking the tray from me.
I felt scolded. “You have enough to do around here as it is,” I replied, and I felt a guilty blush spread up my neck, “and I didn’t want to bother you. I can carry a tray down myself, you know.” I poured myself another cup of coffee from the pot on the counter and sat down at the kitchen table. I knew she was going to say it wasn’t a bother before she said it, and so I just nodded in response. “Is everyone else up?”
“Miss Charlotte went into the city,” she said as she started placing my dirty dishes into the soapy water. “Miss Kayla doesn’t usually get up before noon, if then. Miss Peggy went into town to talk to that Karen Wilson woman about canceling the tours for the next few days.” She pursed her lips. Her tone made it clear she didn’t approve of either Karen Wilson or the tours. “And if you’ll pardon me saying it,” she’d lowered her voice, “I wish they’d cancel them for good.”
“Get a cup of coffee and take a break,” I replied with a smile. I’d known Maeve wouldn’t like the tours.
“Don’t mind if I do.” Maeve got herself a cup of coffee and joined me at the table. She gave me one of her biggest smiles. “It’s so nice having you back in the house, Miss Ariel. I hope you’re here to stay.”
“Oh, thank you, Maeve, but I don’t know how long I’ll be staying. I have to be back at work next Monday. What is up with the tours, anyway? I was surprised when I saw the flyer at the inn.”
“And weren’t you sly, to come back here on the tour.” Maeve winked at me over the rim of her coffee cup.
I cringed inwardly at being caught out. “Yes, well…I didn’t know how I’d be received.”
“Well.” She gave me a look. “Do you mind if I speak plainly?”
“Of course not.” I hated that she even had to ask. “You can always speak your mind with me, Maeve. I’m not really a member of the family anymore, anyway.”
“Now stop that.” She wagged her finger at me. “You’re a Swann whether you like it or not, Miss Ariel.”
“And you don’t have to call me Miss, either.”
She barked out a laugh, and her brown eyes sparkled. “That’s a habit I don’t want to get out of. I know my place here, Miss Ariel. The Swanns have been very good to me and my family over the years. Miss Charlotte paid for my kids to go to college, every penny.” She preened. “All three of my boys have degrees, thanks to her. I’m very grateful.” She leaned across the table. “I may be talking out of turn here, but Miss Charlotte has never been the same since you left.” She tutted. “And weren’t you a bad girl for running away like you did! Running away from problems is never the answer, Miss Ariel.”
“I know.” I got up and refilled my cup. I was going to be bouncing off the walls soon at this rate. “But I’m here now. Do you think Charlotte…do you think she wants me to go?”
“I can’t speak for her.” She shrugged. “But she’s had a lot on her plate lately, and I think she’s glad you’re home.”
Home. I’d never thought of Sea Oats as home when I lived here.
“So, what exactly is going on around here, Maeve?” I asked as I sat back down, watching her face. Maeve knew everything that went on at Sea Oats.
She pursed her lips.
“I never said thank you for how good you were to me when Charlotte brought me here,” I said, and I meant it. “I owe you so much for making me feel welcome.”
“Oh, Miss Ariel.” Her voice softened. “It was my pleasure. You made Miss Charlotte so happy. She was never that happy when she was—” She broke off.
I knew what she was going to say though.
She was never that happy when she was with Lindsay Moore.
Maeve liked Lindsay even less than Peggy did, which was saying something.
“Isn’t she seeing Lindsay Moore again?”
Maeve’s face was expressionless. “A few dinner dates don’t mean anything. They’ve known each other all their lives.” She met my eyes. “You’re the one she loves, Miss Ariel.”
I doubted that, but it was nice to hear.
“As for the others”—she took another sip of her coffee—“there’s some trouble, all right. I don’t know what it all means, or what all is going on, but I…I hear things.”
“I won’t tell anyone you said a word.”
“Well,” she whispered, glancing back and forth, “there’s some trouble with Mr. Sebastian.”
Her tone made it clear she disapproved. She’d told me once that he’d been spoiled and that was his trouble. “He needed his behind paddled a lot more than he got.” Bast himself had told me that she’d never forgiven him for all the pranks he’d pulled on her when he was a kid.
“What else is new?” I rolled my eyes, hoping she’d elaborate. “Isn’t he always in some kind of trouble?”
“He does seem to attract trouble, doesn’t he?” She tutted. “Maybe if he would get a job and do some hard work, like a man, he’d grow up and stop giving Miss Charlotte and Miss Peggy gray hair. They’ve always spoiled that boy.”
“He’s not a boy anymore, Maeve.”
“Then he needs to stop acting like one!” She shook her head. “And do some growing up!”
“What is it this time?”
“Money, what else? It’s always money, isn’t it?” She sighed. “You know he always feels he has to compete with Miss Charlotte. But he’s risked too much this time.” She sighed again. “I don’t understand how it all works, but he borrowed a lot of money to invest in some business and used his shares of the company as collateral, and now he has to pay it back and he doesn’t have the money, so I know Miss Charlotte is at her wits’ end trying to come up with the money for him.”
That was par for the course. Char had been bailing Bast out of trouble his entire life.
“Is it true that someone is targeting the company?”
“Miss Charlotte says so, and she would know. I know she also thinks someone has been breaking into her office.” Maeve shrugged. “She’s hired security for the house, what
with the fire last night and”—her voice broke—“what happened to Angus yesterday.”
“Oh, Maeve.” I reached across the table and took one of her hands. “I’m sorry—I didn’t want to upset you.”
“You haven’t upset me.” She blew out a breath. “Angus is gone, no amount of blubbering or feeling sorry for myself is going to change that.”
“Had Angus—well, had he been himself lately?”
She made a face. “Same as always, ornery and a pain in my behind.” She smiled faintly. “Always slipping in here and tasting what I’m cooking, never a kind word for anyone, but you know he was always teasing, there wasn’t a mean bone in his body. And he’d have died for the Swanns.” Her hand flew up to her mouth. “Oh.”
“When I saw him yesterday—before it happened—he told me something weird,” I said slowly. “He told me the secret was in the center of the maze. Do you know what he meant by that?”
“That damned maze.” She got up and put our cups in the sink. “No, I don’t know what he meant by that. He was crazy about that stupid maze.” She tapped her fingers on the counter for a moment. “Maybe he meant something about Mr. Bast.”
“Bast?”
“You know when Mr. Bast was a boy he played a trick on Angus, with the maze.” She looked pensive. “He dug up one of the bushes and left it in the center of the maze. Angus was fit to be tied. Of course, Mr. Bast never got punished for it.”
Her tone clearly added, He never got punished for anything.
“Thanks, Maeve.” I stood up. “I think I’m going to go for a walk.”
She glanced out the window. “You’d best hurry—it’s going to rain again.”
It was still gray and damp outside, and there were beads of water on the grass. The ground looked soft and wet, and I was glad for the paved walks as I headed along the path that led past the front of the maze and to Charlotte’s office. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to see it—that impulse that causes drivers to slow down and stare at accidents, maybe—but I wanted to take a look.
When we were married, Charlotte had spent a good fifty percent of her time at Sea Oats in her office. I used to join her sometimes, sit in a chair with a book while she read reports and answered emails. I never felt comfortable in her office; it was typical Charlotte, really. Charlotte didn’t care about interior design, whether furniture matched or any of the details of how to make her office comfortable and homey. She honestly believed interior design was a waste of time, which was kind of a problem for me since it was my training and my career. Since it wasn’t a real skill to her, my having to give up my career to marry her and live at Sea Oats wasn’t a problem. Not having your life’s work, your interests, taken seriously by the person you marry wasn’t a good thing. It made me feel discounted, unimportant, seen as lesser.
We were not a good match.
I didn’t like the person I became while living here, and now that I was back, I could see that leaving was the best thing I could have done. No matter how I felt about Charlotte, I should have never married her. It was too fast after we started seeing each other, and we were both so caught up in the magic and passion and novelty of being in love we didn’t stop to think about what being married would mean, about who we were and how we could integrate each other into our separate lives.
I’d been unfair to Charlotte, too. I’d let all my insecurities and problems and issues bubble under the surface, never saying anything, not wanting to create more stress for her than running an international company already did. She was often tired and strung out when she finally made it home in the evenings and I didn’t want to add to her burden. So instead of talking to her I tried to keep my boredom from her, my loneliness, and tried to entertain myself in other ways.
Hardly the recipe for a successful marriage.
The maze loomed over me as I walked alongside it. It sheltered me from the cold wind blowing off the ocean, and the sun was hidden behind gray and black and white clouds. The air felt wet, like it was heavy with rain and just waiting for the chance to start. The dirt in the flower beds was that dark wet black that meant saturation, which wouldn’t be good for the flowers, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the maze. Angus was head groundskeeper but had any number of helpers to work on the grounds so he could primarily focus on the hedge maze. Who would do it now that he was dead?
If it were up to me the hedges would all be pulled up by the roots and burned.
Well, maybe trimmed down a bit, I thought. I stopped and looked at the hedge. There was no way any Swann would agree to get rid of the hedge since it had been put in as one of Arabella’s whims. As I stared at its green impenetrability, I thought about Arabella. When I’d lived here, I’d been fascinated by her. She’d been a woman ahead of her time, a spoiled and indulged only child, heiress to a shipping fortune. Her parents actually had hoped to marry her off to a bankrupt European nobleman, but Arabella had confounded everyone by falling in love with and marrying Samuel Swann, a widower with no children who was some twenty-five years her senior. She’d been an ardent feminist at a time when such a thing was unheard of, let alone in the aristocratic circles she traveled in. I was glad someone was finally writing her biography—it was long overdue. Most of the family stories about Arabella were probably myth, embellished and embroidered over many retellings since she’d died. Samuel had the maze planted for her, the bushes imported from England to replicate the one she’d been so fascinated by on that long-ago English country estate. There hadn’t been anything like it anywhere else in North America, and so it had been a bit of a wonder, still was, in fact.
The wind shifted a bit and I could smell stale smoke, so I started walking again. Charlotte’s office, the dower house Samuel had built so Arabella’s mother could have her own home, was a small Tudor-style building. I’d often wondered how Arabella’s mother had adapted to living in such a small place—the story was she’d moved in there after it was finished and she’d never lived in the city mansion and never visited the place in Newport. I’d always kind of doubted that story; it hardly seemed realistic that a wealthy widow would so drastically cut back her lifestyle once her husband had died. It seemed like a kind of quaint notion from the Victorian era that a widow had to shut herself up away from the world and wait for death.
I rounded the corner of the maze and gasped at the sight of the cottage. I’d always thought it was kind of a cute place. Before Charlotte turned it into a workspace for herself it had been used primarily as a guest house after the death of its original occupant. The downstairs was all one enormous room, with a fireplace at either end, with a small galley kitchen tucked into a corner opposite the hanging staircase that led upstairs to the two bedrooms and the bathroom. There was a third bedroom in the attic, but it was primarily used now for storage.
The entire front of the building was blackened and windows had been broken out. The scorch marks ran along the upper floors, and the flowers in the beds in front were burned to a crisp. The grass was also scorched, and the front door was open. I could hear faint voices, and as I approached, a man in a suit came outside, talking to Charlotte. They shook hands and he gave me a look as he took the walk that led the other way, around Sea Oats and to the driveway.
My heart leaped when I saw her, and I felt an involuntary smile form. My eyes went from her face down her figure and back up again.
A chance to speak to her alone, maybe get the conversation started, see if there was a chance…
I started walking toward her.
Of course Charlotte scowled when she saw me coming her way.
“Lovely to see you, too, good morning,” I said, my smile fading as I approached. She was wearing a navy blue pantsuit, and she looked tired. “Were you able to get any sleep last night?”
“A little.” She ran her left hand through her hair, which fell back into place neatly. She exhaled. “This is the worst possible time for you to be here, Ariel. Why did you come?”
I bit my lower lip. Don’t let her get unde
r your skin. “Don’t you think we’ve been avoiding each other long enough?” I asked quietly, still covering for Peggy. Why Peggy didn’t want Char to know she’d invited me was a mystery to me, but I didn’t see any reason for me to say anything about it just yet.
“Just pack your things and go back into the city,” Char said. “Joseph can drive you.”
I felt myself getting angry. “Sea Oats is technically still my home,” I replied hotly. “And in case you’ve forgotten, the police have told me I have to stay. I can move back into the inn if having me under the same roof is too much for you to bear.”
I turned on my heel and started walking away quickly as angry tears formed in my eyes. I wiped them away and raised my chin defiantly as I kept walking, even though she called after me. I would be damned if I was ever going to let Charlotte Swann see me cry again. I walked back along the path the same way the insurance inspector had gone. Of course, she didn’t follow me. Why should this time be any different?
I took a deep breath as I went around the corner of the house and caught my breath. The pond spread out to the left of the house and I could feel tears forming in my eyes again. It was calm, the surface slightly rippled by the wind, the dark water reflecting the gray clouds in the sky. A family of ducks was paddling happily along near the shoreline. I watched them, a faint smile on my face as I remembered the first time I’d ever seen the pond, when Charlotte had brought me here to meet the family and see the place.
I was so lost in memory I almost jumped out of my skin when someone called my name.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to startle you,” Roger Stanhope said, as he came down the side steps from the gallery, his arms spread wide.
“Roger!” I allowed him to give me one of his wonderful hugs and a kiss on the cheek. I’d always liked him. He’d always been nice to me, tutoring me on the sly about table settings and what fork was for what when I’d first come to Sea Oats as a socially awkward bride, worried about making a fool out of myself every time I turned around. “I understand congratulations are in order? How wonderful! I’m so happy for you.”
A Lamentation of Swans Page 8
