Looking for Peyton Place

by Barbara Delinsky

  It was a tactical error. For starters, nothing in Middle River was self-serve; after all, gossip couldn’t spread unless people had the opportunity to talk. I had no sooner pulled up to the gas pump when Normie Zwibble emerged from the mechanics’ bay. Normie had barely graduated high school and, ever since, had run the station with his father. The Normie I remembered had more hair, but he had always been pudgy. He had also always been friendly and sweet, neither of which had changed, which was why it took twenty minutes to fill the car with gas. Before the nozzle was even in place, Normie had to properly oooh and ahhh over the car. Then, while he filled the tank, he kept up a running commentary about all of the people I might remember from Middle River High. He continued talking long after the nozzle had quit on its own. I paid in cash, simply to speed up our escape.

  By then, though, Timmy and Lisa were asking about the time, exchanging worried looks, saying that they were supposed to pick up a prescription for their mother at The Apothecary, but that the pharmacy closed at four and it was nearly that time now.

  I had no choice. Driving straight down Oak, I pulled into a diagonal space outside the drugstore, and sat in the car while the kids went inside. They hadn’t been gone more than a minute when a monster of a black Cadillac SUV with darkened windows whipped around the corner. It passed me and abruptly stopped, then backed right up until it was blocking my tail. The driver rolled down his window. There was no mistaking that square jaw, that beak of a nose, or that full head of auburn hair.

  I had known I would run into Aidan Meade if I was in town for a month. I had just prayed it would be later, rather than sooner.

  Chapter 4

  KAITLIN DUPUIS was dying. She hated shopping with her mother in the first place, hated the clothes her mother made her buy (clothes she wouldn’t be caught dead in when she was with friends) and the noise that went with it—this one’s more slimming, that one’s more flattering, the other makes you look smaller, for God’s sake get that hair out of your eyes. Her mom never told her outright that she was ugly and fat—she was too PC for that—but those little digs did the same thing. Being with Nicole was demoralizing for Kaitlin, but there was no way around it. She might hate the docility she had to show, but one thing was tied to the next—docility to trust, trust to privileges, privileges to independence, and independence to Kevin Stark, though of course her mother didn’t know about Kevin. Kaitlin had to keep it that way, but she couldn’t think straight with her mother in her face, and after Miss Lissy’s Closet, there had been lunch and then a mother-daughter tennis match at the club (wearing the totally dorky fat-farm whites the club required), and driving back and forth, all with her mother there, even in the ladies’ room, because this was Wednesday, and during the summer Nicole DuPuis had Wednesdays off.

  Nicole was Aidan Meade’s executive assistant, meaning that she was his liaison to the outside world. She handled his phone calls and opened his letters, but the crux of her day was spent on e-mail. Aidan liked e-mail. He felt that it effectively countered the image of backwoods New Hampshire, and though little of the e-mail he received was crucial, since his father ran the show, he was forever being cc’d on matters, so there was volume indeed. Nicole’s job was to give Aidan the perception of importance by replying to each and every e-mail in a manner that suggested he was at his desk, hard at work, and on top of every part of the business.

  Basically, as Nicole had told her friends often enough for Kaitlin to know, it was a sell job, and that was right down Nicole’s alley. She was good at selling, marketing, packaging. She had built a life doing it for herself, transforming the poor girl she had once been into a woman with just enough savvy and skill to snag a wealthy husband. The fact that Anton DuPuis didn’t have anywhere near the money Nicole had thought he did was only a temporary setback. So she wouldn’t have a cushy nest egg for her old age or millions to pass on when she died. Nicole only cared about the here and now anyway. She had enough money to create the perception of wealth, and that was all that mattered. The DuPuises lived on Birch Street. They drove late-model cars, belonged to the country club, and shopped to their hearts’ content.

  So then how to explain the fact that Nicole worked? Power. She didn’t have to work, she told friends. She chose to work, because, after all, she had only one child, who was in school and didn’t need her, and charity luncheons weren’t really her thing. She needed an intellectual outlet (Kaitlin nearly gagged each time she heard that one, because she knew that her mother had lunch at her desk not to get more work done or to read Jane Austen but to watch All My Children on the portable TV she kept hidden in the drawer), and Aidan Meade had come to depend on her, so wasn’t that nice? What would she do with her time and her mind if she didn’t have this? If the job paid well—which this one did—so much the better. And she did love those Wednesdays off.

  “This gives me quality time with my daughter,” she said—another PC sound bite—and planned the entire day to make up for all the time she was at work—which was why only now, hours after the fact, Kaitlin was finally alone in her bedroom and able to make the call.

  Kevin answered after barely a ring. “Hey, cutie.”

  “She knows,” Kaitlin said in quiet panic. She had her head bowed, hair hiding her face in a way that was usually a comfort, but there was no comfort now. “We’re in trouble.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Annie Barnes. She saw us last night.”

  There was a silent heartbeat, then an incredulous, “No way,” from Kevin. “It was dark. It was like five seconds in the headlights. She doesn’t even know who we are.”

  “I keep telling myself that, but she walked into Miss Lissy’s Closet while I was there with my mom, and she winked at me. I mean, it was deliberate. If you’d seen the look on her face, you’d know it was true.”

  “How? How could she tell?”

  “I don’t know,” Kaitlin said. “Maybe my hair?” Or my fat butt, she was thinking, though she didn’t say it. Kevin claimed that he didn’t think her butt was fat, but that was because he knew it would upset her if he told her the truth.

  “Like, none of your other friends has long blonde hair?” he asked. “She can’t know who you are. She doesn’t live here.”

  “Kevin, she winked. I’m telling you, I don’t know how, but she knows.”

  Kevin was quiet for a minute. “Did she say anything?”

  “Of course, she didn’t! There was no time for that—I mean, like she went off into the other room, and we didn’t see her again—but I’m sure she told her sister, and by now Phoebe’s probably told Joanne, and Joanne will tell her mother, and her mother works for James Meade and sees my mother at the office all the time. What are we going to do, Kevin? If she finds out, we’re sunk! She’ll be furious. She’ll dock me for months, she’ll interrogate me every time I go out, she’ll send me away if she has to. She’ll threaten your parents with God-only-knows-what. She’ll accuse you of rape.”

  “I never raped you.”

  “It’s a legal thing, Kevin. I’m underage!”

  “And your mother wasn’t doing what we are when she was seventeen?”

  “Of course she was, which is why she’s so distrustful of me. She’s terrified I’ll do what she did.”

  “She didn’t do so bad.”

  “She hates my father. They barely talk. They don’t even make love anymore.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard her tell a friend on the phone.”

  “Well, that’s not the situation with you and me. We love each other. Besides, we were just having fun.”

  Kaitlin might have strangled him for missing the point. “Kevin. Think. Having fun is even worse, because having fun leads to babies, and that’s how I came to be. She’ll go ballistic if she knows I’m on the pill, and she won’t hear the part about love. She’ll just think about your daddy working at the mill.” Kaitlin rubbed her temple. She might have known she would be caught. She was always caught. “What were we thinking?�
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  “That it was nice.”

  Oh, it had been nice. It always was with Kevin, right from the start. He had been her first. And gentle? Omigod. So sweet touching her breasts, so excited taking off her clothes that his hands shook, and then so careful and apologetic and upset when she bled. She had expected to feel grateful that he wanted to make love with her. What she hadn’t expected was to feel the fire. But it was there every time. This wasn’t the first backabehind they had pulled. Lacking the privacy of a bedroom, they had made love in the woods, behind the school, even out at Cooper’s Point. They had made love on Oak Street, Willow Street, and now Cedar.

  Kaitlin wouldn’t find another guy like Kevin. If it ended, she would be back to being the only one without a date. If it ended, she would feel more ugly than ever. If it ended, she would absolutely, totally cease to exist.

  “Annie Barnes will tell,” she cried fearfully. “She’ll even do it out of spite, because she never pulled a backabehind. Like, who’d have slept with her? She had no friends. I mean, ze-ro. She was ugly, and she was odd.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they always said, but I saw her today, and she wasn’t ugly. She came into Harriman’s while I was stocking the shelves.”

  “Omi god. That’s how she knew. You must have looked totally guilty.”

  “She didn’t see me.”

  “Not once?”

  “Not once.”

  Kaitlin flipped her hair back from her face. “I can’t believe Annie Barnes chose that instant to drive down the street.”

  “Maybe she won’t tell.”

  Kaitlin felt despair. “Yeah. Right. Like she won’t write it into something? Kevin, do you know who she is? She writes books, and she’s come here to write about Middle River, because that’s what she used to do, only now she’s rich and famous, so the whole world reads what she writes. We’re in big trouble,” she cried. “What are we going to do?”

  Chapter 5

  HEART POUNDING, I watched through my rearview mirror as Aidan Meade studied first my car and then me, but that pounding heart had nothing to do with physical attraction. I’m not even sure I had felt that for Aidan back when I was eighteen, when we were meeting in the woods at Cooper’s Point. What I felt then was awe; Aidan was the most sought-after twenty-one-year-old in Middle River, and he was interested in me—or so I thought at the time.

  I knew differently now, which was why the pounding of my heart came from anger. I tried to get a grip on it during the time he spent studying my car, but it was unabated, even stoked when he opened his door, climbed out, and approached.

  Fifteen years was a long time for anger to simmer. Be cool, Annie, I cautioned. Be the deliberate woman you are in D.C.—the one who doesn’t act on impulse and has more power for it.

  “That’s some car, Annie Barnes,” he said in a smooth voice, but the closer he came, the less sure he seemed. “Annie?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You look like her, but not. Wow, you’ve changed.”

  Had he made it a compliment, I might have calmed, but as stated it annoyed me all the more. “Not you, Aidan,” I observed. “You look the same. Older, but the same.”

  He smirked. “I was hoping you’d say ‘older but wiser.’”

  “Wiser?” I couldn’t help it. “You’re on what marriage now? Fourth?”

  “Third. Four would be pitiful, don’t you think?” I thought three at his age was pitiful, but before I could tell him, he said, “Been following my life, have you?”

  “Not yours, per se. I read the Middle River Times cover to cover each week. It’s better than People—more juicy. I’m always amazed. It reports each of your weddings like it was the first.”

  “Dad-dy!” came a shriek from the car.

  Aidan held up a hand to still the voice.

  I couldn’t see in the windows, though there was truly no need. “And now you’re a daddy, too,” I observed politely. “How many kids do you have?”

  “Five.”

  “In all?”

  “Three with Judy and now two with Bev. Lindsey and I didn’t have any kids.”

  I frowned, puzzled. “Lindsey was the first. Didn’t you marry because she was pregnant?” Of course, he had. The town had been abuzz with the news. There had been a miscarriage and a speedy divorce. The marriage had lasted a mere six months.

  “No,” Aidan lied, then glanced at his car in response to a cry.

  “Daddy, he’s kicking me! Stop it, Micah!”

  “Micah, keep your feet to yourself!” Aidan yelled. He faced me again. “You have an edge, Annie. But then, you always did. As I recall, we had something going, until you turned sour.”

  The barb wasn’t worth answering. “As I recall,” I said with a smile, “we never got something going, because you were never there. You’d tell me to meet you at eight, and I’d sit alone in the woods until you showed up at ten or eleven. You’d give me some story about work holding you up and how exhausted you were and that you’d call me in a couple of days, and sure enough, you did. Then Michael Corey accused you of having an affair with his wife, and you said it couldn’t possibly be so, because on the dates in question, you were with me. You said all that in a sworn affidavit. And I didn’t deny it.”

  “Nope,” he said smugly.

  “Because to deny it,” I went on, welcoming the catharsis, “would have meant admitting to the town that we hadn’t been together, and you knew I wouldn’t do that. You knew I had never dated anyone else and that I thought it was awesome to be picked by a Meade. You knew I would jump at the chance to be yours.”

  He grinned. “You did.”

  “And that I would lie, rather than say you had basically stood me up all those times.”

  “You did that, too.”

  “Lied, yes—but not under oath like you had, never under oath.” I stopped smiling. “I was your alibi right up to the night of my senior prom. You offered to take me.”

  “In gratitude,” he said.

  “And then stood me up.”

  He smirked. “Couldn’t be helped. I was tied up.”

  “So I sat home alone that night, all dressed up in the prettiest dress from my mom’s shop. I had told everyone at school that you were my date. When I never showed up, they decided I had made it up.”

  “So then you backtracked and said you lied about the other,” Aidan picked up the story, “only no one believed you. After all, I was the one who had sworn to tell the truth. You were such a pitiful thing. People understood why I did what I did.”

  “Even though you lied.”

  “My lie was for the greater good. Wouldn’t have done Mike Corey any good to know the truth about Kiki and me. They got back together again after she and I broke up.”

  I gave him my most serene smile. “For the greater good? Huh. What would you do if I told you I was wearing a wire right now?”

  I saw a second’s surprise in his eyes, but he was distracted when a blood-curdling screech came from the car. This one was higher pitched, if smaller.

  “Leave the baby alone, the both of you,” Aidan roared, “or you’ll get it when we get home!”

  Beat your kids, too? I wanted to ask, but it would have changed the subject. We weren’t done with this one yet.

  Aidan was less cocky now. “You’re not wearing a wire. You had no idea I’d be coming round that corner.”

  “No, but, y’know, I’m glad you did,” I said and meant it. I had been dreading this meeting. Now it had happened, and I hadn’t crumbled. This was proof that I wasn’t the lonely girl I had once been, the one Aidan Meade had left waiting in the woods, the one who had been stood up on the night of her only senior prom, the one who had been disappointed and humiliated and compromised. The woman I was now said in a voice that was forceful for its self-possession, “I’ve always wanted to tell you what a snake I think you are. You used me, Aidan. I won’t ever forget that.”

  I glanced past him when another big SUV rounded the corner. This one was identical to
Aidan’s, dark windows and all, except that it had the Northwood Mill logo on the side of the door. It came to a stop as suddenly as Aidan had, idling in the street while the driver opened his door and walked over. Fortyish and intelligent-looking, he wore jeans and a jersey with the same mill logo on the breast pocket.

  “Your father’s on the warpath,” he told Aidan. “The ad folks just showed up, and you haven’t answered your cell.”

  Aidan glared at his own car and shouted, “Did that phone ring, Micah?”

  I half turned in my seat to get a glimpse of the shadow of a child, but another shadow caught my eye first. This one was in the passenger seat of the Northwood Mill SUV. Judging from the size of it, it was a man and from the profile, a Meade. That would be James. He was the older brother, the heir apparent, the brains behind the mill’s recent growth, and the father’s right-hand man.

  I don’t know whether the child answered Aidan or not, but Aidan was arguing with the man from the mill. “They weren’t supposed to be here until four.” When he saw his man looking at me, he said with a snide edge, “This is Annie Barnes. She’s come back to town to make trouble.”

  I wasn’t bothered by the remark. I looked good, and I knew it. Offering the man a hand, I smiled pleasantly. “And you are?”

  “Tony O’Roarke,” he said.

  “He’s our VP for operations,” Aidan put in, “which means he’s the hands-on guy at the mill and the one the old man calls when he has a gripe with one of us.” To Tony, who had shaken my hand quite nicely, he said, “Those people said they’d be there at four, so that’s when I’ll be there.”

  “He wants you now.”

  Aidan’s look was as cold as his tone. “I’m busy now.”

  Clearly feeling the chill, Tony raised a low hand and took a step back, then retreated fully. Aidan watched them drive off. Mouth and nostrils were tight when he faced me again, but he picked right up where we’d left off.