Ben flashed an accusatory look of disbelief. “You get all that from a pile of reading workbooks?”
“It’s what I do. This is exactly what I do. I teach children how to read.” Then an idea sparked. “Ben, I’m going to be here for the next few weeks. I could work with your daughter.”
She tried to read him. The anger that had erupted only seconds ago was gone, but it was replaced with the mask of indifference he had worn most of the night.
“You and Zoe have shown me so much kindness. You won’t take any money for rent. I hope you’ll take me up on this.”
Ben didn’t meet her gaze as silence filled the room.
Unsure of what to say, Jenna picked up her purse and tucked the paper with Ben’s phone number and WiFi password into a side pocket. She stood and walked toward a pair of French doors that led from the kitchen out to the backyard. Ben’s back was to her now, and she watched his sculpted shoulders rise and fall with each breath as he sat fingering the pages of one of the workbooks.
She wanted to touch him, place her hands on his shoulders and take away his pain. But she balled up her fists instead. Ben didn’t want her help or her comfort. Not only that, he didn’t seem to want her there at all.
She opened the door and headed back to the refuge of the carriage house.
8
Ben watched through the window as Jenna’s darkened form moved toward the carriage house. She opened the door, but before going in, she turned and looked back at the house. After a few seconds, she went inside, and soon the windows of the carriage house turned from plates of black to a warm golden glow.
He smiled wistfully, knowing exactly which lamp she had turned on. He designed that carriage house and knew it like the back of his hand even though he hadn’t stepped foot in it for more than three years.
Had it already been three years since that awful day?
His thoughts were jumbled, jumping between the past and present. He took out his phone and looked at the pictures he’d taken with Kate just days ago at Disney World. He stopped at a picture of Kate smiling with her bright green eyes and dark hair all wild and flowing around her. Would her hair be styled with little bows and braids if her mother were still alive?
Sara, why did you have to leave us like that?
Deep down, he had known she wasn’t well, but he couldn’t forgive her. It was irrational to hate the mother of his child, but she had left him in the worst way possible.
They had met at a party during his last year at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He was finishing up his master’s in architecture while she was completing her undergraduate degree in landscape design.
Sara was petite with shining green eyes and chestnut colored hair that brushed her shoulders. They spent the entire night debating the use of green space in urban planning, and he offered to take her home.
They ended up kissing in his old Jeep Cherokee, and within a few years, that kiss had grown into something much more, and they married.
The first miscarriage came right after their wedding. They blamed it on stress. Ben was starting his architecture firm, Fisher Designs, and Sara had taken a position with a large landscape group in Kansas City. They worked crazy hours and lived on takeout.
But then it was two and then three miscarriages. And it started to take a toll.
Sara stopped working, which meant Ben had to make Fisher Designs profitable. They purchased a 1930s Tudor style home in Langley Park, and Ben moved his office to the town center nearby. He worked long hours, and Sara, often alone, withdrew from the world, only interacting with him and making phone calls to her mother in Arizona.
Ben wondered if that was when Sara began to slip away, but before he could worry about Sara’s retreat into herself, she was pregnant again. This would be her fourth attempt to carry a child, and Ben’s fourth attempt to try and hold them together.
Sara’s mother, Liz, had decided to leave her home in Phoenix and move to Langley Park to be closer to Sara and, God willing, the baby. Ben designed and built the carriage house specifically for her.
But sadness and tragedy found them again. When the carriage house construction was completed and ready for Liz to move in, they received an awful phone call. Liz had died suddenly—a heart attack in her sleep.
Six months pregnant, Sara and Ben traveled to Phoenix to bury her mother. Sara’s grief was indescribable. She didn’t have any other family, and she and her mother shared a bond like Ben had never seen.
As Ben grieved for Liz, he worried about being the only one there for Sara if she were to miscarry for a fourth time. Ben’s family loved Sara, but in her grief, she had distanced herself from them. He was all Sara had, and that terrified him.
Thankfully, the fourth try turned out to be the charm. Despite going through the painful loss of her mother, Sara gave birth to a healthy Kathryn Elizabeth Fisher or Jellybean, as Ben would come to call her shortly after her birth.
The early years with Kate were tough. Like most parents with their first child, they were all about survival. Their lives revolved around feedings and sleep schedules. The time went by like a blur. He had also found his niche in renovating and restoring the beautiful, old homes in Langley Park. He was working harder than ever, building up his business, and taking on more clients. In no time at all, Fisher Designs had grown from a one-man shop into a successful business, employing three architects and an office manager.
He wanted to spend more time with Kate and Sara. He told himself work would eventually slow down. Then he’d be the doting father and husband he knew he could be and find the work-life balance.
Sara seemed to adapt well to motherhood, but she was extremely protective of Kate. They rarely left the house, and Sara limited the amount of time Ben’s family could spend with Kate; citing safety concerns over germs and accidents or any other hazard she perceived. Ben didn’t fault her for this. After living through the miscarriages, he wanted to do everything in his power to keep his sweet daughter safe, too. So he acquiesced to Sara’s demands, and they lived a quiet, solitary life.
Looking back, Ben should have known something was very wrong around the time of Sara’s death. It was Mother’s Day, and Kate was growing into a precocious three-year-old. They had spent the holiday, like most of their days, at home playing inside. Mother’s Day was especially difficult for Sara, but that year she was full of life. She’d kissed him that morning, and it was the first time she’d initiated physical contact in years.
He was at work the next day when his mother called. She wanted to tell him how pleased she was that Sara had brought Kate over for a visit, but voiced her concern regarding her almost euphoric behavior.
Ben had told his mother not to worry and even shared how much more vibrant Sara had become in just the last few days. But after their call ended, he couldn’t shake the terrible feeling that something was off.
Despite a light rain, Ben decided to walk home and join Sara and Kate for lunch. He tried to call Sara to see if she wanted him to pick up some sandwiches from Park Tavern, but the call went right to voicemail. This was odd. Sara always had her phone on her. She insisted for safety that it always needed to be charged and ready in case of an emergency. Ben’s walk became a jog, and he rushed up the path leading from the sidewalk to their home.
The front door was unlocked. That should have been his first warning. He walked inside his home. It was deathly quiet with only the sounds of the spring rain dancing on the roof.
“Sara? Jellybean?”
No response.
He made his way upstairs to Kate’s room and then into the bedroom he shared with Sara when he saw the pill containers sitting in a neat row on Sara’s nightstand.
Sleeping pills.
Three empty bottles silently accused him of being the distracted husband, blind to his wife’s deteriorating mental health.
Sara’s doctor had prescribed the pills for her insomnia, but he didn’t know she’d been refilling the prescriptions and stockpiling them right
under his nose.
Adrenaline coursed through his veins.
“Sara!”
He ran through the house, checking closets and bathrooms, even going down to the basement. But Kate and Sara were nowhere to be found.
Ben passed through the French doors leading from the kitchen to the back porch, hoping he’d find his wife and daughter in the backyard. It was raining harder now, and thunder was rumbling. But a faint noise drew his attention. He stopped and tried to pinpoint the sound. He glanced at the carriage house, and then it clicked.
Heart pounding, Ben ran. It had to be less than a hundred feet to the garage, but time was moving slowly.
He lifted the heavy garage door and saw Sara’s car. He was met by a rush of fumes and the sound of the motor humming. There was something else. A word repeated over and over again.
Mommy. Mommy. Mommy.
It was Kate.
Ben rushed to open the car door and found his daughter glassy-eyed, head lolling against her car seat, her face red and stained with tears. Kate met her father’s gaze with sleepy eyes.
“Out, Daddy. Out.”
Ben unfastened the five-point harness. He threw back the straps and clutched his daughter in his arms. Looking her over frantically, he carried her from the garage and set her on the wet grass. She was groggy, and the storm didn’t seem to faze her, but she was breathing and alive.
“Stay right there, Jellybean. I’m going to get Mommy.”
“Sara,” he yelled, almost losing his footing on the slick grass as he ran back toward the garage. But before he reached her car, a voice called to him from the sidewalk.
“Is everything all right?”
It was a jogger. She’d heard the commotion and came running up the driveway to offer help.
“Call 911. Tell them we need an ambulance,” Ben called out, rushing to turn off Sara’s car.
Sara’s small body was slumped over the steering wheel. Ben had to reach awkwardly over her just to turn off the ignition. He lifted her from the car and dragged her body out of the garage and onto the grass. She felt as if she was made of lead.
“I called 911. They’re on the way,” the jogger called out.
Ben pulled his gaze away from Sara to see that the jogger had taken Kate to sit on their covered back porch. Only then did he feel the rain soaking through his shirt.
Ben looked at his wife. Her lips were tinged blue, and her eyes were open and vacant, not blinking back the punishing rain soaking them both. He checked for a pulse and found nothing.
“Daddy, Daddy!” Kate cried out to him, but he had to try and save his wife.
Shielding Sara’s body with his own, he kept looking for some sign of life, waiting for the rise and fall of her chest, the sound of her voice. But there was nothing.
“Come on, Sara. I can make this right. I can fix this. You just need to breathe.”
His movements were frantic as he administered CPR. He pressed his mouth against Sara’s, trying to force air into her lungs. But as he worked, an unbelievable realization took over. His wife no longer inhabited her body.
She was gone.
Then there were people all around him. He heard the crunch of their boots coming up the driveway. Firefighters and EMTs descended and clustered around Sara’s prostrate form. A fireman had taken him by the arm and brought him over to the porch where Kate was still sitting with the jogger.
From there, things moved quickly. Kate was loaded into an ambulance with an oxygen mask strapped to her tiny face, and her painful whimpering filled the air. “I want Mommy. Where’s Mommy?”
“Just breathe, Jellybean. Just breathe,” was all he could say holding her tiny hand as they sped toward the hospital while images of his wife’s dead body, sprawled lifeless in the wet grass, flashed through his mind.
Sara was dead, and he was to blame.
Jenna sat at the corner desk of the carriage house typing on her laptop. After her tense exchange with Ben, she needed a distraction and turned to work. She finished up an email and glanced out the window. Ben was standing in the middle of the backyard looking up at her.
What could he want?
She opened the carriage house door and walked across the dew kissed grass to where he stood.
“Is everything all right?”
“You can help Kate.”
She wasn’t sure if Ben was making a statement or asking a question.
“Yes, I can.”
A few long beats of silence passed as they stood face-to-face in the darkness.
“It would have to be in the house. I don’t want Kate near the garage.”
Her pulse quickened. “Okay.”
Ben nodded as if he’d just decided something important he’d been silently contemplating.
“Good night, Jenna.”
She heard his words, but he wasn’t moving. He wasn’t retreating from her. It felt as if he had more to say, but he just stood there rooted to the ground. She stared back at him. Her hands twitched. She wanted to touch him, but she held back.
“Good night, Ben,” she said, almost taking a step toward him, but turned and walked back to the carriage house.
She glanced over her shoulder before opening the door, but Ben was gone. The Tudor’s French doors were closed, and the house was dark. She didn’t know what to make of the moment they had just shared, only knowing it was gone.
9
Despite her late night, Jenna woke early and stretched as she glanced out the window. The sun hadn’t begun to greet the day yet, and she smiled, loving the stillness of the early morning. Her video conference with the teachers wasn’t until ten o’clock, giving her plenty of time for a run.
Walking out of the carriage house, Jenna noticed the Tudor was still dark. She shivered, thinking back to last night and how badly she’d wanted to reach out and touch Ben. Even after all this time, she still felt a connection to him. But if there was one thing Jenna had learned, it was that connection could be a dangerous thing.
Had she just built him up in her mind?
Of course, she had. While he had lived in her sweetest of memories and starred in her most tender teenage daydreams, she was barely a blip on his radar.
Jenna pushed Ben Fisher out of her mind and focused on the sound of her feet crunching on the packed gravel driveway.
She was starting to find her bearings for Langley Park and decided to head toward the lake. She popped in her earbuds and set off, heading south down Baneberry Drive. She loved this time of day when the world around her was still sleeping. The lazy sun was just beginning to cast its light over the tall oaks lining the street as she inhaled deeply.
Her legs were warming up and feeling stronger with each stride as the first notes of pianist George Winston’s “Living in the Country” played. Her body in sync and her mind focused on each crisp, deliberate note, she turned left on Prairie Rose Drive and followed it east past the botanic gardens and onto the Boley Lake trail.
While mountain biking was the way she escaped her thoughts by allowing her mind to focus on navigating the terrain, running was how she processed anything weighing heavy on her heart. It was as if her body’s physical exertion helped her mind order the chaos into manageable pieces.
Midwest Medical Center came into view as she headed east along the trail, and her thoughts went to Judith. For the first time in many years, she knew where her mother was living. She pictured Judith asleep in her small hospital room and reflected on how strangely their first meeting had gone. She needed to keep her guard up, but that tiny part of her heart that yearned for a mother’s love wanted to believe her mother could change.
Jenna rounded the lake trail and headed back toward Langley Park’s town center. Pleased to be heading west with the sun at her back, she turned off the main trail and followed one of the narrow dirt paths leading into the dense woods surrounding the lake.
Running hard, she felt the presence of someone behind her and moved to the right to allow the runner to pass. But, after a f
ew moments when nobody went by, Jenna looked back and was surprised to see she was all alone. Unsettled, she increased her pace and turned off the music.
More alert to her surroundings, she debated turning around and running back to where she’d left the main trail. She’d been lost in her thoughts and wasn’t sure how long she’d been running on the winding dirt path. Deep in the dimly lit woods, she couldn’t quite get her bearings as to which way she was heading.
Just then, Jenna saw something fly through the air. But before she could discount it as a bird, another object came whizzing past her head.
A rock?
Then she felt a stinging sensation on her shoulder blade where a baseball-sized stone had struck her hard.
Her mind was racing. What the hell was going on? The sun was coming up, but it was still quite dim under the thick canopy of trees. Could it be kids? A horrible, mean-spirited prank?
Jenna ran harder, ducking when another rock flew over her left shoulder and hit the ground.
Whoever was doing this was behind her now.
She kept going, thighs burning, as she propelled her body from the shady woods and onto the main trail now bathed in the early morning sun. She slowed to a jog as a group of older women came power walking toward her.
“Did you happen to see anyone coming out of the woods?” she panted, hoping the walkers could make out her breathy words.
The women clustered around her with concern etched on their faces.
“No, you’re the first runner we’ve come across, dear. Are you all right?”
Jenna rubbed her shoulder. “Someone was throwing rocks at me. I was hoping you saw something.”
The women all shook their heads.
“We’ll keep an eye out. It was probably just children. They start to get a little stir-crazy this close to the end of the school year.”
Jenna nodded and tried to smile as she jogged toward the botanic gardens and the Langley Park town center. She checked her phone. It was half past six. It seemed quite early for children’s shenanigans, but she shrugged off the encounter. She was only a little banged up but no worse for wear.
The Complete Langley Park Series (Books 1-5) Page 7
