As You Wish (25 page)

Patricia jumped up and wrapping the comforter around herself ran after him. “Ryan,” she stage-whispered. She heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs, and they hadn’t hesitated. She ran to the balcony overlooking the foyer. “Ryan!” she whispered again.

He looked over his shoulder from the last step. His cold expression changed to one of horror as he turned and started to run up the steps two at a time. “Get back in there. Do you want someone to see you?”

She met him at the third step from the top. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She put her arms around his neck.

“If someone sees you out here dressed in a blanket, they’re going to know.” He picked her up, trying to keep the comforter wrapped around her, and carried her back to her bedroom. “Why do I have to keep carrying you around?” he scolded.

“Please forgive me, Ryan. I just don’t know what to do about David. I feel like I should marry him, but I’m not sure I want to, and I’m not sure if that’s because I don’t really like him or if I’m just afraid.” Patricia sobbed, clutching Ryan’s shoulders when he tried to put her down on her bed. “I wish someone were here to tell me what to do. I wish my grandfather were alive.”

Ryan sank onto the bed, holding her. “I know, Princess. It’s gonna be okay.”

“You won’t leave me, will you?”

“I won’t leave you. I promise. You’re gonna have to make me go.” He stroked her hair.

“I got your shirt all wet.”

“Yeah, it’s not the first time.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not the first time for that either. Don’t worry about it. It’s wash and wear.” He gave her a light squeeze. “I have to go back down before someone misses me. I don’t want to look too devoted, or the ladies will start wondering.”

“I have to make an appearance too.” She pulled herself out of his arms. “You know I don’t think of you as a servant, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “Of course not, Princess.” He touched her nose with the tip of his finger. “See you downstairs.”

Patricia took a fast shower and pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater before venturing downstairs. When she walked into the room, she was shocked at how old and tired her great aunt looked. Patricia knelt in front of her, taking her hands. “Aunt, maybe you should go take a nap.”

“I can’t, dear, I have guests. And besides, I’m fine.” Beatrice smiled weakly.

“Oh my, is it that late?” Mrs. Jacoby said, giving pointed looks to one or two others. “I really should be going. It’s just been such a lovely afternoon, I guess I didn’t want it to end.”

“Do you have to go so soon?” Beatrice asked.

“Oh, Beatrice, I wish I didn’t.” Mrs. Jacoby stood, managing to give a few more looks at the circle of women. One found a mark.

“You know, I really need to go also.” This woman was younger than most, and Patricia didn’t recognize her. The woman set aside her teacup, groping for her purse on the floor. “I have to get the kids. All their practices end soon.”

“Ryan!” Beatrice called. Her voice hardly carried across the room, let alone into the hall, but Ryan appeared in the door looking as though he had not been having sex and then fighting with his lover within the last half hour. Patricia cringed. He had pulled it off without the benefit of a shower to get himself together.

“Yes, Miss Beatrice?”

“Will you get Mrs. Jacoby and Mrs. Lemark their coats?”

“Would you get mine too, please, Ryan?” A woman about the age of Patricia’s mother stood. Her voice was rich and dark like her skin. Mrs. Beauvais had been very close to Patricia’s mother. Patricia remembered her from before she went to school. During college, Mrs. Beauvais had sent an occasional care package around finals.

Somehow what Mrs. Jacoby hadn’t been able to accomplish, Mrs. Beauvais did. Suddenly everyone had to go pick up children or stop at the store on the way home so they could make dinner or pick up dry cleaning for work tomorrow. Several mentioned wishing they could do this again, and a few confided to Patricia that they were jealous of her having Ryan at her call. Patricia stood behind her aunt’s seat, smiling and trying to remember names. As David’s wife, she would have to be accomplished at these kinds of things.

As Ryan ushered the last of the guests out the door, and Jeff and his assistant walked around the room picking up discarded cups and plates, Patricia knelt beside Beatrice again. “I think you should take a nap, Aunt Beatrice.”

“Is that your medical opinion, my brilliant niece?”

“No, it’s my niece opinion. I also think you invited too many people. You overexerted yourself.”

“But they all wanted to come. I hated to disappoint them.”

“You should have disappointed about half of them for your own health. That is my medical opinion.”

Beatrice smiled and patted Patricia’s hand. “Why don’t I just doze here for a few minutes?”

“Now, Miss Beatrice, you know you’ll be more comfortable in your own bed.” Ryan scooped her off the couch and carried her out of the room.

Beatrice chuckled with a pale, papery tone. “It’s been a long time since a strong young man swept me off my feet.”

“A whole week?” Ryan asked, climbing the stairs. Patricia trailed after them.

“Much longer than a week.”

“I can’t believe it. All the men you know must be nearsighted and have bad backs.”

Patricia hurried around him into Beatrice’s room and turned down the bed. Ryan settled her in so Patricia could slip off her shoes and cover her. He bowed and left the room. Patricia stayed behind to make sure her aunt was comfortable. Her aunt’s eyes were already drowsing closed. Beatrice always had the energy of someone half her age, and Patricia often forgot she was her grandfather’s older sister.

“He’s such a nice boy,” Beatrice murmured. “He reminds me of my Dickie.”

“Who?” Patricia asked.

“My sweet Dickie. How I miss him.”

Patricia sat down, taking Beatrice’s hands in hers. “Who is Dickie, Aunt Beatrice?”

“My one true love.”

Patricia’s mouth fell open. As far as she knew, her aunt had never been in love. Beatrice had never married, and no one had ever told her why. Patricia had asked her mother once, and her mother had just shrugged and said she didn’t know. After her parents died, she’d asked Beatrice and been told,
“I never wanted any of the boys your great-grandfather thought I should marry.”

Any of the boys her father thought she should marry? Then, Patricia had just put it down to a different age. Now it sounded sinister.

Patricia opened her mouth to ask about this one true love, only to find her aunt had fallen asleep. She’d always assumed her aunt had ended up a spinster because there was no one good enough to marry her. In retrospect, that was stupid logic. Patricia could walk into the street, close her eyes, and point, and men would fight to be in the line of her finger in case she planned on considering them. Things would not have been much different when her aunt was a sweet young thing. Rockefellers and Carnegies had stayed here with their suitably aged sons. She wasn’t sure about Mellons, but it was likely. Somewhere in the library was a signed edition of
The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton because someone in the family had known her after her books were being published and before her husband went crazy.

So there was some other reason Aunt Beatrice had never married. A reason named Dickie.

She hunted down Ryan, who was helping the caterers put away the china. For a split second, she wondered if those women her aunt had invited realized they were sipping from actual antique bone china. “Ryan, I need your help,” she announced, shoving the distraction aside.

He frowned. “Doing what?”

“I need to find something in the attic.”

His frown deepened, and Jeff and his assistant exchanged a significant look. As Patricia caught the look, she realized what an awful excuse it sounded like, and her face heated, making the situation worse. They didn’t know she and Ryan didn’t need to slip off to the attic for a trysting place. They’d been trysting upstairs an hour ago. However, the catacombs of Well Spring’s servants’ quarters would make an excellent winter meeting place. Her face heated further, and Ryan’s expression shifted toward bewilderment.

“My aunt’s papers,” she said. “I know she’s got some diaries up there someplace, and I—I need to know something.”

“You don’t expect to find something in particular, do you?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been up to the attic lately?” Ryan asked. He obviously hadn’t picked up on Jeff and his assistant’s curiosity or considered the seclusion of the attic. “There’s about a hundred years’ worth of stuff up there.
Antiques Roadshow
could get lost up there for a season and not find everything.”

“I have to try.” Patricia started for the back stairs leading to the attic, hoping Ryan would follow her.

The attic had once been servants’ quarters and storage. Over the years it had become more and more storage until it was riddled with rooms full of boxes, old furniture, and objects of both obvious and mysterious uses. When she was younger, she’d whiled away days there alone and with friends because there was so much fodder for the imagination in the piles of boxes and old clothes. She could pretend to be anything. Over the years, she had forgotten what it looked like. Room after room of every imaginable household item, plus a few unintelligible ones piled in orderly, unmarked heaps. Geological strata were more organized.

Ryan put his hands on his hips. “I’m hoping this is some kind of lure to get me alone.”

“No.” Patricia stared across the narrow servant’s parlor to the long, dim hall lined with doors. Behind every one of those doors was a scene much like the one in this room. The task suddenly felt more monumental than medical school. But her aunt had devoted years to raising her niece. Patricia owed her at least this. “My aunt mentioned having a one true love. I need to know who it was.”

“Couldn’t you just wait until she wakes up and ask her?”

“No, because she won’t tell me.” She opened a box and discovered her Barbie dolls with all their clothes and all their shoes neatly arranged. She remembered announcing over breakfast one morning about a year before her parents died that she was too old to play with Barbies. The dolls had disappeared from her room while she was at school, but she’d never known where they went because she had long since given up playing in the attic on rainy days. “I’ve never heard about this before, and I want to know.”

“You need a team of archaeologists up here, Princess.” Ryan peered into another cardboard box.

Patricia opened a trunk and was surrounded by the smell of her mother’s favorite perfume. She’d never questioned what happened to her parents’ things after they died. Someone had packed them into the attic with everything else. What had that perfume been called? Tatiana? Tears filled her eyes. The sweet, delicate perfume made her feel so safe and loved. And now so alone.

“Patricia?” Ryan put his arms around her. “What’s the matter?”

“These are my mother’s things,” she mumbled.

Ryan kicked the trunk shut and held her. “Come on, maybe the older stuff is further in. See, some of it’s marked.” He pointed to a box marked TAX RECORDS 1976. “We could throw some things out while we’re at this, maybe. Kill two birds.” He pulled her deeper into the attic past the boxes containing her parents’ possessions.

An hour of determined searching produced nothing, not even the correct area of the attic. Ryan had stacked fifteen miscellaneous years’ worth of tax records by the stairs to carry down later and located a trunk full of gowns dating from the thirties, while Patricia discovered her father’s toy trains and a butterfly collection whose labels were so old they were unreadable.

“Oh, look at this!” Patricia shouted from the next room.

Ryan stepped through the door, wiping his forehead on his arm. “What is it?”

“It’s my Uncle Gilbert’s Congressional Medal of Honor. He died in Korea.” Patricia touched the medal. “He wasn’t really my uncle. He was more of a second cousin. His mother was my grandfather’s oldest sister. She was barren, and they adopted, but everyone said he was a true Whitmer because he did his duty for his country.”

“I hate to interrupt this, but your aunt is going to wake up soon.”

Patricia looked at her watch. “I have to find out what happened.”

“I know.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’ll keep at this, and you go see if you can find out about this one true love the easy way, hmm?”

She kissed his dusty cheek and ran down the stairs.

Chapter Seventeen

David started tearing his napkin into perfect squares. The action reminded Patricia too much of Bruce suffering over Rita’s answer to his marriage proposal. “Patricia, I really would like an answer.”

“I know.” Patricia sighed.

“I know things…things hadn’t been as smooth as I would have liked. I’ve acted rashly and not taken your feelings into account as fully as I should, but I can change. I swear to you.”

Patricia watched his hands. He had long slender fingers that looked as though they’d never suffered a worse injury than a paper cut. “I think you would make a very good governor, but I don’t know if I would make a very good First Lady of Ohio. Or First Lady of the United States, for that matter.”

“Of course you would,” David said in a rush. “I can’t do it without you.”

“I don’t see why not. There have to be a hundred other women who would be better than me. I’m not very good at politics. I forget people’s names. I can’t host a dinner.”

“Patricia, you can learn. You’re a Whitmer.”

A Whitmer, she thought, because that alone makes up for all other character flaws, like an inability to entertain like a political wife and an insatiable hunger for the estate caretaker. She glanced around the deserted cafeteria. Tomorrow night was the ball, and David still wanted to announce their engagement then. But there was no engagement to announce. The thought of marrying David made her ill, and she thought it might be too soon to be having cold feet.

He was trying so hard. Consented to dinner at the hospital because she was on call tonight and couldn’t get away. Calling and sending flowers. Every day this week, he’d taken her to lunch. Rita had been a trial because of it, wanting in-depth reports and providing counter arguments. Patricia found herself avoiding her best friend.