House of Strangers (Harlequin Super Romance) (9 page)

“My arm’s longer than yours. Let me try.”

She stepped aside.

This time he managed to grasp the edge of whatever it was. At first he thought he wouldn’t be able to budge it, but it began to slide and suddenly fell to the floor at his feet.

It was some sort of plastic mailing tube nearly as big as the pipe and almost as long. It was filthy and covered with cobwebs, but as far as he could see, it had escaped the teeth of rats and mice.

Ann picked it up and took it to the counter under the skylight. A plastic cap had been plugged into the end of it. She grasped it with her fingernails, pulled it out and upended the tube. The tiniest edge of white paper showed. She grasped it carefully and began to pull. “I can feel sketch paper and what feels like watercolor paper. Maybe there are some canvases rolled up inside,” she said. “It seems perfectly preserved. Hand me a couple of those cans of turpentine. I need something heavy to set on the edges while we unroll it.”

Paul leaned over her and held down one side as Ann gently rolled the paper out. The sheets inside were of differing textures and sizes. The one on the top was a charcoal drawing of a street scene in the rain. He recognized the Champs Elysées and the Arc de Triomphe. A standard subject for an art student in Paris.

“Lovely,” breathed Ann. “Leave it flat. We shouldn’t roll it back up again. Don’t want to break any more fibers if we can help it.”

Paul gently moved the single sheet of paper to one of the countertops and used another pair of cans to hold down the edges.

“Oh, look at this one!”

Paul peered over her shoulder. It was a pastel portrait
of a boy about two years old. The blue eyes were mischievous, and a shock of unruly blond hair fell across the forehead. Paul had seen that shock of hair. The blue eyes were still mischievous, although there were fine lines around them. Trey Delaney. Couldn’t be anyone else.

“It’s charming. Why would he hide this?” Ann asked.

“No idea. It’s really good.” He thought for a moment. “Do you think your aunt Karen might want it?”

“You know she would! I don’t think she has any of Uncle David’s work.” She grasped his arm. “Would you give it to her?”

“Of course. But I’d like to present it in person.”

“Sure. When?”

“As soon as possible, don’t you think? Where does she live?”

“In town. She remarried not long after Uncle David was killed. Trey has a half brother and half sister. They’re much younger. I don’t think they communicate much—at least I didn’t see them at the Fourth of July barbecue. Any mother would love to have a picture like this. He’s captured that catch-me-if-you-can look Trey still has.”

“Would you call her for me? Maybe come along to introduce me?”

“Perfect. I’m dying to see her face when you give her this.” She sounded excited. “How about I find out if she’s free tomorrow afternoon? Assuming you are.”

“Where else would I be? It’s too early to start crop dusting. Yeah. Tomorrow afternoon would be fine.” He kept his tone even although his heart was in his mouth at the prospect of interviewing the woman who’d taken his mother’s husband from her. He laid the pastel carefully on top of the Paris scene and moved the cans to keep it flat.

“Whew!” Ann said from behind him.

He turned back and his breath caught.

The girl his father had sketched looked back over her shoulder, laughing. Her long dark hair blew in the wind. For a moment he didn’t recognize this laughing innocent, so full of life, so joyous. In the only photo he had of her, she looked as though she’d been through a war—tired, much too thin, older than her years, unsmiling, and that wonderful hair dragged back into a tight chignon at the back of her neck.

“She’s lovely,” Ann said. “I wonder who she was.”

He nearly said,
My mother.
He stopped himself just in time.

“Let’s see if he did any more like that.”

As each sheet peeled away, they saw pose after pose of the same girl, joyful, in the rain, in the sun, laughing up at the snow, eating an ice-cream cone, licking the stuff off her nose. Some were fast charcoal sketches, but many were watercolors. In all of them only the figure of the girl was finished.

“He put the landscape on top so that if anybody found them, they might not look any further,” Ann said. “Poor guy. I don’t know who she was, but he was obviously nuts about her.”

Maybe in the first flush of their relationship he
had
loved her. That made his betrayal even more hateful. How could he have drawn her like this with something akin to worship and yet have run away to hide in America only a few months after they’d married?

They were down to the last four of five sheets. Paul didn’t think he could endure even one more sketch of that laughing girl. He had never heard her laugh. Not once in the six years she’d been with him.

“Here we go,” Ann said as she used her hands to spread the picture. “I was wondering why they were all
just head-and-shoulder portraits. These make Wyeth’s Helga portraits look chaste.”

The watercolor took his breath away. The girl was no longer a girl. She was a woman, beautiful, passionate, sated with love, naked on her lover’s bed, open, vulnerable. Her hair lay tossed against the pillows, her lips were swollen, her eyes drowsy.

“Roll it up,” Paul said. He turned away quickly.

“I never pictured you as a prude,” Ann said. “This is lovely.”

“It’s intrusive.”

“It certainly is. There was nobody else in that room except the woman and the painter. Obviously she was Uncle David’s mistress.”

Paul wanted to scream,
She was his wife!
Instead, he gritted his teeth and kept his mouth shut.

“Okay,” Ann said. “I’ve rolled it back up. Be careful. It’s beautiful and possibly valuable.”

He turned away after a single glance at the next picture. How could his father have seen this woman’s love for him so clearly, put it down on paper so perfectly, and then left her? His love for her was in every brushstroke. How could he have deceived her so viciously? Destroyed her? Because that was what he’d done. The woman in these pictures had truly died in spirit long before her son had been born, when she realized she’d been abandoned. She might have breathed afterward, but there was no real life in her.

Ann unrolled the last watercolor. He heard her breath catch. “Okay, this one you can look at.”

He glanced at it, then moved closer. Her head drooped forward. Her long hair curtained and concealed most of her face. The picture spoke of sorrow and loss.

He caught his breath. Could his father have drawn this
from memory? Could he have sketched it just before he left her in Paris to come home?

Or did he sketch her from life just before he killed her?

P
AUL SPENT
the afternoon flying his Cessna. He hadn’t done much flying since he’d flown his plane down, and he needed to clear his head. He’d wanted to find his father, learn what made the man tick. Now Paul had to accept the evidence of his own eyes, even if it didn’t jibe with what he wanted to believe. Maybe a couple of hours in the clouds would help him focus.

He definitely needed to avoid becoming too involved with Ann. Not only for his sake, but for hers. At the end of this quest, he, too, would have to walk away as his father had done. He must not leave a brokenhearted woman behind.

Not that avoiding a relationship with Ann would be easy. The more he knew her, the more comfortable he became with her, the more he wondered whether, if there was a woman in the world for him. Ann was that woman.

The question was, should he give up his desire to punish his father and find his mother’s grave to pursue Ann on the off chance they could be happy together?

No. This mission had been the driving force in his life for too long. In school, in the academy, afterward in the air he’d tried to let it go. Sometimes he wouldn’t think about his mother’s death for weeks at a time, then something would trigger his anger. He’d see Tante Helaine’s face begging him to avenge his mother’s death, to give her a decent burial in consecrated ground.

His anger had been less than useless until he’d seen the evidence Tante Helaine had kept hidden all those years, but now, he had a real goal in life for the first time. Not revenge, but justice.

Justice? For whom? His mother? She was beyond caring. His family? Tante Helaine was also beyond caring. Giselle wasn’t interested in revenge. And as for Trey, Paul didn’t truly believe the sins of the father should be taken out on the sons.

But wasn’t that what had happened to him all his life? His father’s sins had shaped him, walled him off from any real intimacy.

He wanted the whole affair over. Maybe then he’d be able to find some peace.

Without Ann? Without Rossiter? Without these people who were, whether they knew it or not, his family?

The only alternative was to drop the whole thing now, sell the house and find himself a desert island somewhere.

Not good enough.

He’d bull his way through and hope to God there would be some forgiveness for him in the Rossiter hearts. In Ann’s heart. But he didn’t think there would be.

When he got back to the house, the workmen were packing up for the day. Buddy met him in the front hall. He was wearing his police uniform. “I’m about to go on patrol. all the chimneys are in good shape, apparently,” Buddy said cheerfully. “They need cleaning, of course, but the tuck pointing’s fine. I’ve got the plans for your new kitchen and some sample cabinets and countertops. They’re in the kitchen. Look them over tonight, why don’t you. Then tomorrow we can make any changes and start tearing out the wall between the kitchen and the butler’s pantry.”

“Sounds good.”

“And I’ve got Jim Bob, the landscaper, coming at eight in the morning. He’s going to look over the garden and design a plan. Time to start clearing and planting.”

“Fine.”

“Wiring’s just about done. Heating and air-conditioning should be installed by the end of the week.”

“Telephone lines?”

“That’s going to take some time,” Buddy said apologetically. “Have to work by their schedule, and sometimes they’re slow as molasses in January.”

“What about the work on the house itself?”

“Termite inspection was this afternoon while you were gone. It’s not nearly as bad as I thought. Probably take us a couple of weeks to get all the bad wood replaced.”

“Plumbing?”

“You did say you wanted to keep the bathrooms as close to the period as you could, right?”

Paul nodded.

“That means replacing the broken tile, one toilet and matching a couple of pedestal sinks. When we open the wall we can create a dressing room, as well as a closet for the master bedroom.”

“Frankly I’m overwhelmed. In any case it sounds as though you have everything in hand. How’s Ann doing?”

“I haven’t seen her all day. I think she’s been out there in that summer kitchen.”

The pager on Buddy’s belt buzzed. He clicked it on and read the message. “Damn! Some idiot just drove off the road east of town. I’ve got to go.”

Paul walked through the back hall, out the back door and onto the brick patio. He could see a faint shimmer of light coming through the dirty skylight and the grimy side window of the studio. He picked his way to the door and knocked on the frame. “Just me.”

“Great,” Ann called.

He walked in.

The windows weren’t the only grimy thing in the studio. Ann’s jeans and shirt were covered in splotches of
white paint. Her face and hair were smudged, too. The dirt from the room seemed to have gravitated to her. He thought he saw a cobweb hanging from the bedraggled scarf she’d used to tie back her hair.

The face she turned to him, however, was radiant. So radiant he felt a jolt when he looked at her. She shared none of his ambivalence. She knew nothing of the quandary he was in. She was simply delighted with a good job.

“It’s the other canvas—the big one,” Ann said. “It wasn’t completely set when it was painted over, so I had to be very careful not to smear the paint underneath. I think you ought to see it.”

Paul wasn’t certain he wanted to, but couldn’t think of an excuse to avoid it. He moved slowly to Ann’s end of the room. What he really wanted was to bury his face in her hair, wrap his arms around her and walk away from this whole thing. He couldn’t do that, either.

“Look at the picture,” Ann said quietly.

He blew out a breath and walked around the canvas. He felt his stomach lurch. It was a self-portrait that might have come out of Dorian Gray’s attic. The only photo he had of his father showed a young man full of energy and drive. And love.

This was the portrait of a man in mortal agony.

His mouth was open and slack. His left hand reached forward as though to save himself from falling. Paul didn’t recognize the woman he reached out to. She was turned away, unseeing of his gesture.

“Who is she?” he asked.

“That’s Aunt Karen, his wife. They seem cut off from one another. It’s so sad.”

His father had barely begun to sketch in another figure behind him, reaching out to him. The figure was still with
out a face, but Paul felt certain it was to have been his mother. The man in the portrait was turned away from her and toward Karen. He didn’t know that she was there.

Had his grief over the murder he’d committed driven him to paint this picture? The man in the painting was in pain, but he was also guilty. Paul looked away, unable to bear the suffering in the figure’s face. How could he hate a man who’d been in such pain?

Easy. Paul’s father might have suffered, but he suffered in luxury surrounded by wealth, privilege, approbation.

While Paul’s mother lay in an unmarked grave.

While her sister died, still mourning her.

While her son grew up with people who were not his parents.

No. Even from beyond the grave, his father had to pay for what he had done.

“Y
OU SURE YOU DON’T WANT
to bring these sketches and paintings to your house?” Ann asked. She was folding up the dingy sheets that had covered the pictures.

“They’ve been safe in the studio all these years. They should be safe another couple of nights.”

“From mice? I don’t think so. Not any longer.”

He sighed. “All right. We’ll move them into the house.”

“They’ll get filthy with all the work going on. How about I take them to my place? I’ve got closed cupboards in the workroom where they’ll be safe. I can flatten the sketches out properly and keep the paintings out of direct light. I don’t have mice. Dante and the local cat see to that.”

“If you think that’s best.”

“I do. I don’t want anything to happen to them. How about I bring my truck around here, we load up the portraits and the drawings, and move them right this minute?”

“They’ll fit in the back of my car.”

“Yeah, but Dante won’t.” She touched his arm. “Be right back. Come on, Dante, you can run better than that, you old fat thing.”

He considered going back in and staring at the portraits, but decided he’d had enough revelations for one day. Nothing seemed to add up about his father. If he’d loved
his mother once, when had he stopped? He’d
married
her, for God’s sake. Tante Helaine said he married her because he couldn’t entice her into his bed any other way. That might be partly true. Still, his mother had told him his father had planned to live in Paris the rest of his life.

Lieutenant Pinkerton had married Madame Butterfly and abandoned her. Had his father wanted to marry an
American
girl? Had he felt that marriage to a
French
girl in France did not bind him?

Paul had news for him. If there was one thing the French were good at, it was legalities. David Delaney had used his address in Paris on the marriage license, and the marriage banns had been posted in his
arondissement
rather than in Michelle’s neighborhood where her parents might spot the announcement. That made no difference. The marriage was legal in France, and by extension, the whole world.

It was sheer luck that they had managed to pull it off. Banns stayed posted for three weeks. Any time during that period a friend or neighbor of the Bouvets might have happened upon the names of Michelle Bouvet and Paul David Delaney on the banns and queried the Bouvets.

Maybe David Delaney had counted on just that. If he’d offered to marry Michelle and been thwarted, she might have turned to him in disappointment and come to his bed, anyway.

But in the end the marriage had taken place. Paul hadn’t inherited much from his mother, but he did have her
livret de famille
—the little red book that constituted a decree of marriage in France. His name was entered on the first page devoted to children of the union. There he was listed as Paul Antoine Bouvet Delaney. When they came to the States to live with Tante Helaine and Uncle Charlie, his mother had decided he should use her parents’ name, Bou
vet. Tante Helaine said she’d rather not have to explain the circumstances of being Delaney.

Paul thought Michelle must have been embarrassed, as well as angry and sad at her husband’s duplicity. Tante Helaine had berated her again and again about allowing her husband to spin falsehood after falsehood about who he was and where he came from.

After his mother disappeared to look for his father, when Tante Helaine was filling his ears for the umpteenth time with the story, she’d always tell him, “I could not believe she had married the man without once looking at his passport. She didn’t copy down the number or the information.” Helaine would throw up her hands. “If I had still been in France, I would not have allowed her to be so naive.”

He knew from Helaine that Michelle’s parents had been furious when her pregnancy had forced her to tell them about her marriage. They’d threatened to throw their younger daughter out on the streets until Helaine called them from Queens and convinced them to forgive her.

It had been bad enough when Helaine had married her GI, Charlie, and moved to the States. In New York their elder daughter was as good as lost to them. They never saw their grandchildren. They didn’t particularly like Americans. Everyone knew they were crude and loud and had no idea how to hold their cutlery.

Michelle was supposed to marry a hardworking provider who could take over the business when her parents retired, give them grandchildren to spoil and help support them in their old age.

Suddenly she’d betrayed them by marrying in secret—and another American at that. Then she allowed him to desert her and leave her
enceinte
—with a baby on the
way. Another mouth to feed. Not a child they would enjoy spoiling, but a burden.

And Michelle was no longer a marketable commodity. She refused even to consider requesting an annulment, though they argued and threatened and begged her to try for their sakes, as well as her own.

Michelle swore that her David had not deserted her, that he would be back to claim her and live with her in Paris as a good French father should. Even after the letters she sent to him were returned “address unknown,” even after she faced a blank wall when neither the American military nor the American embassy would help her find him, she still swore that he loved her and would come back for her.

But he never knew about the baby she was expecting. They’d agreed not to have children until his career as an artist was well under way.

Tante Helaine had told him that David’s mother had continued to send him money in Paris secretly until he’d returned to the States. His father cut him off after he chose to leave the army in Europe, rather than return to the States. Conrad must have felt that if he deprived David of money, sooner or later he’d get sick of poverty and come home.

Even with the money his mother sent, David was still poor. Michelle lived at home after their marriage. Their only moments as husband and wife had been stolen on afternoons when she told her parents she was studying or nights when she swore she was staying over with a girlfriend.

Years after his mother disappeared and Tante Helaine knew she, too, was dying, she’d finally told him how his mother came to get pregnant so soon after the marriage. Helaine had met and fallen for Corporal Charles Parker
in France and had married him five years before Michelle met David Delaney. Despite her parents’ disapproval of the union to an American, she’d had a decent wedding in a church before she moved to the States.

She’d had sense enough to start a baby right away, Helaine said, whatever she and Charlie had agreed on. As a good Catholic, she wasn’t supposed to use birth control, anyway, but Charlie insisted.

“But one has ways,” Helaine said. By the time Paul’s conversation with his aunt took place, Uncle Charlie was dead of lung cancer and Tante Helaine was failing. “I wrote your mother and told her how to do it,” she said with satisfaction. “The American GIs all bought their
ca-pots
—their condoms—in the PX, and her David still had a large supply after he left the army to move to Paris. They come in these small square foil packets.”

As if Paul hadn’t known since he was thirteen what condoms looked like.

“They are very good, very safe. The Americans depended on them. But even the safest birth control can fail.” The old lady had grinned like a child who has discovered a way to steal candy without being caught.

“I wrote Michelle from America and told her that she must become pregnant at once. Otherwise it would be too easy for her David to leave her. It is only a matter of heating a needle very hot and piercing through the foil and into the little condom rolled up beneath. Very simple.”

“But the hole would be tiny. Surely it wouldn’t work.”

Tante Helaine laughed. “Michelle was eighteen and a virgin when she married. Even one small hole would be enough if the time of the month were right. She took all the condoms from David’s bedside table while he was out
painting in the gardens of the Louvre, she used her needle, and poof, she was pregnant.”

At that point Tante Helaine had become sad. “If I had known that he would abandon her, I would never have taught her my little trick.”

At that point she’d stroked his cheek. “But you were a blessing,
cher
Paul. God took my sister, but He gave you to me because I could not give Charlie any sons.”

He’d had to leave her then because she was on the verge of falling asleep in her chair. He tucked her frail hand under the woolen rug that covered her knees and slipped out of the room. His cousin, Giselle, had been waiting at the door. She tugged at his sleeve, drew him into the kitchen and out of earshot, then said, “Well, would you believe that? If I’d ever tried that on Harry and been caught, he’d have killed me. Great way to start a marriage, right? Lie to your parents, lie to your friends and then, by God, lie to each other.” She shook her head. “Aunt Michelle must have been out of her mind to try something like that.”

“Some part of her subconscious must not have trusted him even then. It was a terrible thing to do, and God knows she paid for it with me, but I can understand why she did it.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Giselle said, leaning her hip against her mother’s kitchen counter. “I’ve read magazine articles about all those trophy wives that say the first thing a woman should do after she marries her aging multimillionaire is to have a baby. That way she’ll be a wife and not just a mistress with a piece of paper in her hand.”

Paul laughed. “Don’t forget the French are the most practical people in the world about marriage. It does not always go hand in hand with love. The French understand
that marriage is about property and children, period. Mistresses and lovers are for romance.”

“Huh. Not in my family. If my Harry ever took a mistress, I’d poison his brioche.”

A
NN LEANED
on the doorjamb of the studio. Paul sat on the bottom step with his head bent forward on his folded arms. If he wasn’t asleep he was pretty close to it.

She wondered how much the pain of his injury took out of him during any given day. His body was muscular—wonderfully muscular, if the way his jeans fit was any indication. She longed to caress that wounded shoulder, to take away whatever pain he felt, to hold him in her arms and let him sleep until he wasn’t tired any longer.

And then what?
Do not go there,
she told herself.
The more exhausted he is, the safer I am from my own libido.

He lifted his head and sighed deeply.

“Hey, every time I leave you for five minutes, you fall asleep,” Ann said.

Paul stood up and stretched. “Not asleep. Thinking deep thoughts.”

“I’ll just bet you were. Okay, help me get this stuff into the truck.”

“You’ll never be able to get those paintings up your stairs alone.”

“I wasn’t planning to.” She smiled at him. “You’re helping. It’s your stuff.”

“I intended to help, but I didn’t want to intrude again without being asked,” Paul said.

They wrapped the paintings in one of the sheets from the studio, taking care to put the clean side toward the paint. They laid them carefully in the bed of Ann’s small truck, then carried the pastels and sketches out.

“Get in,” Ann said. “I’ll lay them in your lap.”

Dante climbed carefully into the rear of the crew cab and lay down behind Paul’s seat.

They made the short trip to the alley in less than two minutes. It took much longer to get the paintings and sketches up without damaging them.

Inside, Ann laid the sketches flat on her worktable. The pastel of Trey Delaney gazed up at them.

Ann pulled sash weights from a drawer under one of her cupboards and began to lay them carefully on sheets of wax paper at the edges of the stack of prints. “While I was over here picking up the truck, I called Aunt Karen,” she said as she set the last of the weights carefully across the upper end of the stack. “She said she’d love to meet you and tomorrow at four will be fine.”

“Should I bring flowers? Wine?”

“Good Lord, no.” Ann pointed to the pastel. “Bring this. That’s enough.”

“If you say so.” He started toward the door. “Are you up for that dinner I promised you yesterday?”

Her breath caught, but she managed to keep her smile bright. She wanted very much to have dinner with him, to find out more about him. Not a good idea. “Thank you, but I think I’ll have an early night. Some other time.”

After she closed the door behind him, she leaned against it and listened to his footsteps descend her stairs. “Close one, eh, Dante?”

“I
S
D
ANTE GOING
with us?” Paul asked the following afternoon when he arrived to pick her up. The dog sat at the door of the loft with an expectant look on his face.

“Not this time. Sorry, Dante. Stay.”

The dog gave Ann a look of reproach, sighed deeply and dropped to the floor.

“We’ll be back before too long,” Ann told him, and preceded Paul down the stairs, carrying the pastel of young Trey. She’d placed it on a sheet of poster board, covered it with plastic, and wrapped the whole thing in brown paper.

He drove out onto the highway and turned toward Memphis. “Tell me about your aunt Karen. You said she’d remarried. What’s her name now?”

“She married Marshall Lowrance a few years after Uncle David died. She has two children by him, a boy and a girl. I think they’re both away at college.”

“You don’t know?”

“I told you, the children don’t usually come to the family picnics and holiday celebrations. Not surprising. They’re city kids and almost a generation separated from Trey. I don’t think they like Trey much, although I’ve never heard anybody actually say that. Truth be told, they’re probably jealous. Trey is still his mama’s fair-haired boy.”

“And your uncle Marshall?”

“I think of him as Aunt Karen’s husband, not as my uncle, though I suppose he is. He’s a partner in a big law firm in town. I don’t imagine they’re hurting for money.”

Thirty minutes later Paul pulled into the circular driveway in front of the Lowrance house.