Secrets (4 page)

When they reached the garden with its manicured lawn, and the boxwood-edged shapes that were filled with pink begonias, they began to walk more slowly. The house loomed over them, with its huge windows seeming to look down on them. They were in the sacred territory of a woman who was a legend. She had been famous when Cassie's mother was a child. There were few people on earth who could remember a time when Althea Fairmont wasn't famous—at least it seemed that way. She'd been a child star before talking movies, looking up with big eyes, begging the villain not to throw her and her mother out into the street. The 1930s came, and along with them, Shirley Temple with her singing and dancing. Althea could do neither of those, but she could act. By the time Althea was fourteen, the studio was lying about her age and casting her with the Barrymores. When she reached thirty, the studio began lying about her age the other way.

All that had been done had worked. Althea had starred in every type of movie and stage production. Whether she played a comedy, a tragedy, or did a guest appearance on a talk show, the viewer was guaranteed a great show. Althea Fairmont could play any part and had proven it many times over. Still, at her age—whatever it was, as the bios disagreed—whenever she appeared, there was a line waiting to see her.

Now, Dana and Cassie walked through the garden, uninvited, trespassing, and they slowed with each step.

“Maybe it wasn't a shot,” Dana said.

“It could have been a car. Or something falling.”

“Exactly. Maybe we should leave.”

“Yes, I think maybe we should,” Cassie agreed, then turned to head back out of the garden. But they had taken only one step when they heard what sounded like a moan.

Dana and Cassie turned to look at each other, then they looked back toward the house. The ground floor had an enormous, deep veranda that was divided in the middle by a conservatory. They could see orchids and tropical ferns inside it. A short flight of steps led up one side of the veranda, but they didn't dare climb them. All they could do was stare. The furniture on the slate-floored area looked as though it had been made for the house. It was all oversize and padded in a cream-colored linen, with pillows with palm leaves printed on them. In the back was a stone-topped table and beneath it, on the slate-paved floor, was what looked to be a shoe.

It took them a moment to realize that the shoe was attached to a foot. The women rushed up the stairs and across the veranda. Lying on the stone, her eyes closed, her beautiful pantsuit in disarray, was Althea Fairmont, her perfectly preserved features recognizable to every adult in the United States.

For a moment Dana and Cassie just stood there looking at her, unable to breathe. For Cassie, she remembered one movie after another that she'd watched as a child, then all the movies she'd gone to as an adult. If Miss Fairmont was in it, Cassie went to see it. There had been a three-day retrospective on her at college, and Cassie had attended every lecture and movie. She still had the binder that had Althea's photo on the front.

As for Dana, she saw a woman who had achieved everything that life could give. Althea Fairmont was a legend, true, but she was also a woman of great personal success.

Althea opened her eyes and looked at the two young women staring down at her, neither of them moving. After a few moments, she made an attempt to get up by herself.

Cassie was the first to recover. “Oh, my gosh!” she said. “Let me help you.”

“That would be kind,” Althea said, extending her arm toward Cassie.

Dana took the woman's other arm. When she was standing between them, the women stood still, not knowing what to do with their famous charge.

“Perhaps you could help me inside, to sit somewhere comfortable,” Althea said in a voice that was almost as familiar to them as their own.

Cassie lifted her chin to look at Dana over Althea's blonde head. Inside?
Inside
the mansion? her eyes asked. The place that all Hamilton Hundred had been dying to see since it was built? For the year after Althea moved in, everyone who lived in the resort community—the women anyway—had talked of nothing but seeing the inside of that house. They'd left business cards of services for interior decorating, floral arrangements, even private nursing. But the Great Althea had called on none of them. They speculated on whether she was going to give herself a housewarming party. One of the women had even written Miss Fairmont a letter stating her qualifications as a party planner—but there was no response.

Years had passed and no one who lived in Hamilton Hundred had ever seen the interior of Althea's house. But now Dana and Cassie were being told to help Althea Herself inside.

Since the woman was leaning on Cassie more heavily, Dana stepped forward to open one of the doors. Even as she did so, her mouth opened and wouldn't seem to close. The door was of some exotic wood that had swirls of black and deep red. There were little round whorls of brass on the door, making it look like the entrance to a fortress. But it swung open easily on its enormous hinges.

They walked into a high-ceilinged sitting room that looked like something out of a Jane Austen movie, and it was the prettiest room either of the women had ever seen. It was done in peach and a pale, mossy green. There were two big sofas facing each other, with an inlaid coffee table in the center. Elegant tables of mahogany were along the walls, with pretty Chinese lamps on them. The walls had oil paintings of what looked to be Althea's ancestors, but upon closer inspection were of Althea in her many roles on stage and screen.

Cassie helped the woman to sit on one of the sofas. The chintz curtains were open, and the windows showed straight through the trees to the little beach where she and Elsbeth played so often. With a sick feeling, Cassie realized that every time they'd been trespassing, they'd been seen.

“Can I get you something?” Cassie asked. “Call someone?”

Althea leaned back against the sofa and smiled. “No, thank you. It's just my housekeeper and me here. And Brent outside. Just the three of us.”

Dana was looking at the ornaments on the mantelpiece. She wasn't sure but she thought one of the two eggs was genuine Fabergé. “But surely it takes more than just three people to run this place,” she said.

Althea smiled at Dana. “Now and then I need more people, but for day-to-day living, it's just the three of us. Would you be so good as to push that button on the wall? I hope that you two will stay for a midmorning tea. Or are you too busy on this lovely Saturday morning to share a bite with an old woman?”

“No, of course not,” Cassie said quickly. “Our families have run off together on a boat and we're absolutely free.”

“Families?” Althea said, looking at Cassie. “I thought you were the nanny for that beautiful little girl. Don't you work for a widower and his father? Have they become your family?”

Cassie stood up straight, blinking at the woman. What she'd said was true, but Cassie didn't want to hear it put so bluntly. No, they weren't her family. “I…I…,” Cassie began, but she could think of nothing else to say.

“She's been there so long that they seem like family,” Dana said. “I can attest that Cassie loves little Elsbeth very much.”

“Ah,” Althea said, looking at Cassie in speculation. “But isn't Jefferson Ames about to marry David Beaumont's daughter? I met the girl when she was a child and I found her to be the most spoiled creature I'd ever met. Has she changed much?”

Dana smiled. “Not at all. But how in the world do you know so much about what's going on in Hamilton Hundred? Names, marital stats. You seem to know everything about us.”

“Won't you sit down, both of you?” Althea said, smiling. “Let's just say that I have a spy. I can't, of course, tell you who it is, but I'm kept informed of whatever is thought to interest me. I'd love to go to your country club and hear the gossip myself, but did you know that I did that once?”

Dana and Cassie sat by each other on the couch on the opposite side of the pretty coffee table and smiled. Of course they knew that. Within ten minutes of Althea's arrival at the club, the parking lot had been full and the manager had had to ask that no one bother her while she ate. But afterward, graciously, Althea had signed autographs. They could understand why she'd not returned.

“We heard what we thought were shots,” Dana said.

“Yes,” Althea said, giving a sigh. “He was here again. I think Kenneth waited until he saw my young Brent drive away, then he walked around the fence to the house.”

Both Cassie and Dana blinked at her. Althea's second husband had been the great Shakespearean actor, Kenneth Ridgeway. He was the sort who thought that only Broadway was worth an actor's time, and during the years he was married to Althea, he had been publically disdainful of her film work. In spite of his nasty little remarks, their marriage had lasted for over twenty years. It was when Althea had taken a role on Broadway and been heralded as “magnificent” that the marriage died. The day after the fabulous reviews came out, Kenneth Ridgeway filed for divorce. But the joke was on him. His career never recovered from his so-obvious jealousy. He became a national joke, the butt of talk show hosts' monologues.

“Kenneth Ridgeway was shooting at you?” Cassie asked, wide-eyed.

Althea smoothed her perfect hair, pulled back from her exquisite face, the cheekbones nearly as perfect today as they had been in the 1920s, and nodded. “I assume it was a stage pistol that uses blanks. Kenneth always did love drama over substance. But, yes, there were shots fired.”

“At you?” Cassie asked quietly.

“Of course,” Althea said, smiling. “He wants more money. But then he always wants more money. I told him I'd pay him if I just didn't have to hear that speech again about how he made me what I am and how I owe him everything. But this time I think I said too much because he pulled out a pistol and shot at me.”

Cassie and Dana just looked at her, too astonished to say anything, when the door opened and in came a woman with a wheeled cart covered with a pretty porcelain tea set, and dishes with tiny sandwiches and cakes. The woman was short, dark skinned, and probably as old as Althea was—except that she looked her age.

“Just put it there, Rosalie,” Althea said. “I'll serve.”

“What have you done this time?” the woman asked as she shoved the cart to the side of the couch. She stood with her hands on her hips, glaring at Althea.

“This is not the time…,” Althea began. “I have guests.”

“It ain't never the time,” Rosalie muttered as she went toward the door, then turned back to look at the two young women. “If somebody shot at you, maybe you should call the police.”

Cassie and Dana nodded in agreement.

“I don't think so,” Althea said. “Not now.”

“Just what I thought,” Rosalie said, then left the room, closing the door loudly behind her.

Althea turned back to the two women. “Do you take milk or lemon?”

“Let me do that,” Dana said, at last beginning to recover from the awe of being in Althea Fairmont's presence. She got up and began to expertly pour and serve the tea.

Cassie took her cup after Dana had served Miss Fairmont. “What do you plan to do about this man?” she asked sternly.

“Nothing,” Althea said, sipping her tea. “He loves the excitement and it makes him feel manly, rather like a pirate come here at gunpoint to demand that I give him money.”

“But this morning it was more than excitement, wasn't it?” Dana said, sitting down by Cassie, her cup in her hand. “When we found you, you were passed out on the floor. If we hadn't found you, who would have helped you?” She didn't say the words, but it hung in the air that it was a big house and it was peopled by only two elderly women. For all that Althea—thanks to modern surgery—looked like a well-preserved fifty, she was still an older woman. And Rosalie wasn't any younger.

Dana's eyes said it all as she looked at Althea.

“Yes, well,” Althea said, looking away from Dana's stare. “I know I should do something about it, but I did make Kenneth a laughingstock of the country, and I carry some responsibility for that.”

“He made himself a laughingstock,” Cassie said firmly. “You beat him at his own game by showing him up on stage. He was the idiot who filed for divorce right after the reviews came out.”

Althea smiled warmly at Cassie. “Oh, my, you do have a passionate nature, don't you? Thank you for championing me, but I do feel guilty in a lot of ways. Kenneth had to work for what he had, but I…” She gave a little shrug.

“You had raw, natural talent,” Dana said.

“I had hunger,” Althea answered.

Dana and Cassie nodded. They knew Althea's story, as did most of the United States, thanks to the movie that had won Althea her first Academy Award. She was born to a beautiful, ambitious, husbandless mother who wanted to be in the movies, so she'd dragged her infant to Hollywood when the place was mostly desert. The problem had come when the woman was found to have no talent whatever. But that hadn't stopped her from trying to push her way in front of the camera. She'd been unable to afford child care so she'd dragged her daughter to the sets and left her to fend for herself. One day, a director needed a child to play a small part, he'd seen Althea sitting in the shade with a coloring book, and he'd put her in the role.

As they say, the rest was history. Althea had all the talent her mother yearned for but didn't have. From the time she was three Althea lived on movie sets, and as her fame and wealth grew, her mother's extravagant lifestyle increased. The woman died when Althea was twenty-eight. Everyone said it was a good thing because Althea found herself not only broke but also deeply in debt. Her mother had not only spent all that Althea had earned, but also had borrowed heavily on her daughter's talent. Biographies and the resulting movie—in which Althea played herself—told of the hardship she'd gone through to pay off the debts and to keep her dignity while doing it. The movie ended when her husband filed for divorce the day after he read the reviews of her stage performance. In one of the all-time greatest scenes, Althea vowed that she'd not only survive, but she'd triumph.