Secrets of the Lost Summer (19 page)

He toweled off, put on a clean T-shirt and pair of jeans, and headed to the bedroom he’d chosen to make his. It didn’t feel like his. It felt like a guest room in an old lady’s house. His camp bed was a step up from blankets on the floor, but he doubted it was nearly as comfortable as a bed in one of Olivia’s guest rooms.

A dangerous thought, there.

He checked his BlackBerry for messages and saw that he had just enough of a signal to call Noah. His friend picked up on the first ring. “How’s life in the land of the chives?”

“I just went for a long run. I saw a bald eagle.”

“You’re scaring me, Dylan.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to order me back to San Diego?”

“Have I ever ordered you to do anything?”

“Where are you right now?”

“Your office, actually. Pining for my co-conspirator in this crazy-assed business.”

“Good one, Noah. Funny. No fires, earthquakes, sons of bitches, financial emergencies?”

“Nothing. Dare I ask where you are?”

“I’m standing in a bedroom with peeling wallpaper and a creaky floor—”

“Nice view?”

He hadn’t noticed and glanced out the window, taking in the buds on the trees, the green grass, scattered daffodils in front of the stone wall and, across the fields, Carriage Hill. “Nice enough,” he said. “Different.”

“Olivia Frost?”

“Dying to meet you,” Dylan said as Noah hung up. His friend was in one of his bounce-on-the-surface-of-life moods, which usually meant he did have something on his mind. Even if Dylan was there, it wouldn’t make any difference. Noah wouldn’t necessarily be able to pinpoint what he was thinking about. He’d just wander around, mulling, all but walking into walls.

Dylan went across the hall to the smallest of the three bedrooms and found a stack of books and old files on the floor by a nightstand. He sat on the threadbare rug. He needed to borrow a vacuum from his pretty neighbor. He opened the top book, an illustrated version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Hobbit.
Inside the front cover was a handwritten note:
To Miss Webster, From your grateful students, The English IV Class of 1975.
They’d all signed it. Dylan remembered his own high school years. He’d squeaked through his classes, doing just enough to stay out of trouble and be able to continue playing hockey.

His father had loved Tolkien. Had he sat here, under this same floor lamp, on a similar dark night, reading about Bilbo Baggins?

The next book was a local church cookbook, with recipes by church members. Several were from Grace Webster. There was one from an Audrey Frost. Olivia’s grandmother? A great-aunt? A cousin? How many Frosts were there in the area? Then there was the mother’s family, too.

In the back of the cookbook were black-and-white photographs of the lost towns of Quabbin. Barefoot schoolchildren, a horse-drawn wagon stacked with wood, men harvesting ice on a local pond, young women dressed up for portrait day, country roads and farmhouses now gone forever. One was of a young Grace Webster, or so was noted in the caption. She wore a simple dress and was standing alone in front of a clapboard house. Dylan was surprised he recognized her, but the teenager’s eyes and those of the elderly woman he’d met earlier were the same.

He put aside the cookbook and picked up a third book, surprised when he saw that it was relatively new.

It was a guide to Portugal.

He opened it carefully, as if his father had just walked into the room and was standing over him. A page was bent back—it described the area where his father had died. He must have planned that final trip while he was here in Knights Bridge. He always had a number of projects going at once. Whatever his reasons for buying this house, he hadn’t displayed any sense of urgency, at least none that Dylan had noticed.

He shut the book and got to his feet. His father had been in this room. He’d gone through Grace’s books.

“Why, Dad?” Dylan asked aloud. “What did you want here?”

Maybe Olivia was right and he was in Knights Bridge to get closer to his father, the elusive Duncan McCaffrey.

Thirteen

J
ess rolled out of bed in her apartment in the old sawmill far too early, her heart racing, sweat pouring off her, the walls and ceiling closing in on her. She gulped for air and bolted down the narrow stairs and through the side door, into the morning mist. She felt as if the clouds themselves were holding her down, choking her.

Mark had to be in the city again today and hadn’t stayed through the night, but he always left before her parents arrived at the mill. It wasn’t that they didn’t know that she and Mark were sleeping together—they were all but formally engaged, after all—but he was self-conscious. Jess supposed she was, too, but not right now, she thought. Right now she just wanted to calm down.

Sunlight pierced the mist. It would burn off soon and turn into a glorious day, with temperatures into the seventies by afternoon. She wanted to enjoy it.

She did a few deep-breathing exercises and focused on her surroundings, the present, as she walked over to the millpond. The smell and sounds of the clear water rushing over the dam soothed her anxiety. She loved this place but could understand why her mother dreamed about going somewhere else. Traveling, visiting museums, seeing different sights—different people.

Jess sometimes wondered if her bouts of crawling claustrophobia had to do with knowing every damn person in town. Some days she thought she knew every tree, too.

She headed up to the shop and made coffee in the office. Her mother arrived first, alone. She set her bag on the rolltop desk and spun around at Jess. “Did your father ask about the dots?”

“The what? Mom…” Jess couldn’t deal with it. Dots. What the hell?

Her mother showed her an 8½-by-14-inch sheet of plain white sketch paper. “I’m talking to someone. Not a psychiatrist. I’m not on pills.” Her tone was more combative than defensive. “I’m working on…things.”

“Things? Mom, I don’t need to know.”

She plopped down in the chair at her desk. “I have anxiety issues, Jess. It’s not a secret. You, Liv, your dad—you’ve all noticed. Everyone in town’s noticed.”

Jess concentrated on the dripping of the coffee.

Her mother smoothed the paper out on the desk and pointed at a cluster of multicolored dots centered on the page. “That’s me. The blue dot in the middle.”

“The blue dot,” Jess said, wishing the coffee would finish brewing and she could have an excuse to get out of there. She was interested in what her mother had to say, curious about what the dots were all about, but she’d just bolted out of bed in a crazed panic herself.

Olivia arrived, standing in the doorway. She started to back away, but Jess held up a hand, keeping her there.

Olivia didn’t say a word, and their mother either didn’t see her older daughter or pretended not to as she continued, “The therapist gave me a sheet of blank paper and asked me to make a dot that’s me and then to put dots where everyone in my life would be in relation to me. You’re the red one, Jess,” she said, pointing to a dot close to the blue dot that represented her. “Liv’s the purple one right next to you. I tried not to fuss too much with which colors to use for each person. I had a nice fresh box of Crayola crayons to choose from.”

“Mom…” Jess cleared her throat and tried to make her voice sound less strangled. “Mom, you don’t have to tell me about your session with your therapist.”

“Your dad’s the dark gray one. Then there’s his mother, my folks, Mark—”

That got Jess. “Why is Mark on your page?”

“Shouldn’t he be? He’s a little farther away from me but close to you.”

“All right, all right.”

“I have dots for my brothers, my nieces and nephews, the crew here, the church, friends.”

“That’s a lot of dots, Mom,” Jess said.

“I was afraid I’d forget someone important. Notice how the dots are all crowded at the center of the page, near my little blue dot. That’s because they all represent people I care about.”

It was Olivia who spoke next. “What did the therapist say?”

Their mother sat back in her chair and sighed. “She said, ‘It’s a big sheet of paper, Louise.’”

Jess stared at her mother. “Mom?”

“It made sense to me. I can give myself space, and everyone can still be on the page with me. I keep everyone so close, especially you two.” She shot to her feet. “Jess, Liv, am I suffocating you?”

“Not at the moment,” Jess said lightly. “Right now I need coffee and here you are with a coffeepot right in your office. I have a ton of work to do today—”

“Jess.”

She raked a hand through her hair. Coffee first, then she’d brush her damn hair. If she hadn’t leaped out of bed so quickly, she might have missed her mother’s talk of dots, but it couldn’t have been easy for her to explain their meaning. Finally Jess gave her mother a reassuring smile. “I’m glad you did this. I want you to be happy. That’s all.”

“Me, too,” Olivia said. “It’s great you’re talking to someone, Mom. I hope it helped to do this assignment.”

“My happiness isn’t your responsibility,” she said. “Nor is your happiness my responsibility. That doesn’t mean we don’t love each other and aren’t there for each other.”

Jess wasn’t one for heart-to-hearts and tried not to cringe. When she heard the outer door creak, she looked past Olivia and almost jumped in relief when she saw her father enter the building. “Dad’s here. Mom, have you told him about the dots and the therapy?”

“No, but it’s not a secret. If you want to—”

“No way. I’m not telling him for you.”

Her mother swiveled around in her chair, quickly folded the sheet and hid it away in one of the nooks and crannies in her desk.

Olivia backed out of the doorway. “I just remembered something. I’ll see you all later.”

Jess didn’t believe her for a second. Her sister was making her escape, although Jess couldn’t blame her. She poured coffee and headed for her desk in the showroom as her father entered the office. He and her mother were a pair. They could work out whatever was going on between them without her help.

Breathing in the steam and rich smell of the coffee, she switched on her computer and settled at her desk by a window overlooking the brook. She remembered when she was six and had gone to look for their golden retriever after he’d wandered off. Her mother had found them at the edge of the brook. It was the first time Jess had noticed that her mother didn’t exactly have nerves of steel. She supposed any mother would be panicked, but even as a small child she had recognized that hers had gone into a state of near hysteria.

She remembered her father saying,
“Look at Jess, Louise. She’s okay. You can relax. All’s well that ends well.”

He’d been reassuring, protective. In those days, she hadn’t let her worries impede her. Then came her daughters’ teen years and a car accident that would have challenged any parent’s nerves.

It didn’t do much for mine, either,
Jess thought, all at once faintly irritated with her mother.

“We’re fine,” she said aloud, as if to convince herself. “We were fine then and we’re fine now. We were lucky.”

She didn’t want to think about the accident, but she was proud of her mother for recognizing her problem and doing something about it. Jess had often wondered if she’d stayed in Knights Bridge just to avoid upsetting the applecart with her mother. She was twenty-seven and had never lived in another zip code.

Was that why she’d fallen for Mark? Because he’d keep her in Knights Bridge, and she wouldn’t have to confront her own anxieties?

Jess gave herself a mental shake. Was she out of her mind? She loved Mark.

She drank her coffee and reviewed a complicated order of doors and windows for the restoration of a Maine museum. She loved working for her family’s business. She loved living in her hometown. Was it wrong not to want to do anything else, live anywhere else? Should she live in Boston or New York—or Paris—before she settled down in Knights Bridge? She and Mark had talked about starting a family right away. How long before they could afford to travel? If she didn’t go to Paris now, when?

Her mother materialized behind her. “I’m going to California, Jess. I don’t want you and Olivia to trim your dreams because you worry about me. I want to be an example to you.”

Jess rose with her coffee. “Don’t go to California for our sake, Mom. Do it because it’s what you want.”

“I am.” Her eyes brimmed with tears even as she smiled. “I am, Jess. I’m making this trip. I don’t care if I have to have someone knock me out with a brick to get me on the plane. It’s not flying that gets to me so much as…going. I didn’t know that for a long time. I rationalized my fears.”

Jess noticed her father had left. “Did you tell Dad you’re seeing a therapist?”

Her mother waved a hand in dismissal. “It’s none of his business.”

“You and Dad…”

“We’re fine. Don’t worry.”

“I’ll worry if I want to worry,” Jess snapped, immediately regretting her impatience. “Sorry. I got up too early.”

When her mother returned to the office, she shut the door behind her, which she almost never did. Jess called Mark on his cell phone but hung up before he could answer.

He called her back. “Everything all right?”

Jess hesitated. How could she explain that her mother was seeing a therapist and marking dots on a page over a trip that most people would jump at the chance to take? “Mark, Olivia and I are strong, independent women, aren’t we?”

“What? Yeah. The strongest and most independent. Why?”

“Anxiety isn’t a weakness. It’s a condition that can be treated.”

“Jess?”

She stopped short of telling him about her attack of claustrophobia. “I’ll see you later?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Jess—”

“I’m fine, Mark. Sitting at my desk going over an order for reproduction twelve-over-twelve windows.”

“I’ll be back in time for dinner.” He paused, then added, “We can plan Paris.”

“Do you mean that?”

“I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it.”

He hung up, and Jess looked out the window at the familiar scene of brook, trees and rocks. The broad, sweeping branches of the old sugar maple by the entrance were leafing out, creating dappled shade now that the sun, as expected, had burned off the morning mist.

Paris…an entire ocean between her and Knights Bridge. Between her and her family.

Her stomach twisted. Her mother would worry even if she said she wouldn’t.

Jess pictured the Louvre, the Seine, croissants. A week alone with Mark in one of the most romantic places in the world. They wouldn’t have to think about someone they knew popping in or driving by.

She smiled, loving the idea. Whatever had awakened her in a panic this morning was gone, and had nothing to do with Paris.