The Unloved (16 page)

Kevin shifted his eyes to his wife and silently took a deep breath before he spoke. “I’ve just been thinking about our problem,” he said. “And it occurs to me that even though Mother was trying to control me with her will, she might have done us all the biggest favor of our lives.”

Anne’s eyes flashed briefly toward Marguerite, who was sitting quietly, her own eyes fastened on her brother. “All of us?” she asked, her skepticism clear in her voice. “I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“An inn,” Kevin said, deciding it was time to lay his cards on the table. “We all know I’ve always wanted to run my own place, and it seems to me that Sea Oaks is perfect. It’s way too big for a family, but we’ve got nine bedrooms—every one of them with its own bath—and plenty of space down here for public rooms. Not to mention the rest of the island. There’s more than enough land for a golf course, condominiums, swimming pools, and tennis courts—the whole works!”

Anne stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Kevin, what are you talking about? It sounds like you’re thinking of turning this place into another Hilton Head!”

“Exactly!” Kevin exclaimed, the enthusiasm for the project that had been building in him all afternoon spilling out. “Why not? I’m not saying it wouldn’t take a lot of work and a lot of money, but everything we need to start is right here. We’ve got one of the best beaches on the whole coast, a house that’s perfect for a small hotel—at least to start with—and all the land we need! And we already own it. And think of the benefits to the town—my God, if it’s any kind of a success at all, land values would skyrocket, there’d be more jobs than we have people to fill them—”

But Anne didn’t let him finish. She stood up abruptly, her face expressionless. “I think you and I had better talk about this later, when we’re by ourselves,” she said. “If you’ll excuse me …” As her family sat in silence, she left the
dining room, and a moment later her footsteps on the stairs echoed through the house. It was Julie who finally spoke.

“You goofed, Dad,” she said. “How come you didn’t at least talk to her about it first?”

Kevin knew his daughter was right, but the whole idea of the inn had seemed so perfect to him that he’d allowed himself to hope that Anne would see it too. But he also knew Anne hated surprises, and, even worse, hated the idea of having decisions made for her. And the way he’d been talking … He dropped his napkin onto the table and stood up. “I’d better go talk to her.”

“Well, I still think it would be neat,” Jeff said after his father was gone.

Julie hardly even heard her brother. Instead, she was looking at her aunt, who was sitting perfectly still in her chair, her eyes almost blank. “Aunt Marguerite?” Julie finally asked. “Do you know what this is all about? Why is Dad talking about turning your house into a hotel?”

Marguerite shook her head as if trying to clear something out of her mind, then managed to smile at her niece. “It’s … well, it’s not really my house anymore, darling,” she said. “It’s your father’s now. And, well, there are some problems.” As simply as she could, Marguerite explained the terms of her mother’s will to the children. When she had finished, Julie was filled with indignation.

“But it’s not fair!” she declared. “How could she do that?”

Marguerite shrugged. “I know it doesn’t seem fair, darling, but life never is, really, is it? And what your father is doing is trying to find a way for us all to deal with Mother’s will.” Her eyes drifted around the room, lighting for a moment on each piece of furniture, then moving on. Finally she sighed quietly. “But a hotel,” she mused. “I don’t know—to fill the house with strangers—well, it just seems such a peculiar idea.”

Now Julie cocked her head thoughtfully. “But it isn’t, really, Aunt Marguerite. Daddy’s right—this house would make a wonderful inn. And places like this are what everybody wants to find now. Daddy says everyone’s tired of new
hotels. They want to stay in places that have history, and are really old-fashioned, and—” She fell silent with sudden embarrassment at her thoughtless remark, but her aunt only smiled at her.

“Yes, the house
is
old-fashioned,” she said. Then she brightened a little. “And certainly the kitchen is big enough to feed an army. Way back in my grandmother’s day it wasn’t at all unusual for there to be twenty or twenty-five people here for meals.” Marguerite’s face began to light up as she remembered the past. “Even when I was a girl, we still had balls here. Everyone would come from miles around, and we’d hire extra staff, and the house would be all decorated like something out of a fairy tale. We’d have a little orchestra in the ballroom, and we’d dance all night.” Her eyes, sparkling now, came to rest on Julie. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it could be like that again?” she asked. “Why, it would be just like it used to be, before—” Abruptly she stopped talking and the light faded from her eyes.

“Before what?” Julie asked.

But Marguerite only shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just, well, sometimes I let my mind drift, that’s all. And I mustn’t do that.”

“Why not?” Jeff asked. “I do it all the time. I like to lie on my back sometimes, and look up at the sky, and pretend I’m a bird, or a cloud, or something. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, I suppose,” Marguerite said, but her voice was vague, as if she were thinking about something else. “But you can’t let yourself do it too much. If you do, you can forget what’s real and what’s not. And then …” Her voice trailed off, and once more her features took on the faraway look they’d had before. Jeff, who’d been watching her as she spoke, looked nervously toward his sister. But when he started to say something, Julie shook her head.

“Come on,” she said. “We better go help Ruby do the dishes.”

A few minutes later, when they were in the kitchen, Jeff looked up at Julie, his eyes serious. “What’s wrong with
Aunt Marguerite?” he asked. “How come she was talking so weird? And what’s wrong with pretending?”

But before Julie could answer, Ruby spoke. “Nothing’s wrong with pretending. But your aunt wasn’t pretending. She was remembering. And whenever she remembers all the good times she had, she remembers the bad ones too.”

Jeff glanced at his sister then back to Ruby. “Bad times?” he asked. “What do you mean?”

Ruby seemed about to speak, then appeared to change her mind. “Nothing,” she said. “I guess I was just talking.”

“How am I
supposed
to feel?” Anne demanded. “This afternoon I had to deal with your mother’s insane will, my daughter nearly drowning, and my son being attacked by a rattlesnake. And what happens at dinner? You act as if the most wonderful opportunity in the world has just dropped into your lap!” Her anger growing, she stood in the center of the bedroom, her eyes flashing. “And you didn’t even talk to me about it! That’s the worst of it—you just made up your mind what you wanted to do, and now you expect me to go along with it! Well, I won’t, Kevin. I simply won’t do it.”

Kevin moved toward her, but Anne stepped back, effectively ducking away from his touch. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Honey, I know I should have talked to you about it, but the whole idea just seemed so perfect that I couldn’t imagine you wouldn’t see it too.”

But Anne wasn’t mollified. “Perfect? For Heaven’s sake, Kevin, do you have any idea what it would cost? Where are we supposed to get the money for this crazy idea?”

“We have the house—” Kevin began, but Anne cut him off.

“Which is mortgaged to the hilt. We’ll be lucky to break even on it, and you know that as well as I do!”

“This house,” Kevin said hastily. “I think I can mortgage it, but even if I can’t, I think I’ve found a way around the will.”

Anne shook her head. “You heard Mr. Waterman. There
isn’t any way around the will. If there were, he’d have found it.”

“But that’s just it. It’s not quite going around it. I think I can sell options to buy when the leases run out. I can sell them to the tenants—as many of them as want to buy their land—and I’ll bet I can sell the rest to outside developers. Same thing with the land on the island …”

Anne stared at him as if he’d gone crazy. “But you can’t do any of that,” she objected. “You can’t sell anything for ten years, and you can’t even do that unless you stay here. And if you think I’m willing to do that—”

“Wait,” Kevin pleaded, holding up his hand. “Will you please just wait and think about it? I know I was wrong not to talk to you about it right away, and I didn’t really mean to present it the way I did. But I still think it’s a way we can turn Mother’s will to our own advantage. All I’m asking you to do is think about it. Can’t you at least do that?”

Anne opened her mouth to voice still another objection, then changed her mind. What was she doing? Making her own mind up as unalterably as she thought Kevin had made his? She took a deep breath, then forced a small smile. “All right,” she agreed. “I’ll think about it. But I want to think about it myself, without you trying to talk me into anything.”

“Just let me tell you how I think I can work it,” Kevin began, but Anne shook her head.

“We’ll talk about that tomorrow. Right now, I have to think about whether or not I can even live here. And there are the kids to think about too. What about school? I don’t know much about South Carolina, but I know they don’t spend a lot on education down here.”

“I went to school here,” Kevin pointed out.

“You went to the Fortress, and you know perfectly well you hated every minute of it.” Suddenly she grinned, almost in spite of herself. “Pretty clever of your mother to threaten to leave everything to the Fortress, wasn’t it? She must have known you’d do almost anything to keep that outfit from getting their hands on this place.”

The corners of Kevin’s mouth twitched slightly. “Nobody
can say Mother wasn’t smart,” he agreed. “But I hadn’t really thought much about that aspect of it.”

“Well, you’d better,” Anne sighed, “because I have to tell you I think there’s a pretty good chance they’re going to get it.” The grin faded from her face, and she met her husband’s eyes. “I love you very much, Kevin,” she said. “But I don’t know if I can live here. I promised to think about it, and I will. But what if I decide I can’t? What then?”

Kevin’s stomach felt hollow. What, indeed, if she said she couldn’t live here? What would he do? It came as a jolt when he realized he didn’t know. He didn’t know what meant more to him—his wife, his family, and the life he’d lived for twenty years—or this ancient mansion—the symbol of the unhappy years of his childhood, and now the possibility of a future he’d never been able to do anything but dream about. His mind raced, but before the right words came, it was already too late.

“Well,” Anne said quietly, her voice trembling, “I guess I have my answer, don’t I?”

It was past midnight, but the temperature had dropped only slightly and the light breeze that had stirred the air earlier had died completely. A heaviness lay over the house, and as Anne sat in the dimly lit living room, she felt the atmosphere closing around her, suffocating her. Outside, the night buzzed with the whirrings of insects, and she could hear them batting at the window, trying to get to the beckoning light of the table lamp.

She’d been sitting alone for hours now. Until ten-thirty, when the children had finally gone to bed, she’d felt their eyes on her, watching her warily. They’d already made up their minds, she knew. They wanted to stay.

And why shouldn’t they? For Jeff the island was paradise on earth, acres and acres of wilderness to be explored, his own private beach, a house that was more like a castle to an eight-year-old. In his mind, everything about Devereaux and Sea Oaks was a fantasy come true.

For Julie it was much the same. She’d already made friends, friends she seemed to like better than the kids she’d known all her life. And, of course, there was Kerry Sanders—tall, blond, and blue-eyed, and he had already saved Julie’s life. Even alone in the semidarkness Anne had to smile at the knowledge of how Julie must feel right now. Kerry, obviously, was destined to be the first big love of Julie’s life, and Anne could well imagine the heartbreak Julie would go through if she were forced away from him. But it was a heartbreak she would get over, no matter what she thought right now.

Anne had felt Marguerite’s eyes on her, too, though Marguerite had done her best to appear totally neutral. But what would Marguerite do if Anne convinced Kevin not to stay here? How could she live without the house and the income from the land and whatever holdings Helena might have managed to cling to over the years? She’d probably have to live with them in Connecticut.

Marguerite would hate it.

All of them, eventually, would hate it.

But what about me? Anne thought. She’d spent an hour wandering through the enormous house, trying to imagine herself living in the huge expanse of rooms. She’d run her hands over the furniture—furniture that had been in the Devereaux family for generations—and tried to imagine it all as hers.

She couldn’t.

She wasn’t a Devereaux—at least not a Devereaux of Sea Oaks—and never would be. You had to be born into the ability to be comfortable in surroundings such as these, and she wasn’t. She had grown up in a small town in upstate New York, in a tiny five-room house her parents had barely been able to afford. From there it had been an apartment in New York shared with three other girls, and then she had married Kevin, never once understanding the kind of background he had come from. He’d talked of his family so little, and when he’d talked of them at all, it was with a bitterness that made Anne’s heart ache. She’d known he’d grown up in military school—and hated every minute of it—and moved north at his first opportunity. And never, not once, had he intimated
he might be willing to move back to South Carolina under any circumstances at all.

Yet here the circumstances were.

Of course, they wouldn’t be living in the mansion, she reminded herself. At least not all of it. And it wouldn’t be a mansion anymore. It would be a business, and Kevin, she knew, was perfectly capable of running it.

But they’d still have to live here, and Kevin would have to work twenty-four hours a day, at least for the first few years, and the children would have to go to school here, which, as far as Anne was concerned, was almost as bad as not going to school at all.