True Love (57 page)

Jared nodded in agreement, a sacred vow between the two men, and Ken stepped away to go sit by Jilly.

They had decided not to write their own vows, as the words in the traditional ceremony said everything. “Through sickness and health.” “Till death do us part.”

At the mention of death, Jared thought of his grandfather and what he had endured to be with the woman he loved. Jared smiled at Alix, who smiled back. As always, they seemed to have the same thoughts at the same time.

Alix repeated her vows to him and Jared thought how they were all about sharing. Sharing all that you had, all that you were, with another human being. He remembered her telling Victoria that she thought Jared’s life had been lonely until now. He’d never thought it
was but he knew she was right. One by one, he’d lost the family he’d been born into, but gradually Alix’s family had replaced them. And now the circle was complete.

“I do,” Alix said, and in the next moment the pastor said, “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

Jared took Alix in his arms and kissed her sweetly, a kiss of promise. For a second he held her, and their eyes seemed to say it all. Turning, they looked at the many people inside the chapel.

It was as though all the anger and hostility had been erased by the magic of the wedding, and the crowd began to applaud joyously.

Jared took Alix’s hand and started to run back down the aisle. But when Alix stumbled over her long skirt, he picked her up in his arms and carried her. The audience loved the gesture and broke into spontaneous laughter and even more applause.

Outside the chapel, Jared set Alix down. For just a second they were alone. “To forever,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered. “Forever.”

Epilogue

J
ared leaned back in the chair and looked at his grandfather. It had been three weeks since the wedding and as he’d predicted, Alix had wanted to go to New York right away to see his offices.

All the way there she’d been nervous that once they left Nantucket things would change. Specifically, she was worried that her new husband would turn into a different person, that he’d become the Great Jared Montgomery.

Of course it hadn’t happened. While it was true that most of the employees were in awe of him, Alix wasn’t. No matter how other people saw him, she saw the man—and let him know it. The first day they had a rather loud argument about a house remodel that was to go out with his company’s name on it.

“I hate this thing! And you cannot possibly allow anyone to see
this. It’s so far beneath your usual work that you should be embarrassed by it,” Alix said with passion.

“There’s nothing wrong with this plan,” Jared answered just as vehemently.

Alix proceeded to tell him in detail what was wrong with every window, door, and wall. One by one, the other employees tiptoed down the corridor to listen and watch. They were shocked that anyone would talk to Jared Montgomery like that.

But Tim, also watching, was grinning.

It was only after Alix had gone over every detail of the twelve pages of drawings that she realized that actually, Jared agreed with her. She looked around, saw the office watching, and knew what he was doing. He was showing everyone where Alix belonged, that she had veto power over
all
plans, his included.

Suddenly, she realized that the design wasn’t Jared’s. It was the product of someone in the office—who was now going to hate her. Her face turned red, she rolled up the set, and held it up. “Who did this?”

A young man with dark hair timidly raised his hand.

Alix tossed him the plan, then, too embarrassed to speak, she left the room.

It took Jared some coaxing to get her to forgive him, not for what he’d done but how he’d done it. It was only when she saw that instead of being hated by the people in the office, she was very much liked, that she forgave him.

The employees saw Alix as the perfect step between Tim’s anything-goes attitude and Jared’s “No” that rarely came with an explanation. By the end of the first week, Alix was indispensable to all of them. Tim asked her about everything from making the employees stop using so much copier paper to presenting Jared with a bill for new computers. The other architects asked her to look at their plans before Jared saw them.

As for Jared, he was so happy to turn things over to her so he
could create that he could hardly stop smiling—something few in the office had seen.

Last night they’d returned to Nantucket for the first time since the wedding, and this morning Alix had run off to see her mother and Toby. As soon as she left, Jared went to see his grandfather at Dr. Huntley’s house in town.

Since Victoria was living in the little house with him, and because Jared knew she wouldn’t like the modest place, right away he’d offered them Kingsley House.

“I never want to enter that house again,” Caleb said with so much venom that Jared laughed. They had a lot of catching up to do. It was too soon for him to have mastered a keyboard or even a cell phone, so they’d left everything to when they saw each other in person.

“Did you find out from the journal what happened to Valentina?” Jared asked.

“Yes,” Caleb said. He was sitting by a window and lifting his face up to the sun, loving its warmth. He knew Jared had waited a long time to hear the story, so he didn’t postpone it. “Even when I was here on the island, my odious cousin Obed used to follow Valentina around. He would skulk and hide behind trees to watch her. I threatened him more than once.”

Caleb took a breath. All this was hard for him even after so many years. “Valentina begged me not to go on what was to be my last voyage, but I wouldn’t listen. I was so full of myself! Anyway, after I left, Obed must have seen the symptoms in Valentina and known she was in the family way. He didn’t wait long before he told her a lie. He said that he’d had news that my ship had gone down with me on it. This was years before it actually happened.”

He paused, remembering the story. “Valentina wrote in her journal how gentle Obed was when he told her about my death, and how kindly he offered her marriage. He said he’d give my child the Kingsley name, and he swore to love them both and to build them a fine
house on Main Street. Valentina wrote that she was so miserable at hearing of my death that she couldn’t think clearly. She married him.”

“But it was all a lie, wasn’t it?” Jared said.

“The only truth was that my son got the Kingsley name. Obed always was a skinflint and he kept Valentina in what was little more than a shack on the North Shore. I’d given him that place but I’d meant for him to build there,” Caleb said. “What Obed
really
wanted was her recipe for soap. It seems that when he’d been stalking her he’d been trying to see how she made it.” Caleb shook his head. “I was so in love with her that I thought everyone looked at her as I did.” He grimaced. “Yes, it was all a lie. After they were married, Obed treated my son like a servant, and he kept Valentina making that damned soap fourteen hours a day.”

Caleb took a breath. “On the day she disappeared she wrote that she’d paid an off-islander to take her and our son to the mainland. She was going to make her way home to Maine. She felt she could tell no one she was leaving, not even Parthenia, because she feared what Obed might do to them when he found Valentina gone. She also knew that his rage wouldn’t be because she and the child had left, but would be due to the fact that she was taking her soap recipe with her. But then she saw that as her son’s future.”

“He did get the recipe,” Jared said, and he knew the next part of the story. After Valentina disappeared, Obed had continued to make and market Kingsley Soap. It made Obed rich. Besides that, when Caleb exchanged ships with his brother and wrote a will leaving everything to Valentina and their son, that money went to Obed. For a while he had been a very rich man.

But it hadn’t lasted long. A few years after his ship went down, Caleb had shown up as a ghost. He’d been confused and dazed, not understanding what had happened to him, and the
only
person who could see him was his young son, Jared.

When Obed saw the boy talking to what looked to be nothing, the man reacted out of fear. Obed beat the child. That night Caleb’s anger made him so strong that even Obed could see him. The man
screamed in terror and died instantly—before Caleb could get an answer from him about Valentina.

“He must have found out about her plan to escape,” Jared said.

“Yes. She said she thought he’d always paid people to spy on her. He was the lowest of the low and always loved sneaking about.”

“What did the journal say happened?” Jared asked.

Caleb got up from the chair, went to a cabinet in the wall, and withdrew Valentina’s journal. He sat back down, opened it to the last page, and began to read.

I have killed my wife. I did not mean to. May God forgive me but what the woman said put the devil into me. She said she would rather be with Caleb in death than with me in life. At her words, my soul was taken from me. For a while I could not see and when I was myself again she was dead on the floor, her neck twisted half around. I go now to give myself over to the authorities and take mortal man’s idea of justice, although I swear I am not guilty. As she always did, Valentina forced me to do what I did not want to. She deserved her ill fate, but I do not. May the Lord and my fellow man have mercy on my innocent soul.

When Caleb finished reading, he looked up at Jared. The pain in his eyes was breathtaking.

“But he didn’t turn himself in,” Jared said.

“No. I figure he took her … her body to sea, then he blackened her name forever. He must have paid those men who told her relatives that they’d taken her to the mainland.”

Jared was thinking about what people did for money. Obed’s treachery, his greed, caused the deaths of many people. Caleb, in his urgency to get home, had taken an entire shipload of men down with him.

But Obed hadn’t lived long enough to receive the full benefit of the soap company he’d killed to get. Caleb’s son and Susan, the woman Obed had married soon after Valentina’s disappearance, had run the company. For a long time the Kingsley family had been very wealthy, but many years later, Five wasn’t good at business so he’d sold the company and squandered the proceeds. By the time Jared was growing up, nothing but some old houses that needed constant repair were left. And it was only through Caleb, with Addy’s help, that they were saved from being sold.

“Why didn’t he destroy the journal?” Jared asked. “You’d think that with his confession written in it, he’d be frantic to find it.”

Caleb smiled. “He probably was, but young Alix found the book and hid it.”

“
My
Alix? Oh. You’re talking about reincarnation again.”

“I am. She was Alisa back then, the daughter of John Kendricks and his first wife. Parthenia—”

“Who is now Jilly.”

Caleb smiled. “You are right. Parthenia is Jilly. Does this mean I have taught you something?”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Jared said, grinning. His grandfather may look different but he was certainly the same man.

Caleb chuckled. “Parthenia was John Kendricks’s second wife, and she was a very good mother. But in between, young Alisa loved Valentina, just as she does now. When she heard that Valentina was missing, she stole the journal and hid it where only Valentina would look for it.”

“Why didn’t she tell people what was written in the back of the journal?” Jared asked.

“My guess is that she didn’t have time to read it. The old place burned down—probably set fire to by Obed—just days after Valentina disappeared. Besides, Ali was just a child. Maybe she forgot. Forgot for a couple of hundred years, that is.”

“If you knew where the journal was, why didn’t you have someone dig it up a hundred years ago?”

“I didn’t know there even was a journal until your Alix came here in this life when she was four. Sometimes young children remember things from before they were born, but they forget them when they’re an adult. Alix and I were playing checkers and she told me that she had a very big secret. When I encouraged her to tell it, she said that she’d sneaked into the bad man’s house, found her mother’s favorite book, and put it in the oven. Of course I thought she was talking about Victoria, and it wasn’t until years later that I figured out what she meant. Mother in this life; friend long ago.”

Caleb smiled in memory. “But even though I knew where the journal was, it wasn’t the right time to dig it up. Ken had to get over his anger, and Parthenia had to come home to us. Everyone had to be in place, starting with your young Alix, but she had no reason at all to return to Nantucket for any length of time. Addy had always felt bad for not searching more for Valentina, so she and I concocted the will that made you so angry.”

Jared smiled. “Sometimes we don’t know what’s good for us.”

“In your case, that happens often.”

Jared groaned. “I can see that having a human body hasn’t softened you.”

It was Caleb’s turn to groan. “I had forgotten what human pain feels like. This body creaks and aches. And Victoria’s demands …” He gave a little grin.