“You’re pathetic,” he had said out loud with disgust, sailing his words out over the endless sea of his land sprawled before him, where they had been swallowed up and carried away out into the silence as he’d watched the dark night spreading across his domain. “You’re missing someone who doesn’t even belong to you, whom you’ve never even kissed or held. Hell, you’re missing a woman who belongs to another man, you ass,” he had chided himself angrily.
Seeing her tonight and getting a look at the mysterious Derek had made him realize that Torie Mills was way the hell out of his league and he needed to face that fact and get over it. But she didn’t seem to be out of his league—when she was in her blue jeans and tennis shoes strolling through the yard of an estate sale with him scavenging for little treasures, or shopping with him at the hardware store, or laughing with him at the diner as she would try to tell him some silly joke and invariably would goof up the punch line. She was a terrible joke teller which made it all the more endearing. She was the most down-to-earth woman that he had ever met in his lifetime, in spite of her fame and millions. She always seemed like just an everyday person and simply put—he thought that she was amazing.
That bastard Derek sure is a good-looking son of a bitch, he thought with jealous ire. He had been dressed in what must have been at least a thousand-dollar suit and was perfectly matched with the elegance that Torie exuded in her understated but breathtaking, above the knee, sleeveless black cocktail dress. Her beautiful long, layered hair had fallen perfectly down her back and over her shoulders. As always, her sexy bangs had helped to frame her delicately featured face.
He had taken a couple of minutes to study Derek and Torie before he had texted from the bar, wanting to watch their chemistry together. In his opinion, the guy hadn’t seemed appropriately attentive to Torie and in fact, he had been across the table from her and engrossed in conversation with some man. Dave couldn’t fathom any man not doing whatever it took to keep Torie by his side. Wasting even one moment of an opportunity to look into the deep ocean of those beautiful blue-gray eyes was beyond his ability to comprehend. He would have given anything to have been escorting Torie out of that bar tonight with a sheltering hand on her lower back. Derek had left her to follow along behind him without even so much as a backward glance, but it had allowed Dave another look at those silky-smooth looking long legs emphasized by stiletto heels walking away.
“Well, here we are,” Sharon said, bringing him back from his thoughts. “Would you like to come upstairs?”
Dave stood there on the sidewalk beside the plush high-rise condo and looked up at the lighted building with its distinctive royal blue roof and then down into Sharon’s eyes. It was decision time and there was only one decision for him.
“I had a good time, Sharon…”
“But?” she said, sensing a rejection coming.
“Maybe we can do this again. I really need to head home to Fremont tonight. I have a dog and—”
“I understand,” she said and nodded.
He felt relieved that she was going to make this easy for him but as she looked up at him with her sultry dark eyes, he knew that he was the biggest fool on earth to be giving up a chance at what would have likely provided some very pleasurable relief for his baser needs and the crew down south of his belt-buckle were all for taking refuge in the comfort of a beautiful woman’s warm bed for the night. But a one night stand just wasn’t who he was and it would be just that, nothing more.
He bent to give her a customary good night kiss and she stretched up on her tiptoes and deepened the kiss, placing her hands around the back of this neck and giving it her all—likely to give him no doubt as to exactly what he was passing up. He put his arms around her and kissed her back, giving it his best effort to feel—something—but there simply was no spark and he knew that there wouldn’t be because Sharon Johnson was not Torie Mills and goddamn it all to hell, he wanted Torie Mills!
After seeing Sharon up the steps to the lobby and elevators, where they parted company, he climbed into his truck and pulled away from the curb, slipping a CD into his player and cueing up his favorite track. Matt Nathanson’s “Come On Get Higher” soon filled the cab with lyrics that fed the loneliness he felt tonight.
Chapter 9
June 2, 2012
Finally—moving day! Three months ago, it had seemed as if this day would never arrive and now—here it was. The restoration of the house itself was now complete, down to the barn-red barn and the reproduced front-room wallpaper. With the details from the photographs as a guide, many of the original features such as the fancy Acanthus leaf crown molding and window casings, and the windows themselves, which were modern and energy efficient, were painstakingly accurate in styling to the Victorian era. The roof, narrow clapboard siding, porch brackets, and picket fencing around the front yard, had all been completed while I had been on tour. The last task to be finished up had been the painting of the house which Dave had contracted out to other professionals to complete and it had come down to the wire but everything was done and the house was lovely, painted a nice eggshell with cornflower blue trim. So all I had to do now was to start filling the place up with my own things and all of the treasures that I currently had squirreled away out back in the PODS, where they just waited for me and my moving assistants to unload them into my new home.
I answered a knock on the front door to find Dave Cameron, looking all sexy and smoldering in his white T-shirt and blue jeans, leaning against the open screen door with one shoulder. Actually, he was just standing there, like an everyday guy but he was smoldering in my book, from the stray wisps of straight, dark hair spilling over his forehead, to the hypnotizing light crystal-blue eyes, to the dimpled grin that I now knew so well. He was looking hot today—hotter than he should be to a woman in a committed relationship but it had been the middle of May since I’d spent that weekend in Des Moines with Derek and had seen Dave and Sharon at the bar, who, I had learned a couple of days later, was no longer in the picture. Apparently they hadn’t hit it off as well as I’d thought that they had and that night at the bar had been their last date. This news, let me just say, hadn’t broken my heart, although I wasn’t examining too closely exactly why I should have any opinion on Dave’s private life, one way or the other.
Regarding my man Derek, it is going to be at least another two weeks until he will be coming here to stay and he just happened to be unavailable to help me move to over this weekend because he just happened to have some clients come into town who he needed to wine and dine.
Oh well, that’s what long distance is all about, Torie old girl, I thought philosophically. After all, the relationship with Derek had been this way since the beginning. It was what I’d signed on for and honestly, except for the dry spells sex-wise, it was a good fit for me and my rather limited emotional abilities. I don’t do full-on relationships well and I never have.
“Mov—ing—day! Mov—ing—day!” Dave chanted enthusiastically like a cheerleader cheering on the home team. Let’s—go—team!
I reached out to grab his forearm and give it an excited shake.
“I can’t believe it’s finally here!” I squealed with a laugh and then glanced beyond him to the men standing with their arms crossed over their broad chests, looking as though they didn’t get the joke. Behind Dave on the porch of my rented house stood two capable looking and burly men, dressed in matching slate-gray tees, and behind them in the drive was their large truck with the famous logo Two Men and a Truck emblazed across its side. They had already stopped in Des Moines and emptied my storage unit first which Dave had graciously offered to assist with and he had accompanied them there earlier today. What a guy.
“I’m all packed up, guys. Come on in.” I stepped back and allowed them to enter as I instructed them. “Only the furniture I have marked with little white tags goes with me, but everything else, the TV’s and all of the boxes in each room are mine.”
I looked at Dave who was surveying t
he mountain of boxes I had assembled in my living room.
“I can’t believe I have so much stuff!” I said in amazement. “I think that I must have doubled my possessions since I’ve been here.”
“I’m not surprised,” Dave said teasingly with a grin. “You bought a truckload of crap every single trip we made,” he reminded me.
“Crap?” I feigned offense at such blasphemy. “Just wait until you see how great everything is gonna look in Rose’s house. It’ll be beautiful.”
Dave crossed his arms over his chest with a warm smile.
“I have no doubt,” he assured me with a wink and a playful nudge of my shoulder as he sauntered off toward the back of the house to assist the movers.
***
At 9:00 p.m., I finally dropped into a chair at the kitchen table of my new house and slowly stirred a steaming bowl of minestrone soup as I blew across the surface to cool it. I took a handful of crackers and crushed them in my hands before sprinkling them over the bowl. I was so dead tired from the day of hard labor that this was all that I could manage to prepare. I flipped open my laptop and logged onto the Internet to check my email and catch up with family and friends on Facebook while I ate.
With a sigh of irritation at myself for forgetting, I struggled to my feet again and grabbed a diet soda from the fridge. Plopping soundly back onto my chair with a groan, I kicked off my tennis shoes and rubbed my aching, tired feet one atop the other, whimpering with the pain and the relief that the motion caused, relief uppermost I decided. Finishing up these ministrations, I glanced at my computer and saw that I had a Facebook chat message from Dave.
Dave Cameron: How goes your first night so far?
Torie Mills: Great, just sat down to some warm soup.
Dave Cameron: Spaghetti O’s for me.
Torie Mills: I win.
Dave Cameron: Ha ha. I’ll talk to you again soon?
Torie Mills: Definitely! We gotta do lunch sometime.
Dave Cameron: I’ll give you a call.
Torie Mills: Anytime!
Dave Cameron: Good night.
Torie Mills: Night, Dave!
As Dave went off into the Facebook cosmos, I finished up a message to my sister Sarah in Colorado, checked my book sales on Amazon, logged off and closed my computer. Then after I’d finished my soup, I rinsed my dishes, wiped off the table, and flipping off light switches as I went, I headed upstairs to spend my very first night in the master bedroom of Grandma Rose’s house.
Chapter 10
I awoke with a start. I had been asleep, and then boom, I was awake. I sat up quickly and looked about the room, feeling that something must have happened to jolt me awake so abruptly, like maybe a ten-ton semi had driven right through the side of my house or a freak earthquake had just occurred in the middle of Eastern Iowa. But the room was peacefully quiet; the sun, however, was streaming through the sheers at the window, and I glanced beside me to my nightstand and the digital alarm clock and gasped: 10:00 a.m. No way! I never sleep past six. Oh boy, I gotta go! I realized and kicked the covers off of myself haphazardly, hurrying to the bathroom at the end of the hall.
As I reentered my bedroom a few minutes later, I kept having a thought that was niggling at the edge of my brain, not really a thought but more of a sense of unease and upset that I couldn’t quite put my finger on but that came into clearer view as I rolled it around in my head. It was as if I was overdue for an important appointment I’d forgotten about, but there was nowhere that I needed to be today. I tried to consider exactly what was bothering me and finally came to the realization that what it was, had to do with a rather vivid dream that I’d had in the night and that I was beginning to recall now in detail, but it wasn’t only that.
I clicked on my desktop computer as I began to seriously ponder what had happened in the dream and for some unexplainable reason that I chose not to question, I opened my family tree program because there was a certain date that kept running through my head over and over again, almost like a chant.
In the dream, which I had seemed to have been a part of, I could recall seeing a room full of people. In my head, I can actually still see it; it had been in the front room downstairs and I could recall now that many of those present were crying—maybe a funeral or some other sad occurrence? Everyone had been in dark clothing and everyone had been hovering around me, comforting me but it couldn’t have been me, because it had been nothing that I had ever been a part of, I feel certain of that. It had been as if there was a period piece stage performance going on all around me. The people had all been dressed in old-fashioned clothing and the front room had been furnished exactly as it had been a hundred years ago or more, not my feeble attempt at recreating the front room.
I brought up the combined list of my family members in the family tree and scanned down through all of the dates displayed for each person, birth and death dates. The date that kept running through my head again and again was December 12, 1885.
My family tree includes over twenty-seven thousand relatives and I realized that scanning for the date could take me all day so I decided instead to do some deductive reasoning. In the dream, it had been this same house—so it had to of been some of my dad’s side of the family here in Fremont. Okay—so of my Fremont relatives, thinking in my mind’s eye about the room full of people around me in the dream and using my extensive genealogy knowledge, I considered those whose faces I could recall clearly from the dream and those who would have been living in 1885. The people could have been Rose Wyman’s family members or quite possibly some of my Mills family as well.
I scrolled down the Wyman family tree; Rose, her children, aunts, uncles, then—wait, I’d almost overlooked it. My great-great-grandfather Judson Wyman, husband of Rose, had died on December 12, 1885.
“Oh my god,” I whispered aloud in surprise.
I sat pondering then, really thinking about all of those people that I had seen about me in the room and I flipped to the tree and started looking at the photographs of all of the children of Rose and Judson and photographs of their grandchildren including many of my Mills relatives and I felt a cold chill run up my spine and goose bumps rise on my arms. I recognized many of them from my dream. They had been alive, moving and walking in my dream—talking to one another and to me.
I could remember that I had been sitting in a chair in the front room downstairs. They must have all just come back from the cemetery because I can recall that people were removing their scarves and coats. I remember the front door opening and a blast of chill air coming in with a man in a heavy overcoat and top hat before it had been hastily closed again.
I can recall looking into the dining room and seeing several men placing chairs around a dining room table. The men were Rose’s sons—George, Norman, and John and I can clearly recall seeing that John had a white boutineer in his lapel. Thinking about myself in the dream, I remember that I also had held a white flower in my hands which were resting in my lap, but they weren’t my hands, they were weathered and spotted from age and blue veins had stood out stark beneath my white paper-thin skin and had been in marked contrast to the skirt of the long-sleeved black woolen dress that I’d worn. The two young women who had been kneeling on the floor before me and patting my forearms consolingly were my great-grandmother Alice Wyman Mills and her youngest sister Mahala Wyman.
“Mother, you should rest,” Mahala had said, looking up into my eyes. “You’ve had a trying day. Let us take you upstairs to lie down, would you?”
“Can I get you a nice cup of Oolong?” Alice had offered with a warm smile as she had squeezed my arm gently.
I hadn’t answer her, I know that I hadn’t because I remember that in my head I had been frantic, thinking Oh my god, they think that I’m my great-great-grandmother Rose Wyman! The two girls had taken my lack of an answer to either of their questions as my refusal of both offers because they had resumed their gentle ministrations, stroking my hands and forearms while murmuring soothing words to me and
talking about God’s will.
It had been a dream, but it hadn’t a dream. How could I have possibly dreamed in such detail, something that I have never even thought about? I have never considered the actual event of Judson Wyman’s death even during all of my years of doing genealogy research. I hadn’t ever gone to such depths as to consider what people would have been wearing, or the fact that he had died in December and everything that that fact would have meant, such as the cold bite of the winter air or whether coats would have been worn the day that he had been buried. I had never entertained any thoughts of Judson being laid out in the dining room, but in the dream, as I had watched the men arranging the dining room chairs, I had known, viscerally, that Judson had been laid out there just hours before.
I left my bedroom now barefoot and padded downstairs in my comfy tee and boxers to the front room and stopped in the center of the room. Closing my eyes, I put my fingers to my temples to assist in my concentration and I thought of the dream and I tried to envision exactly where I had been sitting. I decided that I had been just to the right of the front door and so I opened my eyes, looking around and then picking up and carrying a small antique parlor chair that I had acquired from a shop in Oskaloosa, settling it in the correct position and taking a seat there.
I glanced to the left, past the foyer and staircase that leads to the second story, through the archway of the dining room, and noted that in my dream the table had been almost exactly where it was positioned now but with ten chairs around it. I could clearly envision the men placing the chairs, one by one.
I stood up and made my way to the dining room and to the swinging door that would have been directly behind Norman as he had worked to place a chair. I could see the top of the swinging door just behind him as he stood there in my dream and I now looked to the same spot where he would have come up to on the door and I had a thought.