She was thinking about everything that had happened in the last few days as she went to the bathroom to take a shower.
“What happened?” Amy asked.
Faith took a breath. “It seems like so much longer than just sixteen years ago. Ty packed up and left town.”
“He did what?” Amy asked.
“He left town. He was never seen again. When I didn’t see him for about three weeks, I went to visit his mother and she said he’d come home wearing wet clothes, then he’d changed and left in his convertible. To my knowledge, no one in our town ever saw him again.”
“That’s odd,” Amy said. “You’d think he would have fought for you.”
“No,” Faith said softly, “I think that that afternoon he saw me as he thought I had become, and he wanted nothing more to do with me.”
“Or maybe he was in a car wreck and lost his memory,” Zoë said, not looking up from her pad. “It does happen, you know.”
Grimacing, Amy looked back at Faith. “What happened with you and Eddie?”
Faith gave a bit of a smile. “Everything changed. It was as though he saw that it was possible to lose me, so he fought the dragon.”
“And the dragon was his mother,” Zoë said.
“Oh yes. A few days after our confrontation in my bedroom, Eddie told his mother he was marrying me and that was it.”
“So you married in a tiny wedding that was paid for by your mother, and afterward, what did Eddie’s mother do to you?” Zoë asked.
Faith put her head back and made a groan that came from inside her soul. “She made my life a living hell. While Eddie was sick—”
“When did he get sick?” Amy asked.
Faith looked down at her hands.
When she took so long to answer, Zoë looked at her. “He was always sick, wasn’t he?”
Faith didn’t look up, but nodded her head.
“Oh!” Amy said. “That’s why he never participated in sports with you and Ty. It’s why he always held back.” She paused for a moment. “But you didn’t know that when you married him, did you?”
“No,” Faith said. “His mother was the consummate snob and she couldn’t bear for anyone to know that she’d been able to produce only one child and he had a defective heart. She took him to doctors far away from our small town so that no one knew he had anything wrong with him. And she lectured Eddie daily about keeping his bad heart a secret.”
“She probably didn’t want him to marry a lusty redhead for fear that you’d kill him in bed,” Zoë said.
Faith smiled. “That may have had something to do with it, but I think her real objection was that, in her mind, I was of a lower class than her precious son was.”
“Was his illness why he didn’t go to bed with you before you were married?” Amy asked.
“Yes,” Faith answered, and there was a quick flash in her eyes. “I was pretty angry about that. Eddie knew that I’d been to bed with Ty and he assumed that Ty was a good lover, so Eddie didn’t want any comparisons with him. Eddie wanted me tied to him legally before I found out that he…”
“He what?” Zoë asked.
“Before I found out that he was…What is the kindest thing I can say? Premature in bed.”
“You were lied to and tricked into marriage,” Zoë said, “so why didn’t you divorce him?”
“I thought about it. Three times I tried to leave him. One time I even had an affair with another man, but in the end, I always went back to Eddie. He needed me so very much and I…” Her head came up. “The truth was that I loved him. I’d loved him since I was a child and we had a lot of history between us. On the days when Eddie felt good, we laughed and enjoyed ourselves. There was very little sex, true, but there were other things.”
When Zoë and Amy looked at each other, Faith continued, her voice urgent as she defended herself. “I know I’ve made my life seem horrible, but it wasn’t. At least the first years weren’t. You can put it down all you want, but Eddie was rich. The first five years of our marriage, we traveled. I mean traveled in the old-fashioned sense, not one of those things where you go to six countries in six days. Eddie and I went on ocean liners and stayed in first-class hotels. We stayed a month in Venice, six weeks in Paris.”
“It also got you out of town and away from his mother,” Zoë said.
“And, besides,” Amy said, “what was there for you at home? Your true love wasn’t there.”
“True love,” Faith said. “Is that what you think Ty was?”
“Yes,” Amy answered, but Faith said nothing.
“What happened about the road across Ty’s property?” Zoë asked.
Faith shrugged. “The road was built and the money for the land was paid to Ty’s mother. She also left town and I never heard from her again. I don’t know what happened to her, but the gossip was that she went to live with Ty.”
“What about the house he was going to remodel for you?” Amy asked.
“It was torn down. Eddie offered to buy it for me and move it anywhere I wanted, but I couldn’t bear to look at it, much less live in it.”
“So where did you and Eddie end up living?” Zoë asked, her eyes on her drawing pad.
When Faith didn’t answer, both women looked at her.
“Don’t tell me you lived with Eddie’s mother,” Amy said. “You couldn’t have done that. Tell me you didn’t.”
“We did. Eddie said it was just temporary until we got our own house, but once we were in there, he said that his mother was alone and that he’d be torn in half thinking about her in that big house by herself.” She shrugged. “By that time I was already so beaten down by the two of them that I didn’t make much of a protest.”
“What happened to her?” Amy asked.
“Nothing. She’s still alive and still hates me.”
Zoë gave a low whistle. “You’ve put up with that battle-axe for your entire life?”
“Yes,” Faith said, but she gave a little smile. “But I hit her. I hit her hard.”
“With what?” Amy asked. “Some information?”
“No,” Faith said, smiling broader. “At Eddie’s funeral I hit her in the face with my fists, first a right, then a left. Pow, pow! It was wonderful. Of course I was hauled away and spent a night in the local jail, but I still remember it as one of the high points of my life.”
“Too bad you didn’t do that before you married Eddie,” Zoë murmured.
“But you loved Eddie,” Amy said. “I can understand a lot of what you did because, in spite of everything, you loved him.”
“You really are a romantic, aren’t you?” Faith said.
“If I had her husband I’d be a romantic too.” Zoë turned the sketch pad around and showed them her drawing of Stephen. If it was possible, she’d made him look better than he did in real life. Since the drawing was black-and-white, you couldn’t see his blond hair. Zoë had portrayed him as having dark hair and eyes, and his eyebrows were arched in a way that said he was used to getting what he wanted.
“My goodness,” Faith said, eyes wide.
Amy reached out and took the pad from Zoë. “I think I might have to fly home tonight,” she said, looking at the picture.
“Can I go with you?” Zoë asked. There was such sincerity, such lust, in her voice that the three of them laughed.
“May I buy this from you?” Amy asked, holding on to the pad as though her life depended on it.
“No, but you can have it.”
“You can’t—” Amy began, but stopped herself. “Thank you. Thank you very much. I’ll owe you for this.” Reluctantly, she handed the drawing pad back to her.
Faith gave a yawn. “I don’t know about you two, but I need to go to bed. This has been a four-hour therapy session.”
“Won’t Jeanne be proud of us?” Zoë said as she put away her drawing supplies.
“Oh yes, speaking of her,” Faith said as she got up, “did either of you receive any business cards today?”
; “Business cards?” Amy asked as though she had no idea what they were.
“Not me,” Zoë said. “I didn’t buy anything except lunch and no one gave me any business cards.”
“Why do you want to know?” Amy asked.
“I talked to Jeanne yesterday and she said we were to take all business cards that were offered to us. She seemed to think it was important.”
Amy looked at Zoë and they shrugged. “Sorry, can’t help,” Amy said. “We’ll go out tomorrow and see what we can find. Maybe she collects business cards.”
“Nah,” Zoë said. “She probably has a crazy patient who uses them for—”
“Building model houses,” Amy said quickly before Zoë could come up with some disgusting use for the cards.
“Sure,” Zoë said. “I’m off to bed. You want the bathroom first?” she asked Faith.
“I’d like to take a shower, if you don’t mind.”
“Ha!” Zoë said. “You’d like to spend an hour in the tub. I saw those jars of smelly stuff you bought.”
“That takes too long,” Faith said. “I’ll just shower and—”
“Use the tub!” Amy said in a commanding voice. “Zoë hasn’t finished the drawing of my son and she can use my bathroom. Go and enjoy yourself.”
“Okay, I will,” Faith said, then left them.
When they were alone in the room, Zoë went to the kitchen, Amy right behind her. “So what do you want to talk to me about?” Zoë asked as she opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of white wine.
“What makes you think I want to talk to you?” Amy asked as she washed their wineglasses.
“You lied to Faith about the drawing that I haven’t even started and you’re in the same room with me. Alone. So what do you want to say?”
“I don’t know,” Amy said. “It’s just that Faith’s story upset me. What do you think really happened to Tyler?”
“He left town. That’s what she said. He hung around that town waiting for the woman he loved to come home from college, and when she did, he saw that she wanted someone else. So Ty did the smart thing and left.”
Amy held out her glass for Zoë to fill from the bottle she’d just opened. “I don’t know. There was something creepy in her story that bothered me.”
“You mean the way Eddie lied, cheated, and manipulated in exactly the same way that his mother did?”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean. Poor Faith,” she said, leaning against the countertop and sipping her wine. “I feel so sorry for her. She still says that Eddie was the love of her life but how could he be?”
“So what’s in your clean little mind to do? Take her to a hairdresser and give her a makeover?”
“Would you stop it?” Amy said, glaring at Zoë. “I’m beginning to be able to see through your tough-girl act.”
“I guess I’m just a scared little girl under a lot of face paint.”
“Is that what Jeanne said about you?”
Zoë smiled. “Yeah, it’s a direct quote.”
Amy looked toward the bathroom door where she could hear water running. “I wish there was something we could do for her. It’s hard to imagine all that’s happened to her in these past years. She went from being a—”
“Busty redhead,” Zoë said.
“Yes, a busty, lusty redhead, to a…” She looked at Zoë.
“To a worn-out, beaten-down old woman who isn’t even forty yet.”
“I wonder what happened to her mother?”
“Died years ago,” Zoë said. “Faith told me before you arrived. I bet the old bat died happy.”
“Why not? She’d badgered and bullied her only child into marrying a man with a defective heart and—”
“And had a mother-in-law with no heart, but she was rich.”
“I swear that I’ll let my children marry whomever they want,” Amy said.
“Oh yeah? And what if one of your beautiful, college-educated sons comes home with a bleached-blonde high-school dropout on his arm and he tells you he wants to marry her and adopt her three illegitimate children?”
“Good point,” Amy said, looking out the window at the garden. It was late and she should go to bed, but she kept thinking about Faith’s life that had been thrown away. “I wonder if we could find Ty?”
“We? When did you and I become ‘we’?”
“When you drew my husband as the sex god that he is.”
Zoë laughed. “I bet the truth is that he drinks and fornicates.”
“No, that would be his brothers. They’re on second and third wives. But Stephen is perfect.”
“Isn’t that a bit boring?”
“Of course not!” Amy said, then drained her glass and washed it out. “I think that tomorrow I’ll check out some of those search engines that help you find people.”
“What do you know about this man Ty that you’ll be able to find him?”
“His name, the town where he grew up, and that his brothers moved to Alaska. I think I can piece together enough to find out something. Okay, I’m off to bed. See you in the morning.”
When Amy was gone, Zoë stood in the kitchen for a few minutes, then she went into her bedroom and got her laptop. Even though it was close to midnight, she wasn’t tired. Since she’d been in the hospital she’d had trouble sleeping and rarely got more than four hours of rest a night. Usually, she stayed up painting, but tonight, she thought she might see what she could find on the Internet. As her computer warmed up and the wireless Internet came on, she poured herself another glass of wine and sat down.
“Well, Mr. Tyler Parks, if you still have the same name, I’m going to find you,” she said to the screen as she began typing.
Seven
Amy was dreaming.
She was in bed, but it was different from her own. The covers enveloping her were heavy and there seemed to be a foot-tall stack of them. Yet in spite of them, her nose was freezing. She pulled back under the covers, trying not to let any of her body be exposed. The room seemed to be unheated. She stuck out her foot to feel for Stephen. Maybe she could get him to turn up the thermostat.
In the next second, she sat upright. The boys! If their room was cold, so was the boys’. As she sat up, she hit her head on something hard. Rubbing it, she turned and put her feet on the floor, but instead of her soft bedroom carpet, she felt something rough that hurt the bottoms of her feet. “What in the world have the boys spilled on the carpet while I was in Maine?” she murmured as she ran her hand over the foot of the bed, looking for her bathrobe, but it wasn’t there.
It was so cold in the room she could see her breath. She glanced at the window and saw that it had panes that were diamond-shaped, not the Colonial windows that she and Stephen had chosen when building the house. What had they done while she was away?
With her hands on her upper arms, trying to protect them from the chill, she walked across the rough carpeting and headed for the door. “Stephen!” she said when she got to his side of the bed. She could see the top of his head, but nothing else. “Stephen!” she said louder. “Something’s wrong with the furnace. You need to call someone.
“And I’m sure they’ll come out in the middle of the night,” she said under her breath. She saw her husband move a bit, but he didn’t look out from under the covers.
“Men!” she said under her breath as she went to the door. It was dark in the room, with only the moonlight shining through the window illuminating it. But she knew the room well so she didn’t need to turn on the light.
When she got to the door she reached for the brass doorknob, but her hand came in contact with an odd contraption that was more like a latch for a barn than for a bedroom. “What is going on?” she said aloud, while wondering what she was going to say to her family for making changes while she was away.
Annoyed, she lifted the latch and went into the hall. It was darker there than in the bedroom. Where were the night-lights that she kept all over the house? She knew the boys sometimes got up at night, so
she’d wanted them to be able to see where they were going. The fixtures were supposed to be light sensitive, coming on only when it was dark, but they weren’t on now. Amy wondered if the electricity had gone out and that’s why the furnace had stopped working.
She hurried the few steps down the hall to her oldest son’s room. Again when she reached for the knob, there was just a latch. Frowning, she opened it.
She lifted the latch, but before the door opened, a strong arm reached out and grabbed her.
“I would not do that if I were you,” said a man’s voice above her head. His voice was deeper than Stephen’s and it had an old-fashioned English accent, like something from an old black-and-white movie.
“Stephen?” she asked. “What are you doing? Let go of me and go down and check the furnace. It’s freezing in here.” She turned back to open the door.
The man put his hand over hers. “Nay, do not.”
“Will you stop it!” she said, pushing his hand away.
“Ah, I see. You are not who I thought you were. I see now that you are in your nightdress. Go on, then. And mayhap you will come to my room later.”
“Great,” Amy said. “The house is an ice cube and you want to play sex games. Tell me you didn’t put on those ridiculous tall leather boots you bought.”
“Boots?” the man said. “Aye, my boots are leather.”
Amy couldn’t help laughing. “Stephen, you have the strangest timing. Go downstairs and see what you can do with the furnace. I’ll get the boys and put them in bed with us. Go on now and do it!”
For a few moments the man didn’t say anything. “You are mad, woman,” he said. “Your mind is deranged.”
“It’ll arrange itself back once it’s above fifty degrees in this house.”
She heard him moving—it was too dark to see anything—then a match was struck, he lit a candle, and he held it up. Amy’s eyes widened as she looked not into the face of her husband but at a stranger. He was as dark as Stephen was fair. His black hair was long, ending just at his collar, and his eyes were dark, with thick lashes above them. His brows were black and shaped like a bird’s wings.