Secrets Read online

  Since the woman was leaning on Cassie more heavily, Dana stepped forward to open one of the doors. Even as she did so, her mouth opened and wouldn’t seem to close. The door was of some exotic wood that had swirls of black and deep red. There were little round whorls of brass on the door, making it look like the entrance to a fortress. But it swung open easily on its enormous hinges.

  They walked into a high-ceilinged sitting room that looked like something out of a Jane Austen movie, and it was the prettiest room either of the women had ever seen. It was done in peach and a pale, mossy green. There were two big sofas facing each other, with an inlaid coffee table in the center. Elegant tables of mahogany were along the walls, with pretty Chinese lamps on them. The walls had oil paintings of what looked to be Althea’s ancestors, but upon closer inspection were of Althea in her many roles on stage and screen.

  Cassie helped the woman to sit on one of the sofas. The chintz curtains were open, and the windows showed straight through the trees to the little beach where she and Elsbeth played so often. With a sick feeling, Cassie realized that every time they’d been trespassing, they’d been seen.

  “Can I get you something?” Cassie asked. “Call someone?”

  Althea leaned back against the sofa and smiled. “No, thank you. It’s just my housekeeper and me here. And Brent outside. Just the three of us.”

  Dana was looking at the ornaments on the mantelpiece. She wasn’t sure but she thought one of the two eggs was genuine Fabergé. “But surely it takes more than just three people to run this place,” she said.

  Althea smiled at Dana. “Now and then I need more people, but for day-to-day living, it’s just the three of us. Would you be so good as to push that button on the wall? I hope that you two will stay for a midmorning tea. Or are you too busy on this lovely Saturday morning to share a bite with an old woman?”

  “No, of course not,” Cassie said quickly. “Our families have run off together on a boat and we’re absolutely free.”

  “Families?” Althea said, looking at Cassie. “I thought you were the nanny for that beautiful little girl. Don’t you work for a widower and his father? Have they become your family?”

  Cassie stood up straight, blinking at the woman. What she’d said was true, but Cassie didn’t want to hear it put so bluntly. No, they weren’t her family. “I…I…,” Cassie began, but she could think of nothing else to say.

  “She’s been there so long that they seem like family,” Dana said. “I can attest that Cassie loves little Elsbeth very much.”

  “Ah,” Althea said, looking at Cassie in speculation. “But isn’t Jefferson Ames about to marry David Beaumont’s daughter? I met the girl when she was a child and I found her to be the most spoiled creature I’d ever met. Has she changed much?”

  Dana smiled. “Not at all. But how in the world do you know so much about what’s going on in Hamilton Hundred? Names, marital stats. You seem to know everything about us.”

  “Won’t you sit down, both of you?” Althea said, smiling. “Let’s just say that I have a spy. I can’t, of course, tell you who it is, but I’m kept informed of whatever is thought to interest me. I’d love to go to your country club and hear the gossip myself, but did you know that I did that once?”

  Dana and Cassie sat by each other on the couch on the opposite side of the pretty coffee table and smiled. Of course they knew that. Within ten minutes of Althea’s arrival at the club, the parking lot had been full and the manager had had to ask that no one bother her while she ate. But afterward, graciously, Althea had signed autographs. They could understand why she’d not returned.

  “We heard what we thought were shots,” Dana said.

  “Yes,” Althea said, giving a sigh. “He was here again. I think Kenneth waited until he saw my young Brent drive away, then he walked around the fence to the house.”

  Both Cassie and Dana blinked at her. Althea’s second husband had been the great Shakespearean actor, Kenneth Ridgeway. He was the sort who thought that only Broadway was worth an actor’s time, and during the years he was married to Althea, he had been publically disdainful of her film work. In spite of his nasty little remarks, their marriage had lasted for over twenty years. It was when Althea had taken a role on Broadway and been heralded as “magnificent” that the marriage died. The day after the fabulous reviews came out, Kenneth Ridgeway filed for divorce. But the joke was on him. His career never recovered from his so-obvious jealousy. He became a national joke, the butt of talk show hosts’ monologues.

  “Kenneth Ridgeway was shooting at you?” Cassie asked, wide-eyed.

  Althea smoothed her perfect hair, pulled back from her exquisite face, the cheekbones nearly as perfect today as they had been in the 1920s, and nodded. “I assume it was a stage pistol that uses blanks. Kenneth always did love drama over substance. But, yes, there were shots fired.”

  “At you?” Cassie asked quietly.

  “Of course,” Althea said, smiling. “He wants more money. But then he always wants more money. I told him I’d pay him if I just didn’t have to hear that speech again about how he made me what I am and how I owe him everything. But this time I think I said too much because he pulled out a pistol and shot at me.”

  Cassie and Dana just looked at her, too astonished to say anything, when the door opened and in came a woman with a wheeled cart covered with a pretty porcelain tea set, and dishes with tiny sandwiches and cakes. The woman was short, dark skinned, and probably as old as Althea was—except that she looked her age.

  “Just put it there, Rosalie,” Althea said. “I’ll serve.”

  “What have you done this time?” the woman asked as she shoved the cart to the side of the couch. She stood with her hands on her hips, glaring at Althea.

  “This is not the time…,” Althea began. “I have guests.”

  “It ain’t never the time,” Rosalie muttered as she went toward the door, then turned back to look at the two young women. “If somebody shot at you, maybe you should call the police.”

  Cassie and Dana nodded in agreement.

  “I don’t think so,” Althea said. “Not now.”

  “Just what I thought,” Rosalie said, then left the room, closing the door loudly behind her.

  Althea turned back to the two women. “Do you take milk or lemon?”

  “Let me do that,” Dana said, at last beginning to recover from the awe of being in Althea Fairmont’s presence. She got up and began to expertly pour and serve the tea.

  Cassie took her cup after Dana had served Miss Fairmont. “What do you plan to do about this man?” she asked sternly.

  “Nothing,” Althea said, sipping her tea. “He loves the excitement and it makes him feel manly, rather like a pirate come here at gunpoint to demand that I give him money.”

  “But this morning it was more than excitement, wasn’t it?” Dana said, sitting down by Cassie, her cup in her hand. “When we found you, you were passed out on the floor. If we hadn’t found you, who would have helped you?” She didn’t say the words, but it hung in the air that it was a big house and it was peopled by only two elderly women. For all that Althea—thanks to modern surgery—looked like a well-preserved fifty, she was still an older woman. And Rosalie wasn’t any younger.

  Dana’s eyes said it all as she looked at Althea.

  “Yes, well,” Althea said, looking away from Dana’s stare. “I know I should do something about it, but I did make Kenneth a laughingstock of the country, and I carry some responsibility for that.”

  “He made himself a laughingstock,” Cassie said firmly. “You beat him at his own game by showing him up on stage. He was the idiot who filed for divorce right after the reviews came out.”

  Althea smiled warmly at Cassie. “Oh, my, you do have a passionate nature, don’t you? Thank you for championing me, but I do feel guilty in a lot of ways. Kenneth had to work for what he had, but I…” She gave a little shrug.

  “You had raw, natural talent,” Dana said.