Holly Read online

  There was a pretty, young African-American woman there who was, one by one, pressing every carved leaf that went across the mantel. It was an intricate carving of English ivy that twisted and turned and trailed down the sides. The carving had always fascinated Holly and she’d been told that it was the work of a slave who’d once been the overseer of all Belle Chere. “Before the war,” Lorrie had told her.

  Suddenly, Holly thought, For a slave to have been made overseer, he must have been a trusted servant. Very trusted. And smack in the middle of the mantel was carved the date, 1839.

  “Oh!” the woman said, at last seeing that she was being watched. She jumped back guiltily. “I was, uh, I was…” Looking embarrassed, she picked up her handbag off the floor and started for the door.

  “I’m Holly Latham,” Holly said loudly, and the woman halted and turned back.

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” she said, taking a step forward. “I’m Kera Ivy. I teach at the local elementary and I thought I’d look around before someone buys the place and does whatever to it. I’ve always wanted to see the place and I thought that this would be my one and only chance.”

  The woman was talking too fast and too nervously. Holly figured her nervousness could be from several things, but she guessed that Miss Ivy had been doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing. It couldn’t have been thievery. How could she have thought to walk through a crowd carrying a fireplace mantel? “What were you doing?” Holly asked.

  “I, uh—” She looked at the tip of her shoe.

  Nick stepped forward. “I’m Nicholas Taggert,” he said, extending his hand.

  “Oh!” she said as she shook his hand. “Are you one of these Montgomery-Taggerts? I read in the newspaper that they were going to be here.”

  “Yes, I am,” Nick said, smiling. “My cousin wants to buy Belle Chere. Or maybe I will.” He kept his eyes focused on Kera’s, ignoring Holly’s glare.

  “Wow,” Kera said. “Hollander Tools and the Montgomery-Taggert megacorporation bidding against each other. That will be exciting. I won’t want to miss that. I think I’d better go home now and rest up for that. See you tomorrow.”

  As she headed for the doorway, Nick caught her right arm and Holly her left.

  “So what were you looking for, Miss Ivy?” Nick asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I just thought it was a beautiful fireplace, that’s all. And what with its being covered in ivy and my name being Ivy, it interested me.”

  Nick smiled at her. “Now, why don’t I think you’re telling the truth?”

  “Because one liar can recognize another one,” Holly said, giving him a false smile. “Because a low-down, slimy, sneaking rat can tell when someone else is up to no good.”

  Kera looked from one to the other and said, “I think I’d better go now.”

  Neither Nick nor Holly released her arms, but they quit looking at each other and looked at Kera.

  “You were looking for something, weren’t you?” Nick said.

  Kera sighed. “Okay, so I was. If you’ll release me, I’ll tell you.”

  “I have a Thermos of hot chocolate in my car,” Nick said. “I don’t know about anyone else, but my feet are freezing.”

  “Sounds good,” Kera said and Nick released her to let her pass.

  “Mine’s the black car by the entrance.”

  Kera walked ahead, Nick and Holly side by side behind her. “Did you bring the Bentley or the Rolls?” Holly said through clenched teeth.

  “The Jag,” he said cheerfully. “Instead of bidding against each other, how about if one bids and we split the cost?”

  “Own something with you?” Holly asked. “Not in this lifetime.”

  “But I thought—”

  “What?” she said, halting and glaring at him. “That when I found out you had money, I’d throw my arms around your neck and agree to marry you?”

  “Actually, yes.”

  “Think again,” she said, walking and nodding toward two men from a university in Arkansas.

  “Holly,” Nick said, pleading. “I wanted a woman who loved me for myself, not for my money. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “I understand that you put me through hell.” She was walking faster, moving ahead of Kera; Nick stayed right beside her. “I understand that while I was pouring out my deepest secrets to you—secrets I’d never told anyone else—you were lying to me about the very essence of who you are. While I was being torn apart, you were enjoying your little game immensely.”

  “I never enjoyed myself for one minute,” Nick said.

  She turned on him. “Never enjoyed yourself?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant I didn’t enjoy what I was doing to you.”

  “Which was?”

  “Making you fall in love with the gardener?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

  “Gardener! You don’t deserve the title. You—”

  “Is this the car?” Kera asked, stopping at a long black limousine.

  “No, that one.” Nick pointed toward an inexpensive black Jeep.

  “Slumming?” Holly asked.

  “Saving to buy you a multiacre wedding present,” he said as he opened the car door.

  Angrily, Holly got into the backseat while Kera and Nick took the two front seats. Minutes later, Holly had removed her cloak, and was sipping the hot chocolate Nick handed her and doing her best to listen to Kera’s story and block from her mind what Nick had done to her.

  Kera had grown up in an old house that was locally known as “Ivy House” because all four of its fireplaces were decorated with carved ivy vines.

  “I was told that before the Civil War, they were carved by my ancestor, who was a slave at Belle Chere. The two mantels upstairs are rather crudely carved, but by the time he got to the living room and the fourth mantel, the carving’s good.”

  “So why were you pressing the leaves on the fireplace?” Nick asked.

  “All four mantels at home have a secret compartment. You press a leaf and a panel clicks down and reveals a little hiding place.”

  “How big?” Holly asked.

  “The one in my bedroom can hold one Barbie doll snugly,” Kera said.

  “Unfair analogy,” Nick said.

  “You can talk of fairness?” Holly hissed at him. “You don’t understand the concept.” She looked back at Kera. “You think the same man carved the mantel in the overseer’s house?”

  “It looks the same to me. My great-granny said that our four were practice work for the real one, which she always told me was at Belle Chere. But since nobody local was ever invited to visit this place—unless we worked here, that is,” she said bitterly, “I’d never seen the inside. When I heard of the open house, I thought I’d look for an ivy mantel. I stupidly assumed it would be in the big house.”

  Holly leaned back against the seat and thought. The dates were right. The mantel had been carved a few years before Jason Beaumont was said to have cleaned out Belle Chere, and the legend was that a “trusted servant” had helped Jason.

  “Do you know anything about the man who did the carving? How he died and when?”

  “Nothing. I’ve often wondered about him, though. If he was a slave, how did he come to own a house that’s ten miles away from Belle Chere?”

  “Maybe he carved the mantels and sold them and whoever built the house bought them,” Holly said. “How did your family come to own the house?”

  Kera finished her chocolate and smiled. “Promise you won’t laugh?”

  “I believe I can promise you that for sure,” Nick said.

  “My great-granny used to tell me some tall tales that I loved to hear. She had to whisper them because my mother got angry. Anyway, Granny told me that my great-great-whatever-grandmother had purchased the house after the war with an emerald bracelet that had been hidden in one of the mantels.”

  She looked from Nick to Holly, who weren’t smiling. “Silly, huh? Unless she stole the bracelet,