The Summerhouse Read online

  Even now, with her knowledge of what was going to happen, this sanity thing was a sticking point. How did one prove that one was sane?

  She had been concentrating on this question so hard that she hadn’t noticed that someone had walked up the carpeted stairs and down the hall. When she glanced at the doorway and saw the man leaning against it, she jumped. “Oh!” she said, then, “Sorry. I didn’t see you come up.”

  He was a tall man, in his mid to late sixties, or maybe in his seventies and well preserved. As with many men in California, he was dressed in cleaned-up cowboy gear. Usually this was an affectation, but Ellie had an intuition that this man was real. This man probably spent most of the day on horseback and his favorite animal was, no doubt, the longhorn steer.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said softly. He was one of those men who inspire jealousy in women because age looked good on him. Those sun creases radiating out from the corners of his eyes probably made him more handsome than he had been when he was a younger man. He wore Levi’s, a cream colored cotton shirt with pearl inlaid silver buttons, cowboy boots with deep undercutting, and he held a tan cowboy hat in his hands. “But you were thinking so hard that I could have run a herd of cattle through here and you wouldn’t have seen a thing.”

  She smiled at him. There was something about him that made her feel at ease, as though he were an old friend. “I was just thinking about how to prove that I’m not crazy. Any ideas on how to go about that?”

  She’d meant the statement to be taken as a joke, the way she had always coped with serious subjects and intense emotion, but the man didn’t smile. Instead, he looked at her with serious eyes. “If you’re here to see Mr. Montoya, then I guess this is a court case, and if you’re trying to prove you’re sane, then you must have money. Nobody cares about the sanity of a poor person. So who’s trying to get control of your money?”

  For a moment Ellie just looked at him with her mouth hanging open. “Yes,” she finally managed to say. “My ex-husband. Will be ex, anyway.”

  “Makes sense,” the man said. “What’s he doing? Saying that he’s always ‘managed’ your money and since you’re crazy, he has to keep on managing it even after you dump him? And since you’re a woman and he’s a man, the court is probably listening to him.”

  Maybe it was the way he said it, maybe it was the horrendous amount of work she’d done in the last three days, or maybe it was just being back into it all again, but Ellie put her hands over her face and burst into tears. Like a knight of old, the man sat down on the bench beside her, pulled out a clean, blue bandana handkerchief, and handed it to her. “I’m sorry,” she said, still crying. “I don’t usually cry in front of people, but it’s all been so awful and no one believes me! People think that the courts of America are fair and just and that if someone goes to trial, she’ll get a fair shake. And people think that because I’ve earned so much money that I have power. But I have no power because no one believes me. They all believe him. I don’t understand it. Whatever I say, they think is a lie, but whatever he says, they believe. I told them he has a lot of money hidden somewhere, but neither my lawyer, his lawyer, nor the judge believed me. But he said he cowrote my books and they accept that as fact. The man couldn’t name three titles of my books, much less tell the plots, but they believe that he wrote them with me. Yet I said that if I was sane enough to earn the money, then I was certainly sane enough to know how to put it in a bank, but they said no, that wasn’t true. After all, writers are really just glorified liars, aren’t they? And now I can’t believe I’m saying all these things to someone I’ve never met!”

  Ellie was trying to stop the tears as she wiped at her eyes with the handkerchief. It would be her luck that her ex had hired this man and he would testify against her in court. The first time she went through the divorce, it seemed that every person she’d ever met had been willing to testify against her.

  “That’s where I’ve seen you before,” the cowboy said, leaning back to look at her.

  Ellie sniffed. “What? Where?”

  “On the cover of a book. My wife has them all over the house. You’re that . . . What’s the name? She says it all the time.”

  It had been years since anyone had recognized her from a book cover. For one thing, Ellie had gained so much weight that she no longer looked like her publicity photo, and for the other, if you don’t have a book published for three years, the public forgets you. But now she wasn’t fat and she had just had a book come out six weeks ago. It was still in the top five on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

  She sniffed again. “Which name? Alexandria Farrell or Jordan Neale?”

  “That’s it!” the man said. “Both those names. My wife loves your books. Really loves them. She says she wants to be the woman in the book. Which one is that?”

  “Jordan,” Ellie said, her tears drying up.

  He nodded toward her notebook beside her. “Don’t tell me that you’re writing another one?”

  “Maybe not a Jordan Neale, but another book, anyway.” The way he was looking at her was making Ellie feel much better. For years now she’d felt nothing but pity coming from people, pity because she’d become fat, pity because she wasn’t writing, pity because she’d let some man beat her in a court case. “I wouldn’t have let him win,” she’d heard a thousand times. And the truth was that if it had happened to someone else, Ellie would have been the one saying that she would have fought until she won. But the women who said that hadn’t been up against a judge who considered Ellie a liar and insane.

  “This is amazing,” the man said, then held out his hand to shake hers. “I’m Marcellus Woodward,” he said, “but everyone calls me Woody.”

  She took his hand, warm, dry, brown from the sun. “Ellie Abbott,” she said, then caught herself. “Gilmore. It’s Gilmore until the divorce, but—”

  “Well, Miss Abbott,” he said, smiling at her, “I’m very pleased to meet you. You wouldn’t want to come home with me, would you?”

  She blinked at him. It had been a long time since a man had tried to pick her up.

  “No, no,” he said, smiling.

  He had nice teeth, she thought. In fact, if he weren’t thirty years older than she was . . .

  “I live up north, on a ranch, and it’s Friday, so maybe you’d like to fly up with me and spend the weekend with my wife and me and our little boy? And my brother will be there and about fifty ranch hands.” When Ellie didn’t reply to this, he lowered his head and gave her a shy glance through his lashes. “But maybe you’d rather spend the weekend here digging up dirt about your husband.”

  At that Ellie laughed, really laughed. “You are a devil, aren’t you?” she said, grinning. “You’ve seen something you want—a famous writer as a gift for your wife—so you’re going after it, aren’t you? I would sure hate to take you into a courtroom.”

  Lifting his chin, he grinned back at her. “Ain’t lost a case yet,” he said. “Here, hand me that notebook of yours.”

  She did so and he wrote down a few names, then handed the book back to her. The names were all of prominent people in and around Los Angeles. In fact, some of the names made her eyes widen.

  “You know any of those people?” he asked.

  One of the names was a banker whom she’d known for years. “Yes.”

  “Then call him or all of them and ask about me. They can probably even fax you a picture of me. I want you to check me out so you don’t think I really am the devil.”

  Ellie looked down at the notebook. In all the years she’d been married, she’d been absolutely faithful to her husband. She’d never so much as flirted with another man.

  Three years ago, it would never have occurred to Ellie to accept an invitation to go away for the weekend, not with friends and certainly not with a stranger. If Ellie wanted to do anything that wasn’t related to work and earning more money for Martin to spend, he would start whining that he never got to go anywhere, but then he wasn’t a big-de