Carolina Isle Read online

  “Yes, he’s wonderful,” Eden said, then cut herself off when she heard the sarcasm in her voice. It was tough to think how she’d tried to raise her daughter to be an independent woman, only to see her marry a control freak like Stuart. To Eden’s mind, Stuart was all show. For all his talk of having a great future before him, he’d willingly moved into Eden’s apartment “for a few weeks,” as he’d said just before the wedding. “Until I get a place for us. A little farther uptown.” Stuart had made Eden’s generous offer seem as though it were worth nothing, and she’d had to resist the urge to defend herself. But that was two years ago, and now nothing Stuart said bothered her. He and Melissa were still in Eden’s small apartment, still letting her cook for them and letting her take care of most of the household chores. Months ago, Eden had decided she’d had enough and was going to evict them. She’d built up her courage to the point where she didn’t care if they had to live on the street for a while. It might do them some good. Teach them some lessons. But then Melissa had announced she was pregnant and that was that. Eden could still remember the smirk on Stuart’s face when Melissa made the announcement. It was as though he’d known what Eden had been thinking and he’d calculated the pregnancy just so Eden couldn’t throw them out. “You don’t mind, do you, Mom?” Melissa had said. “It was an accident. We meant to have children, but we wanted to wait until we had a place of our own. But with Stuart on the verge of a promotion, it doesn’t make sense to buy something small and dreary when in just a few weeks we’ll be able to afford something grand and glorious.”

  Since her daughter had married, Eden often wondered if Melissa had become a marionette. “Small and dreary” and “grand and glorious” were Stuart’s words, not Melissa’s.

  Eden took a seat on a bar stool at the kitchen island and read the letter again. “Mrs. Farrington had no other heirs, so she left me everything.”

  “How nice for you,” Melissa said. “Any money?”

  Eden kept her head down, but she felt the blood rush up the back of her neck. Anger did that to a person. There was fear in Melissa’s voice, and Eden well knew what caused it: Stuart. For all that Melissa told Eden at least three times a day how much she loved her husband, the truth was that after two years of marriage she’d come to know him well. If he found out that Eden had inherited a lot of money, there would be problems.

  “No money,” Eden said cheerfully and tried not to hear her daughter’s sigh of relief. “Just a falling-down old house. You remember it, don’t you?”

  “A Victorian monstrosity, wasn’t it?”

  Eden started to correct her daughter and say that the house had been built before George Washington’s Mount Vernon, but she didn’t want Melissa to tell Stuart that. He might see money in a house that old. Melissa hadn’t yet learned that she didn’t have to tell her husband everything that went through her mind. “More or less,” Eden said, still looking at the letter. She was to go to a lawyer’s office in North Carolina as soon as possible to sign the papers and take possession of the house. They’re probably worried that the roof’s about to cave in, she thought, but said nothing as she folded the letter and put it back in the envelope.

  “What will you do with an old house like that?” Melissa asked, her eyes wide.

  Eden knew that her daughter was afraid for her mother to leave. They’d rarely been apart since Melissa’s birth twenty-seven years ago. “Sell it,” Eden said quickly. “And use the money to buy my grandson a house in the country. With a copper beech tree in the backyard.”

  Smiling, Melissa relaxed, then hurriedly drank the rest of her chocolate milk when she heard the front door start to open. She washed the glass in seconds, so she was ready to turn and greet her husband when he walked into the kitchen. Stuart was tall, thin, and handsome. Melissa’s eyes lit up when she saw him.

  Eden gave her son-in-law a nod, then slipped out of the kitchen to go to her bedroom and close the door. For a moment she leaned against the door, closed her eyes, and remembered back to that summer when she’d been pregnant with Melissa. Eden had been just seventeen years old, just out of high school, when she’d been walking home from church choir practice one night. She’d been leaped on by a man, thrown down, and … She’d never been able to remember much of what happened after that. When it was over, she dragged herself up, pulled her skirt down, and staggered home. She’d wanted to call the police, but her parents had refused. They didn’t want their family to be the object of gossip; they didn’t want people to know what Eden had done. “But I didn’t do anything,” she’d cried. A few weeks later, when she’d started throwing up from morning sickness, her parents told her to get out of their house. Nothing Eden said could sway them. She’d packed one suitcase, taken the $300 her parents had grudgingly given her, and got on a bus going east. She ended up in North Carolina, a state she’d never been in, but it was beautiful and she loved the old houses and the flat fields.

  She’d tried to get a job, but there wasn’t much work to be had, and no work for a girl who was by then obviously pregnant. When she’d applied at the newspaper office in Arundel, a man had taken pity on her. He was looking at the job application she’d filled out. “You didn’t misspell one word,” he said, teasing her. Eden was hot, tired, hungry, and wishing she’d never been born. All she could do was look at him. Was he going to grade her application?

  He looked her up and down for a moment, then said, “Let me guess about you. It’s something I’m good at. Decent family, church every Sunday, good grades in school, wrestled with the high school football quarterback on the backseat of a car, and now the two of you’ve run away together. Or did he leave you somewhere along the way?”

  Eden was too tired to play games. He’d probably eaten more for lunch than she’d had in the last two days. “Religious fanatic parents who spent my childhood telling me I was a sinner. Top of the top grades in school, but then if I went below an A plus I got the belt, buckle first. No quarterback, just a rapist on a dark night. When I came up pregnant, my parents threw me out. I now have fifteen dollars to my name, no place to live, nothing to live on. I’ve been looking hard at the local train tracks.”

  The man blinked at her a couple of times, then picked up his telephone and pushed a memory button. “Gracey? Henry here. I’m sending over a young woman. Feed her and let her have that bed in the back, will you? She needs food and rest, then I’m going to send her out to Alice’s.” He paused, listening. “Yeah, I know Alice is a pain in the neck, but, trust me on this, this girl can handle her. Compared to what she’s been through, Alice will seem like a dream.”

  Somehow, Eden managed to get out of the chair and make it to the door without fainting. Rage at the injustice of what had happened to her had kept her going, but now that someone had shown her some kindness, she feared she might collapse. The man didn’t help her up or walk her to the door. Maybe he’d guessed that Eden’s pride would get her there on her own. It wasn’t easy to be proud when you hadn’t had a bath in over a week, but she managed it.

  Eden was almost run over by a pickup as she made her way across the road to Gracey’s Restaurant. A tall, wiry woman, her gray hair in a bun at the back of her neck, came out to put her arm around Eden. “Honey, you’re worse than Henry told me you were.”

  Three hours later, after Eden had eaten more than Gracey had ever seen a person eat at one sitting, Eden climbed into bed and didn’t get out until the next morning. It was Sunday when Gracey drove Eden out to meet Mrs. Alice Augusta Farrington, who lived in an old house across a bridge, just outside downtown.

  Eden had always loved history, and she’d loved any movie that was set in a historical context. That was good, since her parents didn’t allow her to watch any movie that had been made after 1959. Their opinion was that the 1960s were the beginning of the end of Godliness in America. When Eden got out of Gracey’s car and looked up at the old house, she knew that she was looking at the genuine article. This wasn’t a house “built in the Colonial style.” This w