First Impressions Read online

  Eden looked out at the lawn in front of her. The house sat in a little oasis of greenery, surrounded on three sides by acre upon acre of farmers’ fields. On the fourth side was a wide, deep creek, probably where the original owners moored their ships. On the right side of the house was what looked to be a vegetable garden, with flowers mixed in with the peas. To the back was what could be an orchard. It was all as messy as the interior. Taking a breath, Eden smelled the air. Fresh air, shade trees, fresh fruits and vegetables. In an instant, she made a decision. She was going to do the best job of cataloging that anyone had ever done, so that Mrs. Farrington would let her stay for the next several years. And Eden was going to raise her child here in this idyllic spot.

  Smiling, she went back into the house.

  “Can you cook?” Mrs. Farrington’s voice came from somewhere in the back of the house.

  “Not at all,” Eden called back, feeling quite happy.

  “That’s something else you’ll have to learn,” came the voice.

  Smiling, Eden went in search of the kitchen. She was willing to bet there were cookbooks somewhere in the house. “Probably Martha Washington’s original cookbook,” she said as she made her way through the stacks of furniture to find the kitchen. Turning the corner, she gasped. The kitchen was a huge room with lots and lots of cabinets—and every one of them was so full of papers that the doors wouldn’t close. On one countertop was a foot square that held a few dishes, a skillet, and a pot. Eden had an idea that was all the cookware that Mrs. Farrington used.

  Now, leaning against her bedroom door, Eden smiled in memory. Yes, that was all the cookware that Mrs. Farrington had used, but later Eden found whole sets of dishes hidden away inside the cabinets. Her daughter’s first years were spent in that wonderful old house. Her baby dishes had been from the 1920s, and her silverware had been real, with English hallmarks.

  It was the silverware that sparked the “clearing of the wealth” as Mrs. Farrington called it. Casually, Eden had remarked that the silver must be worth a fortune. “Then we have to hide it!” Mrs. Farrington had said quickly, her voice almost panicky. At first Eden had stiffened with pride. Did Mrs. Farrington think she was a thief? She calmed when she realized that if Mrs. Farrington had thought she was a thief she wouldn’t be telling her, Eden, to do the hiding. It wasn’t until Henry from the newspaper office came to visit that Eden understood.

  “He’s out,” Henry had said. Mrs. Farrington turned pale and sat down. Seeing her sit made Eden worry, because Mrs. Farrington never sat down.

  “I knew it was close, but I thought I’d have more time,” Mrs. Farrington whispered.

  After Henry left, Eden didn’t ask any questions, but Mrs. Farrington told her. She had one child, “a son so worthless he shouldn’t be allowed to live” is how she stated it. Eden didn’t ask questions, but she assumed that “out” meant out of jail. For the next three weeks, the two women hid things. Anything that was valuable, they hid. They pried up floorboards and shoved in silver teapots. They cut a hole behind the lath and plaster and dropped spoons down into the walls. They buried plastic boxes of things in the garden. Young Melissa, a year old by then, loved the game, and they caught her just as she was shoving Mrs. Farrington’s reading glasses into a mouse hole in the baseboard.

  But Alester Farrington didn’t show up then. He didn’t show up until Melissa was five—and that’s when Eden found out why he’d been locked up. He was a pedophile. But she didn’t know it that first night.

  The night her son returned home, Mrs. Farrington woke Eden, whispering in a way that made her sound like a crazy person. “They told me he’d changed. They said there was no more danger.” Puzzled, Eden had allowed Mrs. Farrington to pull her into the next room, Melissa’s room. In the dark, silhouetted by the night-light, Alester Farrington was standing over the child’s bed. Just standing there and watching Melissa sleep. In an instant, Eden understood everything. Mrs. Farrington told her son to get out of the room, and for a moment Eden thought he was going to strike his mother, but he didn’t. He smiled at Eden in a way that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Quietly, he left the room.

  Eden didn’t need to be told what she had to do. She looked at Mrs. Farrington, and there were tears in the old woman’s eyes, but she nodded, then shoved Eden toward her bedroom. Eden jammed clothes into a suitcase, grabbed some boxes, and left with her daughter in the middle of the night. She’d had no contact with either of the Farringtons since that night twenty-two years ago.

  Now, Eden walked to the bedroom window and looked out at the wet street lined with overflowing garbage cans. She could hear the loud music from the bar across the street; a man was peeing into the gutter. She closed the curtain. Sometimes she wondered how she had ended up in New York City. She who loved trees and bird-song. She used to read gardening books as though they were novels. She used to memorize principles of eighteenth-century gardening. Eden knew that the happiest time in her life had been those years with Mrs. Farrington. The people in town had thought Mrs. Farrington was an eccentric old woman, but all Eden had really known were her parents, whose great delight in life was meting out punishment. Compared to them, Mrs. Farrington was the sweetest, kindest—

  Turning, Eden looked at her tiny room. She’d given the master bedroom in the apartment to her daughter and her new husband, thinking that they were going to be there only a few weeks. But the months had turned into years, and she’d had to put up with the man her daughter had chosen to love, a pompous man who coped with his inability to get ahead in the world by putting other people down. And his favorite punching bag seemed to be his mother-in-law. Stuart compensated for his failings by assuming an air of superiority, as if he were of a better class than Eden. He never said the words out loud, but still they hung in the air. Melissa made excuses for him, saying that he was on the verge of being promoted to partner, that they were going to live in a penthouse on Park Avenue. Melissa seemed to believe that when Stuart got the promotion that he’d been up for for four years he’d have an overnight personality change. He’d stop looking down his arrogant nose at people and would become the sweet, loving man she knew he really was.

  Eden didn’t want to disillusion her daughter, so she was determined to keep her nose out of it. There had been times when she’d tried to talk to her, but Melissa had a talent for hearing only what she wanted to hear. It was difficult for Eden to do, but she was going to have to let her child find out about life on her own. Was that like letting a child ride a motorcycle without a helmet, so he’d learn that he could get hurt?

  Sighing, Eden went into her bathroom and stood there, looking at herself in the mirror. She had been told many times that she looked good “for her age,” but she was still forty-five years old, and for a moment, a wave of self-pity ran through her. Since that night so long ago when she’d seen Mrs. Farrington’s son looking down at Melissa asleep in her bed, Eden wondered if she’d had a moment to call her own. She’d had to raise her daughter alone. Most of the time she’d been too busy to think about herself, but there had been quiet evenings when she’d wondered how her life would have been different if she hadn’t had a child so young. She’d had a couple of serious relationships, but in the end had chickened out on getting married. She’d always been too afraid of turning her life, and that of her daughter, over to a man.

  When Melissa entered college on a partial scholarship, so had Eden. No scholarship, but she’d enrolled anyway. Eden had graduated with a degree in American history, with a minor in English lit. Melissa, giggling, had said that her degree in child development was actually an M.R.S. degree. As Eden got to know Stuart, she thought that a real diploma would have been much better.

  After college, Melissa had taken a menial job in a law office in New York just to be near Stuart, telling her mother that if she “played her cards right” she was sure that Stuart would ask her to marry him. He did. After a year in the big city, Melissa had begged and pleaded with Eden to move to New York, get