The Summerhouse Read online

  A month later, my sister’s husband received a fabulous job offer: double his salary, free housing, free cars. A full-time nanny for their daughter, three maids, and a country club membership were included. It was a job they couldn’t refuse. It was in Morocco.

  After Jimmie’s plane crashed and left me a widow at thirty-two, all the media around the world wrote of only one thing: that Jimmie had willed me “nothing.” None of his billions—two or twenty of them, I never could remember how many—none of it was left to me.

  “Are we broke or rich today?” I’d often ask him because his net worth fluctuated from day to day, depending on what Jimmie was trying at the moment.

  “Today we’re broke,” he’d say and he would laugh in the same way as when he’d tell me he’d made millions.

  The money never mattered to Jimmie. No one understood that. To him it was just a by-product of the game. “It’s like all those peels you throw away after you’ve made jam,” he’d say. “Only in this case the world values the peel and not the jam.” “Poor world,” I said, then Jimmie laughed hard and carried me upstairs, where he made sweet love to me.

  It’s my opinion that Jimmie knew he wasn’t going to live to be an old man. “I’ve got to do what I can as fast as I can. You with me, Frecks?” he’d ask.

  “Always,” I’d answer, and mean it. “Always.”

  But I didn’t follow him to the grave. I was left behind, just as Jimmie said I would be.

  “I’ll take care of you, Frecks,” he said more than once. When he talked of such things, he always called me by the name he’d given me the first time we met: Frecks, for the freckles across my nose.

  When he said, “I’ll take care of you,” I didn’t give the words much thought. Jimmie had always “taken care” of me. Whatever I wanted, he gave me long before I knew I wanted it. Jimmie said, “I know you better than you know yourself.”

  And he did. But then, to be fair, I never had time to get to know much about myself. Following Jimmie all over the world didn’t leave a person much time to sit and contemplate.

  Jimmie knew me and he did take care of me. Not in the way the world thought was right, but in the way he knew I needed. He didn’t leave me a rich widow with half the world’s bachelors clamoring to profess love for me. No, he left the money and all twelve of the expensive houses to the only two people in the world he truly hated: his older sister and brother.

  To me, Jimmie left a rundown, overgrown farm in the backwoods of Virginia, a place I didn’t even know he owned, and a note. It said:

  Find out the truth about what happened, will you, Frecks? Do it for me. And remember that I love you. Wherever you are, whatever you do, remember that I love you.

  J.

  Chapter 2

  Phillip watched Lillian get out of the car and walk slowly toward the house. Though she’d had a quick burst of tears when she first saw the place, he thought she was holding up well. Considering what she’d been through, she was holding up extremely well. Shaking his head in disbelief, he remembered all he’d done to prevent this moment. He and three of his associates had spent two afternoons and one morning trying to persuade her to fight James Manville’s will—a will Phillip had come to see as immoral and possibly illegal.

  But he hadn’t always felt that way. When James had told Phillip what he wanted to put in the will, Phillip had raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t dared let James know what he was thinking—that, obviously, James had found out that his young wife didn’t deserve his money; that she was probably having an affair. But instead of speaking his mind, Phillip had tried to talk James out of causing what would surely be years of court battles. It never crossed his mind that James’s widow wouldn’t contest the will. Phillip told James that if he wanted to leave his brother and sister money, then he should split the fortune three ways; there was enough for everyone.

  But James didn’t seem to hear Phillip. His only concern had been how to make sure that Lillian got some farmhouse in Virginia. “She’ll love it there,” James said in one of his rare self-revelatory moods. “I stole a lot from her and this is the way I can give it back.”

  To Phillip, cheating a woman out of billions of dollars didn’t seem to be repaying her; it seemed more like a punishment. But he kept his mouth shut.

  It wasn’t until after James’s death, when Phillip saw the true nature of Atlanta and Ray, that he wanted Lillian to fight. He wanted to head a team of the most clever, most conniving lawyers in the U.S., and he wanted to take every penny away from those two greedy worms. In the weeks since James’s death, Phillip had never seen anything like what had been done to Lillian, both by the media and by people he’d thought of as James’s friends.

  But Lillian wouldn’t budge. Nothing anyone said could make her file suit. Phillip and the other lawyers told her that she could give the money to charity after she won it, but that still didn’t make her change her mind.

  “Jimmie was very smart about business,” she said, “and he did this for a reason. There’s something he wants out of this, so I’m going to abide by the will.”

  “Manville is dead,” one of the lawyers said, his face red with exasperation. His thoughts were written on his face: What kind of woman could turn down billions of dollars?

  After the third meeting, Lillian had stood up from the table and said, “I’ve heard all your arguments, seen all your evidence that shows that I could win, and I still won’t do it. I’m going to abide by my husband’s will.” She then turned around and walked away from them.

  One of the lawyers, a man who hadn’t known James, and certainly didn’t know his wife, snickered and said softly, “Obviously, she’s too simple to know what money means.”

  Lillian heard him. Slowly, she turned around and looked at the man in a way that was so like James Manville, Phillip drew in his breath. “What you don’t understand,” she said quietly, “is that there is more to life than money. Tell me, if you were a billionaire and you died and left your wife nothing, would she fight for it? Or would she love the memory of you more than the money?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and walked out of the room.

  The other lawyers hid their faces from the man Lillian had just told off because they couldn’t contain their laughter. He had, in fact, just been through his third very nasty divorce and his ex-wife had fought him down to who got the antique doorknobs.

  In the end, Phillip had given up trying to persuade Lillian to fight. The night of the last meeting, he’d fallen into bed beside Carol and said, “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Help her,” Carol said.

  “What do you think this has all been about?” he’d snapped at his wife.

  Carol was unfazed; she didn’t even glance up from the magazine she was looking at. “You’ve been trying to make her into what she isn’t. You’re a worse tyrant than James was.”

  “Yes, and I can see that you’re terribly intimidated by me,” he said sarcastically. “So what’s in that pretty little brain of yours?” After twelve years of marriage, he could almost read her mind, and he knew when she wanted to tell him something. As always, she’d waited for him to fail, and only then would she offer her help.

  “You’ve got to help her do whatever it is that she wants to do,” Carol said.

  “Any ideas what that is?” he asked, looking at her with skepticism. “She stays alone in the guest room, and doesn’t talk to anyone. All those so-called friends that James used to fill the house with haven’t so much as called her to say they’re sorry about his death.” His voice was filled with disgust.

  “I don’t know her very well, but it seems to me that when she was with James, she tried very hard to have a normal life.”

  Phillip snorted. “Normal? With James Manville? Carol, did you have blinders on? They lived in vast houses all over the world; they were surrounded by servants. I took her into a department store right after James died, and I swear she’d never seen one before. Or at least not since she ran away from home