He took a deep breath and stood up, but he stayed behind her.
“Look, he’s just a bird and he’s probably lonely,” she said.
“Actually, he’s so mean no one can stand to be around him.” Tentatively, Tate stepped around Casey and took her hand. “I think we better find the truck and get out of here.”
But Casey didn’t move. Still holding Tate’s hand, she took a step forward, her other hand extended toward the bird. “I’m sure he’s a very nice guy. He just needs a little TLC.”
The big bird suddenly put its magnificent tail up in a glorious circle—and pecked Casey’s hand hard.
“Ow! That hurt!” There was blood on her hand. “I think—”
Tate didn’t give her time to say any more because the peacock, its five-foot tail flashing in the sunlight, was going after Casey.
With the expertise of having done it in many movies, Tate threw her over his shoulder and began to run, the peacock on his heels.
Casey lifted her head enough to see the bird. “He’s gaining on us. Run faster!”
“You sound like my last director.” He swerved around two tree stumps, brushed tree branches out of his face, and jumped over a fallen log.
“I could walk, you know,” Casey said, but Tate ran a caressing hand over her curvy rear end, which was right by his ear. “Actually, I think my ankle is broken and I may never walk again.”
Tate laughed. “Is he still charging us?”
“Oh, yeah. You think that tail is up for you or me? You’re by far the prettier one.”
Tate sat her down with a thunk on the seat of the little truck and kissed her quickly. “He wants you. You look and feel and taste like a girl.” He said it with such a leer that Casey came close to giggling.
Tate started to run around the front, but the peacock pecked his ankle, so he climbed over Casey—with lots of hand–body contact—into the driver’s side, started the engine, and drove as fast as the vehicle could go.
She was watching out the back. “You outran him.”
He slowed down the truck, looked at Casey, and they burst into laughter.
“Hello,” Olivia said.
Casey was putting buckets and mixing bowls in the utility truck. After she and Tate got back, she’d asked to borrow the truck so she could try to find where fruit was growing. He’d warned her to watch out for the livestock, then they’d kissed goodbye, and he’d run to the Big House and the trainer.
“Enjoying your day off?”
The thought of just how much she’d been enjoying the day sent blood rushing to Casey’s face. “So far, it’s been one of the best days of my life. What about you?”
Olivia smiled. “I take it you spent the morning with the master of the plantation.”
“I did,” she said.
“Judging by the new scratches on your forearms, I’d say that you were at the back of the property.”
Casey looked at her in shock. “I forget that you grew up in Summer Hill. Did you spend a lot of time on Tattwell?”
“In the summer of 1970, I was the housekeeper for Uncle Freddy. He wasn’t my uncle, but everyone called him that. What are you doing with all these containers?”
“I’m going to search for food. Tate drove us around this morning and I saw several possibilities. It’s early in the season, but I think there are a few things I can preserve. You wouldn’t like to go with me, would you?”
“I’d love to.”
As they got into the little truck, Casey focused on Olivia. She wasn’t sure, but she thought maybe she’d been crying. “Everything okay at home?”
“Fine,” Olivia said. “Did you check the cherry trees? A few of them used to bear fruit very early.”
“Tell me where they are.”
Olivia gave directions and Casey drove.
“It’s changed so much since I was here,” Olivia said. “All of this used to be beautifully kept. Uncle Freddy gave jobs to so many people in Summer Hill—which is probably why he died broke.”
There was a sadness in her voice that made Casey frown. Earlier, Casey had been so happy that she called her mother to tell her everything—well, maybe not all of it. Her mother had been delivering a baby, though, and couldn’t talk.
But now Casey didn’t feel right talking about her happiness when Olivia looked so forlorn. And she had an idea that her daughter-in-law, Hildy, was behind it. Why in the world was Olivia living in the same house as that rude young woman? Maybe she could find out by starting at the beginning. “Were you madly in love with your late husband?”
Olivia let out a loud laugh. “No, I wasn’t.”
“Oh,” Casey said.
“Turn here. I shouldn’t have said that. I did come to love him, but when I married him I didn’t love him at all.”
Before them were half a dozen cherry trees, some of them dead, all of them in desperate need of pruning. There wasn’t much fruit, but there was some. Casey turned off the engine. “I’ll get what I can while you tell me the story.”
Olivia seemed to consider that for a moment. “All right,” she said as she got out of the truck.
They walked through tall weeds and trees with broken branches, to one that was laden with ripe cherries. The sun was shining, and everything was glistening from the morning rain.
“It was 1972, and emotionally I was in a very bad place. I had recently been told that I couldn’t have children.”
Casey gave a gasp.
“It’s okay,” Olivia said. “It was a long time ago.” She took a deep breath. “My Broadway career had failed and I was at home in Summer Hill, living with my parents. I loved them, but they were older and they hated any noise. You ever play the Rolling Stones at whisper level? It loses a lot.”
Casey laughed.
“I got a job as the bookkeeper at Trumbull Appliances. The owner was a man named Alan, and he was in a mess. For one thing, his wife had died in childbirth and left him with an infant son.”
“Oh,” Casey said. “And there you were with baby lust.”
“It was eating up my soul,” Olivia said. “My childless future made me want to lie down in the road and let trucks run over me. Anyway, there was Alan with this motherless baby and a thoroughly incompetent, lazy live-in housekeeper who pestered him all day with her complaints.”
“Perfect for you to step in,” Casey said.
“At the time I thought so. Besides Alan’s domestic problems, the store was failing. He’d inherited the place from his father, who had been a great salesman, but Alan took after his quiet-tempered mother. By the time I got there, he had only two employees and they did very little work.”
Olivia began to fill a stainless mixing bowl with cherries.
“For three whole months I stood back and watched as things fell apart, but then one day Alan was at his desk, eating a bologna sandwich and pulling strands of the housekeeper’s long dark hair out of it, when she brought the baby in. She handed him to Alan, said she had a headache, and left. He had a desk piled high with papers, the phone was ringing, and he looked like he was going to cry.”
Olivia took a breath. “I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t ask permission, I just took over. I put the baby on his desk and changed him, all while telling Alan what to do. I’m afraid I was very bossy. ‘Answer the phone.’ ‘Tell them you can deliver it by Tuesday.’ ‘Call the newspaper to repeat last week’s ad, but say that this Saturday you’re having a one-day fifteen-percent-off-everything sale.’ ”
“It sounds like you’d thought about it.” Casey put a full bucket of cherries in the truck.
“I had. From the first day, I’d watched and thought about what I would do if the business were mine. Anyway, six months later Alan and I were married, and twenty-plus years after that we owned five appliance stores that did very well.”
“And you came to love him?”
“Yes, I did. But not…” She smiled. “Not in that way of young love, the kind where you rip each other’s clothes off at first sig
ht.”
Casey smiled at the clothes-ripping image. It’s where she and Tate were. If he weren’t with the trainer, she would be with him now. As it was, she was planning a special dinner for the two of them to share. She made herself stop thinking about Tate. “I don’t mean to pry, but why do you now live in your stepson’s house? Did the stores fail?”
Olivia took a while before answering. “Alan willed the stores to his son, but I had our house and a good retirement plan, so I would be quite comfortable.”
Casey’s eyes widened. “Are you saying that your husband left the businesses that you had helped to build entirely to his son?”
“Yes, he did.”
Olivia looked away, but Casey saw a flash of pain go across her face. She had saved Alan Trumbull’s business, yet he’d left everything to his son. “His” being the key word. “What happened?”
“Kevin was always like his father, even in that he married a woman who was stronger than he was.”
“Like Alan married you? Olivia, I don’t mean to disparage anyone, but I’ve seen enough to know that Hildy is not like you.”
“Thank you. I don’t think she is either.” Olivia waved her hand. “That doesn’t matter. What happened was that as soon as Kevin got his inheritance, he and Hildy joined a country club, traveled, bought an expensive house, some cars, et cetera. Unfortunately, the stores suffered. By the time my stepson realized what was going on, they were almost bankrupt.”
“How did they recover?” Casey asked. “But wait, let me guess. You sold your house and emptied your retirement plan to bail them out.”
“I did,” Olivia said. “And I’m afraid it all shook me up more than I thought it would. I’ve been living in their house for about a year now and I need to do something else.”
“I think so,” Casey said. “I’ll ask Kit—”
“No!” Olivia said.
Casey started to ask more but the closed, final look on Olivia’s face made her back off. She knew that Kit had visited Tattwell when he was young. And he had handed Olivia the photo of her when she was an actress. Onstage, it didn’t take much to see that there were some deep feelings between them. Even talking about the rotten things her late husband and his family had done to Olivia hadn’t seemed to bring out the intensity of feeling that erupted at the mention of Kit Montgomery.
She decided to change the subject. “You said you worked at Tattwell in the summer of 1970. You wouldn’t remember a couple of little kids, would you?”
“Letty and Ace?” Olivia’s face lost its angry look. “They were quite unforgettable. They were into everything. If I baked cookies and walked out of the room for two minutes, half of them would disappear. There were times when I wanted to strangle both of them—except that I was laughing at their antics too often. Uncle Freddy loved them so much! He was in a wheelchair and everyone treated him as if he were glass. But not those kids! They used to turn off the chair’s brake and push him down every path on this property. One time he rolled into the shallow end of the pond, and that’s when Uncle Freddy found out that he could still swim. So he had the pool put in.”
Casey tried to be serious but couldn’t. She started laughing, and Olivia joined her.
“In retrospect it is funny, but it wasn’t then. They were the brattiest kids on earth.”
“I know Letty was Tate’s mother, but who was Ace?”
“He grew up to be Dr. Kyle Chapman.”
Casey was so shocked she nearly dropped the bucket of cherries. “My father was Ace?”
“Yes.” There was a twinkle in Olivia’s eyes. Everyone in town knew about the children that Dr. Kyle’s donations had created. “Poor kid. That summer his mother was dying of cancer. His dad needed time to be with her, and that’s why Ace pretty much lived here. People in town said the child didn’t know what was going on, but he most certainly did! When his dad brought him back from visits to his mother…” Olivia didn’t seem able to go on.
“What happened to the children at the end of the summer?” Casey asked softly.
“Tears and screaming. It was awful. Their misery made all of us cry. My mother wrote me that the next summer they were just as inseparable. Ace’s dad, Dr. Everett Chapman, was grieving for his wife, and he was the only doctor in Summer Hill. When Uncle Freddy asked him to please let Kyle stay at the Big House, he said yes. After that, the children’s summers together became the normal thing.”
“Until Letty’s dad got a different job and quit coming here.” Casey put the last bucket into the truck. “I wonder why Dad didn’t seek her out when he was an adult?”
“I have no idea. Why don’t you ask him?”
“I will. You ready to go? I’d like to go to the blackberry patch.”
“The one that surrounds the well house?” There was an odd tone to Olivia’s voice.
“Yes.” Casey pulled the ring on its black cord from inside her shirt. “Have you ever seen this before? It was in the kids’ treasure box.”
Olivia held it for a moment. “No. Never. I bet they found it in the attic. When it was too rainy to go out, the kids disappeared inside the house. We would hear them tramping around up there. There was a windup Victrola and they used to play Caruso records. You should have that ring appraised. It looks valuable.”
“I think so too. Ready to go?”
“Yes,” Olivia said.
They didn’t make it to the well house. Olivia suddenly remembered that she had things to do and couldn’t go, but Casey wondered if the problem was some memory of the little building.
She drove to the front gate, where Olivia’s car was parked, and let her out, then went back to the guesthouse to take care of the fruit and start dinner. But all she could think of was that she was dying to tell Tate what she’d learned.
It seemed that she may have stumbled on a mystery. What—if anything—had happened between Kit and Olivia during the summer of 1970? Some great love affair that ended badly? If so, who dumped whom? From the way Olivia’s lower jaw went rigid at the mention of Kit, Casey felt sure he’d left her. For the woman who became the mother of his son? Was the breakup caused by Olivia’s infertility?
At that thought, Casey’s heart clenched. Her mother, an OB/GYN, had talked to her about baby lust. “When it attacks a woman, she will move heaven and earth to satisfy it.”
“Like you did with me,” Casey would say, then she’d again be told the story of her conception.
Her mother said she’d thought that someday she’d meet a man and they’d marry and have babies. “I thought it would all just sort of happen, but on my fortieth birthday, it hit me that if I wanted it, I had to make it happen.”
“Baby lust,” Casey would say. Her mom had chosen a donor from a catalog: six two, blond, blue-eyed, studying to be a doctor. It wasn’t until Casey was an adult that she’d found out the information in the catalog was a stretch of the truth. Yes, Kyle Chapman was a beautiful, healthy young man, who did become a doctor. But at the time he’d made the donation that would become Casey, he was cooking in a food truck that he drove around New York City.
When she’d told her mother that, they laughed. “It was meant to be,” they said, meaning Casey’s love of cooking.
Dr. Kyle’s other children had inherited other traits. He’d spent a year riding a motorcycle in a metal sphere in a tiny circus. For six months he’d worked with a fabric manufacturer. The sisters had all agreed that Gizzy and Stacy had talents and temperaments that appeared to come from those traits of Dr. Kyle.
Casey looked at the buckets full of cherries. She should get started on them. But in the next second she was running out the door. Maybe her father had adventurously gone from job to job and country to country for so many years before starting med school because of Letty, Tate’s mother.
At the Big House, she walked along the back path toward the garage at the far end. Her mind was bubbling with all she had to tell Tate. His mother and her father had been best friends!
Casey had read the online
bio of her father, that his mother died when he was five and he’d been raised by his dad. When Kyle—aka Ace—was eighteen, he’d left home and for years had gone from one job to another, never staying anywhere very long. But then there’d been an accident and he’d saved a man’s life. The next day he went back to school and eventually became a doctor.
When Casey had read the story, it sounded romantic, but now the reality of it was hitting her. A little boy who’d lost his mother when he was only five. Forever after that he must have feared that something awful was about to happen to him. And no wonder he acted up by being naughty.
She wondered if all that had been behind why her father had run away from home when he was eighteen. But then, as the child of a doctor, Casey knew the pressure to follow in her mother’s footsteps. If she so much as glanced at a stethoscope, someone would remark that it was obvious Casey was going to grow up to be a doctor. When she said she didn’t want to be one, people laughed at her. It was almost as though she had to become a doctor.
Oh, yes, she well knew the pressure to follow parents into a medical career. Had her dad felt it so strongly that he’d escaped, at least temporarily?
And then there was Olivia. She’d been there that summer with the children.
Casey had a vision of her and Tate sitting down with Olivia and Dr. Kyle and hearing about Tate’s mother. There’d be funny stories and information gathered. Casey and Tate had found the well house where the kids played, but what about other places? She imagined exploring the attic with Tate. They’d play Caruso records on the old Victrola—then they’d make love on the floor.
As she got to the garage, she heard Tate’s voice. Damn! He was still with his trainer. Poor guy. They’d been at it for hours.
She leaned back against the building. Should she interrupt them or wait until later to tell Tate? If she met the trainer, how would Tate introduce her? As his girlfriend? That thought made her smile.
“Meryl Streep wants to play my mother?” she heard Tate say.