Within Reason: Mill Brook Trilogy, Book 2

by Carla Neggers

  She was sobbing when she finished. She blamed the heat and overexertion and panic and even too much red meat last night for supper. She blamed Adam’s relentless nature and told herself she was glad to be rid of him. Damn glad. Smart thinking, sending him off as she had.

  But she kept sobbing, smearing dirt and tears and sweat over her face with the backs of her hands.

  She hadn’t cried in years. Not even when Aunt Millicent had died. Dear Aunt Millie. Her death had been the catalyst for her grandniece’s move to Tennessee. What would she have to say now? Something, for sure. Aunt Millie had always had something to say.

  I’ve got to calm down, Char thought. I’ll go out for coffee and biscuits and think about where I’m going to set up housekeeping next. We’ll be fine, Emily and I.

  She pictured the farm of her dreams, she pictured Mill Brook Center and Old Mill Brook Common and her little eighteenth-century house and her office in the village with the window boxes of petunias. For the holidays she and Em would pick princess pine and cut white pine boughs and arrange them in the boxes with pine-cones.

  She pictured their wood stove on cold nights, pictured running water and flush toilets and their refrigerator with its place for eggs and their stove with four burners and their washing machine.

  She smelled cracked wheat bread baking in the oven and heard Emily roller skating in the living room with friends... and she saw a gray-faced Adam Stiles standing in the doorway telling her his wife was dead and he needed her help. She was his attorney and maybe his friend.

  He hadn’t been afraid to ask for her help.

  Char pictured it all—Mill Brook, dreams, memories, fantasy, reality, the day they had buried her Great-Aunt Millicent who had left Char so much money and told her to go for broke in life, if that was what she wanted. Don’t be afraid to chase rainbows. Char pictured all she’d had, all she’d given up.

  What she had left was nothing.

  Except Emily.

  ‘Thank God,” she whispered, wiping her face with a tissue and disgusted because she was being a damn fool. She had her daughter and her own strength of character and skills and education. She hadn’t lost anything important.

  What did you do, blow all your money on a horse?

  Good ol’ Adam. He did know how to hit a nail on the head. It was just as well, she decided as she banged her car into gear, that she had sent him off on yet another wild-goose chase.

  The winding back road was deceptive, for the place Char had sent Adam to easily rivaled Belle Meade or Cheekwood. The paved driveway was flanked by mature cedar trees, beyond which were rolling pastures and the Cumberland River, shimmering in the late-afternoon heat. At the end of the driveway stood a spectacular Greek Revival house, as beautifully landscaped as any museum, with stables and outbuildings in stone. Adam half expected to see a sign directing him to the visitor’s parking lot, but the knot in his stomach told him this was no museum.

  Neither, he felt certain, was it Char’s place. A private residence perhaps, but not hers, no matter how good her nose for a deal. Millicent hadn’t left her that much money. And this place had about it the look of tradition and family, the kind of property handed down from generation to generation. Adam wouldn’t have been surprised if it had never been up for sale, never mind bought by a Vermont Yankee. He wished he had Beth with him. She knew all the well-to-do in central Tennessee from her brief marriage to Harlan Rockwood. Wildly busy himself during those years, Adam had never had a chance to visit her and Harlan.

  He parked in the driveway and headed down a trim brick walkway to the columned porch and the front door, where he rang the doorbell. God only knew who would answer, but he’d bet it wouldn’t be a housekeeper named Ginger.

  He was wrong.

  Ginger was a plain, older woman with a strong central Tennessee accent. Her manner was polite and amiable, but she kept Adam out on the porch. “How can I help you?”

  “I’m a friend of Charity Bradford’s.”

  “Oh?”

  “She’s supposed to meet me back here.”

  “Mr.... ?”

  “Stiles,” he supplied, “Adam Stiles. I’m from Vermont.”

  Ginger took a breath and held it, her expression telling Adam she had opinions she was trying to keep to herself. Finally she said, “Miss Bradford isn’t here.”

  “I know. She’s gone to pick up her daughter. Shell be back—”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Ginger had crossed her arms and was shaking her head, looking a bit sad. Adam frowned. “This isn’t Char’s house, is it?”

  “No, I’m afraid it isn’t.”

  “Mind if I ask whose house it is?”

  That was a question Ginger could answer with pride. “This house belongs to Mr. Harlan Rockwood.”

  In addition to all her other falsities, Char had lied to Adam about when she had to pick up her daughter. She’d had two more hours before she had to be at the school. During that time she accomplished a great deal, including unloading her car. She hadn’t given in, not to guilt, not to anger, not to depression, not to exhaustion. She would get through this disaster. She had, after all, no other choice.

  Emily, ever her perky self, jumped into the car and yanked the door shut. “Did Uncle Adam leave?”

  The sight of her daughter’s eyes, so huge in the confines of the car, made Char’s stomach lurch. What a life she was forcing Em to live! How could she do it? Because you have to. But did she? Couldn’t she swallow her pride and go back to Vermont? She tried to tell herself it wasn’t just a matter of pride, but also of doing what was right, what had to be done. Maybe she was kidding herself. Maybe Adam was right.

  “Yes,” she said. “He had to get back and see Abby and David.”

  Emily pushed her sweaty bangs off her forehead. “Think he’ll come back?”

  “He might. You never know with Adam.”

  If I were him, I’d never want to see me again. Char gripped the steering wheel, wishing that thought didn’t make her feel so damn desolate. She had no idea why it did. Months used to go by without her giving any thought whatsoever to Adam Stiles. He was sort of like a big old rock in the woods, always there, never changing. Now Char was wondering if she’d ever stop thinking about the man.

  “How was your day?” she asked her daughter.

  Emily rattled on for a few minutes about gross school lunches, the third-graders who thought they were so cool, the real neat bug experiment they were doing in class and the journals she and the rest of her classmates were keeping. Emily’s spelling wasn’t the best and her punctuation nonexistent, but she loved telling “Ira”— the name of the fictional person she wrote to in her journal—about the goings-on in her life. Char had had to force herself to respect her daughter’s privacy and not snoop. Not that Emily cared. What she didn’t read aloud to her mother she told her.

  But not today. Whatever she’d written in her journal today she wasn’t going to tell one poor tired mother.

  “Why not?” Char asked.

  “Because it’s private.”

  “What does a seven-year-old know about private?”

  Emily clamped her mouth shut and that, Char could tell, was that. Not that she was willing to give up just yet. “You complained about me not letting you have a hot dog last night, didn’t you?”

  Emily shot her mother a look that made Char remember both the kid’s parents were lawyers.

  “Well, I don’t care,” Char said. “Hot dogs are made out of pig lips and—”

  “Mom!” Emily giggled. “Hot dogs aren’t made out of pig lips.”

  “Have you ever considered what they are made out of?”

  “Cereal.”

  “Cereal? Where’d you hear that?”

  “On a commercial.”

  “We don’t have a TV.”

  “When we were in Vermont. I remember. Come on, Mom. I know hot dogs aren’t made out of pig lips. And they’re not made out of dogs, either. I used to think that when I was litt
le.”

  “Then why are they called dogs? They don’t look like dogs.”

  “That’d be gross.”

  “True,” Char conceded. “So what did you say about your mother in your journal?” But Emily buttoned up, and Char laughed. “You don’t have to tell me. Honestly. I can see a reporter trying to get information out of you if you ever become a lawyer.”

  “No way. I’m going to be an archaeologist.”

  “When I was seven I wanted to become a pirate and sail the seven seas.” And when she was eight, and from then on, she had wanted to own horses and have space and rolling hills around her. Ah, well. She patted Emily on the knee. “Guess what? I have a surprise for you.”

  Emily rubbed her hands together in instant excitement. “Uncle Adam stayed?”

  Char shook her head, forcing herself not to feel guilty over Emily’s obvious longing for the connection to her past that Adam represented. Kids were adaptable, and Emily a free-spirited, gutsy one at that, but Vermont to her was still home. She had friends in Tennessee, but the roots hadn’t sunk in deep yet.

  “No, Emily, Adam was just visiting. He had to go home to be with his kids. We’ll go back to Mill Brook someday and visit, okay? Anyway, my surprise is better than having Uncle Adam take us out for another night on the town.”

  Emily was dubious about that. “It is?”

  “Sure. Close your eyes.”

  In a few minutes Char parked along the curb in front of a tiny Craftsman-style cottage in a small town west of Nashville, where rents weren’t as high as downtown and Emily wouldn’t have to switch schools. Nevertheless, the security deposit and first month’s rent had cost Char every cent—and more—that she had saved. She’d had to dip into her fund to repay Beth Stiles the money she had given Char to invest in her Tennessee horse project. What had become Char’s nightmare was still Beth’s dream, and Char was determined her best friend would get back every penny she had entrusted to her. Dipping into money she didn’t consider her own bothered Char, but continuing to live in a tent when the adventure for her and Emily was long past didn’t just bother her. It was eating away at her insides. She didn’t have next month’s rent, but that was thirty days away.

  “Open your eyes,” she said softly. Then she smiled. “Welcome home, kiddo.”

  Emily squealed and threw her arms around her mother’s neck, and all Char had endured in the past twenty-four hours suddenly seemed inconsequential—even worth it. They examined the cottage together. There was only one bedroom, which Emily would get, plus a small living room, an eat-in kitchen and an old-fashioned bathroom with water stains in the tub, but after their tent the little house seemed like a palace. Emily especially loved the postage-stamp backyard dominated by a huge pecan tree. She couldn’t wait to hang her bird feeder. The question of furniture was secondary in the minds of both mother and daughter. Their cottage was clean and dry, and they could bake cookies tonight and have a hot shower in the morning.

  Silently Char thanked Adam Stiles for forcing her off that river.

  That night she and Emily had stuffed pasta shells and salad and for dessert, baked oatmeal cookies. Emily went to her cot a happy child. Sitting up in her unfurnished living room, Char listened to the rain sweeping through central Tennessee and for the first time in months felt satisfied, if so damn alone. Today a house, tomorrow groceries, the next day—who knows? A table? Curtains?

  She did have a future.

  And that future included settling a score with the rich snake of a man who had swindled her.

  From the jaws of defeat, victory.

  She smiled as she unrolled her sleeping bag and thought again of Adam. What had happened when he’d knocked on Harlan Rockwood’s front door. What had he done?

  Would he tell Beth?

  No. No, Char didn’t have to worry about that. Adam would never upset his sister by telling her that her best friend might very well be mixed up with her ex-husband.

  Might very well be indeed. But she wasn’t going to ruin her mood by thinking about Harlan... or about Adam. Was he cursing her from thirty thousand feet up?

  ‘Thank you, Adam,” she said to herself, “but I’m so glad you’re back in Vermont.”

  And she crawled into her sleeping bag, amazed at how good life looked when she knew she wouldn’t have to face slugs in her shoes in the morning.

  Adam arrived back in Vermont at midnight, turned up at the sawmill at eight the next morning and had his sister to dinner that evening. He refused to discuss Charity Bradford until David and Abby went out to the den to work their latest thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. The evening air was cool enough to build fires in the two wood stoves, one of the first tasks Adam had learned to manage one-handed. He had never even considered giving up his lifestyle in the hills above Mill Brook; he and Julian and Beth had built his post-and-beam house overlooking the rushing, clear, rocky Mill Brook. Six months after he, Mel and the kids had moved in, his wife finally admitted she hated living so far out of town. Why had she pretended enthusiasm for the project when she had felt none? For your sake, Adam, she had told him. I couldn’t bear to disappoint you. Even now his insides burned with guilt at the memory of her words.

  Never again would he permit anyone to do anything for his sake. He could live with disappointment and compromise better than he could guilt. And he had learned to demand honesty and openness from the people around him—most of all, from himself. Mel and he had drifted apart. If she had refused to see what had happened between them, he should have. Perhaps they could have worked out the problems in their marriage; perhaps not. But a resolution, in favor or against staying together, would have been preferable to the state of siege that had existed between them in the last months of Mel’s life.

  Now she was dead. His children had lost their mother, and Adam had lost his naivety. He no longer readily believed what people said. It didn’t follow that just because he never said what he didn’t mean everyone else did the same. Now he always asked himself what was percolating underneath other people’s words. What were the hidden agendas? What weren’t they telling him, for his sake or their own?

  What, for example, hadn’t Char told him?

  And what wasn’t his sister telling him?

  He brought her a mug of hot mulled cider and sat cross-legged with her on the thick carpet in front of the living room wood stove. Solid, dependable, no-nonsense Beth. She could operate any saw at the mill, do any job, take over for either of her brothers, as they could for her. She drove the shabbiest car in Mill Brook and rented a saltbox house in the village, built shortly after the end of the War of 1812 with wood cut on Mill Brook Post and Beam’s old water-powered up-and-down saw. The place was starting to crumble, but she, ever the optimist, believed it could be saved with a little sweat and Yankee ingenuity. She preferred, she claimed, to live a simple life.

  It hadn’t always been that way. Tawny-haired, green-eyed and more attractive than she liked to admit, Beth had shared her best friend Char’s childhood dream of getting out of Mill Brook. At eighteen, when she chose Vanderbilt University in Nashville over the New England colleges that had accepted her, Beth had made her own bid for independence. She met wealthy, charming Harlan Rockwood as an undergraduate; he was a second-year law student. They had married six months later, against the powerful Rockwood family’s wishes. They stayed in Nashville.

  In the shadow of the Rockwoods their marriage began to flounder within a year, but Beth wasn’t a quitter. Trying to ignore her unhappiness, she threw herself into one upwardly mobile job after another until her whole life came apart at the seams. She left her husband, left her high-profile sales jobs, left the posh life being a Rockwood had afforded her. She came home to Mill Brook and the Stiles family business, and if she hadn’t had much to do with men since Harlan, it was her doing.

  More than one man from Vermont had approached Adam for background information on his sister, which he refused to provide. If they wanted to know about Elizabeth Stiles, they would have to fi
nd out for themselves. Many tried. But although she enjoyed an occasional evening out, Beth wasn’t looking for a permanent relationship. Men, she liked to insist, were babies—her brothers excluded, of course: She preferred to put her time and energy into logs.

  Beth sipped her hot cider while Adam related his frustrating trip to Tennessee. Even while he talked he had to repress images of Char and Emily in the sticky heat of their tent on the Cumberland River. They didn’t have to live that way. If Char knew so damn much about everything, why didn’t she know that?

  “Char’s stubborn,” Beth said finally, explaining the obvious. “And she’s proud.”

  Adam scowled. “She’s cutting off her nose to spite her face.”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure we have the right to judge without all the facts.”

  “All what facts?”

  Beth lifted her shoulders in a half-innocent shrug, but didn’t meet her older brother’s eye. “Well, we don’t have Char’s side of the story. There might be a logical explanation for everything she’s done. Adam, you know you rub her the wrong way. She might have been pulling your string the whole time.”

  “Charity Bradford isn’t a game player,” Adam pointed out. “You know that. Beth, what aren’t you telling me?”

  “Nothing...”

  “You never could lie worth a damn. You know something about this business that you don’t want me to know. So far you’ve done all the listening and I’ve done all the talking.”

  Beth gave him an irritated look. “I haven’t seen Char since she left Mill Brook. How would I know what she’s up to?”

  “You’ve been friends forever.”

  “So? Adam, I’m not defending her. I’m just trying to be objective—”

  “Are you denying you were worried about her?”

  “No!”

  “Then why are you squirming?”