The air conditioner quickly cooled the car, making its passengers as comfortable as they could be under the circumstances. Katia concentrated on driving, if for no other reason than to relieve her mind of the heartrending images of those dual coffins. But the McNees and Cassie Morell had no such diversion.
“I still can’t believe it,” Cassie murmured. Even dazed, she enunciated her words carefully, as she had trained herself to do over the years so that one never knew her native language was French. “So much to live for, and it’s gone. All gone.” She pressed her fingertips to her temple. “Why? Why did it happen?”
In a flash of memory, Katia heard similiar words from her mother, uttered nearly nineteen years before, when Katia’s older brother and only sibling, Kenneth, had died in combat thousands of miles from home. Katia had been only eleven, but she had never forgotten Cassie’s pain and bitterness. Now, rather than bitterness, there was simply sadness in her mother’s voice.
Sarah McNee was in a daze of her own, her eyes focused blindly on the passing scenery as she tightly clutched her husband’s hand. “Mark was such an intense child,” she murmured, her brogue, which she made no attempt to cover even in the happiest of times, thicker than usual. “The father couldn’t understand him at all, and the missus worried terribly. He was a brooder, had a creative energy and no outlet. He had visions that were different from the others. From the start she knew he’d never make it in the business.”
“But he found his own business,” Katia pointed out softly, “and he was making a success of it.”
Cassie grunted. “Directing films. What kind of business is that?”
“A lucrative one,” Jonathan McNee injected, the lilt in his speech coated with dryness.
“But unstable.”
Katia shot her mother a gentle, if dissenting glance. “Everything in life is unstable to a degree. If, God forbid, something were to happen to Gil and Lenore today, you could well be out of a job tomorrow. If my company were to be taken over by another today, I could well be out of a job tomorrow. But Mark was onto something good. He’d worked and worked for it, and finally it happened. That’s one of the reasons why this is all so hard to believe.”
“Directing music videos—you call that good?” Cassie mocked. “I can just imagine the kind of crowd he ran with.”
“Mother, Mark was forty-three years old. It’s not as though he were a child. He knew what he was doing. The films he made were good, and the music videos were frosting on the cake. God knows they were timely. Ask Jordan. His cable station is devoted solely to showing videos like the ones Mark was putting out, and he’s raking it in.”
Sarah leaned forward. “Jordan has the golden touch. He rakes it in regardless of what he’s doing.”
Katia couldn’t deny that. Jordan had been phenomenally successful right from the start. Where Nick had been the model son and Mark the distracted one, Jordan, the youngest, had been the aggressive black sheep. He had been determined to strike out on his own, to shun the Whyte Estate and make an independent name for himself. Armed with his father’s business acumen, not to mention the quick temper that struck fear into associates and competitors alike, he had proceeded forcefully. There had been times over the years when he had risked everything on a project, when he had weathered odds that had sent others running in the opposite direction, but he’d made it. Tenacity was one of his greater strengths.
“Deborah was pregnant,” Cassie said so softly that at first Katia, who had been thinking only of Jordan at that moment, wasn’t sure she had heard correctly.
“Excuse me?”
“Deborah was pregnant.”
Katia sucked in a breath. “I didn’t know!” She shot a glance in her rearview mirror and saw that the McNees were as startled as she, which didn’t surprise her. Cassie Morell wasn’t a gossip; more than that, she had never fully identified with the McNees. Though employed in the same capacity and seeing them often, she had always remained a bit apart.
“It had just been confirmed,” Cassie admitted. “I heard Mrs. Warren telling the congressman about it the other day. Deborah didn’t want anyone else to know until she was further along.”
Shaken, Katia gripped the steering wheel more tightly. “Do you think it was possible that Mark didn’t want the child?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or that she didn’t want the child?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could she and Mark have argued about it?”
“I don’t know. I only heard one side of the story. Mrs. Warren was frightened. After what Deborah went through with the last one, it’s understandable.” Desperately wanting a child, Deborah had conceived four years before and carried to term, only to suffer a stillbirth. “They were pleased, the senior Warrens were. They felt that if all went well it would be the best thing for Deborah. It had to have been hard on her, what with Mark running here, there and everywhere.”
Katia might have argued that Deborah had known what she had been getting into when she had married Mark, but it seemed pointless. They were dead. Both of them. That fact shocked her each time it registered.
“God, it seems like yesterday that we were kids, so carefree, just playing together…” she whispered, letting her words trail off as fragments of the past flashed through her mind. Her passengers grew quiet too, lost in thoughts of their own. Katia was almost sorry to approach Dover and realize that the toughest part was yet to come.
When she had arrived the night before it had been late. Wanting to be with her mother, to console and be consoled, she’d gone straight to the small cottage at the rear of the Warren house where she had lived as a child. She hadn’t seen the Warrens or the Whytes other than at the cemetery. Now she would be with them, as she had been for so much of her life. Their grief would magnify her own, she knew. Their devastation would make hers that much more real.
Taking a deep breath, she turned off the main road onto the private way that led, in turn, to a fork. Several hundred yards to the left was the elegant colonial stone farmhouse of the Whytes. Several hundred yards to the right, where she now headed, was the stately Georgian colonial of the Warrens.
As a child, Katia had wondered why two families who shared so much and had even bought abutting pieces of land at the very same time had chosen to build such different style homes. When she had questioned her mother, Cassie had simply said that different women had different tastes, which had puzzled Katia all the more, since even her child’s mind saw that Jack and Gil were the ones in command.
Only when she had grown older had she understood that the houses had been consolation prizes. Jack and Gil were indeed the ones in power, basking in the limelight, reaping the glory. Their wives took back seats and were often alone. It was in token deference to them that the men had stood aside when the houses were being designed.
Hence different styles representing different personalities. Natalie Whyte, in her charming stone farmhouse, was a far warmer woman than Lenore Warren, in her more pretentious Georgian colonial, could ever be.
Which was another bit of anguish Katia felt for Deborah. Deborah, who had been gentle and giving, wanting nothing more than to love and be loved, whose mother was stern and whose father was absent, who had wanted a child and had been denied it, twice, by death.
Who said the rich didn’t bleed? she asked herself in anger.
Pulling in beside her mother’s cottage, well behind the caterers’ trucks, Katia parked the car. She sat at the wheel for a minute to regain her composure, then quietly followed the others toward the main house.
At the door, Cassie turned back to instruct her gently, “I don’t want you working while you’re here, Katia.”
“Why not? You are.”
“It’s my job, not yours.”
“But I can help.”
“You’re a guest.”
“A guest in my own home?”
“You know what I mean.”
Katia did. In many ways it was the crux of th
e dilemma she had grappled with for years. Who was she? Where did she belong? On one hand this was her home. She had grown up a Whyte-Warren, the adopted little sister of the others. She had attended school with them, had taken dancing and skating lessons with them. She had had free run of the houses, the grounds, the stables. She had spent Thanksgivings at the Whytes, Christmases at the Warrens. And during the summers she had gone to the island.
She had never wanted for anything. Still, her mother was the hired help.
From the time Katia had been old enough to understand that she and her brother were lower in status than the others, she had wondered at the material advantages she and Kenny had. Cassie had alternately attributed the fine clothes, the skating lessons, the spending money to prudent budgeting on her part and generosity on the part of the Warrens, but Katia came to realize that Cassie would have done most anything in the world to see that her children rose above her own station in life.
Through her high school years, Katia had straddled a socioeconomic fence. She could play the game with little effort, acting the part of a Warren or Whyte. Few people beyond her immediate group of friends knew that she was the daughter of the housekeeper. But she knew, and that knowledge added to the inevitable confusion of adolescence. She felt increasingly awkward eating dinner with the Warrens while her mother ate separately in the kitchen. She felt compelled to help around the house, then self-conscious when she did so. She grew increasingly uncomfortable going to the country club with the others when she didn’t belong to it herself.
When it came time for college, Katia knew she had to break out on her own. Rather than apply to Wellesley or Radcliffe or Smith, as her mother had wanted her to do, she applied and was accepted on full scholarship to New York University. There she hoped to find anonymity, and, in time, herself.
New York City was also where Jordon Whyte was.
“Katia?” Her mother urged her back to the present with a gentle shake and a look of concern. “Are you all right?”
Katia stared at her for a moment’s reorientation, then smiled. “I’m fine.”
“And you do know what I mean. You’re a career woman now. A successful career woman. Your mother may be the housekeeper here, but you—you are on par with any one of the Warrens or Whytes, or, for that matter, any of the guests that may be here today.” She touched Katia’s hair, stroking it lightly. The gesture was from the heart, emerging as a moment’s digression from the dictates of Cassie’s brain. Katia had always been aware of that dichotomy in her mother, who loved with extreme gentleness yet was driven by quiet obsession. “I want you to hold your head high.”
“I think I’m holding your head high,” Katia teased, then stood aside as a waiter carried a platter of food in from one of the trucks. Cassie waited for him to pass before responding.
“I’m proud of you,” she said with conviction, then enclosed her daughter in a firm hug. “I won’t deny that. I have a right to be proud, don’t you think?”
Katia took pleasure in the moment’s closeness. “I’ve tried. God knows, I’ve tried.”
“Cassie?” Sarah’s slightly frantic call came from the kitchen, her plump figure following seconds later. “They can’t find the percolator! I’ve looked everywhere!”
Cassie reluctantly released Katia, giving her hand a final squeeze before turning to Sarah. “You simply haven’t looked in the right place,” she answered gently as she went off to unearth the elusive item.
Behind her Katia smiled, as proud of her mother as her mother was of her. It hadn’t always been that way. For a time during those high school years when she had questioned her identity so strongly, she had been ashamed of Cassie’s position. She had been angry that her mother wasn’t a pillar of society, angry that certain guests of the Warrens looked down their noses at them both, angry that she couldn’t impress friends by inviting them to the house for dinner.
And she had been torn. There were times when her heart had ached at the knowledge that her mother’s fate in life was to make other people’s beds. Even when she had reminded herself that Cassie didn’t actually do that—there was a maid hired to do nothing but the cleaning, and there was a cook whose veal piccata was as sensational as his Belgian waffles—the hurt remained.
Only when Katia went away to college, when she mixed for the first time with people from all stations in life, did she develop the pride and understanding she felt now.
Cassie’s job was to oversee the Warren household and ensure that it ran smoothly. She did that well. She was in control. In hindsight, Katia saw that this facet of her mother’s personality had provided a source of stability to Katia’s upbringing.
Now, wandering past workers who scurried from room to room in the spacious first floor of the house, Katia marveled at all that her mother governed. The Warren house was magnificent. Each time she returned, she appreciated it more. From the Hepplewhite sideboard and gleaming mahogany table and chairs in the dining room to the double-faced sofas and chintz-covered wing chairs in the living room and the elegant spiral staircase in the huge front hall—it was the stuff of which dreams were made.
Still, Katia was content with her small but stylish apartment in New York. Sinking onto the needlepoint-covered bench by the grand piano in the living room, Katia knew that if she had ever aspired to call these things her own, she did no more. Where once she had thought that the Warrens and Whytes had to be the luckiest people in the world, now she knew differently.
Luck had little to do with wealth and power, and neither of those guaranteed happiness. Mark and Deborah were a case in point.…
The sound of tires on the circular drive outside brought Katia’s head around. Heart racing, she rose from the bench and hurried to open the front door. A wave of heat struck her, seeming to thicken the pall of sadness cast by the arrival of the ominously black limousines.
The first had come to a stop and the senior Warrens were stepping out. Lenore looked distinctly wobbly. Her son-in-law, Donald, supported her, while Gil turned to help Laura and the children.
Katia stood at the front door, her heart breaking for them all. She hugged Laura, who reached her first, then Donald, and, as the children scampered into the house, she put a gentle arm around Lenore’s waist and pressed her cheek to hers.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Warren,” she whispered. “So sorry.”
Lenore didn’t return the embrace, though Katia hadn’t expected her to. She had never quite accepted Katia as the others had done, and Katia understood. Her heart went out to the woman in more ways than one.
After Lenore passed into the house, there were hugs for Peter, his wife and their two sons, then a prolonged one for Emily. Of all the Whyte-Warren siblings, Emily was closest in age to Katia. They had been bosom buddies once upon a time, and though they had gone their separate ways in the last ten years, the affection they had shared as children remained intact.
“What can I say, Em?” Katia said softly. “It shouldn’t have happened.”
“I know,” was all Emily could manage. Clutching her veil in one hand, she groped blindly behind with the other to draw her companion forward. “Katia … Andrew.”
Katia nodded, sure that Andrew, beautiful and cocky on sight, was an actor, but equally as sure that he wasn’t one she recognized. At that moment, however, she saw Gilbert Warren approach. Apologizing in a glance to Emily and Andrew, she moved past them and descended three shallow steps to meet him.
Her heart wrenching in sympathy, she hesitated before Gil for an instant. He finally moved forward and took her in his arms, hugging her tightly.
“Katia,” he breathed hoarsely. “I’m glad you’re here.”
She felt it then, the special something they shared, and she held him every bit as tightly for a fleeting moment. “I wish it were any other occasion than this, Gil. You know how I felt about Deborah.”
For a minute, Gil didn’t speak. When he stepped back he studied Katia’s face. Then, smiling sadly, he brushed the back of his hand agai
nst her cheek. It was a gesture he had made many, many times in Katia’s life, as familiar to her as the trace of cherry-scented pipe tobacco that clung to his clothes.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he repeated brokenly. Taking her elbow, he led her toward the house. “You should have come to see us last night.”
“I … it wasn’t my place to do that, with everyone else here.”
“We would have liked it. It’s been too long since we’ve seen you.”
“How is Lenore holding up?”
“Not well. My guess is that she’ll make it through another hour before she goes on up to bed.”
He didn’t have to elaborate. Lenore sought the seclusion of her bedroom when something bothered her, and it seemed that something was always bothering her. Which was another thing Katia had come to admire in Cassie, who, along with Natalie Whyte, had been more of a mother to the Warren brood than Lenore. If the world only knew.
“And you?” Katia asked, aware that Gil looked pale and more tired than she had ever seen him. “Are you okay?”
He shrugged, then attempted a smile that failed sadly. “I’ll make it.”
They were in the front hall. Gil pressed a gentle kiss to Katia’s forehead. Then, without another word, he straightened his shoulders and retraced his steps to the front walk. He was going to greet his constituents. Katia should have been dismayed, but she knew Gil too well. Politics was in his blood. One either had to love him as he was or despise him. Katia had simply chosen the former.
The stream through the front door resumed with the arrival of the Whytes. Katia shared heartfelt embraces with each, first Natalie, who looked numb; then Jack, who looked distracted; then Anne, her husband and their four-year-old daughter. Nick and Angie followed with their four children in tow.
And Jordan. Katia held her breath when he stopped before her, then her heart began to hammer. He looked weary, but wonderful. His dark hair was longer than that of either his brother or father, falling across his brow in front, teasing his collar in back. He had already removed his suit jacket, loosened his tie and released the top button of his shirt—less in deference to the heat, Katia guessed, than to the natural energy that filled him. He had never been one to be constrained; even time hadn’t changed that. Time had, however, etched tiny crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes and slashed rakish grooves by his mouth. They were signs of good humor, though they were pale now in the absence of laughter.
Twilight Whispers Page 2