“Well, you’re not going to testify against me, are you, Lizzie?”
Lizzie stared at me for a moment, and her eyes misted with tears. “If it’s necessary, I will, Kara. If they ask me questions, I have to tell the truth, that Amanda offered you everything she has and you refused it. It’s not going to look good, Kara. You won’t have a leg to stand on.”
“Well, Rudy says she’s going to settle out of court, and I believe him.”
Lizzie sank down onto the mattress. “You’re so deceived. You believe so many lies.”
My heart beat so hard in my chest I thought it might burst through. “I believe him more than I believe you. You rushed off and left me here.”
“You could have come with me.” Grief twisted Lizzie’s face. “I begged you to.”
“You left me, and he didn’t! He’s here for me, and you’re not. You’re just jealous. You think I’m not special enough to win somebody important like Rudy. You just can’t imagine him falling for me.”
“I know you can do better,” Lizzie cried. “You could meet a man your own age—a decent man—and marry him and have children. We’ve been told all our lives we were nothing but trash, Kara, and you still believe it. But whether you believe it or not, Rudy’s still treating you like trash. He wants the money he thinks you’re going to get. That’s why he’s in such a rush to marry you.”
“Hey, he didn’t even know who I was before he met me. He fell for me before I told him the first thing. And it wasn’t his idea for me to file the suit. I started that whole thing with Eloise and Deke.”
“You see?” Lizzie said. “You’ve been manipulated by somebody all your life. Why don’t you start thinking for yourself, Kara? Start using some of your common sense. I know you have some.”
I couldn’t believe she was attacking me this way, on one of the happiest days of my life. “I wanted this to be a special weekend, but you’re ruining it for me. Why do you have to come here and do that?”
Lizzie got quiet. “I don’t mean to do that, Kara. I do want you to be happy. I want that with all my heart. But I don’t see it coming this way.”
“Well, this is the way I’m going to get it. Like it or not. Now, I appreciate the dress and everything, but if you’re going to just badger me the whole weekend, you can leave right now.”
I could tell Lizzie struggled to hold back the tears overcoming her. “All right, Kara. I won’t say any more about it.”
“Fine.” I sat down on the bed and laid the dress over my lap. Lizzie smeared a tear across her cheek. Rudy had probably heard every word from the living room. I almost hated her for doing that to him.
“So . . . are you going to stay here with me tonight or—”
“I’m staying in a hotel,” Lizzie said quickly. “Amanda got me a suite in a hotel in Vicksburg.”
“At the Isle of Capri?” I raised my eyebrows. “That’s where we’re honeymooning tomorrow night.”
“No, not the one at the casino. It’s down the block a little. She said it’s an exclusive little hotel called the Simmons Suites. I was hoping you’d stay there with me.”
“Really?” I perked up at that. “Oh, Lizzie, that’d be fun. We could stay up all night and talk, just like old times.”
“The old times weren’t all that good, Kara.”
“I know, but they’re about to get better. I promise, Lizzie. Trust me, okay?”
“I hope you’re right, Kara. I really do.” She got up from the bed, took the dress out of my hands, and hung it back up. “We can take all your things and get ready over at the hotel tomorrow if you want to. That way you don’t have to do it here.”
“Okay.” I was already starting to forget how angry I’d been. Excitement was creeping back in. “I’ll get my stuff. But don’t you want to stay and see Eloise and Deke?”
Lizzie considered that for a moment. “No, I’d really like to be gone when they get home.”
“Fine by me. I can’t put this place behind me fast enough.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
That night, we sat up late into the night, talking and catching up.
Lizzie couldn’t stop talking about Amanda and the house she lived in and the family they’d forged there and how wonderful it all was.
I wasn’t buying any of it, but I was curious enough to listen.
“You should have seen me that day when we got to her house.” Lizzie’s eyes widened, as if she was reliving the whole thing. “You can’t even see it from the street. It’s real private, down a winding road with these beautiful oak trees on either side, making a canopy over the road. Even the ride up to it was peaceful and beautiful. It would have been perfect if you’d been there.”
“How did she act on the way there?”
“She talked all the way there, telling me about when we were little. How she met our father, and how she fell in love with us, and how she loved taking care of us.”
“Nothing that can be proved,” I pointed out.
“No, I guess she can’t prove her feelings for us back then. But I believe her.”
“Well, that’s just crazy.”
“Not to me.” She sat on the hotel’s king-sized bed, her legs crossed Indian-style. She had pulled her hair up in a ponytail, and she looked more like her old self. “But when we got to the gates of the house, I just couldn’t believe my eyes. It looked like a big, white palace. Like something right out of the movies. I figured it would be all cold and untouchable.
“But the minute I got out of the car, the huge, massive front door flew open, and this group of people burst out, acting all excited to see me.”
“Who were they?”
“Practically family, though none of them are really related to us. See, years ago, Amanda moved into the mansion because her life had become a security nightmare. After she got the inheritance, no one would leave her alone. She decided to move into the mansion, even though she couldn’t imagine living in a place like that, because she wanted it to still be there for us when we grew up.”
“Yeah, right.”
“But she didn’t want to live there alone, with just the staff. And she didn’t like the butler. He was this snobbish jerk who looked down his nose at her and made her feel creepy, so she fired him and all of the staff who acted like that and hired up people she liked. Instead of a butler, she hired her father’s best friend, Mack, to move in and help oversee the staff. He’s a sweet old man, just like a grandfather ought to be. Nothing like Deke . . . Mack is sweet and plump and keeps hugging me and telling me how thrilled he is that I’m finally home. He was the first one out to greet me that day. You would have thought I was really his family. He even had tears in his eyes as he hugged me.”
I tried to imagine it, but all I could picture was some guy working up a lot of fake emotion.
“Who else?”
“Joan, of course. She’s Amanda’s best friend. When Amanda inherited HolCorp, Joan became her assistant. You never met a more efficient person. Joan can do anything. She lives in the mansion, too. Amanda invited her to live there with her and Mack and the staff. And then there’s Sarah, the head maid who raised our dad. She’s old now, but she’s sweet and Amanda loves her. Amanda doesn’t let her do much work. She’s even given her her own set of rooms and she treats her like a mother or something. Sarah’s always telling me stories about when Daddy was little. I can almost picture him bouncing a basketball on the marble floor, sliding down the banister, playing hide-and-seek in those huge rooms.”
“Is it like a museum?”
“No,” Lizzie said. “It’s warm and cozy in every room. Amanda redecorated completely so it would look more like a home. There’s not a room in that house that I don’t feel comfortable in. But it wasn’t like that at first.” She got up, standing on the bed. “When I got there, they took me into the ballroom where the staff, about two dozen people, were lined up, all dressed in crisp black and white.” She demonstrated. “I thought I was going to faint. But then someone blew one of those curly
horn things that people have at parties, and all of a sudden everybody started clapping for me, like I was a movie star or something. And they surrounded me and we had this big party.” She bounced back down on the mattress.
“That’s weird.”
Lizzie frowned. “Why?”
“I don’t understand what they want.”
“Nothing. They just want to restore me to my home and my family. The weird thing is that they knew everything I liked, without my telling them. Amanda had kept such tabs on us growing up that she knew our favorite foods, the colors we liked, the kind of decorations we’d want in our rooms.”
“Our rooms?”
“Yes, Kara. Yours is there, just waiting for you to come. It’s decorated like a dream. Bright floral prints and beautiful curtains and polished cherry furniture. I have a fourposter bed that’s high off the floor, Kara, and it’s so beautiful. You have one, too, with a green-and-white canopy and lace curtains draping down.”
I got up and went to my suitcase, then rummaged around like I was looking for something. I have to admit I was confused. It didn’t sound like Amanda was mistreating her. It sounded like everything she’d promised was true.
But I still couldn’t believe it.
Lizzie jumped off the bed and stood at the center of the floor, waving her arms, as if to show me all the things she described. “From my room, I can look out the window onto the back lawn. It’s brimming with flowers in every color. And sitting right in the middle of the garden is the little playhouse I told you about in my letter. Amanda had it moved there from the little house we lived in. Daddy built it for us. We even helped. You can see where we painted and hammered.”
I looked up at her then. “That’s got to be a lie. I would remember something like that.”
“I don’t remember it, either,” she said. “But it’s all true. There are pictures. When she took me out there for the first time, we went inside the playhouse. There was some little Fisher-Price kitchen furniture in there, and she said it was what we used to play with. She brought a photo album, and we sat out there and looked at pictures of our family.”
“What pictures?”
She gave me an aha smile and rushed to her suitcase. “I’ll show you.”
She pulled out a wrapped gift and set it on my lap. “This is kind of my pre-wedding gift to you.”
I sucked in a breath. “My first gift.” Grinning, I tore into the paper, opened the box, and pulled out the photo album decorated with pearl beads and gold plating. I ran my fingers over it. “I’ve never seen one this fancy,” I whispered.
“Open it,” Lizzie said. “Look at the pictures.”
I flipped back the cover and saw the pictures of a woman holding two little red-haired babies, just hours old.
“That’s our mother.” Lizzie’s voice was laced with reverence. “She died when we were just weeks old.”
I turned the page. A man who looked strangely familiar, though I didn’t think I’d ever seen him before, sat grinning, two tiny babies in his arms. He had red, curly hair like ours and big, friendly eyes. “We look like him,” I whispered.
“Yes, we definitely have our father’s eyes,” Lizzie said wistfully. “And his hair, of course. But I think we have our mother’s chin.”
I turned a couple of pages and found another snapshot of our mother, holding us.
“That one’s you.” Lizzie pointed to the one that was yawning. But my eyes were on my mother, who was blonde and thin and prettier than Eloise and Deke had ever told us.
“And look at this.” Lizzie turned the page and showed me another one of our father, holding me in his arms, and leaning down to put a kiss on my round little cheek. I’d never been all that sentimental, but my throat got all choked up. I had to close the book. “I don’t think I can look at this right now.”
“That’s fine.” Lizzie laid her hand on my arm. “I got real emotional the first time, too. You can look at it when you’re ready. There are lots of pictures of us with Amanda when we were three, before they took us away from her. When you see them, you’ll realize how much she loved us.”
Silence fell over us, and Lizzie got down on her knees in front of me. She looked up into my face and pushed my hair behind my ear. She was different than she’d been just weeks ago. She was sweeter, more sensitive.
Nothing like me.
“Kara, I feel like I was in a prison for most of my life, with cruel, greedy people lying to me and making me think that it was my fate to be there. They kept us down, Kara. They controlled us. They made us into people without hope. And it was a life sentence. You’re accepting that sentence, Kara, when the doors to that prison are open now. But you won’t walk through them. We can go back to the family in the pictures of this photo album. We can know peace and joy.”
“On her terms!”
“Yes, on her terms. They’re good terms, Kara. I’ve never felt more free in my life. The whole world is open to me now. I have hope and a future. Things are happening to me that I never even knew to hope for or imagine. For the first time in my life I feel like I’m standing on steady ground. And I feel strong, because it’s not just me, Deke and Eloise’s tattered granddaughter. I have all of Amanda’s resources behind me, and she’s there rooting for me and guiding me. It’s all about love, Kara. Not money.”
“Love is always about money.”
“No, it’s not! That’s a lie you’ve been taught!”
I bit my lip. Maybe I was just messed up. Maybe Lizzie had it right. After all, Rudy might be in this for the money, just like Eloise and Deke were. I started wondering what it would be like to get into that limo with Lizzie tomorrow and let her take me to Amanda’s with her.
But those thoughts felt like self-betrayal. Lizzie was playing with my emotions, luring me with these pictures and all the stuff she’d told me.
But it was going to blow up in her face before long. It was too good to be true. Too easy. Nothing was that simple.
“I brought you more gifts,” Lizzie said, and I looked up at her.
She got out a flat box wrapped in white, and another small box.
I felt the shadows in my heart lifting. I smiled as I took the boxes.
“The big one’s from me,” Lizzie said. “The small one’s from Amanda.”
“Yours first.” I undid the bow. “It looks so pretty. I hate to mess it up.”
“You have to mess it up to see what’s inside.”
I grinned, then tore into the paper. I got down to the white box, pulled it open. An ivory veil lay folded there, with a band made of inset pearls. I pulled it out and settled my astonished eyes on it. “Oh, Lizzie.”
“I couldn’t let you get married without a veil, after all those times we played—”
I threw myself at her, and she laughed and hugged me. Tears started to make their way down my cheeks. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was.
Lizzie shook the long netting out and slid the comb into my hair. “I tried it on myself at the store. I pictured you in it.”
Wiping my eyes, I floated to the mirror. “I’m a bride,” I whispered. “A real bride.”
Lizzie stood back and watched me go to the dress hanging in the closet. I quickly undressed and slipped the dress back on, then spun around in front of the mirror. “Look at me, Lizzie. It’s just what I always imagined.”
“Except for walking down the aisle of a church.”
“Well, I don’t have a church. Anyway, could you just picture Deke giving me away? No, walking up the courthouse steps is just fine.”
I didn’t want to take the dress off, so I just sat there in it. I couldn’t stop looking in the mirror.
“Don’t forget Amanda’s gift.”
I hated to tear myself away. “I don’t really want anything from her.”
“You’d be silly not to take it. Trust me, you’ll love it.”
I took the package she handed me and tore into it with less excitement. “Looks like jewelry,” I said when I got to the box. I took
off the lid and gazed down at the pearl bracelet, exactly made to match the necklace I had hocked.
“Pearls again.”
“Where’s your necklace?” Lizzie asked. “Are you going to wear it in the wedding tomorrow?”
I swallowed. “No.”
“Well, you should. Do you know how valuable this bracelet is? It’s probably worth thousands of dollars. The necklace is worth even more.”
I felt a little sick. “Thousands? Over at the pawnshop they only gave me five hundred!”
Lizzie looked crestfallen. “Kara!”
I jumped up and backed across the room, lifting the skirts of my dress as I moved. “I shouldn’t have told you that. I knew better.”
“You hocked it for five hundred dollars? Kara, how could you?”
“I needed the money! I had to have it to pay my attorney.”
“That’s just like you, Kara. Trading your birthright for a bowl of stew.”
A bowl of stew? I stared at her like she was nuts. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s what Esau did in the Bible.”
“The Bible? Since when have you read the Bible?”
“Since Amanda got me interested in it. It’s good, Kara. Better than any novel I’ve ever read. But that’s not the point. The point is that you don’t even understand the value of the things Amanda has for you.”
“I guess not.” I looked down at the bracelet. “But I won’t sell this.”
Lizzie looked as if I’d insulted her when I sold the necklace. “At least not for five hundred bucks,” she said. “If you do sell it, at least get what it’s worth.”
“Well, how do you do that? The pawnshops don’t give you that much.”
“Take it to a jeweler,” Lizzie said. “I’m not telling you to sell it, but for heaven’s sake, if you’re going to, just do it right.”
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