The Complete Novels of the Lear Sister Trilogy

by Julia London

  Yep, the life of a hermit was perfect for her. And in fact, she managed to finish her prospectus for her dissertation, which her professors loved: The Use of Art in Political History: How Medieval Craft Guilds Shaped Future Unions and Pseudo-Governing Bodies in a Commercial World.

  She tried to resume her weaving class, but really didn’t have the heart for it. She sort of wandered from loom to loom, with a lot of “That’s great,” or “Really nice,” and the ever popular “Looks good.”

  Chantal and Tiffinnae tried their best to cheer her up by complimenting her. “Girl, you looking good,” Chantal said one evening when Rachel had worn her fat jeans.

  “And I think that’s a new hairdo, too, ain’t it?” Tiffinnae added, peering curiously at the pile of hair on the top of her head.

  “No. Same old, same old,” Rachel had sighed, and wandered over to where Mr. Gregory was working with Jason. “That’s great,” she said, and jumped a little when she realized Chantal was behind her.

  “Something is stuck to the bottom of your shoe, honey.” Rachel looked down; saw a neon-green Post-it was protruding from the back heel of her Doc Martens. She stooped over, peeled it off, and looked at it. It was an old reminder to send the Tantra book to Robin that had fallen out of her bag. She felt close to collapse, and canceled the weaving class until mid-January with an excuse of the Christmas holidays.

  As the class filed out, Chantal tried once more, putting her arm around Rachel’s shoulders and squeezing tightly. “You’re better than this, Rachel,” she said. “You way better than this. Now you need me or Tif, you call us, you hear?” she asked, and scribbled down her number. “I mean it, girl. We’ll be there for you.”

  Rachel smiled weakly. “Thanks,” she said. “But I’m all right.”

  “Well, if you’re feeling a little down, let me know,” Sandy said. “I’ve got some real good antidepressants. You look like you could use a bunch.”

  And of course, Jason shuffled around, waiting until everyone had gone. “If you need someone to help you move the tree, I can do it,” he said. “I have an axe.”

  “Thanks, but that’s okay,” Rachel said. “I sort of like it there,” she muttered, and let Jason walk her to her car.

  She did slowly resume her job search, but only halfheartedly, driven by the need to eat, at least occasionally. But she didn’t look very hard because she preferred, at least for the moment, the obscurity of a string of odd jobs. Which pretty much left her alone with her self-pity and the occasional pint of Ben and Jerry’s Brownie Fudge Ice Cream. Well. Okay, frequent pint.

  If only Dagne would leave her alone. Dagne was really beginning to bug her. She was not content to watch Rachel slide into a deep depression, and when Rachel would not return her calls, Dagne forced herself on Rachel, arriving at her house, letting herself in, acting all mad and irritating Rachel to no end.

  “Get up!” she cried at Rachel. “You’re going to get huge lying around like this!”

  “Actually, I’ve lost a couple of pounds,” Rachel said, and continued to eat popcorn from a bag the size of a king pillowcase. She’d picked three or four of them up at her last temp job, Kettledrum Popcorn, Inc.

  That had made Dagne mad, as usual, and she had stalked off to a very clean dining room and had started going through the hutch while Rachel watched The Bachelor.

  It was the night The Bachelor was to pick his four top favorites and tell them all that he was falling in love with them. And for some reason, as he started to tell the first one that he felt a real connection, Rachel started to sob. “Don’t believe him!” she wailed at the television. “He’s lying! You can’t trust him, you’ll never be able to trust a word he says.”

  Amazingly, she never even saw Dagne hurtling through space toward her. She was stunned when Dagne snatched the popcorn from Rachel’s hand, and the remote, which she used to turn off the television before she hurled it into the dining room and shouted, “SNAP OUT OF IT!”

  “You’re screaming at me,” Rachel said tearfully.

  “Yes, I’m screaming at you! I’m screaming at the top of my lungs because I can’t take it anymore! You and this little pity party have got to stop, Rachel. Okay, okay, he hurt you, he lied to you, he should have told you the truth, but how long are you going to go on like this?”

  “Oh shut up!” Rachel shot back angrily. “I’ve forgotten all about Myron!”

  “Jesus, Rach, I’m not talking about Myron! I’m talking about Flynn.”

  The very mention of his name was like a knife in her heart and with a gasp that surprised even her, Rachel came up off the couch, gathered her robe tightly around her, and marched past Dagne in her Holstein cow slippers to the kitchen.

  Naturally, the bitch followed right behind her.

  “Leave me alone, Dagne!”

  “I am so sick of this. How long can one person feel sorry for themselves?”

  “I don’t know, and what do you care? You have boyfriends! Two at last count, Glenn and Joe!”

  “Glenn dumped me, remember? And Joe is not my boyfriend,” she said, her face turning fireplug red, which, of course, meant that she was gaga for him.

  Rachel poured a glass of wine, pushed past Dagne, and moved into the dining room, feeling, all of a sudden, like a fish out of water, like she couldn’t quite catch her breath.

  “Joe’s just been working with me to retrieve the items I sold on eBay, that’s all,” Dagne insisted.

  “Oh, sure,” Rachel snorted. “Christ, Dagne, you don’t even get it. At least you don’t believe he is there for any other reason, like maybe, for you.” Just admitting it aloud was a sucker punch, and Rachel inadvertently gulped back a terrible sob.

  “Flynn was there for you,” Dagne said, the shout gone from her voice. “He loves you.”

  “Oh God, Dagne, do me a favor and stop trying to make me believe some stupid spell. Right, right, he loves me so much he’s gone back to England,” she said, and took a huge gulp of wine.

  “No, he hasn’t. He’s here in Providence.”

  The floor seemed to shift a little; Rachel looked at Dagne from the corner of her eye. “What do you mean? He’s here?”

  Dagne nodded. “He’s been tracking down the stuff I sold on eBay, too.”

  That news hit Rachel hard—she had convinced herself that he’d left, had flown back to England and had put her out of his mind. To think he’d been in Providence all this time, while she had been mourning him . . . “So he’s been here and never bothered to let me know. Oh yeah, that’s love all right.”

  Dagne looked at her with such exasperation that Rachel cringed. “Well, he might have called you if your phone wasn’t disconnected. And he might have come by if you hadn’t told him you never wanted to see him again.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “It’s pretty obvious.”

  “Oh, God,” Rachel moaned.

  “Anyway, I don’t give a shit what you think,” Dagne said with all authority, and picked up her purse, and tucked a giant bag of popcorn under her arm. “Because you are incapable of thinking straight. But if I were you, I’d get myself ready. I put a major spell on you, girl. And when the moon is full, which, for your information, is only days away, true love is going to come hopping back into your life. For good.”

  “Jesus, will you stop with that crap?” Rachel cried, covering her ears.

  “No, I will not,” Dagne said pertly, and marched to the door. “Because I believe! That’s always been your problem, you know that? You never believe, unless it’s something negative about yourself! Try believing in the positive for once! You’re pissing me off now. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.

  “I can’t wait,” Rachel muttered. But when she was sure Dagne was really gone, she picked up her wine and went upstairs, to her laptop. She did too believe, and she believed it was time to leave Providence.

  Subject: Re: Hello Baby Girl

  From:

  To: Dad m>

  Hi Dad. Yes, I’m okay, I really am. I wouldn’t say I did what I needed to do in Hilton Head, but I learned a few important things, mostly about me, and how I really have been living in a fantasy. I am really tired now, and I don’t know what I want to do with my life anymore. But my dissertation topic has been accepted, which means I will actually graduate with a Ph.D. in the next few months. I know, I know, big surprise, right? Anyway, after that, I think I want to come home to Texas. Everything here is just a reminder of things I don’t want to be reminded of anymore.

  P.S. Thanks for not giving me any advice. I still can’t believe it. Kidding. Not really, but you know what I mean.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The surprise of finding his ex-fiancée and his mother in his flat was the icing on Flynn’s proverbial cake, and candidly, he could not eat another bite of that sodding cake. He’d been turned upside down, and he therefore endured the first night by actually speaking very little, drinking quite a lot, and lying on the couch with a bottle of lager in one hand, his arm slung over his eyes, silently bemoaning the fact that he did not possess a single set of ear plugs.

  His mother was quite beside herself at his less than warm reception for Iris—she had chastised, pouted, then begun to harp. But Flynn was immune. He loved his mother, but he had no sympathy for her. He’d been unfailingly honest with her on the phone, had told her more than once his feelings for Iris had changed, and not for the better. But his mother, God bless her, saw in his the perfect match for her eldest son—the Willow-Throckmortons were also part of the fringe aristocracy.

  As Flynn listened to his mother drone on about the Fall Flingaling, or whatever it was he had missed, and thereby had embarrassed her for life, he couldn’t help but think that he had, in a roundabout way, stumbled on Iris’s motive for wanting him all along.

  He had known, of course, that there wasn’t a more blatant social climber. But he supposed he’d been rather numb to it. His mother had been the queen of social-climbing all his life, whereas Iris was more a princess in training. As he listened to them talk about Buckingham and Alnwick, or where the Prime Minister’s children were schooled (Iris brazenly informing them that the children she bore Flynn would also attend that school), at what charity event they had seen the Countess of Sussex, he began to realize that the real reason she had flirted with him, then had engaged him, had not been because of some attraction to him. It had been to his mother’s insistence that they were kin to the Duke of Alnwick.

  It was all his mother and Iris could talk about, and he wondered idly if it had always been this way, and if he hadn’t really noticed until he came to America, where the lives of the aristocracy were not all-consuming to so many people. It was also now perfectly clear why his mother was such a bloody fan of Iris’s. They were cut from the same cloth, both of them wanting to latch on to something beyond their reach, and dear God, how close had he come to marrying a younger version of his mother? An image of his father skipped across his mind’s eye, and in that image he saw himself, twenty years hence, a man silenced by years of shrill harping, reduced to glorified handyman while his wife flitted about, trying to gain entry to all of the events.

  Come to think of it, now that he was arse over elbow after a few lagers, it was his mother who had balked at his wanting to become a homicide detective all those years ago. That had been the only thing he’d ever wanted, and Flynn had gone along with all the high teas and polo matches they’d put him through. But when it came to his life, they had been adamantly opposed to anything as pedestrian as a mere police officer. The compromise had been his stint at Lloyds, which his father had helped him get.

  Flynn could hardly grouse about his occupation. Over the years, he had become one of their best investigators, and he had been to some very posh locales, had rubbed elbows with some very posh and frightfully rich people, and moreover, some very exotic women. Lloyds had paid him handsomely for it, and he really had no right to complain, not at all, but lying on the couch, listening to his mum, he felt a certain indignation. It wasn’t right. They should have encouraged him to follow his dreams—not theirs.

  Now, once again, his mum was pushing her will on him. She wanted him to marry Iris so that she’d have yet another connection to some distant aristocratic line. Iris wanted to marry him for the same reason. Not because she loved him, as he had once so foolishly believed, but because she loved his income and his name.

  In all honesty, he’d really known this deep in his gut since he first walked in on Iris and Paul. But now it had been birthed into the glaring light of day, bawling and wriggling around like a newborn infant. There was no avoiding it—no matter how much Flynn would have liked to have stepped around it, perhaps tiptoed out and left it in another room, or just fled to another continent to avoid it altogether, he could not.

  What tormented him was how he had come to believe he was in love with Iris to begin with. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been perfectly pleasant—she’d always been polite and very keen to make sure he knew what to wear to what event and who would be attending, and so forth. And while she wasn’t an exciting lover, she had been a cooperative one.

  Perhaps it was nothing more than that she’d said the right things. The truth was that he’d been quite ready to come home to a house with a wife and perhaps even children one day, and there had been times he’d arrived in Heathrow after one assignment or another feeling an impossible sadness as he looked around at all the anxious faces of people waiting for their loved ones. There he’d walk through them, nothing but his briefcase and overcoat in hand, as they embraced and cried and laughed all around him. Perhaps she’d filled that void in her own way, and he’d begun to see in her an answer to a dilemma he really didn’t know he had.

  Whatever it was, it was over. Now he knew what love was, for he had fallen in love with Rachel, improbable though that may have been, and her absence in his life had created a hole in him, one that was growing wider each day that passed without her. Iris had never, not once, created a hole in him.

  He was determined to fill his hole. But first, he had to rid himself of Iris once and for all, send his mum home where she belonged, and finish up the investigation into the RIHPS fraud (which was being helped along, interestingly enough, by Joe, who had taken a fancy to Dagne Delaney). And then he was going to check into a certain international exchange program Joe had mentioned.

  So lying there that evening, listening to them prattle on about Prince Harry, he quietly put a plan into place.

  The next day, Iris and Mum had rested up, and had gone out to do the requisite shopping. When they arrived late that afternoon, Flynn was waiting for them. He had catered in a lovely dinner and had bought copious amounts of liquor for whoever would need it. When the girls came in, they were extremely pleased with what they obviously thought was his attempt at reconciliation.

  “Darling, you shouldn’t have!” Iris exclaimed, air-kissing him again.

  “Oh, my lovely boy, how marvelous!” Mum had cried, clapping. “But I really must nosh up and run along.”

  “Run along?” Flynn asked.

  “Didn’t I tell you? I took a room at the Hilton. I can’t sleep very well here, you know, and I am quite desperate for a good night’s sleep.”

  Righto. Nothing like a bit of a conjugal sleepover to patch it all up, eh, Mum? “That’s really not necessary,” he said calmly.

  “Oh darling, I insist,” Mum said, checking her hair in a small mirror near the entry. “Very well, then, shall I serve? I’m really quite starved!” she said brightly, and busied herself gathering plates.

  The meal passed pleasantly enough, if one could tolerate a review of each shop in Providence and what they could find, or not find. “Frankly, if one is to reside in America, it simply will not do to live anywhere but New York,” Iris opined as she lit a cigarette.

  “Mmm, I would have to agree,” Mum said.

  “I rather like Providence,” Flynn said. “It’s quaint.”

  �
�Quaint!” Iris laughed. “Darling, you have Butler Cropwell for quaint!”

  Flynn smiled thinly. “Here’s something that’s quaint, Iris—I have always wanted to be a homicide investigator.”

  That earned both the ladies’ attention; Iris looked nervously at Mum, then laughed. “I suppose all little boys dream of being a policeman,” she said, waving her hand dismissively.

  “Perhaps. But I still dream of it. In fact, I think I shall pursue it.”

  “Nonsense!” Mum said with exasperation. “You’ve an excellent job with Lloyds! Why would you want to do something that involved murder and unsavory characters?” she asked, shivering a little for emphasis.

  “Dunno, Mum, but I do. And I’m really rather good at it. Furthermore, I care very little about the aristocracy. In fact, you could take the whole bloody lot of them and ship them off to China or some such place for all I care.”

  Iris laughed, but his mother looked at him as if he’d insulted her somehow. “Oh really, you shouldn’t tease your mother in such a way,” Iris said, playfully tapping him on the arm.

  “I’m not teasing her,” he said, swinging his gaze to Iris. “I’m being honest. I want to investigate homicides. I put in a call to my boss just this afternoon and asked if Lloyds might participate in an international exchange program. He thought it was a rather grand idea and has gone off to see what can be done. In other words, I am hoping that I might remain in Providence to learn the art of homicide investigation from the Americans. And then, I’m thinking of moving to America permanently.”