Refuge on Leebrick (The Hills of Burlington Book 4)

by Jacie Middlemann

  “Your great-great-grandmother,” Casey said quietly into the silence.

  “Yes,” Beth smiled sadly. “She too was very powerful. Much more so than many had been in generations. She believed her daughters could have been as well just as the daughters who came from them.” She looked at her father. “Especially one of them.”

  Casey caught her breath on a slight gasp. “Mom.” She looked at her brother. Closed her eyes again and let the memories come. “Remember I told you, Aunt Charlie did too, how much Beth looks like Mom.”

  “You’re talking about Aunt Leslie. She must be the granddaughter our great-grandmother believed could be strong…far stronger than others had been, maybe even stronger than she was,” Mary said even as she struggled to remember what else they had learned from their great-grandmother’s writings.

  “Yes.” Beth closed her eyes. Pictured in her mind the grandmother she had never met. She’d seen photos. “And she was. More than was known.” She looked over to her father. They’d spoken around it but never of it. She regretted that she hadn’t told him before, as there seemed to be no other choice but to do so now. “Your mother held it close to her not so much out of fear as her mother had but of worry that those she loved most wouldn’t understand. Wouldn’t see her in the same way if they knew. And feared how she would feel if it turned out they didn’t believe.” She sighed deeply at the understanding that filled her father’s eyes. Closed her own as she felt more than saw her aunt’s reaction even before it came.

  “Dad!” Casey stood and stormed toward the back window of the small kitchen. The window that looked out to the past they all shared in one way or another. “She couldn’t count on Dad not treating her like some empty-headed imbecile if she told him about it. Or even hinted at it. And that’s not even taking into consideration the reaction from those moronic brothers of mine. No one is better than they at making a person feel small and stupid with a single look.” Her head dipped slightly, let it lean against Carrie’s when she quietly came to stand beside her at the window. “Damn them.”

  “Casey…” Jake began only to be interrupted by his sister. But her voice no longer held the anger it had moments before. Instead it shimmered with sadness.

  “Not you, Jake,” Casey said without turning. She felt Carrie’s arm slide around her waist and squeeze slightly in understanding. She too had brothers who hadn’t always been there. Maybe never would. “Never you. Mama always knew that, even at the end, that you always had her back. That you were there for her even when the others weren’t. Not the way it really mattered. She knew you were looking out for her, thinking of her and not yourself.” She sighed as so much fell into place after years of silent denial. “Not like the others.”

  “Casey,” Jake tried again. Knew his sister was close to the end of her rope. He’d seen her shoulders tremble and knew the tears that likely filled the eyes he couldn’t see were not what she wanted. And certainly didn’t want anyone else to see them. Before he could say anything Beth reached over to grasp his hand that was next to his coffee cup. Suddenly he felt a surge of something that had no explanation but with it he knew exactly what to say to his sister. Knew and understood far more as well about the situation they spoke of. The slight shake of Beth’s head as she lowered it told him that she too was close to the end of her own rope. That whatever had just transpired when she’d taken his hand in hers wasn’t to be discussed now but later, in private. Clearing his throat, far more shaken by what had just taken place than he cared to admit, he told his sister what he couldn’t have known moments before. For the life of him he had no earthly clue how he knew now with the absolute resolve that he did. But it was there. And she needed to know.

  “Casey, Mom made her choices long ago. Long before any of us were old enough to understand. And she never once regretted it.” He felt the slight squeeze of Beth’s hand as she continued to hold his. “She loved us. Each of us. And she understood every single one of us maybe better than we understood ourselves. Dad too.” He paused, took a deep steadying breath. “I’m not saying what happened was right or that you or I would make the same choices but that’s on us, not her. She gave us what she could knowing we had to make our own choices.” He looked as his daughter, met her eyes as they held his. “And I think…I believe that she knew of all her children that you and I didn’t just have that which she chose not to openly acknowledge…or use, but that we would do differently than she chose to when the time came.” He turned his gaze back to his sister even as she turned around to face him. Her eyes still sad, but intent on his. Waiting. “I can’t tell you how I know but I do. She gave us what she could in order to allow us to be where we are now…today. To accept what we have as she did in her own way. Her own very private way.” He took a breath, again spoke what he knew. “She accepted what she had but poured what she could into the two of us knowing that in doing so, she was doing what was meant to be.”

  “She went to the mat with Dad when you said no to law school,” Casey said slowly, remembering.

  “She supported me every step of the way. She backed me up even when I went overseas and I know it scared her to death that I might not come home in one piece or worse not at all.” He held her eyes willing her to hear beyond his words. “I saw more in the spate of a few years than the others could ever hope to see in their lifetimes. I saw all the things I never thought were possible. Good and bad…mostly bad. But because of all that I came to accept not just the possible but the improbable…even the impossible.”

  “And that prepared you for this. To be open to accepting on faith so you could see what others don’t…or won’t.”

  Mary stood and walked over to Casey where she still stood next to Carrie. All of them were standing close to the back window that looked out over the alley that had been there since their childhood and before. She’d seen something pass between father and daughter when Beth had taken Jake’s hand minutes before. She had no clue to what it was but had practically felt the air around them shimmer with it. But for now, she needed to help Casey see what it was Jake was trying to tell her. “Remember Casey, remember when you wanted to take journalism classes instead of all those classes your Dad wanted you to? The classes he felt would prepare you for law school?”

  Casey closed her eyes. She remembered. How could she not? “Mom went to bat for me, too. Dad had threatened to pull the plug on my tuition. She told me that she had enough set aside to get me my PhD in Journalism if that was what I really wanted.”

  Jake spoke again. “She didn’t just want for you what you wanted for yourself, Casey. She wanted more. She knew that without Dad’s influence, in a field where you were exposed to a myriad of all that could be, good and bad, you would be more than likely to become more accepting of what someone else couldn’t.”

  “Like Dad.” Casey’s voice was flat.

  “Yeah,” Jake said. There was simply no sense in dancing around it. “If you’d teamed up with Dad at the law firm you would have probably been a damn fine lawyer but you’d also have been tied to the black and white world he lives in. Right and wrong. Real and not. Practical and ineffective. Moral and immoral.” He caught his sister’s eyes. “No in between. No middle ground. No gray between the black and the white of the world he lives in.”

  “No leeway for what many see as the impossible,” Casey said understanding what he was trying to tell her. She shook her head wearily. “Mama shouldn’t have had to give up what and who she was.”

  “No,” Jake agreed immediately without hesitation. “But it was her choice, Casey. Don’t take that from her.” He watched her eyes widen as she understood his words. Their mother had indeed gone to bat for them, in a different way than she had for her other children. To deny her that would be to deny the strength it had taken for her to do so. The choice to be who she was…and wasn’t. Casey’s slight nod was all she could give in response that she understood. And accepted.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “I should have told you.” Beth watc
hed her father, a man she was still getting to know, walk through the house in front of her towards the kitchen. She had tried to think of a way to explain things on their short walk home from Mary’s house. Acknowledging what both of them already knew was the best she could come up with. She’d never been good at keeping secrets. The few times she tried she hadn’t been great at explaining why either. With the slightest of sighs she pulled out the closest chair to her and sat down. If she’d been looking she would have seen the worry in her father’s expression when he turned at the small noise she’d just made.

  Jake pulled two sodas out of the refrigerator and sat one down in front of his daughter as he pulled out a chair and took a seat across from her. He studied her as if he was gauging what he wanted to say. Especially after that little sigh he’d heard. She’d sounded as if she was worn out. He could understand it but didn’t want to be the cause of it. That wasn’t going to get them anywhere. He took a quick drink out of his soda then answered the softly spoken statement she’d made as they’d walked into the house.

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” he said then let out a long sigh of his own. Fatherhood wasn’t easy and he still didn’t know most the rules. He wasn’t even sure this qualified as a father thing. But he knew it was something they were going to have to talk about. It might as well be now. “How about you tell me what happened tonight.” There was no reason to be specific, both knew what he spoke of.

  “I know things,” she said slowly, beginning with what he already knew. They’d talked about it a couple of times now and despite whatever he said to the contrary she knew he worried because of it.

  “I get that, Beth.” Jake took a long swallow of his soda. “Thanks to whatever I have in me and added to that what your Mom was capable of you obviously got a double dose of it.” And paid dearly for it in more ways that anyone could imagine, he thought to himself with no little bit of remorse and knew her mother would feel the same. Probably had. He took a deep breath, then looked at his daughter before continuing. “My question is, did you know you were able to do what you did tonight, that you could pass on what you knew to others?”

  “I’m not certain that I was able to until recently.” She didn’t know her father nearly as well as she wanted to yet but she understood him. Understood how much he worried about how all this affected her and how she felt about it.

  It didn’t take Jake long to understand her brief response. “Since you walked into that room in the Summer Street house.”

  Beth sighed as she thought about how quick he was at putting things together. A part of her wondered if it was his own keen insight along with the strong intuition gifted to him by his mother. She knew the other possibility was he was simply getting to know her so well he could read her as easily as her parents had been able to. Instead of staying where she was across from him at the table she stood and wandered the kitchen hoping he wouldn’t be able to gauge her thoughts as easily as it seemed he could. “Somewhere around then,” she finally said, agreeing with him because there was no real reason not to.

  “Okay.” He wondered if there was anything else but knew she’d tell him when she was ready. Instead he asked her one of the easier questions that were gathering inside him pressing for answers. “Can you do it with anyone?”

  That stopped her because she hadn’t really thought about it in that way. “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “Wes.” She turned back to the table. Shrugged with a slight lift of her shoulders at her father’s questioning look. “He was asking about my childhood, silly questions. But then he knew before I said anything. He knew as I was thinking of the answers.” She thought back to it, the initial fear and then the realization of what had happened. “That’s how I found out I could.” She sat back down, feeling more comfortable because he seemed to be. “I tried with memories that he didn’t ask about and that’s how I realized I could control it.” She smiled as she thought of how Wes had taken it all in stride as if it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.

  Jake leaned back and finally posed the question that had been eating at him as nothing else had since they’d left Mary’s. “The memories you shared were my mother’s. You never knew her.” He ran his hand through his hair restlessly. He was open to many things but was having a hard time believing they were even having this conversation let alone the reason for it. He shook his head. “Besides that for a minute it felt like she was right there. I could practically feel her.”

  “Remember what you once told me?” Beth said softly, her voice gentle. She understood how it must have hurt. You talked about how in the midst of all the possibilities between heaven and earth there were many that weren’t even thought of yet.” Beth took a breath, she understood his thoughts, spoken and not. “Mary told me she believed that we don’t truly lose those we love. She believes that they’re not altogether gone from us, we just can’t reach out and touch them in the physical sense as we once did, as we want to.” She brought her fingertips together gently in front of her, steepled them as she gathered her thoughts to put them into words. Sometimes, she thought to herself, words did little to express a person’s deepest feelings but for her father she was willing to try. “She believes that if we allow ourselves, we can feel their touch in other ways. Not as we might wish, but as we are able.” She looked across the table and caught his eyes, held them with hers. “Aren’t our memories the same? Don’t they keep us connected, allow us to feel their presence through all that was shared?”

  Jake remembered a similar conversation with his cousin. Wondered what more she believed she hadn’t spoken of to him at the time. And why. “Okay.”

  Beth kept her eyes steady on him as she tried to gauge if there was anything more he wasn’t telling her. Anything more he wanted to ask. “Just okay?”

  “For now.” For now it was enough he thought to himself. He could think of another dozen questions he’d like to ask her but she looked like he felt, completely worn out. That wasn’t to say that she hadn’t given him plenty to think about. The more he thought about it, he realized he needed to talk with Tom again before he pressed his daughter any further on all of this. He still grappled with the very fact they even had these discussions at all. Even though he accepted what many would see as impossible, it didn’t mean he wasn’t still skeptical at times. He wasn’t certain that would ever change.

  “It’s who you are, why would that change?”

  Jake looked up into the face of his daughter, a face that strongly resembled that of his mother as he remembered her when he was a child. He said nothing but let out a short sigh at the realization of how easily she could see his thoughts, but didn’t question that she could.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Mary sat across the table from Liana Farrell and watched the younger woman pick up her glass for the third time, lift it to her mouth, then set it down again without taking a single drink out of it. It hadn’t been much more than fifteen minutes since she’d arrived. It didn’t take Mary half that time to realize this was a woman close to the end of her rope. She also had a strong sense Liana was also a woman looking desperately for any knot along the way to grasp on to rather than continue her slippery slide downward.

  Since she knew a lot more about the situation than the other woman realized Mary had a pretty good idea of what Liana wished for but believed impossible. She wanted nothing more than to help her with what the other woman considered unattainable but knew they wouldn’t get anywhere until all that stood between them was out on the table. There had to be trust. For that there was going to have to be some painful honesty as well.

  “Liana, I do a lot better when everything is out in the open. We both know why you’re here. What you may or may not know is that Leslie actually came here to talk to me about this situation. She’s not just concerned about what’s going on, she’s also very worried about you. Something else I’m pretty certain you’re not aware of is that I have something of an idea of what you’ve been through over the last several months.” She watched th
e other woman’s expression shift from discomfort to worry and then quickly to irritation. She couldn’t blame her for it. Not one bit. No one wanted their life to be an open book unless they chose for it to be so. But before Liana could express any of those thoughts Mary continued. “Even before Leslie unexpectedly came to see me I was getting emails and phone calls from some individuals I barely know. And since I’m sure you have a good idea of who they are we’ll leave them unnamed for the moment because in the big scheme of things they’re not important.” Mary watched the surprise leap into Liana’s eyes and was grateful that at least she now had her complete attention. “One of the reasons I asked Leslie to suggest you visit here is because I know how these types of situations can escalate without a lot of effort. I wanted the chance to find out from you personally what if anything you know about what might have instigated all this.” Seeing the other woman’s sudden expression of alarm she waved her hand as if smacking away a league of pesty flies. “I’m not talking about their allegations which are petty at best. What I want to know is if you have any idea of what set them off,” she said knowing her choice of words could have been better. Taking a chance, she reached over to cover Liana’s tightly clenched fist and repeated what she’d already said. “If it means anything at all I know what you’re dealing with.” She shook her head at the almost dazed look on the other woman’s face that was very easy to read. “Not Leslie, she didn’t say a word. My husband is a lawyer. I asked him to try to find out why this all started. I meant it when I said the accusations against you are petty. I wanted to understand what was motivating them if anything. I made sure that he was very discreet and those who said anything at all did so hesitantly and only because it was made abundantly clear that our interest was solely to protect you, not harm you.” What Mary didn’t tell her was that she knew the man who was now Liana’s ex-husband. They had met several years ago at one of the few seminars Leslie had been able to talk her into speaking at. She had spoken to him personally after Leslie’s visit. It was from him that she’d gained most of the what she knew about what this younger woman was going through. And because she knew Sawyer Farrell she had a pretty good idea of what he was going through because of it.