by Teresa Hill
"Miss Bennett? I'm William Webster." The man in his sixties moved slowly up the walkway and held out a hand. "I'm so sorry I'm late."
Allie wasn't sorry at all. She didn't want to go inside. They shook hands, and she said, "I appreciate you meeting me here on such short notice."
"No problem at all, young lady," he said, smiling. "I'm awfully sorry to hear about your mother. And I'm glad someone's finally going to do something with this old place. It's a shame the way it sat empty all these years."
She smiled, knowing it was as obvious an opening as she was likely to get.
Ask him, she told herself. Just ask.
"I made copies of the keys for you." Mr. Webster pulled a set from the pocket of his overcoat. "Had the utilities turned on, too. Shall we go inside?"
"Of course."
She hadn't come all this way to cower on the front porch. After all, it was just a house, stone and mortar, wood and plasterboard. An inanimate object. It could not hurt her.
In fact, the few memories she had of this place were happy ones—at least until that last summer. Until her sixteen-year-old sister ran off into the night and was never seen alive again. Somewhere on a rural highway in Georgia, Megan had died in a car accident. At least, that's what Allie had been told. To this day, Allie didn't know why her sister ran away, and she could no longer be certain how her sister died, either.
Glancing up at the stately white columns flanking the entranceway like the most stoic of sentinels, she wondered if the answers to that particular mystery were somewhere inside. She hoped so, because there was no one left to ask. There was no other place to go for answers. Except here.
The front door opened with an ominous creak. The lawyer stepped back to allow her to enter. Allie took that first step. And caught her heel on the antique rug just inside the doorway, nearly falling down.
"Careful." Mr. Webster's hand shot out to steady her. His other hand stretched past her left shoulder and found the light switch.
Nothing happened.
"Why am I not surprised?" Allie said.
"I'm so sorry," he said, flipping three wall switches in a row, all to no avail. "My secretary called the power company as soon as I hung up the phone with you yesterday. They assured her this would be taken care of by now."
"Oh, I didn't mean this is your fault. Just that I'm not surprised at any little glitches. It's been a difficult day."
She spared him her tale of flying through the storm. Now she found herself in something akin to a mausoleum with no electricity. Glancing outside the open doorway, she saw the faint light of day beginning to fade. Soon it would give way to full darkness, made even more ominous by the clouds that would obliterate the moon and the stars. She'd be alone with nothing but her memories and wild speculations about why she'd been so scared to come back.
Mr. Webster phoned the power company about her electricity. Allie hovered just inside the doorway thinking that perhaps this was a blessing. She didn't have to stay. It would have been silly to go to a hotel when she had a five-bedroom house sitting here empty. But she had no power. For one more night, she had an excuse not to be here. Relief flooded through her.
Just then the lights in the overhead chandelier flickered once, then again, then stayed on.
"Damn," Allie muttered. It would be a long night.
Mr. Webster graciously brought in her bags. In the big kitchen, he opened the refrigerator, showing her the casserole his own housekeeper had prepared and delivered earlier, along with a few other staples. A small welcome home, he explained. Surprised and touched, Allie thanked him.
She stopped him at the front door, knowing she couldn't let him go at this. "My father... All those years, he knew where my mother and I were?"
"I'm not sure he knew all along," the man said kindly. "But when he came to me eleven years ago to make out a will, he did. Your mother was his sole beneficiary. He told me then where to find her."
He rattled off the address and phone number.
Allie nodded, unable to deny it any longer. All along, her father had known. He could have been with them, if that's what he wanted.
She forced herself to go on. "He and my mother never divorced?"
"I've never seen anything to indicate they divorced."
It seemed impossible. They'd lived apart for fifteen years, yet Allie also had found no divorce decree when she went through her mother's things. Instead she'd found letters from William A. Webster, attorney at law, Dublin, Kentucky, the town of her birth. Letters addressed to Mrs. John Bennett, among them one notifying her that her husband had died, a letter dated more than two years ago. Allie had been sure it must be an awful mistake. What kind of mother didn't even tell her own daughter that her father was dead? One who hadn't told her daughter much of anything else, she supposed.
"What about custody? Of me?" Allie tried. "If they went to court, there should be a record of it somewhere, shouldn't there?"
"If there was a custody agreement, I'm not aware of it. The only thing I handled was the will and your father's estate."
"But... you could check?"
"Of course. I'll do anything I can to make this easier for you, my dear."
"Thank you," she said, so many questions running through her head. Allie settled on one. "All this time... My mother... she wouldn't come here?"
"No," he said simply.
"Why not?"
"I'm sorry. I don't know," he said. "The first time I called your house when I asked for Mrs. John Bennett, she hung up on me. I called back and got an answering machine. The next day the number had been disconnected."
Allie remembered her mother abruptly having the phone number changed. She'd claimed she was getting crank calls.
"I wrote letters," Mr. Webster continued. "She never replied. I finally flew to Connecticut, thought she'd throw me out of her house. But she must have seen that I wouldn't give up, because we came to an agreement. She didn't want anything to do with the house. I offered to have it sold. She said she'd think about it. I told her there was some money from your father's estate. She didn't want it. So I paid taxes on the house, had somebody cut the grass, that sort of thing. I kept your mother informed all along. She never responded."
Allie could hardly believe it. All that time her mother had known.
"For what it's worth," Mr. Webster said, "I always liked your father. And he missed you, Allie. I could see it in his face whenever he talked about you and your mother. He missed you both."
"My mother said he didn't want to have anything to do with us," Allie whispered.
"I scarcely knew your mother. I couldn't say what might have given her that idea. But I knew your father. He missed you."
Allie thanked him for all his help. Once he left, she stood with her back pressed against the door, the house spread out before her like a mystery to solve. The first piece of the puzzle only left her with more questions.
Allie shouldn't have given in to her mother's wishes. She should have demanded answers years ago, no matter how much it upset her mother.
How could she have let her mother slip away without telling her anything? Allie knew, of course, but that didn't make it any easier to accept. She'd done it by refusing to accept that her mother was so close to dying. Janet Bennett had been diagnosed with breast cancer and seemed to respond well to chemotherapy. But she'd grown weak, her body worn down by the treatments. She needed the kind of care that could only be provided by someone with her day and night. As much as Allie hated to give up the independence she'd gained over the years, she quit her job and moved back into her mother's house.
In the end, it was nothing but a cold, which turned into pneumonia, that sent her mother slipping into a coma and dying. For so long, Allie had longed to be free of her mother, a master manipulator. Until she was free, and it didn't feel like freedom anymore. It simply felt like being left all alone.
She'd been sorting through her mother's things one day when she started finding letters. Not just the ones from M
r. Webster. There was the letter Allie wrote her father that had never been mailed. Stamped and addressed in her childish scrawl but never mailed. She'd found it in a box tucked into the corner of a drawer by her mother, who seldom threw anything away.
Allie had written many such letters, full of love and longing and sadness, and later, shortly before she'd simply given up, letters full of adolescent rage. Her father had never answered her. Her mother's face fell every time Allie asked about him, every time she asked her mother to send off another letter. She'd stopped writing around the time she was twelve. She'd started to believe her mother, who was all she had left then, and she'd never imagined her mother might not have even mailed those letters.
But it was the last letter she found that had sent her rushing back here.
It had arrived at their house in Connecticut after her mother's death, forwarded by Mr. Webster from their old address in Kentucky, from a man named Jason Getty, who lived in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. He wrote rather cryptically that he was trying to contact the parents of Megan Bennett, who had been killed in a car accident in Georgia nearly fifteen years ago. He had questions about the incident he hoped they could answer, and he might have information for them as well. He suggested they might help each other.
Allie tried to tell herself it really didn't matter, not after fifteen years. Her sister was dead and buried. Nothing could bring her back. The letter was probably someone's idea of a sick joke. But she simply hadn't been able to leave it alone.
There was indeed a man named Jason Getty at that address in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a forty-three-year-old stockbroker, with a wife and three children, a man who claimed he'd never heard of Megan Bennett or her mother and knew nothing about a fifteen-year-old accident. He couldn't imagine why anyone would think he would, and seemed genuinely baffled by the whole situation.
Allie had the man checked out by a private detective. He was well respected in his job and his personal life, paid his bills on time, had never been arrested, seldom missed being in church on Sunday. As far as they could tell, he'd never been to Dublin, Kentucky, or to the town in Georgia where Megan died.
He'd pointed out, quite reasonably, that anyone could use any return address they wanted on an envelope, and if the letter writer truly wanted answers about her sister's death, he wouldn't have Megan's family writing back to a false address. All of that was true. But why would anyone write such a letter in the first place all this time? Why use Jason Getty's address? Had they simply picked it from the phone book?
It had been so odd, and it had made Allie think. She really didn't know much about how her sister died, didn't even know why her sister ran away. She didn't know why her family fell apart all those years ago. It was her mother's way, of course. To avoid all things unpleasant, to pretend they didn't exist, to hope they might go away. Well, none of Allie's questions had ever disappeared. They'd always been there, hovering on the edges of her mind. And she'd decided it was time to stop wondering, time to go after the answers for herself.
She just hadn't realized how hard it would be to come here after all these years. Even this morning, at the airport, her bags packed, her plane ticket in her hand, she'd had the ridiculous urge to get up and walk away. The past might tease at her mind, like the half-forgotten lyrics of an old, familiar song. It might haunt her like a dream at times, a nightmare at others. But she'd lived with it for so long, the questions, the uncertainties, the odd sense of yearning for something she didn't even understand. It had taken all of her resolve simply to board the flight.
But now that she was here, she made a solemn promise to herself. No matter what happened, she wasn't leaving until she found out the truth. About her father, her sister, her life. She had to have those answers before she could ever really put this behind her and start fresh.
Which meant she had no business standing here with her back pressed against the front door as if she meant to escape at the first opportunity.
Outside, she heard the ominous roll of thunder, felt electricity in the air. At any moment it would come together in a blinding bolt of lightning. More than likely, she'd lose power again before the night was over. Interminable hours of darkness stretched before her.
It was that thought which finally propelled her through the first floor, past the graceful, swirling lines of the grand staircase in the front hall, through the living room—the furniture like ghostly mounds under fading white cloths—to the kitchen in back. In the walk-in pantry, she rummaged through the cabinets until she found several large candles and some matches. She lit three candles all around the kitchen, then had the oddest feeling of the past closing in on her, smothering her.
She'd been in this room so often, and the memories seemed to come rushing back, memories she thought she'd lost completely in the intervening years. Allie turned her head and could have sworn she saw...
Herself?
She blinked twice. The image before her remained stubbornly the same. For a moment, it was as if someone had turned one of the pages of time, and she was back in this room, fifteen years ago. Like she was two people—herself, as a grown-up, watching herself, as a child.
She sat on a high stool in the corner of the kitchen, using the wrapper from a stick of butter to give a baking pan a thin coat of butter, something she'd done a hundred times. Her mother never threw away a butter wrapper. She folded them neatly into rectangles and stored them on the shelf on the refrigerator door that held the butter dish. When it came time to bake, Allie got out one for each baking pan. There was just enough butter left on the wrapper to grease a pan.
"Almost done, dear?"
Allie whirled around. There was her mother, clad in a pristine white apron her hair without a speck of gray, her face not nearly as sad. She walked over to little Allie and dumped a quarter cup of flour into the pan. Allie worked it around the bottom and the sides, so nothing they baked would stick, and her mother smiled at her. There had been times when her mother smiled beautifully, when she'd been happy, as well. Allie had forgotten that.
"Can I lick the bowl?" little Allie said, looking unbelievably young and happy and innocent.
Allie knew why. This had been before.
Their lives together were inexorably separated into before and after.
Before Megan ran away, little Allie had been happy, unafraid, thinking life would go on just like that, that nothing would ever change.
Blinking to clear her eyes, the grown-up Allie now saw nothing but the flickering of candlelight in the corner where they'd been. A chill ran down her spine. Her own voice—hers as a child—seemed to echo in the room, the sound filtering through the house, like water flowing down a gently moving stream, until it was gone and silence remained.
"Oh, God," Allie whispered. Obviously, she was in dire need of a decent night's sleep and some food. Her stomach had twisted itself into knots, and she had a bad case of the shakes, which meant her blood sugar level was crashing. She always got the shakes when she waited too long to eat.
Allie turned on the stove, put the casserole inside, and set the timer. Coffee sounded good, too, and the caffeine didn't worry her in the least. She had no prayer of sleeping well tonight. She made a pot, stood there in the kitchen waiting for it to brew, finding her gaze darting this way and that at every little creak, every whine of the wind.
It didn't matter what happened here—what she thought she saw—she was staying. If the house didn't hold the answers she sought, the townspeople likely did. This was the kind of place where people were born, lived out their whole lives, and died. She'd find people who knew her father, remembered her mother and her sister. She'd ask her questions, have her answers, no matter how painful.
She was still standing there a moment later when the wind started screaming. Even though she was expecting it, she still gave a start when the thunder finally sounded and the lights flickered and died.
She was just starting to calm down a little when she heard another sound. Someone was knocking on the door
. Her heart gave another painful lurch, thinking of that eerie vision of herself and her mother in the kitchen. But the noise persisted, and Allie hurried to the front door.
Without even looking to see who it was, she flung open the door, forgetting all about the candle in her hand. The wind came at her in a rush, the light dying abruptly. Lightning crashed around them, for a second providing dramatic backlighting for the man. She'd thought Mr. Webster might have returned for some reason, but this man was much younger, taller, broader through the shoulder, darkly handsome, and he looked as surprised to see her as she was to see him.
"Oh, my God," he said softly. "Megan?"
Chapter 2
A bit of light flared between them—from a cigarette lighter, she realized—and Allie gaped up at the tall, dark stranger. He reached for her, and it wasn't until she'd likely made a fool of herself that she figured out he only meant to light the candle she held in her hand. She was trembling so badly he put his hand over hers to steady it, then took the candle from her. He slipped the lighter into the pocket of his raincoat and carefully shielded the candle flame from the wind as he held it up to her face. The man stared at her for a long moment, as if he couldn't reconcile the image he saw with the truth—that the girl he remembered was dead. Surely he knew that.
"She died," Allie said. "Fifteen years ago, she ran away and never came back."
"I know. That's why I was so startled by the sight of you." He stared at her, his eyes narrowing, recognition dawning yet again. "Allie?"
"Yes." She gave him a tentative smile. "I'm afraid I don't remember you."
"I doubt you would. You were what? Six or seven years old? When you and your mother left town?"
"Nine," she corrected. She'd just finished third grade and had so few specific memories of that time. Struggling with multiplication tables. Watching with curiosity and envy as a few of the older girls started filling out in all the right places and gossiping about boys.
She didn't remember this man.
Just then, the rain came thundering down, running off the sides of the porch and blowing toward them. The man came one step closer. Allie hesitated only a moment. She dreaded the idea of being alone in this house, and he had known her sister.