“That it is,” Toni agreed and hoped the attack was over. Going back and rehashing things that couldn’t be undone didn’t do a damned thing except make her feel like crap.
“Good, it’s settled.” The frown melted away and Bridget smiled, her expression softening as the storm blew past. “I will say this again, dear girl, I’m very happy you’ve come home at last. It warms my heart to see your old room put to use again. And I figure that, by the time your mom’s out of the hospital, we’ll have this place spick-and-span. It’ll be so nice that you won’t want to leave.”
Fat chance, Toni thought but wisely kept her lips zipped.
“And once we’re done down here”—Bridget paused, and a thick-knuckled hand left its spot on her knee to gesture at the ceiling—“then we’ll start on the junk in the attic. There’s so much of her history that Miss Evie couldn’t bear to deal with. Perhaps it’s time someone else sorted through it for her.”
“You want me to go through my mother’s things?” Toni squinted at the woman like she’d gone off her rockers.
The Evie Ashton she knew would bust a gut if she came home and realized they’d been pawing through her personal paperwork, much less her private mementoes. Not to mention the fact that the last time Toni had peeked into the attic, it had looked like an overcrowded U-Store-It. Hell, they’d be lucky to get through everything in the den before Toni had to return to St. Louis. How could they possibly add more clutter to the list? The days already didn’t have enough hours to do all that needed doing.
“Sorting the stuff in the attic could take the rest of my natural life,” she said, blowing wisps of hair from her brow.
“Then so be it.” Bridget came off the folding chair. She brushed tiny bits of paper from her polyester slacks. “When Miss Evie’s well again, she needs to look to the future with a clear conscience. In fact, the other day, I told her, ‘You can’t face your past and you can’t let go of it either. You cannot leave Antonia with such a frightful mess.’ Which is probably why she went up there yesterday morning. Maybe she’d been thinking about finally making peace with what’s done and forgiving those who need forgiving.”
Good Lord. Toni felt a twinge begin at her temples.
Bridget cocked her head and glanced ceiling-ward. “She must’ve gone up before breakfast, bless her soul, because I didn’t find dishes in the sink when I arrived at eight. She’d taken off her nightgown and put on a black dress, and there were dog-eared photographs scattered around her. She was curled up like a baby. At first I thought she was sleeping.” She bit her lip, growing teary. “If only she’d waited till I arrived. Maybe things would’ve been very different.”
“What do you think she was doing?” Toni asked, because wearing a black dress at the crack of dawn and rummaging through photographs didn’t sound at all like Evie.
“She must’ve had her reasons.” Bridget sniffed and mopped the damp from her cheeks with the cuff of her sweater. “Could be she wasn’t in her right mind by then. The minute I saw her, I folded her nightgown and put it underneath her head. ‘You hang in there, Miss Evelyn,’ I kept saying as I stowed the pictures away in her hatbox before the paramedics came running. I didn’t want anyone stepping all over them.”
“It’s just so strange,” Toni murmured, wondering if Evie had been searching for anything in particular.
Her mother had never liked it when Toni had gone up in the attic to play; in fact, she’d shooed her out every time. “Go outside,” she would say, “where there’s fresh air to breathe and not dust.”
She thought of her conversation with Hunter Cummings about his father’s broken engagement to Annabelle Evans. Was Evie looking for something of Anna’s in the attic? Was one of the dog-eared photographs Bridget found scattered around her of the sisters? Was it Anna who needed forgiving?
“Did you know my aunt Annabelle?” she asked out of the blue, and Bridget gave her the oddest look.
“Well, of course I did,” the housekeeper answered and glanced down at her knees, brushing invisible lint from her slacks. “Everyone in Blue Hills knew Miss Annabelle. I figure she’s the only girl in town who’d ever said no to a Cummings. That’s something worth remembering.”
“Yeah, I guess it would be.” Toni wondered if that’s why Anna had never returned to Blue Hills, because the town wouldn’t let her forget. Sometimes it wasn’t easy to be who you wanted to be when people knew too much about you. Good luck trying to start over with that kind of baggage.
“All right, enough gum-flapping,” Bridget said and slapped hands on her thighs, getting Toni’s attention. “I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry. What do you say I go fix us some chicken salad sandwiches for lunch? I figure we could both use a break, and you need something in your belly besides coffee from the hospital cafeteria. That swill’s unfit for man and beast.”
“Sure, I could eat something.”
The housekeeper grinned. “That’s my girl.”
Toni watched her leave but she didn’t follow. What she did was take several deep breaths, the way she’d learned in the yoga class she’d attended twice before quitting. Bridget’s accusations had gotten her stomach twisted in knots. She had to calm down. She couldn’t go back to the hospital with her insides feeling so tense and tangled.
You didn’t have to keep away for so long . . . did you? When your daddy was dead and buried, how often did you visit?
She wished like hell that Evie had expressed her devastation instead of suffering in silence. She wished, too, that she’d hung around longer for her mom after her dad’s funeral instead of taking off as soon as she could. But Evie had given her no reason to stay. “I can take care of myself,” she had said, and not for the first time. “It’s your life to live, so do what you need to.” And Toni had always believed her.
Evie had been so unfailingly capable and self-sufficient, never asking for a hand or a shoulder, and Toni had felt in the way and unneeded. Had she let her mother down? Maybe she had, if Bridget’s words were any indication. How crappy it made her feel, thinking that the housekeeper was the only soul who’d stuck around for Evie to lean on.
Well, Bridget and apparently Hunter Cummings.
She took another deep yoga breath before she chanted to the cluttered den, “I am not my mother’s keeper, I am only her daughter, and I’m doing the best I can.” Then she repeated it a few more times to ease the frantic beating in her chest.
She refused to start feeling guilty for the past. Like Bridget said, it was spilled milk. She was here now, wasn’t she? Besides, what was Toni supposed to have done two years ago? Should she have forgotten she had a life in St. Louis and moved back home to keep her mother company?
God, she hated getting schooled, like she was ten and not three decades beyond. Why did being a daughter have to come with so many strings attached? And why did coming home always make her feel like a child, no matter how old she was?
“Miss Antonia!” Bridget yelled from across the house. “Lunch is ready!”
Perfect example, she thought and hollered back, “Coming!”
Then she put down the mail she’d been sorting, got up, and headed to the kitchen.
Chapter 11
Evie
I didn’t hear from Annabelle for the longest time after she ran out on Davis Cummings and, if truth be told, on Mother and Daddy and me.
Early on, I’d harbored hope that she’d return once the maelstrom had quieted. Since Anna was our own Sarah Bernhardt with a flare for the dramatic, I figured she’d give herself time enough to catch her breath and plot how to move on from such an awkward situation. Once she’d penned that new script in her head, she’d descend on Blue Hills with tears in her eyes and her tail between her legs, begging for forgiveness. Then she’d beguile her detractors before they knew what had hit them, all would be forgotten, and she’d press onward as if nothing had happened.
For weeks, my ears pricked at every knock on the door and every jingle of the telephone as I waited for Anna
’s return. But neither came to pass.
As odd as it felt to go on without her, the world kept spinning regardless. Soon, spring blossoms faded and the days grew long as summer blanketed Blue Hills with its typical muggy heat. By then, I knew I’d been wrong to think I’d see my sister anytime soon. Anna had finally done what she’d longed to do for so many years: she’d spun the globe, set her finger on a faraway destination, and put Blue Hills behind her. At that point, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see her again.
“What in God’s name was she thinking?” my father walked around muttering for weeks on end, at first to me and then to no one in particular. “What the devil has possessed her? I did everything I could for that girl, everything, and it was never enough.”
I bit my tongue instead of reminding him that Anna had been a free spirit since birth and that pushing her into marriage with Davis Cummings had only made her feel trapped. But I kept that to myself, along with my guilt. Because I knew I bore some of the blame for what had happened. I was the elder sibling and far more level-headed. I should have kept my sister from going into the Gypsy’s shop that day or, at the very least, stopped her from buying the dress. But I had done neither, and, in the end, an act of magic—or voodoo, whatever one chose to call it—had turned her head and sent her off in an entirely different direction.
As confused as I felt about what Anna had done, her absence affected me deeply; it affected us all. Without her around to tease us out of our dour moods and bind us together, our once tight-knit family began to unravel.
“She’ll come home, Evie, just you wait,” my mother insisted, nodding as she spoke, as if to convince herself it was the truth. “She won’t stay away forever, not my baby.”
But I’d seriously begun to wonder. I had gone into Anna’s room many times after she’d run off, desperate for some kind of connection. I didn’t sense her presence so much as the emptiness left in her wake. I’d seen the bare hangers in her closet, the missing suitcase from beneath her bed, and, lying open atop her vanity, the black velvet case in which Mother had kept Charlotte’s pearls. I had no idea what else of value my sister had taken with her. My guess would be whatever she could carry.
Despite my being labeled as “the bright one,” Anna was no mental lightweight. She had always been clever as a fox; one might even say manipulative. She must have packed enough to survive for quite a while, even if she had to sell family heirlooms to do it. Anna may have loved pretty things, but material goods had never meant as much to her as to my father, and I’d venture to say that she didn’t put a price on living her life her own way. Perhaps Anna had felt that being stuck in Blue Hills was a fate worse than death, one she’d narrowly escaped.
“She hasn’t written you at the school, has she, Evelyn?” my mother asked, even though I visited the building only occasionally during the summer to check on my classroom or for a private tutoring session, as I wouldn’t resume teaching full-time again until September.
“No, ma’am, she hasn’t.”
But after six months with no word from Anna, Mother’s porcelain-smooth façade had developed cracks, and it would have been impossible to miss the desperation in her voice when she asked, “She hasn’t contacted you through one of her friends?”
“Not even a postcard,” I admitted.
“Will you let me know if she does?”
“Yes, of course I will.”
If I, like my sister, had been more a fiery McGillis and less a stoic Morgan, I might have had the nerve to shake my mother and say, “Anna is not coming home, not now or anytime soon! And she’ll stay away for as long as it pleases her!”
Annabelle had always had a mind of her own, and she’d obviously made a conscious choice to steer clear of this town and our family. As painful as it was to grasp that ugly truth, I’d begun to do just that. Clearly, my parents had not. I wasn’t certain which was worse: my father’s righteous indignation or my mother’s heartfelt delusions. It hurt to listen to them both.
Every night before I fell asleep, I lay in bed imagining how different things would have been if not for that one afternoon in Ste. Genevieve. Anna would be married and safely ensconced in the Cummings family manse, by far the most ostentatious house in the county. With Davis’ daddy a widower, my sister would be the mistress of a vast acreage that included land our great-grandfather had staked so many years before. Daddy could have patted himself on the back for a job well done (one that my granddad Joseph surely would have cheered), and Mother would have a newlywed daughter to fuss over while she anxiously awaited the birth of future grandbabies.
It all sounded so neat and proper, like the perfect ending to a fairy tale, but Anna would have suffocated. She had never hidden from any of us her desire to roam the world. Why was it so odd that she’d finally found the strength to flee? And if the dress had given her the courage to do it, was there anything so wrong with that?
But it seemed that I was the only one who even tried to understand or who offered my sister an iota of sympathy.
My father had run in circles apologizing to everyone even remotely touched by what he deemed “Anna’s unpardonable behavior.” He’d even visited with Davis Cummings to personally beg forgiveness, but Anna’s would-be groom and his family were not so willing to accept.
“You have deeply humiliated my son, myself, and our good name,” said an angry note from Archibald Cummings, Davis’ father, which Daddy had read aloud to Mother and me, his voice trembling. The gist of it was that no Evans was welcome in their home or on their property ever again.
I understood their rancor as I believed then that Davis had been wounded as deeply as we had. I had witnessed firsthand the pain in his face when Anna had walked out on him. However, it wasn’t long before I saw it announced in the paper that Archibald Davis Cummings Jr. (aka Anna’s former groom) was engaged to marry Christine Deaton Moody. There was even a portrait of the pretty pair, her hand on his shoulder as she looked adoringly into his eyes. He’d rebounded very swiftly from his deep humiliation, hadn’t he?
Good riddance, I decided. Let the Cummings family rule their mighty vineyard and leave us be. I hoped Davis and Christine would be happy as clams. They deserved each other. Even Anna had given them her blessing: Everyone in town knows Christine Moody has been crazy about you for ages. She’s the one you should be with, not me.
But the snub devastated Daddy. My father’s elaborate plot to reunite us with those eighty lost acres had failed through no fault of his own, and it hit him hard. He turned into an old man overnight, his salt-and-pepper hair going white, his walk more a shuffle than a stride.
“It’s not your fault,” I assured him, even though Mother had told him the opposite; but he waved me off.
I wanted to confess about the dress, but how could I? My father was a realist who based his actions on facts, not whims. Even if I’d tried to explain, he would never have believed me. And why should he? I knew firsthand what the dress could do, and I hardly believed it myself.
So, while Daddy pined for the union that never was and my mother wept for her long-lost daughter—and the rest of Blue Hills gossiped about my disgraced sister—I knew the reality of the situation. A mystical black dress sewn of silk spun by spiders had cast its spell upon her, causing her to see the future and chase it; and to preserve itself, the dress had revealed its power to me as well.
Maybe it was wrong, but I decided that I’d rather have everyone deem my sister flighty or wanton than hear the truth. I had no intention of making things worse by babbling about Gypsy sorcery, not even to Jonathan. If there was one thing my parents didn’t need right now, it was another member of the Evans family gone off the deep end. For the moment, I felt like I was the only sane one in our gloomy old house.
For a pall had been cast over the old Victorian as surely as if there had been a death. I missed the sound of my sister’s voice, her high-pitched squeals and laughter. Instead, the only constant was the strident ticking of the grandfather clock as it counted off th
e passing minutes and hours. I grew increasingly grateful for the rambunctious fifth graders in my classroom when September finally rolled around and for Jonathan’s convivial company in the evenings when he got off work and took me out.
Since that fateful day in March, we’d become inseparable, although I kept him away from the house and my parents as much as I could. While my father had withdrawn from his gregarious self, rarely smiling or laughing, my mother had simply withdrawn. Too tormented by migraines to do much but lie in her darkened bedroom, she wasn’t often up and about. More frequently, she hid herself within her womb of drawn drapes, a perpetual grimace on her face.
But after six months of courtship, I figured it was time that Jonathan broke bread with my family, or what was left of it. So I invited him to the Victorian for dinner, which would have seemed quite a simple thing under normal circumstances. I hoped that having a new face around would shake my family out of its funk. Besides, I had to keep living my own life, even if my parents had stopped living theirs.
It all started out well enough with Jon showing up at the door precisely at six with a bouquet of yellow mums for my mom and a tin of Prince Albert pipe tobacco for my father. My mother had suggested bringing in the help to do the cooking, but I declined graciously. It was important that I make this meal myself. So I spent the better part of the afternoon in the kitchen under my mother’s watchful eye, preparing her famous brisket. Despite the screened door open to let in the air, the oven’s heat and hardly fall-like warmth turned my cheeks ruddy and stuck my hair to the back of my neck.
But it was worth the trouble. The house filled with the scent of smoky barbecue as well as a nice breeze by mealtime. Sheers billowed at the open windows, and the temperature cooled by a dozen degrees. The table had been set, and I had donned a boatneck blue dress I knew Jon admired. In the background, Sinatra crooned about fools rushing in from the speakers of the RCA stereo.
Little Black Dress with Bonus Material Page 8