by J. L. Wilson
Table of Contents
Excerpt
Look for other Remembered Classics romances
Flyer
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
A word about the author…
Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
“What brings you back to town?”
“You.” He looked down at me. “I wanted to be with you for the funeral.” As always, he was simple, direct, and to the point.
“Thank you.” I leaned against him, his comforting warmth an antidote to the sudden chill that made me shiver. “Where are you staying?”
He laughed softly. “Didn’t you know? I’m a major stakeholder in that new motel they built out by the hospital. I had a suite built there for me.”
The “new” two-story Kensington Arms Motel was built ten years before on the west side of town, just six blocks away from Mom’s house. It was a significant improvement over the old ten-room roadside motel that had served travelers for half a century. “I’m sure it’s not the Ritz or the Savoy,” I said, moving away from him. A suite at the Kensington was probably two cramped rooms with a whirlpool tub in the john.
His eyes narrowed at my jibe. “It’s clean, quiet, and private. That’s all I really need.”
“Not according to the magazine stories I’ve read about you.” I walked past Peter’s grave to the edge of the bluff. An oak tree, probably a hundred years old, towered over me. It was just losing its leaves to new spring growth and the lawn underneath was strewn with brown detritus. “You’re a celebrity, Bell. It seems like you flit from hot spot to hot spot, always with the most beautiful people. You’re the most eligible bachelor in the world.”
He joined me on the bluff. “Don’t believe everything you read.”
Look for other Remembered Classics romances
by J L Wilson from The Wild Rose Press, Inc.:
DOGGED
LAKED
Flyer
by
J L Wilson
The Remembered Classics Series
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Flyer
COPYRIGHT © 2018 by J L Wilson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Contact Information: [email protected]
Cover Art by Kim Mendoza
The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
PO Box 708
Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708
Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com
Publishing History
First Crimson Rose Edition, 2018
Print ISBN 978-1-5092-1913-1
Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-1914-8
The Remembered Classics Series
Published in the United States of America
Dedication
To VHS Class of 1970
and memories of a simpler, happy time
Chapter 1
The rituals around death give those who are living very little time to immediately grieve. There are forms to fill out, papers to review, music to decide on, a guest list of sorts, relatives to notify. I filled up several sheets of legal paper in the hours after my mother’s death, keeping a checklist of things I had to do.
Through a cruel twist of fate, Mom died on Mother’s Day Sunday night. I spent most of Monday handling paperwork. Tuesday morning I spent at the funeral home, working out the details. It was the first time I had to plan someone’s funeral and the enormity of the task came as a surprise.
My mother had handled all the other deaths in my family. My older brother David died when he was ten in a skating accident. My father died when I was in college and my younger brother Michael died shortly after my father. And my younger brother John died overseas, fighting in an undeclared war no one really cared about or understood.
I thought about my mother often as I prepared for her funeral. She had planned four funerals, three of them for her children. When I was at the drugstore on Tuesday morning, the clerk expressed her sympathy. “Your family sure has had its share of grief,” she said with a mournful nod, as though confirming a universal truth. “We all said it was such a shame about the Davis boys. Your mother surely had her share of heartbreak.”
I murmured my agreement and my thanks but wondered if anyone thought about the remaining Davis, the Davis girl—me, Wendy? Didn’t I have my share of heartbreak, too? I lost brothers, a father, and now my mother. It was as though I was a ghost, a spirit who hovered around those who died. Of course, I hadn’t lived in town for a long time so perhaps people had forgotten about me, but I visited often. Didn’t that count for something?
Unspoken but there, I knew one other death that clung to me like an extra shadow, a faint echo of times past. Almost thirty years ago, I let someone die and that memory haunted me as surely as if his ghost did.
I walked back from the drugstore to my mom’s house, the Davis house, the two-story white frame house on the corner of C Avenue and West Gloucester Street. The May sun was warm on my face and the air smelled of damp earth from last night’s rain. Our house was in the “old” part of town where the houses were all two or more stories, the yards were large, and the trees were mature and budding into a fine haze of green overhead.
One house I passed had an entire front flowerbed full of daffodils, the yellow and white flowers bobbing in the breeze. Another house was vibrant with tulips, large masses of varying colors with one special section planted in green and gold, the high school team colors, Pirate colors. I didn’t know there were green tulips in the world. I paused to admire the arrangement before continuing my slow walk home.
You can walk just about anywhere in Kensington, Iowa. The town has ten alphabetical and ten numerical north-south avenues, with 1st avenue being the dividing line. There are also eleven east-west streets named for British dynastic houses, crisscrossing at tidy intersections. The town was founded in the mid-1800s and presumably the founding fathers had some nostalgic connection to Britain or maybe just a desire to make tidy, Midwestern streets sound grander than they were.
The old part of town was in the alphabetical avenue section. A suburb of sorts sprang up in recent years on the west side of town, which caused consternation for the city planners because most of the dynastic names were already in use. Consequently, the new streets were named for boroughs of London so we had Greenwich St., Camden Court, Kensington Gardens, and Chelsea Way, keeping with the British Isles theme.
When I was growing up we roamed the streets on our bicycles, ranging from the swimming pool on the east side to the river on the west side. I used to know every house and every alleyway, but change had come to town in the twenty-some years since I went to college then moved away to become a grown-up.
I was at the sidewalk in front of our house, preparing to walk to the front porch, when a car pulled up and the driver leaned across the seat to speak out the open passenger side window. “Wendy? Is that you?”
I didn
’t recognize the man driving the dark gold Cadillac sedan. He had thinning brown hair, a round face, and a look of pinched worry around his eyes when he peered out at me. “I’m Wendy,” I said, going to the passenger window and bending over to look inside. “Who are you?”
“I guess I don’t look the way I used to. You look just about the same, except your hair is short now.” He smiled, a crooked smile with one corner of his mouth twisting up. That was what gave him away.
“Dibs?” I asked, leaning into the window to get a good look. “Is it you?”
John Jones, nicknamed Dibs, grinned at me and for an instant I saw the boy from junior high and high school. Back then he was a hyperactive, skinny, beanpole of a kid who aspired to either play professional basketball or become a rock star. He wasn’t picky. Either would suffice. His lousy knees and his inability to play guitar halted those dreams. He got his nickname because he was always calling dibs on any fun things we found. The last I knew, he sold cars in Iowa City, forty miles north of Kensington.
“I figured it had to be you,” he said. “I heard about your mom. I’m sorry, Wendy.” His cheerful grin gave way to an appropriately sober expression. It was odd to see such an adult look on a face I remembered from my youth. Of course, it was odd to see the skinny beanpole change into this rotund man in front of me, too.
“She had a good life, except for these last few months,” I said, the oft-repeated words rolling off my tongue and barely registering on my consciousness. “I think she was ready.”
I believed that even though Mom died at the relatively young age of seventy-one. That she was ready was what was told to me by the hospice workers and what Mom confirmed for me, if I interpreted her correctly. Mom’s massive heart attack and subsequent stroke three months earlier left her almost totally paralyzed except for her eyes, which were amazingly communicative, and her right hand. She and I “talked” a lot at first, but that faltered in the past few weeks when her health began to go downhill at an alarming rate.
“How long are you in town?” Dibs asked.
“At least this week,” I said, squatting down near the still-damp grass so I could more easily converse through the open window. “Mom’s funeral is on Friday. I’ll probably stay through the weekend and into next week, too.”
“You’re living in Des Moines, right?”
I thought about my two-bedroom condo west of Des Moines in a bustling suburb. “Yes, I am. I’m on a leave of absence from my job right now. Mom was so sick these past few weeks.”
“You’re a writer or something, aren’t you? For some software company?”
I nodded. “I write documentation at Lerner Software. We just wrapped up a big project, so it was okay for me to take some time away. I need to figure out what I’m going to do with the house, take care of the furniture and…” My voice trailed away when I thought of the list of To Do items waiting for me inside. “You know.”
“Yeah, I know. My dad died five years ago and I helped Mom with all the stuff. If you need anything, we’d be glad to help. I’m married. You don’t know her, I met Barb in college. We have three kids. Anyway, we’re glad to help however we can. We live in Iowa City. I’m in town today to see Mom.” His cheerful, rambling conversation was exactly as I remembered. Dibs could talk for hours about nothing at all, usually accompanied by elaborate gestures and side stories that left the listener bewildered and lost.
I slowly straightened, my once agile calves protesting slightly. “Thanks, I may take you up on that offer. There’s a lot to do.”
“I’ll try to get to the funeral,” he said, his gaze going to the house. “I spent a lot of time here when I was growing up. Seems like we were all here, going in and out.”
“Yep. You guys were always underfoot. I think my folks enjoyed it.” My father especially loved to have the crowd of boys who always flocked to our house. They were my older brother David’s friends and after he died, the boys transferred their friendship to me and my younger brothers. There were always kids playing in our yard or an extra boy or two staying for supper. Our house was the hang-out, the place where everybody congregated.
“Your parents had as much to do with raising us as our own parents did.” Dibs started to straighten. “That reminds me. Tom Bell is here.”
My heart froze. “Bell? Why?”
Dibs went out of sight when he sat upright again behind the wheel. “I suppose to see you and go to the funeral. He visited your mom a lot these past few years.”
I leaned over, almost falling into the expensive leather passenger seat. “He did?”
Dibs frowned, his thick eyebrows drawn together into a solid line. “Yeah. Didn’t your mom tell you?”
I tried a nonchalant shrug. “She mentioned he would stop in now and then.”
“He and I get together sometimes when he’s in town. He lives in New York City now, I think. It seems like he travels a lot. I suppose you knew that, though.” Dibs watched me with frank curiosity, his gray eyes sharp and assessing.
“Yes, I know. He’s sure been successful, hasn’t he?” My heart was beating so frantically I was certain Dibs would hear it. “Seems like I see his picture in the magazines a lot. I’m surprised the press isn’t hounding him.”
Dibs laughed. “He told me he has a deal with them. They leave him alone when he’s here and he gives ’em a story when he leaves. Everybody in town knows that when he’s here, he’s just Tommy Bell, Kensington’s favorite son. He’s not T.K. Bell, former owner of one of the world’s biggest computer companies.” He shot me a shrewd look. “I read that he’s giving up the head office and is going to step into the background. He always said he wanted to retire before he was fifty. Looks like he’ll manage it.”
I nodded dumbly. Bell was forty-eight, two years older than me. Of all the people I thought I’d see at Mom’s funeral, Bell was the one person I didn’t expect. “Bell was always a techie,” I mumbled. “I’m not surprised he’s so successful.”
“Your father was, too. I suppose that’s why they hit it off so well. Remember that gaming console your dad and Bell built together? That was so cool. Man, we played video games for hours in your basement.”
I laughed at the forgotten memory. “Dad later said that building that gaming console probably saved him a thousand dollars or more in the money the kids would have spent at an arcade. And Mom was happy to know where we were—in the basement, playing some game my father and Bell cooked up.”
Dibs shot me a shrewd look. “If you still have that gaming console, I’ll bet you could sell it for a bunch of money. It’s the first invention that T.K. Bell ever worked on.”
He was probably right. It was the first one Bell built, but it certainly wasn’t the last one. Bell had made a fortune on innovative hardware and software design, becoming one of the leading figures in computers. He sold his first company, started another one, sold it, started another and was in the process of selling it soon. “I’ll look for that console,” I said, knowing damn well it had probably been consigned to a recycle bin years earlier. “You’re right. Maybe I could make a fortune.”
“I wonder what Peter would be doing if he lived.”
I backed out of the window, bumping my head on the frame. “Ouch.” I rubbed it, my gray-and-black short hair becoming even spikier.
“Peter was the brains of the bunch,” Dibs said. “If Bell can end up one of the richest men in the world, Peter probably would have ended up a world leader.”
“Or a war criminal,” I said sourly. “Peter had a fluctuating sense of morality.”
“That’s a good way to phrase it.” Dibs laughed. “He did, didn’t he? Well, I have to go. I’ll see you at the funeral on Friday. It was good to see you.” He held out a business card and I took it. “Call if you need anything. My mobile number’s on there. If I’m not in, just leave a message. I’m glad to help.”
“Thanks, Dibs. I appreciate it.” I stepped back from the curb and he waved a good-bye before pulling out onto the quiet street.
I looked down at the card with his name in bold letters and a logo of a car dealership imprinted on top of a ghostly image of a Mercedes Benz. Fine luxury autos for discriminating buyers. I smiled. Dibs had been one of my favorites among the Lost Boys who hung out at our house. That was the term my mother used for them and it wasn’t until I was older and I read Peter and Wendy that I realized how appropriate a soubriquet it was. David had been their leader and without him, they were lost.
Until Peter stepped in to lead them. Then they were still lost, but in a different way. I shivered at the memory.
I tucked the card in my jeans pocket and went into the house. By today’s modern standards, it was small, with a living room, dining room, and kitchen to the left and a bedroom and bathroom on the right. Upstairs under the eaves were two bedrooms and a tiny bathroom. The boys had one room and I had the other. When their friends stayed overnight, they took over the basement where there was another sleeping area (barely finished and hardly qualifying as a bedroom), a pool table, a roughed-in bathroom, and an old television set on which they played video games all night.
I passed through the living room with the comfortable, casual furniture my mother favored. The couch was brown-and-gold floral with loose cushions and low arms. Two low armchairs in a muted beige plaid were comfortable for curling up with a book in front of her faux fireplace, or to kick back and watch the small TV in the corner.
Athos, Mom’s petite mostly-black-with-a-white-tummy cat, looked up from his spot on the back of the sofa, yawned, then settled back to sleep. He was accustomed to me because I was here often. In the past three months, I frequently telecommuted from Mom’s house or worked an intensive four-day week so I could have a three-day weekend here. For the past two weeks, I was here most of the time, alternating my time between telecommuting and being with Mom at the hospice where she eventually died.
I went through the dining room with its small round oak table and four chairs, then entered the kitchen, a utilitarian space that was adequate for one person and claustrophobically crowded with two. Mom always joked that Dad made sure we had a small kitchen so he wouldn’t have to help, although when we were growing up, somehow it was always crowded with multiple helpers.