The Chesapeake Diaries Series 7-Book Bundle: Coming HOme, Home Again, Almost Home, Hometown Girl, Home for the Summer, The Long Way Home, At the River's Edge
Page 167
“Forget that. I don’t have any ‘works.’ Just a few old amateur paintings and I don’t even know where they are. Besides, I was never serious about it and I really wasn’t that good.”
“That can be debated.” Carly looked pensive. “Well, what about your grandmother? Lynley’s mother? Did she paint as well?”
“I have no idea.” Ellie shook her head. “She and my grandfather moved to California before I was born. They died out there in a boating accident. I don’t know anything about them, really. Since I came to St. Dennis, I did learn that they more or less handed my mother over to Lilly when Mom was just a child, but I don’t even know much about that.”
“Maybe someone in town can shed some light on all that, too. But it doesn’t matter. If we market this all the right way, when we finally send the paintings to auction, you’re going make a fortune.”
“The book is a fabulous idea, Car, except for one thing.” Ellie momentarily stopped petting the dog and Dune pawed at her to resume. “I know nothing about Carolina, very little about Lilly, and apparently I didn’t know my mother as well as I thought I did.”
“There are still people here in St. Dennis who remember Lilly. You could interview them.” Carly’s enthusiasm for the idea was growing. “And I’ll bet you could learn a lot about your mother’s life here at the same time.”
“I don’t know what I’d say to people. How can I interview people here as Ellie Ryder and then have this book written by Ellis Chapman, surrounded by all the publicity you’re talking about. Everyone will know what a liar I am.” Ellie got up and began to pace. “Everyone will know what a fraud I am.”
“Well, I guess that’s a choice you’re going to have to make,” Carly said slowly. “On the one hand, you can maximize what you’ll make on the paintings through the book and the publicity, which will reveal who you really are, or you can skip the book and continue to protect your identity, and make half—a third—of what you could have gotten for the paintings.”
Ellie felt her stomach churn with anxiety.
“I guess the real question is, do the people here mean so much to you that you’d forfeit making a potential killing? I mean, all along you’ve been planning on leaving and not looking back anyway, right? So what’s the difference what they think of you?”
Ellie thought about the look in Cam’s eyes when he set her on her feet after he’d carried her across the library’s lawn, about the feel of his hands on her arms and the way her heart had skipped a beat or two when she realized he was drawn to her as much as she was drawn to him.
“I don’t know,” she told Carly. “I think a book with my name on it might bring back the scandal all over again.”
“Maybe. But you have time to think it over. In the meantime, let’s get some cloths and start cleaning up these beauties. And then let’s go back upstairs and see if we missed any the first time around.…”
Cameron turned on his back-porch lights, stepped outside, and inhaled deeply. In the warm months, the nearby marsh was sometimes unpleasantly odoriferous. Now, in November, he caught whiffs of the very last of the sweet autumn clematis and the scent of drying cattails, but no decaying fish or rotting vegetation, for which he was grateful.
All in all, Cam had liked living here. In the daylight hours, he could watch the osprey and the hawks hunt and the red-winged blackbirds flit across the wetland area. Now, at night, the marsh wrapped in deep shadow, there was sound but no sight. Some small creature, a rabbit, most likely, shrieked in the darkness as the deadly talons of an owl sank in and carried it off. The owls were nesting now. He’d heard their calls back and forth from tree to tree over the past week, mate seeking mate. One night he’d even seen a pair sitting on the branch of a tree outside his bedroom window, their bodies silhouetted against the moonlit sky.
The bungalow that sat a long stone’s throw from the edge of the marsh was the latest in Cam’s home improvement projects. He’d watched the market closely and picked up the place for a song when the children of the former owners decided the house would require more work than they wanted to take on. So far, Cam had replaced the roof, the front and back porches, and two bathrooms. He’d stripped and repainted all the rooms and was partly through the kitchen renovation. Once he finished replacing the cabinets, floor, and installed new appliances, he’d be ready to sell and move on to his next project.
He already had a place in mind. But that house wouldn’t be flipped. That house—the Cavanaughs’ house—was meant to be his, pure and simple.
Why Ellie wouldn’t just sell it to him right now and spare herself the time and the money she’d have to put into it—well, that just didn’t make any sense at all.
Cam wouldn’t mind helping her out, of course. Whatever he did in the house now would be less he’d have to do later, and he’d be paid in Ted Cavanaugh’s duck decoys to boot. How sweet a deal was that? Cam meant to earn every one of them. They should stay in St. Dennis—preferably in that house.
Besides, he figured if he had a hand in the renovations, things would be done to his satisfaction and done right. Nothing worse than having to rip out someone else’s shoddy work. He’d been down that road more times than he could count, and he wasn’t about to let some hack muck up his house. If Ellie were left to her own devices, God only knew who she would end up hiring to do all those jobs she couldn’t do herself.
Which brought him right back to the question of why would she bother when she had a buyer right under her nose, willing to negotiate a fair sale price today.
He would miss the big garage here, though. The Cavanaugh house did have the carriage house, but it, too, needed a lot of work. The garage here not only housed the tools he needed for his contracting work, but provided space for his sideline, making furniture—mostly tables—from reclaimed barn boards. The entire second floor of the oversize garage was filled with boards he got from Clay when one of the old barns on the Madison farm was razed. Clay had offered Cameron all of the salvage wood in exchange for Cam helping to dismantle the building and for aiding in the construction of a hop barn where Clay and Wade could cure the hops they were growing to make their beer. Of course, Cameron had jumped at the chance; prime aged barn board was becoming increasingly scarce. His latest project was almost finished: a trestle table for Brooke and Jesse that was intended as a wedding gift. It was especially apropos, he’d decided, the wood being from a barn on Brooke’s family farm, and he’d been working on it for several months whenever he had a few minutes to spare.
He turned his wrist to look at his watch. It was later than he realized and he had an early day tomorrow. He went back into the house and locked the door, the thought heavy on his mind that if things had worked out the way he’d wanted them to, he wouldn’t be home alone at this hour. He’d hoped to spend some time with Ellie this evening, but she and Carly had opted to leave the Grange right after dessert was served. But even if they’d stayed, well, three’s a crowd.
There was no way to deny that he was becoming more and more attracted to Ellie. He liked everything about her—the way she looked, the way she smiled, the way she laughed, the way she’d felt when he’d carried her in his arms. But he still couldn’t put his finger on what exactly it was about her that bothered him. Something about her just didn’t add up.
So which was stronger, he wondered: his attraction or his curiosity?
His laptop was on the kitchen table, and he pulled up Magellan Express, his search engine of choice, and typed in Ellie Ryder. When nothing relevant came up, he entered first Ellen then Eleanor Ryder—assuming that Ellie was short for something else—and hit search, but the links to the women that appeared were clearly not Ellie.
Curious.
He deleted Ellie’s name and typed in Carly Summit.
He studied the screen that appeared for a moment, then whistled. Carly Summit, age thirty-two, was the only child of Patrick Summit of Summit Industries, and was the sole owner and CEO of the very upscale Summit Galleries International.
So how did Ellie—who is so broke she has to do all the painting in her house herself because she can’t afford to hire someone to do the work—become best friends with someone who was obviously among the superwealthy? It occurred to him that perhaps Ellie wasn’t as bad off financially as she pretended. For one thing, there was the matter of that Benz.…
But why pretend? Why insist on doing all the work on the house herself—the type of work she’s obviously never done before? Grunt work. Nothing fun about pulling up floors and scraping layers of wallpaper.
Yeah. Something’s wrong with this picture.
He cleared the screen and typed in Rushton-Graves.
The link for the school’s website pulled up immediately. Cam clicked on it and waited for the site to load.
“Wow,” he muttered when the home page pulled up.
The campus of the Rushton-Graves School in Massachusetts’s Berkshire Mountains took up most of the town of Endicott, a small village that appeared to exist solely to support the school. Rushton-Graves’s buildings were of brick construction in the Federal style, the lawns spacious and meticulously clipped, the student body neat and shiny and ridiculously preppy in their appearance, and the tuition, room, and board astronomically high.
How could Ellie Ryder afford to attend such a place?
He scanned idly through the website, only half paying attention to the photos, until he came to a page that posted pictures from an alumni field hockey game from ten years ago. There in living color, smiling, her arms around her teammates on either side, stood Carly Summit. On her left was a dark-haired girl identified as Megan Granville. On her right, a platinum blonde: Ellis Chapman.
The hair was different—blond instead of chestnut brown, long past her shoulders instead of the shorter style she now wore, but the smile was unmistakable. Ellis Ryder Chapman, the caption read.
It was Ellie, all right.
Cam stared at the picture for a long moment, then returned to the search engine and typed in Ellis Chapman. This time, the results went on for pages.
“Oh, jeez,” he said aloud. “That Ellis Chapman.”
The Ellis Chapman whose father had been named Villain of the Year last year.
The Ellis Chapman whose mother was Lynley Sebastian.
THAT Ellis Chapman.
It was all starting to make sense.
He read one article after another, most of which described her father’s crimes in excruciating detail. There were photos of Ellie—the blond Ellie—walking into the courthouse during her father’s trial accompanied by a dapper older man in a well-tailored suit who was identified as her personal attorney. Photos of her during the press conference in which the district attorney announced that Clifford Chapman had changed his plea to guilty in order to avoid a trial. Photos of her ducking into a limo, her eyes behind the dark glasses he now recognized. Photos of her and Carly in the hallway outside the courtroom where her father was sentenced. Photos of her dodging questions about her former fiancé.
Photos of the former fiancé himself. God but he looked like a tool. Cam wondered how a man—any man—could trade a chance for a lifetime with a woman like Ellie for something as fleeting as wealth.
All in all, Cam learned more about Ellie—Ellis—in that one hour than he had since the day he met her. The bottom line was that her father was the worst kind of crook and her ex-fiancé was the world’s biggest fool—and Ellie as much their victim as the thousands of people they’d defrauded.
He scrolled back to a photo that was taken of her seated in the courtroom at her father’s arraignment. Her face was a study in confusion and pain. It was clear even to Cameron that she’d been totally blindsided by his arrest. He pulled up pages of articles and the accompanying photographs to form a time line of the past year of her life, and found it telling that the only people in the photos with her were either her attorney, or Carly. No other family. No other friends.
It wasn’t hard to figure out why she was hiding her identity.
Cameron completely understood the fear of being judged against the actions of a parent. He knew too well how the sins of the father—or in his case, the mother—could burn into your soul and haunt every day of your life.
It occurred to Cam that Ellie needed to remember that she was Lynley’s daughter as well as that weasel Chapman’s. That she isn’t responsible for what her father did any more than he, Cam, was responsible for his mother’s actions. Of course, it had taken him years to come to that conclusion. Maybe for Ellie, it was all still too raw for her to view the situation with a more rational eye.
Cam turned off his computer and sat back against the chair. Now that he knew the truth about her, what was he going to do about it?
It took him a moment to realize he wouldn’t be doing anything. It wasn’t his place to confront her, to try to force her into talking about something she wasn’t interested in discussing. If she wanted to continue living a lie, that was her choice, her business, and he didn’t have the right to try to make her confess a secret she wanted to keep. She obviously had her reasons, and he of all people knew how the sins of a parent could mess with your head and make you question who you were and how you felt about yourself.
Cameron had been there and done all that.
No, there’d be no confrontation. What would that prove, beyond the fact that he was clever enough to ferret out her secret, and that wasn’t who he was. He’d be respectful of her privacy as long as she felt it necessary to keep up the facade.
He did wish she’d come to trust him enough to tell him the truth herself, though, but he knew that he’d have to earn that trust, and it would take time.
Cam sat at his desk for a while longer, still trying to process everything he’d just read. If anything, he was left with more questions than answers.
Finally he turned off the lights and locked the doors and was halfway up the steps when his phone rang.
“What’s up, Jesse?” he asked after a glance at the caller ID screen.
“Just wasn’t done busting your stones about having to put out such a hefty sum to ransom Ellie this morning. You’re a good sport to pay that much for a woman you’ve never even taken to dinner.”
“I believe the record shows you paid more for Brooke,” Cam reminded him.
“Yeah.” Jesse’s chuckle had a smug ring to it. “But I get to see Brooke naked.…”
Chapter 13
“I wish you could stay longer.” Ellie stood in the doorway watching Carly pack.
“So do I. And next time, I will.” Carly glanced up from packing and smiled. “Assuming I’ll be invited back.”
“Of course. Anytime. No special invite needed.” Ellie walked to the bed, sat, and scooched back to lean against the headboard. “Besides, I’m holding the Porsche hostage.”
“Just one more reason why I’m glad I loaned you the sedan. There’s no way I could fit the paintings in the little 911.” She grinned. “Room for all in the Mercedes, though.”
“I’ll take good care of the beast for you.”
“I know you will.” Carly squeezed her toiletries into the suitcase and zipped up the sides. “I just wish I could have rescheduled tomorrow’s meeting. I really thought I’d be able to do that so I could stay a few days longer.”
“Who are you kidding?” Ellie laughed. “You can’t wait to get those paintings back to your house.”
“Well, there is that.” Carly feigned nonchalance but the gleam in her eyes at the mention of the artwork she’d be taking with her gave her away. “I will buzz through that meeting tomorrow at the speed of light and I’ve canceled everything else I had on my calendar for the next week. This is such an amazing find.”
She hoisted her suitcase and reached for a jacket she’d left on a chair.
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��I’ll get it.” Ellie stood and grabbed the jacket. “Got everything from the bathroom?”
Carly nodded. “No harm if I forget something, though. I really will be back as soon as I’ve finished with the paintings. I’ll clean the oils myself and see about having the watercolors backed with acid-free paper.” She paused on the way out the door. “Of course, your mother may have taken care of that herself. It’s hard to tell how old her paintings are.”
Ellie led the way down the steps. “I keep getting little flashbacks of her standing at an easel in a big room on the third floor of our house in Connecticut. There were big windows that looked out over the sound and there was always a lot of light there.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she did a lot of her painting here as well. Next time I’m here, we’ll search for clues.”
They reached the first floor and Carly set her bag on the floor near the door.
“What kind of clues would there be?” Ellie asked.
“The most obvious would be drips of paint on the floor. And you’d want a room that had a lot of light, just like you described. Then again, maybe you’ll find some supplies in a closet or notes, sketches that she later turned into paintings.”
“It seems there’s no end to the surprises this house holds.”
“I know. Isn’t it great?” Carly reached for her jacket and Ellie handed it over. “You know, I feel so much better about you being here. I admit I was worried at first, but after seeing your wonderful house and meeting your new friends—”
“I don’t know anyone here in St. Dennis well enough to consider them friends,” Ellie interjected. “And frankly, that works for me.”
“I think I may have already reminded you that it’s not fair to judge everyone you meet by the people who dumped you in the past,” Carly cautioned.
“It wasn’t just that I was dumped. It was as if I’d been collectively erased from the memories of everyone I’ve ever known. Like I just don’t exist anymore.”