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

by Stewart, Mariah

  “You’re going to sell all of them?”

  “Yes, when I can. She’s certain she’ll have buyers lined up for them. I can use the money to start fresh somewhere.”

  “So what exactly does ‘starting fresh’ mean?” he asked. “Just what is it you want to do, Ellie?”

  A shuffle near the top of the stairs drew their attention upward.

  “Is that true? What you said?” Gabi asked from the first landing. “You’re going to sell this house? You’re going to move away?”

  “Yes,” Ellie told her.

  “Oh.” Gabi appeared crestfallen.

  “I’ve always planned on selling it, Gabi. I never meant to stay here in St. Dennis. But don’t worry. You’ll be going with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Well, I don’t know yet.”

  Gabi turned and went slowly back up the steps.

  “Are you almost ready to go to Paige’s? It’s close to four,” Ellie pointed out.

  “I changed my mind. I’m not going.”

  “Why not? I thought you were looking forward to it.”

  “I was,” Gabi said pointedly. “But what’s the point in making friends if I’m going to be moving away soon and have to make friends all over again?”

  “Not soon. Not till the summer.”

  “That’s soon.” Gabi went back up the hall and quietly closed her bedroom door.

  “I should go talk to her. I guess the thought of another move has really upset her.” Ellie avoided Cam’s eyes. She knew their conversation wasn’t over.

  She stood, and looked anywhere but at Cameron.

  “I’ll talk to you later, then.” He leaned over and kissed the side of her face. “I’ll let myself out.”

  She nodded, and went upstairs to talk to Gabi.

  From the hall, Ellie could hear Gabi crying. She knocked softly on the door and waited to be invited in.

  “Come in,” Gabi told her.

  Ellie found Gabi lying across her bed, sobbing into her pillow.

  “Gabi, want to tell me what’s wrong?”

  “Everything’s wrong.”

  Ellie took a deep breath. Of course, for Gabi, everything was wrong. Her mother’s dead, she’s living in a strange town with a stranger, she just starts to make friends and finds out she’ll be moving at the end of the school year. Again.

  “I’m sorry, Gabi. It didn’t occur to me to tell you about selling the house. It just isn’t something I was thinking about.” Ellie stood awkwardly next to the bed, then sat down cautiously on the edge of the mattress. “I know that all of this—everything that’s happened to you over the past month—has been a nightmare. If I could change things back to the way they were for you, I would.”

  “I miss my mother,” Gabi sobbed. “I want my mother back.”

  “I know, sweetie.” Ellie rubbed Gabi’s back and smoothed her hair back from her wet face. A few minutes later, Dune jumped up on the bed and licked the tears.

  “I miss her so much, Ellie. I don’t know why she had to die.”

  A few more sobs escaped her lips, then Gabi sat up, her face red and blotchy.

  “I wake up sometimes at night and I cry because I miss her so much. I try to keep quiet because I don’t want to wake you up. I don’t want you to think I don’t like living here with you.”

  “I wouldn’t think that,” Ellie said softly. “You can wake me up anytime. I don’t want you lying awake, alone and sad.”

  “I’m sad but I’m not alone.” Gabi sniffed. “The lady with the white hair is always here when I wake up.”

  “The lady with the white hair?”

  “I told you about her. She just lets me talk, and she listens, and then I fall back to sleep.” Gabi wiped her face with a tissue she pulled from a pocket of her jeans. “What would happen to the lady if we left? She wouldn’t have anyone to keep her company.”

  “You know she’s not real, right?”

  “Not real like you and me, maybe, but she’s real, Ellie. I see her every night.”

  “Does it scare you to see this …” What to call it? “This woman in your room at night?”

  Gabi shook her head. “No. I like her. She makes me feel safe.”

  Great, Ellie thought. I now have a thirteen-year-old child and a ghost of a woman who’d been near one hundred living with me. But at least the ghost is Lilly.

  Ellie shook her head. Had she really just thought that?

  “The next time we see Cam, I want you to describe the white-haired lady to him, all right?”

  Gabi nodded. “Has he seen her, too?”

  “I think it’s been a long time since he’s seen her, but then again, not much would surprise me today.” In spite of herself, Ellie was starting to think that maybe Gabi was seeing Lilly. It defied everything she believed, but still, the child was convincing. “So about tonight. I think you should go and have a good time. I think you’ll have a lot of fun. You and Paige got along so well this morning. I think she’d be disappointed if you didn’t go.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I do.”

  “Maybe …” Gabi scooched over to sit next to Ellie. “Why do you have to sell the house in the summer? Why can’t you just decide to stay here?”

  “For one thing, I’ll need a job.”

  “You have a job. With Cameron.”

  “That’s only temporary. I don’t know that I could support us by scraping wallpaper.”

  “What’s the other thing?”

  “I already promised Cam I’d sell the house to him in May. I gave my word. I can’t change my mind now.”

  “I bet he’d be okay if you wanted to stay. He likes you.”

  “Cam’s waited a long, long time to live here. I can’t tell him I’m not going to sell it to him.”

  “Even if you wanted to?”

  “Even if I wanted to.” Did she want to? She was starting to wonder.

  “When I first got here I thought it was just an old house,” Gabi confided, “but now I think it’s the best place.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Gabi shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just a happy place to be.”

  “Well, it is that.” Ellie remembered something else she wanted to ask about. “Gabi, do you have a cell phone?”

  “I did, but I don’t have one now.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It was in my book bag when my mom dropped me off for my dance lesson. It was in the car when …” Gabi swallowed hard. “When the truck hit it.”

  Instinctively, Ellie put her arm around Gabi’s shoulders. “Look, if you ever want to call any of your friends in New Jersey, you can use my phone.”

  “I can?” she asked as if it hadn’t occurred to her to ask.

  “Sure.” Ellie took it out of her pocket and handed it over. “Who was your best friend?”

  “Laurie.”

  “I’ll bet you miss her.”

  Gabi nodded. “Everything happened so fast.…”

  “Give her a call. Maybe after speaking with Laurie you’ll feel more like socializing. I’ll drive you to Paige’s, if you decide to go. Otherwise, you’ll have to call her and let her know that you’re not coming.”

  “Thanks, Ellie.” Gabi began to punch in the numbers.

  Ellie stopped in her room to pick up the journal she’d been reading the night before, and heard Gabi laughing, a sound she hadn’t heard since the girl arrived. She started toward the steps, Gabi’s voice floating down the hallway.

  “Oh, I’m living with my sister in Maryland. It’s the coolest house, it’s right on the Chesapeake Bay. And we have a dog. Her name is Dune. No, my sister is cool. She’s the best.…”

  Ellie smiled. She’d met with one of the counselors at Gabi’s school this week and discussed the situation. The psychologist warned Ellie that Gabi would most certainly have mood swings following the trauma she’d been through. Right now she might be happy, but an hour from now she might be sobbing and despondent. All to be expected,
Ellie’d been told. It could all turn on a dime.

  But right now Gabi was laughing with a friend, and Ellie was “cool.” She’d take it. And if Gabi decided to go to the sleepover, Ellie would have a sleepover of her own.

  Chapter 21

  The call to her old friend cheered up Gabi considerably. She was in a fine mood when Ellie drove her to Paige’s for the sleepover.

  “Paige said her stepmom is Dallas MacGregor. The movie star?” Gabi chatted happily in the car. “Have you met her? Is she really beautiful in person?”

  “Yes, and yes,” Ellie replied. Mood swings, indeed. Let’s hope there’s no meltdown later tonight.…

  “Paige said she’s really nice, though. She said sometimes she likes Dallas more than she likes her real mom. She said her real mom mostly cares about her new baby brother. She said she’s been wanting to live with her father ever since her parents got divorced but her mother just finally said okay so she came to live here in September. She likes it here better. She likes that her dad has all these dogs he takes care of. She gets to take care of them, too. She said I could help walk them sometimes.”

  Gabi continued her chatter all the way to the Wylers’ house.

  “Did Paige say what time I should pick you up in the morning?” Ellie asked as Gabi gathered her things before hopping out of the car.

  “I think she said ten.” Gabi paused in the open car door and blew Ellie a kiss. “Thanks, Ellie.”

  “You’re welcome.” Ellie blew the kiss back to her, then waited until the front door opened and Gabi was safely inside.

  Sighing deeply, Ellie decided to stop at Cam’s house instead of calling him once she got home. His pickup was in the drive, but there were no lights on in the house. She hesitated before getting out of the car. He could be taking a well-earned nap, or he could be out in the back. She rang the doorbell, waited a minute, then rang it again. If he didn’t answer, she’d go quietly and call him later.

  The door opened just as she turned to step off the porch.

  “Hey. This is a surprise.” His smile welcomed her.

  “I hope you’re not busy. I should have called, but I just dropped Gabi off at Wylers’—”

  “She decided to go to the party? Good. I’m glad. The kid needs to be a kid.”

  Ellie nodded her agreement.

  “Oh. Hey, come in. Sorry. I was so surprised to see you that I forgot my manners.” He stepped back and she came inside. The house was warm and smelled of pine.

  “I was just working on a table downstairs. Give me a minute to turn things off.…”

  “What are you doing to the table?”

  “Making it. Out of old barn boards.”

  “May I see it?”

  “Not much to see just yet, but sure …”

  He led her down the basement steps and into a workshop he had set up. The top of the table he was making was held in some sort of vise.

  “I don’t have a piece wide enough for the top, so I’ve had to glue several boards together to get the size I wanted,” he explained.

  “Will the glue hold?” She ran her hand across the smoothly polished boards.

  “It’ll hold pretty well, but I’ll reinforce the bottom with brackets just to make sure.” He looked up and grinned. “You don’t want your soup to land in your lap because your table fell apart.”

  “Who’s the table for?”

  “It’s for me, actually. I made it to fit that space near the windows in Lilly’s kitchen.” He looked mildly chagrined. “Yeah, I know, a little premature …”

  “Good to plan ahead,” she said. “I guess it takes awhile to make something like this.”

  “A couple of months, less if I’m not working.”

  “It’s beautiful.” And it was. He’d sanded and refinished the old oak boards in a way that restored the grain to its original beauty. “You could probably sell these if the remodeling business got slow.”

  “We were slow for a while last year, but this year, it’s been tough to keep up. I have a waiting list of at least a month. Not a complaint, by any means. Just a fact.”

  He turned off the light over his worktable. “It’ll have a better finish on it when it’s done. I just couldn’t wait to see what the grain was going to look like once it was sanded.

  “Let’s go upstairs and make a fire. We should take advantage of the fact that you have the night off.…”

  Ellie woke up in a strange bed, where a strange light played against shadows across the wall. She sat up with a start, then realized where she was. In Cam’s bed, in his house, and the light was from the fireplace in his room. She settled back down next to him, and sighed.

  “You okay?” he murmured.

  “I just got disoriented for a moment.” She rested her head on his chest. “I love that you have a fireplace in your bedroom.”

  “I love that you’re getting to enjoy it.” His fingers trailed lazily up and down her back. “You know, it’s almost Christmas.”

  “It’s the beginning of December,” she corrected him. “That’s hardly ‘almost Christmas.’ ”

  “Not if you’re in St. Dennis. The holiday season begins early here. We’ll be lighting the tree in Old St. Mary’s Church Square next weekend. Weekend after that is the house tour.…”

  “Houses all dressed up for Christmas, open to the public?”

  Cam nodded. “I think there are eight houses on the tour this year.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “The shops up on Charles Street all have special sales from the first right on through till the big day. Brings in a lot of tourist dollars.”

  “I noticed there was a lot of traffic and a lot of people milling around the shops when I drove Gabi over to Wylers’ earlier.”

  “Some people in town complain about the weekenders and the day-trippers, but St. Dennis would have died years ago without them. A few forward-thinking folks on the town council had a plan to attract people to come here to vacation. It took awhile, but slowly the economy has turned around. St. Dennis has become a real destination on the Bay. Everyone’s profited from it. I sure have. Every time another old house changes hands, there’s going to be work for me and my crew.”

  “Sounds like win/win. You keep working, someone gets a spiffed-up house.”

  He nodded. “You all set to go to work on Monday morning?”

  “Looking forward to it. I’m going to need to earn a few bucks for Christmas shopping for Gabi.” She wrapped the sheet around her torso and sat up. “She needs a cell phone.”

  “What thirteen-year-old kid doesn’t have a cell?”

  “She did have one. It was in her mother’s car when it crashed. I let her use mine today to call one of her friends from her old school. It seemed to cheer her up a little.” She pushed a pillow behind her head. “Christmas is going to be tough for her this year.”

  “It will be,” Cam agreed. “So let’s keep her busy. Take her to the old church tomorrow for their service and plan on the other stuff as we get closer to the holiday. It won’t make it not hurt, but maybe you can help her to focus on other things.”

  “Is there somewhere I can go to get a list of what’s going on each weekend?”

  “You’re looking at it.” Cam grinned. “We’ll do it all together. It’s been a long time since I went caroling. It’ll be fun.…”

  Over the next few weeks, it was fun. Ellie and Cam took Gabi to the living Nativity where the manger would lie empty until Christmas Eve and they went caroling three times, each time ending up at Cuppachino for what Cam had promised would be the best hot chocolate they’d ever tasted. There was a house tour that had left Ellie breathless. She’d seen a lot of professionally decorated houses, but nothing compared to the homes of St. Dennis, where each stop on the tour had been decked out by the owner and their family and friends.

  Garlands of hand-tied pine boughs wound up stairwells and draped around polished newel posts where bunches of holly and ivy trailed. Vases filled with tall branches of w
interberry holly graced mantels and sideboards, and silver bowls were piled high with colored satin Christmas balls. Mantels were festooned with arms of blue spruce holding pinecones and silver bells tied with red ribbon.

  “I love St. Dennis at Christmas,” Gabi declared one night when she arrived home from the middle school holiday musical.

  “So do I,” Ellie had agreed.

  “I wish …” Gabi glanced at Ellie, then stopped in midsentence.

  “You wish what?”

  “Nothing.” Gabi’s eyes were downcast. “I guess I’ll go up and look over my homework.” She fled up the steps, two at a time.

  Ellie’s gaze followed her, knowing that Gabi must be wishing for so much this year, none of which were presents.

  They picked out a tree at a lot on Charles Street, and with the help of Cam and his pickup, got it home and set up in the front corner of the living room. Gabi and Paige searched the attic and found boxes of old ornaments, some of which looked as if they dated from the early 1900s. The china cupboard in the dining room was still empty, so Gabi and her friends set up displays of the oldest ornaments on the shelves, safely behind the glass doors. It was a Christmas unlike any Ellie had ever had, but it left her with a glow in her heart. She knew it would be an especially tough day for Gabi, but they managed to get through it.

  And Gabi did seem to love her new iPhone on Christmas morning.

  “It’s exactly the phone I wanted!” she squealed. “How did you know …?”

  “I asked Paige what to buy.”

  “I can’t wait to use it. Can I call someone right now?”

  “Sure.” Ellie glanced at the clock. “I’m guessing that most of your friends are awake by now.”

  “Are you kidding?” Gabi laughed. “It’s Christmas. Everyone gets up early on Christmas.”