The Bridesmaid's Gifts

by Wilkins, Gina

  “I go off on business trips fairly often. No one thinks twice about it. They know they can reach me on my cell phone if they need me.”

  “Same here.” Which reminded her that she hadn’t turned her phone back on after getting off the plane. She dug into her canvas-and-leather bag and rectified that right then. Not that she expected any calls for a while.

  “I thought we would grab a bite of lunch and then get started,” Ethan said a few minutes later.

  “Fine.”

  “You in the mood for anything in particular?”

  “No. Anything’s okay with me.”

  Taking her at her word, he turned into the parking lot of a tidy diner that advertised “country cooking” and appeared to be popular, judging by the number of vehicles in the smallish parking lot. “There should be something here we’ll both like,” he remarked.

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  A smiling waitress in jeans, T-shirt and apron greeted them at the door and escorted them to what appeared to be the last available table. “What can I get you to drink?”

  “Iced tea for me, please,” Aislinn replied.

  Ethan nodded to second the order, and the busy waitress bustled off to get their drinks, leaving them with menus to peruse until she returned. Aislinn took a moment to look around. It was a little early for the Sunday after-church lunch crowd, but the diner was still full. The other patrons seemed to be enjoying their meals, talking and laughing so that the room was filled with the clatter of tableware and the sounds of camaraderie.

  No one seemed particularly interested in her and Ethan, and for once she was picking up nothing from anyone else that gave her any cause for concern. She could enjoy her lunch and feel as normal as anyone else here.

  She looked back across the table to find Ethan studying her over the top of his menu. “What?”

  “I was just wondering what was going through your mind when you looked around the room,” he answered candidly.

  She glanced down at the menu, trying to concentrate on the choices. “I doubt that you would understand,” she murmured.

  “Try me.”

  It was almost tempting, just to see how he would react. She was rather relieved when the waitress returned then with their drinks, giving her a chance to change her mind.

  “Have y’all decided what you want?”

  Aislinn looked quickly down at the menu again and chose the first thing that appealed to her. “I’ll have the grilled chicken breast.”

  “Just bring me the special,” Ethan said, handing over his menu.

  Making note of their orders, the waitress nodded and hurried away again.

  “Well?” Ethan prodded.

  She spoke brightly. “I was just wondering what our agenda is for today. Do you have an idea of where we should start?”

  He frowned, making it clear he knew she was holding back, but he let it pass. “I thought we’d examine the accident site first, maybe get a feel for the surrounding area.”

  She nodded. “That sounds like a good place to start.”

  She suspected that it wouldn’t be easy for Ethan to go to that spot. It might be less difficult for him if he could truly believe, as she did, that Kyle hadn’t died there—but maybe not. Either way, Ethan had lost his little brother that day. Even if they did find him again, those missing years could never be recovered.

  Their food was delivered with impressive promptness, and they ate without much conversation. Aislinn’s meal was very good, well cooked, nicely seasoned. The juicy chicken breast was accompanied by side orders of rice and steamed broccoli. Judging from the speed with which it disappeared, Ethan’s lunch must have been good, too. The daily special turned out to be fried pork chops with red potatoes mashed with the skins, green beans and corn. Country cooking, just as the signs outside had advertised.

  “You chose well,” she said when they’d both eaten all they could. “That was delicious.”

  He shrugged. “You know what they say—if you want a decent meal, look for the place with the most pickup trucks in the parking lot.”

  She chuckled. “An interesting measure for culinary excellence.”

  A fleeting smile quirked his lips. “Probably not the best way to choose gourmet cuisine.”

  “True. But I’m not all that into gourmet cuisine, anyway. Though I do enjoy a place that serves interesting desserts,” she added lightly.

  “Even though you don’t want to be a pastry chef in one of those snooty places.”

  She shrugged. “Doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the efforts of the ones who do enjoy it.”

  “Can I get y’all some dessert?” their waitress asked, approaching the table again. “The coconut pie’s good today. Got some chocolate cake, too.”

  Neither of them wanted dessert. “I’ll take the check now,” Ethan said.

  Aislinn reached for her purse. “I’m paying my own way.”

  “I’ve got this.” Obviously Ethan wasn’t in the mood to argue about it just then.

  Because she didn’t want to cause a scene, Aislinn gave in, promising herself they would talk about the expenses of this trip later. While they were on a quest to find the truth about his brother, she had made the decision to accompany him. He hadn’t offered to pay her, and she didn’t want him to. Taking pay—even letting him buy her meals—felt too much like some of the “psychic” cons he’d been so leery of when he had first met her.

  Aislinn was dressed in brown again. Ethan was beginning to seriously question her predilection for the rather drab color. Not that she could ever look drab, with that striking black hair and those dark chocolate eyes—but still. Remembering how good she had looked in the bold red of her bridesmaid dress, he wondered why she didn’t choose bright colors more often.

  “What’s your favorite color?” he asked as he drove the windy mountain roads, breaking a silence between them that had stretched almost since they’d left the restaurant a half hour earlier.

  The question seemed to startle her. He rather liked being able to take her by surprise occasionally.

  “My favorite color? Why?”

  “Just making small talk. You have a favorite color, don’t you?”

  “I—um…green. Emerald-green, a little brighter than your shirt.”

  “Really?” Seemed she could startle him a bit, too.

  “Why does that surprise you?”

  “I guess because I haven’t seen any evidence of it. I’ve never seen you wear that color, didn’t see it in your decorating, either, at your home or your shop.”

  She gave a self-conscious smile. “I don’t have to wear it or decorate with it for it to be my favorite color. It just gives me pleasure to see it.”

  “Bet it would look good on you.”

  “It looks good on you. Green, I mean. What’s your favorite color?” she asked quickly, as if to cover a slip of the tongue.

  He didn’t even have to stop to think about it. “It’s red.” As of fairly recently, actually.

  “Do you wear red very often?”

  Chuckling at the way she had turned the question back against him, he admitted, “Not since I quit going to football games back home. The Danston Cardinals,” he explained. “Everyone wears red.”

  “Actually, I knew that. Nic told me. It’s why she picked red for her wedding color—because she and Joel fell in love during his homecoming weekend.”

  “Yeah, that was quite an event. Heidi, the class officer who arranges all those events, kept them busy partying all weekend—until the balcony collapse that last morning, anyway. That put an end to the reunion. It was a miracle no one was more badly injured.”

  Nodding her agreement, Aislinn asked, “Does your class have reunions?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And do you go?”

  He gave her a look that effectively answered her question.

  “Oh,” she said, smiling wryly. “Of course you don’t.”

  “No. I see the people I want to see when I want to
see them. As for sitting around with a group of near strangers, reminiscing about stuff we did twenty years ago, well, that would bore me into a coma.”

  “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Has your class had a reunion yet?” He wasn’t sure exactly how old she was, but he assumed she had to be close to Nic’s age.

  “They had a ten-year reunion last summer.”

  “I suppose you went?”

  “No, actually. I skipped out on it.”

  Something in her voice made him glance her way. She was looking out the side window, so that all he could see of her face was her profile. Yet that was enough to let him see that she didn’t really want to talk about her school years.

  “Neither one of us is interested in reliving the past, I guess,” he remarked lightly.

  “I suppose not.”

  “So why are we making this trip?”

  That made her look at him. “This isn’t about the past,” she reminded him. “Not primarily, anyway. It’s about the present—and the future.”

  “So what do you see in my future? Do you predict that I’ll find my brother and we’ll all live happily ever after?”

  “You’ll find your brother. But whether you live happily ever after is up to you.”

  Inexplicably amused by her slightly acerbic tone, he chuckled. “Maybe I like being grouchy and bitter.”

  “Trust me, you wouldn’t be the first person I know to enjoy living that way.”

  It was obvious that she was referring to someone in particular. One of her parents, maybe? Both?

  He realized that he knew absolutely nothing about her past except that she had grown up in Cabot and had been friends with Nic for most of her life. Lizzie had implied that Aislinn’s childhood had been a difficult one, but he didn’t know what that meant. How hard it had actually been.

  Because this didn’t seem to be the time to ask, he changed the subject. “Look at those directions I’ve written in that pad in the console, will you? I’m not sure where I’m supposed to turn once I get to Bellamy, the town where we lived. I looked up the directions on the Internet last night.”

  “Have you been back since you moved away?” she asked, opening the notepad.

  “No. We moved three years after Kyle…disappeared and we never went back. I was nine. As far as I know, my parents pretty much lost contact with all their friends there, and we had no relatives there to visit.”

  If she had noticed his slight stammer about Kyle’s fate, she didn’t comment. “They wanted to start a new life in Alabama—away from people who knew them before they lost Kyle.”

  “Yeah, I guess. And it worked. We all made friends and felt at home there. Joel barely remembers living in North Carolina at all.”

  “But you do.”

  He shrugged. “I was older. But I wasn’t opposed to the move. Even that young, I knew somehow that it would be easier for Mom to live in a new house, away from all the reminders of Kyle.”

  He paused a moment and then something made him add, “I still remember the day we moved into our house in Danston. Mom told us to choose our rooms. Joel looked up at her and asked which room was going to be Kyle’s. I can still see her face when she told him that Kyle wouldn’t have a room in the new house but he would always have a place in our hearts.”

  And then, embarrassed that he had revealed so much and wondering what it was about Aislinn that brought out things like that from him, he spoke again before she could comment. “So where do I turn? It’s a highway number, I think.”

  Probably sensing that he needed the change of topic, she began to read the directions to him.

  Ethan guided the rented vehicle to the curb and put it into Park. “That’s it. That’s the house where we lived.”

  Aislinn studied the tidy redbrick, ranch-style house across the street. The trim and shutters were cream, as were the posts that supported the roof of the long front porch. A redwood fence surrounded the backyard, but the neatly manicured front lawn was open and inviting, with a couple of large shade trees and flowers in well-tended beds.

  Whoever owned the place now took pride in their home and kept it looking nice. It appeared much the same way when the Brannons had lived here, Aislinn thought. There had been toys on the lawn and a swing set in the backyard. A happy home but a noisy one, with three boisterous little boys inside.

  It had been very quiet in that house after Kyle’s disappearance, she thought sadly. While the laughter had gradually returned, the tone had forever been altered. The family’s broken hearts had mended but had never been made completely whole again. And no matter what happened in the future, those scars would never completely heal.

  “Your Christmas tree was always in that window,” she said, pointing. “And you had a dog. A small brown one.”

  “A dachshund,” he confirmed. “We called him Teddy.”

  She could almost see him, a dark-haired little boy chasing after a small, brown dog. “You had a hiding place in the backyard.”

  “There was a big bush. The branches came all the way down to the ground, and I could hide inside them and watch people without them seeing me.” He looked at her as he spoke, evidently trying to determine if she was only guessing or if it was more than that.

  “You went there a lot after Kyle left. And you took something of his in there with you.”

  “A toy,” he said, speaking more slowly now. “A stuffed cat. I thought if I concentrated really hard on the toy, Kyle would come home. He’d be okay, and my parents would stop crying.”

  “You kept that cat. Even when your parents packed away Kyle’s things, you kept the toy and you didn’t tell them. You took it with you when you moved—because you thought as long as you kept it, there was always a chance Kyle would come home to claim it. Do you still have it?”

  “No.”

  She frowned. “Yes, you do. It’s packed away. You haven’t looked at it in a long time. But you have it.”

  “Okay, I do,” he admitted a bit crossly. “How do you know these things, Aislinn?”

  She was appalled to feel her eyes suddenly fill with hot tears. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  Visibly rattled, he asked quickly, “You aren’t going to cry, are you?”

  Forcing her eyes to dry, she shook her head. “No. Sorry.”

  She didn’t know how to explain her uncharacteristic emotionalism. Part of it was because of the vague images that had filled her mind. The sad little boy grieving for his lost brother. The happy family whose lives had been so tragically and so permanently changed.

  She was also genuinely unnerved by the clarity of the images she was receiving. She didn’t see the need to tell him again that she didn’t usually pick up so much information. That the past few weeks had been different for her—and more than a little frightening.

  She had learned to live with what she considered heightened intuition. She had never asked for more. Never wanted more.

  Clearing her throat, she spoke more brusquely. “So Carmen left here with your brother that afternoon. In the rain, knowing there was extensive flooding in the area.”

  Seeming relieved by the return to objective facts, Ethan nodded. “Yeah. She left the house at about two o’clock that afternoon. One of the neighbors saw her drive away and thought it was strange that she would go out in that weather.”

  “When did the anonymous call come in about the car going off the road?”

  “An hour and a half later. Just after three-thirty.”

  “It took her that long to get there?”

  “We’ll find out. We’re going to drive there from here.”

  “Were any of her things missing? Clothing, money, that sort of thing?”

  “I don’t know yet. If so, Mom didn’t seem to know anything about it.”

  “From what we saw in the newspaper accounts, there didn’t seem to be much of an investigation. It appeared to be taken as fact that the car went over and the bodies were washed away.”

  “The
re was no real reason to think otherwise. Carmen had been our nanny for eighteen months. She seemed perfectly content with her life. She had no money, nowhere to go. Why would she have faked her death?”

  “Maybe you’ll have the chance to ask her.” But something about that statement didn’t feel right. Maybe he would never find her. Or maybe Carmen had died since. Except for the picture of Kyle she had drawn in her sleep, she had no insight into what had become of Carmen or Kyle since they’d disappeared into that storm.

  Ethan put the car into gear. “Let’s find the spot where the car went over. Check your watch. We’ll see how long it takes to get there from here.”

  “It was somewhere along this stretch of road. I’m not sure exactly where.”

  A metal guardrail provided a border between the two-lane highway and the steep drop-off to the river below. Ethan had already informed her that the river was popular for canoeing and kayaking in the shallows and white-water areas and for fishing in the deeper parts. It was deeper in this area, the ever-moving surface glittering in the late-afternoon sun, a few fishing boats tucked into small inlets or drifting with the current. She pictured it as it had been on that afternoon, swollen several feet above its current level, rushing violently downstream and carrying anything in its path along with it.

  Glancing at her watch, she said, “We’ve driven twenty-five minutes from the house. There’s no way it took her almost an hour and a half to get here.”

  Doing his own mental calculations, he nodded. “Even in the bad weather, it shouldn’t have taken her that long. Either she drove a more circuitous path to get here, for some reason, or she made a stop along the way.”

  He pulled over to the narrow shoulder and stopped the car. “This guardrail wasn’t here thirty years ago. Just the shoulder and then the drop-off. The newspaper report said there weren’t any skid marks from braking—though the water on the road could have had something to do with that, if she hydroplaned.”

  Gazing at the river, Aislinn chewed her lower lip, trying to visualize the accident.

  “Well?” he prompted after a moment. “Are you picking up anything?”