I was about to speak when my uncle finally decided he had something to say. “What would you like for dinner? I have pizza in the freezer. It won’t take long to bake. Do you like pepperoni, or do you prefer sausage? I have cheese or vegetable if you don’t like meat.”
Whatever I had been about to ask was lost. “I—I don’t care. It doesn’t matter . . .” I was still sorting out my thoughts when we reached the driveway.
But my thoughts went on hold when I got my first real look at the house. When we’d left that morning, my mind still fogged with sleep, I hadn’t even glanced at it. Now I stopped in my tracks to stare. The house was Victorian style, trimmed with what looked like wooden lace. Two round turret rooms pointed skyward like the peaks of a fairy tale castle. One of those rooms was mine, I realized. The one on the left.
Large as it was, the house was set far off from the road, looking comfortably settled in among numerous trees and shrubs, as if they had all grown up together. The lawn sprawled wide and vibrant green, the grass long and brushy, probably from recent spring rains. The evening sunlight showed off the house paint, a creamy white of age, and shadows hung back along the house’s sides, tangled among tree branches. Full-blooming lilacs brushed one corner of the house and a flourishing vine clung to the other. There was an enchanting quality about it all—something I’d never encountered in California. I don’t think you can find it in new houses . . . it’s the dignity of age, perhaps. Yet I’d seen plenty of old houses in California. Just none quite like this. I had a sudden desire to sketch the scene.
Leaving my uncle to get the mail, I crossed the lawn to the left side of the house, where the lilacs grew. I looked at them only a moment before passing them by.
My eyes skipped over a large stump, momentarily wondering why a tree had been cut down. My gaze fell on an unkempt garden bordered with rocks and half bursting with some large, fan-like plant. “Is this rhubarb?” I heard myself ask aloud. I was surprised to receive a reply.
“It is. Rhubarb is a persistent plant. It comes back year after year, even if you ignore it.” I turned to see my uncle retreating to the front of the house. “I should get the pizza on.”
“Uncle Peter!” I caught up with him as he mounted the front steps. Inspiration had struck me, and I didn’t even realize this was the first time I’d bothered to address him. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to make dinner tonight—a homemade meal. If you don’t mind eating late, that is.”
My uncle nodded without turning. “That would be fine.” He paused with his key in the door. “There are a lot of old cookbooks in a cabinet in the kitchen. Feel free to look through them. Make anything you like.”
He disappeared inside, leaving me to find my own way to the kitchen. With all its doors and halls, the house reminded me of the inside of a carnival funhouse—without the fun. It must have taken me five minutes to find the kitchen as I wandered room from room, pausing to admire paintings and porcelain figures filmed with dust. I was surprised my uncle hadn’t asked whether I’d ever made a meal before, or if I even knew how to cook, for that matter. He’d just assumed I knew what I was getting myself into.
And I do, I thought.
The lilacs had made me realize it was time to find out more about my mother, and the rhubarb had provided me with the means to do it. I would make a fabulous homemade dinner—dessert too—and set the ideal opportunity to ask my uncle to tell me everything he could. There was so much to find out, because I knew almost nothing. It hadn’t really mattered to me before, but now that I was here in Lorens, if only for a little while, I felt compelled.
I located the ragged, food-spattered cookbooks. Most of them were made up of pasted-in or hand-written recipes, compiled over many years, I supposed. Some recipes were so old and faded that I couldn’t read them. It didn’t matter, because I had more than enough recipes to choose from.
Of course, I already knew what I would make for dessert. I found a rhubarb pie recipe on a dog-eared page, proving its frequent use. The recipe was written in spidery handwriting, and I had to concentrate to decipher it. I wondered if my mother’s mother—my grandmother—had written the recipe. Or maybe it went back even farther, to my great-grandmother.
“Grandmother.” I said the word quietly, almost reverently. My tongue liked the way it felt. I wasn’t used to thinking about relatives. Long ago, I think when I was in third grade, and all the kids were supposed to write letters to their grandparents for grandparents’ day, I’d asked my mother about mine and she’d told me we didn’t have any. “It’s just you and me, baby,” she’d said. “We have each other.” But my grandparents had been alive at one time, had lived in this house—had baked and eaten this pie.
Shaking myself free of such thoughts, I took out a mixing bowl. Following the recipe carefully, I cut butter into flour and mixed in water to make the crust. I ran outside to pluck five thick stalks of rhubarb, then wasted time trying to find my way back to the kitchen. I was relieved to finally put the pie in the oven.
I was surprised to see that it was a modern oven with electronic buttons. Smooth looking, but I didn’t think it suited the old-fashioned style of the kitchen. Checkered curtains, wooden utensils displayed in a ceramic cream pitcher, and copper pans hanging from the ceiling all worked together to oppose such technology.
While the pie baked, I searched through the cupboards, pantry, and refrigerator to see what ingredients were on hand for making dinner. The kitchen turned out to be fairly well stocked with cans and boxed foods, but there weren’t many fresh ones. A package of ground beef sat lonely on a fridge shelf, an unappetizing pool of red juice collecting around its base. The freezer was crammed with pizzas. Unless I made dinner, it was clear what I’d be eating every night.
When the meal was ready, I set the dishes on the table, called my uncle, and after a brief prayer of thanks we began. Everything tasted as good as it looked, and though I was weary from the effort, I couldn’t help feeling proud of the results. I knew I wouldn’t mind making more meals in the future. True, I wasn’t going to be here much longer, but while I was, I might as well enjoy the freedom of the kitchen and taste some of my new-found family’s heirloom recipes. Maybe I would even copy some of the recipes before I left. It would be something unique of my mother’s—and grandmother’s—to keep with me and carry on.
During the meal, my uncle didn’t say much, but I could tell he was pleased with the food. After all, you don’t eat three helpings of Layered Beef Bake if you don’t like it.
As the meal progressed, I was conscious of time slipping away. I knew I should bring up the subject of my mother, ask my questions, but for some reason I kept stalling. I promised myself I would ask when I served the rhubarb pie.
I was more proud of that pie than anything else. I waited tensely for my uncle’s reaction. After the first few bites, he spoke.
“Your mother used to make a good rhubarb pie.”
Of course, I knew this already.
“This is good, too,” my uncle said. “Maybe with a little more practice, you’ll be able to match hers. It was my favorite.”
I stuffed a forkful of pie into my mouth and chewed rapidly. Now is not the time to get touchy, I warned myself. No matter how much I felt like telling my uncle I wouldn’t be here long enough to get “more practice,” I needed to stay on the current train of conversation.
“There’s a lot I don’t know about my mother.” This was even harder for me than I had anticipated. “I was wondering if you could . . . fill me in.”
My uncle waited till he was completely done chewing. Then he took a long drink of milk before answering. “I was wondering what this was leading up to.”
What did he mean by that?
“I gather there is a lot she never told you. But first, why don’t you tell me what you do know. Then I’ll have somewhere to start from.”
I pushed the pie about with my fork, making a gooey, pink-green trail on the ceramic plate. “She didn’t talk about her past much, and
I guess I just never brought it up because—” I searched for an explanation—“because there was never any reason to.” I took a deep breath. “I know that twenty years ago my mother married my father—a doctor—in Colorado. That’s where I was born. My father died in a car crash when I was a baby. Then my mother and I moved to California, and that’s where I grew up. That’s where my home is.”
My uncle took off his glasses and began polishing the lenses with a corner of his napkin. “But she told you nothing about before her marriage?”
“No.” My heart rate speeded up. “So what is there to tell, and why didn’t she tell me?”
“I believe your mother had her reasons. She wanted to put it behind her. That’s why she left and didn’t keep in contact. She never told you she had a brother, did she?”
The question surprised me. Surely he knew the answer. That’s when I realized my uncle must have a lot of his own unanswered questions, though his were of the years since my mother had left Lorens. I wondered if this hurt him. If it did, he didn’t show it.
“No. But she talked about you that last night.” It suddenly sounded awful to me, as if my mother hadn’t cared enough about her brother to keep in touch. Then she died and dumped me on him—after all these years when she hadn’t had anything to do with him. I felt embarrassed for her. “I’m sure she thought about you a lot.”
“Do you know about your grandparents?” he asked.
“They’re dead.”
“Yes. Both your mother’s and your father’s parents died before your mother and father married—”
“You knew my father? I thought they met in Colorado—”
My uncle shook his head. “They married in Colorado, but they met here—let me tell it. I’ll start from the beginning. Your grandfather, Steven Hutch, died in 1966 in the Vietnam War. Your mother was five at the time; I was fifteen. Our mother had a bad heart. She died seven years later. Your mother and I lived on here, and we made out all right. I got a job, and your mother was an excellent student.”
Typical, I thought. My uncle, unaware of my silent interruption, continued. “She was in her senior year at the high school and had a very promising future.”
When he paused, the silence that came was emphasized by the steady ticking of a clock coming from somewhere in the house, a ticking I hadn’t noticed until now. I waited, almost not wanting to hear what would follow.
“But something happened in her senior year. An accident.” He cleared his throat. “She was working on an article at the time, a local history story. You see, she was interested in journalism, and she had a part time job as an intern at the paper. She came up with an innovative idea and somehow convinced the editor to let her write a feature story. If it was good enough, he agreed he would run it. Tiffany had a way of convincing people.” My uncle smiled, but it was nothing like the beaming smile he had greeted me with at the airport. “She was very ambitious, very enthusiastic about the story. In fact, I’d never seen her more serious about anything in her life before. She put her all into the story, taking great efforts with her research—”
“But what was it about?” I demanded. What did any of this have to do with an accident?
“Her story focused on the history of the Ingerman Mansion, an old mansion on the outskirts of town. Understandably, since it was one of the first places built here, over the years many rumors have developed about it. But Tiffany set out to get the facts. At the time, the mansion was owned by Anthony Ingerman—his family built the mansion in the eighteen hundreds and it had always been owned by one of them—he was the last of the line. He didn’t live in the mansion because it was too large, too run-down. And though he needed the money, he wouldn’t sell it. Tiffany, being Tiffany, managed to get his permission to explore the house. But only on the condition that she be extremely careful. Unfortunately, the house was more run-down than anyone realized.” My uncle shook his head. “She shouldn’t have even been on the balcony. She should have known it wasn’t safe. The railing broke, and she fell . . . twenty feet to a rocky garden below.”
I gasped, but my uncle continued.
“She was lucky to survive. She was unconscious—hit her head—and she broke her leg. If she hadn’t been found when she was . . .” My uncle’s voice trailed off. Then, suddenly, he found it. “She was rushed to the hospital. They did all they could, but the fall affected her mind—her memory. She regained consciousness, but had amnesia. For a while, it looked as if she wouldn’t remember anything. Then, gradually, things started to come back . . .”
My uncle paused, as if searching for words. “But the accident affected her in a more complex way. Of course, she was behind in all her schoolwork—her friends had graduated and were ready for college by the time she could have even begun making up the work—but she could have overcome that. Only . . .” my uncle frowned, forming deep creases in his brow, “she said she didn’t find it easy anymore. But it was as if she wouldn’t try. She’d lost all her enthusiasm. She changed. Tiffany had never been a nervous person, but after the accident she often became anxious for no reason at all. She avoided her friends and stayed home as much as possible.”
From the way he kept referring to her as Tiffany, I knew he still thought of her as his sister, not my mother.
“I don’t know . . . there was more to it than I could possibly understand. The doctors said she was still suffering aftereffects. She saw a lot of different doctors and specialists. I did everything I could for her, but it wasn’t enough. Or maybe it was too much. She wanted to get away. She didn’t want college anymore, or anything she had wanted before. She married one of her doctors—your father—and he took her away. I never heard from her again.”
My uncle replaced his glasses.
I shook my head, bewildered. This person he was talking about . . . was my mother? Incredible. I’d expected my uncle to tell me something simple. Something like my mother had lived such a boring life that she’d had no reason to talk about it.
“But why?” I asked. “Why didn’t she tell me?”
“She wanted to forget,” he repeated. “She couldn’t adjust after what happened here. The best thing was to start over, leave it all behind, and everyone and everything that would remind her.”
Including you, I realized. I looked at my uncle’s eyes, but saw only his glasses reflecting blankly back at me. Suddenly I felt sorry for him. I wished I hadn’t acted like such a spoilt brat, thinking only of myself. If I’d only known what he’d been through, what my mother had been through . . .
“Tell me,” my uncle said suddenly, “do you think she was happy?”
I opened my mouth to say, “Yes, of course,” but I couldn’t say it. Because I didn’t know. All seventeen years I’d lived with my mother, I’d never really known her. Couldn’t have. Not if she’d kept secrets like this from me. I was already overwhelmed by what my uncle had revealed, and now my heart ached terribly, throbbing with remorse for the mother I had never known. I’d wanted my uncle to answer my questions, but all he’d done was given me more.
Had she been happy? I fumbled through my memories. There had been times when she seemed happy, but other times—more frequently—I had sensed her uneasiness, her worry. But it would come and go. I’d never thought much of it. That was simply the way my mother was.
“We did a lot together in California,” I finally answered. “We laughed a lot. She seemed happy.”
I rubbed my forehead, trying to slow my whirling mind. I was the one who should be asking questions. There was so much I didn’t understand, so many questions to ask that it seemed impossible to focus.
“The mansion,” I said, grasping the one fact that emerged in my mind, “the mansion where she had the accident—is it still around?”
My uncle nodded. “It stands just outside of town. More dilapidated than ever. It’s closed up and has been ever since Ingerman died. No one goes there now.” He looked at me a long moment before he spoke again. “Robin, I told you all this because . . . it�
�s right that you should know. But it’s in the past, and I want you to realize there are some things that happen that we don’t understand—questions we’ll never be able to answer—and it’s best we leave them in the past.” I thought he was finished, but he added, “Trust in God to take care of the future.”
In the silence that followed, I realized we were both sitting at the table in the dark and that my pie still sat, half eaten, before me on my plate. I knew I was not going to finish it.
Pushing back my chair, I stood up. My voice broke the eerie silence. “When my mother lived here, which room was hers?” I don’t know where the question came from. But the answer did not surprise me.
“Your room. It only made sense to give it to you. It was all ready . . . only needed a good cleaning. I dusted the furniture, vacuumed and shampooed the carpet. I thought perhaps you might want to look through some of your mother’s things. They’re all yours now, you know. She didn’t take much when she went, and I left everything the same. Just in case.”
So I’m living in my mother’s old room, in her old house, in her hometown, I thought, and shuddered. It’s as if I’m taking her place.
Chapter Five
I was drawn upstairs and down the hall to my room—my mother’s room. As I pushed open the door, I realized that my mother must have been about my age the last time she’d passed through this doorway. The hairs prickled up on the back of my neck.
I switched on the light, and it was like I was seeing the room for the first time. Last night didn’t count, because I hadn’t known then that this was my mother’s room. I hadn’t realized that the carpet was not just “a kind of purple color,” but a faded lavender. A nightstand stood beside the bed, and I ran my hand over the smooth, dark wood, felt the little nicks and scratches embedded in the surface and wondered what had caused them.
Past Suspicion (Christian Romantic Suspense) Page 5