A Month at the Shore (61 page)

"
Mom, you are so naive,
"
Becky said, rolling her eyes.
"
The ax and shoes are just props. If he
'
s Fund Manager of the Year, obviously he can afford to get his wood split and stacked. Look him up, look him up,
"
she urged.
"
See if they say he
'
s from
Salem
.
"

Helen did as she was told. The cover article was long, and it finished up, as all such pieces do, with a few scraps of biographical information.
"
For goodness
'
sake,
"
Helen said.
"
You
'
re right. It says he lives on a
'
prestigious street in
Salem
.
'"

"
Oh, like he
'
s gonna live on a slummy one? What else? Let me read it.
"

"
When I
'
m done,
"
said Helen, pulling the cover away from her daughter
'
s pesty, hovering grip. She read aloud:

"
Byrne and his wife, Linda Bellingame Byrne, to whom he's been married for eight years, have one three-year-old daughter and another child on the way. Mrs. Byrne, an art historian who lectures occasionally in the area, abandoned a professorship at
Boston
College
when her husband began putting in eighty-hour weeks after his promotion to manager of the
Columbus
Fund. in the five years since then, they have taken no vacations.

"'
Nathaniel Byrne has made a lot of money for a lot of investors,
'
Mrs. Byrne told us.
'
After the new baby
'
s born, I
'
m hoping that they let the poor man have a week or two off now and then,
'
she said with a teasing smile at her husband.

"
So she was pregnant,
"
Helen mused.
"
How sad.
"
She added,
"
It
'
s funny that the article lets her have the last word.
"

Becky, meanwhile, was impressed.
"
This is so cool. You know this guy, Mom!
"

"
Number one, I don
'
t know him,
"
Helen reminded her daughter.
"
And number two, there
'
s nothing cool about it. The timing of this is tragic.
"

With the ruthless indifference of youth, Becky shrugged and said,
"
It sounds like Linda Byrne wouldn
'
t
'
ve been all that impressed by an article about him anyway.
"

"
Rebecca! A little less cynicism, please.
"

Brought up short by her mother
'
s sharpness, Becky defended herself.
"
I only said what you just told me, Mom. Why are you taking this so seriously?
"

"
I don
'
t know,
"
said Helen, staring at the man on the cover.

What she did know was that her headache had retreated even further. She lifted her hand to the back of her head, just to make sure her head was still there. Yep. And hardly any pain.

Well, for Pete
'
s sake,
she thought with a bemused smile. Was it the soup, the pill—or the sight of his face?

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Beyond Midnight

Antoinette Stockenberg

"As hilarious as it is heart-tugging ... a rollicking great read."

--I'll Take Romance

In Gilded-Age Newport, an upstairs-downstairs romance between a well-born son and a humble maid is cut short of marriage.  A hundred years later, the descendants of that ill-fated union seem destined to repeat history.  Or not.

Chapter 1

L
iz Coppersmith and her friend Victoria raised their wineglasses to the brooding mansion on the other side of the chain-link fence.

"
Not a bad neighborhood,
"
said
Victoria
, the taller, more whimsically dressed of the two. She dropped into a plastic lawn chair, shook out her red permed curls, and straightened the folds of her star-print sundress.
"
You
'
ll do lots of business over there,
"
she predicted,
"
or my name
'
s not
Victoria
.
"

Liz had heard her say
"
or my name
'
s not
Victoria
"
a thousand times since they
'
d
met five years ago in a grief-
management group. And every time, Liz had to resist saying,
"
Your name
isn'
t
Victoria
, damn
it.
"
Victoria
'
s name was Judy Maroney, and if it weren
'
t for her stubborn, persistent, rather amazing amnesia, Liz would be calling her Judy
and
not Tori at that very moment.

"
If I do get any work out of them
, Tori, it'll be thanks to you.
You found me a house in a perfect location.
"

"
I did, didn
'
t I?
"
said
Victoria
, pleased with herself.
"
Call it intuition, but I was sure you
'
d like it, despite that
unpromising
ad in the paper. I mean
—
a four-room house? I have more bathrooms than that, and I live alone.
"

They both glanced back at the sweet but plain two-
story cottage that now belonged to Liz. It was exactly the kind of house that children invariably draw; all that was
missing was a plume of Crayola smoke from the red-brick chimney.

"It's no castle," Liz conceded
. She
tilted
her head
toward the intimidating mansion to the east.
"
But what the hec
k," she said with an ironic smile.  "It's close enough."

She went back to
gazing
through the chain-link fence
at her neighbor
. The grounds of the estate were magnificent, even for
Newport
. An
cient trees, presided over by an enormous
copper beech, threw shimmering pools of shade over an e
xpanse of well-
kept grass. In the sunny openings between the trees we
re huge, wonderful shrubs — viburn
ums and hydrangeas and lush, towering rhododendrons. There were no flowers to speak of; only a green, understated elegance. It was like
having
her own private
deer park
—
except without the deer
— right in the heart of
Newport
.

Too bad
she was separated from it by a
chain-link fence
and barbed wire.

Liz reached up and plucked a strand of the rusty wire as if it were a harp string.
"
This has been here a
long
time,
"
she said.

"
If I were you,
"
said
Victoria
,
"
I
'
d think about getting a tetanus shot.
"
She frowned in disapproval.
"
Barbed wire. Who do they think they are, anyway?
"

"
You mean, who do they think
we
are,
"
Liz corrected.
"
Obviously they don
'
t trust my side of the neighborhood.
"
She
took in
her tiny cottage, the smallest house on a street of small houses.
"
And let
'
s face it, why should they? We don
'
t exactly radiate wealth and prosperity.
"

"
Never mind,
"
said
Victoria
with an airy wave of her hand.
"
That will come. It
'
s your karma. I had a vision.
"

Liz laughed and said,
"
You and your crystal ball just might be right. After all, yesterday
—
the very day I moved in!
—
there I was, talking through this fence to their housekeeper. I suppose they sent her over here to make sure I wasn
'
t in some prison-release program, but I liked her, even if she
was
a spy. Her name is Netta something, and she was as chatty as could be. Apparently
her boss
is some workaholic bachelor
—
"

"
Uh-oh. No business there,
"
said
Victoria
, sipping her wine.

"
That
'
s what I thought, too, at first.
"
Liz raked her hair away from her face and cocked her head appraisingly at the Queen Anne
-
style mansion.

"
But then I found out that his parents stay at the estate
— East Gate, it
'
s called
—
every summer. It
'
s been in the family since it was built, a hundred years ago. Besides the parents, there are a couple of semi-permanent guests staying there now as well. They must do
some
entertaining.
"
Liz smiled and said,
"
Naturally I found a way to let it drop that I was an events planner.
"

"
Did the housekeeper even know what that was?
"
asked
Victoria
.

"
I made sure of it. I told her I design weddings, dinners, birthdays, dances, receptions, fund-raisers, charity events
— the works.
"

"
In other words
—
"

"
I lied.
"
Liz
'
s deep brown eyes flashed with good humor.
"
Hey
,
if I told her I arranged kids
'
birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese, you think she
'
d have been impressed?
"

"
You did what you had to do, Liz Coppersmith,
"
agreed
Victoria
.
"
You planted the seed.
"

"
Yeah. That was the easy part. The hard part will be to provide references who
'
re old enough to read and write.
"

Victoria
said,
"
If you need references, don
'
t worry. I
'
ll come up with references.
"

And she would, too, because
—
unlike Liz
—
Victoria
had money to buy anything she wanted.

It wasn
'
t always that way. Less than six years earlier, Victoria
—Judy Maroney then
—
had crossed the Rhode Island border with her husband, two children, and not much more than high hopes that her husband
'
s new job at the Newport Tourist and Convention Center would give her family more stability than he had at his old job in the defense industry. The family was eastbound on Route
95,
just a few miles behind their moving van, when they were sideswiped by a drunk driver and ended up broadside to two lanes of eastbound traffic.