Heartwishes (33 page)

“What a dear boy you are,” Dr. Burgess said as Tris left.

The second he was alone with Gemma, the old man moved his chair a bit closer to hers, and she had to give him her attention. Whereas she’d liked odd-looking Mr. Lang from the moment she first saw him, she didn’t like this man, who had moved much too close to her.

“It’s you I wanted to talk to,” he said, smiling at Gemma in a way that would have been appropriate from a much younger man but that she found a bit creepy from this old man. “I don’t know if you’ve been told that I’m also an historian. I would love to hear about your research. I want to know what you’ve been finding out. From the gossip around town, it’s truly fascinating. And also,” he said with a sly look, “I hear that congratulations are in order for your engagement to our local sheriff.”

“You’ve heard wrong,” she said. “There is no engagement. Colin Frazier and I have only been dating.”

He put his age-spotted hand on her arm. “But you are living with him, aren’t you?”

She pulled away from him and picked up her bag.

“Oh dear, I’ve offended you,” he said. “I do apologize. I thought it was normal today for young couples in love to live together. Maybe I’m wrong.”

Tris returned with coffee and a plate of pastries. “Gemma, you aren’t leaving already, are you?”

“Gemma—may I call you that?—was just about to tell me all about her research.”

“She’s good at her job,” Tris said, looking from one to the other as he sat down.

She wanted to stay with Tris and hear about the Heartwishes Stone, but more than that, she wanted to get away from this old man. In spite of his protestations of hunger, he hadn’t touched the pastries. She glanced at the big belly that protruded under his old cotton shirt. The cuffs were frayed, the collar discolored around the neck. If he was hungry for something, it wasn’t for cream puffs.

It hit Gemma all at once what was bothering her about the man. He was an ailing historian who, by the poverty of his clothing, hadn’t been very successful in his career. The man was an academic, which meant that he desperately wanted to be published. She had no doubt that he’d heard rumors about the Heartwishes Stone and he planned to find out all he could from her, add to it, then get published. She had a vision of newspaper articles, magazines, tabloids, TV, the Internet, all of them splashed with stories of the Heartwishes Stone. Minutes after the stories appeared, Edilean would be inundated with . . .

She didn’t want to think of what would come into the peaceful little town: everything from rampant greed to the truly needy. All the horrible things she envisioned were the reason she’d decided never to write about the Stone in anything that would possibly be published. She’d even thought of talking to Mrs. Frazier and explaining why the document Gemma wrote for the family’s private use shouldn’t include the story of the Heartwishes Stone. It was one thing to write of an old legend, but things that were happening
now
seemed to be going back to that Stone.

She had to shake her head to clear it.

“Are you all right?” Dr. Burgess asked, his hand yet again on her arm.

Gemma didn’t want to be near the man any longer. She stood up and looked at Tris. “I’d like to talk about Pere some more. Could I come by your office?”

“I’m booked solid today. I’ll be so glad when Ariel gets here and can help out. How about dinner tonight?”

“Great,” Gemma said. “I’ll come by your office at six.”

“Perfect.” He smiled at her. “And don’t worry about Pere. I’ll take care of everything.”

“Nice to have met you, Dr. Burgess,” she said quickly, then kissed Tris’s cheek and left.

As soon as she got to her car, she texted Tris to tell Burgess nothing about her or the Stone.

I don’t trust that man.

He wrote back,

Thanks for the tip

An hour later she was in the guesthouse, but even the beauty of the library couldn’t make her keep her mind on her work. She kept thinking about what Tris had said, that he may have found the Heartwishes Stone.

At twelve-thirty, she got a text from Joce.

Did you hear Sara’s news?

She typed back that she hadn’t heard anything about Sara.

Joce wrote back:

Call me or come over and I’ll give you lunch and tell all.

It was the break Gemma needed. She practically ran to her car and was at Joce’s beautiful old house five minutes later. The door was ajar, so she pushed it open. She very much wanted a tour of the house, but from the cacophony it seemed that both babies were crying.

Joce looked exhausted and frantic. “They’re dirty at both ends,” she said.

Gemma didn’t reply, just took a baby and stripped him/her—it turned out to be a him—and plunked him down in a sink full of warm water. Like magic, he got quiet.

Joce looked at her in awe.

“My sister taught me how to do this.”

For the next few hours, she and Joce worked like a team, with washing babies, feeding them, then washing again, and redressing. Joce never stopped telling Gemma thanks. When the babies were ready to go down for their second nap, it was three hours later.

“Why don’t you lie down and take a nap yourself?” Gemma said to Joce. “I’ll listen for the babies and look after the house.”

“I couldn’t allow that,” Joce said. “You’ve done too much already.”

Gemma had to practically push her up the stairs, with Joce saying thanks at every step.

While they slept, Gemma toured the house on her own and got the laundry done, cleaned up the kitchen, and put the living room back in order. When everyone was still asleep, she checked the fridge and found ingredients to make a meat loaf. She smiled as she worked, remembering Colin teasing her about her meat loaf, which she’d never made for him.

At a little after five Joce came downstairs with two smiling babies in her arms. Gemma took one.

“I can’t thank you enough for this,” Joce said as she looked in the oven window. “Sometimes I get so overwhelmed I can’t think. If it weren’t for friends like you I don’t know how I’d manage. I don’t know how Sara is going to cope. She knows so few people outside of Edilean.”

“Are you saying she had her baby?”

“Good heavens! You came over to hear the news and I forgot to tell you. Last night Sara had an emergency C-section and delivered twins.”

Gemma quit bouncing the baby and stared at Joce. “Twins? Didn’t she have a sonogram so she knew how many kids she was having? Or did she just not tell anyone?”

“She didn’t know. The second baby was positioned behind the front one in such a way that no one saw it on the sonograms.”

Gemma was having trouble collecting her thoughts. “At the barbecue, Sara wished for . . .”

“I know. She wished for twins.”

Gemma sat down at the kitchen table, the baby held firmly to her. “Boy or girl?”

“Two boys. Mike said he’s already ordered martial arts gear for them.”

“How is he?”

“Excited. Bewildered. Scared out of his mind.”

“I wish—” Gemma began, then swallowed. “I mean, I hope that they come back here and live.”

“Me too, but Mike has a couple more years to go before he can retire. Now that his friend Frank is going to be living here, he really wants to be here too.” Joce looked at Gemma. “You don’t think there really is anything to this Heartwishes Stone, do you?”

“No, of course not,” Gemma said, but she didn’t sound convincing. She glanced at the wall clock. It was five-forty-five. “I have to go. I have a date with Tris at six.”

“Date? But Colin—?”

“Not that kind of date,” Gemma said. “A date to gain information.” She put the baby in her high chair and kissed her.

“Let me know what you find out,” Joce called as Gemma ran to the front door. “And I’ll never be able to thank you enough for today. I feel like a new woman.”

In his office, Tris greeted Gemma warmly, his hands on her shoulders as he kissed her cheek. He was wearing his white doctor’s coat and looked very professional.

Four women were there, all of them looking at her in speculation—and as though they were ready to fight to protect Tristan.

He led her back to his office and closed the door behind her.

“Are they your harem?”

“Pretty much,” he said as he took off his white coat. “At least they think they are. And besides, they think you’re stepping out on Colin.”

“Or are they angry that I’m going out with
you
?”

Tris chuckled. “Would you like to go to my house for dinner? I have a refrigerator full of food.”

“I’d love to,” she said.

As they left his office, she couldn’t help being glad when Tris told the women who worked for him that if he was needed, he’d be at home. “With Gemma,” he added.

When they were outside, she said, “This is going to be all over town.” Somehow, that didn’t bother her. “Should I follow you in my car?”

“Sure,” he said as he got out his keys.

As Gemma followed Tristan in her car, she couldn’t help but be curious about where he lived. They went down a road she’d never seen before that seemed to go into the nature preserve that surrounded Edilean. They left the paved road and turned onto gravel, but when she still didn’t see a house, she began to wonder if he lived in a tent on vacant land. There was another turn, then they came to cattle bars, and he drove over them.

To her left, through the thickly wooded area around them, she saw a sparkling blue lake with ducks swimming about. Ahead of her was the house. It wasn’t large, but it was lovely. Better yet, it was in an idyllic setting, with the lake directly in front of it.

She stopped behind Tris and got out of her car. It was wonderfully quiet, with only the sound of birds and the wind in the trees. “This is gorgeous,” she said. “Have you lived here long?”

“All my life, and my dad grew up here too. It’s called the Aldredge House and part of it is old. Not old by Edilean standards, no eighteenth century, but it was built in the 1840s.”

“For that time period, shouldn’t it be a modified Colonial?”

“I think it was, but generations of Aldredges changed it.”

She walked toward the lake to look up at the house. It was two stories, with windows all along the front, and she saw a chimney above the roofline. She could imagine sitting by a fire on snowy days. On the far left was a low-roofed room that seemed to be all glass. “Is that a conservatory?”

“Yes,” Tris said. “My ancestor who built the house was a master gardener.”

“What about you?”

“I’ve been known to frequent a nursery now and then. Come inside and I’ll show you the rest of it. You have to tell me what’s old and what’s new.”

“Ah! A challenge,” she said as she followed him in a side door. They went into a large hallway, with a tile floor and an oak staircase at the end.

“Old,” she said, then nodded toward the door to the right, silently asking if she could open it. It was a large family room, with bookcases and a big TV, very cozy. It took only a glance to see that the room was newer than the hall and she told him so.

Across the hall she opened a door to a long room that was wide on the right but narrowed at the other end where she saw the kitchen with its dark cherry cabinets. “This is old and I don’t think it’s always been one room. So how’d I do?”

“Perfect,” he said. “My mother had the walls torn out on this side. Right after Addy was born, Mom told my dad that she wasn’t going to be stuck alone in the kitchen, and that if he wanted dinner on the table he damn well better let her see what her kids were up to. Two days later, the walls were down.”

“I think I like your mother.”

“Me too,” Tris said. “Can I make you a drink?”

“Can’t. I’m driving, but if you have it, I’ll take a tonic water with lots of lime juice.”

“Coming up.”

“Mind if I . . . ?” She nodded toward the door to the conservatory, and he waved his hand for her to go. It was a beautiful room that looked like a Victorian garden. And as she’d gathered from his self-effacing tone, Tris was also good at gardening. Plants—mostly orchids—were everywhere, hanging from the ceiling, in floor pots, all in a lush display that made her want to sit in one of the wicker chairs and read. What she liked best was that Tris didn’t confine the larger plants but had them growing out of the ground that surrounded the beautiful hand-painted tile on the floor.

Tris handed her an icy drink. “This is the only room that no one has touched. My dad said it was the favorite room of my great, great, etc. grandmother who built the house, and that she spent most of her time here.” He leaned forward to remove a dead leaf from an oncidium orchid. “She was one of the women who had a baby with no husband.”

“In normal circumstances, that wouldn’t be interesting, but since it’s been remembered for so long, I think there’s a story there. I’d love to hear more about her. What was her name?”

“Louisa. I don’t know much about her, but Joce said she called my grandfather and talked to him about our family. He said that Louisa Aldredge’s child’s birth certificate said her brother and his wife were the parents.”

“I’m sure that’s what was considered the proper thing to do at that time,” Gemma said. “So . . . Sometime in the 1830s or 40s Louisa Aldredge had a baby out of wedlock, had to give him up, so she built herself a house in the wilderness, and lived here all alone with her plants.”

“You are as romantic as Sara,” Tris said, grinning. “I’ll have you know that when my dad remodeled these rooms, he found surgical instruments dating back to about the time the house was built. And there were also some toy trucks from about that time. My guess is that Louisa built so far out of town so her clients wouldn’t be seen going to a female doctor. And I think she lived here with her son.”

“Sounds like you know quite a bit about her.”

Tris shrugged. “Aldredges, male and female, tend toward medicine, so it wasn’t a big leap to figure it out. Now, to more important matters.”

“The Heartwishes Stone?” Gemma said quickly.

“I was thinking more in the lines of food. I have a housekeeper who comes in twice a week and brings me things she cooks at home. She likes to experiment, so I never know what’s waiting for me.”