Keepsake (41 page)

Who else?

Sickened still further by this latest turn of events, Olivia detoured to a clump of forsythia and threw up behind it, then rinsed with a bottle of soda water she carried everywhere now.

Suddenly she heard her niece cry, "Auntie Livvy, Auntie Livvy, I see you!"

Kristin was peering at her through the yellow shrubs, obviously assuming a game was afoot. "Now it's our turn! You count to a hundred, and Zack and me will hide. No fair peeking!"

"Oh, wait, sweetie, no, that isn't—"

Her niece, muddy from her Mary Janes to her nose, halted and turned for further instructions. Were there other, more special rules to be followed? She was ready! She was willing! Her eyes were huge with expectation, her mouth opened and ready to swallow everything that her beloved aunt was willing to tell her. Hop on one leg? Run away backward? Just say the word.

With a laugh that was half sob, Olivia dropped into a crouch and held her arms out wide. "Hug first. Then we'll play. And make it a
big
hug."

Kristin broke into a wide, gap-toothed grin and ran full speed into her aunt's arms, then squeezed as tightly as a five-year-old could. Anything for love.

Olivia breathed the child's innocence deep into her lungs the way a firefighter would suck in air after escaping a smoke-filled building. It was all for the women and children now, her silence.

The men in her family were tainted.

****

Quinn Leary was in the last few days of building a stone wall for a well-heeled cosmetic surgeon in
Santa Barbara
. He enjoyed the work, enjoyed not having to make any decision more earth-shattering than which stones would lie flattest on top of which other stones. When his beeper sounded, his first impulse was not to respond. He had taken very few commissions since his return to
California
, and he liked it that way. For now, he was going to continue to pick and choose.

But that's not why he had the beeper. Thanks to caller ID, he knew that it was Mrs. Dewsbury trying to get in touch with him. The widow was strictly A-list, so he grabbed a bottle of water from the cooler in his truck and found himself a shade tree.

He was concerned—Mrs. Dewsbury would never call before the rates changed unless it was important. Presumably it had nothing to do with her recent discovery about the burning bus. He never should have sent that provocative postcard about
Harrisburg
, not to a woman as shrewd and well-informed as she was.

He sighed. She looked like such a little old lady. Why the hell couldn't she
behave
like a little old lady?

He dialed her number. She answered at once.

After gliding through opening pleasantries, she said, "My dear, I have some very interesting news for you."

"Don't be coy, madame," he said, sitting back against the tree. "It's not your style."

He was slugging water from the bottle when she said, "All right, then. Olivia is pregnant."

Out came the water through his nose and down the wrong pipe, giving him a choking fit that ended in tears.

"How do you know this?" he managed to croak.

"Promise you'll keep it a secret until the day you die?"

"Yeah, yeah—
who?'

"Father Tom. He did
not
hear it in the confessional," the widow hastened to say. "He heard it as gossip. There's a difference, you know. He's not bound—"

"I don't care, I don't
care,"
said Quinn. "Just tell me how reliable the rumor is."

"On a scale of one to ten, I would say eight. Father Tom heard it from his housekeeper who heard it from her niece, who works in the billing
department of an ob-gyn in Mid
dletown. Apparently Olivia didn't want to put in a claim to her insurance and insisted on paying cash. Well! Even though she'd gone to a clinic outside of Keepsake, the girl in billing still recognized the name. I mean, really. Bennett Milled Goods. It's like being a Hershey in
Pennsylvania
. Olivia should have used an assumed name if she really wanted it kept secret. Of course, in that case I wouldn't be calling you now."

Quinn let her roll to a complete stop before his next question. "Who else knows about this?"

"I imagine it's just a matter of time before everyone does. Father Tom may have been one of the first; I doubt he'll be the last," Mrs. Dewsbury said dryly.

"When did Liv make that initial visit?"

"Early April, I believe."

"Has she gone since?"

"Oh, yes. More than once."

She was keeping the baby, then.

"And why did it take the blabbermouth so long to blab?"

"It's ironic. She was pregnant herself, and went out on maternity leave right after Olivia's initial visit. Father Tom's housekeeper eventually went to see her new grandniece, and that's when she got the scoop. Since then, of course, the housekeeper has made it a point to keep herself informed."

Just as well that Quinn was sitting down; he was reeling. He thought of asking, "Is
Olivia seeing some other man?" but the question seemed absurd. He knew she wasn't. The conviction came from the same place deep down in his soul as the belief that the baby was his, conceived on New Year's
Eve. It had felt, on New Year's Eve, as if they were reaching for the stars. Now he knew that they'd managed to snatch one and bring it down to earth.

It was going to be a girl.

"I'll be on the next-plane," he said.

"I knew you would. Hurry home, dear."

****

Olivia's mother had created charming hanging baskets of annuals for every shop on the cobblestoned court.

"At first I just made one for you—to hang from the lamp in front of Miracourt," Teresa Bennett said. "But then I thought, why stop there? Is it really so much of an effort to make up ten of them? I hope the other shopkeepers won't think I'm being presumptuous."

Olivia flattened her hands against the rear window of her mother's Explorer as it sat in the street with its engine running and its air conditioning on. The cargo area was filled with magic: green-glazed pots that would hang where they were told, tumbling over with bright pink ivy geraniums and silver-green lamium and exploding with compact daisies in the middle.

Olivia straightened up and gave her mother an enthusiastic squeeze. "They will
love
them. Do you want me to take them around to the shops for you, or would you rather do it yourself?"

"Oh, honey, would you? I'd feel a bit funny."

"I'll be glad to—but let's hang this one first."

She was standing on the second rung of her stepladder, reaching up to hang the pot from a cast-iron hook on the antique lamppost, when her mother smiled and said, "Speaking of pots
...," and patted Olivia's stomach.

"Mother!" Olivia said, shocked to the core. She scrambled down the ladder.

"Livvy, I was only teasing," her mother said, taken aback by her daughter's vehemence.

Olivia folded the stepladder with a smack and said primly, "It's
not
very polite."

"I'm sorry."

"Well
... never mind. I'm just self-conscious about it, that's all."

To say the least. She was going to have to tell her mother, and soon. But, oh God, she didn't know how. One thing was apparent: The charm of the moment was gone. "I'll unload the car," Olivia said stiffly.

"I'll help you," offered her mother, much more subdued than before.

It was so awkward. Quinn was everywhere in those pauses between them, which seemed to come more frequently now. It was Olivia's fault, of course; she was the one who had pulled back from her whole family. But her mother obviously was assuming that it was because she had objected so violently to Quinn, and now that he was gone, she was always trying to bridge the gap between Olivia and her with little gestures of affection. With no more success than today.

For the past few months Olivia couldn't help wondering whether her mother had known about
Rand
and Alison's affair. Now she had begun to wonder whether her mother might not know even more than that. If Owen Bennett had acted true to form and had tried to clean up the scandalous mess that his son had got into, then how could his wife not know it?

All in all, better to stay estranged.

Olivia spent the next hour passing out hanging baskets to pleased and grateful shopkeepers. It was such a beautiful day, and she enjoyed wandering around the cobblestoned court. She came back to Miracourt with real reluctance, which surprised her; the shop had always been her first love and her paramount joy.

But today she was drawn to flowers. If she owned a garden, she'd be home in it. She watered the dusty miller and ruby-red impatiens that were just getting started in the long box beneath her shop window, and then she dragged out the stepladder again; she wanted to rehang her mother's pot so that the sun-loving daisies faced south. Small gestures, perhaps, but they appealed to her newly discovered nurturing instincts.

She was standing on the ladder, gazing with pleasure at the flower baskets that hung from every lamppost in the court, when something propelled her to look toward
Main
. Whether it was a car horn or loud music or just plain magnetism, she never afterward knew, but the first thing to pop into focus was Quinn Franc
is Leary, striding toward Mira
court as if he were late to pick her up for dinner.

She hadn't seen hirn since January 14: four months. Long enough for his hair to grow out and hers to be cut short. Long enough for him to lose weight and her to put it on. Long enough for her to forget how tall he was, how rugged, how head-turning handsome.

Long enough for her to have lost touch completely with deep, abiding joy.

"Hello," she said, gazing down at him.

"Should you be climbing ladders?"

He knew.

"I'm eighteen inches above the sidewalk, Quinn. I think I can handle it."
I
love you, I missed you. How could you leave me
!

"It was
only
a question, Liv; I didn't come back to tell you what to do."

"Good."
Why did you come back at all? Nothing has changed.

"I understand that there's been a
development."

Oh. Right. That one thing.
"You heard it from Mrs. Dewsbury, I take it?"

He smiled. It was such a sad and melancholy smile. "I'm not allowed to say."

"I don't know why people bothered inventing the Internet," Olivia said, climbing down the two rungs. "A few Mrs. D.'s strategically placed could do the job just as well for a lot less money."

He had been appraising her figure, Olivia knew, deciding for himself if the rumors were true. For one vindictive moment she wished she owned a muumuu.

She tried to close the ladder, but for some stupid reason the metal spreader wouldn't fold. "Here, I'll do that," Quinn said, moving in to help.

"No, really, I can do it myself. I—ow!"

He'd closed the spreader on the edge of her little finger, hardly a tragic event. But Olivia was feeling tragic, and her cry reflected the sharp pain in her heart more than the little pinch on her hand. Again Quinn apologized, this time profusely.

"It's nothing," she said, sucking the spot. She glanced at it and added, "A little blood blister, that's all."

With a shaky laugh he said, "Before I maim you for life, will you agree to see me somewhere? Livvy, my God, we
have
to talk."

How odd. Not so long ago, Olivia was begging him for the ve
r
y same mercy.

She glanced around the court. There was Ella, spying on them over the checkered cafe curtains of her bakery. Burt was outside his antique shop next door, feeling a sudden need to re
-
sweep his sidewalk. Mark—no discretion there; he just stood in front of his music shop with his arms folded, watching the show. Any minute now someone was bound to pop out of the sewer with a manhole cover on his head and snap a photo of Quinn and her for the bulletin board at the foot of Town Hill.

She crossed her arms and hugged her sides, mostly to cover her stomach, and said, "Okay. I suppose I owe you that much. Where do you want to meet?"

"Your place?"

"Are you crazy? No!" she shouted. "You can't just waltz back into my life!"

She was overreacting; even she could see that. "Somewhere else," she said, lowering her voice, "but nowhere public. I don't want to be hashing this out in a restaurant or, for that matter, where we're standing. God, I'm
sick
of this town and its gossip," she added. She felt like taking all of the hanging baskets back.

She stared at the sidewalk while she chewed her lower lip. Finally she looked up and said, "I know where: the gardener's cottage. My father is in
Mexico
—yes,
Mexico
," she snapped when Quinn did a double take. "He won't be home until after midnight, and my mother always stays near a phone when he's away. We won't be bothered at the cottage."