The Chesapeake Diaries Series (224 page)

“And at first, after my mom died and no one knew what to do with me, I was thinking I was like Anne. You know, an orphan coming to live with strangers who don’t understand her. But I told myself that I’m not quite an orphan, that I do have someone.” She looked across the room to Ellie with her huge round eyes and said, “I have you. And while you don’t understand about my mother, you understand about my father.”

“All too well.” Ellie nodded. “But I can relate to how it feels to lose your mother. My mother died, too, though I wasn’t a kid when that happened.”

“I remember about your mother. My mom had a
People
magazine that had her picture in it. She was beautiful, like a fairy princess.”

“I always thought so, too. But how could you remember that?” Ellie asked. “You were only a year old or so when she died.”

“I found the magazine in my mom’s room. I guess she kept it for some reason.” Gabi’s fingers twisted in her hair. “You probably don’t like my mom very much, do you?”

“I didn’t know her,” Ellie answered honestly. “I don’t know what went on between my dad and my mom, or Dad and your mother. I doubt we’ll ever know.”

“She was a really good mom, Ellie.” Gabi’s voice was thin and tight.

“I’m sure she was. Judging by the fact that you seem like a really good kid, she’d have had to have been a really good mom.”

The tension that had been building in Gabi’s face began to vanish.

“Gabi, you know that you can talk about your mom anytime you want,” Ellie assured her. “Your mom, or anything else you want to talk about.”

Gabi nodded several times, then ran up the steps, Dune close at her heels.

It wasn’t hard for Ellie to recall how lost she’d felt when Lynley died, and she’d been twenty at the time, halfway through college. But she was an adult, and had handled Lynley’s death with a certain amount of maturity with the help of her father. At thirteen, Gabi not only lacked the maturity, but she hadn’t had the support of her father, and from the little she’d said,
there didn’t seem to be another adult in her life who could help her to navigate such deep waters.

Whatever the relationship between Marilyn Hansen and Clifford Chapman might have been, their daughter did seem like a good kid—despite the lack of attention from her father—a kid who deserved a better hand than the one she’d been dealt. Ellie covered her face with her hands. The last thing she’d expected when she arose that morning was to find herself with a very young teenager to raise, but there it was. And if Gabi could make such a brave effort to adjust, so could she.

Ellie cleaned up the kitchen from dinner and closed up the house for the night, turning off lights as she went through the downstairs to the stairwell in the foyer. She started to grab a book from the stack of journals she’d yet to read, then put it back. What if she discovered something else that she didn’t really want to know about? She had enough to keep her mind racing through the night, so why look for trouble?

She stopped in Gabi’s room to say good night, and found her already asleep, book in one hand, the other resting on Dune’s back. The dog’s tail began to softly thump when Ellie walked into the room to turn off the light, her little dog face looking chagrined at having been caught on the forbidden bed.

“It’s okay,” Ellie whispered, her hand briefly touching Dune’s head as she reached for the book. “Keep her company, Dune. Good girl.”

Ellie left the book on the bedside table and turned off the lamp. In her own room, she stripped down for the shower and grabbed a long nightshirt from a
drawer. She took a long, hot shower, dried her hair, and dressed for bed. The last time she’d felt so drained, mentally and physically exhausted, had been last year when the charges were made against her father and Henry. Ellie had been so shocked, so devastated, so disbelieving. She’d had to be shown the evidence in order to believe it, and the agents who’d investigated the case undercover for months had been happy to lay it all out for her, hoping for her testimony. But since Ellie had never been involved in the investment side of the business, and because both her father and her fiancé had gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure she was kept in the dark, the government had had little use for her. She’d been deprived of the comfort of both men in her life, and had been left with Carly and Carly’s family to hold her together.

She couldn’t imagine going through something like that without Carly to help her through. Yet here was Gabi, going through so much more, with no one. Well, no one except Ellie.

The wind picked up outside and the branches of the trees smacked against the glass. Ellie turned off the light, pulled the blankets up to her chin, and tried to get comfortable. The last time she’d crawled into this bed, she’d been with Cameron. If not for Gabi, he’d probably be here now.

Not a good idea to have a sleepover with a guy the first night Gabi was here, she’d realized. Not a good message to send the kid. She pulled over the pillow Cam had used and held it against her body. It was a poor substitute, but she could smell the faintest bit of his aftershave lingering on the pillowcase.

She’d been shocked when Cam admitted that he knew who she was, surprised that he hadn’t made more of an issue out of it and that he’d never let on. She tried to focus on this one thing, her eyes closed in the dark, an attempt to calm her brain because there was way too much swirling around in there tonight.

On the one hand, she felt that he’d deceived her by not letting her know that he knew, for letting her keep up the pretense. On the other, she’d be the world’s biggest hypocrite for accusing him of being deceitful when she—liar, liar, pants on fire—had so deliberately kept her identity a secret.

He knew, but he hadn’t told anyone, not even her. He’d respected her right to privacy, he’d said. How could she be angry with a man who hadn’t grilled her or confronted her, but who’d left it up to her when to reveal her secrets?

She fell asleep, thinking he was a one-of-a-kind guy. A guy it would be really hard to say good-bye to when the time came. But they had from now until summer, and that was going to have to be enough.

The first snow of the season was falling on Saturday morning, the fat flakes drifting down like feathers onto the grass and the trees. It wasn’t a snow destined to last, nor would it stick to the ground, but it was a pretty snow, and Gabi had been excited to see what it looked like on the beach, so she and Ellie put on their heavy jackets and took Dune down to the water’s edge to watch the snow fall onto the sand and dissolve into the Bay.

Gabi had pointed across the Bay. “You can hardly
see the other side, the snowfall is so thick. It’s like everything out there is white.”

Dune leaped to catch the snowflakes even as Gabi caught them with her tongue. The grasses held a thin covering of white that the occasional breeze blew onto the sand. They walked down the beach as far as the remains of the lighthouse, then turned back, the wind having shifted to send cold gusts along the shore.

“Brr. It’s really cold today,” Gabi was saying as they returned to the house. “How can it be so cold today when it was only chilly yesterday?”

“I guess this time of the year, you can expect almost anything,” Ellie replied.

“Is that your car?” Gabi stood in the driveway near the path to the front door. “That is so cool!”

“It belongs to my friend Carly. She let me borrow it because I don’t have a car.”

“Why don’t you have a car?” Gabi asked.

Ellie hesitated for a moment.
Honesty
, she reminded herself.
Total honesty
.

“I bought my car with money that I made from doing public relations work for my father’s company. The government said that the money he paid me had been gotten through defrauding his clients, so they took the car to sell it and put the money into a fund to pay back the people he’d stolen from.”

Gabi stared at Ellie, the color draining from her face.

“Can the government take anything that was bought with money he made?” she asked, and Ellie nodded.

“They could take the town house and my mother’s car and our clothes and—”

“Whoa, there. Let’s not look for trouble, all right? I don’t know if the FBI even knows about you. And if they do, or if they find out, we’ll deal with it if we have to.” She put her arm around Gabi and walked with her to the front porch. “Right now let’s go inside and make a fire and some hot chocolate.”

The wood that Cam had stacked on the back porch sat under an overhang and was dry and well seasoned, and caught right away. Ellie and Gabi decided it would be a great place to read, so they took their mugs of cocoa into the living room and curled up on the sofa, Gabi with
Anne
, Ellie with one of Lilly’s journals. They’d barely gotten comfortable when Ellie’s phone rang.

“Hi,” she said after glancing at the caller ID.

“Hi yourself. How are you and Gabi getting along?” Cam asked.

“Just fine.” She felt Gabi watching from the corner of her eyes and decided to leave it at “fine.”

“Listen, my sister’s on her way. We usually have Thanksgiving dinner together on the day after—because she’s a chef and always works that day—but this year we had to skip it because of her move. She decided she wanted to do the dinner thing tonight. Any chance you and Gabi would want to join us?”

“How would your sister feel about that?”

“I already told her I’d like to invite a guest or two. She’s okay with it. Actually, she’s looking forward to meeting you.”

Ellie looked out the window. The snow had stopped and none had stuck to the street.

“Sure. We’d love to. What time is good?”

“We’re planning on six o’clock.”

“Can I bring something?”

“She says she has it covered, so I’ll say no. Just yourselves.”

“We’ll be there. Thanks, Cam.” Ellie put the phone down and told Gabi, “Cam’s invited us to dinner at his house tonight. His sister, who’s a chef, is making a two-days-late Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Well, you know, I already had Thanksgiving dinner. At the Foresters’.” Gabi bit the inside of her lip. “Maybe the one at Cam’s will be more fun.…”

It
was
fun. Wendy O’Connor was a petite dynamo who had put together a fabulous meal of all the traditional favorites and then some. In addition to the most delicious turkey Ellie had ever tasted (“It’s organic,” Wendy explained), there was zucchini au gratin, corn-bread stuffing with oysters, fresh cranberry sauce, and brandied carrots. For dessert there were cream puffs filled with pumpkin mousse.

Wendy was busy in the kitchen when Ellie and Gabi arrived, and there’d been little opportunity to engage in conversation with her until they sat down to eat at the beautiful table Cameron had made from reclaimed barn boards.

“So Cam tells me you’re a new resident of St. Dennis, Ellie,” Wendy had said pleasantly after Ellie had complimented the dinner.

“New resident, new homeowner.”

“Bought a house?”

Ellie paused. Continue the lies, or take the first step toward the truth? She glanced at Cam, whose expression
told her,
You’re on your own. But I’ll back you either way
.

“Actually, no. I didn’t buy a house.” Ellie put her fork down. “I inherited one.”

Cam looked up, his gaze flicking from her to his sister and back again.

“Really? Which one?” Wendy helped herself to the carrots, which had already made their way around the table.

“The house at the very end of Bay View.”

Wendy looked up and frowned. “You don’t mean the Cavanaugh house.”

“I do. That’s the house. I inherited it from my mother.”

“Last I heard, Lynley Sebastian’s estate owned that house.”

Ellie nodded. “I’m Lynley’s daughter.”

“No shit.” Wendy put her fork down on her plate and stared.

“None whatsoever,” Ellie assured her.

Wendy turned to Cameron. “Did you know …?”

He nodded. “Yes. I knew.”

“You didn’t say anything?” Wendy looked as if she were about to throw something at her brother.

“I’ve been a little sensitive about telling people who I am,” Ellie said. “Don’t blame Cam. He was only respecting my right to privacy. Because of my father.”

“Lynley was married to … Your father isn’t …” Wendy’s eyes narrowed.

“Clifford Chapman, yes, he is.”

Wendy’s jaw clenched and she stared at her plate for a long time. Finally she said, “Clifford Chapman’s
shenanigans wiped out my pension. I lost every penny I’d scraped together to invest, thanks to him.”

“I’m very sorry.” Ellie’s appetite left her, and she pushed away from the table. “Gabi, maybe we should—”

“No, no, of course you shouldn’t leave.” Wendy composed herself. “I’m sorry. It was just such a surprise. Cam, I really wish you’d given me a heads-up.”

“I wanted Ellie to make that call,” he told his sister. To Ellie, he said, “So is this your coming-out?”

“I guess it is. I hadn’t given it much thought, except that I assumed that you’d told Wendy.”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t …”

“… your place. Thank you. I appreciate your giving me the option, but from now on, I think I need to own up. If Gabi can do it, I can do it.” Ellie rubbed Gabi’s back.

“You know there’s probably people here in St. Dennis who invested through Chapman’s firm and lost their shirts,” Wendy said.

“Probably.”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to hold it against Ellie or Gabi,” Cam said. “I think everyone’s going to think of Lynley and how good it is that her daughter has come back. The people who’ve already met Ellie like her. If anyone is bothered by it, well, there’s not much we can do about that.”

Wendy was lost in thought. “You know that Cam and I spent some time there when we were little?”

Ellie nodded.

“It was our sanctuary when we had nowhere else to go,” Wendy told them.

“Me, too.” Gabi piped up. “I didn’t have anywhere
to go, either, until Ellie said I could come to stay with her.”

Gabi related her own story, embellished by her natural flair for the dramatic.

“Interesting, don’t you think, that that house was a refuge for the three of us?” Wendy glanced from Cam to Gabi.