Read The Sisters Montclair Online
Authors: Cathy Holton
Tags: #Contemporary Women, #Family Life, #General, #Fiction, #Historical, #Retail
The Sisters Montclair
A Novel
CONTENTS
Praise for Cathy Holton’s Novels
“Holton has a lively, fluid style that shifts easily among the viewpoints of several characters and goes down as easily as sweet tea.”
The Boston Globe
on
Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes
“Sharp, witty, and warm.”
Entertainment Weekly
on
Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes
“The novel’s wistful tone and serious revelations will set it apart from summer’s lighter fare, while the characters’ witty barbs and beachy setting keep it entertaining.”
Booklist
on
Beach Trip
“Brimming with unforgettable characters, smart conversations, and an engaging mystery that makes spending a summer in the South a tantalizing proposition.”
Kirkus
on
Summer in the South
The Sisters Montclair
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Cathy Holton
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Branwell Books,
Chattanooga, Tennessee
Trade Paperback Edition ISBN 978-1-938529-00-9
eBook ISBN 978-1-938529-01-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012907487
October, 1934
C
ome home. Your sister has lost her mind
.
Her mother’s words seem to echo in the room around her. Alice could almost hear the breathless pauses in her voice, the undercurrent of tension and pleading in her tone. Her mother wrote the way she spoke. Alice crumpled the letter in her lap.
Well, why should she
? Go home, that is.
She was in college now, away from home for the first time in her life, and surely her sisters were no longer her concern. She had felt when she came up to Sweet Briar a year ago that she was leaving her old life behind and beginning anew. Reinventing herself as the person she wanted to be, not the dutiful oldest daughter who must always watch after her little sisters, escort them to school on the streetcar, make sure they had money in their pockets for the return trip. Laura, with her cloud hair and angelic face, always wandering off into the street, lost in her own dreamy world. And Adeline, the youngest, difficult and stubborn and determined to have her own way.
And now Laura was sixteen and Adeline was thirteen, old enough to take care of themselves, and it was unfair that Mother would expect Alice to come home. As if there was anything she could do to prevent her sister from falling in love with an unsuitable man and running off with him against their parents’ wishes.
Really, it was unfair of Mother to even ask.
Alice felt her mother had an ulterior motive in asking her to return, just as she had an ulterior motive in refusing. The simple truth was, and Alice would admit this to herself even if she wouldn’t to anyone else, she didn’t want to come home because she didn’t want to see Bill Whittington.
She had let him kiss her at a cotillion party in August and now something seemed to have been settled between them, something Alice was loathe to acknowledge or accept. The fact was, she didn’t even like him. He made her nervous, with his fine clothes and manners, and the slightly condescending way he had of speaking to her, as if he expected her to be dazzled by his charm. He was five years older than she, and he and all his friends had been to college and had come home to join their fathers’ businesses. Or spend their fathers’ money, in Bill Whittington’s case. His grandfather had been one of the first millionaires in Chattanooga and he had grown up in a sprawling mansion staffed with servants. He and his friends were from Lookout Mountain, which was where the old money resided, and Alice was from Signal Mountain, which was where the people who ran Chattanooga, the doctors, lawyers, and engineers, lived.
Her father, Roderick, did not like it when she voiced this distinction.
You have nothing to be ashamed of
, he would say gruffly.
Your people were here in this valley long before the Whittingtons arrived
. The Montclairs had been in the Tennessee Valley from the time of the Indian Removal, long before the first carpetbaggers came to town and made their fortunes. Her father was a lawyer and he had business dealings with many of the Lookout Mountain crowd but he let Alice know she was never to feel socially inferior to any of them. Her mother had been a Jordan, which was one of the Old Carpetbagger Families (as her father called them privately), so Alice at least had some connection to Lookout Mountain. But despite her father’s admonition, she always felt slightly out of place with Bill Whittington and his gentlemen friends. As if they were all laughing at some joke she wasn’t privy to.
Alice had no intention of returning to Chattanooga and settling down with Bill Whittington, or anyone else for that matter. She liked boys well enough; she liked dancing with them, and flirting with them, but she didn’t like being told what to do or how to do it, and it seemed to her that that was a husband’s sole purpose.
Two days after she let Bill Whittington kiss her she came home from a party to find her parents on their way down to Ringgold, Georgia to rescue Laura from yet another undesirable suitor. The lovebirds had gone down there to get married because Georgia didn’t require a blood test.
Watching her parents drive away, Alice decided that once she graduated from Sweet Briar, she would never come home again. She would never get married.
She would travel the world and live life to its fullest, and above all else, she would avoid love like the plague.
I
t was one of the largest houses she’d ever seen, rambling along the western brow of Lookout Mountain. More like a hotel, really, than a house. Stella Nightingale pulled to the side of the road and checked the address. This was the son’s house. He lived next door to his ninety-four year old mother, Charlotte had told her. Stella put the car in reverse and backed slowly along the street. She’d been driving for half an hour along this road that ran up the front of the mountain and meandered along the brow past houses that looked like they belonged in Beverly Hills.
She could see now why she had missed the house. It was smaller than the others, more like a cottage really, sandwiched in between the two mansions on either side. Larger than anything Stella had ever lived in but smaller than most on the mountain. It sat down slightly from the street, with a high pitched roof and a circular drive in front. Stella pulled into the drive and parked in front of the garage beside another small, forlorn-looking car. The other caretaker was named Janice, Charlotte had said. She was the one who would be showing Stella the ropes.
“She’s been with Miss Alice the longest so it’s best that she train you.”
The whole time Charlotte was talking, Stella was thinking,
Do I really want this job?
But jobs were not easy to come by these days, especially for girls like her, so she kept her mouth shut and nodded her head politely as Charlotte explained the routine. Miss Alice was hard of hearing and she was particular. She wasn’t difficult, of course, (said with a nervous laugh) she just liked things done a certain way. Her way. She had her own little routines, and that was the important thing, to keep Miss Alice on her routines. Not to shake her up. She got upset over small things so it was important to follow the routine to a tee. (Another nervous laugh).
Stella had answered the ad on Craigslist because it had stated clearly that she would be a “companion.” An in-home caregiver, not a nurse. No bathing the client, no insulin shots, no ass-wiping. The client was ninety-four years old and walked with a walker and the caregivers were only there to make meals and make sure she didn’t fall. There was a housekeeper to do the cleaning. Her son, Sawyer, who lived next door, did all of the shopping. The job was for two twelve hour day shifts, eight to eight on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the ad claimed that the client kept mostly to her room so caregivers were on their own for much of the time.
It had sounded like the perfect job for a college student; plenty of time to study and write term papers. The interview process was brutal, a twelve page application, an online psychological test, and a background check. Stella had never expected to make it through, especially through the psychological test. She had been surprised when Charlotte, the head of the agency, called to tell her she was hired.
