Birthright (4 page)

So why did her eyes appear so hollow? Why was she looking at him as if he wasn’t even there? All he’d done was offer his condolences. Nothing unusual about that.

Unless there was more to her husband’s dying than he knew.

He didn’t
want
to know. All he wanted was for the life to come back into her eyes.

“All right,” he said, leaning forward again as if he could will her to cheer up. “Yes, I’ve heard rumors you inherited some money. This is a small town. People talk.”

His candor brought a spark back to her eyes. “No kidding,” she muttered, evidently not pleased that people talked—even though he couldn’t imagine anyone ever saying anything bad about her.

“So I thought I’d give you a try. It’s a terrific program, and if I can get a little extra money, I can hire an assistant and handle more than ten kids a week. I also want to hire a certified water-safety instructor so the kids can use the pool when they aren’t playing hoops. Right now I can’t budget any of that into the program.”

She appraised him, her gaze steady and mildly intrigued. “You have only ten children in this program?”

“Ten a week. That’s all I can handle at one time. I’ve got around forty kids signed up, and I’ll be rotating them from week to week. I wish I could take more into the program, but I can’t with the funding I’ve got.”

“Aaron Mazerik,” she murmured, a faint smile tracing her lips once more, assuring him that she had, indeed, come back to life. “Who would have thought?” She tapped her fingers on her knee, then got to her feet and shrugged. “How much do you need?”

“A hundred thousand dollars would be great,” he said, then flashed a grin. “I’d be thrilled by a thousand. Even a few hundred. Right now I’ve got coffee cans in the Sunnyside Café, the IGA, Sterling Hardware and a few other places. I’m collecting nickels and dimes. Paper money would really turn me on.”

She laughed again. It wasn’t a big boisterous laugh, or even a frothy, charming laugh. It was low and…rusty-sounding somehow, as if she hadn’t laughed in a long time—which was probably the case, given that she was supposedly shattered. “At the risk of turning you on, Aaron, I’m going to think about this. I’m not saying yes or no. I’m saying I’ll think about it.”

“Great.” If she wanted to risk turning him on, all she had to do was laugh again. Or smile. Or just look at him.

He gave himself a shake. He wasn’t going to
let
her turn him on. Even if she wrote him his dream-come-true check, he wouldn’t let her turn him on. The money, yes. Lily, no.

Not wanting to overstay his tenuous welcome, he rose to his feet. “I appreciate it. The program starts tomorrow. If you have any questions, you can reach me at the high school. The gym office is extension 407.”

“All right.”

He extended his hand to shake hers, this time in farewell. But she seemed distracted by her painting. “You strike me as an honest man,” she said.

He wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he merely shrugged.

“Tell me what you really think of the painting.”

He sensed that this was some kind of test. If she wanted her ego stroked, she’d come to the wrong person. If she wanted honesty, though…“The truth? It’s too safe.”

“Safe?” She eyed the painting, her head tilted to one side. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s
good
, but…Look, I’m no art critic.”

“I asked your opinion, Aaron. I’m not going to hate you for giving it.”

Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t. “A jug and a pear don’t mean anything to me,” he admitted. “And you’ve painted them so—” he struggled for the right word “—precisely. It’s so neat and pretty and…I don’t know, safe.”

She stared at the painting for a minute longer, obviously dissatisfied—with the painting or with him, he couldn’t say. For all he knew, his critique might have screwed his chances for getting any money from her for the program. It had probably screwed his chance to be anything more than a former classmate to her—if indeed that chance had ever existed. And it hadn’t. It wouldn’t.

Her silence continued, unsettling him. It occurred to him that he was never going to see a penny from this meeting, and he was never going to feel anything but uncomfortable around Lily. “Anyway, thanks for
hearing me out,” he said, edging toward the side of the house. “I won’t take up any more of your time.”

She turned from the painting. Her eyes had come fully back to life, he noticed, glittering like stars in a night sky. “Safe, huh?”

“I shouldn’t have said anything.” He didn’t care about the money. He just didn’t want her to feel offended. “When it comes to art, I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I’m not so sure about that.” An enigmatic smile flickered across her face. “I’ll think about your program, Aaron.”

“Thanks.” He nodded, pivoted on his heel and walked away, one long resolute stride after another. The farther he got from her, the more certain he was that she wasn’t going to donate to the program. He’d been a fool to ask her for money, and a fool to speak the truth about her painting. That was more than enough foolishness for one day.

A
ARON
M
AZERIK
scared her.

He always had and he still did. It didn’t help to remind herself he was no longer a rebel with a wicked reputation. Fifteen years after they’d graduated from high school—she near the top of the class, he by some miracle that had kept him out of reformatory—he still sent a sensation down her spine, ice and heat, something that left her feeling oddly breathless. He was still tall and lean and teeming with barely checked energy. He still had the most dangerously beautiful eyes she’d ever seen.

And he was still so reckless he’d criticize a painting by a woman from whom he was trying to wrest
a charitable contribution. Reckless but honest. He was right about her painting. It was too safe.

Sighing, she entered the kitchen through the back door. She was thirsty—and restless. She needed to take action, although she couldn’t think of anything to act on besides her thirst.

The kitchen was too large. The entire house was too large. She’d managed to furnish most of its spacious rooms because the house she and Tyler had owned in Cohasset, outside Boston, had also been absurdly large. Once she’d sold the place, she’d had the furniture shipped to Riverbend.

Her gaze circled the sun-filled room. Potted herbs lined the windowsill above the sink. To either side, glass-fronted oak cabinets displayed neat stacks of dishes and rows of glasses. She pulled down a glass and hiked across the room to the refrigerator, where she filled the glass with lemonade.

She didn’t care that the house was too big. She’d fallen in love with it when she’d been a child, cycling past it on her way to meet her friends down by the river. She hadn’t known anything about the house or the family living in it then; all she’d known was that it seemed grand and magical, with its porthole windows and angled roofs and the rounded tower. It was the sort of house that spiced a girl’s imagination. She could imagine fairies living beneath the eaves, and a ghost in the cellar—a friendly ghost, of course—and the scent of gingerbread in the air. When she’d returned to Riverbend and discovered the house for sale, she’d bought it without thinking.

She didn’t regret her impulsive purchase, but she acknowledged that a woman living alone couldn’t
possibly fill it. It was a good place to hide from the world while she attempted to pull herself together, to come to terms with the tragic mistakes of her life. She liked ambling through the generously proportioned rooms, sitting wherever she wished, turning the stereo up loud or watching television at two in the morning.

Carrying her lemonade, she headed for the front door. A peek through the window there revealed that Aaron was gone.

Did he still have a police record? Or had it been expunged once he turned twenty-one? Why was she even wondering about it? She’d never had anything to do with bad boys.

During his wild adolescence, Aaron Mazerik had been a source of curiosity, not just to her but to all her friends. When he’d suddenly made the varsity basketball team—as a sophomore—they’d all been stunned. Why on earth had Coach Drummer taken a chance on a punk like Aaron Mazerik? Everyone knew he sneaked out for cigarettes and worse. Everyone knew he cruised the streets late at night, without a curfew, and there were rumors that he stole things, although Lily wasn’t sure she believed that. Or maybe she just didn’t want to believe it.

She’d heard he’d been arrested, though. She’d heard he’d been picked up for vagrancy, that he’d hot-wired cars and smoked pot and filched a knife from the hardware store, though no one had ever found the knife on him. She’d heard that Frank Garvey had arrested him and he’d spent a night in a holding cell at the police station. His mother had never married. There was no Mr. Mazerik. Just Evie
and her son. The loner. The troublemaker. The outsider.

Lily was uncomfortable about his coming to her for money. Yes, Tyler had left her quite wealthy, but she would gladly have traded every last nickel for some happiness and relief from the crippling guilt that continued to plague her. She knew that coming back to Riverbend had meant everyone would be talking about her inheritance, because everyone talked about everything here.

Still, she didn’t want people to assume she was an easy mark. She didn’t want them looking at her and seeing dollar signs. In time she would probably wind up giving a lot of her money away. But she wasn’t going to be stupid about it.

She stood in the arched doorway of her living room, surveying the embroidered sofas, the brick fireplace with its polished mantel, the framed oil painting above it. It was a seascape. Nothing special, but it had appealed to her when she’d spotted it at an art festival one summer. Tyler had hated it—he’d called it a cliché—but the house had been
her
realm, and she’d fixed it up the way she liked it, paintings and all. The seascape had caught her eye because it had mirrored the view of the ocean from their patio. But she’d also been drawn to it by its motion—the white spuming spray, the eerie shadows in the waves, the ominous clouds riding the horizon. It wasn’t a “safe” painting.

Her little watercolor was. Aaron had been right about that. He might be a reformed thug—or a not-so-reformed one—but he’d spoken the truth about her painting. It was a still life, not a moving life. It
was tight and tidy and safe. She hadn’t dared to paint outside the lines.

Well, who could blame her for wanting a little safety now? She’d grown up feeling safe, loved by her parents, accepted and respected by her friends. Riverbend had been a safe place to grow up, a town where people looked after one another and the river never moved so rapidly that a swimmer could get swept away. Lily had thought that after eighteen years of safety she was ready to take risks.

She’d taken them, leaving home to attend college in New England, then marrying a man so different from anyone she’d known before. She’d taken risks and failed so miserably she was afraid ever to take a risk again.

Talking to Aaron Mazerik had been a risk, though, and she’d survived. She wasn’t sure she was going to write him a check for his summer basketball program, but she’d sat with him, and shaken hands with him, and dared to ask him to tell her his honest opinion of her painting.

Maybe she
was
ready to start taking risks again.

Or maybe Aaron, with his mesmerizing eyes and his inexplicable charisma, had gotten her to take a risk she would rather not have taken.

L
ILY HADN’T KNOWN
much about being rich before she married Tyler.

She’d known about being comfortably middleclass, about living in a nice home in a nice neighborhood and never going to bed hungry. Every August she and her mother would shop for a new school wardrobe without any hand-wringing, and she’d always owned more than one pair of shoes, even when her feet were growing a size every few months. She took piano lessons, ballet lessons and art lessons. More often than not, her family went out to a restaurant for Sunday dinner, and no one thought twice about the cost.

When she’d been accepted at a small private college in Massachusetts, her parents hadn’t said it was too expensive or she’d need to get a scholarship. Not only had they sent her there, they’d paid the airfare so she could fly home for Thanksgiving, winter recess and spring break.

But until she met Tyler, she hadn’t known what it was like to be rich the way the Holdens were rich.

It had been hard for her even to conceive of a family having so much money. Tyler had seemed like a member of an alien species to her, a precious stone buffed to a high gloss, radiating not just beauty
but an almost overwhelming attitude of entitlement. On their first date, he’d thought nothing of driving her up to Boston in his Porsche, taking her to a restaurant where the cheapest appetizer was ten dollars—he’d insisted that she order a complete dinner—and then driving her back to her dormitory, kissing her and departing with a promise to call.

She’d been dazzled.

He’d called.

She never gotten used to his spending so much money on her—ironic, since his parents had assumed she was a gold digger. When she and Tyler had gone shopping for her engagement ring, she’d chosen one of the smallest diamonds on the jeweler’s tray, but Tyler had rejected her selection and insisted on buying the largest. She hadn’t cared about his wealth—which, he’d told her, was one of the things he loved about her. Apparently he’d dated too many women who were attracted more to his wallet than to him. He’d trusted Lily, though. He’d loved her beauty and her quiet intelligence, and her honest insistence that she loved him for himself.

They’d lived in Boston for a few years, in a spacious apartment in a ritzy Back Bay neighborhood. By the time he was well established at his law firm, the marriage was already beginning to show hairline cracks, and he’d decided they could mend those cracks by buying a palatial house with ocean views in Cohasset. She’d assumed the reason he wanted a five-bedroom house was that he was finally ready to start a family, but no, he wasn’t. He’d just thought that moving out of the city would make things better.

It hadn’t. Things had gotten worse. She’d become
active on some local boards and volunteered at a nearby hospital, but those efforts hadn’t fulfilled her the way a career might have, or a baby. She’d been trained to teach art. She’d been born to become a mother. Living in Cohasset with Tyler, she’d seen neither goal realized.

“No wife of mine is going to work,” Tyler had declared. “You can’t take a good job away from someone who needs the money.” As for children, well, they could talk about it after he made partner at his law firm.

By the time he’d made partner, she knew she would never bring a child into their world. Not unless Tyler changed. And he’d shown no interest in changing.

So she’d filled her days with library-board meetings and stints delivering flowers to patients at the hospital. She’d filled her evenings with Tyler and his parents and all their elite Boston friends at galas and symphony concerts and benefits. She’d filled her nights with tears and recriminations and prayers that Tyler would somehow turn back into the man she’d fallen in love with, the smart, witty, imaginative guy who used to listen intently to everything she said, who used to ask her opinion about things and surprise her with silly gifts and unplanned outings, who’d seemed as devoted to her as she was to him.

No one in Riverbend had known the truth. She couldn’t have borne it if they found out how dreadfully her life had turned out. Phoning home regularly, she’d assured her parents that everything with Tyler was wonderful. She’d written letters to her old friends and told them she was happy.

She had always been perfect. She’d done everything she was supposed to do, and everyone had predicted that she would live a golden life, married—and why not?—to a handsome wealthy Harvard Law School graduate like Tyler Holden. How could she admit she’d failed? How could she let everyone down?

Tyler’s parents had been appalled by the amount he’d left Lily in his will. She’d tried her best to be a good daughter-in-law to them, but they’d never accepted her. They’d always been condescending toward her, putting forth a great effort to make sure she knew she wasn’t one of them. When she’d tried to talk to them about her concerns regarding Tyler, they’d told her she was exaggerating. Surely enjoying a couple of martinis before dinner was merely being civilized, they’d insisted. Perhaps if she saw a problem, it was within her, not within him.

That was what Tyler had said, too: “If you think I’m drinking too much, then maybe you ought to think about
why
I’m drinking. Maybe you don’t make me happy. Maybe my home isn’t as pleasant as it ought to be. Maybe my wife doesn’t love me enough.”

She’d really, really tried to love him enough. But by his fifth martini of the night, every night, she couldn’t bear to be near him.

After he died, she took her inheritance, sold the house and left. Now she was back home, where apparently the entire town knew she was rich, if not precisely
how
rich. They probably all saw her inherited fortune as more evidence of how perfect her life was. A beautiful marriage, a tragic death, and she
was still the golden girl, the wealthiest widow Riverbend had ever seen.

One thing she’d learned from Tyler was that when you were rich, you had to be cautious around people who weren’t as rich, because nine times out of ten, their interest in you was actually interest in your money. Their attentiveness, their ingratiating behavior, their kindness—it usually meant they simply wanted to get their hands on your assets.

She was by nature a generous woman, but she had to be careful. She had to think before she acted. And right now she was thinking and having doubts about donating money to a summer sports program run by Aaron Mazerik, of all people.

She wasn’t sure she
didn’t
want to donate to the sports program. The amount Aaron sought was a mere drop in the bucket to her. But she wasn’t going to write him a check just because she could. First she wanted to figure out exactly what the money would be used for, and she wanted to get a sense of what, if anything, he might want from her besides her money.

She had pretty much avoided going into town since she’d moved back to Riverbend. She feared having to make small talk with all the people she would run into. She hated having to try to guess whether what she saw in their eyes was pity or envy. She hadn’t seen either in Aaron’s expression, which might be why she was considering contributing to his program. Maybe that wasn’t a good reason, but it was the only one she had so far.

She needed to have a look at the program first. She needed to find out what it had, what it lacked,
how her money would be used. For all she knew, Aaron harbored grandiose visions of setting up a semipro basketball training program, with topnotch facilities and members of the Indiana Pacers coming to town to teach master classes. She didn’t want to subsidize something overblown like that.

More importantly, though, she needed to learn whether she could trust Aaron.

So, at around noon on Monday, she climbed into her BMW convertible and pointed it in the direction of the high school.

She was going to have to get a new car. There was nothing wrong with the BMW except that it was a BMW. Tyler had picked it out for her, claiming that it would retain its value, and she had to admit she liked driving a convertible. Plenty of people in the Boston area had driven BMWs.

But in Riverbend the pricey coupe seemed pretentious. Foreign cars were a rarity. She had no idea where she’d be able to take such a car for servicing, or who would buy it from her if she decided to get rid of it. She’d probably have to advertise in the Indianapolis newspapers.

But until she sold it, she could enjoy driving it on a lovely day in late June, with the sun warming her face and the wind whipping her hair. She could enjoy glancing up to see nothing but trees and sky.

She didn’t enjoy the stares her car received from people as she turned onto Main Street. Maybe if she put the top up she’d be less conspicuous, but it was too late for that. Pedestrians and shoppers darting from their cars to stores had already noticed her.

At least she had her sunglasses on. She didn’t have
to meet anyone’s gaze, wave at people she recognized or acknowledge the attention her car attracted. Besides, she was in mourning. No one expected her to be friendly.

Up ahead, she spotted her mother emerging from Jones’s Drugstore. Even from half a block away, Eleanor Bennett looked beautiful in a crisp white blouse and a denim skirt. She was as slim as she’d been the day Lily’s father had met her, and her complexion was still creamy. It was from her that Lily had learned the importance of good posture and proud bearing. “If you carry yourself like a queen,” her mother used to tell her, “people will treat you like a queen.”

Lily wished she’d learned more than that from her mother. But her father had been the dominant presence in her life. Her mother had never seemed to mind that Julian Bennett was the earth and she was his moon, revolving around him. She’d always been a quiet, almost passive woman, willing to smooth the edges for everyone else, willing to supply whatever was needed and then step back and join in the applause. Thirty-three years old, Lily still didn’t feel she knew her mother very well.

She did know, however, that her mother was looking tense and grim as she exited the drugstore, a small shopping bag clutched in one fist. Lily cruised up the street until she was alongside her mother and then called, “Mom? Need a lift?”

Eleanor Bennett turned, and her face broke into a bright smile. “Lily! I’m so glad you got out today. It’s just gorgeous, isn’t it?” She approached the car, spreading her arms as if she could embrace the day.

“It is,” Lily agreed, pulling to the curb and untangling her windblown hair with her fingers.

“What brings you into town?” her mother asked.

Lily couldn’t guess what her mother would think about her possible investment in Aaron’s sports program. If her mother remembered Aaron at all, it was probably as a troubled young man whom she prayed her daughter would never date.

In any case Lily wasn’t about to have a lengthy car-to-sidewalk discussion with her mother about Aaron’s visit to her house yesterday. “Are you busy now?” Lily asked, feeling spontaneous. “Why don’t we have lunch?”

Her mother appeared first bewildered, then pleased by the invitation. “I don’t see why not. Find a parking space. We can pop right down the block to the Sunnyside Café.”

Lily’s misgivings set in as soon as her mother waved her toward an empty parking space a few cars down. She wanted to have lunch with her mother, mostly to find out why she’d looked so solemn when she’d left the pharmacy. But not at the Sunnyside, the most public place in town.

Everyone ate at the Sunnyside: professionals, truck drivers, shopkeepers, city workers, farmers from outside town. The place was a hive of gossip. Once Lily entered the café with her mother, word would spread throughout Riverbend: The rich widow is out and about, tooling around town in her snazzy car. The recluse has
un
-reclused. She’s ready to glide back into the flow of life.

But she wasn’t. Not because she was in mourning, but because she’d left Riverbend as a young woman
blessed with luck and hope and she’d returned tainted by what had happened to her, shamed by it, practically smothered by the weight of her guilt. She wasn’t ready to glide back into anything.

Too late now. Her mother was waiting at the corner for her, her expression a mask of good cheer. Lily would simply have to don a similar mask and get through lunch.

They entered the bustling restaurant. Its cheerful yellow walls would have hurt Lily’s eyes if she hadn’t left on her sunglasses. The din of conversation and rattling plates would have given her a headache if stress hadn’t spawned a headache first.

“There’s a place,” Eleanor said, pointing to the only empty booth in the room. She led the way around the tables, waving at someone she knew, and Lily followed, keeping her gaze lowered. She didn’t want to recognize people and wave. All she wanted was to spend this time with her mother.

They slid into the booth facing each other, and Lily reluctantly removed her sunglasses. To keep them on might offend her neighbors; they’d think she was putting on airs. She tucked the glasses into her purse and discreetly scanned the room.

The woman occupying a stool behind the cash register near the door looked familiar. Her hair was an odd auburn shade and her face was striking, full of angles and hollows. She was chatting with a beefy fellow in overalls and a John Deere cap, grinning up at him all the while.

Suddenly Lily remembered where she’d seen the woman before: leaning on Aaron as they’d left the
church after the memorial service for Abraham Steele. Aaron’s mother, Evie Mazerik.

Lily had never met her, but she vaguely recalled being told that the woman worked the day shift at the Sunnyside. As a high-school student, Lily hadn’t had much reason to eat breakfast or lunch here. At night sometimes, she and her friends would head to the café for ice-cream sundaes, but in the evenings the cash register was run by a man.

She’d heard more about Aaron’s mother than just where and when she worked, of course. People talked. Evie had had Aaron without the benefit of marriage. Out-of-wedlock children were a lot less common thirty-three years ago, and they’d been practically unheard of in Riverbend. Certainly girls must have gotten pregnant back then, but they wouldn’t have stayed in town and had their babies. They would have been sent to serve their nine-month sentences at a relative’s place in another state, and their offspring would have been put up for adoption.