Scarlet Nights (6 page)

Sara didn’t want to argue with her cousin, and she didn’t want to have to discuss her future. She decided to attack. “With all your talk about ‘us’ why didn’t you tell me about that tunnel? This time it was someone we know who used it—know by relationship any way, certainly not by character—but what do I do next time when a stranger comes climbing into my bedroom?”

“Mike said he was sorry about that, but—”

“He told you that he sneaked into my apartment in the middle of the night and nearly scared me to death? Did he also tell you that he wanted to call the police on me?”

“Technically, he had a right to do so. He was entering his sister’s apartment, while you’re—”

She did
not
want to hear that Mike Newland was right and she was wrong. “How’s
my
apartment coming?”

“Fine,” Luke said. “I took out the toilet this morning.”

“Before or after you met Tess’s brother?”

Luke acted as though he had to think about that. “After. In fact, right after I met Mike, I went into your apartment and saw that the old toilet needed to be replaced. It only took me a few minutes to remove it.”

“The whole kitchen needs to be remodeled but you haven’t done that yet.”

“I know it does,” Luke said contritely, but then his head came up. “I know. Maybe I’ll get Mike to help me put in a new kitchen. He looks like a man who could handle a screwdriver. Will you make lunch for us every day?”

Sara picked up her big pincushion and threw it at him. Luke caught it, tossed it back to her, then, chuckling, he went into the garden, the shovel across his shoulder.

At noon, Sara went inside to make herself lunch. She’d been too busy to go to the grocery since Greg left, so all she had was a loaf of three-day-old bread and some tuna salad her mother had made for her. As she bit into the boring sandwich she couldn’t help but glance at the clock. She still had time to change clothes and drive into Williamsburg to have lunch with Mike at the elegant Williamsburg Inn.

But then she thought about all the gossip that would cause, plus the I-told-you-so look that would be on “that man’s” face, and she discarded the idea. Getting up, she checked her phone, but Greg still hadn’t called. However, she did have three voice mails from people around town. Reluctantly, Sara listened to each one—and they were all about what a great guy Mike Newland was. He’d helped her aunt Mavis unload a car, and he’d put the chain back on Uncle Arnie’s saw—then Mike had cut the tree branch for him. The worst one was from her mother. Mike had paid a visit to Sara’s mother, and she said she’d be over in the afternoon and they’d “talk about it.”

“What did he do this morning?” Sara nearly shouted. “Go from one house to another and introduce himself? Or did he just perform good deeds all day?” For a moment she entertained herself with the thought that he’d spent the night sabotaging people’s property, then in the morning he’d gone from one place to the other correcting the bad that he’d done.

Smiling at her little daydream, she put her dirty dishes in the washer, gathered her things, called Greg and texted him, then she went back outside. She should put her sewing machine on Tess’s desk, turn on the TV, and work inside, but then she’d have to hear her phone ringing—or explain to people why she’d turned it off.
This way, she could just give the excuse that she was outside working and didn’t hear it. As for Greg, if he did call, it might be good for him to reach her voice mail.

At two, she went inside to make herself a pitcher of iced tea and saw that Greg hadn’t called. While the water boiled, she looked at the closed door of Mike’s bedroom. Correction, Tess’s guest room, and Sara seemed to be overwhelmed with curiosity. Quietly, as though she were being watched, she put her hand on the knob. It wouldn’t surprise her to find out that the door was locked, but it wasn’t. Feeling like a thief, she peeked in. The curtains were open on the one window, the bed was made, and as far as she could tell, it was exactly the same as it had been the day before. Contrary to what Luke had told her, there didn’t look to be anything wrong with the bed.

Feeling bolder, she stepped inside and looked around. Nothing. There was no evidence that he’d been there. She went to the closet and opened it. There wasn’t so much as a shirt inside, and no suitcase was on the floor. Now that she thought of it, he’d had no luggage with him last night when he’d come up out of the tunnel.

Frowning, Sara opened all three of the drawers in the chest. They were empty, as were the bedside table drawers, and nothing was under the bed. She even pulled the bedcovers back and looked under them, but there was not one thing of his in the room.

As she left, she thought about his note and that he’d said he needed to run errands. What secret assignations did he have in Williamsburg?

Sara had just closed the door behind her when she heard a car drive up and instantly knew it was her mother. It was, no doubt, some primal instinct that told her when her mother was near, and when she looked out, she saw that she was right. Before Sara could think how to escape, her mother was at the front door. When she saw Sara, she said through the glass, “I need some help.”

“Don’t we all?” Sara muttered as she opened the door. To her surprise, her mother had eight canvas—never plastic—bags of groceries on the little porch. All Sara’s bad thoughts and feelings left her. Her mother knew how hard Sara was working to get the alterations done before the wedding, so she’d taken on the job of cooking for her. Armstrong’s—Eleanor Shaw’s maiden name—Organic Foods had grown since her mother opened it out of her kitchen in 1976. Now she ran three stores, one in Edilean, one in Williamsburg, and in the summer, a big fruit and vegetable stand on the highway to Richmond. She employed nearly a dozen women to cook food that sold out as fast as they could make it, plus another fifteen to handle the stores. That her mother would take the time in her very busy life to care about her daughter’s needs made Sara forget any complaints she’d had. She really did have the most wonderful mother in the world.

Sara put her arms around her mother’s neck and hugged her tight. “Thank you. You are the best mother … the best friend … anyone ever had. How did you know I was practically starving?”

When Eleanor was released, she handed Sara two bags of groceries. “Sorry to disappoint you, sweetums, but Mike bought all of this.”

Sara’s face fell. “Mike? Tess’s brother?”

“You have more than one Mike living with you?”

Sara put the groceries on the counter by the refrigerator. “All right, so what heroic deed of monumental importance did he perform for
you
today?”

As Ellie opened the refrigerator door, she raised an eyebrow at her daughter. “What’s got you so riled up? The fact that your husband-to-be went off and left you practically at the altar, or that he hasn’t called?”

“How did you know—” Sara glared when she realized her
mother wasn’t sure Greg hadn’t called until Sara’s outburst told her. “All right, out with it. Say what you have to, then go. I have work to do.”

“You always do.” Ellie put a bunch of dark
cavolo nero
in the crisper and adjusted the humidity level. “In fact, it seems that now you have so much work to do that you don’t have time to even feed yourself, much less spend time with your friends and family.”

Sara had heard it all before. Reaching into the bag, she withdrew a heavy chunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. “I don’t have—”

“A grater for that?” Ellie said. “Don’t worry, Mike took care of it. He
bought
one from me. Paid for it with a debit card. You know, the kind of card that takes money out of his bank account instantly?”

Sara didn’t have to be told what her mother was referring to. Not long after she introduced Greg to her family, he stopped by the grocery and got a cart full of expensive, premade food—then wheeled it out without paying. When the store manager went after him, Greg said he could have whatever he wanted with no charge because his “girlfriend” owned the store. It took the manager a few minutes to understand that Greg was talking about Sara, not Ellie. Later, it had been Sara who’d had to deal with Greg’s anger because his future mother-in-law wouldn’t give him everything he wanted from the store for free. Since then, Sara had done the shopping and paid for everything, even though she did get an employee’s discount. She didn’t tell Greg because she didn’t want to spend more hours explaining, but she was given many items without charge.

Now, as Sara unpacked more food—none of it ready-made—she thought about how to get her mother on her side. The praise for Mike Newland was getting out of hand. “Look, Mom, I know he seems like a nice guy and all, and he is Tess’s brother, but there’s something about him that I don’t trust. Wait until you hear how he broke into my apartment in the middle of the night. He—”

“I know. He came up through the old tunnel.”

Sara paused, her hand on a small, reusable canvas bag full of chili peppers. “How do you know about that?”

“Aunt Lissie told me about it when I was a kid, but it’d been closed up. Luke rediscovered it the year before he met Joce. You know, that time when he was so depressed he wasn’t talking to anyone. He got my father to help him shore it up. Do you think Dad could do something like that and I’d not know about it? I was the one who washed his filthy clothes and rubbed liniment on his sore back.”

“Who else knows about the tunnel?”

“Alive or dead?”

Sara shook her head. “Okay, so lots of people of your generation and older know about it, but that doesn’t excuse how he—this stranger—used it. I think he
wanted
to scare me.”

“I guess he should have knocked on the door of what he thought was an empty apartment.”

“If he and Tess are so close, why didn’t he know I was staying here? And why is his room empty? He showed up here at night with
nothing
. Don’t you think that’s a bit odd?”

Ellie looked up from the refrigerator. “Not if your apartment burned down and all you had left was what you were wearing and your car.”

Sara stared at her mother, speechless.

Ellie straightened up, her hand on her lower back. She was sixty-two years old and a handsome woman—due, she said, to not eating the poisons that were in commercially grown foods—but she didn’t look anything like her daughter. Sara’s delicate prettiness came from Ellie’s mother’s sister, Lissie, a woman of alabaster beauty. “I thought he might not have told you why he showed up during the night and why his room—which it looks like you’ve
been snooping through—is empty. The poor man has nothing. I ordered kilts for him.”

“You what?”

“I measured him, called the shop in Edinburgh, and ordered two complete Scottish outfits for him, one for dress and one to wear to participate in the games at the fair.”

“Games? At the fair? Are you talking about the
Scottish
games? Throwing a cable? Shot putting? The mock
battles
?! The Fraziers will slaughter him.”

Ellie gave her daughter a sharp look. “What, exactly, is it that you have against this man? He’s certainly better—”

When her mother seemed on the verge of saying more, Sara gave her a warning look. “If you’re planning on saying anything bad about Greg, don’t do it.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Only because you can’t think of anything you haven’t already said.”

“Think not? Give me three hours and I could fill them up.” At Sara’s look, Ellie put her hands up in surrender. “All right, no more fighting. It’s none of my business. So how’s your work going?”

“Fine.” Sara wanted to get the subject away from Greg. “What are all these groceries he bought for? Is he planning to open a rival store?”

“It’s what Mike needs to be able to cook.” Ellie’s face took on a look of enchantment. “I’ve never met a man who wasn’t in the business who knew so much about organic foods. We must have spent ten whole minutes talking about the benefits of flaxseed.”

“That sounds fascinating.”

Ellie ignored the snide remark. “Mike gave me a recipe for parsnip soup that I’m going to try on your father tonight, and they have a golf date this Saturday.”

“Who does?”

“Mike and your father.”

“My father is going to play golf with a man half his age, someone he doesn’t even know? A policeman?”

“I’ll tell Mike to leave his guns at home, and Henry can wear his bulletproof vest. You didn’t answer my question about what you have against this man, who, by the way, isn’t so young. He’s thirty-six and he can retire from the police force in under three years. I wonder where he’s planning to live?”

“Mother, if you think that this man and I—”

“Never would I dream of interfering in the life of any of my dear daughters. Actually, I was thinking of Mike and Ariel. Wouldn’t they make a lovely couple?”

“Ariel?” Sara asked, aghast. “Ariel Frazier? What’s
she
doing in town?”

“Sara, dear, did you forget that Ariel
lives
here?”

“She hasn’t lived here since high school when she told all of us that she couldn’t wait to get away from this backwater town and everyone in it.”

“And she did. She went to medical school and now she’s finished and she wants to take a break before she begins the grueling work of doing her residency. Then she’ll be a doctor—and she wants to open a clinic here in Edilean.”

Sara thought her mother was looking at her as though she expected her to say or do something, but Sara had no idea what it was. Ariel was one year older than she was, and her family had been in Edilean for as long as hers had. Since the beginning, the Fraziers had sold whatever moved on wheels, whether it was bicycles, wagons, tractors, or Lamborghinis. It was said—but no one had any proof—that the original Frazier was the best friend of Angus McTern Harcourt, the man who’d settled Edilean. It was also said—
with even less proof—that the first Frazier had actually been the one who drove the wagonload of gold that had been the basis for the founding of the town. When Sara was in the first grade and Ariel in the second, she’d told Sara that her grandfather said that by rights Edilean Manor, even the entire town, should belong to them. That was the first of many fights Sara and Ariel’d had.