Someone to Love (2 page)

“I’ll give you the money,” Frank said.

“Lend me the money.”

Frank nodded, then looked at his watch. “I have a meeting. Tell me how much and where and the money will be wired.”

True to his word, Frank had sent the money. Jace had already repaid part of it by selling the house he had bought for Stacy and himself. It had been vacant for years, partly furnished, ready to receive the bride and groom. Jace often remembered the day they’d closed on the house. He’d carried her across the threshold, both of them laughing and pretending the ordeal of the wedding was over. They’d drunk champagne while sitting on the new sofa they’d chosen together and talked about their future. Stacy had surprised him by saying she wanted to go back to school to get her law degree. Jace had agreed readily. He liked the idea of having a lawyer for a wife.

He brought himself back to the present and looked up at the sky. The sun was shining brilliantly; a beautiful day. He had to get back in the car and go to that house. Already he missed his family, missed their concern and their efforts to cheer him up. In the years since Stacy’s death, his family had never failed to listen to him and to try to understand. But he knew he was wearing on them. How many times could a person go over the same material? How long could he stand in one place and not move forward? Last month his uncle Mike told him that he had to either move forward or die. “Is that what you want to do?” Mike asked, his eyes angry. “Have you so glorified Stacy that you want to die with her?”

Jace couldn’t meet his uncle’s eyes, and that’s when he realized he had to
do
something. Good or bad, he had to. A few days later, he was looking for a book when he’d pulled out a paperback that had fallen to the back of the shelves. He was still living in the small apartment that he and Stacy had shared. Her sister, in a rage after the funeral, had gone to the apartment and taken whatever she thought had belonged to Stacy. Jace had returned to an apartment that was cleaned out, almost as though Stacy had never lived there with him.

When the paperback fell on the floor, he saw that it was the one Stacy had been reading just before they left for England. For a moment, Jace forgot that she was gone and almost called out to her. When it hit him yet again that she was dead, he clutched the book and collapsed onto a chair.

He looked at the book with its gaudy cover and smiled. He used to tease Stacy that she had “low-class taste” when it came to novels. “I read legal papers most of the time,” she’d said, “so at home I need fun reading. You should try them. They’re great.”

He got up, meaning to put the book by his bedside, but something fell onto the floor. When he picked up the envelope, his heart nearly stopped. It was postmarked “Margate,” the English village where Stacy had died.

Inside was the photo of an ugly house and on the back someone had written that he/she would meet Stacy the night before she died. “This is why she wanted to go to England,” he’d said aloud. It wasn’t that she wanted to be with him but that she was meeting another person. Who? Jace wondered. Why? Was it a man?

For days he thought of nothing but the photo. He memorized the words. “Ours again.” What did that mean? That Stacy had owned the house before? Jace spent sleepless nights going over everything Stacy had told him about her life. Her parents had divorced when she was three. Her mother had moved them to California while her father stayed in New York with his business. When Stacy was sixteen, her mother had died of cancer. One day she had a headache that wouldn’t go away, so she went to a doctor. Six weeks later she was dead. Stacy was sent to live with her father, a man she’d seen only a few times in her life. Stacy used to laugh when she said that at first they “didn’t get along.” She’d meant it as an understatement. She was a teenager and angry that her mother had been taken from her, and angrier still that she was sent to live with her father, who was always working and never had time for her. Stacy said that she managed to be so bad that after a year her father sent her back to California to live with her mother’s sister.

After Stacy graduated from Berkeley, she and her father finally became friends. But the friendship nearly died a year later when her father married a woman who was deeply jealous of Stacy.

Jace tried to remember all the places Stacy said she’d been. In the summers while she was in college, she used to go with a group of kids to Europe to “see the sights.” “My hippie days,” Stacy would say, laughing. Was that when she saw the house? Jace wondered. Is that when it was “theirs”?

He wanted to ask her father questions, but Mr. Evans had said that…Actually, Jace didn’t want to remember what Stacy’s father had said to him on the day of the funeral.

On impulse, Jace had gone to the Internet and brought up the name of the premier real estate agency in England, then typed in “Margate” for the location. The house was for sale. He recognized the photo as the one in the envelope and was sure that the picture of the house had been cut out of a sales brochure.

Jace downloaded the brochure for the house and read every word carefully. It was a very old house, part of it built on the remains of a monastery established in the early 1100s. When the Dissolution of the Monasteries was ordered in 1536, the brochure said it had been converted into a “stately manor house.”

The second Jace saw the house he knew what he had to do. He knew in his heart that the secret to why Stacy had killed herself was inside that house. She had been there before. She had met someone who was so important to her that when he/she had written just a few words, Stacy had figured out a way to go there to meet…him. Jace felt sure that she was meeting a man. Yes, he was jealous, but he was sane enough to know that there could have been reasons other than love to explain her actions.

When Jace knew he was going to buy the house, he said nothing to his family because he knew that whomever he told would come up with a sensible reason for why he shouldn’t. In the end, the only person he mentioned it to was his uncle Frank because he had the money that Jace needed to borrow to buy the big house.

When Jace got to the real estate office in London, the agent was cool and polite, but he got the feeling that the man and his office mates would be toasting with champagne if someone at last sold the odious old house. Maybe the realtor had an attack of conscience because he handed Jace a thick stack of brochures on other houses in England that were for sale. Jace had smiled politely, thanked him, then tossed them into the back of his brand-new Range Rover and left them there.

He saw the house only once before he bought it. It was a Sunday afternoon, raining hard outside, and the electricity had gone off. The darkness made the gloomy house even more dismal. But it didn’t matter as Jace hardly looked at the place. At least not at what the realtor was pointing out. Had Stacy sat on that window seat and looked out? he wondered. Had she climbed those stairs?

Since it was Sunday, he hadn’t met the housekeeper or the gardener. The realtor said that Jace was, of course, free to hire his own employees, but both of them had worked at the house for many years and—“Yes, I’ll keep them,” Jace had said. He didn’t plan to stay long enough to go to the bother of hiring new employees.

So now he was ready to take possession of the house and the contents. For an extra hundred grand, the realtor had persuaded the previous owner to leave behind a great deal of furniture and housewares. Few antiques, no valuable ornaments, but some couches, chairs, beds, and china were left. During the price negotiation, the owner had taken more time discussing the furniture than he had the house. Frustrated, Jace said, “Tell him that the ghost might have attached herself to the furniture and might leave with it.” He’d meant it as a joke and the realtor presented the statement as humorous, but the owner didn’t laugh. Immediately, he stopped haggling and gave in to Jace’s requests.

Now Jace got into his new car, turned on the engine, and continued to drive. When the house came into view, he sighed. Yes, it was as hideous as he remembered. From the outside, it looked to be an enormous square fortress, three stories high, with thick brick turrets pasted on top of each corner. The truth was that the house was hollow—or at least that’s how he thought of it. Although it looked to be solid, when you drove through a gap between the buildings, you were inside a large, graveled courtyard. If the house were seen from the air, it would look like a rectangle with an empty interior.

Inside, it was almost as though there were two houses, one for the owners and one for the staff that it took to run such a large place. Two sides of the box formed a normal house, with large rooms, several of which had beautiful ceilings. The other two sides had smaller rooms that contained the service areas, including the laundry and a big kitchen. There were also two apartments for the live-in staff.

Above the owners’ part of the house, there were two floors of bedrooms and baths. The master bedroom was huge, thirty by eighteen, and it had been connected to two smaller bedrooms that the previous owners used as giant closets. The third floor was a kids’ paradise, with four bedrooms and two bathrooms, and a walk-in closet under the eaves that could be used for a “hideout.”

Jace let the car roll through the wide opening between the buildings and into the courtyard. So far, he’d seen no one, not a gardener, nor the housekeeper, not even a kid on a lawn mower. He hadn’t even seen any animals. Were there animals on the grounds? Dogs? Sheep? Cows, maybe? For a moment he sat in the car and reminded himself that he was now the owner of the estate and should know whether or not there was livestock on his land.

When there was a knock on his car window, he jumped so high his head hit the ceiling. Turning, he saw a little old woman standing outside. She was short and plump, with rosy cheeks and an apron full of green beans. He pushed the button to lower the window.

“Well, come on,” she said in a thick accent that seemed to leave out half of each word. He had to wait a second before he understood her. “Are you gonna sit there all day or come inside and have some lunch? I’m servin’ Jamie today.”

With that, she bustled through a brick archway that was topped with a pointed roof. Jace hesitated for a second, then leaped out of the car and followed her. Life! he thought. She was the first sign of life he’d seen about the place. Besides, what with there being a north wing and a south wing and a main house, he feared she’d disappear and he’d never see her again. On the other hand, was
she
the ghost? She didn’t look like a swashbuckling lady highwayman, but…

Inside the house, there was no sign of a human. It was dead silent. The thick brick and stone walls kept out all sound. He was in the main reception hall and in front of him was a beautifully polished oak staircase. Halfway up was a tall, leaded glass window with a little round insert of a couple of lions. Where could she have gone? he wondered as his stomach gave a growl. He hadn’t eaten since early that morning and it was now after three.

He couldn’t remember the floor plan from when the realtor showed him the house. He took a right and went down a hallway, peeping into rooms as he went. He saw a big living room with oak paneling three-quarters of the way up the walls. Next to it was a kitchen. Eureka! he thought, but there was no one there. The cabinets were beautiful, the floor slate, the windows stone-cased. He opened the refrigerator. It was empty. Maybe the woman cooked outside. On a grill, maybe.

Vaguely, Jace remembered the realtor telling him that there were two kitchens, one for the family and one for Mrs. Browne. The man never called her “the housekeeper” but always referred to her by name, as though she was someone of significance.

Jace turned right and went past another little sitting room, then into a second drawing room. Huge, floor-to-ceiling windows ran along one side, while the other wall had nothing on it. “I’d put bookcases there,” he said aloud. “If I were staying here, that is.” The ceiling was rounded and covered with delicate designs done in plaster. There was no door except the one he’d entered through.

Turning, he backtracked until he got to the entrance hall. This time he took the old oak door to the left. This led into a narrow passage that took a sharp left turn. He went past a laundry big enough to take care of the crew of a submarine, an office, a little room that contained another staircase, a walk-in closet, a powder room, and a door to the outside. He had his hand on the knob to the exterior door when his nose made him turn left. He walked into a big kitchen that looked like something out of a history magazine. It was as unlike the other kitchen he’d seen as it could be. For one thing, there wasn’t one built-in cabinet. The walls were lined with a mixture of tall wardrobes and a Welsh dresser that displayed an amazing array of old dishes, none of which seemed to match. There was an old sink along one wall, one of the constantly on, beloved-by-the-English, multidoored Aga ranges on another wall, and a huge oak table in the middle of the room. The legs on the table were about a foot in diameter and turned into huge rounds.

Mrs. Browne was at the sink, her back to him. “Had trouble findin’ the place, did you?” she asked.

“Totally lost,” Jace said.

She turned around to look at him. “You’re a big one, aren’t you?” In her hand was a plate with a long sandwich on it. “And near as handsome as our Prince William. But not as handsome as my Jamie. Now sit down there and eat. You look starved. I imagine you been livin’ on sausages and burgers in the States. Now, sit and have a good meal.”

Like a child, Jace did as she told him to, pulling out an old oak chair and sitting down. The sandwich she put before him was divine: roast beef, cooked onions, and cheese on what he was willing to bet was homemade bread.