Kitabı oku: «A Family Likeness»

CHAPTER ONE

“NOW, LET’S SEE…it’s seven inches down to this little bunch of flowers, and four and a half inches up from the bottom…”

Gina made a pencil mark at one end of the strip of wallpaper stretched out on the floor, then crawled briskly over the hardwood, pencil clamped between her teeth, to make a corresponding mark farther down on the roll.

“Did I say four and a half inches?” she muttered, pausing to frown at the paper. “Or did I say four?”

“Who are you talking to?”

Gina glanced up at the doorway, then gestured toward the wall behind her. “Hi, Mary. Isn’t this pretty?”

Her housekeeper strolled into the room, wiping her hands on her apron, and looked at the strips of new wallpaper that partly framed an upholstered window seat.

“You were right,” she said in surprise. “I thought it was too yellow, but it looks really nice on the wall.”

“I knew it would. This paper is exactly what I wanted.”

“Listen to her,” Mary said indulgently. “The girl who always knows what she wants. You’re too young to be talking to yourself.”

Gina crawled back around to measure the strip again. “Four and a half inches,” she said. “I thought so.”

Mary dabbed with her dishcloth at a tiny soiled patch near the edge of the window seat. “I’ve got to find the time to clean all these before the summer rush,” she murmured.

“Now you’re doing it.” Gina held the ruler in place to make a pencil line, then started cutting.

“Doing what?”

“Talking to yourself.”

“I’m sixty years old,” Mary said placidly, smiling and looking out the window as a pair of white butterflies danced an aerial ballet near the lilacs. “I can talk to myself anytime I want.”

“Well, I’ll be thirty-six next week.”

Gina rolled the strip of wallpaper and plunged it into a narrow plastic trough. She stood erect, holding the dripping sheet of paper over the trough, and glanced at the other woman.

“You know, Mary,” she said, “there are times when I can hardly believe it.”

“What?” Mary sat down on the window seat, fingering the yellow chintz upholstery with a dreamy faraway look.

“That I’m almost thirty-six years old. Where have all the years gone? It seems like yesterday that I bought this place.”

“There’ve been a lot of yesterdays,” Mary said in her gentle voice. “And you’re right, they’re really flying by.”

“Well, I guess that means we’re having fun, right?” Gina said dryly. “Even though it doesn’t always feel like it.”

“You love this place,” Mary said.

Gina carried the wet length of paper across the room and climbed the ladder. She frowned in concentration as she fitted the strip into place, matching the pattern carefully. “You’re right,” she said. “This was the only thing I ever wanted to do with my life. But that doesn’t mean I don’t find it pretty frustrating sometimes.”

She took a sponge from the tray on the step-ladder and began to smooth the paper. Mary asked, “The only thing?”

“Beg pardon?” Gina was still wiping briskly at the damp paper.

“Gina, you’ve got a big wrinkle there on the edge, right under that yellow basket.”

Gina smoothed the wallpaper while Mary watched her with a thoughtful eye. “I just wondered,” the housekeeper went on, leaning back against the broad oak window frame, “whether that’s really true. I mean, that running this business is the only thing you ever wanted.”

“Of course it’s true. What else have I ever wanted to do?”

“That’s what I’m asking.”

Gina’s face shadowed and she turned away quickly. “If you mean a husband and babies, I’ve never wanted them. You and Roger are my family.”

Mary smiled. “Some family,” she said.

“It makes me happy.” Gina climbed down from the ladder to smooth the bottom of the wallpaper, then trimmed it above the wide baseboard. “Families come in all shapes and sizes, you know.”

“I know.” Mary got to her feet and headed for the door. “But you and me and Roger, we’re a mighty strange family by anyone’s standards.”

Still kneeling at the baseboard, Gina looked over her shoulder. “Speaking of Roger, don’t forget to tell him about that cracked toilet seat in the blue room, all right?”

Mary’s cheeks turned pink with distress. “You’ll have to tell him yourself,” she said. “I’m still not speaking to him.”

Gina sighed and got to her feet. “Now what are you two fighting about?” It seemed the housekeeper and the handyman/caretaker were always at odds over something.

“The man keeps insisting on sneaking food to Annabel, even though I’ve specifically asked him not to.”

“But Roger loves Annabel. You know he does.”

“She’s my dog,” Mary said firmly. “And the vet says she’s too fat. She needs a low-calorie diet. How can she lose weight if that man insists on giving table scraps to her behind my back?”

“Roger’s just too softhearted. He can’t stand to hear the way Annabel whimpers in the pantry during every meal. It really is a heartbreaking sound, you know.”

“She’s my dog,” Mary repeated with uncharacteristic stubbornness. “I guess I know what’s best for her.”

“I’m sure you do.” Gina gave up the argument. “I’ll talk to Roger, all right?”

Mary nodded, looking somewhat mollified, and paused in the doorway. “Oh, by the way, I just remembered what I came up here to tell you. A man called a few minutes ago.”

“What man?”

“Name’s Alex Colton. Said he wanted to talk to you about a room.”

“Did you get his number?”

Mary shook her head. “He’s in town. I gave him directions and he said he’d drive out this afternoon to make arrangements with you in person.”

Gina looked at the messy scraps of wallpaper and the damp floor. “Well, I hope he doesn’t get here until I’ve had time to finish this,” she said. “I was really hoping for just one day when I could work without any interruptions.”

“There’s no such day in this business.” Mary smiled, her sunny nature apparently restored. “After fourteen years, you should know that, dear. It looks real nice,” she added, gesturing at the wall. “You’re doing a lovely job.” Then she was gone, vanishing down the gleaming oak staircase that descended to the lower foyer past a wall of stained glass.

Gina stood in the doorway and watched, thinking about her housekeeper. Mary Schick was worth her weight in gold. She’d been here almost since Gina had first opened the old mansion as a bed-and-breakfast. It was hard to imagine the place without her. A small spare woman with graying hair worn in a careless perm, the housekeeper was the kind of quiet efficient person upon whom people seemed automatically to depend. In fact, she’d spent her entire life looking after others. She’d settled in right after high school to run her family’s restaurant and look after her parents. She’d never married, had never even left Azure Bay. When her mother died and her father soon afterward, she’d sold the restaurant, happy to be free of the responsibility, and come to work as a cook and housekeeper for Gina Mitchell.

A few months later, Mary had sold her parents’ little house in the village, as well, and moved into the bed-and-breakfast as a permanent resident. She and Gina had been together ever since.

Fourteen years, Gina thought as she walked back into the guest room shaking her head in disbelief. She knelt to measure the next strip of wallpaper, then squinted up at the wall to determine the pattern match.

But Mary’s visit had set Gina’s thoughts on another track, and keeping her mind on the job at hand became increasingly difficult.

“Almost thirty-six years old,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “Lord, I can’t believe it. Where has the time gone?”

She got up, the pencil in her hand forgotten, and wandered over to look out the window. Beyond the leaded-glass panels, a willow tree swayed and rustled in the warm breeze, partially obscuring her view of the lake. Gina stared into the trailing green branches, thinking about the swift passage of time.

Framed by the window, she could have been a boy. She wore loose denim shorts, a white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up and frayed sneakers. Her body was slim and sun-browned from hours of working outside in the yard and garden, and her curly dark hair was cropped short. She had hazel eyes, high cheekbones dusted with freckles, and a sober level gaze that belied the boyishness of her face and body.

Fourteen years, she thought again, opening the casement window and leaning out to look across the lake. Almost half her life had been poured into this place.

But Gina had no regrets. Edgewood Manor was her life; it was her passion, her dream come true. Few people ever had the chance to live out a fantasy the way she had, right from the beginning.

She remembered the first time she’d seen the old mansion, and the powerful visceral surge of yearning she’d felt when she looked at its stately facade, its spacious grounds. From that moment, at the edge of twenty-one, she’d wanted the place for herself, and she would have done anything to get enough money to make the down payment.

In fact, what she had done to raise the money had been almost unthinkable…

Gina’s face tightened. Those were memories she never allowed herself to dwell on. They were buried deep in the past, and she intended to leave them hidden there forever. It was enough to know that Edgewood Manor was hers. As long as she could keep her business operating at a modest profit and make the mortgage payments on time, nobody could ever take the house away from her.

Nobody, she thought fiercely, gripping the window frame.

She swung her gaze to the orchard. It was early June, and the blossoms on the fruit trees had vanished, replaced by a drift of fresh green leaves. Soon the fruit would ripen, and they’d pick baskets of apples and pears and luscious apricots, and Mary would make jam and preserves. Then the frost would come and the leaves would fall. Snow would drift across the mountains, hiding the lake in shrouds of mist.

And another year would pass, and another…

Gina caught sight of a solitary figure down in the side yard, under one of the apple trees.

“Roger!” she called, leaning out the window. “What are you doing?”

The caretaker looked up and waved a length of wood he appeared to be whittling.

“Don’t go away,” Gina said. “I’m coming down.”

She glanced at the unfinished wall, the partial roll of wallpaper on the floor and the untidy clutter of scissors, rulers and paper scraps. With a rueful shake of her head, she left the room and ran lightly down the stairs.

An elderly couple were in the plant-filled sunroom when she passed, reclining in wicker chairs among the ferns and reading peacefully. Gina paused to smile at them.

“Hello,” she said. “Are you enjoying our Okanagan sunshine?”

“It’s heaven,” the woman said, lowering her book. “We came all the way from Pennsylvania to stay at this place, you know. Friends of ours were here two years ago, and they never stopped talking about how wonderful it was.”

“Really?” Gina said, pleased. “From Pennsylvania?”

The man nodded. “The Piedmonts,” he said. “Allan and Sheila.”

“Oh, I remember them,” Gina said. “They were here in the fall, I think. In fact, I seem to recall that Mr. Piedmont spent most of his time outside taking pictures of the autumn foliage.”

“Allan’s a real camera nut,” the woman said. “Sheila gets so annoyed with him.”

Gina lingered for a moment, exchanging pleasantries with the guests, then excused herself and went out through the French doors.

She crossed the flagstone courtyard, where a young honeymoon couple shared one of the wrought-iron benches near a rose-covered trellis, talking in low tones.

They looked up at Gina with shy smiles as she passed, then returned immediately to their conversation, heads close together and fingers intertwined. Gina ignored the tiny pang of envy she felt. The young couple had a closeness, an almost palpable aura of love that shut the rest of the world out.

She moved to the gate set in the honeysuckle hedge, then trotted across the clipped grass to the orchard.

“Hi, Roger,” she said, approaching the tall man in a plaid shirt and denim overalls who sat under the apple tree whittling. “What’s that?”

“One of the spindles on the back stairway is warped. I’m carving a new one.”

Gina looked in awe at the length of oak, which had been partially turned on the lathe in Roger’s workshop at the back of the house and was now being hand-finished to match the other spindles.

“It’s amazing,” she said, bending to run her fingers along the wooden shaft. “When you’re done, I probably won’t know which spindle you replaced unless you point it out to me.”

“Well, I certainly hope not,” Roger said placidly. He returned to his carving while Gina leaned against the tree and considered how to tell him that his habit of sneaking food to Annabel was a source of great distress to Mary.

It was funny about this pair. Roger and Mary were about the same age, and Roger, like the housekeeper, had wandered into Gina’s life just when she’d needed him most.

She’d still been fairly new in the business then, struggling to make a success of her bed-and-breakfast operation and cope with the mortgage payments. Mary had helped a lot in those early years, with her housekeeping skills and her genius in the kitchen. But Gina was still crushed by the constant repairs that needed to be done, and the prohibitive expense of getting tradespeople out from the city.

Then, one mellow autumn day, Roger had dropped into her world like a gift from the gods, and things had begun to run smoothly.

Roger hadn’t arrived looking for work. He’d actually been a paying guest, an executive from a Vancouver-based lumber company trying to deal with burnout and job stress by taking a holiday in British Columbia’s lovely Okanagan Valley.

Despite his desk job, Roger was a man who could turn his hand to almost anything. He’d entertained himself during his vacation by helping Gina with leaky pipes, ill-fitting windows and warped doors.

When it was time for his holiday to end, he decided he didn’t want to leave. So he simply mailed in his resignation, moved his accounts to the bank in Azure Bay, bought a snug little house and property just down the road from the hotel and stayed on as Gina’s handyman and caretaker.

“I don’t know how I ever ran this place without you,” she told him now, watching as he carved neat grooves into the bottom portion of the spindle. “What on earth would I ever do if you left?”

“You’d manage,” Roger said comfortably. “You’re not a girl who needs help from anybody, Gina. You’re a real survivor.”

She thought about that, enjoying the way the long curls of wood fell away from the oak shaft under his hands. “Everybody thinks I’m so tough and independent,” she said at last. “But lots of times I don’t feel that way at all.”

He smiled up at her. Roger was nearly bald, with a tall angular body and eyes that were blue and tranquil under silvered brows.

Gina sometimes wondered how he’d adapted so readily to this life-style, which must have been, after all, a radical departure from his old existence.

Roger never talked about his past. Apparently he had no family or emotional entanglements, and seemed to be financially independent. At least, he managed without apparent discomfort on the small salary that was all Gina could afford, ate most of his meals with Gina and Mary in the hotel kitchen and passed his free time happily in his little farmhouse. For hobbies, he had his woodworking and a lovely old cello he played with surprising skill in a local chamber-music group.

“Mary’s upset with you again,” Gina said at last. “I promised I’d talk to you.”

Roger sighed. “What did I do this time?”

“It seems you’ve been sabotaging Annabel’s diet.”

Roger looked up, feigning innocence. “Is Annabel on a diet?”

“Roger, you know she’s too fat.”

“She certainly is. She’s probably the most obese poodle in the province.”

“So why do you insist on feeding her table scraps?”

Roger grinned and began to carve another neat groove. “That animal was howling so loud yesterday the couple in the patio room were complaining about the noise. I just gave her an old soup bone to chew on, that’s all.”

“With a bit of meat on it?” Gina asked wryly.

“Maybe a little,” he admitted.

She chuckled, then sobered. “You’re a sweetie, Roger, and you know how much I love you. But you’ve got to stop upsetting Mary that way. Someday this will escalate to the point where I’ll lose one of you, and then I’ll probably have to close the business.”

“Nobody’s indispensable,” Roger said mildly. “Always remember that, Gina. You could get along perfectly well without either one of us. We’re just a habit, you know. A well-worn groove.”

Gina glanced at him sharply, caught by something in his tone. “You keep saying things like that.”

“Do I?”

“Lately you’re always talking about how capable I am, and how perfectly well I could manage on my own. Are you setting me up, Roger? Is there something you want to tell me?”

He shook his head and went back to his careful whittling. “I don’t like hearing you say you’d have to close the place down if one of us left, that’s all. It doesn’t sound like you, Gina. You’re a fighter, not a quitter.”

“I know. But I’ve grown used to having companions in the battle, that’s all. I’d really hate to be all alone again.”

“So why don’t you find some nice young man to work at your side?”

Gina kicked his leg gently with the toe of her sneaker.

“Stop that,” she said. “Immediately.”

Roger moved his leg slightly. “I mean it,” he said, holding the shaft of wood to his eye like a rifle and squinting down its length. “You’re not that bad-looking, and still reasonably young. Aren’t there any decent prospects out there who don’t mind a skinny, freckled, hot-tempered girl with a will of iron?”

Gina relented and sank onto the grass, sitting cross-legged next to him and frowning at a ragged tear in the hem of her shorts. “All the men I meet fall roughly into two categories,” she said.

“Okay.” He put the wood down and rubbed his knife on a small whetstone, then tested the blade with his thumb. “I’ll bite. What are they?”

Gina plucked a stem of grass and chewed on it thoughtfully. “Well, there’s the kind of man who feels really threatened by a woman living alone and running her own successful business. Those men seem to need to put me down in all kinds of subtle ways just to prove they’re still dominant.”

“Mmm. That’s attractive,” Roger said. “What’s the other kind?”

“The ones who think what I’m doing is great, because they could move in with me and have a nice free ride on my efforts.”

“Equally attractive. So which category’s worse?”

“I don’t know,” Gina said gloomily, throwing the grass away. “I hate them both.”

“Not an attitude that’s going to get your dance card filled, my dear.”

She grinned and got to her feet. “Oh, there are a whole lot of openings in my social calendar, all right. And it’s probably a good thing, because I never have .enough time to get my work done as it is.”

“Speaking of work, what are you doing in the gold room this afternoon?”

“Putting up new wallpaper. You should come and see it, Roger. It looks terrific, especially around the window seat.”

“Isn’t that the paper Mary thought was going to be too yellow?”

“Yes, but now she admits she was wrong.”

“She does?” Roger’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “Now, there’s a first. For such a timid little thing, Mary can be pretty hardheaded in her opinions, you know.”

“You be nice,” Gina told him severely.

She left him under the tree with his whittling, strolled across the grass and let herself through the gate into the courtyard, recalling, too late, that she still hadn’t told Roger about the cracked toilet seat in the blue room.

No rush, she decided. Roger was busy with other things at the moment, and the blue room wasn’t booked for at least a week.

She paused inside the hedge and looked up at the house. Even after all these years, the sight of its massive vine-covered bulk against the distant violet of the mountains and the cloudless blue sky was enough to make her heart beat faster.

“It’s really beautiful, isn’t it?” a feminine voice said at her elbow, echoing her thoughts. “Like a scene out of Sleeping Beauty or something.”

Gina turned and smiled at the honeymoon couple who, dressed in bathing suits now and carrying towels, were on their way down the path to the beach. They were an attractive pair, both medical students from Minnesota who’d just completed their residencies before their June wedding. This Canadian honeymoon had been a gift from the groom’s parents.

“The house is more than a hundred years old, fairly ancient by local standards,” Gina told them. “Actually it’s quite a romantic story.”

“Tell us,” the girl commanded, leaning against her young husband and gazing up at him. “We’re in the mood for romance these days.”

Gina smiled, thinking about their cozy love nest up in the rose pink dormer room with its little stone fireplace.

“The house was built by Josiah Edgewood,” she began. “Josiah was a Scottish nobleman and adventurer who came out to Canada when he was a young man and discovered gold up north in the Caribou region. Josiah made a fortune at his mine and fell in love with the area. He picked the Okanagan Valley for its spectacular scenery and mild winters, and started trying to convince his new wife to come and join him here.”

“But she wouldn’t?” the young bride asked, still looking up at her husband as if unable to believe that any woman would be reluctant to follow her man to the ends of the earth. He dropped a kiss on her nose.

“She was afraid. Poor little Lady Edgewood,” Gina said. “She was barely out of her teens and quite frail, and she thought this whole country was overrun with wolves and grizzly bears. She refused even to consider living in the wilderness unless Josiah could provide her with some decent accommodation.”

“So he built this big house?” the groom asked.

Gina smiled. “Wait till you hear the story. Josiah moved the house. Most of this is the original Edgewood Manor from the family estate near Kilmarnock in Scotland. Josiah had the whole structure dismantled and every piece marked. It was shipped across the ocean in crates, a proceeding that took several years to accomplish. The house was reassembled like a huge jigsaw puzzle right here on the shores of Okanagan Lake. All to please his darling Elizabeth.”

Both young people gazed at her, enchanted. Gina understood their rapt expressions, because she, too, always felt a little thrill whenever she thought about Josiah’s great venture.

If she could ever meet a man like that, a real man with a generous spirit and a strength to match her own, maybe then she wouldn’t be so reluctant to share her life…

“So what happened?” the girl asked. “Did Elizabeth come and live here with him? I hope she didn’t die on the ship coming over and leave him all heartbroken or anything.”

“She certainly didn’t,” Gina said cheerfully. “She arrived to find her manor house completely reproduced on the shores of a Canadian lake, right down to the chandeliers and the stained glass on the stair landings. She was so happy she gave Josiah a big hug and a kiss and settled right in to have babies.”

“How many?”

“Eight. Six girls and two boys. She became the queen of local society and a generous patron of the arts and charities, too. She lived in the house until she died more than seventy years later. That was about 1960, I believe.”

“What happened to the house after that?”

“It went through some pretty hard times,” Gina said. “None of Josiah Edgewood’s offspring wanted to live here, so they tried various money-making projects, like opening the manor up for day tourists and dividing it into apartments. Both the value and appearance declined rapidly, and about fifteen years ago they decided to put it on the market.”

“And?” the young man asked, toying absently with a strand of his wife’s long blond hair.

“And I bought it,” Gina said. “I’d just finished a degree course in hotel management. I was on my summer vacation, like you are. I came out to Azure Bay with a friend to spend a day swimming and lazing on the beach, saw this tumbledown old place and fell in love at first sight. I knew it would be perfect for a bed-and-breakfast, which was something I wanted to run.”

“But you must have been so young!” the bride said in awe. “Younger than we are, even. How could you ever buy a big place like this?”

“Well, for one thing, I had a small inheritance from my grandmother.” Gina’s voice was offhand, but her stomach tightened at the memory of that awful time. “And the bank was really impressed with my plans for restoring the building and developing a business.”

“Bankers aren’t all that easy to impress.” The young doctor looked at her with frank admiration. “Nowadays it seems they only lend money to people who already have lots.”

Gina gazed across the rippling turquoise waters of the lake. “I know. It all happened so long ago the details are pretty hard to remember. But I managed it somehow,” she said with forced casualness. “So, you two are off for a swim?”

“If the water’s warm enough. Yesterday it still felt like ice.”

Gina laughed at the girl’s expression. “Okanagan Lake is more than eighty miles long from one end to the other, you know, and it’s mostly fed by snow melting up in the mountains. The water doesn’t really warm up for another month or so. But with the hot weather we’ve been having, it should be getting tolerable.”

“Jenny’s just scared of the lake monster,” her husband said, ruffling his wife’s hair fondly. “What’s his name again?”

“Ogopogo,” Gina told him. “Lots of the local people say they’ve seen him. He’s supposed to be about sixty feet long, quite playful, with several humps and a head much like a horse.”

“Have you ever seen him?” Jenny asked.

Gina smiled. “Maybe,” she said. “But I’m not telling. Hurry up and go for your swim, or you won’t be back in time for tea.”

“I love teatime,” the husband said with enthusiasm.

“Forget the tea and cakes,” his wife teased. “The sherry’s what he really likes.”

The young man grinned, then ran off along the path to the beach, laughing as his wife came scrambling after him.

Gina watched them until they disappeared behind a rocky promontory. At last she turned and headed back up to the house, climbing the stairs to the gold room with its piles of wallpaper scraps.

SOON SHE WAS ABSORBED in her task again, lulled by the mechanics of the job, the careful measuring and fitting and the almost magical transformation as the fresh new paper covered the faded walls.

Gina hummed softly, thinking about curtains. The old lace panels looked limp and discolored against the new paper. Maybe she’d make a set of white priscillas for the window seat. Or some muslin panels on fling rods, trimmed with macramé lace…

She frowned, considering, and took a step closer to examine the window frame. In most of her decorating projects, she tried to stick to an authentic Victorian look, which was in keeping with the rest of the house. But window coverings, those were a real challenge.

She preferred a light fresh look in draperies, something that let in the marvelous scenery and the fragrant breezes from the garden and the lake. She hated the Victorian habit of swathing windows in yards and yards of heavy brocade and damask, often further cluttered with fringes and valances, all designed to keep the sun at bay. She paused to look out the window, pleased by the sights and sounds of her little world. Far below on the beach, she could see the honeymoon couple lying on the beach, stretched out on their dark blue Edgewood towels, their hands touching.