Aly's House (11 page)

“No,” she said, her heart in her throat. “I was still up. What can I do for you?”

“I had dinner with Willy tonight.” Dinner. In the past, it had been supper.

“How nice. What has that to do with me?”

“He told me about Benjy Carter. I owe you an apology, Aly. It's thirteen years overdue. May I see you tomorrow night?”

Emotions warred within her. She wanted to see him, but she didn't. This was probably how he had entrapped Victoria. “Well, I—did Willy tell you where I live?”

“No, but I'm sure I can find it.” The tone was somewhat dry. “I'll take you somewhere for dinner. Jimmy's still open?”

“Yes. It's bigger and better than ever.”

“Then let's go there. Seven o'clock be all right with you?”

“Yes,” said Aly, her mouth dry. “I'll be ready.”

“So where do I pick you up?”

“At my house, Marshall, here on Cedar Hill.”

T
he next evening as she dressed for her dinner date, Aly felt almost nauseated from anticipation. All day she had been immersed in her thoughts of Marshall, so deeply submerged, in fact, that Joe Handlin had been compelled at one point to snap his fingers before her eyes and holler, “Hello in there! Anybody home?”

She had shot up from the depths of her contemplation so fast that she had weaved uncertainly, unable to focus clearly on Joe's concerned face. “Aly? You okay?”

“Yes, Joe. Just preoccupied, that's all.”

“Wouldn't have anything to do with Marshall Wayne, would it?”

“Now, Joe, don't be jealous.”

“Why shouldn't I be? I don't need Marshall coming in here warming himself at a fire that I've been trying to kindle.”

“You're crude sometimes, Joe. Did you know that?”

“I love you, Aly.”

“I know.”

Joe Handlin, like Sampson, had come with the purchase of Green Meadows. Before then, the facts about the night Lady Loverly aborted her foal had come to light, thanks to Benjy Carter's “getting religion” after he realized the horrible truth of what alcohol addiction had forced him to do. Benjy, tearful, repentant, and fearing for his soul, had gone to Matt and confessed that he had been promised by “a man over the telephone,” payment of his bail and enough liquor to see him through Christmas if he would do what had to be done to get Aly Kingston fired. He hadn't wanted to do it, but the hounds of hell were eating him alive, and he'd have killed his own mother for one drink. Learning the truth, Joe had felt so guilty over the matter that on his day off he had driven to Norman where Aly was attending college to apologize in person for wrongfully accusing her. She had been grateful for his invaluable assistance when she took over Green Meadows, but with it had come an affection that she neither encouraged nor wanted. His feelings could make for a tricky situation if she saw much of Marshall, a possibility that might be likely now that she, too, had been removed from his list.

At four o'clock when she finished making her rounds of the stables, Willy had limped with her down to her office. “I enjoyed having supper with young Marshall last night, Punkin. It's so good to see him again. I'd often wondered about him, what had happened to him when his folks died.”

“It's been my guess that he's been busy making money…and remembering.”

“You got both those right, kiddo.”

“You sound worried.”

“I am a mite. I think a right smart of the boy, but I'd be mighty put out with him if he included you in anything he might have in mind for your pa. He ain't got no cause to hurt you, Aly, none a'tall. Cedar Hill came to you fair and square. I hope you didn't mind, but I told him how it was that you came to lose Sampson and your job with Matt Taylor.”

“I don't mind. I'm glad you did. It clears the air on that score at least. What makes you think Marshall plans to hurt us?”

“It's not anything he said. It's just a feeling I had when I looked at him, heard him talk. Has he seen the house yet?”

“No. He'll see it tonight. He's taking me to Jimmy's.”

When Victoria arrived shortly afterward to pick up the boys, she had shooed them into the station wagon without much more than a hello to Aly.

“Victoria, what is the matter?”

“Did you boys tell Aunt Aly that you had a good time?”

To their choruses of
yes
, Victoria had bunched the fullness of her tent dress around her thighs and slid beneath the wheel. “Nothing is the matter with me, Aly. You upset me yesterday, that's all.” Without another word she had driven off, leaving Aly staring after her in deep concern.

At her dressing tables, Aly consulted herself in the mirror.
Old sins cast long shadows.
That had been a favorite maxim of her grandmother's, quoted often in the presence of her only child. Aly wished her father had taken heed. His sins stood to cast their shadows over the lot of them. Who of them would suffer the most from the menace of their shade?

Slowing his car at the gate of Cedar Hill, Marshall looked up at the spiky green sentinels guarding the hill.
So she'd built herself a house, had she?
he thought in chagrin,
and on the exact spot where his family's had been
, he'd bet. He might have guessed as much when Aly told him she'd purchased Green Meadows. Well, for the moment he'd push that problem aside and deal with it later when he'd successfully dispensed with the first one.

Unease rode high in his chest, like a hiatus hernia. Things were not going as smoothly as he'd planned. Hattie Handlin had not been answering her phone. Yesterday her nephew had not been at work. Were the two circumstances related, and did they imply trouble for him? He couldn't afford to show the smallest interest in either one. The news was out that he was in town. His bitterness over the foreclosure had not been forgotten, nor, it seemed, his promise to Kingston. A mere mention that he'd inquired about Hattie—or even Joe—would be enough for some people in certain quarters to know why he'd showed up just now. He'd just have to sit tight and wait until tomorrow.

Also his feelings for Aly worried him. He shouldn't be seeing her tonight, but he was one who always paid his debts, and he owed Aly Kingston. Last night he'd gone to bed full of shame after Willy's disclosure about Benjy Carter. So old man Kingston had been responsible for Aly losing her job, had he? God, what a reprobate! He remembered the day she had explained about Sampson, and how he'd disbelieved her and told her he never wanted to see her again. He could still see the look on her face, though he hadn't thought of it since. That had been unforgivably cruel of him. He had known of her slavish devotion to him since grade school. His mouth twisted wryly. Aly and her deals. How like her to make such an offer to Matt in the first place.

She was a fine human being. There was no other way to describe her. He appreciated now how hard for her it had been growing up in her family. His mother had described Aly Kingston as an orphan of the saddest kind, the kind abandoned within the home. Aly'd been wonderful to Willy, and she'd loved and revered his parents. Those geraniums up at the cemetery—they were Aly's doing.

Still, it bothered him to think that now he owed her consideration. He wanted nothing or no one to interfere with the sweet, pure, unadulterated joy he expected to feel when he deposed Lorne Kingston, when he plucked away his son's birthright as Kingston had done his. True, right or wrong, the man was Aly's father; the son, her brother. It would be her family's livelihood that he would be taking away, and for all their differences, Aly loved her father.

But, he thought regretfully, that would just have to be Aly's problem. He had no intention of allowing any consideration to deflect him from the one thing that provided meaning in his life. Following the thought, Aly's house came into view.

For an astounding moment Marshall thought that, here on this soil that had borne and bred him, something had snapped in his mind. By some cerebral quirk, he was transported back into time, far, far back—back before New York and Wharton and the foreclosure, back to the days of his boyhood, back to the house on Cedar Hill. His parents had finally managed a new coat of paint. The house gleamed a crisp yellow in the last rays of the sunset. White shutters and trim stood out fresh and bright. The roof had been repaired and the oval pane of glass in the front door replaced with a clear new one.

Marshall slowed the car, peering through the windshield to impress upon his mind as many details as he could before they dimmed. But as he drove closer, he knew he was viewing no mirage, experiencing no hallucination. His heartbeat filled his ears as he realized that Aly's house was the exact replica of his boyhood home. There was the wide front porch, the swing, the broad-armed chairs with a table in between, the pots of red geraniums lining the steps. There were the two pecan trees, not as full as the ones he remembered, nor as old—nothing was as old here, but the feel of the place was the same. He stared beyond the pecan trees, almost expecting to see a field of corn crowding the cyclone fence, to hear the clink of cowbells coming up the path, to find his father coming from the barn to meet him…

Profoundly shaken, Marshall drew to a stop before the porch steps and sat for an incredulous moment behind the wheel. Oh, God, why had she done this? What did this mean? She could have built for herself a house of any size, style, shape, and design, but she had chosen to resurrect the house on Cedar Hill.

Throat on fire, tears hot as irons behind his eyes, he opened the car door. This was not at all what he had expected. Not at all. He had the uncomfortable, almost helpless sensation that the tables were being turned on him.

“I'm sorry,” Aly said when she opened the door and saw his expression. “I should have warned you. Come in, Marshall.” She stepped aside for him to enter and asked as he walked with a slight hesitation into the breezeway, “Are you…terribly shocked?”

For a moment Marshall could not answer. “It's very beautiful,” he said softly.

“Come. I'll show you the rest of it.”

“Let me stand here awhile first.”

His first impression was that everything was as he remembered. Similar pieces of furniture—a refectory table and chairs, a hall tree, and an umbrella stand—stood against the left wall. The hall, off which familiar rooms opened, led as in former times to a back porch. The difference was that everything his eyes fell upon represented the kind of warm, gracious luxury his mother would have preferred for Cedar Hill. The back porch, for example, was not screened but jalousied to let in fresh air and light. Everywhere was air and light. He lifted his gaze to find the source of the sunset glow that filled the breezeway and discovered that a skylight served as the central section of the roof. Through it, filtered sunshine had made lush the exotic plants grouped dramatically along one wall. The other housed an aquarium in which tropical fish of breathtaking colors and iridescence swam in waters of aquamarine blue.

“Marshall?” Aly asked gently, touching his arm. When he turned to her, she saw his eyes were shadowed with memory. “Are you ready to see the rest of it?”

“Yes,” he answered briefly.

“May I take your arm?”

He held it out and covered her hand with his own when she took it, as though in need of human contact. They began their journey.

It was both a trip back into the past and into a future that now would never be his. Though the rooms were larger, the colors fresher and fabrics richer than the hodgepodge with which his mother had had to make do, Aly's house was essentially unaltered from the one where he'd grown up. Some things had not changed at all. The view from the front windows was the same. The wind whistled the same tune around the corners of the chimney. In the parlor a last slant of light from the sunset struck the exact spot on the hearth where it had fallen in years past. Its extinction usually signaled the time of day his mother would come in and turn on the lamp at the end of the sofa. Releasing his arm, Aly did that now, and he started at the first light pouring out from the shade, wanting her back at his side, close to him, her hand in the crook of his arm.

She had been talking all the while on their tour, using her free hand to point out this and that while he worked through the emotion of the moment. He was grateful for her sensitivity. He could not have spoken. He was finding feelings and sensations that squeezed shut his throat and sandpapered his eyes. By the time they reached the kitchen where he had measured his growth on the pantry door, he was wondering if he could get through the evening at all.

“My old room,” he managed to ask when they had circled through to the breezeway again. “You didn't show me my old room.”

“Oh,” Aly said dismissively, “there's no flavor of the past there. I was only in your room once, you know.”

“Is it the guest room?”

She hesitated. “No,” she said after a few seconds, steering him back to the porch where she had set out ice and glasses for drinks. “It's my room.”

When he was seated on the couch and watching her at the small bar built into the wall next to the kitchen—a definite innovation for Cedar Hill—Marshall decided that he couldn't face the evening without her. Even if her company wasn't what he needed, just the pleasure of looking at her would have been comforting. Tonight she was beautiful, from the golden crown of her head down to her neatly shod feet.

“Why, Aly?” he asked as she handed him a drink. “Why did you do this?”

She sat down across from him smoothing imaginary wrinkles in the lap of her denim skirt. The fiddling gave her somewhere to focus her attention, Marshall knew. Suddenly she stopped and looked directly across at him, her chin a little high. “Because,” she said, “I loved the old house on Cedar Hill. I spent the happiest days of my childhood in it. Maybe because when I was there, I was the happiest with myself. In my parents' home, I was mean, spiteful, and jealous. It was only when I was at Cedar Hill that I knew a nicer me. I suppose that when the time came to have a place of my own, I just naturally thought about a house like it. I—I—know it must gall you to think of a Kingston living here in—in a house like your former home on land that you still love.”

“Yes,” he answered honestly, “it does somewhat. This land should still be mine, you know. I had always hoped to come back here and buy it back.”

“Is that the real reason you went out to Green Meadows yesterday? Is that the reason you're back in Claiborne?”

Inwardly Marshall sighed in enormous relief. “Yes,” he lied, smiling to show there were no hard feelings. “However, I concede I've been beaten to the draw.”

“You're not angry, Marshall?” All at once, Aly felt much lighter, happier.