Page 19

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A fter Garrett started laying the tile in the bathroom, Aspen reapplied her makeup and headed out.

When she’d returned home from her coffee with Brent, she’d only wanted to light a fire in her fireplace, turn on an old movie, and escape for a few hours. The state of her living room had destroyed that notion, which was why she’d been so upset.

But Garrett had given her some good ideas to follow up on. She called the police department and asked to speak with Chief Cote, but he’d gone out of town for a couple of days. Frustrated, she left her name and asked that he call her when he returned.

With Brent Salcito’s words fresh in her mind, she decided to see if she could track down some of her parents’ old friends. If what he said was true, if there was any way her father had hurt her mother…

It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t.

But people changed. And sometimes otherwise good people could behave very badly. How had Garrett put it? Everybody had triggers that made them crazy. Maybe Mom had pulled one of Dad’s. Maybe he had hurt her.

Aspen couldn’t imagine. But she knew Dad hadn’t become a believer until after she was born. How could she know what he’d been like before he’d surrendered to Christ?

His last words echoed in her mind. “I didn’t do right by her… Do what I never had the courage to do.”

What had he done? What had he not done?

Aspen’s fears dishonored the man who’d raised her so well. Who’d loved her so well. If there was any chance her father had killed her mother, then Aspen didn’t want to know.

But Dad had asked her to come here, to uncover the truth. How could she disregard his last wishes?

She parked in front of the library for the second time that day. Though it was an older building, the inside was new and modern, brightly lit and surprisingly large for such a small town. She approached the circulation desk and spoke to a young woman with dark brown hair pulled back in a tight bun. All she needed were reading glasses to look like the quintessential fussy librarian.

“Do you have old Coventry High yearbooks?” Aspen asked.

“Of course. What year?”

Aspen gave the woman her parents’ year of graduation, and they headed to a section in the back, where she saw a number of books about the history of Coventry and the surrounding area. The librarian found the year Aspen had asked for.

Aspen took the book, asking, “Any chance you have Plymouth State yearbooks as well?”

The librarian’s lips shifted to one side. “Hmm, that’s a good question. Let me find out.”

After she walked away, Aspen slid into a chair at a table far from the other patrons and opened the thin yearbook. First, she found the senior portraits. She gazed at the one of her mother, which looked so much like the image Aspen saw in the mirror every day. Jane was younger here than she’d been in the framed wedding picture Aspen had kept at her bedside all her life. Aspen snapped a picture with her phone, then found her dad’s portrait.

Aspen’s mother was a stranger to her, but her father… She traced the lines of his face, that strong jaw. He was handsome, no doubt. In his eyes was the man she’d known. Even in the photo, she saw his serious nature. But he was also good and kind. He wasn’t much of a jokester, but he knew how to laugh. This photo showed none of the smile lines that would someday grace his face. It showed none of the grief the ensuing years would bring.

She snapped a picture, wishing she had an original. Maybe her grandparents did.

Turning the pages slowly, she peered at every image for more glimpses of her parents.

Dad had not only served as student body president, but he’d also played football and baseball. She saw him in multiple photos, most of them posed. There was one snapshot. He was in a crowd in what looked like a cafeteria. He wasn’t the subject of the photo, just happened to be caught in the background. He was smiling at…

Jane Kincaid.

Her mother wasn’t facing the camera either. She was seated at another table, looking off camera. Her father would have had a side view of her. Jane seemed to have no idea Dad was looking her way.

Aspen studied the two faces. Dad’s focus on Jane. Jane’s focus elsewhere.

But Brent had said Aspen’s mother had a thing for him, not the other way around. So maybe Jane did know he was looking. Maybe she was pretending not to care.

Or maybe Aspen was reading way too much into a random snapshot.

She turned the page.

Though Dad was pictured in more of the organized pictures, Mom was pictured in more of the snapshots. In fact, Aspen counted no fewer than ten pictures of Jane in the thin yearbook. She was involved in zero clubs, but she seemed to know everybody.

Considering she’d only gone to the school for one year, that was impressive.

In more than one place, her mother was pictured with the same blond woman. Since the snapshots were not captioned with names, she searched the senior portraits to see if she could find the girl.

And there she was. Deborah Davis.

Aspen was just about to message Garrett—he’d probably get it, since he was connected to her Wi-Fi at the house—when a woman tapped Aspen on the shoulder.

She turned to find a much older version of that face smiling down at her. “Lana said you were looking for…” Her voice trailed, and she bent nearer to the yearbook. “What a funny coincidence. That’s me.”

“You’re Deborah Davis?”

The woman straightened and gave Aspen her full attention. Then she blinked. “Oh, my gosh. You look just like your mother.”

“She was your friend,” Aspen guessed.

Deborah Davis held a pile of books in her arms. “She was my very best friend.”

Aspen said, “Will you sit with me for a moment?”

Deborah set the books—oh, they were yearbooks from Plymouth State—on the table and slid into a chair. She could hardly keep her eyes off Aspen’s face. “It’s like seeing into the past.” She reached out as if she might touch Aspen’s cheek, then dropped her hand. “I’m sorry.” Tears filled the older woman’s eyes, and she shook her head. “Forgive me.” She swiped them away with the back of her hand. “I’m a little off today. I just went with my husband to the doctor, and I’m still reeling from…”

“Everything okay?”

“It’s his heart. But they say we can manage it with medication.”

“Still scary, though.”

Deborah sat back and took a deep breath. “Listen to me telling you our secrets as if you were your mother. Seeing you has definitely thrown me.”

“Did you know I was in town?”

“Of course. Everybody knows you’re in town.” She patted Aspen’s hand. “And here you are, looking at old photos of your mom. Is that why you wanted those?” She gestured to the college yearbooks. “Lana told me what year you wanted for Coventry High, so I guessed you’d want the next few for Plymouth.”

“You guessed right. But honestly, Miss Davis?—”

“Foley now. Missus. But you can call me Deborah.”

“Deborah, I was trying to find old friends of my mother. I’ve heard so many”—she grasped for a word and settled on—“unpleasant things about her. I wanted to find somebody who knew her as a friend. I mean, I know she did a terrible thing, but…” Aspen wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence. She wasn’t sure how to ask the woman what she wanted to know.

“Your mother wasn’t always who she became at the end. In high school, she was perfectly normal. Perfectly sane. She was vivacious. She had a big personality. She wasn’t in school two days before everybody knew who she was. She was pretty, like you.” Deborah studied Aspen a moment, then said, “Honestly, you’re prettier than she was. I mean, you look like her, but her nose was a little longer, her face a little rounder. You have all her best qualities, and your father’s too.”

“That’s very kind.”

Deborah brushed off the words. “Even though your mother wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous, she was incredibly attractive, in that she attracted everybody. She and I hit it off, and suddenly I became one of the most popular girls in school. Which was weird for me, let me tell you. I’d always been a wallflower. But I knew my own mind, and your mother liked that. She didn’t like sycophants and fawners. And they flocked around your mother like pigeons in the park.”

“What about my dad. Was he a fawner?”

“Ah-ha. You are definitely your father’s daughter. Very insightful question. You knew him. What do you think?”

Aspen couldn’t help the smile she felt creeping across her lips. This woman might be a librarian, but she had the temperament of a first-grade teacher.

“I suspect my father was neither sycophant nor fawner.”

“You are correct. I wish I had a gold star.” Deborah beamed as if her favorite student had won a prize. “He was probably the only guy in school who didn’t fall over himself trying to get close to her.”

“There’s this picture, though.” Aspen flipped through until she found the one of her parents. “It’s the only one with both of them in it, and Dad’s looking at Mom.”

Deborah studied it, grinning. “Sure, he found her intriguing. We all did. She wasn’t just new to town. She was like nobody any of us had ever met. People couldn’t help but look at her. But that was as far as it went with Michael. He found her amusing like one might find a puppy amusing. He never gave any indication that he had feelings for her.”

“And yet,” Aspen said, “here I am.”

Deborah shifted her attention to Aspen, and her grin faded. “Yes, well… Your father might not’ve been interested in your mother, but she was most definitely interested in him.”

“Was that why? Was she the type to want what she couldn’t have?”

Deborah’s head tilted to one side, her eyes narrowing. “That’s an interesting question, and I won’t dismiss it outright. Your mother certainly wasn’t accustomed to people not immediately loving her. But I think it was more than that. I think your father had something she knew she needed. Stability. Her family had moved countless times during her childhood, and she was a little wild herself. I think, deep down, she knew she needed somebody like your dad, somebody to keep her grounded.”

“Dad was always like that, then. Grounded. Stable.”

“Always. I knew him from kindergarten, and nothing rattled him. He was as firm as the mountains and as predictable as the changing seasons.”

Aspen couldn’t help the smile. “That’s a very colorful description.”

“I’m a closet writer.” She winked. “I think all librarians are.”

Aspen liked this woman.

And she liked that her mother had also liked this woman. It was a connection between them, however tenuous. “How did they get together, then? If Dad wasn’t interested?—”

“Oh, that’s… that’s a little harder to explain.”

Aspen settled in her chair, trying to communicate without words that she had nowhere else to be.

Deborah sighed. “Truth is, they weren’t together. They never dated. They weren’t even really friends. In college, your mom and I got involved in the different clubs devoted to saving the environment. It was us and my boyfriend at the time, who I married after college, and another guy we went to high school with. And then, of course, a lot of other students at Plymouth. But the four of us were pretty tight.

“Your mom still had a thing for your dad. He’d pledged a fraternity, and she went to every party they threw trying to get close to him. But he wasn’t into that aspect of fraternity life.”

Aspen would have guessed that.

“During our freshman year, Jane’s parents moved away. She stayed with me for the summer. Your dad was back from school, too, working hard. We saw him out occasionally. At church, at The Patriot.”

“The restaurant was there back then?”

“Sure. It’s been in Coventry forever. And your dad went to the occasional party.”

“He did?”

“He wasn’t much of a drinker, but he had friends. He knew how to have fun.”

That was true, though Aspen couldn’t imagine him at a party with a bunch of teenagers. Of course, he’d been a teenager once too.

“Anyway, at the end of the summer, we were at one of those get-togethers, and your mother managed to get him alone. I don’t know what happened. I do know that she fancied herself in love with him. A month later, she told me she was going to have his baby.”

“Oh. You’re saying…?” Aspen tried to imagine her father having a one-night stand. The man she’d known would never have done that, but he’d been young once, too, with hormones and desires.

Deborah patted Aspen’s hand. “Your father was a good man, and your mother… Well, she was good in her own way. I loved her very much, but she could be determined. And she’d determined that she wanted your father. And when she wanted something, no power in the world could stop her, not even your dad.”

So Aspen’s mother had seduced her father?

Lovely.

And then another thought occurred to Aspen. “Did Mom get pregnant with me on purpose? Was she trying to trap him?”

Deborah lifted her shoulders and let them drop. “I never asked.”

Which meant that the thought had occurred to Deborah too.

The more Aspen learned about her parents and their past, the more she wished she’d never come to Coventry.

Deborah took her hand and held on tight. “Your mother was a complicated person. By then we were starting to see signs of her mental illness. Getting pregnant with you wasn’t rational. Marrying your father when the two of them had nothing in common—I mean nothing. That wasn’t rational.”

“Dad married her, though.” And Aspen’s father was rational. In a moment of weakness, he’d slept with Jane, but to marry her, after she’d seduced him and possibly gotten pregnant on purpose? That didn’t make sense.

“For you, dear,” Deborah said. “Your father married your mother because he knew that, if he didn’t, he’d have fewer rights as a father. He admitted as much to my husband once, that he’d put up with Jane forever to protect you.”

Put up with her.

“He didn’t love her at all?”

“I think he did. He tried to, anyway. Once they were married, he did everything in his power to make her happy. He quit school to take care of you. He bought Jane everything she needed. He was a good, good man, and he tried his best. But to tame Jane was to tame a tornado.”

Aspen gazed at the college yearbooks. She couldn’t imagine learning anything in those that would rival what Deborah had told her.

“Can I ask you something else?”

“Anything.”

“The other person from your high school, the man. Was it Brent Salcito?”

Deborah’s eyes widened. “How did you know that?”

“He told me this morning that he and my mother were involved. That they were having an affair.”

Deborah sucked her lips between her teeth and shook her head. “Brent was head-over-heels for Jane, but an affair? I don’t think so. No, she’d have told me. She was a lot of things, but she loved your father. And she was fiercely loyal.”

Deborah seemed so sure. But Brent…

“Why would he lie?”

“I think that most of what happened between them was in his imagination. She was kind to him, but she was kind to everyone when she was in her right mind. They spent a lot of time together. I think what he saw as romance she saw as friendship. I doubt it helped that my boyfriend and I were paired off, so when the four of us were together…” She shrugged. “But Jane didn’t see it that way. I think he was just?—”

“Delusional? Mentally ill, like Mom?”

“Not delusional. In love. Love can make us stupid sometimes.”

Aspen didn’t know if that was true. She’d never been in love and, based on what she knew about her parents, she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to be.

She could maybe see it happening with Garrett. Eventually. If she were to stay in Coventry, she could imagine love growing between them. Not the kind of love her mother had for her father, though, planted and cultivated in her disturbed mind. And not the kind of love her father’d had for her mother, a love borne out of fear and obligation.

Aspen wanted no part of that kind of love.

But true love, the kind they talked about in romance novels. The kind based on a mutual faith in Christ, on respect and honor, maybe.

Someday.

Considering everything she’d learned, the last thing she wanted was to stay in this town, where everybody judged her by her mother’s reputation.

As much as Aspen liked Garrett, she needed to step away from him.

“How’re the table and chairs working out? Dean said they were stable, but when I saw how beat-up they were?—”

“I’m sorry. What?”

“Garrett did give them to you, didn’t he? The table and chairs? Dean’s been planning to strip them for years, but he’ll never get around to it.”

“Wait. You’re Garrett’s…aunt?”

“I’m sorry. How rude of me. I should have told you.”

Garrett’s aunt had been Jane’s best friend, and Garrett hadn’t thought to mention that?

Even that day, as they’d discussed people who might know about her parents’ marriage, Garrett had stayed silent?

Aspen could only nod like an idiot. She set the yearbook she’d been looking at on top of the others. “You’ve given me so much information that I don’t think I’ll need these anymore.”

Deborah studied her through squinted eyes. “I doubt Garrett knows your mother and I were friends. We’ve never talked about it.”

Aspen nodded slowly. “Even with me back in town, and him working at my house?”

“Garrett and Dean have discussed that a little. But with Dean’s health?—”

“Oh. Right. Garrett said his uncle…” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. Of course you’ve all been distracted. And it’s his heart? Have you told Garrett?”

“He’s not answering his phone, which tells me he’s probably up at your place.”

“He is. I’ll instant-message him and tell him to call you. He should get that if he’s connected to my Wi-Fi.”

“Thank you.” Deborah stood, lifting the books. “I’ll take care of these. I’d love to have you over for dinner sometime. I’m sure Garrett would like that too. Maybe later this week?”

“I’d like that.”