First Impressions Read online

  Chapter One

  “MOM? Mom? Are you all right?” Melissa looked at her mother with concern. She’d brought in the mail and put it on the hall table, then went to get herself something to eat. She was five months pregnant, and she could eat the legs off a table. Her mother had come in from work and picked up the mail, opening a letter from what looked to be a law firm. Melissa hoped it was nothing bad. “Mom?” Her words were muffled by the peanut butter sandwich in her mouth. She’d been tempted to add grape jelly but was afraid her husband would smell the jelly on her breath. Stuart was adamant that she didn’t gain too much weight during pregnancy, so at dinner Melissa ate steamed vegetables and broiled meat. It was just during the day, while he was at work at the prestigious accounting firm, that she indulged in chocolate and shrimp—together.

  “Mom!” Melissa said loudly. “What in the world is wrong with you?”

  Eden sat down on the little sofa by the hall table. The sofa had been a rickety piece of junk when she’d seen it in a small, out-of-the-way shop in a district that Melissa’s husband didn’t want them to visit. Eden had known right away it was Hepplewhite. She and Melissa had tied the sofa onto the roof of the station wagon and taken it home. It had taken Eden six weekends to repair, refinish, and upholster it. “Aren’t you clever?” Stuart had said in his haughty way, as though Eden were of a lower class than he was. She’d had to grit her teeth, as she always did when she dealt with her son-in-law. Melissa loved him, but Eden had never been able to figure out why.

  “Mrs. Farrington left me her house.”

  “Mrs. Farrington?” Melissa asked, looking at the clock. She had seventeen and a half minutes before Stuart came home. Was that enough time to make herself another sandwich?

  “Go on,” Eden said, knowing her daughter’s mind. “I’ll cover for you.”

  “I shouldn’t. Really, I shouldn’t. Dinner will be soon and—”

  “It’s grilled chicken breasts, steamed broccoli, roast potatoes, and sugarless Jell-O for dessert. Very good for you. Not a calorie in any of it.”

  Melissa opened her mouth, then scurried off to the kitchen, her mother behind her. She was slathering peanut butter on bread when Eden walked into the room, the letter open before her. “Who’s Mrs. Farrington?”

  “You remember her, don’t you, dear? We lived with her until you were five.”

  “Oh, yeah. I do remember her. Sort of. Very old. And a long time ago you mentioned a man. Was he her son?”

  Eden didn’t bother to suppress the shiver that ran over her body. “Yes, her son. Dreadful man. It seems that he died some time ago. Before Mrs. Farrington did.”

  “You didn’t keep in touch with her?” Melissa was pouring chocolate syrup into her milk. It was a good thing that Stuart never opened the refrigerator or he’d see the forbidden things that Eden bought for her daughter. No, Stuart was the type who believed food should be eaten at a table and served to him by someone else, preferably his wife. He didn’t go rummaging in the refrigerator looking for something to eat.

  “No,” Eden said tightly. “After we left I had nothing to do with her. Not that she…” She broke off. What happened was not something she wanted to have to explain to her daughter. I didn’t want that pedophile of a son of hers to know where I was, she could have said, but didn’t. “No, we didn’t keep in touch.”

  Many times over the years she’d wondered what had happened to dear Mrs. Farrington, and Eden often felt a wave of guilt run through her when she thought about that sweet woman being left alone with her evil son. But then Eden would look at her daughter and know that she’d done the right thing in running away and never looking back. She glanced at the clock. “You now have approximately two and three-quarter minutes before the master returns, so you’d better drink that and clean out your glass.”

  “Mother,” Melissa said primly, “Stuart isn’t like that. He’s a kind and loving man and I love him…ery uch.” The last words were muffled, as her mouth was full.

  “Yes, he’s wonderful,” Eden said, then cut herself off when she heard the sarcasm in her voice. It was tough to think how she’d tried to raise her daughter to be an independent woman, only to see her marry a control freak like Stuart. To Eden’s mind, Stuart was all show. For all his talk of having a great future before him, he’d willingly moved into Eden’s apartment “for a few weeks,” as he’d said just before the wedding. “Until I get a place for us. A little farther uptown.” Stuart had made Eden’s generous offer seem as though it were worth nothing, and she’d had to resist the urge to defend herself. But that was two years ago, and now nothing Stuart said bothered her. He and Melissa were still in Eden’s small apartment, still letting her cook for them and letting her take care of most of the household chores. Months ago, Eden had decided she’d had enough and was going to evict them. She’d built up her courage to the point where she didn’t care if they had to live on the street for a while. It might do them some good. Teach them some lessons. But then Melissa had announced she was pregnant and that was that. Eden could still remember the smirk on Stuart’s face when Melissa made the announcement. It was as though he’d known what Eden had been thinking and he’d calculated the pregnancy just so Eden couldn’t throw them out. “You don’t mind, do you, Mom?” Melissa had said. “It was an accident. We meant to have children, but we wanted to wait until we had a place of our own. But with Stuart on the verge of a promotion, it doesn’t make sense to buy something small and dreary when in just a few weeks we’ll be able to afford something grand and glorious.”

  Since her daughter had married, Eden often wondered if Melissa had become a marionette. “Small and dreary” and “grand and glorious” were Stuart’s words, not Melissa’s.

  Eden took a seat on a bar stool at the kitchen island and read the letter again. “Mrs. Farrington had no other heirs, so she left me everything.”

  “How nice for you,” Melissa said. “Any money?”

  Eden kept her head down, but she felt the blood rush up the back of her neck. Anger did that to a person. There was fear in Melissa’s voice, and Eden well knew what caused it: Stuart. For all that Melissa told Eden at least three times a day how much she loved her husband, the truth was that after two years of marriage she’d come to know him well. If he found out that Eden had inherited a lot of money, there would be problems.

  “No money,” Eden said cheerfully and tried not to hear her daughter’s sigh of relief. “Just a falling-down old house. You remember it, don’t you?”

  “A Victorian monstrosity, wasn’t it?”

  Eden started to correct her daughter and say that the house had been built before George Washington’s Mount Vernon, but she didn’t want Melissa to tell Stuart that. He might see money in a house that old. Melissa hadn’t yet learned that she didn’t have to tell her husband everything that went through her mind. “More or less,” Eden said, still looking at the letter. She was to go to a lawyer’s office in North Carolina as soon as possible to sign the papers and take possession of the house. They’re probably worried that the roof’s about to cave in, she thought, but said nothing as she folded the letter and put it back in the envelope.

  “What will you do with an old house like that?” Melissa asked, her eyes wide.

  Eden knew that her daughter was afraid for her mother to leave. They’d rarely been apart since Melissa’s birth twenty-seven years ago. “Sell it,” Eden said quickly. “And use the money to buy my grandson a house in the country. With a copper beech tree in the backyard.”

  Smiling, Melissa relaxed, then hurriedly drank the rest of her chocolate milk when she heard the front door start to open. She washed the glass in seconds, so she was ready to turn and greet her husband when he walked into the kitchen. Stuart was tall, thin, and handsome. Melissa’s eyes lit up when she saw him.

  Eden gave her son-in-law a nod, then slipped out of the kitchen to go to her bedroom and close the door. For a moment she leaned against the door, closed her eyes, and remembered back to tha
t summer when she’d been pregnant with Melissa. Eden had been just seventeen years old, just out of high school, when she’d been walking home from church choir practice one night. She’d been leaped on by a man, thrown down, and…She’d never been able to remember much of what happened after that. When it was over, she dragged herself up, pulled her skirt down, and staggered home. She’d wanted to call the police, but her parents had refused. They didn’t want their family to be the object of gossip; they didn’t want people to know what Eden had done. “But I didn’t do anything,” she’d cried. A few weeks later, when she’d started throwing up from morning sickness, her parents told her to get out of their house. Nothing Eden said could sway them. She’d packed one suitcase, taken the $300 her parents had grudgingly given her, and got on a bus going east. She ended up in North Carolina, a state she’d never been in, but it was beautiful and she loved the old houses and the flat fields.

  She’d tried to get a job, but there wasn’t much work to be had, and no work for a girl who was by then obviously pregnant. When she’d applied at the newspaper office in Arundel, a man had taken pity on her. He was looking at the job application she’d filled out. “You didn’t misspell one word,” he said, teasing her. Eden was hot, tired, hungry, and wishing she’d never been born. All she could do was look at him. Was he going to grade her application?

  He looked her up and down for a moment, then said, “Let me guess about you. It’s something I’m good at. Decent family, church every Sunday, good grades in school, wrestled with the high school football quarterback on the backseat of a car, and now the two of you’ve run away together. Or did he leave you somewhere along the way?”

  Eden was too tired to play games. He’d probably eaten more for lunch than she’d had in the last two days. “Religious fanatic parents who spent my childhood telling me I was a sinner. Top of the top grades in school, but then if I went below an A plus I got the belt, buckle first. No quarterback, just a rapist on a dark night. When I came up pregnant, my parents threw me out. I now have fifteen dollars to my name, no place to live, nothing to live on. I’ve been looking hard at the local train tracks.”

  The man blinked at her a couple of times, then picked up his telephone and pushed a memory button. “Gracey? Henry here. I’m sending over a young woman. Feed her and let her have that bed in the back, will you? She needs food and rest, then I’m going to send her out to Alice’s.” He paused, listening. “Yeah, I know Alice is a pain in the neck, but, trust me on this, this girl can handle her. Compared to what she’s been through, Alice will seem like a dream.”

  Somehow, Eden managed to get out of the chair and make it to the door without fainting. Rage at the injustice of what had happened to her had kept her going, but now that someone had shown her some kindness, she feared she might collapse. The man didn’t help her up or walk her to the door. Maybe he’d guessed that Eden’s pride would get her there on her own. It wasn’t easy to be proud when you hadn’t had a bath in over a week, but she managed it.

  Eden was almost run over by a pickup as she made her way across the road to Gracey’s Restaurant. A tall, wiry woman, her gray hair in a bun at the back of her neck, came out to put her arm around Eden. “Honey, you’re worse than Henry told me you were.”

  Three hours later, after Eden had eaten more than Gracey had ever seen a person eat at one sitting, Eden climbed into bed and didn’t get out until the next morning. It was Sunday when Gracey drove Eden out to meet Mrs. Alice Augusta Farrington, who lived in an old house across a bridge, just outside downtown.

  Eden had always loved history, and she’d loved any movie that was set in a historical context. That was good, since her parents didn’t allow her to watch any movie that had been made after 1959. Their opinion was that the 1960s were the beginning of the end of Godliness in America. When Eden got out of Gracey’s car and looked up at the old house, she knew that she was looking at the genuine article. This wasn’t a house “built in the Colonial style.” This was a Colonial house. She’d never seen Colonial Williamsburg, but she thought this house would fit in there.

  “Ghastly old place, isn’t it?” Gracey said. “I tell Alice that she ought to bulldoze it and build herself a nice brick ranch style.”

  Eden looked at Gracey to see if she was kidding. The older woman’s eyes were twinkling. Eden smiled.

  “Just checking,” Gracey said, smiling back. “We like old houses around here.”

  Eden looked up at the house. Seven bays across the front, a full porch on the ground level. There were some truly big trees on each side of the house, and she wondered if they’d been planted when the house was built.

  Alice Augusta Farrington was so small that she made Eden feel big—which wasn’t easy, since Eden was small herself. But Mrs. Farrington was about four-eleven and couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. “What she lacks in size, she makes up for in spirit,” Gracey had said on the way out to the house, when she told Eden about the Farrington family. They’d built the house back in the early 1700s and had held on to it ever since. To Mrs. Farrington’s mind, that made her American royalty. “DAR ha!” she’d say. “Upstarts. Go through a couple of books, find out their ancestors stowed away on a ship, and think they’re worth something. Now, my ancestors…” Mrs. Farrington would then be off and running with stories about her ancestors having been aristocracy in England. “And they would be aristocracy in America if that idiot George Washington hadn’t turned down being crowned king. I’d be a duchess now. What was wrong with that man?!”

  Gracey said that no one knew if Mrs. Farrington was kidding or not, but it didn’t matter, as she never expected an answer. “She likes to talk and just likes for others to listen.” Eden had spent a lot of her life listening to her father pontificate about what he thought God was thinking, so she was good at listening.

  When the house came into sight, Gracey told her that the outside might go unpainted for twenty years at a time, but the roof was always kept in perfect repair, because otherwise, it might leak on her precious papers. It was a local legend that every piece of paper the Farrington family had ever owned was still in that house. Receipts, recipes, diaries, letters—lots of letters—all of them were still there.

  But even after what Gracey had told her, Eden wasn’t prepared for her first sight of the interior. The huge, high-ceilinged center hallway was so full of furniture that a person could hardly walk. The walls were lined at least two pieces deep. A tall desk stood in front of a huge cabinet. A long table was pressed against a wall, covered in what looked to be stacks of old letters wrapped in faded pink ribbon, then smaller tables were set on top of the letters. Tables, cabinets, chairs, couches—every surface was covered with papers. Some were in boxes, some in trunks, many of them loose. Eden’s eyes widened when she saw a hatbox that resembled one she’d seen in a book on antiques. Eighteenth century?

  “Alice,” Gracey said to the tiny Mrs. Farrington. “I found her for you.”

  Mrs. Farrington looked Eden up and down and obviously found her wanting. “This little thing? Too weak. And is that a child in her stomach? Am I to start running a shelter for wayward girls now?”

  Gracey ignored the last question. “Henry Walters—you know, old Lester’s youngest son—researched her, and she’s from a good family. She’s twenty-three years old and her young husband was killed in a horrible accident while defending his family. She was so overcome with grief that she ran away from home. Her family is searching for her, but she begged Henry to let her find her own place in the world, so she can make it on her own. She wants the job, and she can do it. She has a degree in American history from Vassar. When her baby is born, she will, of course, return to her loving family. You won’t be bothered with anything as burdensome as a child.”

  Eden’s mouth was hanging open as she stared at Gracey. What incredible lies! She turned back to look at Mrs. Farrington. Should she tell her the truth and risk losing the job—whatever it was? Eden hoped she wasn’t being offered the job o
f trying to clean this house. The dust on that furniture could be carbon-dated.

  Mrs. Farrington was looking at Eden in speculation. “Family throw you out when you got pregnant?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Eden said, her eyes looking into the old woman’s. They were small black eyes, glistening with life and vitality. Old body; young spirit.

  “How old are you really?” Mrs. Farrington asked.

  Behind the older woman, Gracey was vigorously shaking her head at Eden not to tell the truth.

  “Seventeen,” Eden answered.

  Mrs. Farrington turned so quickly that she caught Gracey shaking her head, disgusted that Eden hadn’t lied. “Your whole family are liars,” Mrs. Farrington said, without animosity in her voice, then she left the room, leaving Gracey and Eden alone.

  Gracey wasn’t offended by Mrs. Farrington’s remarks. In fact, she was smiling broadly. She pushed Eden to follow Mrs. Farrington. “Go on.”

  “But she didn’t say I was hired,” Eden said. “Maybe—”

  “Believe me, if you weren’t hired, Alice Farrington would have told you. She likes you.”

  “Likes me?”

  “She didn’t say one hateful thing to you. It may be a first. Now go on, I have to go bake the pies for tomorrow.”

  Gracey made it all the way to her car outside before Eden recovered enough to hurry after her. “But what is the job?” Eden called from the porch. Her suitcase was on the ground. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Oh,” Gracey said with a wave of her hand as she got into her car. “Make a list of all those papers.”

  “A list?” Eden asked, not understanding what she meant.

  “Like in the library.” Gracey shut her car door and started the engine.

  Eden watched her until the trees hid her from view. “Like the library?” she whispered. Then her head came up. “Cataloging? She wants me to catalog that mess in there?” In high school she’d worked in the library, so she had an idea of what was involved in such an undertaking. Were the other rooms of the house as full as the central hall? If so, making even an inventory would take a very long time. Years, even.