Carolina Isle Page 3

  “I forget that you’ve lived in a tiny world inside the tiny world of Arundel. Her picture is hanging in one of the corridors at the high school. She won every beauty contest in three counties from the time she was three until she left Arundel when she got out of high school. She went to New York, changed her name to Katlyn, and married one of the richest men in the world.”

  Ariel looked at the picture. The woman was pretty, yes, but in that well-preserved way that meant she’d had half a dozen face-lifts and spent her days in salons. “She’s from Arundel and she’s the wife of R.J.’s best friend? Hmmm.” Ariel’s head was whirling with this news. Her intuition told her that this woman was the way she was going to reach R.J. She’d already decided that the less Sara knew about her plans, the better. Unfortunately, this meant she couldn’t ask Sara’s advice about anything. What Ariel wanted to do was to get R.J. onto her territory, into Arundel. If her plan of impersonating her cousin was going to work, Sara needed to be near Ariel while they were pretending to be each other. Ariel knew she’d need help working for R.J., so she wanted Sara close. But how to get R.J.—and Sara went where he did—to tiny Arundel?

  Ariel put her hand on David’s arm, looked up at him, and gave him her best pleading sigh.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” he said. “I’m not going to help you in this. When you elope with that man, I plan to be the innocent, jilted, almost-bridegroom. I want our mothers to think that I did no wrong. I certainly don’t want either of them to think that I helped you.”

  “David, dear,” she said sweetly, “wouldn’t you love some tea? We could drink it while we have a nice, long talk.”

  “I’m going to regret this,” he said as he sat down on a chintz-covered chair.

  Smiling, Ariel started talking. David was so glad to see her happy again that he stayed the entire afternoon.

  In the end, David did help her. Through his girlfriend, Britney, and her connections in “that side of town,” he found a man who was sending Susie Edwards—a.k.a. Katlyn Dunkirk—information about Arundel.

  David got Mrs. Dunkirk’s address and Ariel wrote her a letter asking if they could meet if she ever happened to be in the area. As Ariel hoped, a letter came back soon, giving a time and place in Raleigh.

  On the appointed day, with David’s help, Ariel managed to escape her mother long enough to meet Mrs. Dunkirk for lunch in Raleigh.

  Ariel knew all about the woman the moment she saw her. For all her jewelry (a diamond necklace at lunch?), her careful accent (a sort of French-English concoction), and her five-thousand-dollar suit (in Raleigh?!), Ariel would have known her anywhere. There was an air of the cotton mills around her that no time or money could wipe away. The woman was very nervous and kept smoking cigarettes and talking too much.

  In the end, they both got what they wanted. Mrs. Dunkirk said her husband had talked about buying an island and developing it into “a billionaire’s playground.” It might as well be an island near Arundel. As she said this, she stubbed out a lipstick-tipped cigarette and gave Ariel a look to let her know that in spite of her origins, she’d married into Big Money.

  Mrs. Dunkirk said she would direct her husband toward one of the many islands off the coast of North Carolina, if Ariel would get her mother to crown her as Mrs. Arundel at the fall festival. Ariel had to work to refrain from exclaiming at the vulgarity of such a thing, but she knew where Mrs. Dunkirk was coming from. Mill girls were never made Miss Arundel, no matter how pretty they were. Ariel’s mother had been Miss Arundel and she had been too. To get my mother to agree to such a low-class display, Ariel thought, I’ll have to drug her—or give her what she most wants in life, which is for me to marry David.

  As Ariel smiled at Mrs. Dunkirk and agreed, she gave no sign of her inner turmoil. She said she thought it was a delightful idea to have a Mrs. Arundel, and who better than someone who had made such a success of her life. Mrs. Dunkirk stubbed out another cigarette and went out to her waiting limo. As she waved good-bye, Ariel thought that breeding always told. Even the one time she’d met Sara in person, when she hadn’t had a bath in what looked like weeks, there was an air about her that told who her mother was. Her blood had been diluted by her dissolute father, but the blood of the Ambler family was stronger, and it showed in Sara—just as Mrs. Dunkirk’s breeding showed in her.

  At these thoughts, Ariel could imagine David telling her she was a snob, but she didn’t care. In another era, David would have been a socialist.

  By the time Ariel got home, she was ready to go forward in her plan to get the man she loved. But first, she had to tell David what she and Sara were planning to do. He would, of course, protest and tell her that it would never work, but she knew he’d agree to help her. She couldn’t pull this off if he didn’t help, because David knew her. Really knew her. He wasn’t like her mother, who only cared that she was dressed properly and didn’t embarrass her.

  David was different. One wrong move on Sara’s part and he’d know she wasn’t who she was pretending to be.

  David would help, Ariel knew that. And it was going to work. She knew that too.

  Chapter Four

  WHEN SARA FINALLY GOT TO ARIEL’S bedroom, she was so tired that all she wanted to do was crawl under the covers and sleep. But she couldn’t because Ariel’s bed was covered with a menagerie of weird-looking stuffed animals. Sara vaguely remembered that Ariel had made her memorize some rule about her stuffed animals, but she was too tired to remember it.

  The two cousins had spent nearly three weeks together in New York. Ariel had wanted more time, but it was all she could finagle out of her mother. “And I had to lie hugely to get that time,” she said. “With David’s help, of course. Dear David.” When she said this, her mouth turned down at the corners, as though she was bitter about something.

  Since the cousins had corresponded for years, Sara would have said that she knew her cousin well, but as she found out that first day, she didn’t know her at all. Maybe it was because Ariel had grown up in isolation—homeschooled—but Sara soon found that the things she’d been hoping for didn’t happen. There were no girl giggles at night, no schlepping around in their pajamas for hours on Sunday morning.

  Sara was sure that Ariel didn’t know it, but when she described her mother, she might have been describing herself. It took nearly a week before Sara realized that Ariel knew that she was becoming like her mother and was doing anything she could to prevent it. However, try as she might to avoid it, there was something elegant about Ariel that made people take notice of her.

  It took Sara less than twenty-four hours to learn that there were things she just could not talk about, such as her drunken father. Sara was eager to unburden herself, to at last tell the secrets about her life with her father—but alcoholics seemed to be something that Ariel couldn’t bear to hear about. To stop Sara from telling more, Ariel gave her “the look.” It was a glance of such coldness that Sara thought that a couple of her toes were going to have to be amputated from frostbite.

  Ever the actress, Sara sat in front of a mirror later that night and practiced the look. But what came naturally to Ariel was nearly impossible for Sara. “I think you have to be raised royally to be able to carry off that look,” she muttered to herself. The next day she tried it on Ariel. Her hope was that she’d be able to freeze Ariel as she’d done to her cousin. Ariel giggled. “When you do that, you almost look like my mother.” Sara was tempted to tell her cousin that she was imitating her, Ariel, but she didn’t.

  Ariel wanted the two of them to stay in Sara’s tiny apartment all day and try to figure out how to be each other. For one thing, Sara was supposed to memorize the entire genealogy of the founding families of Arundel. “It’s imperative that you know who belongs to whom.”

  Sara said it sounded very interesting and she wished she had time to memorize it all, but she had to go to work.

  The mention of work made Ariel launch into a hundred thousand questions about R.J. Sara knew Ariel thought she was
going to be able to fool R.J., but Sara didn’t think he was going to believe the switch for even ten seconds. But there was no reasoning with Ariel. For all that Ariel looked like a lady from the past, all prim and proper and perfectly groomed, Sara soon found that she had a spine of steel. When Ariel set her mind to something, there was no changing it.

  It was when R.J. told Sara that he wanted her to go with him on a trip to Arundel, North Carolina, that she saw just how determined Ariel really was. When he told her, Sara was so flabbergasted that she thought her legs were going to collapse. Just minutes before, R.J.’s old friend Charley Dunkirk had been in his office and R.J. had given the man enough whiskey that he was too drunk to walk out on his own. Sara had wanted to give R.J. a piece of her mind about the evils of alcohol, but she’d found out that when she talked to R.J. he twisted her words around, so she’d learned to keep quiet.

  For an hour after R.J. told her they were going to Arundel, Sara couldn’t speak. She did it! was all she could think. Somehow, Ariel had done it. How?! Sara wondered. Ariel lived in a little, rural town and R.J. was a big-city mover and shaker. He and Donald Trump were buddies. So how had a small-town girl like Ariel made R.J. do what she wanted him to?

  Two mornings later Sara was awakened at 4:00 A.M. by the ear-splitting screech of her doorbell. Groggy, she opened the door to see Ariel standing there with the night doorman. Sara was too dumbfounded and too sleepy to say anything as he put Ariel’s six suitcases (all vintage Louis Vuitton) inside her apartment.

  Ariel took off her gloves (white cotton gloves, like a 1950s model would wear) and looked about the apartment. Sara was still rubbing sleep from her eyes, and she could see that Ariel found all five hundred and fifty square feet of it wanting, but she had decided to be gracious. Smiling, Ariel put her hands on Sara’s shoulders and kissed both her cheeks, like in a French movie. Ariel didn’t seem to be aware that it was 4:00 A.M. and that her cousin had to go to work later that day.

  For Sara, the next three weeks were hell. She had R.J. at the office and Ariel at home. R.J. had explained that the reason he wanted to go to Arundel was to look at some tiny island just off the coast of eastern North Carolina. It was called King’s Isle and since it didn’t have a beach, it wasn’t a tourist spot. But Charley Dunkirk was thinking of buying most of the island and making it into an exclusive resort and he wanted R.J. to scout out the place and give his opinion of its suitability.

  Sara asked if he wanted her to do the preliminary research on the island, but R.J. said no, that he’d do it. He wanted her to clear his schedule— which meant he got to sit on a couch and play on the Web, while she had to deal with people who were angry because their appointments had been canceled.

  All in all, Sara’s workload doubled. Since she had no secretarial skills to speak of, R.J. used Sara as a sort of living appointment book. He expected her to remember where he was to be every second of the day, where everything he owned was, and she was to make everything work. This meant doing things like getting down on her hands and knees with a screwdriver to fix his swivel chair. When he suggested that he keep sitting in it while she worked, she gave him her best imitation of Ariel’s icy look. He blinked at her a couple of times, then got up, chuckling, and went to the other side of the room. He loved to order electronic gadgets over the Internet, but he didn’t want to bother reading the instructions, so Sara had to figure out how to work whatever he’d bought, then show him how to use it. He often bought a second one of whatever it was and offered it to her, but she refused to accept it. Her philosophy was that when someone gives you a gift, they want something in return. She didn’t want to owe R.J. anything.

  At home—not that she could still call it that— she had to deal with Ariel.

  For two hours before Sara went to work and until after midnight every night, they rehearsed. Neither was a better actor than the other. Sara’d had years of professional training, but Ariel had had twenty-four years of lying to her mother, so it amounted to the same thing.

  They began to put on little impromptu skits in public. They had to put a scarf and dark glasses over one of them when they left the building so no one would realize there were two of them, but once they were outside, they tried to become each other. Their favorite pantomime was that Sara was a rich snot, and Ariel was her overworked personal assistant. They got so good at it that one day Sara said, “Really, Ariel, can’t you do anything correctly?” and Ariel looked shocked. She said that Sara had sounded so much like her mother that … she couldn’t go on. Sara said, “I sounded so much like her that you were overcome with homesickness?”

  “Why, no,” Ariel said. “You were—” When Ariel realized that Sara was making a joke, she looked at her cousin in astonishment, then they laughed together and Sara began to think that maybe they could carry this off.

  Sara had told Ariel that all she really wanted was a break from R.J., but the truth was that what she really and truly wanted was to meet David. Her best acting was when she pretended to be unconcerned and said, “Oh, yes, what about David? Shouldn’t you tell me about him?”

  Ariel didn’t seem to think David was of any importance. He’d been told that they were going to exchange places so he knew everything, but Sara wanted to hear every word about him. She told Ariel that it was the same way that she needed to know everything about R.J. When Ariel was reluctant to talk about David, Sara thought maybe she was jealous, but when Ariel started talking, Sara couldn’t stop her.

  After days of hearing about him, Sara thought his personality was even better than his looks—if that was possible. He was sweet and kind, thoughtful, intelligent, and willing to help. In other words, he was everything R.J. wasn’t. She tried to tell Ariel what a pain R.J. was, but Ariel wouldn’t listen to her. For a while Sara thought maybe Ariel’s wanting to trade places was because she was one of those superficial women who’d fallen for him, but Sara didn’t think so. She thought Ariel wanted to get away from her mother and to see how the normal world lived. As for R.J., if Ariel had any romantic feelings for him after all she’d been told, then she deserved what she got.

  Two days before they were to leave for Arundel, Ariel told Sara she wanted her to go to King’s Isle too. Ariel’s calmness when she mentioned that island showed how far they’d progressed in becoming each other. When Sara first told her R.J.’s friend was thinking about buying a place called King’s Isle, Ariel had gone ballistic. “He’s crazy if he thinks he can deal with those people!” Ariel said, starting to pace the room. “Didn’t R.J. ask anyone in Arundel what those people are like?” “Anyone” meant the elite of Arundel, the people Sara was to pretend to be one of.

  “You don’t know them,” Ariel said, her voice pleading. “The people on that island are awful. There are terrible stories about them. People who go there disappear. They say they drown, but anyone who lives near Arundel knows the truth.”

  “Ah,” Sara said, suppressing a yawn. Hadn’t she seen this on a late-night movie? She hadn’t had much sleep since Ariel arrived and she was having trouble concentrating.

  It took Ariel a while to calm down and by the time they were about to leave, Sara thought maybe Ariel had given up her childish beliefs about King’s Isle, but she hadn’t. When it got closer to the time of the exchange, Ariel again started voicing her fear of the little island. She said, “You and David have to go with us to that place. You can’t leave R.J. and me alone there. You have to persuade R.J. to let you and David go with us.”

  Sara did not want to ask R.J. for a favor. She talked, she reasoned, she begged, she even cried, but Ariel couldn’t be moved. Sara thought about backing out, but by that time she genuinely wanted to do the exchange.

  Maybe David and she would get along so well that she could … what? Marry him and join the society that her father had so hated? At the thought of her father’s hatred of Arundel, she smiled. He’d only hated it because they hadn’t let him into it. Sara knew that if her mother’s father had welcomed him, given him a house and a job,
he would have loved it. He would have had chances in his life, but he’d messed them all up. But Sara didn’t want to mess up the one and only opportunity she had of meeting a truly nice man. Her friends at work were trying Internet dating, but so far Sara hadn’t seen any good results from that. Ariel had given Sara an opportunity to be part of a society she couldn’t otherwise penetrate, and a chance to meet men, David among them, who, in normal circumstances, wouldn’t allow people like Sara into their world.

  But no matter what she said, Sara couldn’t change Ariel’s mind about David and her going to the island with her and R.J. The only way Ariel would continue with the masquerade was if Sara agreed to ask R.J. if she could go with him. “He’ll need a guide,” Ariel said, “so why not your cousin who lives in Arundel?”

  “And her boyfriend?” Sara asked in disbelief.

  “Tell him you’ll quit if he doesn’t take us.”

  In the end, Sara was too worn down by both Ariel and R.J. to say no to much of anything. Sara was exhausted by the time she and R.J. left for North Carolina. When they got to the beautiful bed-and-breakfast in Arundel that Ariel had recommended, Sara was feeling guilty for what they were about to do to him, but then R.J. started his usual litany of complaints and Sara couldn’t stand him again. Who could hate such a beautiful place? She told him she was going to bed, then went to her own room.

  Ariel was waiting for her in her room. If she’d been anyone else, Sara would have thought she’d climbed in the window, but she knew that Princess Ariel would never do such a thing.

  “He agreed, didn’t he?” Ariel asked as she handed Sara the pageboy wig.

  Sara didn’t know what would have happened if she’d told her no. She said that R.J. had agreed and that tomorrow morning the four of them were heading to King’s Isle.

  “And may the Lord have mercy on us all,” Ariel said. In the next second, she raised a window. “Sorry, but it’s the only way you can leave the room and not be seen.” Sara started to protest, but then she glanced outside and there in the dark was David, his arms raised upward, as if to catch her. Sara wanted to put on a white dress, stand on the ledge, and fall backward into his arms.