First Impressions Read online

  “Beautiful,” she whispered, twirling about and looking at everything.

  She wanted to see the rest of the house, but she was sure that Brad was going to show up at any minute, so she got her cell phone out of her bag, then called the local electric company and told them she wanted her electricity and McBride’s billed separately. “But it is,” the girl at the electric company said. “ ‘Mr. McBride’ had all the electricity put in his name when he rented the house.”

  “Our two houses aren’t on the same circuit?” Eden asked.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Thank you,” Eden said, then hung up.

  She sat down on one of the couches and looked at the beautiful molding around the room. Mrs. Farrington had had every bit of it restored. Brad had said that he believed Mrs. Farrington had had the house restored for her, for Eden. Yes, Eden could believe that, but she also knew that Mrs. Farrington had left the house to Eden so she could protect it. She went into the living room. Paneling covered the wall from the chair rail down, all around the ceiling. The fireplace was especially beautiful; even Thomas Jefferson would have liked it.

  Eden leaned against the wall for a moment. What in the world was going on? she wondered. Brad had seemed to believe McBride completely, even to making Eden the butt of all the jokes. Dumb woman used to living in the city gets freaked out because a man is snooping around in her house in the middle of the night. “Let’s see one of them find someone snooping around and see how he reacts,” she said out loud, then pushed away from the wall with a moan of pain. It would take days to get over her soreness.

  It seemed that the police had contacted someone, been told that Mr. McBride was one of them, and that was the end of it. No one had questioned his story. To them he was a man who’d been innocently using his table saw—male bonding there!—and when he’d seen that he’d blown out his female neighbor’s lights, he had tried to repair them. Take care of the little lady, so to speak. Only Eden had thought it was odd that two separate houses were on the same circuit.

  Trying to calm herself, she walked into the kitchen and saw that it was much as she’d left it all those years ago. She’d been the one to remove all the papers from the cabinets and the countertops. She’d read each piece, then carefully ordered them in one of the many file cabinets that Mrs. Farrington had purchased. Whenever Eden had found dishes buried among the papers, she’d washed them, then put them into the cabinets with the glass doors. As Eden looked around, she saw that the Wedgwood was missing. The expensive set. Mrs. Farrington’s son had probably sold them.

  Slowly, with each muscle aching, Eden went outside to her car. The groceries she’d bought the day before were still in there. Some of them were spoiled, but she could save most of what she’d bought. Limping, she managed to carry the bags inside. When she opened the side-by-side refrigerator, she saw that Brad had had his housekeeper fill it. There were three pounds of stewing beef inside, so Eden set to work making a pot of soup.

  As she chopped, she thought about what had happened last night. Yes, she’d gone crazy. They’d all made her see that. From the doctor to the police boy, they’d let her know that she’d “overreacted.” The only person who hadn’t been “on their side” was one of the nurses, a large woman well into middle age. She was adjusting the machine that was monitoring Eden’s heart rate and hadn’t said a word when the doctor told Eden that she was fine. No real injuries, he’d said, then he’d given her a little smile and told her that the next time she should just run out the front door and not try to beat up a man twice as big as she was. The nurse waited until the doctor was out of the room, then she’d put her hand on Eden’s wrist. “Honey, I know they’re all giving you a hard time, but what you did was right. If you were a man you would have shot him. Snooping around your house like that at night! He shouldn’t have been in there, I don’t care who he was or what his intentions were. As for you, if other women reacted like that the morgue wouldn’t be so crowded.”

  What the nurse said made Eden feel a lot better about herself, and when she was finally released, she could stand young Clint’s smirking.

  But as Eden made her soup she started to think about what had happened to her in the past few days. Suddenly, there were two men in her life. A lawyer who seemed to already be assuming that the two of them were a couple, and another man who lived next door and had snooped around her house at night. What was going on?

  When the soup was simmering, she went upstairs to the bedrooms. Technically, the house was just two bedrooms and two full baths, but the rooms were so big that they were disconcerting. Her bath was the size of a large bedroom, and the room on the other side of her bedroom was bigger than the average living room. Across the hall was a large bedroom with windows on three sides, and a bathroom in the corner. As Eden looked at the room, an idea came to her. If this man McBride was as beaten up as people said he was, maybe she should take care of him. Maybe she should move him into her house where she could be his nurse—or his jailer. If he was in the house she could see what he was doing. She was a light sleeper, so she’d hear him if he started snooping around again. Electrical box indeed! she thought.

  As she went downstairs again, Eden thought how having someone live upstairs could also serve as a chaperone for her and Brad. That man was coming on too fast, too soon. That kind of thing happens when you’re in your twenties, but not when you’re forty-five. Eden’s gut instincts were telling her that the two men were up to something—or wanted something. Could she use one man to protect her from the other?

  When the food was ready, she had taken it to Mr. McBride’s house—their first proper meeting. At her first sight of him, she felt bad that she’d done something so awful to another human being, but as she spent more time in his company, she knew that he was faking how badly he was injured. When Melissa had been in the third grade, she’d had a very hateful teacher, and every morning Melissa had come up with excuses as to why she couldn’t go to school that day. Eden had learned how to distinguish between real pain and fake. When it had been extraordinarily easy to get Mr. McBride to move in with her, she knew she was right.

  It had taken nearly thirty minutes to get Mr. McBride across the garden that separated their houses, then up the stairs to the guest bedroom. Eden knew that he was doing all that he could to slow their progress so he would have time to ask her lots of questions.

  He seemed to want to know all about the history of Arundel and Farrington Manor in particular. On the surface, it seemed a normal bit of conversation, but something didn’t ring true. If he knew absolutely nothing about the area, what had made him decide to come here?

  And another thing: not only did he not ask her a single personal question, but he always deftly managed to change the subject when she asked him about himself. Eden grew suspicious.

  “This is so very nice of you, Ms. Palmer,” he said as he slipped into the bed in the guest room. “I’m not used to Southern hospitality, but it seems to be all that people have said it is.” Reaching out, he put his hand over her wrist, then lowered his voice. “You seem to be so nice.”

  “Mr. McBride,” she said.

  “Call me Jared,” he answered, smiling at her in a way that she was sure had won the hearts of many women. In spite of a black eye and a deeply scratched cheek, he was still quite handsome.

  “Mr. McBride,” she said firmly, “I invited you to stay here out of a sense of guilt because of what I did to you. There’s no more to it than that. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said meekly, sliding down under the covers. “I could never hope that a woman as fine as you—”

  She gave him a look that said, Cut out the bull.

  With a little smile, he closed his eyes and pretended to rest.

  Eden went downstairs to clean up the kitchen, and when she’d finished, she treated herself to a call to her daughter. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Fine,” Melissa said quickly. “Oh, Mom, I don’t mean to be rude
, but could we talk later? Stuart took the afternoon off today and we’re going shopping for our new apartment. I mean, your old apartment. Sorry, I don’t mean to be throwing you out. So how is Arundel? Sleepy as always?”

  Eden could hear the impatience in her daughter’s voice. She wanted to get off the phone to be with her husband. Eden tried not to be hurt by this attitude, and she had to work hard not to try to get her daughter to focus attention on her. She wanted to say that she’d attacked a burglar, been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, then had invited the burglar to move in with her. But she didn’t. “Sure,” Eden said. “Same ol’ same ol’. Nothing ever changes here. Go with Stuart and have a good time. If you need any money, I—”

  “Mother!” Melissa said stiffly. “Stuart can certainly support his own wife and child.”

  If I give him a furnished apartment for less than it costs me to rent it, Eden wanted to say. It seemed that after your children married, you did a lot of biting your tongue. “Of course he can, dear,” she said. “Go, have a good time.”

  After Eden hung up the phone, she stood there for a few moments. She and her daughter had been everything to each other. Not even her daughter’s marriage had been able to break the bond between them, but now…Eden didn’t want to think what was happening, but she knew that the umbilical cord was at last being cut. “That’s good,” Eden said aloud. She and her daughter were too attached to each other. During the year they’d been separated they had barely been able to function, so now, at last, they were separating. And that was good. Wasn’t it?

  Eden took a deep breath and turned away from the phone. She had an urge to call her daughter back and say she was returning. She had an urge to call her publisher and ask for her job back. She had an urge to…

  She stopped walking. She decided to go upstairs, wash her hair, and spend an hour and a half getting ready for Brad’s visit tonight. He was moving much too fast, assuming too much too soon, and McBride…Truthfully, she didn’t know what to make of that man. Both men wanted something, but until she found out what it was, maybe she could enjoy herself.

  Chapter Five

  “DO you think that’s wise?” Brad asked tightly. “I don’t mean to criticize, but do you really think you should let a strange man move into your house?”

  “He isn’t strange, remember?” Eden said, her back to Brad so he wouldn’t see her smile. “Your friends at the police station ran a check on him. I was told that Jared McBride is a full-fledged hero. Considering that I was his assailant I thought that the least I could do was put him into a place where I could take care of him.” She turned to look at Brad, batting her mascaraed lashes. “Did I do wrong?”

  Brad started to answer, then grinned. “Am I right in thinking that you’re telling me to mind my own business and that it’s your house.”

  “More or less,” she said, pleased that he understood. She unwrapped the pecan-encrusted trout from the foil packages that Brad had brought from Soundside, the seafood restaurant that was steps from his office.

  When Brad took plates out of the glass-doored cabinet, Eden noted that he seemed to know where everything was. He said he’d often visited Mrs. Farrington, but that they’d never become true friends; yet he seemed to have visited often enough that he knew his way around the house well. Had he been telling the truth?

  He carried the dishes into the dining room and set the table. “So how long is McBride staying?”

  Eden ignored his question as she put the fish onto the plates. She’d steamed green beans and made a salad. “Tell me everything that’s happened in Arundel since I left here twenty-two years ago. Who got married, who died, who had babies? Any scandals?”

  It took Brad a few moments to get his mind off the man Eden had invited into her home, but when he did, she found that he was a wonderful storyteller. As far as she could tell, Arundel hadn’t changed much. But then, its residents fought hard against change. When Wal-Mart wanted to put in a store on the outskirts, the company met with so much protest that they slunk away in silence. The residents were quite willing to drive a hundred miles to buy goods, just so their pretty town wouldn’t be polluted with ugly, modern stores. Brad’s three last names were an example of the residents’ dislike of change. All of his names came from the founding families of Arundel. Mrs. Farrington told Eden that there were certain names that were all over Arundel, on the street signs, on the buildings, on the businesses. The families had started the town and, for the most part, had never left it. The children still carried the old names, and they still left for college, but they returned to Arundel with spouses from good families to live in the family home, then bear children who were given three last names. Anywhere else it might be unusual to meet a girl named Haughton or Pembroke, but not in Arundel. The names were a permanent calling card, a way to let people know who they were and where they fit into history. Some people thought the whole idea was pretentious and snobbish, but others swooned over the historic continuity, which was so rare in the United States.

  As Eden looked at Brad across the table, she thought how well he fit into the old house. It was as though he was a reincarnation of his ancestors who had often visited the place and had twice married into the Farrington family. When he poured her a glass of wine, she smiled at him and he smiled back. She felt comfortable with him.

  “Okay,” Brad said, “I know I’m too pushy and too forward, and I know that I’ve been taking liberties with you, but you have to realize how much Mrs. Farrington talked about you.”

  “Did she?” Eden said, smiling. “I think I missed her every day I was away from her.”

  “I don’t know how! She was a demanding old woman. I can’t tell you how many times she made me mow her lawn! I wasted two Saturdays a month here behind that hideous old push mower of hers. I used to…” He stopped and smiled at Eden. “If I hadn’t had Alice Augusta Farrington while my wife was ill, I think I might have gone insane. My wife took nearly three years to die.” He looked down at his plate, then back up at Eden. “In this light, at this table, I can almost see her, Mrs. Farrington, I mean. There are things about you that remind me of her.”

  When he pushed his food around on his plate, Eden felt that he had something to say but was afraid to say it. Silently, she waited for him to go on.

  “You’ll hear stories about me,” he said softly.

  “Will they be worse than the ones about me?”

  “No,” he said, then grinned and took a big bite of his fish. “After what you did to McBride, this town will have gossip for the next ten years. You’re going to beat our resident clairvoyant for causing talk.”

  “A clairvoyant? Great! I can have my fortune told. Does this mean that Arundel is becoming New Age?”

  “Far from it. She’s a Pembroke.”

  “Ah,” Eden said. That explained everything. While no one in Arundel would put up with eccentricity from an outsider, they tolerated pretty much anything from one of their own. “So tell me about your wife,” she said.

  “We weren’t exactly a match made in heaven. You’re going to hear that. We’d already started divorce proceedings when she told me she had cancer.”

  “But you stayed with her.”

  “Yes, I did. I wasn’t faithful, though. You’ll hear that too. There was a woman…But it didn’t last. After my wife died, I realized that I didn’t want anything to do with her, not long-term, anyway. Mrs. Farrington made me see that.”

  “Really? But Mrs. Farrington was such a proponent of extramarital sex.”

  “Yeah, my grandfather and my great-uncle.” Brad grinned. “But in between the Willow Stories, as I came to think of them, Mrs. Farrington told me about you.”

  Eden was flattered and curious. “What could she have told you about me?”

  “What you liked to eat, what you wore, what you were good at, what you couldn’t do. What interested you, what didn’t. You name it and she told me about it. She said you liked the garden more than the house, so that’s why she went t
o all the trouble of renovating this old house, but left the gardens a mess for you to have the pleasure of cleaning up.”

  Eden smiled. “I can hardly wait to get my hands on them. Know any muscular teenage boys who need summer jobs?”

  “At least twenty of them. Mind if I help?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re a gardener?”

  “More or less. Well, actually, less. But I can dig holes with the best of them.”

  His look was so intense that Eden looked away for a moment. He seemed to want her to comment on what he’d told her about himself. “Brad, you don’t have to confess your past sins to me,” she said. “Really, at my age, I’ve committed a few of my own.”

  “You?” he said, one eyebrow raised. “What possible sins have you committed? According to Mrs. Farrington you were an angel come to earth.”

  “Didn’t she tell you that I was lazy and daydreamy and all the other things that she complained about me?”

  “She never said a bad word about you.” His eyes were twinkling, and Eden was enjoying his teasing. “I got the impression that you worked nonstop and that you never said an unkind word about anyone in your life.”

  “She didn’t tell you about all the horrible things I said about the youngest Camden boy? He decided he was going to marry me.”

  Brad groaned. “I know him well. Doing you a favor, was he?”

  “Oh, yes. I think he had an idea that Mrs. Farrington would leave me the house, and he wanted it. There weren’t enough old Camden houses for him to have one. I think he thought he’d die if he had to live in a new brick house. Whatever happened to that boy?”

  “He moved up north where he got a Yankee wife, but when his brother had financial reverses, he moved back home. He lives in the Camden-Minton house now. He’s good with money. He must have figured out that Mrs. Farrington couldn’t leave the house to her son.”