The Bridesmaid's Gifts Read online

  She sighed, thinking that they had been over this too many times already. “Believe what you want, Ethan. I’m only trying to help.”

  He leaned back in his chair, slinging one arm over the back, his expression thoughtful. “Has it occurred to you that you continually send me mixed signals? Even as you continue to deny that you are a psychic or a seer or whatever people might call it, you tell me you somehow know things you couldn’t possibly know without some sort of extrasensory perception. You tell me you’re simply a good guesser, but then you ask me to accept that you are absolutely certain that Carmen stole my brother.”

  Nervously gathering the debris from their casual meal, she nodded. “I can’t blame you for being confused. I’m pretty bewildered myself by all of this.”

  He thought about that, then asked, “Why do you fight it so hard? Your ability, I mean.”

  She flinched. “Wouldn’t you? Would you want to be seen as a freak? An oddity?”

  “I’ve been considered an oddity for most of my life,” he answered with a shrug. “People don’t understand why I’m not interested in amassing a fortune for myself. Why I choose to live quietly, in solitude for the most part. Why I don’t play the social games most people choose to play.”

  “But you came from a good family. You live the way you do out of choice, not because there’s something ‘strange’ about you. People may call you odd or antisocial, but they don’t call you ‘spooky.’”

  A muscle twitched in his jaw, letting her know that the label rang a bell with him. Either he’d already heard someone refer to her that way or he had thought it himself. Maybe both.

  “You haven’t said much about your family,” he commented instead.

  She hadn’t said anything about her family, actually. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to do so now.

  And yet…she was aware that she and Ethan had been discussing the most intimate details of his own family’s past, things that had to have been painful for him to share with her. She doubted that anyone else knew he still had Kyle’s stuffed cat tucked away in his possessions, yet she had forced that admission out of him by confronting him with what she had seen. Despite his expressed doubts, he was here, looking into the things she had told him, on the off chance that she could actually be right.

  The least she could do would be to tell him a little more about herself, since she was asking him to have so much faith in her word, she thought reluctantly.

  “I don’t talk about my family much because it’s too painful,” she confessed.

  “Then forget I mentioned it,” he said immediately. “We’ll talk about something else.”

  She suspected that he wanted to change the subject as much for his benefit as for her own. Ethan wasn’t comfortable with delving into emotions, as witnessed by his near panic when he’d seen the threat of tears in her eyes. That was probably a result of surviving too many emotional scenes in his past, when his family had lost their youngest child and, later, Joel’s beloved first wife.

  “It’s okay,” she assured him with a slight smile. “I don’t mind so much telling you about it.”

  Still looking a bit doubtful, he nodded.

  Aislinn drew a deep breath. “I should start with my grandmother, I suppose. She died before I was born,” she said, keeping her tone even, impassive. “Everyone said she was a troubled woman who suffered from bouts of depression. She died of a heart attack just after her fortieth birthday.”

  “That must have been hard on her family.”

  She nodded. “My grandmother was an only child whose own parents both died relatively young. She and Granddad married when she was in her early twenties. From the few stories I heard about their marriage, it wasn’t a particularly happy one. Granddad was a rather humorless man, hardworking, extremely religious, old-fashioned when it came to gender roles. He didn’t know what to do with my grandmother during her ‘spells,’ so he pretty much let her suffer through them on her own.”

  “How many children did they have?”

  “Just the one. My mother.”

  “Having a child didn’t make your grandmother happier?”

  “I’m afraid not. And my mother wasn’t an easy child. She was unruly, stubborn, rebellious. Maybe it was her nature, maybe a result of the way they raised her—or a combination of all those things—but by the time she was twelve she was already sneaking out at night, running wild with kids who were a lot older than she was, regularly getting into trouble with the law. I was told that my grandfather tried everything he could think of to straighten her out, from preaching to punishment to counseling, which wasn’t exactly common in the early sixties—but nothing worked.”

  Ethan took a sip of his soda without commenting, though Aislinn knew he was absorbing every word.

  “My mother was fifteen when her mother died. A lot of people blamed it on her—including my grandfather, I think. Maybe he never told her so, but she probably suspected it.”

  Wincing, Ethan muttered, “Rough on her.”

  “Yes. It must have been horrible for her. Anyway, after that, she went completely out of control. My grandfather washed his hands of her a year later.”

  “She was on her own at sixteen?”

  She nodded.

  “And then she had you.”

  He was obviously envisioning a teenage pregnancy. Logical assumption, but she shook her head. “Not for another sixteen years.”

  That made his eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “She was thirty-two when you were born?”

  “Yes. She would be sixty now. About the same age as the nanny who took Kyle, I guess.”

  “What happened during those years before you were born?”

  “She took off right after Granddad threw her out, and no one heard from her in all those years. And then she showed up with me. Granddad was seventy, still living in the same house where he’d raised my mother. He still owned and operated the hardware store he’d bought just before my mother was born. Granddad was stunned to see his daughter after all those years, but he welcomed her home and invited her to stay with him as long as she needed to. He once told me that he loved me from the moment he saw me. He said I looked like his mother, whereas my mother looked like his late wife.”

  “What was your mother’s name?” he asked, as if suddenly realizing that she hadn’t mentioned it before.

  “She was christened Mary Alice Flaherty. When she was six, she insisted on answering to Maxie. At fourteen, she became Butterfly. Remember, this was during the early hippie years, a culture she embraced wholeheartedly.”

  “Butterfly Flaherty.” He shook his head. “And people called her that?”

  “Her friends did, I guess. Her father called her Mary Alice.”

  “So then she came back to town, carrying you,” he prompted, totally into the story now.

  “Right. She used the nickname Allie then. She was past thirty but still eccentric. The way she was described to me, her hair was waist-length and dyed bright red. She wore peasant clothes and sandals and she was driving a ’69 VW van. I was six months old.”

  “Your father?”

  “She never mentioned him,” she said with the slight pang that always accompanied the awareness that she would never know her father. “She told my grandfather that it wasn’t relevant. He rarely talked about my mother to me, but I once heard him mention to my aunt that my mother had implied there had been another child—a boy—that she had abandoned. That she still felt guilty about leaving behind. He told my aunt that he couldn’t believe then that his daughter would have abandoned a child, but when she did basically the same with me, he figured it was probably true.”

  She cleared her throat, trying not to think about lonely childhood longings. “Granddad never knew I heard him say that, but I was pretty stunned by the revelation. It’s possible I have a brother somewhere I’ve never met. I don’t know for certain, but then, I’ve never been able to sense much of importance about anything that matters most to me.”

  “But y
our mother chose to keep you.”

  “She said she’d wanted to try to be a mother to me but she’d realized she couldn’t handle it alone.”

  “So she stayed in town then? Raised you with her father’s assistance?”

  “No.” She laced her fingers together on the tabletop, trying to keep the pain in her heart out of her voice. “Apparently they spent a very strained evening together, and then she left town again before dawn the next morning. Alone.”

  Chapter Twelve

  She had caught him by surprise again. “She left you with your grandfather?”

  “She didn’t even tell him she was leaving,” she added grimly. “He woke up the next morning to find her van gone and me crying in the playpen she’d put me to sleep in. She didn’t even leave a note, but Granddad said he knew when he saw me that she wouldn’t be back.”

  “What kind of mother would do something like that?”

  “Mine.”

  The stark reply hung in the air for a moment before he asked, “So you were raised by your grandfather?”

  “Believe it or not, yes. He had a younger sister, Maureen, who’d been widowed a few years earlier. She moved in with him to help raise me. She was in her early sixties, and her own son was long grown.”

  “Still, they were both fairly old to become responsible for a six-month-old baby.”

  “There were people who suggested that they should give me up for adoption, but they both refused. I think my grandfather felt guilty that he’d failed with my mother. As for Aunt Maureen, she was lonely and at loose ends since losing her husband and she told me later that I gave her new purpose in her life. Her son, my cousin Alex, was and still is a confirmed bachelor, so she didn’t expect grandchildren. She and Granddad both saw me as a way to atone for past parenting mistakes, I guess.”

  “A big load for a small girl to carry.”

  She shrugged.

  His eyes grave, he asked, “What was your childhood like?”

  “Quiet. Orderly. I had everything I needed.”

  “Not everything.”

  Because she couldn’t really argue with that, she let his comment slide. “I was a very good child,” she informed him. “I never broke the rules, never talked back, never missed curfew.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” he murmured.

  She drew another deep breath. Since she had told him so much already, she might as well tell him the rest. “When I was five, I told my grandfather that the house across the street was going to burn down. Two days later, it did.”

  “How did he react to that?”

  “With fear. And anger. He ordered me to close my mind to thoughts like that. He said they were unnatural. Probably unholy. And that they could only lead me into misery and isolation.”

  Ethan rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Your grandmother had the gift?”

  “Probably.”

  “Your mother?”

  She nodded. “Whenever I slipped during my childhood and said something I shouldn’t have known, Granddad gave me the lecture again. He said my mother had always pretended to be ‘special’ and that it had only led her into trouble. He said he had tried to punish those thoughts out of her and it hadn’t worked, so with me he wanted to use reason. Logic. He told me no one would like me if they thought I was weird. That people would be afraid of me. Or that they would try to use me to their own advantage. He told me that I should pray every night to be normal.”

  Ethan said something beneath his breath that might have been a curse.

  “He meant well,” she said wearily. “He’d seen his wife descend into depression and his daughter lose herself in drugs and rebellion. He didn’t want the same things to happen to me.”

  “So you listened to him.”

  “Yes. I worked even harder to be the perfect child. But I wasn’t very good at being ‘normal,’” she added with just a touch of bitterness. “I didn’t always know I was saying something that other people would find strange. So I quit talking much at all, which made me even more of an oddball among my age group. Nic was the first person I met who never seemed to find me strange. Who accepted my occasional insights with such matter-of-factness that it made me feel almost average.”

  “You continued to live with your great-aunt after your grandfather died?”

  “Yes. She was in good health until I turned seventeen, when she suffered a mild stroke. I took care of her during my senior year of high school and for six months after my graduation. She suffered another stroke then. A fatal one.”

  “That’s why you didn’t go to college. You were taking care of your aunt.”

  “She took care of me all those years. It seemed only right.”

  Ethan was quiet for so long that Aislinn became self-conscious again. What was he thinking? She didn’t want his pity; that wasn’t the reason she’d told him the things she had. She certainly didn’t want him to wonder about things like hereditary mental illnesses. He wouldn’t be the first to mention that possibility.

  After another few moments he said, “You’ve had an interesting life.”

  She was surprised into a weak smile. “Not so much. I told you, I’ve lived very quietly. I discovered my talent for cake decorating when I was in my teens and I parlayed it into a career. I learned to interact better with people through my business and I’ve made a few good friends. I’m quite content, but my life is hardly noteworthy. I suppose my mother was the one whose life could be considered interesting.”

  “Is she still living?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve never heard from her?”

  “I got a birthday card from her on my tenth birthday. All it said was, ‘I think about you every day.’ Granddad and Aunt Maureen considered not giving it to me because they thought it might upset me, but eventually they decided to show it to me and warn me not to read too much into it.”

  “It must have meant something to you for her to tell you she hadn’t forgotten you.”

  “I wasn’t sure how I felt about it,” she admitted. “In some ways, it was harder to know that she hadn’t forgotten me but she still chose not to see me. I still wonder what became of her. Why she left me with her father, whom she never got along with herself.”

  “If it’s true that she knew things, maybe she somehow understood that you would be better off there. That you would grow up safe and relatively happy there. You can’t argue that you’ve turned out well. You have friends, a nice home, a successful business. You probably had a much better life than you’d have had with her, drifting around in an old VW van.”

  “You’re right, of course.” But there had been many times in her quiet, predictable, ordinary life when she had fantasized about being on the road with her wild, free-spirited, adventurous mother.

  “Did she name you?”

  “Yes. I was lucky, I guess, that she didn’t name me Rainbow or Strawberry or Moonbeam, not that Granddad would have left it at that. Aislinn isn’t exactly a common name in Arkansas, but at least it sounds like a name. Even my middle name is ordinary enough.”

  “Joy,” he said, proving that he remembered. “Much better than my middle name.”

  Intrigued, she cocked her head. “What is yours?”

  His mouth twisted. “Albert.”

  She didn’t laugh. But it took an effort. “You don’t really look like an Albert.”

  “It was my grandfather’s name. My paternal grandfather. He lived in Michigan with his third wife. We used to go visit him when I was a kid. He had a fishing cabin on a lake that I thought was the greatest place in the world. I always said that when I grew up I was going to live in a house just like it.”

  “And do you?”

  “Pretty close. I’ve got a house on a river. You can fish off the dock in my backyard. Sit outside in the evenings and watch deer walk along the riverbanks.”

  “It must be lovely.”

  “I like it.”

  She stood to throw away the trash from their dinner. “Well,
now you know my entire life story,” she said lightly. “Sorry you asked?”

  He didn’t smile. “No.”

  “Anything else you want to know?”

  “How can you know what happened to Kyle and not know whether your own mother is still living? Or whether she had any other children?”

  She sank onto the foot of the bed, resting her hands on either side of her. “As I said, I almost never get any feelings that affect myself. I don’t know why I pick up some things and not others. It seems to be completely random and usually pretty vague. Today was literally the first time in my life I’ve been able to deliberately focus and pick up such clear details.”

  “Doing so seemed to take a lot out of you. You went out like a light when we got here.”

  “I felt completely drained,” she admitted. “It was a little unnerving, actually.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  She cleared her throat. “Sorry if I worried you.”

  He inclined his head. “I don’t know what to make of you,” he said after another pause. “I still have trouble believing that you can somehow know all these things.”

  “That’s understandable. I just hope you no longer think I’m some sort of con artist. Or crazy.”

  “I don’t think you’re a con artist.”

  After another moment she smiled ruefully. “I notice you didn’t reassure me about the craziness part.”

  He pushed his chair back from the table and stood, looking down at her with an expression she couldn’t quite decipher. “I told you once that I thought maybe we’re both crazy. The more we get into this bizarre investigation, the more I wonder if I was right.”

  Rising, she gazed up at him. “You came here because, even though it’s hard for you to believe, you had to know if there was a chance I’m right about Kyle.”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “What other reason would there be?”

  He reached out to cup her cheek in one hand. “You can’t think of any other reason I’d want to spend time with you?”

  Warmth flooded through her, centering in the skin beneath his palm. She blurted the first words that came into her mind. “You think I’m spooky.”