The Bridesmaid's Gifts Read online

  “Which would be?”

  “The state of Georgia has some connection to your family.”

  “Georgia,” he repeated.

  She nodded.

  “I’ve never been to Georgia. As far as I know, my family has no connection to the state. We lived in North Carolina before we moved to Alabama.”

  “I don’t know what the connection is. Just that your search will eventually lead there. Whether it will end there, I don’t know.”

  Having nothing else to say about that at the moment, Ethan finished the last of his oatmeal, then set his spoon in the empty bowl and reached for his coffee. “That was good. Thank you.”

  Clasping her hands in front of her, she nodded. “You’re welcome.”

  He drained his coffee cup and set it next to the bowl, giving himself a moment to choose his words. And then he looked somberly at her across the table.

  “I still don’t know exactly how to get started, but I’ll look into all of this,” he said. He had told her that before but had yet to make the first inquiry. Probably because doing so would have felt almost tantamount to saying he believed she somehow knew things that other people did not, and he hadn’t been ready to do that.

  She surprised him then by smiling, though faintly. “You still think I’m a nut. And maybe you’re right. But I wish you would look into it.”

  Actually, the more he got to know her, the less he thought of her as a nut. Which didn’t mean he accepted everything she said, of course, but he was beginning to acknowledge privately that there were things about Aislinn that weren’t easily explained.

  She rinsed out their bowls and stacked them in the dishwasher. He stood and picked up the sketch pad, examining the drawing again. Kyle had been little more than a baby when he was lost in that storm, and Ethan’s memories of him were hazy, to say the least. But he had looked at enough photos of his little brother to believe that this could be the man he would have become. This drawing resembled quite a bit photos of their father at that age, actually.

  “Do you mind if I take this?”

  Glancing over her shoulder, she shook her head. “You’re welcome to it.”

  “Thanks.” He tore the page neatly from the pad, folded it and slipped it into his shirt pocket. “I’ll let you know if I find any evidence at all that either Carmen or Kyle survived that flood.”

  “Thank you.”

  She walked him to the front door. He looked around a bit more on the way through the house this time. Her home was tidy, as he had expected, but he was a bit surprised by the lack of color. Shades of brown and cream. Relaxing, he supposed, but it lacked a certain…spark. Passion.

  Come to think of it, she tended to dress much the same way, he thought, glancing at her jeans and navy T-shirt. Somewhat colorless. Subdued. With the exception of the flame-red dress Nic had chosen for Aislinn’s bridesmaid dress, he couldn’t remember ever seeing her wearing bright or bold colors. Another sign of her determination to fit in? Not to call attention to herself, outside of the spectacular cakes that took so much of her time and effort?

  They reached for the doorknob at the same time, his hand landing on top of hers. He should have removed his immediately, but instead he lingered, intrigued by the feel of her. She glanced up at him, their eyes meeting. Holding.

  She really did have amazing eyes. So dark and deep he could almost fall into them. And her lips. Full. Curvy. Just slightly parted in an invitation he doubted was intentional. Her flawless skin was fair in contrast with her dark hair and eyes, a slight wash of color warming her cheeks as he studied her. He could easily imagine how soft it would feel against his palm.

  From the first moment he had seen her, he had been aware of her beauty. He had pushed the attraction to the back of his mind as he had tried to deal with his wariness of everything else about her.

  She didn’t go pale in response to his touch this time. Instead, her cheeks turned pinker. He wondered what visions, if any, were going through her head this time. He certainly had a few of his own—not that there was anything at all otherworldly about them.

  Because those images were becoming just a bit too vivid, he removed his hand slowly, letting her open the door for him. She turned the knob, then stepped back to allow him to pass through the open doorway.

  His intention was to walk to his car without looking back. Her voice stopped him before he stepped off the front porch. “Ethan?”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “Yes?”

  “Be careful at the stoplight.”

  “What stoplight?”

  “Every stoplight,” she answered and closed the door.

  Shaking his head, he climbed into his car. Seemed like every time he managed to forget the more troubling things about her, she found a way to remind him. Be careful at stoplights? What sort of psychic advice was that? Wasn’t that sort of a “duh” admonition?

  And yet he found himself hesitating when the light turned green, long enough for the guy in the pickup truck behind him to blow his horn impatiently. Shaking his head at his own gullibility, he started to accelerate—then slammed on the brakes when a teenager in a wannabe sports car squealed through the intersection, not even slowing for the red light.

  Had Ethan not waited, the kid would have broadsided him. As it was, he came within an inch of being rear-ended by the pickup, which had moved forward when he did.

  Drawing a deep breath to steady his pulse, he proceeded on with caution. There were definitely things about Aislinn that were getting harder all the time to explain, he thought grimly.

  Chapter Seven

  Even as he dialed his parents’ phone number Wednesday evening, Ethan wondered what he was doing. Was he really starting an investigation into his brother’s death? All because Aislinn had a feeling Kyle was still alive?

  Remembering the incident with the traffic light, he glanced at the drawing that lay beside him. So maybe it was worth asking a few questions. “Mom? Hi, it’s me.”

  “Ethan. Hi, sweetie, how are things there?”

  “Okay. We installed some new software on Joel’s computers today. Should simplify his bookkeeping quite a bit.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. Are you almost finished with his new business plan?”

  “Yeah. I think he’ll see a jump in profits within the next few months.”

  “You didn’t increase his prices, did you, Ethan? Because you know, he takes care of a lot of children whose families don’t have a great deal of money.”

  “I’m not advising him to gouge his patients, Mom. Nor their insurance companies. I’ve simply found places where he and his partner and staff could cut overhead and minimize waste.”

  “Oh. That’s good then.”

  He smiled faintly. “Yeah. That’s good.”

  Shifting into a more comfortable position in his brother’s easy chair, he cleared his throat. “Mom, do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions about Kyle’s accident?”

  After a slight pause, she replied, “No, of course not. But what made you think of that tonight?”

  He had no intention of mentioning Aislinn, of course. Instead he said, “I guess it’s just been on my mind for the past few days. It’s been thirty years next month, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes.” She obviously hadn’t needed the reminder of the sad anniversary. “What do you want to ask, sweetie?”

  He’d made a few notes. He glanced at them, though he didn’t want to sound too prepared to his mother. “The nanny—Carmen Nichols, right?”

  “Yes. You should have some memories of her. She was with us from the time Kyle was only six months old. That’s when I went back to my volunteering and charity work after his birth.”

  Ethan knew his mother still struggled with guilt that she hadn’t been home with Kyle that day. Though she had never worked out of the home full-time after having children, she had been extremely active in local schools and charities, spending part of almost every day volunteering and organizing fund-raisers and other events. It had been alm
ost a year after Kyle’s death before she had been able to start volunteering again, and then only during the hours when he and Joel had been safely in school.

  As much as he hated bringing those bad memories back to her, he pressed on carefully. “She was nice. Sort of quiet, from what I recall. I remember that she was particularly close to Kyle.”

  “She adored him. Of course, she was with him more than she was with you and Joel. You were both old enough to be more self-sufficient when she joined us and you were involved in activities of your own before long—preschool and playdates, teeny-league sports activities, that sort of thing.”

  “How old was Carmen, anyway? I thought of her as being pretty old, but to a little kid, anyone over sixteen is old.”

  “She was just shy of thirty. She was only a couple of years younger than I was, actually.”

  “Older than the average nanny.”

  “A bit. But I’m afraid she wasn’t trained to do much else. She told me that she dropped out of high school during her junior year to get married to a young man in the Army. A few years later, he was killed in a rather sordid incident overseas—a bar fight or something—leaving poor Carmen with little means of support. She was estranged from her family, who hadn’t approved of the choices she had made, and she was pretty much on her own.”

  “How did you meet her? Did she apply for the job?”

  “Not exactly. I hadn’t quite decided whether to hire a nanny, but one of my friends suggested that I should meet Carmen. Carmen was working part-time for a day care center where my friend sometimes left her children, and my friend Angela was very impressed with her. She recommended her to me, and your father and I met with her and decided to give it a try. She was wonderful with Kyle, and you and Joel liked her, so it all worked out nicely. We never regretted hiring her. Even after…”

  Her voice faded, but Ethan was able to fill in the rest of the sentence. “So she just became a part of the family? Didn’t have an outside life of her own? No boyfriends?”

  “No. She had a couple of friends around town but no one particularly close to her. I used to try to talk her into going out more, getting a life outside of our house, but she was too shy. She said she was happy with the way things were and she made it clear that she didn’t want me to interfere, so I stopped trying. I always assumed she was still grieving over her husband and that she would decide in her own time when she was ready to move on.”

  “She didn’t live with us, did she?”

  “No, she had a little apartment not far away. Ethan, these are very odd questions. It isn’t that I mind answering them, but what has made you so curious about Carmen?”

  “Just working out some old memories in my mind,” he prevaricated. “Do you mind answering a couple more questions, even if they sound a little strange to you?”

  “All right. If it will help you.”

  “It will.” At least he hoped so. “Do you know Carmen’s maiden name? And where she grew up?”

  “Her maiden name was Smith, I think. And I believe she once told me that she came from Florida. I’m not sure how she ended up in North Carolina, where we lived.”

  “Does the name Mark mean anything to you?”

  “Mark?” She thought a moment, and then he could almost hear her shrug as she replied, “Not particularly. There’s a Mark who works in the post office I use. I know because it’s printed on his uniform shirt. And Mark Campbell, who goes to the same church your father and I attend. You know him, Ethan. He sells insurance.”

  “Yeah, I know him.” But he doubted that the balding, avuncular insurance salesman had anything to do with Aislinn’s premonition. His family hadn’t even moved to Alabama until several years after Kyle’s disappearance.

  There had been a time when he would have thought of it as Kyle’s death, he realized abruptly. Was he really letting Aislinn affect his thinking this much? Maybe he was if he was willing to put his mother through what had to be a difficult inquisition. And it was about to get harder for her.

  “Why do you ask about the name Mark?”

  He shook his head even though she couldn’t see him. “Just a name I thought I remembered.”

  It was the first outright lie he had given her about this, and he didn’t like the way it tasted on his tongue. He moved on quickly. “I seem to remember being told that no one knew exactly where Carmen was taking Kyle that afternoon. Is that correct?”

  After a moment of silence Elaine replied, “Yes, that’s right. As far as anyone knew, there was no reason for her to have left the house with him that day. She rarely took him out, except to the park, occasionally, and the weather was much too bad for that on that day. He didn’t have any doctor’s appointments, and as far as we could determine, she had no appointments, either. If there had been an emergency of some sort, we’d have expected her to try to reach someone, but we couldn’t find any evidence that she’d tried to call anyone.”

  “Strange.”

  “Yes. After obsessing about it for a long time, I decided she must have needed something from the store or some other sort of errand, though she drove much farther than she should have had to. There were plenty of stores and shops closer to our house than where her car was found.”

  “There were no witnesses to the accident?”

  “No one who was willing to stay around to talk about it, anyway.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t you remember us talking about it? Well, maybe you wouldn’t. Your father and I tried not to discuss the accident much when you and Joel were young. Anyway, there was an anonymous report. A woman called in the details of where Carmen’s car had gone off the road, but she didn’t give her name. By the time the police arrived, no one was there, though they found evidence that a car had gone into the river.”

  “How did they know it was Carmen’s car even before they found it?”

  “The woman gave a license plate number. She said she caught a glimpse of it just as the car went over. The police seemed to think she might have somehow caused the accident. Maybe skidded or crossed the center line into Carmen’s path, and didn’t want to admit it. She panicked, apparently.”

  “Yet she had the presence of mind to note the license plate number?”

  “Some people just notice things like that, I guess.” She sounded a little weary now, as if this conversation was taking a toll on her. “Anyway, the police found the car a couple of days later, some distance downriver. Very deep. As you know, they never found Carmen or Kyle. It was months later before they recovered the poor old man who was swept into the river in another part of the state the day earlier, when he got out of his flooded car in chest-deep water. Everyone said it was the worst flooding of the past fifty years.

  “That’s what made it even harder to imagine why Carmen would have risked taking Kyle out that day,” she added. “Everyone knew how bad the flooding problem was. The earlier drownings had been all over the news. It just didn’t make sense. It still doesn’t after all these years. I’ve just finally had to accept that we’ll never know the answers.”

  Something he should be telling himself, rather than following the suggestions of a pseudopsychic, Ethan reminded himself grimly. “That’s all I wanted to ask, Mom,” he said somewhat abruptly. “Thanks for being so patient, okay? I hope it wasn’t too distressing for you.”

  “Of course not, Ethan. I’m always available if you need to talk, you know that.”

  Feeling decidedly guilty now, he said, “Thanks, Mom. But you’ve answered all my questions. I’ll let you go now. I’m sure you have things to do.”

  “Actually, I do have a book club meeting this evening. But if you’d rather talk…”

  “No. Go to your meeting. And tell Dad hi for me, okay? I’ll see you both next week.”

  “All right. Good night, Ethan.”

  Feeling like a jerk, he hung up the phone. He wished he could say that conversation had managed to convince him that everything Aislinn had said was a load of bunk. Un
fortunately it had only served to remind him that there were still a great many unanswered questions about the events of that long-ago afternoon.

  While he wasn’t prepared to admit that Aislinn had provided any of those explanations, he knew his mind wouldn’t be at ease until he’d made an attempt to pursue a few more answers on his own.

  “You haven’t been cooperating with the staff, Cassandra. That isn’t like you.”

  She shook her head, speaking patiently. “It isn’t the way you make it sound, Dr. Thomas. I’m not exactly refusing to cooperate. I’ve simply chosen not to take the sleep medications anymore. They don’t help, and I don’t like the way they make me feel the next day.”

  “Then let’s try another prescription. There are several we haven’t tried yet. As you know, everyone reacts differently to medication, and there’s a good chance the next one won’t cause the aftereffects you don’t like. You need your rest. It’s obvious that your health is being affected.”

  She didn’t bother to argue with him on that point. She had been feeling weary. Lethargic. Too weak at times to lift her knitting needles. She never complained, but apparently the staff had been watching her a bit more closely than she had realized—and reporting their observations to her doctor. “I’ll be fine.”

  He frowned, and she could see genuine concern in his pretty green eyes. “I worry about you, Cassandra.”

  “Do you?” She smiled at him. “That’s very sweet, Dr. Thomas.”

  “It’s also my job.”

  Reaching out, she patted his arm in a maternal gesture. “But it’s more than that to you. You worry too much about us. Remember what I warned you about burnout.”

  “We aren’t talking about me,” he reminded her, though he couldn’t seem to help smiling back at her. “We were discussing you. You aren’t sleeping. You’re refusing your medications. And you haven’t been talking with your counselor. According to her, you’re always pleasant and polite but not at all forthcoming about anything that might be bothering you.”

  “I prefer to keep my problems to myself. Do you have any plans for the weekend, Dr. Thomas?”