at peacemaking. All the old hurt and bitterness boiled inside her anew, obscuring the joy and the guilt. Her mind wasn’t capable of dealing with many emotions at once, and so it seized upon the strongest. Stubborn pride tilted her chin up as she stared into the face that so resembled the ghost of her own past. “What are you doing here?”
Rachel felt disappointment crush her. She didn’t try to stop the tears from springing into her eyes, but she did manage to keep the sorrow out of her voice. “I came to help you. Dr. Moore called me and told me about your illness.”
“Broderick Moore is a Nazi and a fool. There’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t need your help,” Addie said coldly. She turned toward Bryan. “I have Hennessy to help me.”
Bryan took an involuntary step backward. He already felt like a voyeur, watching the interchange between mother and daughter; now he felt like an interloper as well. Rachel glared at him, her violet-blue eyes luminous with tears, and he held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. He shot a look at Addie. “Addie, you know I’m here only to look for Wimsey.”
“Well, I don’t know why you can’t find him,” she grumbled as her mind tuned out. “He’s all over the place.” She turned and started to shuffle down the hall, her green rubber garden boots scuffing against the marble floor. “I’m going to feed Lester. I’m sure you forgot to do it. No doubt practicing your smooth lines in front of a mirror again. Big Irish rascal.”
Bryan rubbed a hand along his jaw, realizing dimly that he had forgotten to shave. He didn’t know quite what to say to Rachel, who stood in the foyer looking like a piece of crystal on the verge of bursting into a million shards. It suddenly didn’t matter what kind of daughter she’d been, it was obvious Addie’s cold reception had hurt her, and almost certainly the decline of her mother’s mental state had shocked her. He couldn’t feel anything now but sympathy for her and the desire to take her in his arms and hold her.
“Dangerous thinking, Hennessy,” he mumbled to himself. “Don’t get involved. Make a note of that-don’t get involved.” He patted his shirt pocket, looking for his pencil, but it was gone again. “And don’t forget to shave tomorrow.”
“What was that?” Rachel asked. If she could not function in any other way, she could at least be polite, she thought ruefully. Wasn’t that one of the Lindquist rules of deportment? A hysterical little laugh threatened but never emerged from her throat.
Bryan blushed a bit. “Nothing.”
Rachel hugged herself, trying to ward off a chill that came from within. “I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything better than that,” she murmured to no one in particular. Her gaze followed her mother down the hall into the nether reaches of the big house. “She never wanted me here before. Why should she want me here now?”
“You tried?” Bryan blurted out. Shame crawled around in his stomach. It hadn’t occurred to him that Addie’s side of the story might have been biased.
Rachel gave him a cool look, her pride returning to rally around her. “There are lots of things you don’t know, Mr. Hennessy.”
Bryan pushed his glasses up on his nose and nodded. “Oh, yes. I readily admit there are lots of things I don’t know.” He tossed her his most inane grin in an effort to lighten her mood and said, “ ‘A man doesn’t know what he knows until he knows what he doesn’t know.’ Thomas Carlyle. I’ve adopted that as my motto.”
“I see,” Rachel murmured, though she clearly didn’t.
Bryan was unconcerned. The point was, Rachel’s eyes had lost their tragic quality. She was no longer staring after Addie with an expression of shattered hope. She would have to deal with those feelings later, he knew, but at least the intensity of the impact had been defused.
He stuffed his hands into the front pockets of his jeans and gazed up at the chandelier, his blue eyes drowsy with thought. “Of course, John Wooden once said, ‘It’s what you learn after you think you know it all that counts the most.’ For instance, did you know that an alligator’s length in feet is the distance between his eyes in inches?”
Rachel opened her mouth to comment, then closed it and simply stared at him. How had he gotten on this topic? Who in his right mind would try to measure the distance between an alligator’s eyes? The man was a lunatic. A rumpled, handsome lunatic.
She shook her head, deciding she had to be a little off the beam herself to be going on this way about how sexy this strange man was. Finally she decided to ask a question that seemed more pertinent. “Who’s Lester?”
Bryan sobered and sighed. “There is no Lester. Um… your mother thinks she owns a parakeet.” He shrugged apologetically. “If she does, I haven’t been able to find it.”
“Oh.”
“I keep meaning to buy her one, but I forget things. I’m sure I’ve written myself a note about it,” he said, pulling a fistful of paper scraps from his pants pocket. He sorted through them, frowning.
“That’s all right,” Rachel said.
Addie thought she owned a parakeet. This man, who was a virtual stranger, intended to buy her one to placate her. How sweet. What a sweet, sexy, rumpled con man he was. Her heart warmed, then she caught herself and shuddered, cursing her wildly swinging emotions. She felt as if she were trying to keep her balance on the deck of a ship pitching violently in a stormy sea.
Stuffing his notes back in his pocket, Bryan watched her from under his lashes. She looked so lost. In a way it made him think of Addie at the instant her mind snapped from normal to non-functioning. But then Addie would retreat into her fantasies. Rachel didn’t have that option.
Without thinking, he took a step toward her. Odd, but he felt almost as if he’d been pushed toward her. When he caught himself he had already begun to reach out to her. Stopping in his tracks, he slapped his hands together and tried to look decisive. “You must have a suitcase or something out in your car. I’ll go get it.”
He turned and let himself out, taking big gulps of the cool night air as he crossed the porch and jogged down the steps.
“Holy Mike, that was a close call, you moron,” he grumbled to himself. His sneakers crunched on the gravel drive as he headed for a beat-up little Chevette that was parked beside Addie’s old Volvo wagon.
The farther he got from the house, the steadier he felt. The sea air was refreshing. Moisture from the fog that had rolled in at sunset dampened his skin. He leaned against the roof of the little car and let the sound of crashing waves wash the tension from him.
Drake House stood on a cliff overlooking the bay on the very northern edge of Anastasia. Because of the lay of the land and the size of the estate, its nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away. The house on its lonely precipice was a giant sentinel, a gaudy reminder of a bygone age.
It might have looked like a happy, magical place once with its turrets and gingerbread and gables. Now, run- down and in dire need of a coat of paint, it looked like something out of a horror movie. The land that stretched out before it had at one time been a beautifully manicured lawn. There had been gardens and even a maze. He’d seen pictures of it in
The few people who came to visit Drake House called during daylight hours, bowing to superstitions they would never voice. Most of them came to browse through the antiques Addie had collected to sell. The kids of the town sometimes came to the end of the driveway at night. Bryan had seen them-groups of four or five kids who weren’t brave enough to come any closer. They stood down at the gate, shoving each other through the portal but never farther. They were thoroughly convinced the place was haunted. They were also scared to death of Addie.
Addie. Bryan glanced up at the house and caught a glimpse of her silhouette as she passed a window. He knew she was going to all the bird cages she had collected, filling the little dishes with seed. In the morning he would clean the trays out before she got up, or she would be upset thinking there was something wrong with Lester. It never seemed to bother her that Lester wasn’t in any of the cages. Unless, of course, she was seeing birds that weren’t actually there. Ghost birds.
He found his pencil and a crumpled bit of paper and made a note of that, then shook his head as he tucked the scrap of paper into his hip pocket and forgot about it. Addie could be fairly lucid. At times she was sharp as a tack. Then in the blink of an eye she would be talking to people who weren’t there, feeding birds she didn’t own.
It was a sad situation, but it wasn’t any of his business, he reminded himself. He’d dealt with his own sad situation; he didn’t need to get wrapped up in another.
Rachel watched her mother go from bird cage to bird cage, panic tightening her throat. Addie couldn’t be this
