“And those other two?”
“We’re staying out of one another’s way for the most part. Jamie and Gracie spend a lot of time down near the lake. The deck is mine unless Gracie decides to play out here, but she’s a good kid. She doesn’t bother me much. And the front porch is Kate’s.”
“Well, I hope you find some closure,” Aunt Ellie said. “I’m driving into my garage. Talk to you later. Love you, kiddo.”
Amanda flipped through the pictures of her and Conrad on her phone, taking time to touch his face on every one. He’d said his “sister” Kate called him Conrad but he hated that name. He’d always wished that their mother, Teresa, would have called him by his middle name, Jonathan, but his father’s name was Jonathan James Steele, so he had to be Conrad.
She rolled over to the last picture of them together. Aunt Ellie had taken it in the shop right before he had to leave the last time she’d seen him. His smile was genuine, and his eyes were twinkling. Yes, Conrad loved her. He might not have divorced those other two women, but she would never believe those stories about Iris or about him bringing other women to the cabin. Iris had probably only loved him like a son. If he was here, Conrad could explain the women that Hattie thought she saw at the cabin. They were most likely clothing store owners that he was trying to cultivate to sell him their sale merchandise at the end of every season.
Are you an idiot? a voice in her head shouted. Strange, but it sounded exactly like her best friend, Bailey, who had served as maid of honor at Amanda’s wedding. You should be throwing a hissy at that bastard, not moonin’ around after him.
She sat up a little straighter. Bailey was in Germany, stationed there with her husband, who was in the service, and Amanda hadn’t told her about the situation. Still, that was exactly what she would say if she knew.
Just to be sure, she sent a text to Bailey: Call me when you have time. Lots I need to tell you.
The phone rang before she could lay it back on the table beside her. Amanda hit the screen and answered. “Bailey, what are you doing awake at this hour? It must be four o’clock in the morning there.”
“It is, but I’m having one of those sleepless nights. Catch me up,” Bailey said.
“Conrad was killed,” Amanda said and went on to tell her the rest of the story.
“I knew there was something hinky about that man. I wouldn’t say anything only because you were so much in love with him. He had shifty eyes and wandering hands. I steered clear of him. What a mess.”
“I thought you’d support me.” Amanda pouted.
“Support you, yes. Listen to you defend a son of a bitch like that, no, ma’am. You need to wake up and smell the coffee or the roses or whatever the hell it is that you smell when you wake up. Take a lesson from those other two you told me about. Get an I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude or I’d-like-to-kill-him-again one, but stop feeling sorry for yourself and see him for what he was, and that’s a con man,” Bailey told her.
“He loved me,” Amanda declared.
“No, he did not. He didn’t love anything but the game,” Bailey shot right back. “I’m going to hang up now, and you think about the fairy tale you’re telling yourself and then think about the reality. Call me in a day or two when you figure out which one is really right. Good night.”
“’Night,” Amanda said, not bothering to hide her upset.
She hefted her weight off the lounge, stomped barefoot into the house, and went straight to her bedroom. She eased down on the bed and curled up around a pillow, pretending that it was Conrad’s back and he was there with her. A dozen pictures flashed through her mind, starting with the week she’d met him, the whirlwind romance, the small but pretty church wedding, the honeymoon in that very room, and then the shiny black casket at the graveside service.
Then the pretty things all disappeared and she could see a line of faceless women, all with numbers in their hands, lined up from the bedroom door, through the house, down all those steps and out to the lake. There was no counting the women that Conrad had slept with in this very bed. Her eyes popped open as reality hit her smack in the face. She slung the pillow across the room. Anger set in. She wanted to hit something, kick holes in the walls, burn down the cabin—anything to get the misery out of her heart.
“Damn him for doing this to me.”
Feeling as dirty, as if she’d been violated, she went straight to the bathroom and took a long, cool shower, washing her shoulder-length hair twice and lathering up her belly three times. “I will not name you after that man, my son. You’ll have a good strong Irish name, like Liam or maybe Desmond, and I will think of something else to tell you about your father. It won’t be that he was a hero. And you will not have any of his looks or ways. I’m your mother.”
She felt a little better once she finished and was dressed in a baggy T-shirt that came halfway to her knees. But when she went back into the bedroom, she could not make herself even sit on the bed. She paced around it a few times and finally turned her back, closed the door, and went to the living room, where she pulled the cushions from the sofa. She tossed them to one side and pulled out the hidden bed. It might not be comfortable, but it would be a place that Conrad had never used. Or was his name even Conrad? Maybe that wasn’t even the name on his birth certificate at all.
How do you know that? Bailey’s voice was back in her head. He might have used all the beds, including the sofa.
“Because the one thing that I can believe that he told me was that he hated to sleep on sofas. It reminded him of his childhood,” Amanda answered out loud as she went out to the deck, picked up her phone, and found a message from Aunt Ellie.
Rather than sending a text, Amanda called and ranted for half an hour about the bed. When she finished her aunt Ellie was laughing so hard she had the hiccups.
“Now there’s the red-haired fireball of a niece that I raised. I wondered when that wimpy woman that had taken over her body would be banished. Welcome back, real Amanda Hilton.” Ellie chuckled. “I will bring you a bed tomorrow. There’s an extra twin-size one in storage in my garage. I’ll be there by six, so be on the lookout for me.”
“Thank you, Aunt Ellie. It will be more comfortable than the sofa, I’m sure. And bring a five-gallon can of gasoline with you.”
Ellie gasped. “You will not set fire to a mattress in town. Those damn things burn forever, and the smoke would be awful. Besides, after all the women he’s had on the thing, the fumes might be toxic. We’ll talk about it when I get there.”
“Thank you, but I intend to burn it or take it to a landfill. I won’t have that thing in my cabin,” Amanda said.
“See you tomorrow. Anything else you want me to bring?”
“A loaded sub sandwich with cold cuts and lots of Italian dressing,” she said.
“You got it,” Aunt Ellie said.
She laid the phone to the side, picked up the remote, and turned on the television, but before she could flip through the channels, the sliding doors out to the deck squeaked open. Gracie didn’t pay a bit of attention to Amanda but headed straight to the bathroom with Jamie right behind her.
Jamie stopped in her tracks and raised an eyebrow.
Amanda narrowed her eyes and shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m not sleeping in that bed another night. Aunt Ellie is bringing me another bed tomorrow after she closes the shop. Good night.”
Jamie giggled.
“What’s so funny?” Amanda asked.
Jamie stopped and looked back. “It took you long enough to figure it out.”
Kate smiled as she came in the front door. “She’s young and slow.”
Amanda shook a finger at Kate. “Just because you are old doesn’t mean you are so smart. You married him, too.”
“Yes, I did. But I did not spend one night in that bed.”
“Me, either,” Jamie yelled from the hallway.
“And I won’t spend another one,” Amanda declared.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was one of those days when if something could go wrong, it did. Even if there was no way something could go wrong, it did anyway. Kate started out the morning by burning her breakfast toast, spilling coffee all over her favorite pajamas, and killing a spider on the kitchen counter. She’d just put the ingredients for a smoothie into the blender when someone knocked on the door. On the way to open it, she stumbled over Amanda’s flip-flops and almost fell face-first across the living room floor.