Legacy of Lies (2 page)

“Sure.”

We passed a school, went a block farther, then took a right onto High. The street had a mix of houses, churches, and small shops, all of the buildings made of brick or wood. Some of the houses edged right up to the sidewalk; a few had tiny plots of grass in front of them. Pots of bright chrysanthemums perched on windowsills and steps. The sidewalks on both sides of High Street were brick and ripply, especially around the roots of the sycamore trees that lined the street. But even where there weren’t roots, the brick looked softened, as if the footprints of two and a half centuries had been worn into it.

“It’s pretty,” I said. “Are there a lot of wisteria vines around here?”

“People grow it,” she said, “but actually, the parcel of land that became the town was won in a card game called whist. That was the town’s original name. Some upright folks in the 1800s, who didn’t approve of gambling, added to it. I guess we’re lucky they weren’t playing Crazy Eights.”

I laughed.

“There’s my shop, Yesterdaze.” Ginny slowed down and pointed to a storefront with a large, paned window that bowed out over the sidewalk. “Next door is Tea Leaves. Jamie, the owner, makes pastries to die for.

“The town harbor is ahead of us,” she went on. “Only pleasure boats dock there now. I’m going to swing around to Bayview Avenue and show you where I live. You know you’re welcome to stay with me if things get difficult.”

“Difficult how?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I find it isolated out there on the other side of the Wist. And Scarborough House seems awfully big without a family to fill it up.”

“Is that why my grandmother invited me? She can’t get anybody else to come?”

“I doubt
that’s
the reason. Mrs. Barnes has never liked company- Whoa!” Ginny exclaimed, hitting her brakes hard, sending shoe boxes tumbling over the seat from the back of the station wagon.

A guy in an open-topped Jeep, impatient to get
around a car making a turn, had suddenly cut in front of us. The backseat passengers of the red Jeep, two girls and a guy, held on to one another and hooted. The girl in the front seat turned briefly to look at us, laughing and tossing her long hair. The driver didn’t acknowledge his near miss.

“Jerk,” I said aloud.

Ginny looked amused. “That was your cousin.”

“My cousin?” I twisted in my seat, to look down the side street where the Jeep had made another sudden turn.

“Matt Barnes,” she replied.

“I thought he was in Chicago.”

“Your uncle moved there, and Matt’s mother is somewhere in the North, I believe.”

“Boston,” I told her. It had been an ugly divorce, I knew that much.

“Matt has spent nearly every summer in Wisteria. He transferred to the high school here last winter and is living full-time with your grandmother. You didn’t know that?”

I shook my head.

“She bought him the Jeep this past summer. Rumor has it he’s getting his own boat. Matt’s usually carting around jocks or girls.”

Spoiled and wild, I thought. But things were looking up. No matter what he was like, spending two weeks with a guy my own age was better than being alone with a fierce seventy-six-year-old. I’d just fasten my seat belt and go along for the ride.

“Does my grandmother drive?” I asked.

“Pretty much like Matt,” Ginny replied, laughing.

When we got to Bayview, she pointed out her house, a soft yellow cottage with gray shutters, then returned to Scarborough Road.

We crossed the Wist, rumbling over an old bridge, drove about a quarter mile more, then turned right between two brick pillars. The private road that led to my grandmother’s started out paved, but crumbled into gravel and dirt. Tall, conical cedar trees lined both sides. They did not bend gracefully over the drive, as trees do in pictures of southern mansions, but stood upright, like giant green game pieces. At the end of the double row of trees I saw sections of sloping gray roof and brick chimneys, four of them.

“We’re coming up behind the house,” Ginny said. “The driveway loops around to the front. You’re seeing the back wing. That picket fence runs along the herb garden by the kitchen.”

“The house is huge.”

“Remember that you are welcome to stay with me,” she said.

“Thanks, but I’ll be fine.”

Now that I was here, I was looking forward to the next two weeks. I mean, how much of a terror could one little old woman be? It’d be fun to explore the old house and its land, especially with a cousin my age. Four hundred acres of fields and woods and waterfront-it seemed unbelievable that I didn’t have to share them with other hikers in a state park. A
wave of excitement and confidence washed over me. Then Ginny circled the house and parked in front.

“Megan,” she said, after a moment of silence, “Megan, are you all right?”

I nodded.

“I’ll help you with your luggage.”

“Thanks.”

I climbed out of the car slowly, staring up at Grandmother’s house. Three stories of paned windows, brick with a shingled roof, a small covered porch with facing benches-it was the house in my dreams.

I took my luggage from Ginny, feeling a little shaky. For the second time in twenty-four hours, I walked up the steps of the house. This time the door swung open.

two
 

Well, what is it?” asked a short, heavyset woman whose hair was tipped orange from an old peroxide job.

“I’m here to see Mrs. Barnes.” My voice sounded timid as a child’s.

Ginny climbed the porch steps behind me. “Nancy, this is Megan, Mrs. Barnes’s granddaughter.”

Nancy’s response was to turn her back and retreat into the house. I glanced questioningly at my mother’s friend.

“Nancy comes in three times a week to cook and clean for your grandmother,” Ginny informed me in a low voice.

“Is she always this friendly?”

“ ’Fraid so.”

Without stepping inside, I peered down the long,
unlit center hall. Nancy stopped at a door near the foot of the stairway, knocked, then entered. When she returned to us, she spoke to Ginny. “Mrs. Barnes wants to know how much she owes you for bringing the girl and whether you’d accept a check.”

A look of surprise flickered across Ginny’s face. “Please tell her it was my pleasure.”

“Thanks for picking me up, Ginny,” I said, slightly embarrassed.

“Sure thing. You know where to find me.” She squeezed my hand and left.

Score one for Grandma, I thought as I lugged my bags inside the house: I hadn’t even met her and already she’d made me feel like an inconvenience.

Nancy, having emerged a second time from the room by the stairs, fixed me with her eyes, then pointed a thumb over her shoulder. I figured it was a signal for me to go in. There was no chance to ask, since the housekeeper exited quickly through a door at the back of the hall.

I stood by the front door, considering my options. What would happen if I simply waited here? Who would give in first, me or Helen Scarborough Barnes?

I decided to take my time studying the center hall, which ran from the front door of the house to a smaller door under the main stairs, its wide plank floor covered with islands of rugs. I had never been in a hall large enough to contain sofas, side chairs, and tables. Heavy wood doors led into four rooms, two on each side. The broad staircase rose toward the back of the
house, turned and climbed several steps against the back wall, then disappeared as it turned again toward the front. A grandfather clock ticked on the stairway landing: 4:25.

“Megan.”

The voice was low and firm, used to being obeyed. I took a deep breath and walked down the hall, stopping inside the frame of the door. The room was a library, its dark walls lined with shelves of books. It smelled of leather and old fireplace ashes. I liked it immediately; I wish I could say the same for the white-haired woman who sat stiff-backed behind a desk.

She rose slowly, surprising me with her height. I was three inches taller than my mother, and so was she. Helen Scarborough Barnes observed me so closely I felt as if she were counting the threads in my clothes, adding up them and everything else she saw to see if I passed. Fine. I could study her, too, and decide whether she passed as a grandmother.

She had pale skin and high cheekbones. Her hair, pulled back in a French twist, and tiny drop earrings gave her a kind of elegance despite the fact she was wearing slacks. I met her light blue eyes as steadily as I could.

“You may sit down,” she said.

“I’d like to stand, if you don’t mind. I’ve been sitting all day.”

There was a slight pause, then she nodded and seated herself. “Just don’t pace.”

I felt an incredible urge to pace but kept it in check.

“How is your mother doing?” she asked.

“Good-
well,”
I corrected my grammar. “Did you know she finished her master’s degree? Last month she started a new job. She’s at the same school, but as a reading specialist. She loves the kids. She’s terrific with them.”

I knew I was chattering.

“And your brothers?”

“They’re great. Pete, who’s twelve, is into music. Dave’s ten and lives for sports.”

“And your trip here?”

“My father’s doing great, too,” I said, though she hadn’t asked about him. “He was honored by the Sonoran Desert Museum for his work with mammals.”

“Please answer only the questions I ask,” Grandmother told me.

“Just filling in the details,” I responded cheerfully, though we both knew otherwise. I wasn’t about to let Dad be cut out of the family.

“How was your trip here?”

“Fine.”

She waited a moment, perhaps to see if I’d fill in the details. I didn’t.

“I had expected you to come here in the summer, Megan.”

“As Mom explained to you, I go to a year-round school and had already committed myself to working
at a camp for my three-week summer break. October was the next free time.”

“What is your parentage?”

The sudden question took me aback. I stared at her for a long moment. “My mother is Carolyn Barnes, my father, Kent Tilby,” I said, as if that were news.

“You know what I mean, girl.”

I pressed my lips together.

“Your coloring is . . . unusual,” she observed.

I decided not to reply. I have straight black hair, which I keep shoulder length, gray eyes, and skin that refuses to tan. In the bronze land of Arizona, I stand out like a white mushroom, but I didn’t think that was the point of her comment.

Correctly deducing that she wasn’t going to get any information about my birth parents, Helen Barnes rose from her chair. “1 will show you your room.”

I followed her into the hall, fuming. I don’t know what I had hoped for from her. An effort to get to know me, a conversation that lasted longer than three minutes and revealed some interest in me, other than genetic? Some shyness or awkwardness that told me that she, too, had intense feelings about this first meeting? There was no such sign. Her eyes could have iced over the Gulf of Mexico.

“You will see the downstairs first,” she said.

I nodded. Apparently, “Would you like to?” wasn’t part of her vocabulary.

She showed me the three other rooms that opened off the center hall. Like the library, each had a high
ceiling and corner fireplace, but their walls were painted in bolder colors: peacock blue in the front parlor, bright mustard in the music room. The dining room, which was at the back of the main house and across the hall from the library, was blood red. All of the rooms had paintings with heavy gilt frames; the theme in the gory-colored dining room was animals and hunting. I hoped we ate in the kitchen.

“When was this house built?” I asked, abruptly turning away from an impaled deer.

“In 1720,” my grandmother answered, “by a family named Winchester.”

“When did our family move in?”

“The Scarboroughs bought the house, the land, and the mill in the mid-1800s.”

“Is that when our family came over from England?”

“The Scarboroughs”-she said the name clearly, as if to make a distinction between that family and what I called our family-“have been in Maryland since the 1600s. This land was purchased by the seventh generation as a wedding gift for a son.” She led the way back into the hall. “Carry whatever luggage you can,” she told me, resting a thin hand on the curved banister. “Matt will bring up the rest when he gets home from his study session.”

Study session?
I thought. Better not mention that my cousin had come close to hitting Ginny’s car when he was supposed to be hitting the books. I carried all of my luggage.

The trim in the upstairs hall was the same blue as
the parlor’s, but the walls were softened by faded wallpaper. A mirror, darkened with age, hung on one wall; on another were several photographs, old tintypes. My grandmother grew impatient as I looked at them.

“Megan.” She waited by the door at the top of the stairs, the only one open in the hall.

I entered and set down my bags. The square room had a fireplace in one corner and a four-poster bed in the center. Though the inside shutters had been pulled back and the windows opened, there was a musty smell, reminding me that a river was near.