The Marriage Contract. Anna Adams
and her husband, an ambitious attorney whom Clair’s father had nicknamed the Judge, hadn’t been the only ones to look the other way when Social Services had cast around for someone who might take Clair in. None of the people she’d thought were like family had found room for her.
Which made Mrs. Franklin’s invitation all the more suspect. She’d asked for whatever time Clair could spare. Clair reminded herself to be wary. People rarely made such generous offers without an ulterior motive.
She slowed her car at the small elementary school, and memories assaulted her, of books and paper, overheated children who played hard outside at recess. Her memories had never left her, had, in fact, grown more important to her, because they formed a lifeline back to Fairlove.
The bell at Saint Theresa’s began to peal, a call to morning prayers, and Clair turned her car toward the sound. Those deep chimes had punctuated so many moments of her first fourteen years. She was glad she’d broken her trip from Boston in D.C. the night before. She’d wanted to arrive with the morning bells.
As soon as she rounded the corner into Church Street, she saw him. Nick Dylan. The man whose father had destroyed her family. Tall, lean and prosperous-looking in a dark suit and a long black overcoat, he was carrying what appeared to be shirts from the dry cleaners.
Clair began to shake as she saw him approach a Jeep and open the door. The long dry-cleaning bags twined around his body. She slowed as he tucked his laundry in his back seat.
Good. With any luck, he was on his way somewhere else. Since the cleaners was closed on Sunday, he must have brought the shirts from his house. Maybe Fairlove wouldn’t keep him now that his father had died.
He straightened, and the wind lifted his jet-black hair. She glimpsed his sharply etched, aristocratic Dylan face, dark eyes that met hers and instantly flared. Clair looked away, but she couldn’t help looking back at him. His pale, shocked expression struck her as she passed him.
Barely three feet separated them, a space poisoned by years of family enmity. Clair clamped her teeth together, to keep from shouting her frustration. How could she have prepared herself for a Dylan mundanely packing his shirts in a car?
Rattled, her heart pounding, she drove twice around the square. People stared, but no one else recognized her. To push Nick Dylan out of her mind before she saw Mrs. Franklin, she concentrated on the buildings.
A landscaper had taken over the old ice-cream shop. The local newspaper had bought out Mrs. Clark’s sewing-and-crafts shop and added on to their property.
Clair fought back unwanted tears. The sheer, comforting familiarity of these streets and buildings brought her past back to her. Her memories hadn’t just been myths she’d created to help her survive in foster care.
She turned down the town’s outer road toward the high school where she’d been in her first year when her parents had died. Those rooms hadn’t left a strong impression. Nor had the apartment block behind the school, where they’d lived until her father died, a victim of his own sense of failure after he’d lost their house to Senator Dylan. After her father’s death, her mother lost interest in everything. Including her own life. Within months she’d suffered a heart attack and followed her husband to the grave.
Clair looked up the hill. If her home still existed, thick evergreens hid it from her, but the Dylan home remained as commanding as ever. An image of Nick flashed through her mind, but his stunned expression got all mixed up with his father’s customary contempt.
She turned away from that house, determined to conquer the pain that still tore at her. She shouldn’t have come this way. She drove straight to Mrs. Franklin’s bed-and-breakfast, determined to live in peace with her memories of the Dylans.
Her other choice was revenge. A pointless exercise that couldn’t bring back the parents and the home she’d lost.
Clair parked at the bottom of the steps in front of the bed-and-breakfast and climbed out of the car. She swung her backpack over one shoulder. Caution moistened her hands and dried her mouth.
She marched up the stairs and then curled her fingers around the cool brass door handle. Counting two quick breaths, she pushed the door open and stepped into a shadowy hall. Overhead, a fan’s blades whiffed in rhythmic puffs of sound. She waited for her eyes to grow accustomed to the subdued light.
“Clair, you’ve come home.”
Her heart hammered. Home. She knew this woman’s voice—rich, ragged around the edges. Selina Franklin had been a frequent visitor at Clair’s house. She’d brought homemade oatmeal cookies and sock puppets with black button eyes.
The shadow in front of Clair slowly formed itself into a woman who seemed too short to be Mrs. Franklin. Clair had last seen her through the back of that Social Services van. Her memory of her mother’s friend was all bound up with a painful mantra the woman who’d driven her to D.C. kept repeating. “You can’t stay. You have no one here to take care of you.”
That memory had become a nightmare. Mrs. Franklin must have known how she’d felt. Old resentment she no longer wanted to feel rose in her and she swallowed convulsively.
The other woman lifted pale hands to her own throat. “Can you be Clair?” A slight change in the arrangement of lines around her mouth conveyed her welcome. “You look so much like your mother that for a moment I thought you were her. Sylvie was your age when I first met her, when she came here to teach. What are you now? Twenty-four?”
“Twenty-six.” Clair drank in the other woman’s delicate features, pale blue eyes she remembered laughing at her mother’s jokes, a generous mouth that had grown thin after her parents’ deaths. “How is the judge?”
“He lived up to your dad’s expectations. The governor appointed him to the bench about ten years ago.” Mrs. Franklin turned to pluck an object from a cubby behind her desk. “I’m so glad you’ve come. I’ve given you a room, because I thought you’d be more comfortable on your own than staying in my guest room.” She slid a big old-fashioned key across the desktop. “I’m not sure how many of your friends are still in town. Most of our young people seem to leave these days. Except for Nick Dylan.” Clair stiffened at her mention of the Dylan name, but Mrs. Franklin went on, her words tumbling over each other. “He took over Dr. Truman’s practice last year, and he refuses to leave.”
“Refuses?”
“Apparently. Because every time I go past his office it’s empty. People don’t go to him unless they need serious help fast. Maybe he should advertise.”
Trying not to see his shocked face in her mind again, Clair reached for the registration book on its spindle. Mrs. Franklin spun it away from her.
“Don’t bother. You’re my guest. You know, you’ll probably see Nick sometimes. You can understand the quandary folks find themselves in. Honestly, who wants to take her bunions to Senator Jeffrey Dylan’s boy?”
Clair concentrated on Mrs. Franklin’s widow’s peak. Why did the woman go on so about the Dylans?
“I guess you heard about Jeff?” Mrs. Franklin said.
She meant the fact that he’d died a month ago. The nation had mourned him. Clair could not. She adjusted her backpack strap. “I heard.” She searched her key for a room number, but nothing marred the smooth swirls of old brass. “Which room should I put my things in?”
“The Concord. A few years ago, I named the rooms for Revolutionary War sites. The tourists seem to like it.” Mrs. Franklin patted the scarred top of her eighteenth-century accountant’s desk.
Clair worked at a smile, bewildered by Mrs. Franklin’s rapid chatter and the watchful gaze that vied with her light tone. “How do I get to the Concord?” she asked.
“Take the elevator to the second floor and turn right. Three doors down on the left.”
“Thanks.”
“You haven’t said how long you plan to stay.”