Mary?”
“Annabel, stop that whining!” the housekeeper warned with unusual sharpness. “Stop it this instant!”
The poodle slunk away into the hallway, casting a bitter glance over her shoulder as she did so.
“Mary?” Gina prodded.
“Yes,” the housekeeper said, rubbing the back of her neck with a weary sigh. “I’ve met her, all right. She was in the drugstore yesterday, and Maybelle introduced us. I knew the woman was interested in Roger, so I took a real good look at her.”
“What’s her name?”
“Lacey Franks.”
“And how old is she?” Gina asked.
“Probably about fifty, but she looks ten years younger than she is. Dyed hair,” Mary said. “Bright clothes and lots of makeup, but she’s careful with it so you can’t tell.”
Gina wound another fishing fly onto her vise, gripping the pliers in silence.
“She’s very stylish.” Mary looked down ruefully at her cotton dress and brown cardigan. “And she dresses to show off her figure, too. Yesterday when Maybelle introduced us, she was wearing a little yellow tennis dress with a sweater tied over her shoulders like the women in the television ads.”
Gina shook her head in amazement. “And our Roger is interested in her? He’s actually taken her out on a date?”
“More than once,” Mary said darkly. “Maybelle told me she saw them sitting in a booth at the Clamshell eating lobster, holding hands and laughing together like teenagers.”
“Well, for goodness’ sake,” Gina said, pleased by this image. “Isn’t that nice.”
Mary folded a plastic covering over one of the mixing bowls.
“Where does this Lacey Franks live?” Gina asked. “Does the local gossip network know anything about her?”
“Only that she’s supposed to be rich and her home address is somewhere in West Vancouver.”
“That’s a pretty posh area, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Mary said. “I really wouldn’t know.”
The cook got up, removed her apron and hung it in the pantry. With a softly worded good-night, she made her way out of the kitchen, leaving Gina sitting alone at the window, gazing thoughtfully out at the darkness.
ALEX COLTON, TOO, was gazing into the darkness through the window in his study. The sun had vanished below the horizon in a fiery ball of orange, and the light across the waters of English Bay had faded quickly.
At last he got up and prowled restlessly around the little room, picking up papers and setting them down again, scanning the shelves for a book to take up to his room later. But nothing looked interesting.
“Lord, how I need a holiday,” he muttered, returning to the window. “Or at least a change of scene.”
He thought about the vine-covered mansion in the Okanagan, and the newly papered room where he would soon be staying. The place was enormously appealing, especially with that air of bygone elegance that so perfectly suited the peaceful drowsy warmth of its rural setting.
It was odd, Alex mused, that Janice had never mentioned the hotel to him. She’d obviously learned about it years ago and set aside that brochure in anticipation of a time when they could travel there on a family vacation.
But for the past two years, Jan hadn’t been well enough to travel anywhere. And in the final months of her life, she often hadn’t even been able to remember her husband’s name or their daughter’s face, let alone the address of a resort hotel.
Alex gazed blindly out the window at the dark silvered water, trying to fight off the image of Janice’s twisted face, her body ravaged by an illness so brutal that in the end, it destroyed every vestige of dignity and composure. With a little shock of alarm, he realized he could no longer remember her as she’d looked before the illness. He picked up a photograph from his desk and studied the smiling image in the gold frame.
Jan had been slim and blond, with a delicate, almost angelic beauty that belied her determined nature. When they were first married all those years ago, he’d been surprised and a little taken aback to learn just how formidable—and stubborn—a woman she really was.
But even Jan’s strength had been no match for the crippling illness that was hidden in her body, biding its time, waiting to claim her.
He shook his head moodily, still watching as the last of the twilight glow faded beyond the horizon and the first stars began to glimmer over the waters of the bay. He found his mind returning to the old hotel on the lake and the young woman who apparently owned it. She’d been in his thoughts a lot these days, more than he liked to admit.
Slowly Alex sank into an armchair by the window and allowed himself to reconstruct the image of Gina Mitchell’s face. Everything about the woman was appealing. He liked the open frankness of her expression, the level brows and calm hazel eyes, her dusting of freckles and that cropped curly mass of dark hair. He even admired the boyish athletic look of her body.
He smiled, recalling the way she’d emptied her pockets and solemnly lined up those delightful little objects along the top of the stone wall. At that moment he’d been completely enchanted by her. He would have liked to reach out and touch the skin of her bare arm, ruffle her hair, maybe—
Alex shook his head abruptly, the smile fading.
Not a very attractive line of thought, he told himself, for a man whose wife had been dead for little more than three months.
But Jan had been lost to him for a long, long time. When her symptoms had become too obvious to ignore and she’d finally allowed herself to be examined, the diagnosis itself had been a sentence of death. Both of them knew it. But before death had finally claimed her, the illness had been lingering, so excruciatingly painful both physically and mentally that it had drained every bit of strength from all three of them.
For the last three years, Alex and his wife had no physical relationship apart from the care he gave her and the comfort he could sometimes provide by holding her in his arms. Toward the end, even his touch was too painful for her to endure.
Alex didn’t like to dwell on his own suffering, because he knew that his daughter had endured far more pain. As a girl just entering adolescence, growing into the knowledge of her own womanhood, Steffi had watched her mother fade from strength and beauty to utter dependence. She’d witnessed the deterioration of that lovely body and powerful mind, and gradually come to understand that nobody in her life, not even her father, could protect them from this horror.
He and Steffi had once been so close. Alex was desperately concerned about his daughter’s moody silence and increasing withdrawal. No matter what he did, she seemed to retreat farther from him every day into a place he couldn’t follow.
He put the worried thoughts from his mind and returned to his computer, forcing himself to spend a couple of hours in concentrated work on the final column before his trip to Azure Bay.
At last, when he was too tired to see the computer screen clearly, he got up and pulled the draperies across the darkened window, then went into the kitchen to make coffee and help himself from the bowl of cold pasta salad left in the fridge by his housekeeper. Finally he cleaned up the table and climbed the stairs, stopping outside a closed door in the upper hallway.
“Steffi?” he called softly. “Are you awake?”
No answer. After a moment he pushed the door open and went inside, pausing by his daughter’s bed to look down at her. She was in her long plaid nightshirt and sleeping soundly. Her lips were parted, hands curled under her chin like a small child, and she was bathed in the soft pink glow of a night-light shaped in the form of a rosebud, which had been in her room since she was a baby.
Alex