Finding Ashley Read online

  The men she hired often commented to one another about how taciturn she was. She was a woman of few words. Norm Swenson, the contractor she used, always defended her. He liked her, and sensed that there was a reason for how hard she was on herself and others. Now and then he saw a spark in her eye and guessed that there was more to her than she let anyone see now.

  “There’s usually a reason for people like her,” he said to her critics, in his quiet New England way. He liked her, and enjoyed his occasional conversations with her, when she allowed that to happen. They talked about the house, or the history of the area, nothing personal. He felt certain there was a good person in there somewhere, despite her cold demeanor and sharp tongue. He always wondered what had caused it. One of his workmen called her a porcupine. It was an apt description. Her quills were sharp. The locals left her alone, which was what she wanted. None of them knew about Robbie. They had no reason to, and it was a part of her life, and a time, she didn’t wish to share with anyone. No one in the Berkshires knew anything about her history or personal life.

  The fact that Melissa had written under her maiden name of Stevens made her anonymous life in the Berkshires possible. She had kept Carson’s last name when they divorced, in part because it had been Robbie’s name too and was a link to him, and in part because the name Melissa Henderson rang no familiar bells for anyone. But “Melissa Stevens” would have woken everyone up to the fact that there was a famous author in the neighborhood. This way, as “Henderson,” no one knew.

  To their old friends in New York, who hadn’t seen Melissa in years, Carson always said that some people just never recovered from the death of a child, and Melissa was apparently one of them. It seemed a shame to everyone and many people said they missed her. Carson had his own struggles after Robbie’s death, but he had strengthened close personal ties, which had supported him. Melissa had severed hers and set herself adrift. Carson’s marriage to Jane suited his quiet nature better than his marriage to Melissa. There was a dark, angry side of her that ran deep, from the scars left by her parents. She had been happy with him but didn’t have her sister’s innocent, sunny nature. And Jane, Carson’s current wife, was a solid, stable woman. She didn’t have Melissa’s brilliant mind, enormous talent, or tortured soul, which was easier for him.

  Carson had talked to Hattie about it a few times in the early days after Robbie’s death. Hattie had thought it would soften her sister, but it had the opposite effect, and hardened her.

  Carson had always liked his sister-in-law, but lost touch with her when she went to Africa. He still had warm feelings for her. He had also sensed that Hattie didn’t want Melissa to think that she was disloyal, staying in touch with him once he had remarried, so Hattie no longer contacted him. She had written once to congratulate him when he remarried, and said that she was happy for him, and would keep him and his new family in her prayers. He never heard from Hattie again after that. All ties with Melissa were severed except for her yearly emails.

  Melissa’s literary career had taken off around the time that Hattie entered the convent, so Hattie hadn’t been present much during their marriage, but she had come to the hospital regularly when Robbie was sick, and had offered to stay with him so Melissa could get some rest. No matter how angry Melissa was at her for becoming a nun, Hattie’s feelings for her older sister had never wavered, and she was there until the end of Robbie’s life.

  Melissa had never invited her to Massachusetts once she left New York, and Hattie had never seen the house that Melissa loved so much. It had replaced people in her life, and the writing she had loved and been so good at. To Melissa, the house was enough, it was all she needed and wanted now. She didn’t want anyone in her life, and no contact with the people who knew her when she was married, and were aware of the fact that she had a son who died. She didn’t want to be the object of anyone’s pity.

  * * *

  —

  When Melissa finished sanding the door, she lifted it and carried it back into the house. She had grown stronger from all the work she’d done. She examined it closely when she set it back on its hinges, and studied the intricate molding she’d been sanding. She was satisfied with her work. She had removed all the old coats of paint, and had decided to varnish it instead. The original carvings and moldings were delicate and beautiful. You could see them better now. All she cared about was improving the house. It was a living being to her, her only friend.

  After her morning’s labors, she made herself a cup of coffee and stood drinking it, looking out past the lawn and the trees, and the gardens she had created, to the orchards in the distance. They harvested the apples and sold them at a local farmer’s market. She had the time and the money to do what she wanted and what she enjoyed. After five astoundingly successful bestselling books, she had enough money saved to live as she chose. She led a simple, uncomplicated life, and had more than enough in the bank. Two of her books had been sold as movies.

  For a while, she’d been one of the country’s most successful writers, and then she disappeared from public life, to the dismay of her publishers. Carson hated to see her waste her talent. But now, working on her house and property interested her more.

  She hadn’t been back to New York since she bought the house, and said she had no reason to. She had let friends fall by the wayside after Robbie’s death, and purposely avoided them. She didn’t want to hear about their children, or see them, most of whom were teenagers now, as Robbie would have been. At forty-nine, she knew there would be no more children in her life. Robbie had been the center of her universe, just as Carson had been, but that was all over now.

  Once in a while, she contemplated how odd it was never to experience human touch anymore. There were none of the adoring hugs as Robbie wrapped his arms around her neck and nearly choked her in his exuberance, or the gentle, sensual passion she and Carson had shared. She wasn’t close enough to anyone now to have them hug her, or embrace them in return. Now and then someone working for her would touch her shoulder or her arm, or her contractor, Norm, who was a friendly guy, put a hand on her back. It always startled her. It wasn’t a familiar sensation anymore, nor a welcome one. She didn’t want to remember what that felt like. Physical contact with other humans was no longer part of her life, even though it had been important to her before. In their early years, Carson considered her a warm person. And Robbie would respond to her saying “I want to give you a hug” by leaping into her arms, and nearly knocking her down to hug her. He had been a sturdy, happy boy, until he became too weak to walk or even raise his head, and she would sit beside him holding his hand until he fell asleep. In the end, he slept most of the time, as she watched him, making sure he was still breathing, and savoring every instant he was alive.

  “You can’t cut yourself off from everyone!” Carson had warned her after Robbie died, but she had. She had survived the worst that life could dole out to her, losing her only child. She wasn’t the same person anymore, but she was still standing and functioning. She used to love to laugh. Hattie had been livelier and more mischievous as a child, but Melissa had a good sense of humor. There had been no sign of it since Robbie got sick. The immensity of the loss had changed her.

  She rose early every morning and watched the sun come up, and then got busy with her day, doing whatever work was at hand, and she often went to bed soon after dark. She read at times, and liked to sit by the fire relaxing and lost in thought, but the memories snuck up on her then. She didn’t like giving herself time to think and drift back to the past, and avoided it. She was living in the present, and her present was the house she had restored, mostly by the work of her own hands. She was proud of the results and what she had achieved. The house was living proof of how far she had come since she had bought it, and a symbol of her survival. No one in the area knew how hard she had fought to cling to life and not give up when she’d lost the person she loved most. Working on the house had brou
ght part of her back to life, and kept her busy, happy, and fulfilled for four years. It was her therapy and had become one of the handsomest homes in the Berkshire mountains, with exquisite handcrafted workmanship. In its own way, it was a work of art. To Melissa, the house was alive, a living being to be cherished and embellished, and had become her reason for staying alive.

  She let herself think of her sister, Hattie, sometimes, with her fiery red hair and huge green eyes, like a pixie when she was a child. Her copper hair was hidden under her nun’s veil now. She had been a tomboy, and then blossomed into a beautiful young woman with a natural, striking beauty men were drawn to. Boys pursued her even when she was a teenager. Melissa, with dark hair and blue eyes, had a cooler beauty and seemed less approachable. When Melissa went to Columbia, she was more concerned with taking care of her sister than meeting men. She never dated until her junior year.

  When Melissa graduated from college and got a job, Hattie was sixteen and a beautiful, voluptuous young woman by then. All the boys at the school she went to in New York were crazy about her, which made it all seem even more absurd when Hattie decided to become a nun. She had always been the boy-magnet of the two of them and loved to flirt. Melissa was more reserved. Hattie was fun-loving, gregarious, and at ease with everyone. The idea of her being sequestered from the world seemed a criminal waste to Melissa. She was sure her sister would fly back out of the convent in six months, it was all a whim, but she hadn’t. She had stayed for eighteen years, faithful to a vocation Melissa couldn’t understand, and had never accepted, although she knew their mother would have loved it.

  They had shared an apartment until Hattie joined the order. Melissa met Carson around that time, before she published her first book, right after she wrote it. He sold it, and a year later they were married and she gave up their old apartment. She hated being there once Hattie was gone. It was silent and lonely, but she didn’t feel that way about her house in Massachusetts now. She was never lonely there, and had made peace with the solitude she’d chosen. It was a relief to be alone when she and Carson had separated in New York. They’d lived in Tribeca, and their marriage felt so dead to her by then that it was painful being with him, and she was grateful for her freedom when he left.

  She’d started looking for a house immediately, and had found the right one quickly. It was a merciful release when she left New York and started fresh. She didn’t have to look at Robbie’s empty room anymore. It was the end of the happiest time in her life, when Robbie was alive, which was nothing but a memory by the time she moved to Massachusetts.

  When Melissa went upstairs that night, after sanding the door all morning, she glanced at a photograph of Hattie in a frame on the desk in the small den off her bedroom. The photo was of Hattie dressed for her senior prom at her high school in New York. She was wearing a pale blue dress, with her bright red hair pulled back and swept up in a mass of curls. She looked sexy and gorgeous and was beaming in the picture. Melissa perfectly remembered the moment when she took the snapshot. She had helped her sister pick the dress. There were no photographs anywhere in the house of her dressed as a nun, only a few from their childhood and youth, which was how Melissa still thought of her. Her sister’s habit was a costume that made no sense to her.

  Melissa smiled briefly at the photograph of Hattie as she sat down at her desk and signed some checks, and then she went to bed to read for a while, before falling asleep. She always slept with the light on, to keep the memories at bay. She had gotten good at it over the years, and had learned to live with the loss. It was part of her now, like everything else that had happened to her, her marriage to Carson and the divorce, the career that was an unexpected, startling success that she walked away from, the people she no longer saw, the sister who betrayed her by becoming a nun and was a stranger now, the father who had died of alcoholism, and the mother who changed Melissa’s life forever and then died with none of their issues resolved, especially the most serious ones. As Melissa slipped into her comfortable bed, she had so much to forget. The ghosts of the past would haunt her if she let them, but she had become an expert at avoiding them. She looked around the bedroom and smiled. All that mattered to her was in the present. The past was buried and almost forgotten, a dim memory now. She was at peace in the silent house. She reminded herself that the past was gone, and she was happy now. She almost believed it, as she got under the covers and fell asleep, exhausted from the hard work she’d done all day. She had learned that pushing herself to her limits physically was the only way to escape the ghosts that still waited for her in the silent room at night.

  Chapter 2

  The day after Melissa had sanded the first door, she carefully took another one off its hinges. She carried it outside, put it on sawhorses, examined the work to be done in the bright sunlight, and got to it. Within half an hour, there was sweat pouring down her neck and back. The summer sun was blazing, and it was even hotter than the day before.

  An hour after she began, she picked up the door, leaned it against a tree, and moved the sawhorses. It was too hot to work beyond the shade. The air was still and she could hear crickets all around her. The sanding was painstaking work, but she enjoyed it. She ran out of sandpaper at noon, and pulled a T-shirt over the bikini top she’d been working in. There was no one around. It was a Saturday. There were groundskeepers working at the edge of the property, clearing away brush on the perimeter, and boys picking apples in the orchard to take to the farmer’s market. It was the hottest summer she’d experienced since she’d lived there. It had been hot and dry since April.

  Melissa drank a tall glass of water in the kitchen, and then went to get her bag and car keys. She had a list of things she needed at the hardware store, and it was only a ten-minute drive to the village. It was a small, quaint town, and at this time of year, the area was full of summer renters, families who came to spend the summer there with their children, as well as residents who lived there year-round like Melissa. She usually stayed out of the village as much as possible in the summer. She preferred the area in the off months when it was less populated.

  She had a car with four-wheel drive, but drove her truck into town, to bring back what she needed. She had a new wheelbarrow on her list, and a lawn mower part the head gardener wanted, the sandpaper, and weed killer. There was a time when she would have gone to Bergdorf’s to buy shoes in New York on a Saturday, or taken Robbie to buy a new windbreaker for school, or taken him to Central Park to play with him. They had rented a house on Long Island in the summer, and gone to Sag Harbor, where other couples and writers they knew spent their summers. But those days were long gone. The hardware store in the village was the main event for her now. She hadn’t bought new clothes since she’d lived there. She wore what was left of the wardrobe she’d kept. She’d given most of it away when she moved. She had no need for fancy clothes. She had no social life, and only wore jeans and her rough work clothes. The bikini top she’d worn was one she’d bought in the South of France, on a trip there with Carson and Robbie. She looked better in it now than she had then. Her body was toned and strengthened by four years of hard labor. She swam once in a while in a nearby lake in the off-season, or took a dip in the stream that ran through her property. No one saw her in the bikini or cared about how she looked. The T-shirt stuck to her as she drove to the village, her long, dark hair piled helter-skelter on her head again.

  Phil Pocker, who owned the hardware store, nodded at her as she walked in. The T-shirt she wore was an old faded one from her days at Columbia nearly thirty years before. He usually smiled at his customers, and was more effusive, but he knew better with Melissa. She rarely smiled, and was loath to engage in conversation, except to comment on the weather, or ask his advice about a product she had read about and wanted to try.

  “Hot enough for you?” he asked her with a serious look. He was in his seventies and had a son, Pete, who was about her age and worked in the business with
him. His son had never liked Melissa, and thought she was stuck up and unpleasant. Phil thought she was a beautiful woman, even though she didn’t talk much. She was tall and graceful, with a pretty face and a slim figure.

  “She’s not stuck up,” Phil had defended her. “She’s just quiet. She’s a woman of few words. She’s always polite to me. I’d rather deal with her than the summer folk around here. She knows what she’s doing, and her contractor, Norm Swenson, says she works harder than any of the men on her property. She hires from around here, and pays a good wage. She pays her bills on time. She’s a good woman. She’s just not friendly.”

  “That’s an understatement,” his son, Pete, had said. “She nearly took my head off and treated me like an idiot when I didn’t have the size wrench she wanted.”

  “It’s just her way. She doesn’t mean any harm by it.” He always gave her a pass. Phil and Norm agreed that there had to be a reason for how reclusive she was. She was still young enough, and striking looking, and there had been no sign of a man, or visitors of any kind, since she’d owned the property. Norm said that there were pictures of a boy around the house, but she had never said who he was, or if he was any relation to her. They both sensed something tragic in her background. It was in her eyes, and her stiff demeanor, as though she might break if you pushed her too hard.

  “I worry about fire this time of year,” Phil said to her, as he piled the objects on her list on the counter. She was going to pick up the wheelbarrow outside, and he said he’d have someone put it in the truck for her.

  “I worry about that too,” she said quietly. “I have my boys clearing away the brush down by the stream. I think it’s going to be a long, hot summer.” It was still only July.