If the Slipper Fits, page 1
ELAINE FOX
If the Slipper Fits
Contents
Prologue
“Why not just be honest and tell him you’re sorry…
Chapter One
The staff had been gossiping behind her back all week.
Chapter Two
Connor Emory felt the throb of the helicopter’s engine throughout…
Chapter Three
“He’s a Southerner.” Prin Walter threw the lump of dough…
Chapter Four
“Anne Sayer.” He forced a smile onto his face, the…
Chapter Five
Connor had forgotten the peace the sea could give. How…
Chapter Six
Anne walked back into the house through the front door—unusual…
Chapter Seven
“What an idiot!” Anne exclaimed, tossing the weekly newspaper down…
Chapter Eight
Anne trotted down the back stairs and out the side…
Chapter Nine
Connor pushed through the kitchen door and nearly ran over…
Chapter Ten
“They were probably saying how much they’d love to give…
Chapter Eleven
“Patsy, my dear!” Marcello stretched one hand out toward Connor’s…
Chapter Twelve
Connor knew the moment he went looking for her on…
Chapter Thirteen
“My heart,” Connor repeated.
Chapter Fourteen
“Surely he didn’t do it on purpose,” Anne said, looking…
Chapter Fifteen
Connor entered the upper hallway in time to hear his…
Chapter Sixteen
A bloodcurdling scream rent the night. Connor jerked bolt upright…
Chapter Seventeen
“What check?” Anne asked. Could all this be about some…
Chapter Eighteen
Anne’s hand shook as she knocked on the sitting room…
Chapter Nineteen
The words could have been Anne’s, Connor thought, watching the…
Chapter Twenty
“A—an apology?” she repeated.
About the Author
Other Books by Elaine Fox
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Candlewick Island, Maine
January 2003
“Why not just be honest and tell him you’re sorry the bastard didn’t die ten years ago? I know I am.” Anne Sayer’s grandmother stood at the kitchen counter, clattering through the silverware drawer, behind Anne at the table. Though the old woman was tiny and frail, her voice hadn’t weakened a decibel since Anne was a child.
“Well, Gramma, it’s a sympathy note,” Anne said. “I don’t think that sounds very sympathetic.”
On the sheet of notepaper in front of Anne were two words: Dear Connor. Written in her best script. Those two words had been staring at her for the better part of an hour.
She bit the end of her pen. It was the hardest note she’d ever had to write. And her grandmother wasn’t helping.
“I thought you were fixing my lunch.” Her grandmother’s walker squeaked as she wheeled it over to the pantry.
Anne glanced at the clock. “It’s only ten-thirty, Gramma.”
Delores Sayer made a grumpy sound.
Anne closed her eyes and pictured Connor’s face. Would he be surprised to hear from her? Would he see the return address and dread opening the envelope? Was it possible he wouldn’t read her letter at all?
It was all possible, she thought. He hadn’t heard from her in eleven years. He would probably feel all of those things—surprise, dread, trepidation.
Anger?
And yet, she had to write to him. She had to. There was no better time.
She put pen to paper.
I want you to know how very sorry I am to hear about the loss of your father.
Sorry for Connor, she thought. Not Bradford Emory, Connor’s father. As her grandmother’d said, the man couldn’t have left this planet soon enough to please Anne.
She dipped her head with the evil thought. No use thinking like that. The man was dead, and he’d taken the past with him.
I know how much you struggled to forge a closer bond with him. I hope for your sake that you succeeded. But even if you didn’t, Connor, it was obvious to all who knew him that your father loved you very much.
She paused, wondering if it was true, but she decided to let the sentence stay. It was, after all, a sympathy note. She didn’t need to be scrupulously truthful.
It was also obvious how very proud of you he was, and rightly so.
Behind her, the walker squeaked back to the kitchen counter, and something heavy thudded onto the Formica. Anne hoped her grandmother could refrain from breaking something, setting something on fire, or injuring herself for the few minutes it would take Anne to finish the note.
She studied the heavy, cream-colored notepaper before her. She’d bought it just for this purpose. Because it looked classy, adult, and she wanted him to think of her that way.
She sighed. As if he would notice what sort of paper she used. She’d be lucky if he even opened her letter.
She rested her head in one hand. How much more should she say? How plainly should she speak? What in the world would he think if she just flat out said Please come back to me?
She dropped the pen to the paper but didn’t write the words. It had been too long, of course. For all she knew he was in a serious relationship or engaged. Surely she would have heard if he’d married.
For all she knew, he’d forgotten her.
But what did she have to lose? She started writing.
Connor, I hope you will consider returning to Sea Bluff soon. It’s been too long, and…
And what? She struggled with her thoughts. She wanted to say what she meant, but subtly. She wanted to be clear, with ambiguous undertones. Or overtones. She wanted to tell him she wanted him to come back, without actually telling him she wanted him to come back. She wanted to accomplish the impossible.
She sighed and finished, You’ve been terribly missed.
She exhaled slowly. Was it too much? Should she take out the terribly?
She was overthinking this. She signed the note Love, Anne, folded it, slid it into the gold-lined envelope, and quickly sealed it. She pulled a stamp off the roll in front of her and aligned it carefully in the upper right corner.
“Gramma, I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, standing.
She crossed the kitchen, went down the short hallway, and opened the front door.
Delores groused back something about missing applesauce, knowing full well she’d finished it off the night before. She’d badgered Anne at length to be sure to put it on the shopping list.
Anne closed the door behind her. She walked quickly to the corner mailbox, opened the hinged door, and slipped the note in before she could think twice about it.
Then she walked back home, wondering how long it might be before she could reasonably expect a response from Connor.
As she closed the front door behind her and headed back down the hall toward the kitchen, reality closed in on her as tangibly as the gray walls of her grandmother’s tiny house.
And she wondered if there was any chance she’d hear from Connor Emory at all.
Chapter One
Sea Bluff
Candlewick Island, Maine
Six months later
The staff had been gossiping behind her back all week. And the worst thing was, they didn’t think she’d noticed.
“Mr. Franklin, be careful!” Anne said to the gardener more sharply than she’d intended as she rushed to grab the plant he’d nearly knocked off the pedestal in the front hall.
She was annoyed with all of them, she thought, glancing up at the bird circling the foyer’s ceiling over the heads of the rest of Sea Bluff’s core staff. The very staff she’d found whispering in empty rooms and darkened corners nearly every day since last Thursday. Whispering, that is, until she entered the room.
“I’m going to call Animal Control,” she said, striding toward the hall phone. “The new tenants are going to be here within the hour and I don’t want the entire staff in the front hall chasing after some crazed bird.”
“No authorities!” the gardener cried, his flinty eyes following the bird’s flight. “I got it. Look out!” he roared, heading toward Anne, his craggy face intent. A butterfly net—old, bent, and patched with panty hose—flew over his head like a battle flag.
Her pale blonde hair swinging into her face as she spun to follow the gardener’s path, Anne jumped aside and ducked as the bird careened around the front hall of the historic mansion.
The gardener stopped abruptly in the center of the hall, his eyes alert. The net drooped above him.
Everyone stood stock-still. Anne pushed her hair out of her face and looked at the five people drawn from their jobs to the bird “crisis”: the gardener, the handyman, the housekeeper-in-training, the cook, and the business manager.
Lois Marshall, who was accountant as well as business manager for Sea Bluff, had just displeased everyone by telling them to get back to work. “Work” being preparing the island’s largest, most famous summer “cottage” for the arrival of this season’s tenants.
Though best known for its stunning beauty—it was situated on four hundred sea-kissed acres at the northernmost point of the island—and the host of celebrities who had stayed t
Of course, some said she was killed by her own mother, who was also in love with the sea captain, but nobody really believed that story.
In any case, the captain died alone, having never married, and he willed the estate to his nephew, Cornelius Edison Emory, whose descendents had owned it ever since.
“Back to work, she says,” Prin Walter, the cook, protested. “Seems to me makin’ sure the house ain’t infested with wildlife is work.”
“Yes, but it’s work for only one,” Anne said firmly. “And Mr. Franklin is capable.”
A fluttering sounded to Anne’s right. She whirled and pointed past the Frederic Church landscape on the wall to the Florentine marble bust of Socrates near the curve in the massive Italian walnut staircase. “It’s over there.”
“Lord preserve us!” the cook said, her voice issuing the statement like a command to the Almighty. One side of her gray hairdo was ruffled where the bird had glanced off her head, and flour smeared her forearms. She must have been baking bread when the commotion had ensued. “You all know what a bird in the house means, don’t you?” she warned.
“Oh, I had a bad feeling this morning.” Hiding behind a robust Boston fern, the young housekeeper-in-training wrung her hands in her apron. As if greenery were not the very thing a panicked bird might look for, Anne thought. Adried leaf had dropped into her baby-fine red hair. “I’m a little bit psychic, you know,” the housekeeper added.
“Yes, Trudy, we know.” Anne sighed.
Trudy was one of the many young people who came to the island off the coast of Maine to work summers in the mistaken belief that Candlewick Island had something to do with witchcraft. “Wick comes from the word wicken,” Trudy had informed her during her interview several weeks before, “which means to bewitch.”
“A bird in the house means poop on the floor,” Lois Marshall told the cook. “Unless we do something quickly.” Her short, spiky hair and big, handmade silver earrings gave her a look in direct contrast to the old cook’s gray bun and flower-print housedress.
Completely practical, Lois was frequently exasperated working in the 1800s mansion on the cliffs with its colorful crew.
“It doesn’t mean anything bad, Trudy. It just means company’s coming,” the brash young handyman said, winking in the direction of the nervous housekeeper. “Better get your fancy dress apron on.”
“If Trudy is concerned, she can just go back upstairs and finish vacuuming those drapes.” Anne sent a stern glance to her young trainee.
The gardener, who’d been creeping across the ornate foyer with the skill of a man who’d stalked many a groundhog, made a lunge for the bird with the net. He missed. The chrome handle glanced off the marble bust and Socrates teetered, then toppled to the floor as the bird took off with renewed frenzy. Anne watched in horror as parts of Socrates’s face skipped across the floor to hit Prin’s white Reebok sneaker and Lois’s thick-soled oxford.
“Mr. Franklin, stop right now. This is not working.” Anne took several steps toward him, keeping one eye on the bird’s erratic flight. God only knew how valuable that bust was, and what if the next thing he took out was one of the oil paintings? Or part of the antique chandelier? “I’m calling Animal Control.”
But the gardener was already reaching into the air with the net as if he might catch the bird mid-flight.
“No, it don’t mean company’s coming.” Prin scooped up Socrates’s ear as if it were a dust bunny and dropped it into her apron pocket. “That’s when your nose itches. Bird in the house means you’re gonna kiss a fool, that’s what it means.”
Lois scoffed.
Anne looked around the foyer at the staff. “Just how many fools should we be expecting, Prin?”
Lois laughed, then raised her eyebrows toward her spiky hairline and directed a pert look at Prin. “Good point. We seem rather overloaded with them at the moment.”
Lois had been working with Anne for the better part of the last decade, and the two had formed a good rapport. While Anne had practically grown up working at Sea Bluff, starting out as a maid and working up to housekeeper, overseeing a staff that could balloon to twenty in the busy summer months, Lois had only arrived after graduating college in Boston. By then the Emorys, who owned the place, had stopped their yearly summer visits, and the house was leased, year after year, to whoever could afford it.
Now Anne was in the process of turning over her job as housekeeper to Trudy, so she herself could devote more time to her budding career as an events coordinator. There were so many events in the historic mansion on the cliffs each year that she’d become an expert at party planning, and was beginning to attract work outside the mansion. She’d even started a small, party-planning business on the side that she’d romantically named Glass Slipper Inc.
Still, her first love was Sea Bluff, and most of her business was there. Many tenants had passed through the mansion since the Emorys had stopped coming—the summer of 1992 being their last, Anne remembered all too well—a past list of which included corporate tycoons, foreign dignitaries and celebrities who used the place for everything from political benefits to charity balls.
Even Mara Hubert, decorating and lifestyle doyenne of the new millennium, had used the house. Not only had she filmed several Christmas specials there but she’d also looked into buying the place. The Emorys, however, had not been interested in selling.
“Bird in the house means,” the gardener said, turning ominously toward them, gray eyes fierce in his rocky face, “death.”
Even though the gardener was macabre on a daily basis, Anne felt a chill.
“Death?” Trudy breathed. “Oooh, I knew bad luck was coming…”
“Maybe it just means bad luck, like losing your keys or spraining your ankle,” the handyman told her, drawing himself up and putting a hand manfully on the hammer holster at his hip. He smiled reassuringly at Trudy. “Yeah, I think it’s just plain bad luck.”
“A bird in the house is bad luck for Socrates, anyway.” Lois bent and picked up the bust’s nose.
Anne laughed. Lois glanced her way and smiled cynically, which was the only way Lois knew how to smile.
“I don’t know what you’re giggling about, Miss Sayer.” Prin turned on Anne with a warning look. “You’re the one most likely to be kissing the fool, when he comes.”
“Missus Walter!” Lois admonished, sending the woman a scorching glance.
Anne looked at her in surprise. Prin loved nothing better than to warn people about their behavior, so why was Lois upset with her this time? Something had been making Lois tense all day.
Anne stepped into the center of the foyer. “As I said earlier, it’s time for everyone but Mr. Franklin to return to their duties. I’m sure our able groundskeeper will have no trouble keeping track of the bird until Animal Con—”
At that moment the ancient grandfather clock on the north wall decided to chime. Everyone in the room jumped.
Adrenaline shot through Anne’s veins, and she wished for the thousandth time she could get rid of the damn clock. It kept terrible time, chimed only when it felt like it—which was usually every six or seven days, but sometimes three times in one day—and had a gong so loud that it could peel the skin right off your body if you were standing too close.
Startled, the bird dive-bombed her head. Anne ducked as it careened toward the front door, which, she noted in her astonishment, opened just as the creature reached it.
“Whoa!” The man in the doorway dipped back, limbo-like, as the bird grazed his forehead. Just before falling over, he twisted to watch it fly past him into the wild blue yonder.
The clock struck eight, despite the fact that it was noon, and stopped.
Sean Crawford straightened, one hand on the small of his back and the other pulling a garishly orange tie off his shoulder. He smoothed the tie down his expansive chest in a practiced motion.
