Pages of Sin, page 6
“Yes, ma’am,” Sam said.
I grinned. “Good. Now you all can practice sliding your skewers into the bottle of glue. You can see how uniformly the glue is applied.”
“Excuse me, Brooklyn,” someone at the next table said. “There’s something inside this book. It looks personal.”
I turned. A woman named Meredith held a folded square of paper in her hand. I took it from her, unfolded it, and found an old letter on a piece of lined school notebook paper. Every line of both sides of the paper was covered in writing.
My darling Byron, it began. I frowned and almost folded it closed. This was none of my business.
“Oh, hell,” I muttered. Who was I kidding? I continued reading. The handwriting was curvy and loopy and feminine. Wanda must have written this love letter to her husband-to-be many years ago.
It was so sweet. Of course, now that Wanda was gone, this would be a bittersweet memento for Byron. Still, I knew he would want to keep it. I could give it to him at the memorial service Thursday night, unless I saw him sooner.
The letter started out flowery with lots of gushing promises of a timeless love that she knew would last forever.
Before continuing on, I glanced around the room and found Robin staring at me with a suspicious gleam in her eye. I gave her a brief nod as if to convey the message that I would share this information with her later. She nodded back. Message received.
Everyone else was practicing with their skewers and bottles of glue, so I kept reading.
With the next paragraph, Wanda abruptly changed the subject. She had to leave town and she knew he would be upset about it. It was a last minute decision, but it was important to her, some sort of religious mission she had signed up for and pledged to carry out several years before she’d met him.
I’ll only be gone for one short year and I wouldn’t be going if it wasn’t so vitally important to so many people. But I’ll think of you every day, my darling, and when I return, I’ll be ready to marry you immediately—if you’ll still have me. Oh my sweet love, I can’t wait until we are husband and wife!
I should have felt guilty, reading her private words to her lover. It was almost like I was eavesdropping on the two of them. On the other hand, I’ve never had a problem with eavesdropping, so I continued reading.
There was a short paragraph extolling the virtues of performing good works and dreaming of the wonderful things she would teach the village children. Then she veered off again, explaining how her church group would be installing a new irrigation system for the poor community that would allow their crops and animals to flourish.
She followed that up with more flowery words of love. I had to assume that everything worked out for the two of them and Byron forgave her for going away, because they got married, right?
I turned the page over and read more of her meandering words of devotion. The letter ended with, I pray you will always love me as much as I love you.
All my love,
Elaine.
I blinked and read it again.
Elaine?
Yes, it was written by Elaine. To Byron. Who was married to Wanda. Who was dead.
I turned it over and checked the date on the top. The letter had been written almost sixteen years ago. By Elaine!
My hand trembled as I folded the pages and slipped the letter into my pocket. I glanced around and noticed everyone staring at me with concern. “Sorry. This belongs to an old friend of mine. I’d better return it to her.”
I asked Meredith for the book in which she’d found the letter. It was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, nicely bound in dark green leather. I wondered how that book had ended up in the box of damaged books, but figured my mother must have added it. I gave Meredith another book from the box, then had to struggle to focus on the class.
“Okay, grab your skewers and let’s get back on track,” I said lightly. “Who has a torn page we can fix?”
I managed to make it through the rest of the hour despite being completely distracted by the unsettling letter and its unexpected author.
After class, Robin and I walked to our cars together. I told her all about Elaine’s letter and how suspicious it was that we’d found it inside a book belonging to Wanda.
“You might be making too much out of this,” Robin said, then grinned. “Of course, after all the craziness with me and the wild Ukrainians, I can’t blame you for suspecting foul play wherever you go.”
She was referring to an unpleasant time when she’d been involved in the murder of an international spy.
“You have to admit it’s a little odd,” I said.
“I guess it is.” She pulled her keys out of her purse. “Are you going to give the letter to Byron?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I should give it back to Elaine.”
“Ask your mom,” Robin said, grabbing me in a quick hug good-bye. “She’ll know what to do.”
On the drive home, I took Robin’s advice and called my mother to check to make sure she and Dad would still be awake when I got there.
“We just put our pajamas on, but we’ll wait up for you,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, Mom.”
“Of course there’s something wrong. I can hear it in your voice.”
I rolled my eyes. Would I ever get a damn thing past her? “Fine. Something’s very wrong and you’re going to want to see it.”
Chapter Six
The following day was glorious. It was summer in wine country, and the air was clear and mild with just a touch of a breeze, so Mom, Elaine, and I decided to sit outside for lunch. The back terrace of Ristorante Umbria offered a lovely view of the grapevine-dotted hills that rose up from the gully nearby. At the bottom of the gully flowed a bubbly, fast-moving stream that coursed down from nearby Red Mountain and meandered through Dharma. I wasn’t sure of its real name, but we locals liked to call it Moon River because our rugged, hilly region of Sonoma County was known as the Valley of the Moon.
Olive trees in large wooden crates were strategically arranged on the terrace to give the illusion of intimate dining spaces. We relaxed under a colorful umbrella and gave the waiter our orders: Hanger steak and frites for Mom, seared scallops in butter and garlic with a side of bowtie pasta for me, and a Margherita pizza for Elaine. Evidently, we were all hungry.
A server placed chunky slices of sour dough bread and whipped butter on the table, then walked away. I stared at the bread, wondering how many more calories I could force-feed myself before I cried uncle.
“Isn’t this beautiful?” Mom said, looking out at the rows of grapevines thriving in the sun.
Elaine spread her napkin over her lap. “I’m so glad you suggested it.”
“This is one of my favorite places in Dharma,” I said.
Elaine glanced around. “It’s beautiful.”
Mom took a sip of water, then gazed at Elaine with a thoughtful frown. “After I saw you with Byron the other day, I got to thinking. It was you who was Byron’s sweetheart back in the day. Not Wanda. Am I remembering that right?”
I tried to keep a straight face. Only my mother could get away with that kind of opening line. I would have fumbled and bumbled my way through it. I was a terrible prevaricator, sad to say, so it was a big surprise to discover that my mother was rather brilliant at it. Not that she was lying, exactly. She just wasn’t revealing that she already knew the answers.
Elaine released a heavy sigh. “Yes, your memory is perfectly sound.”
“Whatever happened between you two?”
“It was a silly misunderstanding.” But silly didn’t seem to fit with the fact that her fingers trembled as she gripped the stem of her water glass. “I had to leave town for a short time,” Elaine said, reminiscing. “I was on a mission with my church group, living in a small village in Senegal in West Africa. We rarely got mail because we were so far from civilization. But one day a letter came through from my sister Marjorie. I was thrilled to hear from someone back home—until I read it. She wrote to tell me that Byron had married Wanda. My own sister! I felt so betrayed, so heartsick, I wanted to die.”
Now that I could understand. I had sisters, too, and if one of them were to sneak off with Derek. . . . Yeah, I could appreciate that kind of pain. Not that my sisters would ever do that. Or Derek, either. Still, I could totally sympathize with Elaine’s distress.
Last night when I arrived home from my book-repair class, I’d shown Mom and Dad the letter my student found in the Jane Austen book. Dad had said we should give it to Byron immediately, but Mom thought we should talk to Elaine first. I’d wondered aloud if Byron had ever seen the letter, or if he’d blown off Elaine simply because she’d left him alone too long. And how had Wanda gotten hold of the letter? What was it doing inside her copy of Pride and Prejudice? Had she slyly intercepted it before Byron saw it? Who was at fault here?
My parents and I had too many questions, so we’d decided we wouldn’t yet mention to Elaine that we’d seen the letter. Maybe it was unfair to her, but Mom and I wanted to hear her side of the story first. Depending on what she said, we would decide whether to hand the letter back to her, or give it to Byron. Or we could just let sleeping dogs lie and do neither of the above.
“So you came home and confronted Byron, I hope,” I said, too intrigued to care whether I was snooping or not.
“Of course I did,” she said stoutly. “I confronted all of them. Wanda, Marjorie, Byron—they all knew what they’d done to me. But they wouldn’t say anything. They wouldn’t explain and they wouldn’t defend themselves. It drove me crazy. It wasn’t fair. It was as if the three of them had deliberately conspired against me. So I left in a huff and went off on another of my missions. This time it was a refugee camp in Sarajevo, and that’s where I met Radisson.”
“The Earl,” I whispered.
Mom leaned forward. “And you married him.”
“Yes.” She smiled. “And I moved to his home in England, in Somerset. He was a good man, but after a few short years, I grew to miss my family terribly. So one Christmas, Radisson invited them all to the castle. It was a tremendous surprise to me and I wasn’t sure whether to be angry or not. I decided to be happy.” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “I missed my family. I missed Byron. The estrangement never sat well with me.”
Mom squeezed her hand. “It’s good that you all made amends.”
“Yes, it was.” She sipped her water, then frowned as she remembered more. “Wanda didn’t come with them. I felt sad at the time, but Byron told me that she had insisted that he come to England without her. She wanted our rift to end, even if she couldn’t travel. So we all chose to enjoy the holiday in spite of her absence.”
“Did you see her again after that?”
“Yes, we spoke on the phone that Christmas and I finally came out to California to see her. It was a good reunion. I yelled at her and she cried. Then I cried. Then we hugged and dried our tears, got over it and moved on.”
But had she really moved on? I paused, unsure whether to ask the question, but my curiosity won out. “You mentioned that the last time you saw Byron, the two of you had a fight.”
“Yes.” She closed her eyes and shook her head in apparent disgust. “One night after a few glasses of wine, I was feeling glib and made the mistake of saying that marrying Wanda was the best thing he ever did for me.”
Oh, boy. “How did he react to that?”
She shrugged, but I could see that it cost her to say it. “He was angrier than I’d ever seen him.”
Ouch. I tried to keep my expression neutral. “What did he say?”
“I could tell he was seething, but he asked me to elaborate. I finally told him that because of him and Wanda, I had lived a full, happy life with many adventures. And Wanda, well, she’d been stuck behind those dreary walls all these years. The minute I said the words, I wanted to take them back. Byron told me to leave and never return. I was so upset and felt so stupid. Marjorie tried to intervene, but Byron was too angry. That was well over five years ago.”
“And yesterday was the first time you’d seen Byron in all that time?” I asked.
“Yes.” She nodded dazedly. “I still can’t believe what he did, can you? I hope it means he’s not still angry with me, but we’ll have to see. But he’s still so . . . so handsome, and . . . and, oh God, I’m still an idiot.”
Her eyes filled with tears. I felt so sorry for her. First she’d been cheated on and betrayed so long ago, and yet, she’d managed to let go of that treachery. Then with a thoughtless slip of the tongue she was banished from the family circle again. It didn’t seem fair that Byron had held a grudge all these years over what she’d said. At the time, he must have been overly sensitive about Wanda’s agoraphobia.
But poor Elaine. What a bumpy road she’d traveled. I squeezed her hand. “I think you were very brave to come back here and face him.”
Surprised, she smiled at me, but it faded quickly. I wondered if she was thinking about that kiss. How could she not be? I certainly was. It was a humdinger, as my father would say.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have come back, though. I should have listened to Marjorie. She told me not to, said it would be too much for me to face Byron. But I didn’t come back because of him. I came for Wanda. She was my sister and I loved her. She and I had become close friends again, behind Byron’s back. It breaks my heart to know she took her own life. I keep wondering why she . . . Oh, dear.” She covered her face with her hands and sobbed quietly.
The waiter delivered our plates and I ordered a glass of their excellent Pinot Gris.
“I’ll have one, too,” Mom said, sounding a trifle desperate. “And bring one for her, as well.”
Elaine looked up, her eyes red and damp with tears. “Wine’s probably a bad idea.”
“One of us will finish it if you don’t,” Mom assured her.
We ate in silence for a few minutes. My seared scallops were drenched in rich garlicky butter and practically melted in my mouth. Of course, that didn’t keep me from snagging some of Mom’s skinny French fries. Birds twittered in the trees and sunlight glistened off the rocks in the stream. I watched a squirrel tiptoe along the gnarled branch of an oak tree that grew in the shallow canyon.
“I wrote him a letter back then,” Elaine said softly, as she broke off a piece of her fragrant, thin-crusted pizza.
My back tensed up and I exchanged a swift glance with Mom, whose eyes narrowed in speculation.
“When was this, dear?” Mom said.
“It was the night before I left for Senegal. Byron had been out of town on a lengthy business trip to Japan. The church had a sudden cancellation and told me I was the next name on the list of people to go on this mission. I was instructed to be ready to fly out the following afternoon.”
“Couldn’t you have waited a week or so?”
“No, I couldn’t refuse the request. That was unacceptable. This group wasn’t like your Fellowship, Becky. They were very strict. Wanda kept telling me to leave them and join Robson’s group, but I felt I’d found the true church. The true church for martyrs and masochists, as it turned out.” She shook her head in disgust. “We were all so stupid back then.”
Mom cut into her steak. “Yes. Well, some of us were smarter than others.”
Elaine laughed for the first time. “True.”
“So you wrote Byron a letter,” I prompted, wanting to get back on topic.
“Oh, yes,” she said, taking another dainty bite of pizza before continuing. “I gave the letter to Marjorie to give to him when he returned the following week. She swore she gave it to him.”
“Did Marjorie actually see him read it?” I asked.
Puzzled, Elaine peered at me. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask her. When I returned from Africa and confronted them, Marjorie insisted she’d given the letter to him. And Byron was just as adamant that he’d never seen it.”
I looked at my mother again. Somebody in that family was lying.
Mom changed the subject. “Regardless, he must have known you loved him.”
Elaine’s lips were trembling now and I was worried she’d burst into tears again, but she held herself together. “I’d never actually told him I loved him before I left. But he must have known I did because he asked me to marry him two days before he left for Japan.”
Mom nodded. “Then he must have known.”
“But I hadn’t given him my answer yet. That’s why I wrote the letter. To tell him how much I loved him and that I would marry him when I returned. But if he never read the letter . . .”
She gasped and her eyes filled with fresh tears, just as our waiter hurried over with three glasses of white wine.
“Nick of time,” I said, grabbing my glass and taking a healthy sip before having to blot my own tears with my napkin.
Mom frowned and reached for her glass. “Right there with you, Sparky.”
That evening, I drove to the library to teach the second part of my book-repair class. I almost hated to go because Mom and Dad were taking Byron out to dinner and I was dying to hear what he had to say for himself. But Mom promised to tell me everything, so I had to settle for that.
Robin arrived a few minutes early so we could chat before class. I asked her to go shopping in the city with me the following weekend and she voiced an emphatic yes. Because Derek’s lifestyle demanded a higher end wardrobe than I currently owned, I was in desperate need of a few dressy outfits and some classy shoes. Robin and I both knew I was useless in a department store, so as my very own fashionista extraordinaire, she was looking forward to whipping me into shape.
As we talked, I realized all over again how much I missed having her live near me in the city. Since Derek would still be out of town, she agreed to stay overnight at my place. We negotiated which pizza we would order.
