Love Rebuilt Page 2

  My lawyer assured me we weren’t done. There was a joint account that she was convinced should have come to me—one that would allow me to finish the house or move to a place I could live more comfortably, if we could ever get the issue settled. But Jack was fighting tooth and nail, and as of now, I was a broke would-be photographer-turned-waitress working in a mountaintop diner. And I was late for work.

  *

  “Princess! Oh look, Frank! Princess has graced us with her presence.” Adele frowned at me from the register, her over-glossed lips sticky, pink, and disapproving as always.

  “Morning, Adele. Sorry I’m late.”

  “Tables one through six will be happy to hear your sob story.” She threw a pad at me and turned away to pluck at her cuticles in the light from the window.

  “Morning, Mad.” Frank was always reliable for a smile.

  I returned it, happy to see him over the partition between the counter and kitchen. Frank was a constant at the diner, wearing the same grey apron over a faded yellow T-shirt, and he was reliably sweet. He had red-rimmed eyes that spoke of some kind of health concern or a none-too-happy marriage with the grumpy Adele, perhaps. But he was always kind to me.

  I didn’t think I was really a princess by any stretch. But compared to the locals up here in Kings Grove, I was fairly shiny. The place saw its share of visitors from pretty much everywhere in the world, but no one really placed much emphasis on fashion around here. Visitors tended to arrive in shorts and Teva sandals with socks, or tank tops and acid-washed jeans. And the locals favored practicality over a flattering hemline or a leg-extending heel. Personally, I found it hard to shake the fashion ideals I’d cultivated over so many years, but tried to limit my choices to denim and boots. Even if they had a three-inch heel, I figured boots were practical for a mountain environment.

  Kings Grove was home to trees thousands of years old, and a place like that is bound to draw in all kinds. I’d grown up around these Giant Sequoias, but I was still floored by the sheer bulk of the things. It was humbling, standing next to something that you knew had been in that same spot for over a millennium. My crumbly little life was a flash in the pan next to the lives of the trees that bore witness to my pathetic drama and to countless others before it.

  “Sam. Chance.” I greeted the local contractors who had built the frame of our house before the divorce had halted further progress.

  “How are you, Maddie?” Chance Palmer gave me a smile and I steeled myself for it. He was the most eligible man in town, a Stanford MBA who’d come to take over the family business when his dad had died suddenly of a heart attack. With his little brother Sam, he’d built almost every new structure in Kings Grove over the past four years, and plenty before that when they worked for their dad during high school and college. Chance was lean and muscular, his blue eyes sparkling above a chiseled jaw and a chest that appeared to be cut from stone. There was no doubt he was the star of the daydreams of most of the ladies living in Kings Grove, with his hometown-boy good looks, easy smile, and bulging biceps. I’d had many opportunities to witness the way his muscled torso glistened in the sunlight when I’d been left alone to “supervise” the construction of our dream home. His brother was pretty cute too, but Chance was definitely the star of the duo.

  “I’m doing fine, Chance.” There were words unspoken there. Chance had seen far too much transpire between me and Jack to ever see me as any kind of prospect now that I was single. And he was about six years too young. He and Sam had witnessed the complete disintegration of my marriage, and they treated me with a mix of pity and overprotectiveness. They’d also known my family for a long time, since my parents had brought my brother and me up here as kids. My brother Cam had even worked with their construction company for a few summers during college. They were like step-brothers to me, but I could still appreciate the attraction.

  “What’s going on with the house, Maddie? The weatherman’s saying this winter’s going to be a real one.” Sam watched me over the rim of his mug.

  There’d been little snow in California’s Sierra Nevada for the past four years. The odds of a real winter seemed slim.

  “For the sake of this drought, I sure hope so, Sam.” I evaded his question and topped off their coffee. “Food up in a sec, guys.”

  I tended to my other tables, getting omelets and stacks of half-dollar pancakes out as quickly as I could while Adele hissed and tsked from her spot at the register. I probably wasn’t cut out for waitressing, but I did the best I could, and Frank helped me when I forgot to turn in an order or messed up someone’s request. He was the best part of the diner’s management team. The only good thing about Adele was that she disliked the other waitress, Miranda, almost as much as she hated me. Our shared despicability had forged an immediate bond between Miranda and me. Adele hated us for different reasons though. I was evidently just too fancy for her tastes, while Miranda had a nasty habit of spilling coffee, dropping plates, and finding things to trip over on completely smooth floors.

  When the place was a steady hum of satisfied diners and empty tables, I poured a cup of coffee for Miranda and another for me. We stood behind the counter, savoring the calm, as we gazed past the yellow Formica tabletops to the quiet street.

  “What’s going on?” Miranda could read me like a book. I hated it. But I also kind of liked it. It wasn’t like I had lots of girlfriends to talk to. Jack had kept most of them in the divorce. I guess visiting me in a mountain trailer wasn’t much of a draw compared with the yachts and clubs that had made up our social lives in San Diego. Deep friendships, certainly.

  I sighed. Miranda had already figured out that something was up, so I just told her. “Jack stopped by this morning. He’s trying to sell the house. Some guy actually wandered around testing beams and tapping on things.”

  “What guy? Someone from up here?”

  “Like I would know.” I knew the nearest neighbors to my property, since my parents had been good friends of theirs when I was a kid. Otherwise, I kept a low profile and didn’t get too close to the folks who lingered around the village. I did make friends with some of the little kids who came running through my property now and then, fishing out snacks that I brought home whenever I went to the grocery store. Kids, I understood. Grown ups? Not as much. And the dust-smeared mountain kids who roamed in packs during the summer were my tribe. Or they had been once. Cam and I had roamed these hills with a band of grimy children of all ages, scrambling over rocks and laughing off scraped elbows. Now when the kids showed up with their jubilance and spared me a few minutes of laughter kicking dust around my lot, I relived the past for a little while. They let me snap photos of them and I let them climb on the unfinished structure of my stupid house.

  I fished the card from that morning out of the pocket of my jeans. I’d pulled it out of my robe and stuck it there, planning to examine it later. I put it on the counter in front of Miranda.

  “Oh shit,” she said, bending over to read the card as she pushed her blond hair from her face. “This is the guy who wants to buy your house?”

  “Yeah, why? You know him?”

  “Everyone knows who he is. No one really knows him.”

  “Well that’s informative. What are you talking about?”

  “This is Connor Charles.”

  “Yeah, I got that from the card. Where it says right there? See?” I pointed to the name. “Connor Charles.”

  “Right. Well you know who that is.” She was nodding and giving me a look that said I should understand immediately whatever she was trying to convey.

  “Miranda, seriously? No. I have no idea who that is. Some guy with red hair and sunglasses.” The card didn’t offer any other information. Who had a card that only had a name and a phone number anyway, besides psychics and socialites? Creepy. I shrugged and added, “Kinda hot, too.” I couldn’t help it. He totally was.

  “He’s that super-creepy writer. The one who lives in the cabin around Deerwood Point?” He eyes were wide an
d the freckles across her nose seemed to stand out as if they were trying to help her make her point.

  “Oh him.” I made my voice reverent, but I was just doing it for effect. “No idea. I haven’t really had a lot of time to get to know the locals, and I’m not exactly a bookworm. If he doesn’t eat here, I don’t know him.”

  “He definitely doesn’t eat here. Not anymore, anyway.” Miranda glanced around and then leaned in, her glasses slipping down her nose. “He writes those twisted books. About serial killers and stuff? He’s super famous and super hot. And super scary.”

  “Because he writes horror novels?”

  She shook her head, a smile on her face that told me she was enjoying sharing the gossip. “No, because when he moved up here, he had a wife. Or a girlfriend. But no one has seen her for like a year. They used to go out together, eat here, go to the village potlucks. But then we didn’t see her again. Like literally, she disappeared. Rumor has it he’s keeping her prisoner up there in his fancy house.” She looked around, as if Connor Charles might appear at the counter. “Stay away from him, Maddie.”

  “Well, I’m not planning to sell the house anyway. Not yet.”

  “Right.” Miranda nodded as if that made perfect sense, and then spun around to answer a wave from one of her tables. Her coffee cup toppled off the saucer on the counter as she swung her arm, and I caught it and wiped up the mess as Adele fumed, watching from the podium.

  I wondered how much of what Miranda thought she knew about Connor Charles was true. She had a vivid imagination and an appetite for gossip. Since I’d never seen Connor up here before, I wasn’t too worried about crossing his path again. I stared out the window a moment longer, charmed by the way the afternoon sunlight caught the side of the post office window, sending light skittering out in a halo up into the trees. I longed for my camera, for the chance to capture that light, the feeling of freedom and weightlessness that it embodied. But one of my customers was motioning for me, and Adele was calling my name. Well, sort of. She was actually squawking, “Princess!” But that’s what I’d been answering to, so I turned to see what she wanted.

  Chapter 3

  I spent the rest of an endless day at the diner, watching the sun weave among soaring treetops from one side of the village to the other as some of the season’s last tourists stopped through for burgers and sundaes before heading back to their tents and rented cabins. It was easy to lose track of the days up here. The mountains and the big trees measured time in centuries, not in months, days, and minutes. And most days looked about the same to me. But since Jack had stopped by, I knew it had to be a weekend, and a glance at the calendar on my phone confirmed it. It was Sunday. I had Mondays off. Normal people would be looking forward to some down time, or some project they’d been hoping to tackle on a day off. But Monday held little interest for me, and I’d spent many of the last few in bed, pretending things were not exactly as they were and hating myself for letting it all get so screwed up.

  The cooktop in the trailer worked intermittently, and I got lucky that evening, managing to heat a can of soup to go with my toast and red wine. I carried dinner outside, managing the door with my foot and elbow, and wound my way through the skeleton house. In what would have become the eat-in kitchen, I set my bowl and bottle down on the concrete and lowered myself beside them. The kitchen was supposed to have soaring plate glass windows facing the slight decline behind the house that led to a ravine further down the slope. In the early spring, you could hear rushing water down there, but by this point in late summer the entire state was parched and dry. Just a trickle of dusty water coursed through the rocky bed now.

  I’d almost drown in that water as a tiny girl, and I shivered at the possibility of it. I didn’t really remember the incident. My brother Cam had told me that we were playing with some other kids from around the village, and I’d fallen in. There was a deep pond that had been formed over years and years of water rushing into it from the rocks above. It was a side branch of the bigger stream when it was flowing in full force, a quiet spot to the side of the rushing water. Quiet and deep. The water was freezing cold since it was snowpack runoff. I’d reached out too far that day and fallen in, and neither Cam nor I were good swimmers. We were too little. One of the bigger kids had jumped in to save me, pulling me out and carrying me back up to my dad. I hadn’t been in long enough to swallow much water, and I was fine, but it had scared my brother. He’d made a big deal about learning to swim after that, and stayed close to me any time he thought we might be in danger. He had been my protector from that day forward. All the way through high school to college and beyond. Until three years ago when he decided not to be anymore.

  I stared at the darkening green around me. My home was perched atop a mini mountain, at the end of a dead-end road that climbed out of the small village of private homes. Many of them—most of them, really—qualified as true cabins. A few of our neighbors still had working outhouses, and most of the structures were rustic. One of the nearest neighbors had done his damnedest to ensure that our huge modern house would never be built, petitioning congressmen and lobbying the Forest Service and anyone else who might help him preserve the sanctity of the place. But my family had owned this land for more than one hundred years, and there was little anyone could do to stop it from being developed. I had pushed Jack to build something a bit more spare, something that fit in with the rustic landscape instead of competing with it, but as with most of our arguments, I’d lost.

  I sipped my wine as I stared up into the deepening blue that swallowed the branches of the trees above me. How had I ended up here? My life, like my dream house, felt half realized. I imagined myself sometimes as a photograph, emerging sluggishly in the developing tub of a sterile darkroom. I was both photograph and photographer, staring out from the liquid depths and also looking down, waiting for answers to emerge. I still had no idea what the whole picture looked like.

  Jack had been everything I’d ever wanted when we’d met. It was like he’d read a book about how to sweep someone off her feet and had followed the instructions page by page as we got to know one another. He’d mastered the grand romantic gesture long before we met, and he had it down to an art form by the time I strolled into his office to ask about buying a condo I’d seen in my neighborhood. Jack was as slick and polished as any man I’d ever known, from his perfectly shined loafers to the salt and pepper waves that set off his blue eyes. He was worldly, experienced, rich, and funny. And he was interested in me. When I was twenty-six, coming off a breakup with the guy who I was sure had been the one, he seemed perfect. Turned out he was simply a fantastic rebound that I allowed to go on way past its expiration date.

  I hadn’t noticed as Jack had styled me to his liking, brushing off truths about me that didn’t fit his ideal or were otherwise inconvenient. When it came to tossing out my cut-off jean shorts and upping my fashion IQ, I wasn’t alarmed. The things he pruned from my life started off small. A piece of clothing here, an undesirable friendship there. He told me he wanted to take care of me and didn’t want me to work. I’d believed him, and too easily gave up the cluttered photography studio I’d been building into a real business. At the time it seemed like just another reasonable thing I did for love. I was too young and inexperienced to see that Jack was actually building me a cage of ideas that suited him. A cage from which I had a very difficult time escaping.

  Jack had actually broken the lock himself. I’d been so deluded by the image of what I’d become over the five years we were together that I didn’t realize I even needed to escape. It felt as though Jack had crushed my ability to survive in the wild, to fend for myself, and I’d told myself I was content among my new playthings, my new lifestyle. I told myself that I had everything I could ever want and ignored the aching need that no amount of shopping seemed able to fill.

  I shivered in the gathering density of the dark and stood, taking my empty dishes and heading inside for another night of survival.

  As the t
rees faded to blend into the background of inky blue, I considered picking up the camera. But it seemed like a lot of trouble, and every time I touched my camera I still heard Jack’s voice telling me that photography was a ridiculous hobby for a woman like me. That I could easily pay someone to take the pictures I wanted. Jack’s answer to everything.

  I knew he was wrong…about so many things. But it was exhausting trying to figure out which thing to resurrect first, which part of my former self to triage. And so I merely survived, stagnating and doing nothing while nursing the slow burning anger inside me, railing over all that I’d once had and all that I’d lost.

  *

  I hated Mondays. Not for the same reason the rest of the world hated Mondays, though. I hated the way the silence of the mountains compounded the silence of the voice I used to follow. And Mondays, the days I perched in my tiny home on this hilltop, were an endless expanse of nothing to do.

  The phone ringing startled me out of bed. It was after eleven anyway. It wasn’t as if I’d been asleep.

  “Hi, Peach.” Daddy had called me ‘Peach’ my whole life. I had accepted it at this point.

  “Hey, Daddy. How’re they treating you down there?”

  “All good, honey. Except the purser keeps saying that my suitcase is coming and then he never brings it. My swim trunks are in there. How am I supposed to enjoy the pool, pick up the ladies?”

  Dad’s frustration was expected. Every time we spoke he was annoyed about some aspect of his “cruise.” I didn’t push. Believing that he was on a never-ending cruise to some tropical location was far better than understanding that he was living in an assisted-care facility in Sacramento, struggling with a mind that no longer tracked at the same pace as everyone else’s.

  “How’s the food, though?” Dad loved cruise food.

  “It’s good. I need to be careful at those buffets, though. Don’t want to pack on pounds while I’m here.” He chuckled.