Return to Summerhouse (The Summerhouse 2)

Faith and Zoë looked at each other and began to laugh.

“She’s right,” Faith said.

“Perfectly right. So who goes first?”

“Zoë,” Faith said. “I want to know why that town hated you.”

“They didn’t,” Zoë said, then paused to hold the suspense. “They did hate the person who made a man kill himself, but they just blamed me.” She put her hand on Faith’s arm. “You’ll love this: The whole thing was caused by my sister.”

“Damn my waistline, give me more pasta!” Faith said. “I want to hear everything. Don’t leave out a word.”

“You have to understand,” Zoë said, “that when I went back, I didn’t know anything more than I did when I arrived here. My memory didn’t come back until—”

“The night of the car wreck,” Amy said.

“That’s right. How did you know?”

“That’s what would make the story good,” she said, then waved her hand. “Go on. Sorry for interrupting.”

“I went back to two weeks before the crash,” Zoë said, “and everything was fine. No one hated me. No one paid much attention to me. I was just an ordinary girl in an ordinary town where nothing much happened. I’d graduated from high school but I had no plans to go to college.”

“With your talent?” Faith asked. “Were you crazy?”

“That’s the odd thing,” Zoë said. “I was so ordinary that I didn’t know I had any talent. You guys may be too old to remember this, but funding has been cut in schools so much that we don’t have art classes anymore. My teachers used to tell us to draw a farm and we did. No one ever told me to draw the faces of my classmates, so I never tried. And at home I wasn’t exactly surrounded by creative people.”

She ate a bite of food. “I have to backtrack a bit. When my parents died, I was just thirteen, so I was sent to live with my sister. She was ten years older than me, married and had two kids, so she didn’t exactly welcome me. All she talked about my last year of school was how glad she was going to be when I could get a job and help with the expenses.”

“Nice woman,” Amy said.

Zoë said nothing for a while. “Back then, while I was in it, I didn’t see how bad it was. When I went back, knowing what I do now, I saw how truly horrible it was. My sister had been the prettiest girl in the school. She was on the local floats and she won every beauty contest there was. The whole town celebrated when she married her male counterpart, the best-looking guy, captain of the football team, all that.”

“The golden couple,” Amy said, and looked away. It sounded like her and Stephen. “But the real world is different, isn’t it?”

“Right,” Zoë said. “She was pregnant when she got married and he got a job selling used cars. It’s amazing how soon that high school glory can disappear. When I went back, my sister looked old and haggard.”

She looked down at her plate. “Well, maybe she didn’t look too old or too haggard.”

“What did you do about the car crash?” Faith asked.

“You once told me that if you had it to do over again, you’d just leave town,” Amy said.

“That’s what I did,” Zoë said. “I figured that whatever was going to happen would happen whether I was there or not, and I wanted no part of it. I had access to a hundred and fifty dollars, so I took it, a few pieces of clothing, and I left town without saying a word to anyone. I went to New York.”

“And it’s my guess that you looked up someone you’d found on the Internet,” Amy said softly.

“I did,” Zoë said, grinning at her.

“You two are leaving me out,” Faith said. “What man did you find on the Internet?”

“Who said it was a man?” Zoë asked.

“Oh, sorry,” Faith said. “I’m sure you found out you had a half sister whom you’d never met, so you looked her up, and she’s the one who’s made you smile like that.”

Amy looked at Zoë. “You stole my idea, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Zoë said. “I ripped off your idea completely. That night when we came back from the eighteenth century, I looked for Russell Johns on the Internet. I’d read a lot of art history books but I didn’t remember hearing his name. But after we came back here, he was all over the ’Net. You know what for?”

“His paintings of common people,” Amy said. “In Tristan’s time, he was always sketching us as we pulled bread out of the oven. He loved the washerwomen. Hey! Do you think we’re in any of his pictures?”