The Girl From Summer Hill (Summer Hill 1)

“Like Alan married you? Olivia, I don’t mean to disparage anyone, but I’ve seen enough to know that Hildy is not like you.”

“Thank you. I don’t think she is either.” Olivia waved her hand. “That doesn’t matter. What happened was that as soon as Kevin got his inheritance, he and Hildy joined a country club, traveled, bought an expensive house, some cars, et cetera. Unfortunately, the stores suffered. By the time my stepson realized what was going on, they were almost bankrupt.”

“How did they recover?” Casey asked. “But wait, let me guess. You sold your house and emptied your retirement plan to bail them out.”

“I did,” Olivia said. “And I’m afraid it all shook me up more than I thought it would. I’ve been living in their house for about a year now and I need to do something else.”

“I think so,” Casey said. “I’ll ask Kit—”

“No!” Olivia said.

Casey started to ask more but the closed, final look on Olivia’s face made her back off. She knew that Kit had visited Tattwell when he was young. And he had handed Olivia the photo of her when she was an actress. Onstage, it didn’t take much to see that there were some deep feelings between them. Even talking about the rotten things her late husband and his family had done to Olivia hadn’t seemed to bring out the intensity of feeling that erupted at the mention of Kit Montgomery.

She decided to change the subject. “You said you worked at Tattwell in the summer of 1970. You wouldn’t remember a couple of little kids, would you?”

“Letty and Ace?” Olivia’s face lost its angry look. “They were quite unforgettable. They were into everything. If I baked cookies and walked out of the room for two minutes, half of them would disappear. There were times when I wanted to strangle both of them—except that I was laughing at their antics too often. Uncle Freddy loved them so much! He was in a wheelchair and everyone treated him as if he were glass. But not those kids! They used to turn off the chair’s brake and push him down every path on this property. One time he rolled into the shallow end of the pond, and that’s when Uncle Freddy found out that he could still swim. So he had the pool put in.”

Casey tried to be serious but couldn’t. She started laughing, and Olivia joined her.

“In retrospect it is funny, but it wasn’t then. They were the brattiest kids on earth.”

“I know Letty was Tate’s mother, but who was Ace?”

“He grew up to be Dr. Kyle Chapman.”

Casey was so shocked she nearly dropped the bucket of cherries. “My father was Ace?”

“Yes.” There was a twinkle in Olivia’s eyes. Everyone in town knew about the children that Dr. Kyle’s donations had created. “Poor kid. That summer his mother was dying of cancer. His dad needed time to be with her, and that’s why Ace pretty much lived here. People in town said the child didn’t know what was going on, but he most certainly did! When his dad brought him back from visits to his mother…” Olivia didn’t seem able to go on.

“What happened to the children at the end of the summer?” Casey asked softly.

“Tears and screaming. It was awful. Their misery made all of us cry. My mother wrote me that the next summer they were just as inseparable. Ace’s dad, Dr. Everett Chapman, was grieving for his wife, and he was the only doctor in Summer Hill. When Uncle Freddy asked him to please let Kyle stay at the Big House, he said yes. After that, the children’s summers together became the normal thing.”

“Until Letty’s dad got a different job and quit coming here.” Casey put the last bucket into the truck. “I wonder why Dad didn’t seek her out when he was an adult?”

“I have no idea. Why don’t you ask him?”

“I will. You ready to go? I’d like to go to the blackberry patch.”

“The one that surrounds the well house?” There was an odd tone to Olivia’s voice.

“Yes.” Casey pulled the ring on its black cord from inside her shirt. “Have you ever seen this before? It was in the kids’ treasure box.”

Olivia held it for a moment. “No. Never. I bet they found it in the attic. When it was too rainy to go out, the kids disappeared inside the house. We would hear them tramping around up there. There was a windup Victrola and they used to play Caruso records. You should have that ring appraised. It looks valuable.”

“I think so too. Ready to go?”

“Yes,” Olivia said.

They didn’t make it to the well house. Olivia suddenly remembered that she had things to do and couldn’t go, but Casey wondered if the problem was some memory of the little building.

She drove to the front gate, where Olivia’s car was parked, and let her out, then went back to the guesthouse to take care of the fruit and start dinner. But all she could think of was that she was dying to tell Tate what she’d learned.

It seemed that she may have stumbled on a mystery. What—if anything—had happened between Kit and Olivia during the summer of 1970? Some great love affair that ended badly? If so, who dumped whom? From the way Olivia’s lower jaw went rigid at the mention of Kit, Casey felt sure he’d left her. For the woman who became the mother of his son? Was the breakup caused by Olivia’s infertility?

At that thought, Casey’s heart clenched. Her mother, an OB/GYN, had talked to her about baby lust. “When it attacks a woman, she will move heaven and earth to satisfy it.”

“Like you did with me,” Casey would say, then she’d again be told the story of her conception.