Stone Bridges Read online

  The Knights Bridge effect, Vic would call it.

  She took her mug inside, managing to keep her bathrobe secured around her. She owned flannel pajamas, too, but it was too warm to wear them. She’d bought the robe and nightgown on a whim last summer when she’d gone to Paris, where her mother and Vic had enjoyed their weeklong affair. The Left Bank, cozy cafés, liaisons in a romantic hotel near the Musée d’Orsay. Sophia Cross had returned home to California and her fiancé, Richard Portale, passing off Adrienne as their child when she was born not quite nine months later.

  Her parents had divorced when Adrienne was seven.

  No wonder.

  Finding out about Vic had explained so much about her mother in particular.

  Adrienne set her mug on the counter in the big country kitchen. She was still obsessing about her attire. Had she made the wrong impression with Adam Sloan? Would he go back and tell his brothers about her sitting out back in a slinky black bathrobe and nightgown? The Sloans knew everyone in Knights Bridge. It could get around. Vic Scarlatti’s California daughter out at Carriage Hill in a sexy black robe...she’ll never fit in here...she’ll get fired before Thanksgiving...

  “More coffee,” Adrienne groaned. “Lots more coffee.”

  She reached for the coffeepot and saw Adam through the front window. He had the back of his work van open as he lifted out another bag. He placed it on one shoulder and balanced it with one hand as he shut the van. Then he retraced his steps through the side yard to the back of the house.

  Adrienne had no idea how long it would take him to rebuild the stone wall, but she’d be sure she was prepared the next time he showed up.

  She put on more coffee and slipped through the old center-chimney house to the innkeeper’s suite. Its wood floors coordinated with the wide-board floors in the main part of the 1803 house. Olivia Frost McCaffrey, who owned the house, was a graphic designer, her unerring sense of style and color evident in the suite’s throw rugs, linens, soothing colors and woodland prints. Adrienne would have gone with white and called it a day.

  She shut the door and exhaled, letting her robe come undone now that she didn’t have a sexy stonemason eyeing her. She’d run into him multiple times last winter. Even as preoccupied as she’d been with her situation with Vic, she hadn’t been oblivious to Adam’s physical attributes. That he was the quiet Sloan only added to his appeal. A highly physical man of few words...

  Adrienne groaned again. What was the matter with her? She shook off the question and pulled off her robe and nightgown, leaving them in a heap by the bed as she ducked into the suite’s private bathroom. She’d hoped Vic would be in town to greet her, but he’d left for Washington ten days ago for unspecified meetings. Almost a year of retirement hadn’t settled his naturally restless soul. She got it. She was restless herself. But Vic was also driven and ambitious, a contributing factor to why he hadn’t known he had a daughter until Adrienne had shown up at Echo Lake last winter. It hadn’t been just her mother’s doing. Vic had played a role, too. He hadn’t asked questions.

  He’d never married. He’d implied he’d come close at least once, but Adrienne hadn’t pursued the subject with him. He was in his early sixties, and while it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, she doubted he ever would marry. Her mother hadn’t remarried. She wasn’t restless, but she was driven and ambitious. She’d built a successful marketing company based in San Francisco from the ground up.

  “I’m a slug by comparison.”

  Adrienne laughed to herself as she turned on the water to the separate shower. At least her mother had never even hinted at any disappointment in her daughter. They might not have the chummiest mother-daughter relationship, but they understood each other.

  Fifteen minutes later, she was showered, dressed in black jeans, a black-and-gray top and black ankle boots and on her way to the kitchen. She refilled her mug with fresh coffee. She’d more or less adjusted to East Coast time, but she needed two or three cups of coffee first thing in the morning. Getting startled by a stonemason had thrown her off her schedule.

  She sat at the kitchen table by the front window. Adam’s van was gone. She felt a tug of loneliness. Vic was her only connection to Knights Bridge—to the East Coast, in fact—and he was out of town. He hadn’t greeted the prospect of his long-lost daughter returning to his adopted town as an innkeeper without question. “Are you sure, Adrienne?” he’d asked when she’d called him with the news.

  Of course, she wasn’t sure. She was winging it. Just as she had with her wine blog, her wine consulting, house-sitting for him. It was how she operated. She would put everything she had into the job, but she didn’t know how long she’d last. A month? Six months? Six years?

  Not six years, she thought as she drank her coffee. Right now she’d focus on six days.

  * * *

  Adrienne was bleary-eyed after spending the morning in the small office off her suite. By the time she entered the kitchen, she was ready for lunch and a change of scenery.

  Maggie Sloan was unloading two bags of groceries she’d set on the butcher-block island. She was a whirlwind of red curls, freckles, turquoise eyes and boundless energy. Although she wore multiple hats, catering was her primary job and the kitchen, therefore, her domain. She eyed Adrienne. “Uh-oh. You’ve been organizing paperwork? You’ve got that look.”

  “I’m a big believer in mega-batching. I dived in and got it done.”

  Maggie winced. “Was it awful? Olivia and I have just been tossing stuff on the desk for weeks.”

  “Everything made perfect sense.” Including, Adrienne thought, the Post-it note she’d discovered stuck under a pile of insurance papers: Adam 1st thing Th. for wall. She’d recognized Maggie’s handwriting. “I only have one more drawer to sort.”

  “Wow. I’m impressed.”

  “It helps we don’t have any major events until next weekend.”

  Maggie nodded as she set a bag of apples on the island. “Definitely. I hope it wasn’t torture.”

  Adrienne smiled. “I opened a window and listened to the birds.”

  It was true. She’d appreciated the breeze, too, as she’d plowed through information on vendors, paid and unpaid invoices, business cards, catalogs, tear sheets from magazines with garden, decorating and food ideas, monthly printouts of a digital events calendar and vague handwritten notes like the one about Adam.

  “Did you find our someday/maybe sheets for this place?” Maggie asked.

  “I did.” Adrienne grabbed a bag as Maggie emptied it. She folded it and placed it on the counter by the refrigerator. “I didn’t read them. I wasn’t sure if they’re private.”

  “Oh, you can read them. Olivia and I did them one night over a bottle of wine. That’s before she got pregnant. We took two sheets of graph paper and wrote down a hundred things we’d like to do with this place. All our hopes and dreams. No censoring ourselves. We just wrote down whatever popped into our heads, and we had to get to a hundred.”

  “I did notice purple stains on the sheets.”

  “That’s the wine. It was terrible but we drank the whole bottle.”

  “And you got to a hundred?”

  “Exactly to a hundred. Hiring an innkeeper was up at the top.” Maggie grinned as she lifted a jar of mayonnaise out of one of her bags. “It was one of our more sensible ideas.”

  Adrienne helped herself to an apple. They were local apples, of course. Paula Reds, according to the handwriting on the bag. Maggie and Olivia were hardworking, creative and can-do, but they’d taken on a lot over the past year, both personally and professionally. “I’m glad to be here,” Adrienne said.

  “Five days and we haven’t scared you off,” Maggie said cheerfully. “I ran into Adam in town. I forgot to tell you he’d be here today. He says he startled you.”

  “It worked out fine.”

  “He’s quiet. Stealthy,
Brandon says.” Brandon was Adam’s older brother and her husband, an adventure travel guide and carpenter. “He swears Adam got away with all sorts of mischief when they were kids because he never looked guilty or tried to talk his way out of trouble. Brandon always dug himself in deeper. Still does.”

  Adrienne didn’t know if she’d ever sort out the subtle personality differences among the Sloan siblings, especially the brothers. “Adam said he plans to stop by again this afternoon.”

  “He thinks he’ll finish work on the wall before we get busy here.” Maggie pulled out more groceries from her second bag. Locally-made blueberry jam, pickles, salsa. “I have Aidan and Tyler with me, and their friend Owen. They’ve gone out back to play dinosaurs. Have you met Owen yet?”

  “I haven’t. He’s the new librarian’s son, isn’t he?”

  “You’re catching on. He and Aidan are both six. Tyler’s eight. They all know more about dinosaurs than I ever want or need to know. Omnivores, carnivores, herbivores, raptors, this-a-saurus, that-a-saurus.”

  “I never played with dinosaurs as a kid,” Adrienne said with a smile.

  “Me, either. Zero interest. My younger sisters did. They used them for their first stage productions. No surprise they became theater majors.” Maggie lifted a carton of frozen phyllo dough from the bag. “One thing I don’t make from scratch is phyllo dough.”

  “Does anyone?”

  Maggie pulled open the freezer and shoved in the phyllo dough. As the freezer door shut, she pushed back her hair, blew out a breath and then inhaled slowly. “I’ve been running around all morning. School can’t start fast enough. The rest of today, tomorrow, Labor Day weekend and then it’s Tuesday. Freedom. The boys are ready. They’re bored. I think Adam’s work on the stone wall is the only thing I forgot to tell you.”

  “We warned each other we’d be figuring things out on the fly,” Adrienne said. “You’ve never hired an innkeeper and I’ve never been one.”

  “But you’ve run a high-end California winery,” Maggie said.

  Not for long, and “run” was a bit of a stretch. “I straightened things out at the winery and helped get the right person in place for the job—someone more suited to what needed to be done next than I was. Noah and Phoebe made everything easier for me.”

  “They’re quite a pair, aren’t they?”

  They were, indeed. Phoebe O’Dunn was Maggie’s older sister and the former director of the Knights Bridge library. Now she was engaged to billionaire Noah Kendrick. Noah had made his mark with a high-tech company he’d started in San Diego and expanded with the help of his childhood friend Dylan McCaffrey, Olivia’s husband. Noah had met Phoebe after Dylan’s arrival in Knights Bridge. Although not a couple anyone would have put together, they were ideally suited to each other, and, from everything Adrienne had seen in her months with Kendrick Winery, deeply in love.

  Knights Bridge had been on a roll lately with drawing unlikely couples together.

  Was that why she was here? Never mind her long-lost father and her new job. Had she returned to Knights Bridge in hopes she’d find herself a man?

  It’d be an unlikely man for sure, Adrienne thought, amused. When she’d left town for Kendrick Winery, she hadn’t harbored a secret attraction for any of the men she’d run into during her winter on Echo Lake. She’d remembered Adam Sloan as particularly sexy but hadn’t gone beyond that. She’d been preoccupied, house-sitting for a man who didn’t know she was his daughter and making peace with her mother’s dishonesty.

  She shuddered, refusing to think about those troubled days. If she’d learned nothing else this past year, it was that she wasn’t a driven mover and shaker. Not that she hadn’t already known on some level, but now she knew it to her core—to her bones.

  It felt right, being back in Knights Bridge, being here at the Farm at Carriage Hill, at least for now.

  Maggie put a bag of fresh green and wax beans from her widowed mother’s garden into the refrigerator. “Be careful with the beans. The boys helped picked them. I’d watch for anything and everything. Stems, leaves, ants.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” Adrienne said with a laugh.

  “I’ll putter in here while the boys play out back. I won’t be in your way?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I know I have to let go around here. That’s why we have you. I piled too much on my plate. Now with Olivia in her third trimester...” Maggie stopped herself. “I’m not a control freak but delegating doesn’t come naturally to me.”

  “That’s often true of entrepreneurs.” Adrienne smiled as she grabbed a hunk of cheddar cheese from the refrigerator to go with her apple. “That’s what my mother tells me, anyway.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  Adrienne took her lunch out to the terrace. The day had warmed up nicely but it wasn’t hot. Maggie was obviously good at a lot of different things, and she liked to do them. She enjoyed the variety, the challenge—the activity. Finally, though, she’d admitted she was feeling harried and overwhelmed and needed some help. How much she’d let go, though, remained to be seen.

  The apple was crisp and perfect with the cheese. Adrienne loved California, but this quiet corner of New England spoke to her. It had even through a cold, snowy winter when she’d been torn apart about so much. Part of her had wanted to hate Vic Scarlatti and blame him for not knowing about her. But she’d come to realize she didn’t blame anyone. Not him, not her mother, not her dad.

  She noticed the gray stone of the terrace. Had Adam Sloan built it? She shook her head in answer to her own question. It had been added by the previous owners before Adam was born, at the same time they’d installed the flower and herb gardens. She finished her apple in the garden, walking on a bark-mulched path past fragrant purple basil. Markers for various plants would be a nice touch for guests. She’d have to make sure she got the names right, but there was no rush. She had a long list of more urgent priorities.

  Toward the back of the garden, she could hear Maggie’s two boys and their friend Owen playing behind a small shed, apparently their usual spot. She slipped through a gap in the stone wall onto a path that led up to the McCaffrey property. There were plans to improve it. Olivia and Maggie didn’t lack for plans, that was for sure.

  The boys went silent. “Who’s that?” one finally whispered.

  “It’s me, Adrienne. Your mom—Maggie’s in the kitchen.”

  “Okay. We thought you were a giganotosaurus.”

  Adrienne smiled at the relief in the young voice—Tyler’s, she thought. “That doesn’t sound good,” she said.

  “It’s a dinosaur,” he added. “It’s a theropod. That means its limbs have three toes.”

  “There you go,” she said. “I have five toes and five fingers.”

  The boys giggled and returned to their play.

  Adrienne noticed signs of autumn—red-tipped leaves, brown edges on ferns, yellowing field grass. Her lunch break finished, she decided to run a few errands in the village. She let Maggie know and took the ancient car Vic had loaned her. He’d kept it at his house on Echo Lake for years. It was rusted and not exactly sleek, but it ran like a top, as the saying went. She was grateful to have use of it until she figured out what to do about transportation. She’d sold her own car when she’d quit the winery and moved east. It hadn’t been sleek, either.

  The Farm at Carriage Hill was the last house on the dead-end country road. When Olivia’s pretty house was built, the road had wound deep into the Swift River Valley, long before engineers had eyed the region for a reservoir to provide drinking water for growing, thirsty Boston to the east. By the 1920s, four small valley towns were depopulated, disincorporated and razed. Everything went. Homes, businesses, inns, camps, gas stations, general stores, factories and farms. Winsor Dam and Goodnough Dike were finished, allowing the Swift River and Beaver Brook to flood the valley, creating the
pristine waters of Quabbin Reservoir.

  It was a short drive to Knights Bridge village with its classic green ringed by old houses, churches, town offices, the library and a handful of businesses. Adrienne parked on Main Street and made quick work of her errands at the post office, hardware store and country store. She didn’t run into anyone she recognized and was on her way again in thirty minutes.

  She parked behind Maggie’s car at the inn and smiled at the sheer beauty of this place. For the first time since arriving in Knights Bridge, she didn’t feel the smallest shred of doubt about her decision to take the Carriage Hill job. She got out of her car, shut the door. She could hear the stream on the other side of the road, tumbling over rocks as it worked its way toward the nearby reservoir. She breathed in the pleasant air. She could smell grass, mud and something else—a touch of mint, maybe? Was that possible this far from the backyard and its gardens?

  She went inside through the separate kitchen door, painted a warm, welcoming blue, and set the bags on the butcher-block island. She noticed the mudroom door was open but assumed Maggie had gone outside to check on the boys.

  A distinct moan drew Adrienne up short. “Maggie?” She ran through the mudroom onto the terrace. “Maggie—are you okay?”

  She stopped abruptly, spotting Maggie sprawled on her side halfway to the shed where the boys had been playing. Adrienne leaped off the terrace and ran to her. Maggie tried to sit up but moaned again and sank back onto the bark mulch. She had one hand pressed to the right side of her face, blood seeping through her fingers.

  “Easy, easy, Maggie. Let’s have a look.”

  “I’m okay. The boys...” She leaned on her left arm and sat up partially. “Aidan, Tyler...” She couldn’t seem to find the words to finish her thought. “Owen.”