Fireside by Susan Wiggs (pdf e book reader txt) 📗

“All right? It’s going to be exactly what we both need. I’m sure of it. Think of this as coming full circle. It’s going to be wonderful, you’ll see.”

What’s going to be wonderful? Kim wanted to know, but she didn’t ask.

“I’ll run you a bath. That’ll be just the thing,” her mother said, bustling into the adjacent bathroom.

“A bath would be heavenly,” Kim agreed.

Hearing the rusty groan of the plumbing, she set down her bag, dropped the silk wrap on the end of the bed and finally—dear heaven, finally—took off her shoes. She spent a few minutes poking around the room, reacquainting herself with things she thought she’d forgotten—the collection of memorabilia from Camp Kioga, a rustic summer camp at the far northern end of Willow Lake. Kim had gone to camp there as a child, and as a teenager she’d worked as a counselor. Her ties to the small town were tenuous, but vivid memories stood out. Each summer she’d spent at Camp Kioga had been a magical string of endless golden days on Willow Lake, a world apart from the Upper Manhattan life she lived the rest of the year. Those ten weeks of summer had loomed large every year, shaping her as definitively as her expensive Manhattan prep school had attempted to do. The painted oar, autographed by all the girls in her cabin, brought back a rush of memories of ghost stories and giggles. The row of trophies on a shelf had belonged to a girl who was good at sports.

She took down a gray hooded sweatshirt with the camp logo, left over from her seventeenth summer, and put it on. The oversized shirt hung down to midthigh. The soft fabric warmed her, evoking secret memories of that distant time. She hadn’t known it back then, but that had been the summer that had defined the direction her life would take. She shut her eyes, thinking about how intense everything had seemed that summer, how everything had mattered so much. She had been filled with idealism, picturing a fabuous life for herself. A life she thought she’d had—until last night.

The gabled window offered a view of the mountains beyond the town. As a little girl visiting her grandparents, she used to curl up in the window seat and gaze outside, imagining that her future life lay somewhere beyond the horizon. As indeed it had, for a while. Now, as her mother pointed out, she’d come full circle.

Her evening gown fell to the floor in an expensive shimmer of sequins and silk. The strapless bra had been engineered for performance, not comfort, and she peeled it off with a sigh of relief. She had nothing on her bottom half. With a gown as clingy as the one she’d worn last night, a girl had to go commando.

“Are the towels in the linen closet?” she called to her mother.

“That’s right, dear.” Her mother said something else, but the drum of running water drowned it out.

Kim walked down the hall toward the linen closet.

A strange man in a trench coat stood there, staring straight at her. He was older, with iron-gray hair and a tough-guy demeanor—and he had absolutely no business being in her mother’s house.

Panic rolled up her spine, culminating in a scream. At the same moment, she clutched the sweatshirt tighter around her and desperately stretched the hem downward.

“Aw, jeez, hey, didn’t mean to startle you,” the man said.

Kim tried not to hyperventilate. “Stay back,” she said in a quiet, she hoped calming voice. Mom, she thought. She had to keep him away from her mother. Kim usually had mace or pepper spray on her, but of course last night, her purse-size aerosol had been confiscated by the TSA. “The valuables are downstairs,” she said. “Take whatever you want. Just…leave.” She gestured at the stairs, keenly aware that every movement gave him a peep show.

The intruder turned out his hands, palms up. “You must be Kimberly,” he said. “Penny talks about you all the time.”

Penny? The housebreaker had a nickname for her mother?

Kim’s heart constricted when her mother came out into the hall, an expectant look on her face. “I thought I heard voices out here—Oh.”

“If you lay a hand on either of us,” Kim warned, “I’ll hurt you, I swear, I will.” She did know self-defense, though she didn’t relish the idea of performing the moves nearly naked.

Her mother gave a laugh. “Dear, this is Mr. Carminucci.”

“Dino,” he said. “Call me Dino.”

He smiled, which made him resemble that Italian crooner, Tony Somebody. Bennett. Tony Bennett. Kim felt so disoriented she could barely say a word. Caught up in the surreal moment, she offered a halfhearted smile while trying to make sense of his presence here, in the second-story hallway of her mother’s house. He really did look a lot like Tony Bennett, right down to the warm brown eyes and iron-gray waves of hair. He was gazing at Kim’s mother as though he might burst into song at any moment. Penny. No one called her mother Penny.

“Dino is one of our guests,” her mother said easily. “You’ll meet everyone else at dinner.”

Guests? Everyone else? Kim didn’t bother hiding her confusion. “Um, it was nice to meet you, but…” She let her voice trail off and gestured vaguely toward her room. She thought about the sign on the car. Suspicion reared up in her.

“Kimberly just arrived for a nice stay,” her mother explained to the stranger. “She came in from L.A. on the redeye.”

“Then I imagine you must be ready for a rest, Kimberley. See you later, ladies.” Whistling lightly, he headed for the stairs.

Kim grabbed her mother’s hand and pulled her back into the bedroom. “We need to talk.”

Penelope’s smile was tinged with irony. “Indeed, we do. I’ve thought the same thing for the past, oh, fifteen years.”

Ouch. Well, maybe now they would finally get the chance.

“I drew you a nice warm bubble bath,” Penelope continued. “We can have our