Amanda (5 page)

Jesse laughed briefly. “you’re as cautious as your father was, boy. All right, all right—I won’t change my will just yet.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Actually, it was more than Walker had hoped for. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to the office and try to work a couple of hours today.”

“Come for supper tonight,” Jesse said, more command than invitation.

Too curious to invent other plans, Walker merely accepted with polite thanks.

“I’ll walk out with you,” Kate murmured, rising to her feet.

From the front window of her corner bedroom on the second floor, Amanda watched the lawyer stroll to his
car with Kate Daulton at his side. They made a striking couple. He was a little above six feet tall and built athletically, which made him a good match for Kate’s height and impressive figure, and his dark, hawklike good looks complemented her flawless beauty.

They paused by his shiny Lincoln for a few moments, talking intently, and Amanda wished she knew what the conversation was about. When he had spoken to Kate downstairs, his voice had been oddly gentle, and something about his posture now indicated a kind of protectiveness Amanda would have sworn was alien to his nature. Walker McLellan was not a man given to macho protect-the-little-lady impulses, Amanda thought.

But Kate, it seemed clear, occupied a special place in the lawyer’s affections. Were they lovers? It was possible, even probable, given the circumstances. He was clearly at home here at Glory and seemed to be treated virtually as one of the family; he and Kate had known each other all their lives; both were single; and it was doubtful Jesse would have objected to the relationship.

Walker was a good seven or eight years younger than Kate, Amanda thought, but he didn’t seem like a man who would give much consideration to the age difference if he loved her. Odd, though, if they were lovers and hadn’t married. With passion as well as affection, what would prevent them? It certainly appeared a good match, and since both were prominent citizens in a small Southern town where reputations still mattered and sex out of wedlock was still eyed askance, they would have found it troublesome if not downright unacceptable to conduct a discreet affair for any length of time.

Amanda waited to see if Walker would kiss Kate before he left, and she was a bit unsettled to feel a
pang of relief when the lawyer got into his car with no more than a casual wave of his hand. Probably not lovers, then—or else extremely undemonstrative ones. And she wasn’t
relieved
, she told herself, just …

Just what, Amanda?
Just glad the sharp-eyed, lazy-voiced, and suspicious lawyer who thought she was a liar wasn’t having an affair with her aunt?

Shaking her head a little at her own ridiculous thoughts, Amanda watched Walker leave and then turned from the window with a little sigh. Hadn’t exactly been on her side in all this, but she felt oddly alone now that he was gone. Natural, she supposed, since he had been her sole contact during all the interviews that had preceded her arrival here.

She could clearly remember him rising from the big leather chair behind his desk when she had walked into his office for the first time a few days ago. Still see his impassive face and the vivid green eyes weighing her.

“Mr. McLellan. I’m Amanda Daulton.”
And his cool response.
“Are you? We’ll see.”

With an effort, she pushed that wary meeting out of her mind and stood for a moment looking around the room. Maggie, true to her word, hadn’t played guessing games; she hadn’t hesitated to explain that this had not been Brian and Christine Daulton’s bedroom, nor Amanda’s as a child, but had always been used for guests. It was one of the larger available rooms, and Jesse wanted her to have it.

Modernization during the last thirty years or so had given the room a private bathroom, spacious and lovely in shades of blue, as well as plenty of closet space, but the furnishings were some of the few remaining antiques left in Glory.

There were two tall chests, a long dresser with numerous
drawers and a wall-hung oval mirror, and a marble-topped nightstand with a small lamp beside the bed. The bed itself was stunning, queen-size and custom-built by a famed New Orleans cabinetmaker. It was a half-tester, or half-canopied, bed, designed with curved outlines and rococo ornamentation, with a striking carved cartouche on the headboard. The canopy was rich scarlet velvet, a color picked up in the print of the wallpaper and the pattern of the tapestry rug that stretched nearly wall to wall. A loveseat designed in the same restrained rococo style as the bed stood near the front window.

Amanda might not have known much about architecture, Southern or otherwise, but she knew a little about antiques. This furniture was as valuable as it was beautiful.

She liked this room. Even with the elaborate furnishings and rich colors, it was more a comfortable room than an opulent one, and Amanda felt comfortable in it. She opened the front window to take advantage of a slight breeze, pausing to breathe in the faint scent of honeysuckle and absently noting that Kate had apparently come back inside the house since she was no longer visible, then went to a set of gauze-curtained French doors that opened out onto a cast-iron balcony at the west side of the house. Stepping out, she discovered that it was a small balcony for this room only, with its own spiral staircase providing a private entrance.

No doubt intended for guests to be able to take a moonlight stroll through the woods or rolling pastures and return to their room without disturbing the rest of the house, the balcony and spiral staircase were designed with a Louisiana flavor, the fine metalwork done with intricate vines and honeysuckle, and the balcony supported by slender Gothic columns. It
wouldn’t have looked out of place in the French Quarter in New Orleans, and it was lovely.

Amanda liked the fact that her room had a private entrance, but when she went back inside, she checked the French doors carefully to make certain they had a sturdy lock. Then, leaving the doors open, she began unpacking.

She worked briskly, trying not to think too much. Already, she could feel the strain of being forced to weigh every word before she spoke it, and she had been in this house no more than a couple of hours. What would it be like in a week? Two weeks? A month? With so many people watching her, waiting for her to make a mistake, how long would it be before, inevitably, she betrayed herself?

Amanda carried her toiletries bag into the bathroom, hung blouses, slacks, and her few summer dresses and skirts in the roomy closet, and put several pairs of shoes neatly on the closet floor. Then she began filling the dresser drawers with piles of tee shirts and other cotton and knit tops, as well as jeans, shorts, and underwear. She ignored the two tall chests since she didn’t need them; unpacked, she was ruefully aware that all her belongings occupied a very small amount of the available space.

She went to the bedroom door, hesitated for a moment listening, then gently turned the old-fashioned brass key in the lock. She was a little amused at herself for taking that precaution while leaving the balcony doors wide open, but told herself that none of the large people in this house could possibly climb the iron staircase outside in silence. So she’d have warning before an unfortunate interruption. Probably.

She went back and sat down on the bed beside her biggest suitcase, now emptied of clothes. Carefully, she opened the concealed false bottom. Handy for
keeping papers neat, the salesman had offered without a blink. The two manila folders Amanda had placed there were certainly uncreased, as were the three small hardbound books.

Amanda smoothed her fingers over the books slowly, then set them aside and opened one of the manila folders. It was filled with photocopies of magazine articles and photographs. There were quite a few, because Glory was probably the most-photographed and most-written-about house in the entire South. She flipped through the pages, studying the pictures she’d gone over so many times and skimming the articles where, with a yellow marker, she had highlighted entire paragraphs.

Glory. By now, it was equal parts strange and familiar to her. Blindfolded, she might have been able to find her way through the house, but its sheer size—in the flesh, so to speak—had surprised her. The master bedroom, Jesse’s bedroom, had been identified and photographed in exhaustive detail—but Amanda wasn’t sure where the other occupants of the house slept.

Would Sully be in the rear wing rather than this main section, as far away from Jesse as possible? What about Reece? And Maggie, obviously much more than a housekeeper—where was her room?

So many questions.

Frowning, Amanda closed that folder and set it aside, then opened the second one. This one also held numerous clippings, mostly from newspapers, as well as photocopies of very old articles from myriad newspapers, books, and magazines. From their earliest days in America, around the time of the Revolution, to the present, these pages contained the varied and colorful history of the Daulton family.

Important even before old Rufus Daulton had acquired thousands of acres of Carolina land in speculation deals in the 1700s, the Daultons had made a name for themselves during the Revolution when twin brothers George and Charles Daulton had become heroes of that war. Only one had survived, George having been betrayed by a woman whom Charles later strangled with his own hands. He had been tried as a matter of form, acquitted promptly, and gone on to marry the dead woman’s sister and sire seven children.

Amanda shook her head over that, as she had the first time she’d read the story and every time since, bemused and wishing the sister had left a journal or letters to explain her thoughts and feelings about such a bizarre situation—and its outcome. But history kept that woman silent, just as most of the Daulton women were. The men, with larger-than-life personalities and actions, seemed to delight in making themselves heard in every generation, but the women were, at least to history’s eyes, mere footnotes.

It must have been difficult, Amanda thought, for any woman to hold her own with those big, darkly handsome, and fiery-tempered Daulton men, especially given the times. Yet women had married them, borne them, nursed them when they were sick, and buried them when their uncommon strength failed them.

Amanda flipped through the pages slowly, studying the photographs and scanning the sections of text she’d highlighted. An interesting family, to say the least, with plenty of stories at least as curious as the one concerning the twins. Hard-drinking, like most mountain Southerners, the Daultons had fought for their country, brawled with their relatives, and feuded with their neighbors generation after generation.

Lucky enough to plant Burley, a popular tobacco that grew well in the sandy soil of the Carolina mountains, they were also shrewd enough to begin branching out even before the Civil War brought about changes in their way of life. While continuing to grow tobacco, they established a sound program of breeding and training Thoroughbred horses, mined gold and other precious metals in the mountains, and, later, got into textiles and the manufacture of furniture as well.

The Daultons, always lucky in finance, made money hand over fist while other great families floundered in the ever-changing rush of progress. Yet, in every generation, the reins of control for the family were held in one pair of hands—usually that of the oldest male—who, rather like the masters of the old British and Dutch trading houses of Hong Kong, enjoyed a position of ultimate power and authority. He wasn’t called a
tai-pan
, and his authority wasn’t spelled out in ancient documents, but the leader of the Daulton clan was very much in charge.

Amanda continued through the clippings until she reached more recent times. Separating this group of articles from the earlier ones was a sheet of white paper on which was hand-drawn a simple, three-generation family tree.

Amanda studied the tree, one finger tracing the lines from parent to child. She let her thoughts drift. Their thirties seemed an especially arduous time for the Daultons. Adrian had been killed at thirty, Brian at thirty-three, and their mother had died in childbirth at thirty-five. Reece and Sully were in their thirties now with Kate barely past hers—definitely a stressful period, what with the abrupt arrival of long-lost Amanda.

Shaking those thoughts off, Amanda considered for a moment and then returned the folders to the suitcase. It was not an obvious hiding place, since few people would think to keep searching a conspicuously empty bag, so it seemed to her the most secure place in the bedroom.

She looked at the three small books, then opened the topmost one. On the first page, handwritten in neat but flowing letters, was the word
Journal.
Farther down the page, in the same writing, was
Christine Daulton.
And at the very bottom was the notation
1962–1968.

The second journal was dated
1969–1975.
Both journals covered her life from the date Christine married Brian Daulton until the year of his death. The third and final journal covered the same period, but in a much more specific way. It was labeled
Glory
, and the notation of dates read
Summers 1962–1975.