The Inn at Dead Man's Point (31 page)

He cocked his head. “Is that why you slept with him?”

“No, I slept with him the first time because he spiked my coke at a football game. It was the first time I’d ever had anything to drink. When I realized what we’d done, I cried half the night. I wanted my first time to be special, and I did it in the backseat of a car with a boy I didn’t even like that much.”

He sat on the half-made bed. “I never figured you’d want to sleep with me.”

She swung a pillow around and hit him with it. “You were wrong. I just didn’t know what I wanted until I saw you all grown up. You are a magnificent man, Alessandro Donatelli.”

Al gazed at her cheeks, rosy from making love, and wondered what their children would look like. She was so fair, and nearly everyone in the Donatelli family had brown eyes and dark hair. Katie looked a lot like Jenna, but Brian had blue eyes, too.

“When is the baby due?”

“March 21st, give or take a week or two.”

He laughed. “That’s my mother’s birthday.” He cocked his head. “Did you plan it that way?”

“
Plan?
Who plans? This was a complete surprise.”

“And a very nice one at that.” It was the best kind of surprise. He’d be a father, and if he could talk her into it, he’d also be a husband by then. But if he pushed too hard, she might run in the other direction, so he had to move slowly.

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Mattie played the doctor’s games and gave the right answers to his questions, and after too much time in the hospital, he finally told her she was being released to the nursing home on a trial basis. “If at any time they decide you are a danger to yourself or to others, they will send you back to the hospital, and then we’ll have to find you other accommodations. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“If I can’t behave myself, the nursing home will kick me out.”

“That’s right.”

“How soon can I leave here?”

“Tomorrow morning. You’ll have to take your medication on schedule, Mattie. No arguments. I know it makes you a little sleepy, but it’s necessary.”

It might be necessary for them, but not for her, and if she argued the point, she’d end up back here, locked up with lunatics. She might be old, but she wasn’t crazy.

They gave her clothes back the next morning, minus the gate opener and the matches, and handed her an envelope with the money from the sale of the car. “You’ll want someone at the nursing home to lock this up for you.”

“What for?”

“So someone doesn’t steal it.”

“Okay.” She wouldn’t argue the point, but there was no place in the nursing home to spend money except the vending machines back by the laundry. You’d have to eat an awful lot of junk food and drink a lot of Pepsi Colas to spend this much. If someone was going to steal it, it would be the nurses and aides. She never did trust those people.

She rode the shuttle through Tacoma and across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge to Gig Harbor, to another jail of sorts. The driver parked in front of the nursing home and lowered the wheelchair lift to the sidewalk. She’d never needed a wheelchair before, but she’d spent so many days in a hospital bed, her strength was gone.

The driver pushed her inside and up to the nurse’s desk. Nurse Cooley, the head jailor, forced a smile. “Mattie, it’s nice to see you back.”

“Is it?”

The smile disappeared. “It is if you’ll behave yourself this time.”

“I’ll do my best.” Mattie handed the nurse the papers from the hospital and the envelope of money, minus a couple bills she’d stuffed into her pocket when the driver wasn’t looking.

“Welcome home, Mattie,” said one of the aides. The aide pushed her into the room and left her sitting alone in her wheelchair facing the bed.

Mattie wanted to tell her that this wasn’t her home, that it would never be her home. The doctor at the hospital told her she’d never be able to go out to the inn again, but he was wrong. She’d go as soon as she got her strength back and weaned herself off the pills that made her muzzy-headed. She’d start with the morning pill, so she could think during the day, and as soon as she got used to that, she’d stop taking the one in the evening.

She had things to do, and she couldn’t do them until she could get around under her own power and think more clearly.

She’d give herself a week, maybe two.

Mattie Worthington would not die in a nursing home.

Chapter Nineteen

J
enna wouldn’t sleep with him all night like she had before, but over the next few days, she came into Al’s bed to snuggle or he went to her bed. It wasn’t every night, and they didn’t always make love, but he soaked up her affection.

She wasn’t ready to talk of the future, but each time she pointed out features she liked in his plans, he took note of it. He’d incorporate as many of those features as he could into the plan for their home. She’d have her pantry in the kitchen and the corner jetted tub in the bathroom. He’d give her anything she wanted if she’d stay with him.

Jenna came home one day with a bunch of boxes and started packing the linens and kitchen things. There were two sets of dishes, one quite old, in addition to the everyday set. She polished the silver and packed it, and Al handed down the things from the highest cabinet shelves. Many of these were things he’d never seen before. Big wooden salad bowls, casserole dishes, stacks of cloth napkins and tablecloths, serving trays, and beautiful crystal. He said, “If Mattie had sold some of this, maybe she could have paid her taxes.”

Wrapping another glass in newspaper, she said, “She wouldn’t have known what the crystal or china was worth, and nobody uses real silver anymore. I used to spend hours polishing it.”

The garage was full, so Al stacked the boxes in the kitchen.

“How soon do we have to be out?”

“I think we have another week or two. Jenna, my mother wants you and Katie to come back to her house.”

“Tell her thanks, but I put a deposit on an apartment today. It’s not available until the middle of next month, though.”

“We’ll work it out.” Nick had already scheduled the demolition crew, but Al wasn’t sure what date they were scheduled to come.

Jenna finished packing the box, taped it shut, and wrote CRYSTAL on the top and sides. She glanced around the big old kitchen and sighed.

“Sorry to see it come down?” he asked.

“Yes, but maybe it’s better that it’s being torn down.”

She didn’t explain herself, but she didn’t have to. They both had a claim on this place. His was financial.

Hers was emotional.

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Al took a short trip to California with his mother the last week of August, and Jenna took Katie and Sophie and Max shopping for school clothes. Bridget and one of Cara’s guards came along on the shopping trip. The guards were never far when the kids were out and about, but no one recognized Cara’s kids, and no one bothered them.

Katie and Sophie wanted clothes that matched, so Jenna picked out a pink outfit for Katie and a matching yellow one for Sophie. They looked adorable together. Max was starting second grade, and he was a confident, happy little boy with dark curly hair and big brown eyes. The girls had one more year of pre-school before they started kindergarten. Sophie had Nick’s ornery streak, so she’d be a handful as she got older, but Katie was a mellow child, agreeable, and easy to handle most of the time.

Jenna hoped the baby would have Katie’s sweet disposition.

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Instead of riding the wheelchair to meals, Mattie walked, and it was a good distance from her room halfway around the building to the dining room. She stopped taking her morning pill, hiding it under her tongue until the nurse left the room. She hid them in the bottom of her underwear drawer, with the money she’d tucked away. The stupid aides would never find her stash, because they never opened the drawer. Mattie dressed herself in the mornings, and she insisted on putting her own laundry away.

She started walking more, out to the nurse’s desk and back to her room, into the little room they called their library and back. When the nurses and aides got accustomed to seeing her walking about, she started walking to the front door and looking out through the glass in the door. They had a fancy door lock, but the directions were written right there on the wall, along with the numbers to punch into the keypad. The keypad couldn’t be reached from a wheelchair, but Mattie no longer used a wheelchair.

It wouldn’t be hard to get out of the building, but how would she get out to the inn? They didn’t have taxi cabs out here, at least not that she knew of, and she didn’t dare call the kid who bought her car. If she did, he’d tell his mother, and everyone would know where she intended to go. They’d know anyway when they discovered her missing.

Did it matter if someone knew where she was going? Not if she had a few minutes to do what she had to do before they came to get her. But without those few minutes, she wouldn’t be able to accomplish her goal.

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Alessandro was in California over the weekend, so it was the perfect time for Jenna to take a trip across the mountains to see her mother’s best friend, Annie Finnegan. Jenna wanted to know more about her mother’s younger years and she wanted to know about Tom’s life. Knowing she had a brother that no one had bothered to tell her about, one who died before she had a chance to know him, left a heaviness in her heart.

Three hours later, Jenna pulled up in front of a modest older home in Ellensburg. A woman with bright red hair and glasses came out to the car to greet them. “Jenna, oh, you look so much like Kate, and who is this pretty little girl?”

“This is my daughter, Katie.”

Annie hugged them both and they went inside to talk. Jenna looked through several albums, one with pictures of Annie and her mother in college, one of Annie’s wedding to Jim Finnegan, and the others were mostly pictures of Tom. “Did you have other children?”

“No, we’d just found out I couldn’t have children of my own when Kate gave birth to Tom. I couldn’t look at him without crying, because my best friend had what I could never have. Kate understood, and she agonized over her decision to let us adopt her baby. She didn’t want her parents to know, and she had this wonderful scholarship for graduate school that she’d worked so hard to get.”

“It was an open adoption?”

“Oh, yes, of course it was. I would never dream of keeping her from Tommy. He knew he had two mothers, and he knew when you were born.”

He knew, but she didn’t. “Why didn’t someone tell me?”

“Her husband didn’t want her to tell you until you were in high school.” She shook her head sadly. “He was a strange man. He was an engineering student like your mother when I met him. They dated off and on through graduate school. He wasn’t the most affectionate man, and he drank too much, but Kate thought she loved him.

“After graduation, he went back to Russia for a time, and Kate found a job in Seattle. She and Charlie had spoken several times by phone, and he urged her to come to the inn for a visit, so she did. That was when she got pregnant with you.”

“Only this time she decided to keep her baby.”

Annie nodded. “That’s right. She would have taken Tommy back if we’d let her, but he was our son, and we couldn’t picture our lives without him. Peter returned from Russia after you were born. I always wondered if he married Kate so he could get American citizenship. Peter was gone a lot, and half the time Kate didn’t know where he was or who he was with.”

Jenna stared at her hands. “He wasn’t really involved in our lives. I can’t remember him ever attending one of my softball games or piano recitals. Even if he was home, he didn’t express any interest.”

“When Kate said they were selling their home and moving to the inn, I knew their marriage was over. Charlie was a lot older, but he was the man she really loved. From what little Kate told me about the situation, Peter intended to take his half of the equity in the house and move to New York City or somewhere. He had his American citizenship, so he didn’t have to stay married. She said she was buying a half-interest in the inn, so you could grow up knowing Charlie, and I know she intended to tell you about Tom after you got settled at the inn.”

Jenna sighed. Hearing about this saddened her. “We were only at the inn a few days when they were killed.”

“I know, dear. I know. Charlie was devastated at losing Kate, but he still had you.”

“And I had him, but I also had his wife, who hated my very existence. Did you know that she killed him?”

A gasp told Jenna that Annie hadn’t suspected this. Jenna explained what happened and why. “She knew I was Charlie’s, and she didn’t want me to have
her
inn. I know people have died for less, but knowing I was the cause of his death is hard to live with.”

“No, Jenna, you didn’t cause it. If she really wanted him gone, she would have found another reason.”

Maybe, but Jenna didn’t think so. If her mother hadn’t taken her to live at the inn, Charlie might not have died the way he had. But she wouldn’t have gotten to know him and love him.