Holly moved to the window and watched Sean cross the street. She could hardly believe what had just happened, what she’d let happen—encouraged to happen, if she was honest with herself. She should be feeling remorse, or worry, or…something. Something other than the huge urge to do a little dance around the room then wander back to the window, and stare, longingly, at the door to Gallagher’s, reliving every single moment, every word, every breath, every…“Wow,” she said, lifting the hair off her still-heated nape. “That was—he is—” She leaned against the desk again and laughed at herself. “Yeah. Wow, sums it right up.” She spent a moment or two marveling over the kind of stupid silly giddy feelings she had. Had she ever in her life felt like that? That was an easy one. “Never.”
She tried to control the rush of emotion so she could think. She had so much thinking to do. More now than before. Important decisions to make, bigger ones, now. Potentially life altering. And yet, she kept staring out the window. “What am I going to do with you, Sean Gallagher?”
She thought about him over there, inside the restaurant, with all those other Gallaghers milling about…Gallaghers she’d be personally meeting, mingling with, adjusting to, if she wanted to have Sean in her life. She gave a little shudder. A room full of professional clients clamoring for her were one thing. The tightly knit bosom of Sean’s family was quite another. “Okay, so I’m not ready to think about that part yet.”
She stood, making the desk wobble, which reminded her about the hidden compartment she’d found just before Sean had arrived. It was amazing that she was able to recall anything that happened before he got here. The last hour of her life had truly changed everything. It was like, from now on, her life would be compartmentalized as happening Before Sean and After Sean. Or, perhaps, Without Sean and With Sean.
She bent down to get a better look in the desk, her mind still spinning on how just a few days and one person could so drastically change her perspective on everything. Spying something tucked away inside the little cubby hole was finally enough to jerk her thoughts back to the present. “Huh. What do you know.” She reached her hand inside and slipped out a slender, bound volume. A book? Maybe it would help to explain where the piece came from, or why it wasn’t listed in inventory.
She walked over to the divan and sat down as she carefully opened the cover. It was clearly old, very old judging by the faded silk fabric cover and hand-stitched binding. There was no title on the cover, and she realized why as soon as she opened it. It wasn’t a published book. It was someone’s journal. Or diary. A slender piece of ribbon, which might have been pink once, but had yellowed badly with time, was tucked between the pages, marking a spot about two thirds of the way into the book. But, instead of going to that spot, she started at the beginning.
Holly carefully turned the once glossy cover page over and stared at an unlined page filled with row after neatly written row, all done with what appeared to be an old-fashioned ink pen. The handwritten lines filled up that first page, leaving little white space, and all the others that followed it were the same, until the aged slip of ribbon, which marked the final entry. The ink was a faded brown now, and as she carefully leafed through the pages, there were spots that were almost faded entirely away.
She went back to the beginning and skimmed, looking for a full date, but there were none she could find. Days of the week, and sometimes months, were noted, but no years. None marked inside the cover, either, or anywhere that she could discover. No name of the owner, either. A shame, she thought. She might not have been the antiques hound that her mother or Mrs. Gillespie was, but she hadn’t spent a life growing up around them without some of the knowledge of provenance and the like wearing off on her. At least a little.
At the moment, there was more to her curiosity than simply dating the book or the desk it had been stashed in. Not that one necessarily had anything to do with the other. Anyone could have hidden the volume inside the desk at any time over the intervening years. But, though she couldn’t confirm with her mother at the moment, even Mrs. Gillespie had agreed that, as far as she knew, she’d never seen the little antique rolltop before. And given how it had been tucked so far back into the corner of a room used only for storage, and then behind several other large pieces that Holly had had to rearrange to make room for herself as well as do the inventory…who knew how long it had been back there. But, given the dust and location, it had to have been quite some time ago. A decade or more was highly probable, and possibly multiples of that. In fact, for all Holly knew, maybe the little desk had come with the place when her mother had purchased it from Mrs. Haversham almost fifty years back.
She shifted so the natural light illuminated the journal pages better, then eventually shifted back onto the divan the way it was designed to be used. She started reading…and within minutes, everything else faded away and she was engrossed in the unfolding story. A story, that as she continued to read, both moved her…and stunned her. Because the names mentioned in the book weren’t all unfamiliar to her. As the sun set, she pulled the chain on the standing lamp she’d positioned next to the divan and continued reading, without pause.
She’d had no idea how much time had passed until she heard the sleigh bells downstairs. Dammit. She’d never gone down and locked up behind Sean earlier. How long had she been sitting there? She glanced out the window and saw that it was fully nightfall. She heard heavy tread on the stairs and her heart began to race. But it wasn’t simply a reaction to what had happened between them earlier…and what she hoped would happen between them tonight, if she were completely honest.
No, her heart was racing, in part, due to the book laying in her lap. Because the people talked about in this personal journal weren’t just known to Holly…they’d be familiar to Sean as well.
He dangled the take-out box in the open doorway before stepping into view. “Hungry?”
She looked up from the journal she’d been carefully closing, and everything inside her growled. Oh yeah. She was hungry all right. Starved, in fact.
She’d thought it might be awkward, or that she, at least, would probably be awkward, seeing him again after what they’d been doing the last time he was up here. But he was all smiles and easy charm and hot, freshly prepared dinners, and it was like they did this all the time.
If you stay here in Willow Creek…you could do this all the time.
He pulled over a tassled, overstuffed ottoman with a very detailed Santa face embroidered on the top, then shifted her feet and sat down on the edge of the divan, next to her hip. “You know, there’s something weirdly disturbing about having Santa stare at you while you eat.” He put the boxes down on top of the oversized footstool, so all you could see was the velvety red hat and the snowy white beard.
“Tell me about it,” Holly said, shuddering in memory of all the Santas who’d stared at her over the years, and not just at the dinner table. In some ways, it was amazing she hadn’t developed a clownlike phobia about the man. “You know the part that goes ‘he sees you when you’re sleeping’? Yeah, that gave me nightmares for years, because he did actually watch me sleep. Every night. All year long.”
Sean laughed and she loved the natural, full sound of it, like a guy who did it often and openly. It made her feel all kind of warm and fuzzy inside. Which didn’t seem exactly right since she’d just Santa bashed, but she held on to the feeling anyway.
“I do love Christmas, but you’re right, I can’t imagine what it was like, living in winter wonderland twenty-four-seven.”
“We’re even,” she said as he opened a box and handed her a linen napkin rolled with real silver inside. “I only had to put up with a make-believe character. I can’t imagine living with the number of real people you reside with on a daily basis. At least my army was inanimate and perpetually jolly.”
“Oh, I’d say the Gallaghers are a pretty perpetually jolly bunch.” He winked at her. “You know, you could actually cross the street and come inside where we could sit and eat at a real table.”
She inhaled the scent of beef and potatoes like a woman starved and sighed in deep satisfaction. “If this tastes half as good as it smells, you could probably lure me over there just by dangling a bowl of stew under my nose.”
He grinned. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He popped open his own take-out box, then nodded at the book still tucked in her lap. “What’s that you’re reading?”
She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten. “I found this in the little rolltop desk there, in a secret compartment. I’d just unearthed the desk earlier today and discovered it wasn’t anywhere on the inventory list. I was hoping the book might explain where it came from and why it’s here.”
“And did it?”
“Well…not exactly. But it explains a lot of other things. And it involves both of our families.”
He paused in midbite. “What?”
“And the Hamilton family, as well.”
“Hamilton family. As in Hamilton Industries, Hamilton?”
Holly nodded.
Lionel Hamilton, who was in his eighties now, about nine or ten years older than her parents, was the last in a long line of Hamiltons who had either owned or run most of neighboring Randolph County. Hamilton Industries, and the Hamilton family, were responsible for keeping pretty much everyone who lived there employed for at least the past century or so, and it was through their varied businesses that the otherwise rather rural county continued to prosper. And prosper well.
“Anything juicy?” he teased.
“Oh, you might say that.”
Sean’s smile faded and he laid his fork down. “Really? Like what?”
“Did you know that Trudy Hamilton used to live in this very house? Well, back when the bottom part was a rare and antique bookshop and these rooms up here belonged to Old Lady Haversham, she did.”
“Lionel’s wife, Trudy? Didn’t she pass on some time ago?”
Holly nodded. The Hamiltons were local royalty, like the Kennedys must have been to the folks of Hyannis Port and the rest of Cape Cod. The details of their very privileged lives had always been reported on in both local papers and the bigger circulations in D.C. and Richmond. “This was long before she became Mrs. Hamilton, though. Her maiden name was Haversham.”
“She was related to Old Lady Haversham?”
Holly nodded again. Neither she nor Sean had ever met the older woman, as she’d long since passed on before they were born, but stories of the eccentric old woman were a well-known part of the small town lore. The black sheep of the Havershams of Charlottesville and Raleigh, a very well respected and wealthy tobacco family back in the day, all deceased now. “Trudy’s fortune went to Lionel. She was the last of the family line.”
“Right, there was talk about how it was actually the Haversham fortune that rescued Hamilton Industries from near bankruptcy way back when, right?”
“Right. And I think Lionel is only survived by his great-nephew, who—”
“Famously rejected the family fortune. Doesn’t he live somewhere down South?”
“North Carolina, I think.”
Sean picked up his silverware again. “So, what’s the juicy part?”
“Well, Trudy and your grandmother were good friends. At least for the length of one spring and summer.”
Sean’s eyes widened. “Really? How could that be?”
“And they babysat my mother, on many occasions, that summer.”
“How old were they?”
“Trudy and your grandmother were probably only a few years apart at most, if that. They were teenagers, the summer I’m talking about. Fifteen and sixteen, respectively. So…about sixty-five years ago. My mom would have been around seven or eight.”
“Interesting, for sure. I’ll have to ask my aunts if they’d ever heard any stories. I mean, having Trudy Hamilton here in our town…that would have been quite something.”
“Well, she didn’t become Trudy Hamilton for another five years, but I guess even as a wealthy Haversham, it might have made a little noise. Certainly, later on, after she married Lionel, I would have imagined there would have been ‘Trudy slept here’ kind of stories, but…who knows. Maybe it was just a lost summer. I know her family, and probably Trudy herself would have most certainly been hoping it was.”
Sean looked confused. “Why?”
“She came here on a ‘vacation,’” Holly said, using air quotes. “The way young girls had to go away to visit relatives for a time often did. Back in those days, anyway.”
Sean took a moment, then the confusion cleared and his eyebrows rose. “She was pregnant?”
Holly nodded and lifted the volume. “This was her diary or journal, while she was staying here. Right in this room, I’m guessing. I think they sent her here because, at least according to this, Old Lady Haversham was more than a little eccentric. She was a bit loony, or at least her extended family certainly thought so. She was definitely on the outs with them, never talked to anyone, spent all her time holed up here in the bookshop. Anyway, back then, Willow Creek was even more of a small, rural town than it is now, and so the Havershams tucked Trudy away here to have her child, then she’d come back and no one would be the wiser.”
“Wow, but I didn’t think she had any children, ever.”
“Well, she didn’t. At least, not that anyone knew about. And, it gets more interesting. Your grandmother was the one who helped her get rid of the baby.”
Sean looked momentarily horrified. “Get rid of, you mean she—”
“No, no, I don’t mean before, I mean after the baby was born. Your family has been part of St. Francis’s congregation forever, right?”
“Right, so what are you saying?”
“According to Trudy, your grandmother was with her when she gave birth. It sounds like it might have been here in the house. Anyway, I’m not sure what the plan was after the baby was born. According to Trudy, her aunt wasn’t exactly on top of things.”
“Did she even know Trudy was pregnant?”
“Yes, but I don’t know that she really paid much attention to her. Trudy lived up here and didn’t even help in the shop much. That was why she was excited to go hang out with your grandmother when she would babysit. She’d sneak out in the evenings and go to whatever family your grandmother was sitting for, and hang out with her. One of those was my grandparents’ old house, sitting for my mother.”
“So, after the baby was born…?”
“Your grandmother took it to the church and left him with the nuns.”
“It was a boy?”
“Apparently. So, I’m guessing he was adopted, or put into foster care, or whatever the system was back then.”
Sean sat back. “So…Trudy Haversham, who went on to become Trudy Hamilton, had a child. An heir. Both to her fortune…and, I guess Lionel’s…. Her child, if he’s still alive, wouldn’t he be the direct heir? I mean, he’s older than Lionel’s great-nephew, and though not direct blood of Lionel’s, he would be direct in line for the Haversham fortune, right? And, if he’s passed, then I’d guess that his offspring, if he had any, would be next in line. Pretty big bombshell, when you think about it.”
Holly smiled briefly. “I know. Bombshell in a book. The question is, what do I do with it now?”